Marx was righter than this (2011)

Book Review from the November 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why Marx Was Right. By Terry Eagleton (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011) £16.99

Was Marx right? As Terry Eagleton points out in the preface to this book, of course he wasn’t. No thinker gets everything right, nor can any reasonable person expect them to. But was Marx “right enough of the time about enough important issues to make calling oneself a Marxist a reasonable self-description”? In this sense, Eagleton says the answer is yes. And Eagleton is right.

As Eagleton puts it, you can tell capitalism is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism – people become aware of capitalism in crisis, just as an illness or injury makes you newly aware of the body you always took for granted. Thanks to the crisis, people all around the world are talking about capitalism again. How can this discussion become deeper and better-informed? Well, in all kinds of ways, but we can hardly ignore Marx’s body of work, which has “for long [been] the most theoretically rich, politically uncompromising critique of that system”, as Eagleton puts it. Marx was the first person to “identify the historical object known as capitalism – to show how it arose, by what laws it worked, and how it might be brought to an end”. That must surely be of interest to those who are wondering whether capitalism has a future.

What, then, could be more welcome and timely than a book that demonstrates why Marx was right, in what ways he was right, and the relevance of his ideas for political action? And who could be more relied upon to write a witty, engaging and accessible account of this than Terry Eagleton, the author of many justly popular books on subjects related to Marxism, and of regular witty essays and polemics pricking the pomposity of many of our culture’s most unjustly respected liberal thinkers? It would seem to be the perfect book for our time, written by the person perfectly placed to do the subject justice. Sadly, Eagleton lets us down.

Marxists reading this book may think twice about just what it is they’ve signed up for. Virulent anti-Marxists will wonder where all (what they consider to be) the most devastating arguments against Marxism are to be found. But most importantly, non-Marxists, politically interested, anti-capitalist or disillusioned working-class readers, are highly unlikely to be convinced by it either. Eagleton makes no effort to carefully define what Marx’s thought was, nor to compare it with the reality of everyday life under capitalism. Marx’s supreme achievement, as Eagleton says at the start of his book, was to identify an historical object known as capitalism, and show how it worked. But in the book’s 258 pages, we do not hear a word about Marx’s thought on that subject. We do not hear once just what capitalism is, or how it works. Instead, we are just exhorted to believe, from various vague pronouncements and polemical swipes, that capitalism is mostly a very bad and unjust thing. Quite why it is bad, or quite why it leads to such results, we are none the wiser.

As for what socialism is, we hear much more about that. But anyone who is familiar with Marx’s arguments about what capitalism is will wonder just what the difference between capitalism and the various forms of “socialism” Eagleton champions is supposed to be. Even if you’re not familiar with Marx’s arguments on this, anyone who reads Eagleton’s apologias for the Bolshevik dictatorship in Russia and Mao’s China would be quite justified in snapping the book shut and concluding that their prejudices were quite correct after all: that Marx and socialism were things to be avoided at all costs. For Eagleton, these “socialisms” were “botched experiments”, a disgustingly coy way to describe the blood-soaked, anti-working-class tyrannies that imposed state-led, capitalist industrial development on economically backward countries. Whenever Eagleton does bump up against the occasional sensible argument, he quickly dismisses it as “ultra-left”, and veers off to the right – to the rightwing deviation, the senile disorder, of Leninism. Perhaps that’s why Eagleton can find room to mention approvingly or critically just about everything that has ever been dignified with the name of socialism apart from the idea, put forward by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, of the “communistic abolition of buying and selling”. Genuine socialism is just too ultra-left for him.

This book is, then, a bitter disappointment and a wasted opportunity. The capitalist West is just emerging from a long period of illusion. As Eagleton points out, the illusion was not so much a deep belief in capitalism, but a disillusion about the possibility of changing it. “What helped to discredit Marxism above all, then,” says Eagleton, “was a creeping sense of political impotence. It is hard to sustain your faith in change when change seems off the agenda…” Change is back on the agenda. Marx’s analysis of capitalism remains as astute and relevant as ever. But if you want to know why, you’ll have to go to better sources than this book.

Stuart Watkins

Is the 'Manual' Worker the Only 'Producer'? (1930)

From the April 1930 issue of the Socialist Standard

A book recommended by the translators of Marx's "Capital" (E. and C. Paul) is the Marxian Economic Handbook, by W. H. Emmett. This is one of the books supposed to simplify Marx, but it makes Marx more difficult than it is supposed to be. It contains also many errors. The author was prominent at one time in the Socialist Labour Party in Australia, and seems anxious to attack De Leon's explanation of Marx's "theories."

Dealing with that fine chapter of Marx on "Co-operation," Mr. Emmett says :

“In a pamphlet entitled "Marx on Mallock," Daniel de Leon implies that, according to Marx, managers and superintendents, by virtue of their brain work, are productive of wealth." (P.343.)

Mr. Emmett quotes Marx but leaves out the essential quotation. The advantages of division of labour and the necessary cooperation of producers in the modern factory are well brought out by Marx, who explains the necessity of "directive labour" in the following words : —

"Labour that is directly social, community labour on a large scale, always stands more or less in need of guidance, of a management which can establish harmony among the individual activities, and fulfil the general functions that belong to the movement of the unified productive organism as contrasted with the movements of the independent organs out of which the organism is made up. An individual violinist manages his own affairs ; an orchestra needs a conductor. This function of guidance, superintendence, and arrangement devolves upon capital as soon as the labour subordinated to it becomes co-operative. As a specific function of capital, the function of management acquires special characteristics." ("Capital," page 346 Everyman Ed.)

Mr. Emmett makes the following statement :—

"If the increased yield of modern wealth be not the exclusive yield of the manual labour employed, then this will mean that the labourers productive power is not (neither individually nor collectively) increased at all by the co-operation." (Page 343.)

The co-operation of workers does increase the output by means of the cooperative method in production, but does that mean that the work of foremen, superintendents, etc., in directing the division of labour and the co-operation of the various parts of the process, does not play a part in the increased output?

Mr. Emmett fails to take note of Marx's point in the quotation we give.

Marx clearly shows that the functions of guidance, superintendence and arrangement are essential to the co-operative labour process.

Mr. Emmett makes a further point. He. says : —

"If the managers and overlookers were a part of the co-operation (or that "collective power that resides in the manual workers and their direction, collectively ") how could Marx tell us that, "while the work is being done" these managers, etc. "command in the name of the capitalist " (Page 343.)

