Capitalism is the wages system (1977)

From the December 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

The term "wages system" originated at the time of the Chartist agitation in the 1830s and 1840s. It had been coined by former "domestic workers", who had previously worked at home on their own spinning or weaving machines, to describe the system which was then increasingly coming into being under which they worked instead in a capitalist's factory for a wage. This was felt and resented as a loss of independence, as indeed it was, and calls to abolish the wages system and replace it by some form of co-operative production were common among the more radical sections of the working class.

After the decline of Chartism this idea was kept up by isolated ex-Chartists and particularly followers of Robert Owen, some of whom, along with London trade unions, were to form the English section of the International Working Men's Association in whose foundation in 1864 Marx played a prominent role.

Thus when, in 1865, Marx addressed the General Council of the IWMA in English, to deal with an erroneous view on trade-union activity that had been put forward by the Owenite John Weston (an address published after his death as Value, Price and Profit), it was normal that he should have used the term "wages system" to describe the existing economic system since this would have been the term in use amongst the English-speakers in his audience.

In fact in this address Marx used the term "wages system" much more frequently than the term "capitalist production" which figures in the subtitle of the English version of Capital published in 1887 after his death. And he also made it quite clear that these two terms meant the same for him, speaking at one point of "capitalistic production, or the wages system . . . " (Chapter VIII).

Ten years later in a criticism (written in German) of the new programme that was to be adopted at Gotha by the German Social Democrats. Marx was to comment that it was more correct to speak of the "system of wage labour" (in German: system der Lohnarbeit) rather than of the "wage system" (Lohnsystem), a fairly minor change which was in fact incorporated in the programme as finally adopted. It still remains true however that "wages system", "system of wage labour" and "capitalist production" were for Marx all synonyms for what we today call "capitalism" or the "capitalist system".

Engels in a series of articles he wrote in English in 1881 for the trade union paper The Labour Standard, followed the same practice as Marx of using the term "wages system" to refer to capitalism.

Thus when Marx in 1865 and Engels in 1881 wished to convey to English trade-unionists that they ought to devote their energies rather to getting rid of capitalism they expressed this by urging them to adopt as their objective "the abolition of the wages system".

Since their time the term "wages system" has dropped out of common usage as a means of describing the existing economic system (despite the fact that it is just as logical a description as "capitalist system" since capitalism is based on both capital and wage-labour; indeed in some ways it is more descriptive). This has allowed some people, even some imagining themselves to be Marxists, to talk about abolishing capitalism without abolishing the wages system.

This would have been an absurdity for Marx and Engels since, as we have just seem, for them capitalism and the wages system were one and the same thing; "capitalistic production" and "wages system" were two alternative ways of describing the same economic system based on the exploitation of wage-labour by capital. Hence to abolish capitalism is to abolish the wages system—and vice versa.

Adam Buick

Coventry Socialist Group (1962)

From the March 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

ISVESTIA SUB-EDITOR VISITS COVENTRY. Thus ran the first line of a personal column ad. in the 22nd January issue of the Coventry Evening Telegraph. MEET MR. MATVEYEF the ad. went on. Well, the Coventry Socialist Group thought that it would be a better idea if Mr. Matveyef met us. So a few of us  went along to the meeting which, we learned later, was organised by the British-Soviet Friendship Society.

The Soviet sub-editor's speech was slow, halting and rather rambling—but this did nothing to diminish the applause which came at the end of it from the hundred or so Russophiles who were present. As soon as the applause had died down, one of our members was on his feet with some uncomfortable facts for Mr. Matveyef to digest about the Russian dictatorship and to remind him that, although the Communists claimed that the Soviet Union was different from Great Britain because it was a Socialist country, he had taken half an hour before he had even mentioned the word "Socialist."

