"All This Hard Graft No Longer Makes Sense" (1999)

From the March 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx referred to early society as "primitive communism" because throughout the Stone Age our ancestors co-operated to provide for their needs. With this in mind the socialist revolution can be seen as a long cycle of change from co-operation at a primitive level to co-operation in a more conscious, technically advanced society.

Anyone who visits the sites of upper Palaeolithic cultures in the Dordogne, France, can see in the museum at Les Eyzies the flint tools and the conditions in which they were used by the Magdalenian people about 20,000 years ago. It appears that life during this time was not necessarily "nasty, brutish and short". They developed art amidst abundant game, fish, wild vegetables, fruits, nuts and berries. All these things were there for the taking, it was natural wealth which did not have to be produced. Time had no economic value. There was no wage working, profits, bosses or economic crises. The whole community had free access to what was available and if one could avoid toothache, the living could well have been pleasant.

But sometime before 8,000BC conditions developed in which farming began and with it began the treadmill of hard work. For cereals this required ground preparation, sowing, watering, weeding, harvesting, threshing, storage and grinding. Also there were animals to tend. This was surely the beginning of the long working day. But farming brought more than hard work. With the emergence of dominant classes it brought exploitation of slaves who have done all the hard work ever since.

In his short book, Neanderthals, Bandits and Farmers: How Agriculture Really Began, Colin Tudge suggests that the development of farming took much longer than has been commonly supposed and was preceded by along period of "proto-farming". Writing recently in the Independent under the heading "All this hard graft no longer makes sense", he suggests that the once necessary long working day is outdated. He says, "We should see our industriousness not as an inveterate, "objective" good but as an adaptation geared to different times, and one that no longer makes sense; a mental vestige; virtually a psycho-pathology. We and the world would be much pleasanter and safer if we did."

Waste

But our situation is much worse than this. Most hard work has little connection with real human needs and a lot of it is actually lethal. The modern age has seen enormous gains in productivity of labour but where are the benefits for the working population? Do factory workers or farm workers or those in building and construction work less hours after having provided for the needs of the community? Of course they don't. Despite the much predicted society of leisure workers still work long hours and productivity means they are exploited more intensely.

There are thousands of people in supermarkets working long, poorly paid mind-blowingly boring hours operating the tills. They hold you up when all you want to do is leave the store after collecting what you want. They are there to make you pay so their bosses can get their profits. They are there to serve the profit system and their work has nothing to do with needs.

A great deal of hard work is done by the vast numbers of workers in the world's armament industries. The countless millions killed or wounded in the wars of this century were the casualties of every kind of weapon from bayonets, bullets and bombs to high-tech ballistic missiles and all these required long hours to produce. So when we ask whether we need to do all this hard work, the answer must be that it is not just unnecessary, much of it brings about great misery and suffering. So we can certainly do without it.

We can estimate that at least half of all the workers running the capitalist system would be redundant in a sane society where work would be organised economically solely for the needs of the community. This means that, including the present millions who are unemployed, socialism would more than double the numbers of people available to do useful work. Also, these vastly increased numbers would be free to use and further develop the most advanced techniques of production. All this would add up to a huge increase in our powers of production.

At first, to solve problems, production in socialism would have to be expanded. The priority would be to ensure that every person is comfortably housed and supplied with good quality food of their choice. The construction of a safe world energy system would be another urgent project. The present great differences in the world distribution of machinery, plant and up-to-date production methods would need to be evened out. But with an adequate structure of production in place we can anticipate that in socialism, we would soon be in a position to relax in the necessary work of providing for needs.

The idea of producing enough for the community and then relaxing to enjoy many other kinds of activity which may interest people is impossible under a capitalist system. Capitalist production is not primarily about supplying needs it is about making profit and accumulating capital. It can only work with a constant market pressure to renew its capacity for sales. Under capitalism a surplus of commodities, in excess of market capacity means they cannot be sold for a profit. This can bring about recession, workers thrown out of jobs, governments having to pay out more in doles when strapped for cash trying to finance a reasonable health service, it means companies going bankrupt. It means the whole mad market system being thrown into yet another crisis simply because the goods cannot be sold. These are some of the destructive features of a money-driven economy which is long past its sell-by date.

In socialism, with the abolition of the market, and acting with voluntary co-operation, people will produce goods and distribute them to stores without any of the barriers of buying and selling. The cash tills will disappear, shoppers won't be held up and the operators won't have to do their boring, meaningless jobs.

Enough for Needs

What it also means is that for the production of component parts of machinery or household goods, etc, intense production runs using automated systems could supply not just sufficient components for immediate use but also stocks for anticipated future demand. These could be distributed as and when required and this would be an economical use of production facilities which could then be either shut down until when required again or with different tooling used for other production runs. The important point being that in socialism this could happen without any of the problems and chaos that an oversupply of commodities for the market causes under capitalism.

The idea of having enough for needs and then relaxing to enjoy it is perhaps an echo of the best times had by hunters and gatherers. But this way of life was never viable for larger populations who are compelled to produce what they consume. To begin with, during the advent of farming this inevitably required a lot of hard graft, but with the enormous increase in the powers of labour since then, this is no longer necessary. We can learn other lessons from hunter/gatherers. Until recently the aborigines of Australia held the land in common and co-operated to sustain a way of life that was in balance with their environment and had lasted for at least 40,000 years. The modern world has an urgent need to imitate that example.

