What made me oppose the war (1989)

From the September 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

I was born on 22 February, 1914, a few months before the start of the Great War (as it came to be called), the youngest of an Anglo-German family of five children, two girls and three boys. My eldest brother, Edward, was killed on the Western Front in the last month of that war, after having survived its whole course on active service.

He volunteered for the army at the onset, being then aged sixteen. After about two years' service he was discharged from the armed forces because of war wounds, but immediately rejoined another regiment. Over the years I have often wondered about this conscientious heroism of his. When asked why he had re-enlisted although medically unfit, he would always say that he would have been letting his comrades down who were still fighting in France had he not done so.

Some considerable time before I became a socialist I had come to the realisation that warfare was completely inimical to the human condition. As I became older my reaction to the reality of capitalism was to become a rebel without a cause. A combination of particular experiences, and a process of learning by those experiences and coming to conclusions about them, without (as yet) having an all-embracing philosophy.

For example, my mother had to convince the War Office that my brother Edward would have become a major bread-winner for the family, had he not been killed fighting for King and Country, before they would "award" a compensatory pension. After about a year of legal wrangling, the War Office awarded a sum of seven shillings and sixpence a week (in terms of present coinage this would be 37. pence). Such was the reward of a grateful king and country. With hindsight it came to be considered fortunate by the family that this war pension of 7/6d was allocated to my mother and not my father who died relatively young, aged 56; in which case the pension would have died with him, whereas my mother lived to the age of 75.

Another circumstance which profoundly affected my thinking, something that I learned years later, was that in the section of the Western Front where my brother was killed two of his uncles were serving with the opposing German army in that same section at that time. It is not inconceivable, therefore, that my brother could have been killed by them. These were the kinds of experiences, together with my concern for all of the victims of war, which determined my developing an emotional opposition to war and everything connected with it, rather than an opposition based upon a rational understanding of the material causes of social antagonism and war (this came later in my development).

In the late 1920s when the subject of war came up in conversation, I was often asked by relations and others what I would do in the event of war. My reply was that I would oppose its prosecution, to the best of my ability, and refuse to take part in it as an individual. Their reaction to this was usually to say that it is easy to oppose war in peace-time, but that I would probably change my attitude if war should come.

Another factor in my development from childhood was my experience at school. At the age of five I started my "education" at a church school in London which in those days was a school attached to a parish church with an independent board of school governors, but which was funded by the then LCC (London County Council). The lessons at this school were (with overtones of religion) directed towards teaching the children to read, write and count, so that they would be able to appreciate the benefits of patriotism and blind loyalty to their King and Country, and a willingness to die for them and the market economy they represented if necessary. This included the presentation of history as the past battles and wars in which "their" country had been involved. As a pupil I was very unpromising. I was so slow to learn that I was more or less ignored by the teachers and only had any real contact with them when it was a case of receiving punishment for some misdemeanour I had committed.

There were two days of the year in the school curriculum which were regarded as special events in which the whole school took part. These were Empire Day and Prize-giving day. On Empire Day the whole school was assembled in the playground to sing patriotic songs like "Land of Hope and Glory" and to listen to the reciting of the hackneyed sentiments of a Henry Newbolt poem in which an imperialist bloodbath somewhere in the empire was equated with a game of cricket played by "public" school boys on the playing fields of Eton or Harrow. The proceedings were then brought to an end, until the next year, with a homily on God, religion and the Empire given by the vicar.

In the early thirties I became convinced that the Socialist Party's analysis of capitalist society in general and the causes of war in particular was the only valid explanation of the world's social problems and demanded a world-wide solution. I therefore became a socialist ideologically, but I did not join the party until 1946. The reason for this was that I had decided  to object to military service, and my joining the only anti-war political party in Britain might have been seen as merely a personal anti-war tactic and not a complete opposition to the continuation of capitalism, in peace or war. My refusal to perform military service lasted over a period of about two years of close arrest, court martials and prison sentences, terminating in my discharge from military service.

Harry Walters 

BURGESS HILL WAR VETERAN'S MESSAGE TO THE YOUNG

From the Socialist Party of Great Britain website

NEWS RELEASE

Burgess Hill war veteran and former Socialist Party of Great Britain candidate Les Courtney this week warned young people not to be taken in by the “fake patriotism and glorification of war that the Government is trying to stir up” during what he said was “its celebration of the so-called ‘Great War’.”

Speaking after a lively public meeting held in the town on Remembrance Sunday, Mr Courtney pointed out that “Ordinary people do not want war and do not cause wars. Governments and the rich and powerful interests that support them start wars. But ordinary people of all countries could stop a new war if only they said: no we will not fight for you.”

Having served in North Africa and the Middle East during the Second World War and losing his brother, a Spitfire pilot, his experiences led Mr Courtney to become a Socialist. When Britain again went to war in the 1950’s, he refused to be called up to take part in “more senseless and ridiculous killings”, and was accepted as a ‘conscientious objector’.

Held to discuss ‘Lessons of the First World War’, the meeting heard speaker Steve Clayton remind his audience of the words of Harry Patch “the last fighting Tommy of WW1” who said: “War is a licence to go out and murder for the British government” and “isn't worth one life, it is the calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings.”

The meeting was told the scale and duration of the slaughter the war brought should have been no surprise as Frederick Engels warned in 1887 that “the only war left will be a world war, a world war moreover of an extent the violence hitherto unimagined” which would “strip Europe barer than a swarm of locusts. The depredations of the Thirty Years’ War compressed into three to four years and extended over the entire continent; famine, disease, the universal lapse into barbarism.”

Mr Clayton said The Socialist Party had opposed every war in its history and in August 1914 had warned the public that “there were no working class issues at stake in the war: rather, it was fought as a consequence of rivalry among capitalist powers for markets, trade routes, raw materials and politico-military influence.”

Rather it declared in its paper the ‘Socialist Standard’ in September 1914 that: “Having no quarrel with the working class of any country, we extend to our fellow workers of all lands the expression of our goodwill and socialist fraternity, and pledge ourselves to work for the overthrow of capitalism and the triumph of Socialism.”

Concluding his talk, Mr Clayton argued that “Socialism will mean the end of war. There will be no more trade routes, markets, property or profit to fight over. If everyone owns everything or, to put it another way, if nobody owns anything, then there is nothing to fight over. With production for use, to meet human needs, the era of real peace will have arrived.”

Earlier this year the Socialist Party of Great Britain stood its first candidates for Sussex in the European elections, when Les Courtney joined Howard Pilott from Lewes on the Party’s list.

For more information: contact www.worldsocialism.org/spgb or phone 0207 622 3811.

Obituary: Eva Torf Judd (1941)

Obituary from the September 1941 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Executive Committee of the Party deeply regret to announce the death of Comrade Eva Torf Judd, who was a victim of a recent air raid.

Comrade Judd had been a member of the Party since 1935 and was well known to the London membership.