Of course, the chairman had to intervene but this did not stop another member getting into the discussion later. He provoked considerable clamour by using the Soviet Weekly and the Russian Year Book to demonstrate that in the U.S.S.R. there interest-bearing bonds, capital accumulation, profit and exploitation of wage-labour—all hallmarks of the capitalist social system.

Mr. Matveyef's replies were evasive and lame. He begged our indulgence: he was not a professional lecturer (!) and was not equipped to take part in an ideological discussion. Socialism in Russia, he said , meant a planned economy and a rising standard of living—although he admitted that their standards were at present a long way below ours in Britain. Freedom of the press, he claimed, did exist in Russia - witness the readers' letters which complain about this and that and which sometimes result in governmental action. He ended with a familiar-sounding tirade against the commercialism, sex-exploiting and sensation-hunting Western press and went down bravely, trying to defend the one-party State-capitalist dictatorship which is the Soviet Union today and trying to justify its imperialist exploits.

Did the Coventry Socialists impress Mr. Matveyef? Alas, we cannot tell. We can only say that he took his impassive face from the hall not looking at all happy. For our part, we were well contented with our evening's work to dispel some of the illusions about Russia. We made one or two hopeful contacts and we sold six shillings worth of literature.

Coventry Socialist Group.

A Social Critic In The Theatre (1957)

From the December 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard

No playwright has been "in the news," in the popular sense, of recent times to the extent of Arthur Miller. His personal contact with two of America's most famous institutions; Miss Marilyn Monroe and the Un-American Activities Committee, has put him before the public gaze in a way that his ability as a writer would not. But for this we might hazard that his name would never have moved beyond the small and inconspicuous criticism. It would be a pity if his achievements as a dramatic writer were obscured by his more publicised activities. This, even at the risk of appearing ungallant to Miss Monroe.

Writers of Mr. Miller's abilities are rare, and those who combine them with a zest for social criticism are even rarer. Arthur Miller therefore is a controversial playwright. He believes in the Theatre as a social force, and deals with certain subjects in a way that might easily incur him the censure of many of those people whom he approaches as an artist.

Such a position for the playwright is far more precarious than for the novelist behind the printed page; the novelist has a public, but no audience, whereas the playwright standing (albeit metaphorically) in full view of them, is on trial for his artistic life and living. For people are less likely to accept what they see and hear as a group, than what they read as individuals.

Among American playwrights of the present day, Arthur Miller occupies a high place. His first successful play All My Sons (1947) was an indictment of war-profiteering and the philosophy of self-interest. Two years later he wrote Death of a Salesman. Here Miller sets out to show the contradiction between what many Americans think and the way they actually live. The "Salesman," Willy Loman, is a failure who, when he is not lamenting his fate, is extolling the virtues of "go-getting," "know-how," and all the other baubles of American jingoism. It is a virulent condemnation of the American way of life with its fetish of personal success at the expense of other values, and well exemplifies the way people can make a religion of social dogma.

When Mr. McCarthy was at his most ebullient (1953) Arthur Miller used the circumstances of a previous witch-hunt in American history, that which occurred at Salem, Massachusetts in 1692, to illustrate in The Crucible how a whole community can be disrupted by fear, ignorance and superstition combined with official dogmatism. The analogy with the Senator from Wisconsin and his inquisition is unmistakably obvious. Here is the same tight-lipped philosophy, the same calculated fanaticism depicted in the character of Deputy Governor Danforth that we have come to associate with McCarthy.

Arthur Miller's dramatic essay, A View from the Bridge, has recently been seen in this country. It is doubtful whether those who do not belong to Theatre clubs such as the 'Arts,' will have the opportunity of seeing it, owing to the restrictions imposed by the law.

That Arthur Miller is no Socialist need not be stressed here. Social critic though he is, there is nothing that could even remotely be considered revolutionary in his work. Nevertheless, writers of his stamp do help to ease the dead weight of social complacency. Even if it is only fractional and relatively of little significance, they at least make a visit to the Theatre more exciting for us than most. We experience the cool breeze of dissent as opposed to the stifling humidity of uncompromising acceptance.