To re-establish common ownership and co-operation would in fact revert to relationships which were normal for humanity for the very long period of pre-history. Now, of course, we would enjoy these relationships with all the advantages of modern technology and know-how. But, by being aware of history and the great mistakes of the past we would also be aware of the need to use these powers wisely.

Pieter Lawrence

The Battle of the Somme (2006)

From the August 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

The recent 90th anniversary of the human tragedy of the Somme saw the politicians, the churches and the organisations charged with remembrance giving history a makeover.

The Allied warlords planned a massive assault set for mid-summer 1916. The offensive was to be carried through by the combined Allied armies and was intended to break through the German lines on the Western, Eastern and Italian fronts imposing a defeat of such magnitude on Germany as to bring a speedy end to the First World War.

 Doubtless it all worked out well for the generals and marshals as they threw clay representatives of thousands of human beings into homicidal battle against one another on the sands table. But battles are not won on sands tables and in the early spring of 1916 the Germans spoiled the plot by opening up a massive assault against the French city of Verdun which absorbed French divisions planned into the attack on the Western Front at the Somme.

 In the week before the 1st of July Allied artillery carried out a ceaseless bombardment of German positions on a five mile stretch of the front. In all they fired 1.6 million shells but many of the British shells failed to explode and the German fortifications not only proved largely resistant to the shelling but also provided subterranean tunnelling where soldiers could take refuge from the bombardment.

 Such was the confidence of the British Command that an enervated German line would crumble before the ferocity of a massed attack that they ordered their 11 divisions to walk steadily across No-Man's- Land towards the German fortifications. At 7.30 hours on July 1st the men arose out of their entrenchments in response to the blowing of whistles and proceeded to walk towards their objectives.

 Immediately they were confronted with a deadly fusillade from German machine-guns. Like lemmings they offered their bodies like blades of grass before a scythe; wave after wave of them, the cared prodigy of wives and mothers learning the falsehood of patriotism or paying the price for volunteering away from poverty or the dull, hum-drum meanness of wage slavery. 60,000 of them fell that day, 20,000 dead, the rest flawed statistics.

 The chaplains were busy intoning their prayers to a remorseless god and the generals, too, were brutal and remorseless for it didn't stop; it continued the next day and for four more months. In October the torrential rains came changing the blood-soaked ground into a quagmire where putrefying human flesh mingled with the mud and obstructed men as they were striven to further slaughter. When this single phase of the hellish conflict was exhausted in mid- November those designated as 'British' were 420,000 fewer while the French lost 195,00 men and the Germans over 600,000. There were no generals killed or wounded and the Allied forces had advanced 5 miles over wasted, barren land.

 The Somme, Passendale, Salonika, Suvla Bay, names of strange places that became prominent in the lexicon of war and its brutalities. 'Lions led by donkeys' was the popular alibi for the monstrous slaughter and the ineptitude of warlords like the British Somme commander, Earl Haig becamethe focus of bitter criticism and sick jokes. There was no poetry now in the killing; the avalanche of stereotyped telegrams expressing official regret at the death of a husband or son began to speak louder than the xenophobic vapourings of politicians and the media and officialdom may well have been haunted by the thought that workers turned soldiers might catch on to the duality of their exploitation and the brutally obvious fact that a social system that required periodic bloodletting was fatally flawed.

 Time has accounted for those who survived the battle; those who ploughed through the detritus of decaying human flesh and wept for dead comrades. 

If you were a tourist from Mars attending the Somme commemoration the vital question you might want to ask is why were millions of men, men of no property and no financial interests, men who had never met those they were now told were their enemies and with whom they did not share a language that would allow them to curse at one another, why were they killing? Why were they dying?

 The answer is that they were fighting over markets and the political and economic appurtenances of trade; that war was, and is, simply a logical extension of a brutally competitive system of social organisation predicted on profit and ongoing expansion; a system that dominated their lives, took away their human dignity and reduced them to the status of wage slaves and cannon fodder.

So the question must be avoided at all costs; capitalism's obsequious apologists, its politicians, its beholden clergy and media hacks will change the script: Tell the fools how brave they were and how proud they should be; that'll keep them happy to the next time. 

"Give a benediction, bless them with a prayer, 

And tell them how the son of God was longing to be there!" 

In the circumstances of the conflict bravery is a empty virtue; an abuse of language that must surely add insult to injury.

Richard Montague

‘Immigrants’: A Voice From the Past (2014)

From the March 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Think-tanks galore are releasing studies about income inequality. The Tories preach free markets as the answer to it while conveniently ignoring the failure of ‘trickle down’ economics. The Labour Party suggests the need for more social programmes while its left-wing argues for a greater redistribution of income in order to level the playing field. Of course, they will ignore the fact that decades of state-sponsored interventions have failed . What happens when inequality rises? Usually, a demagogue turns up to stir up the discontent and he or she will point the finger at ‘them’ for making things worse for ‘us’. It is all too easy to blame outsiders for causing problems such as unemployment, the housing crisis or even crime.