Born in London of Lithuanian immigrants, her early childhood, which she remembered vividly, was spent in the dingy Metropolitan borough which bears the pleasant name of Bethnal Green. Later, Comrade Judd emigrated with her parents to the U.S.A., and it was there that her interest in Socialism was developed.

Before the last war; whilst living in Boston, Mass., she took part in the struggle for Trades Union rights for the garment workers of that city. But it was in San Francisco, during the post-war years, that she first played an active part on the political field by lecturing at the Labour College.

Although not agreeing entirely with the I.W.W., Comrade Judd gave lectures on Socialism for that organisation in San Francisco and Seattle. Also she addressed many meetings in other cities in the U.S.A.

Returning to London after a sojourn of nearly 25 years in the U.S.A., our late comrade made contact with the Socialist Party, whose members welcomed her valuable assistance in the work of spreading Socialist knowledge. During her residence in London she addressed many successful outdoor meetings for the Party and was a shrewd and lively contributor at Party Conferences.

From 1938 until the time of her death she was active in the Party's cause in Southampton, in which town she met her tragic end.

About two years ago the MSS. of her autobiography was completed, and, in the opinion of those who have read it, it deserves a niche in the records of working-class literature.

To her husband in Southampton, England, and her daughter Judith in Los Angeles, Calif., the Executive Committee, on behalf of her comrades and many friends in the Socialist Party, express their deepest sympathy. Comrade Judd was another good comrade we are sorry to lose.

H. G. H.

But is it Really Capitalism? (2014)

From the November 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Can it truly be the case that capitalism no longer exists? We examine some claims along these lines.

Socialists argue that the dominant economic system today is capitalism, characterised by class ownership of the means of production, wage labour and commodity production. A very small part of the population (perhaps just one percent) own and control the land, factories, offices, raw materials, patent rights and so on. These people form the capitalist class, and the rest of the adult population – the working class – have to sell their working abilities for wages in order to live. Goods and services are produced for the sake of profit, hence the general rule of ‘no profit, no production’.

At the same time there are those, mainly on the so-called political ‘right wing’, who claim that what exists nowadays in much of the ‘developed’ world is not really capitalism at all. Let’s leave aside those who consider that present-day society is socialism or some strange mixture of socialism and capitalism. Instead we shall focus on those who use some such term as ‘corporate’ or ‘crony capitalism’ to describe the social system. Underlying this is a claim, sometimes explicit, that everything would be fine if we could get back to ‘proper capitalism’ rather than the ill-functioning spin-off that has taken its place.

There is no doubt that capitalism has undergone a number of changes since, say, the late eighteenth century, when Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, changes surveyed in Ha-Joon Chang’s Economics: The User’s Guide. In Smith’s day, most capitalist firms and factories were owned by individual capitalists or small partnerships, people who were closely involved in supervising production and, for instance, individually combating strikes. Nowadays, factories, offices, etc are mostly the property of companies, which are themselves owned by large numbers of shareholders; as one example, Superdrug is wholly owned by the Hong Kong-based Hutchison Whampoa, which has a number of other brands too. Corporations now are often huge, with Walmart, for instance, having over two million employees. With lots of different competing firms, eighteenth-century capitalism supposedly knew far more competition than today, when in some cases a small number of companies are enormously powerful in particular areas (as with Amazon and Boeing in ebooks and aircraft, respectively). The state, too, has a much larger role now, with everything from regulation of competition to the welfare system and investment in infrastructure. But the question is to what extent these changes have altered the basic nature of the economy.

One writer who distinguishes between capitalism and corporatism is Michael Labeit (see here). In his view of the world, capitalism is based on the recognition of individual rights, including that to private property; hence theft and murder are illegal. Capitalism involves the free market, ‘the vast network of voluntary exchanges of property titles to intermediate and final goods’.

Under corporatism, in contrast:

‘the government intervenes aggressively into the economy, typically with political instruments that benefit large corporations and enterprises to the detriment of smaller businesses and private citizens. … corporatist authorities seize control of land and capital goods when they feel it is necessary to do so without regard for private property rights.’

Subsidies, tariffs, anti-trust laws and licences are all seen as examples of government working in the interests of large companies and so against the interests of small capitalists and ‘ordinary’ people. Note that corporatism and government interference do not mean state ownership.

Here is another, very sanitised, depiction of ‘genuine capitalism’ (from here):

‘Capital is invested by individuals to further ideas and enterprises that the investor thinks will create a return on the money invested. If the enterprise in question is a good one, both investor and business owner win. If not – better luck next time.’

The Economist  (15 March) developed a crony-capitalism index, focussing on industries that are particularly vulnerable to monopoly or to heavy state involvement, such as banking, defence, infrastructure and energy. They looked at how rich the billionaires in these crony sectors were, as a percentage of GDP. Top by some margin was Hong Kong, followed by Russia, Malaysia and Ukraine. Britain was only fifteenth, the US seventeenth, China nineteenth and France twentieth. Apparently, ‘French and German billionaires … rely rather little on the state, making their money largely from retail and luxury brands.’ As the magazine pointed out, the data were not always reliable, so the precise results needed to be treated with caution. And the claim of people like Labeit is that the economy as a whole, and not just particular sectors, is subject to cronyism.

So is there any real difference between crony or corporate capitalism and ‘the real thing’? As far as the working class are concerned, the answer has to be, very little. All forms of capitalism involve wage labour and exploitation, and it is of minimal relevance for workers to what extent a capitalist company depends on government interference. And of course all companies benefit from the government’s defence of private property and class rule, its anti-worker legislation and its fighting of wars to protect trade routes and access to markets and raw materials.

The descriptions we have cited above all focus on the capitalist class and how they obtain their wealth, whether simply by investment or by relying on government facilitating their profit-making (by licenses, zoning, import duties or whatever). None of them recognise workers and their unpaid labour as the source of the wealth of the capitalists, or the role of exploitation in profit-making. Big capitalists no doubt exercise more sway with the state than smaller ones, but that should not make us feel sorry for the latter, or accept that they have the same interests as workers. Those who criticise corporatism can be seen as standing for the interests of the owners of small businesses (a point that has also been made about the Tea Party movement in the US).

And what of the free market? Many leftist economic commentators have argued that the recession which started in 2007–8 came about because of the free market and the unregulated nature of the financial industry. Thus Seumas Milne of the Guardian wrote in 2008 that ‘it is the free-market model, not capitalism, that is dying’. But the view of those discussed here is that the market prior to then was not truly free, as there was plenty of government regulation. This position, however, inevitably leads to the conclusion that there never has been a free market, since government has always defended the interests of the capitalist class as a whole: in 1700, for instance, the British government banned the import of cotton textiles from India in order to boost the native textile industry. Tariffs, government regulation and war played a crucial role in the growth and spread of capitalism.

Capitalism can take various forms, including state capitalism, where the major industries are owned by the government. The degree of government interference can vary in its extent and its nature, but whichever variant exists it is based on class ownership, commodity production, the wages system and exploitation. So yes, it really is capitalism, and it needs to be done away with as soon as possible. 