Naturally, under capitalism the foremen, managers, etc., command in the capitalists' name, but does that mean that they do not perform an essential part of the producing process ? Marx clearly -shows that management acquires "special characteristics" to-day, because of the "twofold nature" of production, "being, on the one hand, a social labour process intended to produce use-values, and, on the other hand, a process for promoting the self-expansion of Capital, a process for making surplus value." ("Capital," page 348.)

That two-fold character of modern production explains why the foremen, superintendents, etc., of industry are essential to the increased production of wealth in social production, and also "command in the name of the capitalist" for the purpose of producing- more surplus value.

Adolph Kohn

Rise and Fall (1967)

Book Review from the January 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Clydesiders by R. K. Middlemas (Hutchinson, 50s.)

In the general election of 1922 twenty Independent Labour Party members were elected from Glasgow and the West of Scotland alone. As a vast, hymn-singing crowd saw the new MPs onto the London train one of them, Emmanuel Shinwell, was aware that "they had a frightening faith is us . . . we had been elected because it was believed we could perform miracles and miracles were needed to relieve the tragedy of Clydeside in 1922." (Conflict Without Malice by E. Shinwell) The miracles, of course, failed to come. Capitalism proved more than a match for the reforms of the Independent Labour Party. Mr. Middlemas traces the gradual decline of that organisation.

The cover announces his book as "an important contribution to contemporary political history." This claim would not be so wide of the mark if he had got a few more of his facts right. Take, for example, his confusion of the founding of the Socialist Party of Gt. Britain with that the British Socialist Party on page 32:

The impossibilists', the hard core of followers of the American Daniel De Leon broke off in Scotland in 1903 to form the extremist Socialist Labour Party (SLP), and two years later in London to form the British Socialist Party.

Let us make it clear that our founder members were opposed to the confused industrial-unionism if De Leon and that the date of formation was 1904, not 1905 as he suggests. He is plainly mixing up the SPGB with the so-called 'British Socialist Party' (BSP), the inaugural meeting of which was held on 30th September, 1911—with Hyndman in the chair. (See H. M. Hyndman and British Socialism by C. Tsuzuki and the Socialist Standard, November 1912). The BSP held negotiations with sections of the SLP and of the ILP, and others, in 1920-21 and it was this reformist cocktail which eventually became the 'Communist' Party.

Despite the unfortunate mistakes, there are some interesting passages in this book. One of these, on page 276, gives a classic example of policy reversal by the Communists. In October 1932 the CP and ILP were co-operating and they organised the first Hunger March. Yet, only a year before, a Communist Party manifesto had referred to "the struggle against the ILP which is an inseparable part of British social fascism." Elsewhere we find that Shinwell gained his 'socialist' education by reading "the German Socialist Bernstein" and that Maxton, with unconscious schizophrenia, claimed to recognise the class struggle and the labour theory of value—but not the materialist conception of history!

Mr. Middlemas has little to say about the present little group, all that remains of the once powerful ILP. He merely reflects that "like the old-time SDF and the contemporary 'Impossibilists', the ILP was on the inverted road of splinter groups for whom it is more important to decide the details of the socialist millenium than the present methods of achieving it." But it is quite wrong to imply that the ILP sacrificed numbers for the sake of socialist understanding. They have been strongly influenced by anarchist ideas and, now that the great days of Maxton, Brockway and Wheatley have gone, feel that "parliamentary action . . . has many limitations, and its members cannot adequately represent the interests of the working class." Their demands include the extension of the "comprehensive system of education and abolition of the Grammar School system: and the introduction of "differential rent schemes", although "only a socialist society will be able to bring down the rents"! Finally, they have pledged themselves "to fight within the capitalist system" so that "commodity production (can) be organised for the benefit of the community." Could confusion go any further.

From the start the ILP followed an opportunist line and sneered at the 'impossibilists' in the Socialist Party of Gt. Britain. Never having Socialist principles, it could at least boast of a fair body of working class support. Now that that is gone, there is nothing left. It should be a lesson to all those who preach reformism.

John Crump

Socialism: a world of free access (1986)

Editorial from the Winter 1986-7 issue of the World Socialist

We inhabit a world of potential abundance for all, but it is also the case that we have trapped ourselves within a social system of mass deprivation. Throughout the world millions and millions of our fellow men and women are denied the satisfaction of their basic needs. Millions die each year from starvation (635 million live on or below l,600 calories per day) and millions more are blinded, crippled or made lethargic and socially wasted because they lack food, clean water, any medical care. Even in the so-called rich countries poverty is the lot of the majority: not just official 'poverty' which means that the government concedes that you are proof, but the poverty which characterises the life of every worker who is deprived of access to what society could provide for them, but they cannot afford to buy. The reader of this journal whose needs are fulfilled may be an eccentric millionaire, but more likely such a claim of fulfilment is a self-deception - an attempt to hide one's own poverty from one's own consciousness. Let us be honest as workers: our lives, our parents' lives and the lives of our children, however hard the struggle has been to make them 'decent' or 'prosperous', have been less than satisfactory in relation to the level of need-satisfaction, comfort and happiness which society could allow us to enjoy. The working class are confined by the present social system to cut-price lives.

In a socialist society the means of wealth production (the factories, land, offices, mines, transport, media and all the resources required to satisfy human needs) will belong to the entire human community, all of us owning and all of us controlling what will be our world. Production will no longer be for sale and profit; no longer will needs be ignored if there is no money to convert them into 'purchasing power'. In a socialist system of worldwide production the only reason for producing goods and services will be to satisfy needs. Production will be solely for use.

Having scrapped the present system of only producing goods and services if there is an expectation of profit for the parasitical minority who monopolise the earth's resources, socialism will forget the old rules of the buying and selling game (the market) and will distribute what is needed on the basis of free and equal access. Money will be abolished: you cannot buy from yourself what you commonly own. The satisfaction of human needs will involve people giving according to their abilities and taking according to their needs.

Free access means that no human being will need to buy anything. Anything that society can produce will be there for the taking. Decent food; the best houses possible to build; gas, electricity, water; TVs, radios, entertainment; all medical and educational services - all completely free and available for all.

Socialists do not have a narrow conception of need. We would not wish to give the impression that socialism will do no more than satisfy basic living requirements - although doing that alone will be a momentous step forward for the millions of workers now denied the satisfaction of their most elementary needs. More than that, socialism will allow humans to be creative and to explore our wider needs. For too long our needs have been over-influenced by the selling process and the crude mind manipulation of the advertisers: in a socialist society we can begin to think about what we really require to be happy human beings and we shall set about supplying ourselves with the resources needed to live as fully as we can. In answer to the opponent of socialist ideas who asks, 'But will you be able to provide a colour TV for every man and woman in a socialist society?' we answer 'Yes, indeed: a world which can provide enough weapons to murder every person alive could be transformed into one which will provide a colour TV for every person alive, but we feel somehow that once such a new system is established the desire to see ultimate luxury in an escape into technicolour fantasy will not be the ultimate goal which men and women will express.' In short, socialism will not only be able to satisfy our existing needs, but it will enable us to question and challenge those needs - to escape from the poverty of capitalist-determined needs.