Like many famous writers before him, Arthur Miller has at one time gone the "way of the transgressor" and courted the perils of the road to Moscow. Like them, he has suffered the pain of disillusionment, which has left him a wiser, though not we hope, a sadder man. In his own words, "I had to go to hell to meet the devil."

Unlike them, it is to be sincerely hoped that he will continue in, and develop his aim as a social critic, at the same time enriching the world of drama, and not sit at home with despair on the other side of the fire gate; like Arthur Koestler—waiting for the white mushroom-shaped cloud.

Ian Jones

Ernest Bevin (1951)

From the June 1951 issue of the Socialist Standard

About twenty years ago, at a Trade Union conference, a delegate who is now a member of the S.P.G.B., rose to speak. The problems before the conference, he said, must be examined from the standpoint of the workers' interests and from no other. He argued that the interests of the workers were opposed to, and irreconcilable with, the interests of the employers: that to view any matter from the angle of national interest, or, the benefit of the industry, was to see it through the employers' eyes and that would not help to solve any working-class problem.

Mr. Ernest Bevin rose to speak. After a few mildly flattering remarks about the previous speaker he declared that he also, at one time, had held similar views. But, he added, with the accumulated wisdom of passing years, he had discarded such notions until now he regarded them as the immature ideas of his youth.

Ernest Bevin died on April 12th of this year. As is usual when a prominent capitalist politician dies, supporters and opponents joined in voicing their praises of the dead man. Mr. Attllee, the Prime Minister, broadcast a tribute to his late colleague on Sunday, April 15th. He said :-

"But his knowledge of poverty did not drive him into a sterile and bitter class consciousness. He understood and could work with people of all classes."

(News Chronicle, 16.4.51.)

We are a little nonplussed at the Prime Minister's reference to sterility. We should have thought that, if the term sterile was applicable in this sense, it would be more suitably applied to class-unconsciousness. Surely, in comparison, class-consciousness is virile. Further, we can assure Mr. Attlee that class-consciousness, especially when it generates a desire to end class society, is not bitter. He will find more bitterness amongst some of his disillusioned Labour Party members than he will find amongst class-conscious socialists.

We will unhesitatingly agree that Ernest Bevin was not class-conscious. As a Trade Union negotiator he was a man of outstanding merit; as a Labour Party politician he had nothing to offer the workers.

Bevin was born in 1881 of working-class parents in the small village of Winsford on the Somerset and Devon border. He was orphaned at the age of six and he worked as a farm-hand in the west of England from the age of eleven to fourteen. He then went to Bristol where he was employed in a restaurant, later as a tram conductor, and finally as a driver for a mineral water firm. At an early age he became interested in social welfare, local politics and industrial organisation. He became secretary of a "Right to Work" committee in Bristol and he led a party of ill-nourished, poorly clothed unemployed men into a cathedral during a service to demonstrate their need for work.

In 1910 Bevin called a meeting of transport workers in Bristol and from this meeting developed the Carters' Branch of the Dockers' Union with Bevin as its first chairman. He later became this union's first full-time paid official at 2 per week and a few months later he was appointed organiser for the South-West of England. In 1920 he became assistant general secretary of the Dockers' Union with Ben Tillett as his chief. In that same year his advocacy of the dockers' case during a public enquiry into their wages and conditions of work, gained for him the title of "The Dockers' K.C." In 1922 he was largely instrumental in the amalgamation of fourteen unions which became the Transport and General Workers' Union, with himself as the first general secretary. He held this post until he became Minister of Labour and National Service in 1940.

As a trade union chief Bevin was astute. He was wise to such oft repeated tricks of the employers as threatening a wage reduction in order to forestall and stave off a demand by the workers for a wage increase. He urged the members of his union not to fall for such manoeuvres, but to fight against threatened reductions and press forward with their own demands, not be bamboozled into bargaining their claims against the employers' threats.