Paul Bennett

Life in the New York Cities (2014)

Book Review from the World Socialist Party of the United States website:

Tales of Two Cities: The Best and Worst of Times in Today’s New York, ed. John Freeman; illustrated by Molly Crabapple. Published by OR Books in association with Housing Works.

The “two cities” in the title of this book are both New York. John Freeman in his introduction tells us that he set out to collect stories about life in New York that focus on the human consequences of inequality of wealth, which “is at its most acute in the ‘world cities’ where the rich choose to live (or invest their fortunes in real estate).” What does it “feel like” to live side by side with people who are vastly richer and/or vastly poorer than you are?

Some of the thirty stories are true accounts of experiences in the authors’ own lives. Others are fictional, but these too are meant to be true to life. About half of the authors dwell on matters that have no direct bearing on the theme of economic inequality. I am not complaining: their stories are also of interest. But here I want to reflect on a few of the pieces that do focus on the ostensible theme of the collection.

An epidemic of child suicides

Maria Venegas describes her experience teaching in an after-school program for children in an inner city area. The kids find it hard to cope with the demands made on them and often break down in tears. One of them says she wishes she could kill herself. Indeed, ten NYC public school students did exactly that in just seven weeks in 2014 – an “epidemic” by comparison with the previous NYC norm of ten child suicides a year.

“What is pushing these kids over the edge?” – asks the teacher. The immediate “push” is clearly their anxiety about getting the high marks expected of them in tests that are often confusing and badly designed. But let’s look deeper. She gives us a clue when she mentions that a 10-year-old girl in her class has an “H written across the front of her sweatshirt” – H for Harvard. After a few pages we learn that the hallways at the charter school attended by this girl are named after Ivy League universities: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. “The Ivy Leagues dangle before her every day.”

Nowadays every American youngster is constantly bombarded from all directions with the message: You can make it if you try hard enough. This “encouragement” is regarded as a big advance on the bad old days when low-caste children were taught humbly to accept their place at the bottom of the pile. But the new message is actually even crueler than the old one, because it carries the clear though unspoken implication that if you don’t make it that will mean you didn’t try hard enough. You will have only yourself to blame.

As those who perform this charade of “equal opportunity” must know very well, only a few of the children before whom they “dangle” the highly exclusive, elitist and expensive Ivy Leagues will ever get there – and even fewer will make it through to graduation. The teacher herself, although she probably comes from a background somewhat less disadvantaged than that of her students, went to the University of Illinois, one of the more accessible and considerably cheaper state colleges. The “dangling” is the psychic equivalent of hurling these kids into a brick wall – again and again and again. The remarkable thing is not that some of them commit suicide but that most of them do not.

Such are the fruits of efforts at reform – undertaken in many cases with the best of intentions – that leaves intact the capitalist structure of our society.

The housing treadmill

Several of the stories are about housing – “a perpetual concern,” as Freeman notes. An increasing number of city residents cannot afford to rent a home, let alone buy one. Freeman cites some astonishing statistics (they astonished me, anyway): nearly a third of New Yorkers pay over half of their annual income in rent, while in the Bronx, which is the poorest of New York’s boroughs, rent swallows two thirds of the income of the typical household. Besides the problem of high rents, there is also the endless struggle to get basic services and force landlords to make essential repairs.

And yet New York has a long history of legislative reform aimed at controlling rents and protecting tenants against eviction and mistreatment. A recurring theme is the minimal impact of these reforms in practice. Landlords have many ways of evading legal restrictions, some of them quite ingenious. Of particular interest in this respect is the contribution by D.W. Gibson, a lawyer who specializes in the thankless, frustrating, and poorly remunerated task of protecting tenants’ rights (most lawyers prefer to practice law in more lucrative fields). He describes how landlords who want to evict tenants but lack adequate legal grounds for doing so induce them to leave by making life unbearable, one method being to remove kitchen and bathroom installations under the pretext of renovation.

One place where those who couldn’t afford the rents used to go – in the 1990s, before the authorities decided to seal them off – was the tunnels beneath the city. There are several hundred miles of tunnels and a couple of thousand people lived down there together with the rats. In a memoir evocatively entitled “Near the Edge of Darkness” Colum McCann recounts his explorations of this underworld.

Tables turned

Jonathan Dee’s story stands alone in being written from the perspective of the rich. The narrator and his wife get caught in a snowstorm as they drive home to their townhouse from a charity dinner. They encounter a poor man with a shovel who offers to dig them out – for $100, a charge that he soon raises to $200. The narrator considers this unreasonable and swears at the man, but ends up buying the shovel off him for $937 – all the cash that he has in his wallet. The man responds to his rant by explaining: “It’s called the marketplace, bitch. It’s called knowing what your customer will bear.”

The rich guy is used to having his way, and under normal circumstances he has the resources to get almost anything he wants. Under the exceptional circumstances of the snowstorm, however, he and his wife find themselves isolated inside a “bubble” where the only other person is the poor man, and it is he who happens to own the only “means of production” that matters in that particular situation – namely, the shovel. The tables are turned: for once the narrator experiences the vulnerability of those who do not own the means of production to the blackmail of those who do.

Caught in the toils of the engine

My own favorite story is Bill Cheng’s “Engine.” The author describes the loneliness, emptiness, self-loathing, and self-pity that he felt as a young man struggling to make a living as he drifted from one dead-end job to another. His philosophical reflections are succinct and to the point. For instance:

“I don’t know how to talk about money. It’s one of those things we can’t seem to get shook of. As much as we pretend it doesn’t matter, it sets the stage for all our relationships.”

Alone among the contributors, it seems to me, Cheng has a clear concept of the functioning of the capitalist system inside which we all live. He uses the potent image of “the Engine”:

“Even now there are still times when I can almost glimpse the Engine in its entirety: its high walls, the gears and cogs and avenues through which wealth and power traffic.”

We are all caught in the toils of the Engine.

In this respect he contrasts favorably with the book’s editor John Freeman, who has no concept of the system as such. He is more interested in the secondary issue of why some people “succeed” and others “fail” and does not perceive the mechanism that generates, deals out, and assigns meaning to these human fates. But I willingly agree with his conclusion that chance (“luck”) plays a major role in deciding this secondary issue.

A final observation. The units in the competitive struggle are no longer families, as they were in traditional class societies, but lone individuals. This is exemplified by the story that Freeman himself tells about his relationship with his younger brother. An inheritance has enabled Freeman to buy an apartment in Manhattan, while his brother lives in a homeless shelter. He tries to help his brother, whom he loves and to whom he dedicates the book, but it apparently never occurs to him that he could simply provide him with steady financial support. No doubt his brother’s “pride” would prevent him from accepting such an arrangement.