The employers pay as much as they have to pay, in order to carry out their profit-making enterprises. The employers pay scant attention to the cost of living, much less its quality. They pay for their workers what they have to on the open market. They do not care whether you are of 100 percent Anglo-Saxon stock, related to the best families in the land or just another ‘damned foreigner.’ The workers found this out long ago and began to organise unions, pledging one another not to work below a certain price. If they worked to get all available workers into the union and if they vigorously practised solidarity, they were better able to shift more of the burden of economic necessity from their own shoulders to the employer’s, and make him pay them a ‘living’ wage.

‘A Voice From The Aliens’  may possibly be one of the earliest appeals against blaming ‘immigrants’. It was produced in 1895 and was published in the name of several Jewish trade unions. Jewish refugees started to come to this country in the 1880s, fleeing from persecution and pogroms in Eastern Europe and Tsarist Russia. At this time there were no immigration controls. However, there was very quickly racist agitation for such controls and unfortunately some in the trade union movement took up the demand for restrictions. Those who today argue for a ‘just’ immigration policy ought to realise that over a century ago some trade unionists were fighting controls in principle. They rejected the notion of ‘fair’ controls and instead appealed for workers’ solidarity against a system that exploits all workers.

‘It is, and always has been, the policy of the ruling classes to attribute the sufferings and miseries of the masses (which are natural consequences of class rule and class exploitation) to all sorts of causes except the real ones. The cry against the foreigner is not merely peculiar to England ; it is international. Everywhere he is the scapegoat for other's sins. Every class finds in him an enemy. So long as the Anti-Alien sentiment in this country was confined to politicians, wire-pullers, and to individual working men, we, the organised aliens, took no heed; but when this ill-founded sentiment has been officially expressed by the organised working men of England, then we believe that it is time to lift our voices and argue the matter out...’

The pamphlet counters with the conclusion:

 '...is [it]not rather the capitalist class (which is constantly engaged in taking trade abroad, in opening factories in China, Japan, and other countries) who is the enemy, and whether it is not rather their duty to combine against the common enemy than fight against us whose interests are identical with theirs...’

Precisely.

ALJO

Rock against reformism? (1978)

From the June 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

What do Paul Foot (editor of Socialist Worker) and Vera Lynn have in common? Answer: they both entertain people with illusions. During the last war, while workers were being slaughtered in defence of their masters' property, Vera Lynn was employed to sing to the troops to keep up  their morale; tell them what a worthy cause they were dying for, how life would be so much better when it's all over — "There'll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover . . . " It was an exercise in cynical hypocrisy which made Vera Lynn rich and famous and those who attended the concerts all the readier to sacrifice themselves. So what's this got to do with Paul Foot?

If you were in Victoria Park, Hackney, on the afternoon of Sunday 30 April you'd have seen a gathering of fifty to sixty thousand people. At a first glance it looked like a rock concert. There was a stage before which sat thousands of rock enthusiasts listening to the music of Steel Pulse, The Clash and The Tom Robinson Band. But from another angle the scene looked like yet another futile political demonstration, complete with SWP banners demanding the right to work, Lefties selling every shade of newspaper from Worker's Voice to Worker's Arse and the usual contingent of Young Liberals who weren't quite sure why they were there. The organisers of the event were the Anti-Nazi League (for which read Rock Against Racism for which read SWP for which read Paul Foot and friends). The object was to win support for the Socialist Workers' Party's policy of physically preventing the National Front from operating. Emotional propaganda mixed with powerful music is a sure way to build up a politically opportunist movement. The SWP are not original in discovering this. Consider the following remarks:

The great mass of people consists neither of professors nor of diplomats. The scantiness of abstract knowledge possessed by the mass confines its perceptive faculties to the realm of feeling. Within these limits, its attitude is either positive or negative. It can perceive only a forceful stimulus in one of these two directions, and can never appreciate a middle ground lying between them. This emotionalism of the mass, however, is responsible for its extraordinary stability. Faith is more difficult to shake than knowledge, love undergoes fewer changes than respect, hate is more powerful than aversion, and the impetus to the most powerful revolutions upon this earth has lain at all times less in scientific cognition dominating the masses than in the fanaticism inspiring then and sometimes in the hysteria driving them forward. He who wishes to win the broad mass must know the key which opens the door to its heart.

The writer was Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf, p. 371). The Socialist Party of Great Britain does not oppose racist, fascist and nationalist ideas in isolation, as if capitalism will be humanised without them. Our case is that wages system can not be made to run in the interest of the working class. This message can only be impressed upon fellow workers by reasonable argument. Anti-social behaviour will not cease by getting people to wear 'Stop the Nazi' badges. 

There is no  doubt that music can be used to spread ideas and even to increase class consciousness, but this will only happen when those who organise the concerts and perform the music are themselves aware of what Socialism means. In the meantime, we understand that Paul Foot is auditioning for Hughie Green's old job on 'Opportunity Knocks'—opportunism and bad music rolled into one; whay more could he want.

Steve Coleman

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.