Despite his defence of the workers' interests on the industrial field, Bevin was not actuated by a recognition of the class nature of capitalist society. His outlook was essentially humanitarian. His political activities are ample evidence of this.

He first stood as a Labour candidate for the Bristol Central constituency in 1918 and was heavily defeated. He became a Labour M.P. for Central Wandsworth in 1940 and why Winston Churchill immediately saw the advantage of having such a popular trade union leader in his war ministry. The workers would accept many things from Bevin that they would resist from another man.

During the early 1930's Ernest Bevin was mildly rebellious inside the Labour Party. Together with Mr. G. D. H. Cole and others, he argued against the "gradualist" policy of that party. He became chairman of an organisation known as "The Society for Socialist Inquiry and Propaganda," but the members of that society, Bevin included, had about as much idea of Socialism as a bull's foot. Bevin and Cole wrote a pamphlet entitled, "The Crisis. What it is. How it arose, What to do." in which they betrayed their complete lack of socialist understanding. To them, the crisis of 1931 was the result of mismanaged  finances: the remedy was to be found in rigid control of the banks and an abandonment of the gold standard. Nowhere in the pamphlet can we find a glimmer of Socialism. The idea that the financial tangles, like the crisis itself, were the result and not the cause of the capitalist process of production, does not appear to have struck them.

At another time Bevin wrote a series of articles in the New Clarion which that paper published as a pamphlet called "My Plan for 2,000,000 Workless." Again he did not look beyond Capitalism for his "plan." All it amounted to was a scheme for raising the school leaving age and paying optional pensions to workers at sixty years of age. This, he anticipated, would remove the very young and the very old workers from industry and leave their jobs vacant for others.

Even on the subject of war he was all haywire. During August 1939, he delivered an address at the Convocation of the Teachers' College, Columbia University, in New York. This was also published as a pamphlet and called "Forward Democracy." In it he sees as an obstacle to democracy and peace-

" . . . . the inherent primitive fear of man--fears which have prompted man to exercise his predatory instincts.
"It is understandable how primitive man and pioneers in the development of the world, driven by hunger, the desire to expand, striving for security, fighting man and beast, developed and perpetuated these traits."

If he really believed this, he failed to observe what many workers in more humble stations in life consider to be obvious—that war is the result of an economic struggle between sections of the capitalist class to gain control of markets and raw materials.

With an outlook like this it is easy to understand how a man like Bevin could undertake office as Foreign Secretary and do the job to the complete satisfaction of the capitalist class of this country. Like his Labour Party predecessors, Philip Snowden and Arthur Henderson, he was applauded for his defence of British capitalist interests.

Mr. Churchill once called Bevin a "Working Class John Bull." Mr. A. J. Cummings re-echoed the idea in the News Chronicle on April 16th. The inference is, of course, that Bevin was a tenacious, determined, strong man. Another writer, Alaric Jacobs, who claims to have observed Bevin at U.N.O. conferences and elsewhere, has a far different view. In his book "Scenes from a Bourgeois Life" he states how, on March 12th, 1947, at the Moscow Conference, Bevin has declared that the principle of reparations out of current production could not be conceded at all. It would ruin Germany and "make her an economic slum in the heart of Europe." But when Jacobs and other paper men saw him at the British Embassy in Moscow on April 25th of that year, Bevin produced an entirely contradictory argument. He then said that reparations would make Germany too powerful because the flow of reparation goods would help to expand German industry to such an extent that it would be a competitive menace to the rest of Europe.

Alaric Jacobs is most unkind to Bevin. He says of him—

"His is a most plausible demagogue who combines the Simple Simon air of Stanley Baldwin with the tenacity of Snowden, the capacity for intrigue of MacDonald and the shrewdness of J. H. Thomas. Like Baldwin, he can stimulate integrity without possessing it and can make ignorance look like honesty. Enormously vain and self-righteous, he is in the tradition of great English humbugs who are beloved of the people . . . 