Stefan

Organise to end the profit system (1991)

From the June 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialist Party member Fred Edwards was a candidate last April in the election for the two delegates from the Yorkshire and Humberside district of NALGO to the 1991 TUC Conference. We reproduce below his election address. He obtained 3628 votes as against 9172 and 7669 respectively for the two other candidates, who were elected. We would not want to claim that all those who voted for him fully agreed with the socialist views expressed in his statement. All the same it is encouraging that the socialist message obtained such a wide and receptive hearing.

In 1989 when I was first nominated by my branch as a potential delegate to the TUC Conference I indicated then my history in the trade union movement over the past twenty years or so and as such feel it not a necessity to cover old ground, suffice to say that the views I had then are as strong now with regard to the effectiveness (or lack of) by our "leaders".

Throughout the years our "leaders" (for that is what they like to be called) continue to place themselves in a position of trying to influence the powers that be that, by tinkering with a social system which continues to put profits before people, all will be sweetness and light.

However, the reality is whenever workers endeavour to gain a few extra crumbs from they cake they themselves bake the capitalist class and its apologists remind them of the need to be realistic. By which they do not mean that workers should acquaint themselves with Marxian economics and the workings of the class struggle, but rather that the employee class should accept less today in exchange for a share in Utopia tomorrow. In the meantime, the working class have to endure the deprivation of their inferior social position, while the capitalist class can continue to enjoy their parasitic privileges derived from profit, interest and rent.

Production under capitalism is anarchic, as the profit requirement must be placed before the needs of the majority. That is why tens of millions of human beings starve to death each year, while farmers are subsidised not to produce food. Similarly whilst thousand of building workers remain unemployed tens of thousands of workers remain homeless.

Alongside over-production for the market there is under-production for human need. This basic contradiction has remained despite reformist attempts to eradicate working class social problems. They have failed as they address effects rather than the cause: commodity production.

In conclusion, I ask of you, the voter, if you agree that my assertion is substantially correct and the TUC should be educating towards a classless, moneyless, private-propertyless society then please vote for me. If you disagree then you will obviously vote for someone else.

The great task which confronts the working class is to organise consciously, politically and democratically throughout the globe so that a speedy end may be wrought to the system.

Fred Edwards

Action Replay: Seeing Red (2014)

The Action Replay Column from the November 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

It gives you wings, according to the advertising slogan. That’s the energy drink Red Bull, though the Austrian firm behind it is far more than just a soft drinks company. It owns a very successful Formula One motor-racing team and sponsors a series of air races that constitute a world championship. It has a US record label, Red Bull Records, but sport is clearly its main marketing tool in the quest to establish an exciting image for the brand. It spends about a billion euros a year on sports marketing, which helps it to sell over five billion cans of the stuff each year.

The main audience targeted by the advertising is young men who are into extreme sports of various kinds, and the company’s ownership of sports teams is part of this whole campaign. In 2005 it bought an Austrian football team and renamed it Red Bull Salzburg: they won the league title by a mile in 2013–14. In 2009 it bought a lower-league team in Leipzig, but this time it was renamed RB Leipzig to comply with sponsorship regulations (we should explain that the RB does not stand for ‘Red Bull’). Supporters of other German clubs have complained that it does not follow the rules on clubs having members who express their views at general meetings. When they played RB at home, Union Berlin fans displayed a banner ‘Football culture is dying in Leipzig’.

The drink (they are a drinks company, remember) is a minor variant on a beverage originally developed in Thailand. There have been claims that it poses a health risk, and it has been banned in some countries, though no risk has been conclusively demonstrated. It is the case, however, that since 2008 six athletes have died in Red Bull-organised events, from extreme skiing to motorbike racing.

Forty-nine percent of shares in Red Bull belong to Dietrich Mateschitz, who has an estimated net worth of over $5bn and owns an island off Fiji. Red Bull gives him profits. 

Paul Bennett

Tory Bluster About ‘Human Rights’ (2014)

From the November 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Tories are hard at work trying to reaffirm their reputation as the Stupid Party. In an imbecilic and shambolic fashion, they have announced they intend to repeal the Human Rights Act (HRA) and replace it with a British Bill of Rights. Even further, they are threatening to renounce the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) and withdraw from the treaty. Noticeably, they only sent their press release announcing the move to the Fleet Street tabloids, ignoring the broadsheet press. The draft document was then found to be error-strewn and ill-thought out.

When their document became available legal minds across the internet immediately began to pick it apart, showing up inaccuracies and ignorant comments scattered throughout. It claims, for instance, that the European Court of Human Rights has banned whole life sentences: when in fact all it did was say that there must be a mechanism for review of the sentence (and, indeed, the British Supreme Court has since said it believes sufficient such structures are already in place).

It has been pointed out that narrowing the ability of courts to read legislation in such a way as to make it compatible with human rights (as they are obliged to do under the HRA) would lead to courts striking down legislation more often. They also promised to stop British courts being bound by Strasburg rulings, when they are already not. Just as all courts have always done, they listen to rulings and reasoning from other jurisdictions and use it as part of their own reasonings.

It has also been suggested that the Westminster Parliament alone might not have the power to repeal the HRA or withdraw from the ECHR, because the devolved bodies for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have had these documents incorporated into their foundation (in the case of Northern Ireland, this is underpinned by an international treaty).

Former Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, who has been booted out of the government for opposing this policy, has written in Prospect Magazine pointing out that since 1815 the UK has signed up to over 800 treaties that commit to some sort of international arbitration, and the ECHR is just one of those. Far from the EHCR undermining political sovereignty of Britain, it in fact entirely relies upon the Sovereign British state entering into and agreeing to uphold treaty obligations.

The power to make treaties is an executive power (or, in the byzantine world of the British state, a matter of Crown prerogative). It is thus part of the anti-democratic aspect of the state. The Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary can negotiate, practically in secret and bind the state in the eyes of the world. Necessarily, this limits what Parliament can and can’t do since it means that Britain cannot pass legislation that would break its obligations to other countries. This is the basic means by which Britain has entered into the European Union, and all European Law is actually a treaty obligation which is given effect by the British Parliament passing compatible legislation.

As Grieve notes, ‘in promoting the Convention and adhering to it, we have followed a long tradition that has seen our national self-interest bound up in promoting international order.’ That is, British capitalists benefit from promoting international order and transparent processes to protect their property rights and investments.

The rights of property

The ideology of capitalists has always been based around contract, as they seek to mediate both competition between themselves and against other classes in society. In particular, in their battle with the absolutist states of feudalism they sought protection in the language of rights to protect their property and business interests. In today’s world, they still have to protect themselves from arbitrary expropriation by state actors (and also from other capitalists reneging on their obligations). The interest of big British business depends on a stable rights-based world, where contracts can be enforced. We need only look at Russia, where rival groups of capitalists have used the state to imprison their rivals (and indeed, have frequently resorted to British courts to try and resolve their differences).