Needs are social. We are only free to have goods and services to use if it is technically possible to produce them and if there are people ready to do so. In a socialist society there is not going to be a sudden, utopian-like abundance of everything: the skies will not rain with goodies. Socialism will release from the constraints of profit the abundant resources of the planet and these will be used to allow us to live decently and well. There can be no socialism without socialists, and conscious socialists will have to realise that living in a world of cooperation entails giving as well as taking. Under capitalism most of us do plenty of giving (to the profits of our bosses) and an impoverished degree of taking. In a world of free access it will be a pleasure to fulfill the necessity of working to produce goods and services, sure in the knowledge that one is not doing so to make a boss rich, but to make all of our fellow inhabitants of the global village rich in life. In a worldwide human family there will be no shortage of willing volunteers to ensure that those who cannot work are cared for; there will be no problem of people refusing to do what cooperation demands of their humanity. To be sure, no person will be made to do anything as a matter of compulsion in a socialist society: if they refuse to work and insist upon the glorious right to sleep all day they will be regarded as very odd, perverse sorts. The last thing an intelligent social animal of the human species will do once he or she is free to live in cooperative equality will be to sleep as a form of luxury - indeed, what a perverse system capitalism is when it regards the man or woman who enjoys the freedom to sleep all day as having made a success of life.

Socialism will be a stateless society. No government will be present to tell people what they may or may not have. Free access means precisely what it says: people will be quite free to decide for themselves what they want and to take it. Production will be totally geared to that objective. If people want what cannot yet be produced - what is beyond social resources as developed at that stage - then they cannot have that particular need satisfied. But that will be a very different situation from the kind of mass denial of basic needs which characterises the profit system.

A world of production solely for use and free access for all is there for the making. All it requires is a majority of workers who understand and want it to join together for the purpose of bringing it about. For years a minority of workers have argued the case for such an exciting social alternative. For how much longer we will remain a minority is up to our fellow workers. Will they accept a world of misery and insecurity and poverty in the midst of potential plenty, or will they unite for the creation of a system where never again will the pained cry of a hungry child whose parents lack the money to feed it be heard on our planet?

What Goes Up Must Come Down (2002)

Editorial from the August 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

It's funny how often people only believe what they want to believe. For instance, it might suit their interests for property prices to go up, so they convince themselves that, over the long run, they always do. It's the same with shares. Individual shares may go up and down, so the thinking goes, but across the board – as an investment – they're a fairly safe bet if you're lucky enough to have some cash to spare and can play at being a capitalist for a day.

However, recent events have served to shatter some of these illusions. Stock markets across the world have tumbled and a fully-fledged “bear market“ has been pushing shares steadily lower week after week. The series of financial scandals that have been unfolding in the United States (such as at WorldCom) have dented the confidence of investors and the capitalists are now taking flight from the stock market casino. The recent symbolic decision by one investor to spend £50 million buying a lost Rubens masterpiece says it all – fine paintings and antiques are now seen as safer investments than shares.

In reality, the stock market falls are not just a recent phenomenon and they haven't just developed since the catastrophic events of 11 September either. The bear market has been in existence for the best part of three years as financial reality has triumphed (as eventually it always does) over the baseless optimism engendered by a speculative boom. But why should this always be the case?

As legendary Wall Street investor Warren Buffett once said, in the short-term the stock market is like a voting machine – but in the long-run it acts more like a weighing machine. The growth in the paper value of shares (and property too) tends in the long-term to reflect the slow growth, over time, of the real economy, where goods and services are produced and distributed and not just bought and sold. However, two factors serve to complicate matters.

One is that the capitalist economy does not grow in a steady fashion but is periodically beset by economic convulsions which lead to notable periods of decline. The capitalist economy is not on a smooth upward curve but is a roller-coaster ride of booms and slumps. Slumps follow when companies over-invest because of their competitive drive to acquire more profits, a phenomenon which leads them to produce more than the markets they are selling to can absorb. This does not initially happen across the board, but in key sectors that have typically seen huge growth during the boom and in which, for a time, expansion seems limitless. The knock-on effect from this over-expansion can be enough to produce a slump, with falling output, rising unemployment and wage cuts for those still in work.

The second factor working against the steady growth of stock markets is that they can in some ways become de-coupled from the workings of the real economy for short periods. This can occur for all sorts of reasons, such as when shares seem a particularly risky option in an unstable economic environment (e.g. the 1930s and 1970s) or, conversely and most notably, when they become a vehicle for speculation as the act of successfully buying and selling them becomes a more profitable means of investment than long-term investment in the real economy itself.

As an example of the former situation – when share prices seem artificially low for long periods – an investor in the US share market buying their shares just before the Great Depression of the early 1930s would have had to wait well over over twenty years to see them reach their former value despite the big increases in production during that period overall as the US economy recovered from the slump. Similarly, while US Gross National Product rose by 373 percent between 1964 and 1981 the Dow Jones Index of US stocks stood at 875 – less than one point higher than 17 years earlier (Sunday Times, 15 July).

Conversely, however, in the 17 years after 1981 the US economy grew by less than half as much while at the same time the Dow Jones ballooned more than tenfold to over 9,000 points. What happened over this period in particular (not only in the US but in most other markets) is that there was a flight towards speculation, especially in the once-booming hi-tech “dotcom” and telecommunications sectors, which pushed share prices to levels where they bore no relationship whatsoever to the real underlying values of the companies involved. That speculative bubble – based on over-confidence – has now been shattered by the realisation that the profits of these companies were an ephemera. And the situation has since made worse by the discovery that many of them have been cooking the books to buy themselves a bit of time before the inevitable happened.

The fall in world stock markets is already significant (in Britain the FTSE 100 has lost over 40 percent of its value as we write, wiping tens of billions off paper share values). However, past experience from similar speculative bubbles suggest that the markets may have some way to go yet before they start to recover, prompting a serious slump in production as investors save or hoard their cash. Historically, it is not unusual for shares to fall between 70-80 per cent from their peak. That is what they did after the Wall Street Crash, it is what happened in the early 1970s during the last really sustained bear market in countries like Britain (when the FTSE fell 73 percent) and it is what has happened in Japan in recent years as the Nikkei Dow has fallen from its peak at over 39,000 points to around the 10,000 mark.