"Bevin seemed to me to be a bumble whose reputation had been won in too easy a school . . . This is a clumsy fellow, I thought, as I watched him in action. England needs a man with a rapier. She is ill-served by this Shakespearian clown who bats his opponents over the head with a bladder inflated with his own hot air."

("Scenes from a Bourgeois Life.")

Bevin was like so many other labour leaders, full of good intentions and plans for improving the lot of the workers, but failing to learn that Capitalism sets narrow limits to the improvements that can be effected. When in office they find that capital dictates to the politician, not the politician to capital. Then they rationalise their thinking. They consider that they are getting wiser with experience. That accounts for such statements as the one by Bevin mentioned in the opening paragraph. It is not true that they get wiser. They become better trained for the particular job that is allotted to them. They turn from one hopeless plan to another, always trying to make Capitalism work the way it won't. They never get wise to the fact that the solution to working-class problems lies in the abolition of Capitalism and the establishment of a society without classes, without capital, without wages and without labour leaders and politicians.

Many workers who knew Ernie Bevin were genuinely sorry when he died, for they liked him and remembered him as their trade union colleague and chief. But he is more likely to be written down in history as a Foreign Secretary and in that capacity the measure of  his success as a workers' advocate can be gathered from the tributes of the workers' enemies when he died. To be praised by the spokesmen of the capitalist class in no commendation for a workers' champion. The finest epitaph a socialist could have would be one from his opponents which said. "Thank goodness he is out of the way."

W. Waters.

Tom Paine and Today (2012)

From the September 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tom Paine is still invoked today from Obama to some in the Occupy Movement.

In his inauguration speech in 2009, President Obama quoted from Paine's patriotic rallying call The  Crisis, and during his election campaign he quoted from Paine's Common Sense which advocated American independence. In 2012, Obama presented Bob Dylan with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1963 Dylan received the Tom Paine Award for his work in the Civil Rights movement. Later, Dylan wrote As I Went Out One Morning referencing Paine. Paine proposed the abolition of slavery in his African Slavery in America, authored the proposal's preamble for the Pennsylvania Assembly which abolished slavery in 1780 and later supported the Haitian Black Jacobins.

Paine's book Rights of Man laid the foundations for bourgeois liberalism: freedom of property, commercial enterprise (a kindred spirit was Adam Smith), limited government, reduced taxation, advancement based on merit, productivity and industriousness. The bourgeoisie were a revolutionary class; the severed heads of Charles I and Louis XVI are testament.  Paine attacked the “chivalric nonsense” of monarchy and aristocracy for: its privilege and hierarchy, based on heredity; its corrupt government; taxation; wars; and its stifling of economic innovation.

EP Thompson called Rights of Man “the foundation text of the English Working Class movement” although it was in Agrarian Justice that Paine pushed bourgeois radicalism to its limits. He believed that poverty was caused by 'bad' government, and proposed welfare provision to be paid for by progressive taxation on landed property.  He also believed that the dismantling of the war machine would bring savings which could go to the “hordes of miserable poor” and thereby reduce taxation on the bourgeois class. Paine did see that the accumulation of property in the hands of a few would cause poverty, but he was a bourgeois liberal and believed: “That property will ever be unequal is certain”.

Marx saw the “rights of men to property” espoused by Paine and adopted in the USA as “not based on the union of man with man but on the separation of man from man”, and that the Rights of Man did not go beyond egoistic man: “it is not man who appears as a species-being; on the contrary, species-life, society, appears as a framework extraneous to the individual”.

Today, Paine's bourgeois liberalism would be offended by the existence of monarchy, and the aristocracy still in government. The Prime Minister is related to the Queen and is a descendent of William IV, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer is an ‘Anglo-Irish Ascendancy’ aristocrat.