Codified human rights are a way of ensuring that the state cannot be used by rival factions (and also so that state actors can know what they are supposed to be doing). That is the function of rights within the ruling class. Rights, though, also form a sort of peace treaty between the ruling capitalist class and the working class. Rather than fight in the ditches over every single scrap, rights allow us and them to let routine matters of conflict be resolved. Their state gets to operate in a way which is considered broadly fair by the wider population. When it doesn't, then open fighting resumes (usually in the form of riots, strikes and civil disruption, but also at the ballot box). The enunciation of civil rights and their enforcement is a reflection of the balance of class power.

This can be seen in the history of every significant document of rights. The Twelve Tables of Rome, the Muslim Constitution of Medina, Magna Carta: all were created following a period of civil strife as a means of putting an end to the present conflict (and also leaving the existing social structures in place). What this means in practice is that rights are not essential, universal or transhistorical, they are always the outcome of the social relations in a particular society and the relative strengths of the class forces to enforce them. The 1936 constitution of the USSR was touted as the most democratic on Earth (as, indeed it was, on paper). The fact that it was completely ignored and useless in practice was down to the lack of any independent capacity of the population, and the working class, to demand it be lived up to.

Human Rights are an outgrowth of both the competitive class and social division of society and the existence of the state. Just as people who do not keep lions do not need a set of written lion safety manuals, so a society of free individuals without a state will not need a written set of state safety manuals. Instead of rights on paper, we would have the practical fulfilment of human needs with the equal access to sufficient democratic power to secure those needs.

Window-dressing

The Tories know that this is just bluster and window dressing. They cannot effectively remove the rights in the ECHR. The games they are playing are just symbolic efforts to shore up a right-wing coalition. The number of times they fulminate against Traveller sites and planning laws in their document on the British Bill of Rights shows that they are mostly interested in addressing the grievances of people who are big fish in small village ponds (the sort who may vote UKIP because they don’t have big businesses that rely on international stability).

At most, they are seeking to bring control of the law back into the hands of British judges, who share cultural and family relations with the domestic capitalist class, and can be relied upon more than foreign judges to support the interests of the ruling elite. These judges, though, have already shown a willingness to incorporate human rights language wholesale into common law, and have made significant rights based rulings without reference to either HRA or the ECHR.

We should not let ourselves depend on these judges for our freedoms, though. We can defend ourselves and protect what freedoms and rights we have best by building our own movement for socialism and pursuing the class struggle through our unions. We can only ever have the rights we fight for and can defend.

Pik Smeet

No Marx (1989)

Book Review from the June 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Farewell To Marx: an outline and appraisal of His Theories by David Conway (Penguin)

In the continuing flood of literature about Marx and Marxism, whether hostile from the defenders of Market Society—be they Fabians or Fascists, Conservatives or Communists—or friendly from would-be critics of contemporary society, the lack of intellectual discipline is depressing and confusing. It is doubly depressing and no less confusing coming from a Ph.D teaching philosophy.

Elementary text books of logic teach us that terms employed must, to avoid confusion, be univocal and not equivocal. They must also be mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive of the subject under consideration, but:

It is Marxists who have been responsible for establishing socialism in those countries which are socialist. And it is Marxists within the non-communist countries who are the most vocal opponents of capitalism and the most vocal supporters of socialism.

And

the USSR, if arguably not socialist, is certainly not capitalist.

Then

in communism individuals become entitled to means of subsistence on the basis of their need for them. No one is forced to engage in productive activity in order to procure the remuneration necessary for the purchase of his or her means of subsistence. Productive activity is, thus, undertaken purely for its own sake. It is therefore freely chosen.

Also

the means of subsistence are distributed to individuals on the basis of their need or want for them.

Is Russia really like this? Has Western propaganda deceived us to this extent? There are pages of this sort of rubbish. And other sorts.

Conway quotes Engels' oration at Marx's funeral that the forms of government, the legal conceptions, the art and even the religious ideas of the people must be explained in the light of the degree of economic development attained during a given epoch. Conway argues that human beings cannot engage in politics and cultural pursuits without eating and sleeping but it does not follow that eating and sleeping explain the form politics and intellectual activity. Of course Marx never argued that it did. He argued that the relations men entered into in their economic life determined their politics and intellectual activity. We would say today that the relations are a better starting point from which to explain and predict their politics than other starting points. Conway pleads:

Given that there is so little to be said for historical materialism, what is it that accounts for its appeal?

What indeed? Could it be that those concerned to explain the past and predict the future find the material basis of life a more fruitful starting point? Conway rabbits on tediously about the "justice" of exploitation, yet admits that Marx expressly and repeatedly rejects any talk of injustice as "obsolete verbal rubbish". He quotes Allen Buchanan to the effect that Marx thought capitalism unjust but did not want to emphasise its injustice. But if we are to speculate upon what Marx thought as opposed to what he said, here we are where are we!

He says that primitive accumulation of capital was achieved by the first capitalists showing abstinence and drivels on about "sums scraped together" and "pared family budgets" and holds up Richard Arkwright as a model. Shome mishtake here, as Private Eye would say. Does he really mean Carlyle's "Historical phenomenon, that bag-cheeked, pot bellied, much enduring, much inventing barber" who was exposed in 1785 when the courts cancelled "his" patent rights and exposed him as a thief and a fraud, as Ann Beedell has written.

This nonsense about abstinence is only a smokescreen however, and Conway finally comes out with what is really on his mind: the Enclosures, the deserted villages, the war waged by the flag-waving oligarchy on the yeomen of England and the free peasantry everywhere, driving them off the land and into destitution.

Although the less affluent cottagers and squatters may have lost, as a result of the enclosure movement, use-rights in common land previously enjoyed, they were compensated by more work and greater regularity of employment after enclosure.

The Nazis found similar justification, with enabling legislation, for their dispossession of the Jews. "Arbeit Macht Frei!" Doctor Conway appears to be endorsing the acquisition of property by force, an extraordinary view in one charged with the moral and ethical formation of the young!

We must add to Doctor Conway's difficulties with logic a strong urge to contradict himself. On page 50 he writes "It is the simple fact that acquisitiveness and selfishness antedated capitalism by thousands of years  . . . If one accepts that people are on the whole are self-seeking . . ." But on page 133: "People are not in general as envious as Marx seems to be supposing them to be."

He is right, however, in seeing scarcity as the cause of unsocial behaviour:

Scarcity continues amid affluence. There is no reason to suppose that this will not continue for the indefinite future . . . Scarcity together with limited sympathy necessitates the institution of private property as a means for avoiding interpersonal conflict.

So there we are. Time has stopped and to make sure it stops we must organise scarcity by paying people not to produce where the collapse of the Market has failed to discourage them.

The loonies have taken over the madhouse!

Ken Smith

The need for socialism (2004)

From the April 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx states: “No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself” (Preface to A Critique of Political Economy).

It is difficult to show that this claim is correct, but that does not make it irrelevant. It provides us with a starting point to consider whether the material conditions for a socialist society exist today. It also suggests we look at whether capitalism has outlived its role as a progressive economic force in history. For if there is a solution to the problems we face today, certainly it is desirable to implement that solution. And if capitalism is not that solution, and has outlived its usefulness, then surely we are obliged, for our own sakes, to abandon the only economic system any of us has ever known. That is obviously a serious undertaking, and perhaps a frightening one, but one which has been successfully undertaken before, for example, to establish capitalism.