Surreal as the capitalist system may appear to be, its ridiculous speculative bubbles are always burst sooner or later – and the larger the bubble, the greater the correction that usually follows. And unfortunately, the consequences are typically worst for the most vulnerable section of society – the wage and salary earners who have nothing of real worth to sell except their ability to work for the employers. In truth, we can pretty much leave the capitalists to look after themselves – but for the workers there is only one solution to the economic crises and slumps of capitalism: a socialist revolution that will sweep away the fetters of the market economy for good.

Labour's head-banging exercise (1989)

From the July 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Popular working class politics is in a state of great confusion. There is uncertainty, disillusion, a prevailing sense of failure and, above all, a lack of clear direction.

It is not a case of uncertainty arising from a question of what to do next, after making great progress in the solution of problems. No-one would say that. Indeed, the great social contradictions which beset society are still with us. We have millions of unemployed; there is poverty and homelessness; in every modern state there is a vast arsenal of weaponry which threatens our annihilation. We have the obscene waste where vast resources are allocated to the military when people are starving and then the human priorities should be demanding that we build houses, improve our medical services, clean up our environment, and undertake many other lines of social action to serve needs.

Irrational Politics
If we look at the present times in which these problems are being expressed we find that this is in the language of what might appear to be madmen. You've only got to listen to the news on any day and hear the talk about the trade deficit . . . interest rates . . . productivity . . . wage settlements in relation to increased prices  . . . the strength of the currency . . . the level of government spending.

Most people don't understand any of it but the professional politicians who run the system are permanently trapped in this economic gibberish which is totally irrelevant to what has to be done in terms of solving the social problems we face. To see its irrelevance you've only got to look at the record. For the past hundred years this has been the language of those who run the system, yet it has never helped to clarify the nature of our problems. Nor has it ever led to any practical action which could solve them. Yet it goes on being repeated, year after year.

One of the reasons for this political irrationality is because politics has become dissociated from experience. The kind of arguments which went on at the last Labour Party Conference all too place as if the past never existed. The rational way to begin an understanding of our problems should be to examine what did happen in the past and to ask important questions about it: What were we hoping to achieve in the past? What action did we think would be effective? What happened as a result of that action? What were the reasons why we failed? What lessons should be learned from that failure?

Neil Kinnock's Ambition
That doesn't happen and the example of the Labour Party can suggest some reason why. The professional politicians who are in the main controlling positions in the Labour Party and who get their living by being MPs don't want to face up to the past because it only brings out their failures. They've got a vested interest in forgetting it: they want to go on being professional politicians in positions of power. They want to form a government.

They are desperate to form a government. You've only got to see Neil Kinnock on television and in other places. He will say and do anything to form a government. He'll run the market system better than the Tories—those are his own words—just to be Prime Minister of a Labour government. He can't afford to think about the past. He wants to forget it and pretend that it doesn't exist. He needs to create the illusion that he has a unique opportunity to solve our problems which no other politician has ever had before. But we can't just blame him. He is only one of those who are trapped in the prevailing state of political neurosis where action is dissociated from experience.

Even the ordinary constituency workers at what they call the grass roots level whose time and energy keep the Labour Party going want to forget the past. They don't want to face up to the fact that their hours of campaigning to get Labour MPs elected in the past all came to nothing. Indeed, if they looked at it honestly and objectively, they would have to confront the fact that it didn't just come to nothing: the Labour government between 1974 and 1979 did all the things which were the opposite of what they said they would do.

The Facts
What are the facts? Have a look at the 1974 Labour Party manifesto.

They said they would solve the problem of unemployment. What happened? Under the Labour government unemployment doubled. It went from 630,000 to over 1,300,000. This was the opposite to what they said they'd do.

They said they would increase the proportion of national resources allocated to the health service, education, welfare, pensions and other benefits. What happened? Under Callaghan as Prime Minister and Healey as Chancellor they cut spending on all these services.

They said that with an expanding economy industrial relations would be improved. What happened? The country was beset with the chaos of strikes—the notorious winter of discontent which actually led to the Tories under Thatcher being voted into power.

They said they would defend the poor against the rich. What happened? When they took office, wages and salaries accounted for 72 per cent of all distributed income. Profits took 28 per cent. When they left office, wages and salaries accounted for 68 per cent and profits took 32 per cent. This again was the opposite of what they said would happen.

So, on all these counts—unemployment, government spending, industrial strife, and the distribution of income—things were worse when they left office in the 1979 election.

The Problem is Capitalism
There is now supposed to be a great debate taking place in the Labour Party since they don't know what they stand for any more. In any rational response, the first thing you would expect is that they confront the reasons for their past failures. But they're not doing that. Their so-called policy review is a public relations exercise. All that's come out of it is the same old failed methods. It's another phase in the same old process of political head-banging, with Neil Kinnock as their leading head-banger. Not that he cares. All he wants is to be Prime Minister, as he's made abundantly clear.

For workers, the problem is capitalism. We produce all the wealth—in fact we run the useful parts of society from top to bottom—but we don't get all the benefits of our production of goods and our running of services and we don't have direct control of the society we run. Our economic function under capitalism is to produce wealth for an exploiting and parasitical class, the capitalist class.

Since the beginning of the century, when the Labour Party was formed, these basic facts haven't changed. We had capitalism then and we've got capitalism now. Workers were exploited them we're exploited now. The rich had luxury then and they've got it now. Workers had the problems of housing, making ends meet, and economic insecurity then and we've got the same problems now. This is in spite of the fact that we produce every bit of useful wealth that becomes available and run all the useful services that people need.

Capitalism produced for profit then and it produces for profit now. When there was no prospect of profit then, workers became unemployed. It is exactly the same now. At the turn of the century the privileges of the rich were based on their ownership of the means of production and all natural resources and on their control over workers through the state machine. It is exactly the same now.

The Socialist Solution
It isn't enough just to have a clear understanding of what causes the problems of the working class; we must also have a very clear understanding of how they could be solved. That solution is socialism.

Socialism means a society based on common ownership, democratic control, and production solely for human need.

By common ownership we mean a society where all means of production and all natural resources will be held in common by the whole community. In socialism there will be no individuals or groups in society exercising ownership rights of any kind over manufacturing industry, energy supply, transport or communications, nor over land, oil, metal or mineral deposits. All these will be available for use by society for providing for people's needs.