Steve Clayton

Obituary: Alf Mitchell (1966)

Obituary from the March 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

We regret to report that our comrade Alf Mitchell of West Ham Branch died in December. A member of the Party since 1912, Alf Mitchell was an active member, particularly at outdoor meetings where he was always prepared to chair the meetings and sell literature.

During the 1914-18 war after appearing before several tribunals, he was arrested and fined 40/- . . . which he never paid, and was turned over to military escort. Whilst under military supervision he managed to dive through an open door and the authorities never caught up with him, despite enquiries among comrades.

He had been ill for several recent years, but until this, had been active in the fight for Socialism. We tender our deep sympathy to his widow and family.

M.H.

Voice from the Back: Too Poor To Live (2014)

The Voice from the Back column from the March 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Too Poor To Live

You would think that the purpose of medical research is to save lives. Think again, this is capitalism. In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Bayer CEO Marijn Dekkers said that his company's new cancer drug, Nexavar, isn't for Indians, but ‘for western patients who can afford it’. 'The drug, which is particularly effective on late-stage kidney and liver cancer, costs approximately $69,000 per year in India, so in March 2012 an Indian court granted a license to an Indian company to produce the drug at a 97 percent discount. Bayer sued Natco Pharma Ltd, but in March of last year, the High Court in Mumbai denied its appeal. Bayer CEO called the compulsory license issued by the Indian court ‘essentially theft,’ then said ‘we did not develop this medicine for Indians we developed it for western patients who can afford it’ (Raw Story, 26 January). The purpose of medical research, like everything else inside capitalism, is to make a profit.

Dying To Work

The owning class hate to see workers not working. After all they rely on them to produce the surplus value the owners live on. In addition the owning class have got to pay out sickness benefits. Last year they reckon it cost them about £13 billion. The present government have appointed the company ATOS to overhaul the benefits system. Its findings have not been without its critics though. 'One 39-year old woman from Livingston, near Edinburgh, was judged fit to work just weeks before she died. A heart and lung transplant patient from Essex died nine days after being declared well enough for employment' (Sunday Times, 9 February). C'mon workers so you are a bit knackered ... oops dead! Sorry about that.

Business As Usual

Every year the president of the USA gives a State of the Union speech. It is usually the same old guff about how marvellous everything is inside capitalism, but this year there was a slight difference. ‘Those at the top have never done better. But average wages have barely budged. Inequality has deepened. Upward mobility has stalled. The cold, hard fact is that even in the midst of recovery, too many Americans are working more than ever just to get by –let alone get ahead. And too many still aren't working at all’ (Independent, 29 January). It is indicative of how awful capitalism has become that even the president of the USA has to acknowledge it. Needless to say however he will carry on running capitalism the only way it can be run –in the interests of the owning class based on the exploitation of the working class. 

American Nightmare

The USA is often depicted as the embodiment of the virtues of modern capitalism but we are indebted to the American economist Paul Krugman for this expose of its less than perfect characteristics: 'What do we know about long-term unemployment in America? First, it's still at near-record levels. Historically, the long-term unemployed –those out of work for 27 weeks or more - have usually been between 10 and 20 percent of total unemployment. Today the number is 35.8 percent. Yet extended unemployment benefits, which went into effect in 2008, have now been allowed to lapse. As a result, few of the long-term unemployed are receiving any kind of support' (New York Times, 9 February). Hardly the American dream is it?

Knightsbridge Bargain

While many workers scrimp and save in an effort to get together a deposit for a mortgage it is worthwhile looking at how the owning class live. 'An allotted space in an underground car park has gone on sale for £400,000. The space, near the Royal Albert Hall, Knightsbridge, is large enough for a Rolls-Royce Phantom and comes with metal lockable doors' (Times, 13 February). You homeless workers will be glad to know that the agent Hobart Slater said ‘We've already had plenty of interest in the space.’

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