Does the current mode of production ─ capitalism ─ act as a fetter upon production? Are the material conditions which currently exist, sufficiently mature to support new, higher relations of production: socialism?

In 1992, Professor Vulimiri Ramalingaswami, Chair of the World Health Organization medical research committee, told the world that we have the ability to produce enough food for everyone. The ability and technology currently exists to feed, clothe, and house every human being on the planet. However, that ability and technology cannot be used to feed, clothe, and house billions of human beings. Even in supposedly wealthy countries such as Canada, about eight percent of the population had difficulty putting food on the table at least once in 1998-99, according to Statistics Canada. Yet Canada is a net exporter of food. And people freeze to death in the streets because they have no home. Yet Canada is a net exporter of lumber. Something is wrong with this picture: capitalism.

According to the World Health Organization, one child dies, and another is disabled, every twelve seconds, day and night, because they cannot afford vaccines costing about $10 (£5.25). The World Health Organization also tells us that in the United States, tuberculosis, an easily-cured disease of the poor, is increasing. Something is wrong with this picture: capitalism.

Although capitalism cannot provide necessary food and medication for our children, it  spends more than $350,000 (£184,000) every twelve seconds on arms (guns, bombs, jet fighters, aircraft carriers, landmines, etcetera). Socialists do not suggest that the arms budget should be used to feed and care for children and the rest of us. As desirable as such diversion may sound, we know that capitalism must spend that money to protect capitalists from other capitalists, and from the working class. Military spending under capitalism is not optional, it is an absolute necessity. Redirecting the money from war, to help the starving, the homeless, and the sick, is impossible. Something is wrong with this picture: capitalism.

The current material productive forces are in conflict with the relations of production. We should clarify these terms. “Material productive forces” refers to the things actually involved in production, such as workers, land, factories, mines, and transportation. The “relations of production” is somewhat more difficult to explain. It involves such things as whether production occurs, who owns the material productive forces, and who owns the results of production. Currently, the relationship between people and land, factories, mines, and transportation, divides people into two groups. One group owns those things. The other group must use its physical and mental labour to turn raw materials into finished products. Workers produce everything from food to education, from automobiles to hammers, from houses to hospitals, and from shopping malls to factories. We even produce the weapons used to kill each other in capital’s wars.

Those who own the means of production (basically the material productive forces excluding workers), control when, where, and how production takes place. If a factory owner decides to shut down a factory, the workers have no say in the matter. If the owners of an automobile manufacturing company decide to move their factories to Canada, or Mexico, or the United States, or Japan, or Taiwan, it is their choice. They own the means of production. If the owners of a food processing plant believe that they cannot sell their product for a profit, they have the right to shut down the plant. That right is theirs even if the processing plant produced all of the food in the world.

The products of the factories are owned by those who own the factories. The owners may have never been on the same continent as the factory, but they nonetheless own everything produced in the factory. Those who do the actual work have no legal right to the products they have produced. Those who own the means and the products of production, and who control production, are capitalists. The rest of us are the working class. With that understanding of material productive forces and relations of production, we can continue our examination.

We have developed our ability to produce to a level which easily enables us to meet everyone’s needs. But the relations of production-capitalism-disable us. Capitalism cannot accommodate that necessary production. By and large people do not go hungry because there is no food, but because they are, from the unalterable perspective of capitalism, unworthy: they cannot afford to eat. They cannot afford to eat because from capitalism’s perspective there is no reason to employ them and pay them. We have developed the material productive forces to such an extent that fewer and fewer workers can produce more and more of the things we need to live. But still, people cannot get the necessities of life.

Those of us who haven’t been hungry, who’ve always managed to scrape together enough money to purchase clothing and housing and medical care, may think that they are somehow excluded from these negative effects of capitalism. Don’t be so sure. Some of those people in Canada who had difficulty putting food on the table where members of what Statistics Canada euphemistically calls the “middle-class.” Canadian workers used to wonder why Japanese workers would not take all of their holidays. Now Canadian workers are doing the same thing, for the same reason. They are afraid for their jobs. More and more, workers are working an extra half-hour or an hour or more, before they leave work for the day, or they take work home. They are producing extra profit for the capitalists, but no extra pay for themselves. Even though fewer workers produce more, it isn’t enough for the capitalists.

For years we have been told that improvements in production should mean reduced working hours. Instead it means that many of us work longer hours for the same pay. Many others are not permitted to work because capital does not require their labour. This is more evidence that our productive ability has outstripped the ability of capitalism to accommodate our ability to produce.

The apologists for capital would have us believe that Karl Marx was wrong about (almost?) everything he said and wrote. But it is clear that “the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production.” Marx was right.

Most workers do not believe that capitalism itself is the problem. The media, which is a propaganda outlet owned and controlled by capitalists, encourages us to blame anything but capitalism. Most of us do not see through the propaganda, but most of us complain of capitalism’s effects. We attempt to subvert its actions for our own good, and we direct our dissatisfaction in a million directions. We grumble and complain about our lot in life. We busy ourselves with hobbies so that we don’t have time to think about our problems, or solve them. We try to change the laws; we see beauty in things which are not; and we philosophize that humanity is incapable of solving the problems of production. We invent religions which denigrate our humanity, and which offer a solution in the mythical, never-never land of the future. And sometimes we change religions, hoping for better.

We are encouraged to do all of these things because it blinds us to the source of our problems. But even with all the diversions, there are strikes and riots in the streets. As Marx wrote, all of these things are how we “fight it out.” Even the riots are used by capitalism. People are so frustrated by capitalism’s obvious failure that they lash out blindly with riots and terrorism. Rioting workers and terrorist workers make it easy to justify further repression of dissent. The rioters and terrorists are easy to attack, because they really have no solution, only rage.

Workers have good reason to be angry. Workers have no good reason to destroy useful things produced by other workers, or to hurt other workers. But in desperate anger, can one be surprised that some occasionally do? However, rage and desperation rarely clarify the facts. To solve the problems we need to understand why society does not work for us. We need to understand the structure of society, and the real enemy. Workers are boxing with shadows, and paying for the “privilege.”

Socialists are accused of ignoring the obvious improvements capitalism has wrought since it defeated feudalism. Our accusers are wrong. Socialists have clearly stated that capitalism was a necessary stage in human development. At its outset capitalism was progressive: it freed the burgeoning productive forces from the restraints of feudalism, and forced workers to produce wealth which would have been unimaginable before capitalism. Capitalism has evolved from an agent for development of the productive forces, into a roadblock. It is time to remove the roadblock.

The material conditions for new, higher relations of production have been carried in the womb of capitalism for too long. It is time for a birthing. It is time to release our ability to produce and to solve our problems, by providing the appropriate relations of production: socialism.