By democratic control we mean a system of administration where social policy and action will be decided by the democratic decisions of the community. Communities will be free to make their decisions about what needs to be done and, within the limitations of what is practicable, will organise social resources so as to achieve the objectives of those democratic decisions. This will entail the conversion of the present state machinery, which represents the power of the capitalists to maintain their monopoly of the means of life, into the required democratic institutions.

Production solely for human needs will replace the present capitalist system of exploitation where workers sell their mental and physical abilities for wages or salaries and produce commodities for sale on markets. Production solely for human need on the basis of common ownership will mean people cooperating to produce goods and maintain services directly for needs and in line with democratic decisions. This will be a practical and straightforward system of useful work producing useful goods free from the economic constraints of production for profit, without any exchange of any kind and without therefore the use of money.

Production will be humanised in the sense that human beings won't have a price put on either their ability to work or the product of their work. Jobs won't have a price on them, nor will goods, nor will needs. Instead of working for wages people will cooperate, and this will bring work under the control of those who carry it out. It will be the self-determined activity of individuals responding to the needs of the community of which they form a part and who have the responsibility and the real power of decision-making and action.

That is the sane system we must establish and it is the only sensible definition of socialism.

Pieter Lawrence

Socialists confront Mr Tony Benn (1980)

From the January 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tony Benn may be the next Labour Prime Minister of Great Britain. Almost alone among the Labour leaders, sunk in a gloom as they are after their party's defeat last May, he offers a plan for Labour's future, with an optimism that they will one day once again get power over British capitalism. 

So we were surprised when he agreed to be interviewed by the Socialist Standard about his policies and attitudes as he expresses them in his recent book Arguments for Socialism. Defenders of capitalism are notoriously difficult to persuade to match their case against ours. The interview (which Tony Benn preferred to call a debate) lasted an hour and our published account of it has needed to be abridged.

In truth, Benn's plan for Labour's revival is little more than a paper thin assumption that, with a few constitutional changes, his party will be able basically to alter its nature. It will, he hopes, be able to throw off its past as a party which has run capitalism firmly in the interests of the capitalist class and begin to run society in the interests of the majority. There is no evidence to support this assumption; indeed after every electoral failure Labour tries to bolster its confidence by telling itself, and us, that it can and will change.

Benn's political ideas are basically that if there are enough small reforms imposed upon capitalism the system will, in a way which has yet to be explained, suddenly stop being capitalism and become socialism. In the case of Benn, even this shaky argument might have been a little stronger if he had been able to give any idea of what socialism is or even to know whether the Labour Party stood for socialism.

He claims that reforming capitalism is "doing something", as opposed to socialists who are "pure" and "impotent". This is a familiar, not to say exhausted, argument - one which continues to exist only because those. like Benn, who put it forward do so by ignoring reality and experience.

The working class have had plenty of time to become familiar with Labour governments and with Labour politicians who - no matter what the effect of their anti-working class policies, no matter how obvious their failures to eliminate capitalism 's problems tirelessly assure us that a vote for Labour is a vote for a better society. This, again, flies in the face of reality.

One final point. Benn, as we have said, is a leading politician But his justifications for capitalism, and his objections to the principles of revolutionary socialism which are uncompromisingly put forward by the Socialist Party of Great Britain, were exactly the same as those we confront all the time, wherever we are and whenever we state the case for the new society of common ownership.

Socialist Standard: You claim to be a socialist and to stand for something which you describe in your book Arguments for Socialism as democratic socialism. Now the Socialist Party of Great Britain also claims to stand for socialism and because of this we are hostile to the Labour Party. So it is clear that we and the Labour Party differ about socialism and what it is. Could you tell us how you define socialism?

Tony Benn: I suppose there are many schools of socialism in this country. There is the Labour Party, which is not particularly ideologically united; there is the Communist Party, there is the New Communist Party, the Socialist Workers' Party, the International Marxist Group. There are an enormous number of schools of socialist thought and I suppose that discussing socialism is like discussing religion. I think that if you look at British socialism you have to see it in two ways: first of all you have to see those sects of socialist thought, all of which are very valuable, as a means of illuminating what is happening. Then you have to ask yourself a second question: how does the working class movement in Britain mobilise itself for social change by defending its interests against those hostile to it, and how does it secure advances on limited fronts or major fronts? The Labour Party comes in the second category. It is the instrument of the British working class movement but there is no ideological test in the Labour Party. There are people in the Labour Party who in other countries would be Christian Democrats and there are others who in other countries might be communists I suppose — or anything in between and beyond. So the Labour Party has never purported to stand for a particular school of thought and to that extent it lacks the purity the SPGB would like to see. It's an instrument.

Socialist Standard: That doesn't answer our question of how you define socialism: you don't define socialism in terms of a basic change in society.

Tony Benn: In the preface to the book I identify some of the influences in my life that brought me to a view that I describe as socialist and only I can decide how I'm to be classified. But the influences that were present in my life have driven me to conclusions that the structure of society needs to be changed in such a way as to bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power in favour of working people and their families. If you want to put it in the classic language: "To secure for the workers by hand and by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof as may be obtainable on the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange."

Socialist Standard: Could we move on from there and ask you about a specific feature about society which is drawn from your book. The actual statement is: "Investors there will always be." You follow this up by saying " . . . but there is no valid reason why the investors' money should give them first claim to control over those who invest their lives." Now socialists would argue about the detail of that statement at some length but for the moment we would like to ask you how you would reconcile the existence of investors — which necessarily means other people who work to produce the yield on the investments, in other words exploitation, profit producing — with a system of society which, in any rate in part, is defined in Clause Four as "common ownership"?

Tony Benn: Well, if you have savings in the Post Office Savings Bank are you an investor? If you have money put aside in a pension fund are you an investor? If you are a borrower for the purpose of buying your own house, is there anything wrong in borrowing money that you may yourself have invested in a Building Society? I don't think that raises the question of socialism at all: the right of people to put aside from their current earnings money that they wish to invest. What really matters is whether that gives them command over the livelihood of others and that is the key difference, as I understand it. I've never heard the argument put forward by socialists that it's wrong for somebody to put aside money from their earnings to provide for their holiday or their retirement. It seems to me to be perfectly compatible with socialism.

Socialist Standard: We don't think, when you were talking about "investors", you mean people with small amounts of savings in something like the Post Office. You have to draw a distinction between people in pension funds and the sort of people you're referring to in your book when you say you came to the realisation that banks and the big financial institutions actually controlled what you did, rather than the other way round. Does your answer mean that you do envisage a socialist society as having investors?