Steve Szalai

Cooking the Books: More on Profits (2014)

The Cooking the Books Column from the November 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Chris Dillow’s article on ‘Robot Dangers’ raises other issues about profits. Noting that ‘profits don’t come merely from being able to produce goods cheaply’ but that ‘you have to sell these goods’, he asks:

‘And if millions of people are out of work, who will you sell to? In theory, therefore, robots aren’t good for profits and might be disastrous for them.’

This is the old one about mechanisation causing continually rising unemployment. It hasn’t happened in practice, though it could theoretically. It doesn’t happen if capital accumulation continues and the extra demand for labour it entrains rises faster than the displacement of labour by machines. This is what has happened in the past. So, Dillow’s investors needn’t worry too much on that score.

After noting that technology has been eliminating many routine white-collar jobs in recent years, Dillow continues:

‘… this process has not been accompanied by rising aggregate profits. Office for National Statistics data show that returns on capital have fallen since the late 1990s. this is not merely because of the recession; profit rates were lower in 2007 than in 1997. In this sense, the IT boom has lowered profit rates.’

It is true that profits rates do tend to fall at the end of a boom but Dillow’s conclusion here seems rather daring, especially as aggregate profits are not the same as profit rates and can go up even if rates go down.

Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Marx and even Keynes discerned a tendency for the rate of profit to fall in the long run, even though they offered different reasons.

Marx’s explanation was linked to increasing mechanisation. He argued that as profit came only from that part of capital invested in productive wage-labour and that as mechanization meant that the part of capital invested in buildings, machines and materials grew faster, there would be a long-run tendency for the rate of return on total capital to fall.

Perhaps surprisingly (or perhaps not, as he mentions that he has read Marxian economist Andrew Kliman), Dillow takes Marx’s view:

‘According to the standard work on historic economic data (Mitchell’s British Historical Statistics), the UK’s capital stock rose by a factor of almost 11 between 1850 and 1938 whereas profits rose by a factor of less than seven. Ninety years of massive technical progress – the Bessemer process, electrification, combustion engines, telegraph, radios and so on – saw profits fall.’ (He means the rate of profit).

He apologises to his investor readers for seeming ‘a little dystopian’, but they needn’t worry too much about this since robotisation reducing the rate of profit to zero is only a theoretical limit and in any event would be years and years away. Well before that, they will have something more urgent to worry about – a growing socialist movement aiming to end the profit system altogether.

Dillow ends by posing a very pertinent question:

‘What’s at stake here is a matter of utmost importance: how can we ensure that technical progress benefits everyone rather than just a minority, while encouraging that progress?’

Easy. Make the means for producing wealth the common property of everyone instead of just a minority. Since people would then no longer depend on wages to live but would have free access to what they needed, robotisation wouldn’t deprive anyone of a living but would just reduce the work load all round.

Socialism—A Communist Definition (1949)

From the April 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the Daily Worker (22/2/49) William Gallacher, M.P., assumed the role of tutor and outlined a "Lesson for Mr. Attlee." The latter had written a foreword to a new edition of a book he wrote before the war, in which the said: "The progress of events since the war has sharpened the distinction which I drew between the socialism of the British Labour Party and the totalitarianism of the communists." Mr. Gallacher is unable to see the distinction, not because it is a distinction without a difference as far as the system itself is concerned; but he says, "Because there you have an attempt to convey the idea, not confined to Attlee, that there is some special kind of Socialism, invented by the British Labour Party. Of course, it is utter nonsense."

"There can be no national qualification of the word 'Socialism'," Mr. Gallacher remarks. Then, like all good tutors, he commences his lesson with a definition. In precise and emphatic terms he tells Mr. Attlee, for the information of his readers, that: "Socialism means the common ownership of the land and the means of production, distribution and exchange whether here, in Russia, America, or any other country."

Surely nothing is more humiliating for a would-be tutor than to fall down on a definition. Especially when the mistake is so obvious that anyone can spot it.

We would point out to Mr. Gallacher that it is possible to conceive of exchange under a system of private, class or state ownership, but not under common ownership. Exchange is an act that implies ownership by individuals, groups or states. Common ownership rules out all such forms of ownership, and by producing and distributing according to the needs of all, eliminates the necessity for exchange.

Mr. Attlee is unlikely to challenge Gallacher's definition on the grounds of the contradiction it contains. For him nationalisation, public or state ownership is the only definition of "socialism" that is politically practicable.

A sound definition of Socialism must necessarily exclude all the institutions that make capitalism what it is:  a system of exploitation. The highly complex machinery of exchange veils this exploitation because it includes human energy, or labour-power, among the things bought and sold. It makes labour-power a commodity with a price, or wage-scale, adjustable to the practice of capitalism.

Exchange, working in conjunction with private or class ownership of the means of life, is in fact, based on that ownership, and becomes the method by which the producers are exploited. Mr. Gallacher's definition, which includes exchange as something to be owned is common is, therefore, as he himself would say, "utter nonsense."

F. Foan

On getting a bit of your own back (1979)

From the May 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Technically, Proudhon was wrong when he wrote that property is theft. But they are inseparable in a way which is not captured by crime statistics, nor portrayed anywhere in five decades of cops and robbers films. The working class version of self-help is not the sort of thing of which Samuel Smiles would have approved, yet it is more universal than his prescription of inventiveness, frugality and diligence as a means of improvement. I mean pilfering.

The world of the workers is one where access to what is needed is heavily restricted by the rationing system of wages; while the world of the capitalist is one of abundance where desire has only to be expressed in pieces of paper for the object of that desire to be accessible. These two worlds come together, in part, at places of work; for there the worker glimpses, at second-hand, what it is like to belong to the master class.

Clock Cards

In factories the stores are always full of materials and tools which the machinist needs to complete his jobs; power flows unrestrictedly through the machine he operates and electric light floods from the roof of the machine shop—with no need for anyone to worry about bills. money for the meter, or who is going to pay to-day. For the machinist adds his measure of labour time to the products which pass through his hands. When the worker is surrounded by this beautifully organised system of social production, he cannot help contrasting it with the paucity of his private ownership; so he gets a bit of his own back as part of the vain attempt to redress the balance, after his employer has taken everything he makes, leaving him only a small packet of money.

Thieves do not form a sub-culture of the working class; most of us are at it. Hence the half-admiring description of the opportunistic worker — "he'll steal anything that's not bolted down". While the sharp-eyed storeman who controls every washer is — "as tight as a duck's arse". Because the worker has no stake in what he makes, the battle between these two is often the only thing which lends interest to the working day. Anyone who doubts that the workers are resourceful enough to run a socialist society should consider their skill in outwitting the storeman.

Self-Help

What happens to the street trade with his barrow, who sharpened knives, shears and landmowers? Every cutter-grinder in the toolrooms where U have worked has two jigs under his bench. One mounts the cylindrical blades of the landmowers his friends bring in for sharpening; the smaller fixture holds the blades of the rotary mowers. Between them they earn him his cigarette or pin-money.