Tony Benn: I think the question really would entirely depend, in this context, upon whether the financial institutions were publicly owned, which I think they ought to be, or not. If you have the pension funds in public ownership and those pension funds then put their money into a publicly owned industry like Leyland for the purpose of expanding motor car production they are investors. What I am saying is that neither the state investor, nor the private investor should have the power to determine matters of industrial policy that are properly the concern of those who work in those firms. I've never heard the argument used that socialism would abolish the concept of investment, because investment is the transfer of surplus into future production or into some other socially desirable purpose. The question is, who does it and what are the consequences of it?

Socialist Standard: Socialists—members of the SPGB—would say that your vision, which you call socialism, looks very much like capitalism. In your book you indicate that you think that governments, including Labour governments, failed to affect problems like poverty; in fact you mention something like "we aim to eliminate poverty" and you say a couple of lines later "This is a very old aim." So if you're arguing that Labour governments have failed to eliminate poverty and other problems like unemployment which you draw attention to in your book, do you not think this is a basic failure, something to do with the capitalist system of society rather than with personalities in the Labour Party?

Tony Benn: Oh, yes. I don't think it's got anything to do with personalities in the Labour Party. In 1959 the Labour Party was persuaded to abandon socialism on the basis that capitalism would always give you growth and welfare, full employment and so on. That was one of the features which explained the failure. Other features you could go into in greater detail, but the main one was that we abandoned the attempt to make fundamental changes. But that no more shakes my confidence in the Labour movement, as the instrument of social change, than a defeat in a general election shakes my confidence in the validity of the ballot as means of determining who should be in power.

Socialist Standard: The argument, surely, is that the Labour Party has been in government roughly half the time since World War II and by your own arguments this "fundamental and irreversible shift in power" has not happened. We can try and put it a bit further; it won't with a Labour government, whichever Labour government, whether it's your brand or Callaghan's brand or whatever. You're not actually trying to affect the fundamental basis on which society works. For example, nationalisation is one of the things the Labour Party has always taken Clause Four to mean — it was intended to shift the balance of power and it hasn't done so in the industries which have so far been nationalised. You've got to be responsible for the Labour Party; your record since 1945 is one of, on your own definition, somewhat large failures.

Tony Benn: If we are asked to justify our record, as we are, then I must ask the SPGB what it has got to show for its record of great purity and but little influence and political impotence. However we make changes it will take time and we have to be both impatient and patient at the same time. These changes cannot be carried through overnight.

Socialist Standard: Could we take you up on the point of unemployment? In your book the conclusion you come to, having outlined the problem pretty adequately, is to say that we should not lay the blame for what has happened at the door of any individual or any group of individuals. A couple of sentences later you say "These contradictions are fundamental to the economic system under which we operate." Now that's what socialists are talking about. We are saying that problems like unemployment are not susceptible to being reformed out of existence. We argue that a basic change in society is needed.

Tony Benn: It's not due to personalities but it is due to something being fundamentally wrong. If you say that reform had never secured change, how do you explain, for example, the very substantial change that did occur when the Combination Acts were repealed viz-a-viz the role of the trade unions—or the impact upon society, which has been very profound, through the extension of the franchise? I think that to say that reform is always wrong because what is needed is fundamental change entirely misses the point that, to be effective, reform has to be fundamental and this becomes a semantic argument.

Socialist Standard: First of all we don't think that your reforms are actually doing what you claim they are doing. To put it another way, if the Labour Party got all that you claim it would like to do, that would not be fundamental change. Things are changing every day — there's been fantastic changes, some of which the Labour Party has helped, some of which it's held back. You talk about unemployment, say you have got to do something about it but you can't; ultimately unemployment is one of those inevitable problems which keep cycling up and down in this society. This is what's happening now, it happened last winter and the Labour Party, even at its best, is not going to stop that.

Tony Benn: That is a view, which  is very common on the ultra-left, based upon pessimism — that doing anything is a waste of time because you're bound to fail. In some circumstances, as now, we are in a mainly defensive posture, to prevent the destruction of the Welfare State and the rise of unemployment to two or three million. It would be a remarkable achievement for the Labour movement. Our first function, as a representative of the British working class movement, is defensive. At the same time we have then to organise and explain and analyse and mobillise and then win a majority for a change.. Now you can say "If you do all that it's simply not worth doing. It won't do anything you describe." Well that form of pessimism feeds sectarianism because having dismissed the entire Labour movement in which the hopes of the British working class have been put, in one shape or form, for a century, it justifies the view that you should like in a little world of purity and impotence. I'm driven to say that although I don't think you are either pure or impotent.

Socialist Standard: You accuse of being pessimistic; we would say that what you are doing is confusing, creating a fog, because you're building up hopes of all sorts of people who are desperate for a change yet you can't put them in a situation where they can bring about that change.

Tony Benn: What I'm saying is that while the present structure of economic and industrial power remains the problems of our society are inevitable and until we open our minds to a different concept of society we can have Labour governments in office but never Labour governments in power. And we can have Labour governments in power and never have socialism in practise.

Socialist Standard: We urge the working class to learn from their experiences and one thing which is signally clear is that at the moment they are not learning from their experiences. In particular, they don't learn from their experiences of government. You mention the 1945 Labour government; well you know the sort of policy that government carried out. For example they took the working class of this country into the Korean war, they immediately imposed an attack upon working class living standards, they behaved in the accepted way of any capitalist government. And that has been the history of all Labour governments up to now. Now the socialist attitude is that the working class should learn from their mistakes. Could we tie that up with a point about fundamental change needing consent; we argue that in order to change society there has to be a socialist consciousness. Now do you think that when a Labour government does this sort of thing — when it attacks trade unions, for example, when it attacks working class living standards, when it prosecutes the wars of capitalism, when, in other words, it behaves pretty well like any Conservative government — do you not think that to call that socialism, or to say it has something to offer the working class, does anything but raise consciousness? It causes confusion.

Tony Benn: I draw the same distinction as between the organisation of the church and the christian message, which has survived, despite the organisation of the church over a long period. I don't regard any human organisation as being capable by its nature of reflecting in a pure form the socialism the Labour Party professes. What I'm saying is that the Labour Party is the only instrument by which socialism can be introduced. Socialist governments have had some successes and some failures. I've never argued that Labour governments are socialist in themselves but they are the instrument through which socialist ideas can be introduced.

Socialist Standard: It looks to us just the opposite. If you didn't know the names, didn't know who was who, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. If you dropped from Mars at the time of the last Labour government and heard Callaghan last winter, how would you tell that that was supposed to be the instrument for introducing socialism? You are asserting what you want to believe; you've got your eyes closed to what is really going on in the Labour Party.

Tony Benn: Well that's perfectly fair comment and criticism. If I'm asked to justify the Labour Party I will look at the resolutions that have been passed by the party Conferences. Those of them that have been implemented embrace real and fundamental socialist concepts. Nobody is going to persuade me that the National Health Service was not a fundamental change in the opportunity and access the people have to good health. The comprehensive schools do represent a fundamental change in the concept of education. Legislation designed to advance trade unionism has fundamentally altered power relationships at work. Now those are only three examples. But to say that the whole thing is a fraud and has been intended to confuse and divert people is to do less than justice to the common sense of the people who support the Labour Party.

Socialist Standard: Do you think, then, that whatever comes out of the current enquiry into the organisation of the Labour Party, a Labour government would ever respond to a decision by your conference which it saw as being against the interests of British capitalism? For example, if the Conference passed another resolution to abandon unilaterally British nuclear weapons, weapons which a Labour government thought, as all Labour governments have thought up to now, are very necessary to British capitalism — do you really think they would scrap the weapons?

Tony Benn: Well if you're saying that democracy is impotent in the Labour Party, and is destined to be impotent in the Labour Party, you're saying that democracy is impotent everywhere. If the Labour Party, by changing its Constitution so that its leader is accountable, its policy is determined by its members, its MPs can be reselected — if you are saying that all those things are destined to fail, you are saying that there is something inherently wrong about the Labour Party, that even if it adopted your policy en bloc it could never be capable of implementing it. And this again is a form of institutional pessimism which I simply can't accept.

Socialist Standard: If the Labour Party adopted our policy en bloc it wouldn't then be the Labour Party — it would be a different party, that would stand for socialism. You see, the SPGB says — we want socialism. We define it very clearly, we talk about a world common ownership society with free access, voluntary co-operation. That's the society we are after. We are not a "broad church", we are not a broad movement, we are after socialism and nothing else. Now you say you want fundamental change but on the other hand you also say you want what the Labour Party wants. Now a lot of members of the Labour Party, as you know, are not for fundamental change at all. They are for very small reforms because that is the way they see the Labour Party making progress. But we would like you to be specific about what fundamental changes you want.

Tony Benn: Well I'll do the best I can, but I will be referring to policies that have been adopted by the Annual Conference which are: that the crisis of investment has got to be resolved by diverting the nation's savings to re-equip the nation's industry in circumstances that are accompanied by, and indeed promoted by, expansion of public services. We want a society where all those who exercise power are accountable to those over whom they exercise it. Now you might say that's a very generalised phrase but it's no more generalised than saying we want a world full of good people to work with each other because that's the "second coming". In any circumstances I can foresee for the next century or more, any little bits of socialism you create will be operating within a hostile sea of capitalism or fascism or international control of some kind or another. To reject the idea of piecemeal changes because there has not been a total change can become an excuse for not even trying. I'm arguing that socialism is always going to be piecemeal advance towards a change because you do not have it within your capacity to make the big change at once, which could not in any case be made without winning people's hearts and minds to the benefits of little changes, and that has got to be done in other countries as well. I will accept that your dream world is broader than my dream world but my dream world is perfectly capable of encompassing yours. I don't quite understand how your dream world would help me in trying to deal with the day to day problems of the people I try to represent.

Socialist Standard: The case for socialism is not a matter of pessimism or a dream; at the matter it is a matter of diagnosis. In answering the question about fundamental change you promptly started to talk about piecemeal change and that really is the whole kernel of it. There have been centuries of attempts at piecemeal changes — some of them you discuss in your book — and yet capitalism today is as terrible a system to live under as it ever was. The working class still have tremendous problems and there are still people like yourself who are putting forward policies to deal with them. Now our diagnosis of that situation is that capitalism has outlived its usefulness and all organisations — and we include them all in this — are going to fail if they don't recognise that basic fact. So we say, as part of our diagnosis, the remedy comes next: a fundamental change in society, a social revolution, and that is something the Labour Party has never stood for.

Tony Benn: All I'm saying is quite simply that if you are going to make an advance you have got to be prepared to tackle problems on a piecemeal basis, by which I mean discrete areas that you change.

Socialist Standard: I'm glad you're not a doctor. I wouldn't goto a doctor who said that, when I had a problem, tackle that problem just as it comes up. We are saying that the logic of your argument leads, not to socialism but to different forms of capitalism. By establishing socialist society we will not be chasing after all these little problems one after another, which is what you advocate. We will be actually changing the society which causes the problems.

Tony Benn: But you skip the whole problem of how you create a socialist society. You simply say — "If things were different, you would have a better life." It is no good me going to somebody and saying "If things were different you wouldn't be out of work, your mother wouldn't have to wait two years for an operation". They want to know, how do we make it different? And frankly, if I as a minister approached the problems that way, there would have been no interest at all. If people simply went to ministers and heard this interesting lecture about how under socialism it would be different and then were sent away with our problems round our necks, it would be a disaster.

Socialist Standard: You are saying that a socialist can't exist in a Labour government, which is absolutely correct. Or in the Labour Party.

Tony Benn: Well, anyway I've enjoyed it very much. A stern cross-examination.

Ralph Critchfield

Ronnie Warrington

Uncles (1999)

A Short Story from the December 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

When I was a very little girl my family had a benefactor called Uncle. At the time I thought he was a relation of ours. In those days it was considered to be impolite for children to call adult friends and neighbours by their first name; it would have to be Auntie Betty or Uncle Fred even when they were no relation to you whatsoever. But my parents were rather unconventional and so dispensed with this silly tradition. So I thought this Uncle must be a real uncle even though I had never met him.

What was bewildering for me was listening to my parents discussing him. Mum would say "I'll take your suit down to Uncle's on Monday and get it back in time for the weekend." Dad wouldn't be likely to wear his best suit for work. He had a working uniform of dark blue denim with WBC (Woolwich Borough Council) etched on the back of the jacket. His suit was worn at weekends only. Uncle paid my mother for the loan of the suit, and sometimes she would let Uncle borrow my eldest brother's suit as well. This led to a terrible quarrel in our house. Alex, my elder brother, had a new girlfriend he was constantly trying to impress. Whenever he brought her to the house my younger brother and I would mouth the word "Yuk" to one another; they were forever kissing each other and we thought they were sloppy. Anyway, the row was over the fact that Mum had taken Alex's suit to Uncle's and had failed, for some reason, to get it back in time for the weekend when the beloved girlfriend was due to visit. They all shouted at each other for hours and Dad told him to get out if he didn't like it. He said very angrily, "It's to put food on the table." It was an ugly scene.