Learning how to get a bit of your own back starts early for most workers. Who does not have an atlas and a few school textbooks on their bookshelf? While teacher tried to stop us from stealing or "losing" books, she kept her house in pens, pencils, drawing pins, Sellotape and envelopes from the stockroom, taken while the school secretary's back was turned.

Jobs which involve collecting money offer endless scope for self-help. The crowded early morning work 'bus often arrives at the factory area before the conductor can collect the fares upstairs. So he stands on the platform as the passengers come down, takes their money and rolls a stream of 5 pence tickets for 25 pence fares. The 'bus inspectors spend a lot of their time looking for discarded strings of 5 pence tickets; so a clever conductor takes them home with him. It is a poor man who does not fiddle enough for his own and his driver's tea money this way.

I once knew a sheet metal worker whose whole house was decorated with low relief brass and copper ornaments, hammered from offcuts of material used in his work. So accomplished had he become in producing the cycle of jobs at the factory, that he was able to divide his time at work equally between jobs for the gaffer and his homework. Standardisation had taken all of his skill and inventiveness out of his trade, so he lavished it on those ornate and decorative tokens of his stolen labour.

Free For All

The existence of this universal fiddling is a strong argument for the futility of criminal reform. Petty crime is as natural an occurrence as rain in Manchester. Small wonder then that a few workers schooled in this tradition take to theft in a big way. The whole process is turned into an institution by dossers in cities. Most of the book on "alternative" London list places where free food, drink, clothes, telephone calls and other unlikely gifts can be had from firms engaged in promotions, display and publicity events.

Fiddling has its amusing side. Norman moved into a new council house. He was nailing down the linoleum in the toilet, when a carelessly aimed hammer struck the lavatory pan a glancing blow. It fell apart and there was water everywhere. Rather than face the wrath of his wife, he unscrewed the two halves from the floor, quietly carried them across the road to the unfinished houses, slipped in through an open window, exchanged the broken one for a new one and crept back home. His wife never learned of all this, but a few days later he was passing the time of day with the site foreman of the estate, who was complaining of vandalism. "They even get into the new houses just to smash the lavatories nowadays", moaned the foreman. "It's terrible" said Norman, "I don't know what the world is coming to".

Socialists know what they would like the world to come to. But the pity of it is that workers in general have no idea of how the stores of the world could be made freely available to them—and not surreptitiously.

Barry McNeeney

Analysing Marx (1992)

Book Review from the October 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Karl Marx, Our Contemporary. Social for a Post-Leninist World. by Keith Graham. (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992. £35)

Marx is our contemporary, argues Keith Graham in this book, in that he analysed not just 19th century capitalism but capitalism in general, and capitalism, unfortunately, is still very much with us.

Graham's approach is that of what has come to be called "analytical Marxism" which consists on analysing what Marx wrote to get at the logic of his line of argument and then to see where this leads, as well as identifying, and even correcting, any inconsistencies.

Graham applied this technique both to what he calls Marx's "general theory" (basically, the materialist conception of history, how societies are structured and change) and to his "special theory" (of how capitalism works and how it can be abolished). Light is thrown on various problems of interpretation of Marx. For example, what did Marx mean when he wrote about property relations becoming a fetter on the development of the means of production? Is it the class struggle or the development of the productive forces that is the motor of change from one form of society to another?

Graham also discusses Marx's concept of class and its political implications. Marx adhered to the principle that "the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself". So do we (it is incorporated into our declaration of principles). So do many others. But the sort of action this commits you to depends on how you define "working class". Which is where the disagreements and misunderstandings begin.

One view defines the working class as, essentially, only manual workers who actually physically manipulate raw materials. This is the popular view and also that of non-Marxists who define class in terms of occupation and way of life. It has definite political implications, as Graham points out:

If it [the working class] is identified with those engaged in manual labour, it constitutes a small and probably shrinking proportion of the population. And, as Przeworski puts it, 'A party representing a class which has fewer members than the other classes combined cannot win electoral battles'. This identification would therefore militate against acceptance of democratic political structures.

As a minority within society, the working class would not be able to use democratic political means to emancipate itself and so would have to reject majority action and favour some other means, such as industrial action.

Another view holds that Marx defined class in terms of class consciousness and political organisation. Graham quotes David McLellan who says that for Marx "a class only existed when it was conscious of itself as such, and this always implied common hostility to another social group", and Ralph Miliband who argues that "for Marx, the working class is not truly a class until it acquires the capacity to organize itself politically . . . without consciousness, the working class is a mere mass".

This view too can lead to an anti-democratic conception of the emancipation of the working class by excluding the un-class conscious and the politically unorganised—and allowing the politically organised minority to act as "the working class".

Graham argues, convincingly, that Marx rejected this view. Marx defined class in terms of a social group's material circumstances (relationship to other social groups with regard to control over and access to means for producing wealth) not of their consciousness. He gave an objective not a subjective definition of class. The working class were the working class, by virtue of their position in society, even if they were unaware of being a class.

So how did Marx define working class? Graham has no difficulty in showing that Marx did not restrict the working class to skilled and unskilled manual workers. First, Marx introduced the concept of the "collective worker" as all those workers who, within the social division of labour, contributed in way or another to the productive effort; this would include those engaged in activities which at a lower stage of technological development would have been done by the same person as actually worked the raw material—planning, researching and co-ordinating the work—and so embraced engineers, researchers, draughtspeople, their back-up clerical staff and other such "white collar" workers.

But, even apart from this, Marx defined the working class as the class of those whose economic circumstances (exclusion from ownership of means of production) compelled them to sell their ability to work for a wage or salary, including those dependent on them and those unable to find an employer. This included clerical workers, civil servants, teachers and even managers (who Marx referred to as "a special kind of wage labourer"). In a country like Britain we are talking about the overwhelming majority of the population, well over 90 percent of people in fact.

If this overwhelming majority is the working class that is to emancipate itself, then the political strategy for achieving a classless society can live with, and make use of existing democratic political institutions, limited and distorted as they are and must be under capitalism. As Graham puts it:

If you believe that the proletariat is in the process of becoming the majority class in society, and if you believe that this class is the only practical agency which can be expected to carry out and consolidate the desired transformation to the future society, then you have strong grounds for favouring democratic values. Universal suffrage and majority rule will be congenial institutions in that regard.

This was why Marx always supported action by workers to secure the franchise, as the Chartists in Britain, and urged those who had got it, as in France, to transform universal suffrage "from the instrument of fraud it has been up till now into an instrument of emancipation" ("Introduction to the Programme of the French Workers Party", 1880).

The principle that the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself committed Marx to a thoroughly democratic practice. His was a concept of a democratic social revolution, both in the sense of the workers organizing themselves democratically without leaders and in the sense of democratic methods being employed.

Graham brings this point out well in his book, which can be highly recommended to those who  want to understand what Marx was trying to say on this and other subjects.

Adam Buick