I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to imagine this Uncle of mine. Why would he need to pay Mum for the loan of Dad's rather tatty suit? And what would he want with Alex's suit too? I even asked a couple of the kids at school if their dads and brothers had uncles who borrowed their clothes and, looking mystified, they shook their heads. One girl told me, "My dad hasn't got a suit."

Then the day came when I was to meet Uncle. I had been away from school with a head cold and as Mum refused to leave me alone in the house when she went out, we both got on a tram to town. Mum carried with her one of those battered, cardboard suitcases, the only kind poor people could afford in those days, and a woman who got on the tram at the same time asked me, "Going on your holidays, are you?" I told her, "No, we're going to Uncle's, aren't we Mum?" Later Mum glared at me saying, "Must you show me up like that?" All my life I've felt sorry for children. They are seldom given any examples of how to be truthful, and adults have so much more practice in lying. Wasn't it Shakespeare who said, "Out of the mouths of babes and of sucklings"? Well, something like that.

In town I trotted alongside my mother excited at the prospect of meeting Uncle at last. We turned into an alleyway and there stood a small building with three brass balls over the top of the door. Inside it was dim and dusty and there was a counter like ordinary shops have. A man appeared suddenly from a door behind the counter and Mum opened the case and took out the suit. He looked the suit over and then gave her some money and a ticket. I watched this transaction with great interest. Some uncle—the man ignored me! I had a real uncle who used to pat me on the head and say, "You're a little beauty, just like your mother," and sometimes he would give me a packet of sweets and tell me not to talk so much.

This man was not my uncle. He wasn't pleasant to my mother, nor she to him. She resented him. Well, who wouldn't resent a man who took your husband's suit, laid it on a dusty old shelf somewhere, lent you money and charged you interest on it?

Mum picked up the empty case and we traipsed back through the town and caught a tram home. My mind teemed with questions, none of which I could give a name to and something warned me against trying to voice any of them. That day, young as I was, I saw the rudiments of capitalism—that every action must involve money, that nothing, absolutely nothing, can exist without exploitation to make the system work. Of course I didn't really understand that at the time, but I peered out at the world, short-sighted though I was, and suspected that it was a very strange place indeed. And so it is. I waited for the adults to discover my myopia and recommend spectacles. When at last I got them the world came into sharper focus and my mind reeled at the absurdity of it all, that humans arrange affairs in such a way as to create chaos. Uncle's was a tiny part of the personal experience which shaped me into the person I am today and into being a socialist. That experience was invaluable I think.

Heather Ball

Bolshevik primer (1969)

Book Review from the September 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

The ABC of Communism by N. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky. Penguin, 8s.

For half a century Bolshevism has been a blight on the working class movement. But recent years have seen an important tendency, especially among many young workers, not only to recognise Russia as state capitalist but also to question Bolshevik methods and the theories from which they are derived. To do this many have been going back to the classics of Marxism and Leninism and it is no accident that over the last few years several major works which have been unavailable for decades have suddenly been republished as commercial propositions. So the very fact that Penguin now find it profitable to bring out from its mothballs the ABC of Communism is significant.

Bukharin and Preobrazhensky belonged to the generation of old Bolsheviks which was systematically murdered by Stalin in the 1930s. After allying himself with Stalin against the opposition led by Trotsky and Zinoviev, Bukharin ended up as one of the defendants in the Moscow trials and was shot in 1938.  Preobrazhensky was expelled from the Bolshevik party along with Trotsky in 1927, but after 'recanting' he was readmitted for a short period in 1929 — only to be arrested and executed later.

Their ABC, however, was written before this (in 1920) as a commentary on the programme adopted by the eight Bolshevik party congress in March 1919. Over the next ten years it was accepted as "an elementary textbook of communist knowledge" and was published by Communist parties throughout the world.

The ABC now stands as a monument to the utopian dream of Lenin and and his comrades in the early days of Soviet Russia. World socialist revolution was the order of the day — "What Marx prophesised is being fulfilled under our very eyes. The old order is collapsing. The crowns are falling from the heads of kings and emperors. Everywhere the workers are advancing towards revolution . . ." But it is more than this — it also shows that, for all its defects, their understanding of capitalism and Socialism was far more penetrating than that of their latter-day disciples. So Bukharin writes that a fundamental "characteristic of the capitalist system is the existence of wage labour" and, referring to so-called "state socialism", that "here, likewise, there is no trace of socialism. We have state capitalism, based upon forced labour". Contrasted to this is "proletarian communism (or proletarian socialism)" — "a huge co-operative commonwealth". "The communist method of production presupposes  . . . that production is not for the market, but for use": " . . . we no longer have commodities, but only products". 

It is also interesting to note that while most would-be Bolsheviks now talk in terms of 'generations' before the wages system could be abolished in Socialism, Bukharin — even though he was influenced by Russia's industrial backwardness and low level of production — merely writes that:

At first, doubtless, and perhaps for twenty or thirty years, it will be necessary to have various regulations. Maybe certain products will only be supplied to those persons who have a special entry in their work-book or on their work-card. Subsequently, when communist society has been consolidated and fully developed, no such regulations will be needed.

So we can warmly recommend the ABC of Communism as required reading for all sub-species of neo-Bolshevik. Although it contains numerous theoretical errors, it should introduce many of them to certain basic socialist ideas — which they have certainly shown no signs of being familiar with up till now.

John Crump

Leigh Burr-Parti makes a mint of money (1976)

From the September 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Leigh Burr-Parti: "We are the masters now." (1976)

From the August 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Communities, International and Otherwise (2014)

From the November 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

The concept of a community is generally viewed in a positive light. So people may speak approvingly of community involvement in some project, or community support for some idea. You may live in a thriving community, or one that is undergoing community regeneration.

Dictionaries offer various definitions of community, often along the lines of ‘a social group residing in a specific locality and often having a common cultural and historical heritage’ (adapted from dictionary.com). A community can be a place itself, or ‘a social, religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists’.

This last definition is the one that underlies such expressions as the gay community, the Jewish community or the scientific community. The common characteristics may include sexual orientation, language or religion, among others, and need have little or nothing to do with where people live. There is often an assumption here that members of communities of this kind do indeed share the same interest, whatever that may be. People may claim to speak for a particular community or to be community leaders, though it is not always clear on what basis such claims are made.

Benedict Anderson wrote a book on nationalism called Imagined Communities, since nations could not be proper communities in any real sense. A similar point might be made about other uses of the word, such asthe business community, which presumably points to the capitalist class, especially one within a particular country. They may share the interest of deriving profit from those they employ and of having their access to markets and trade routes defended. Yet they hardly constitute a community in any other way, and are often at each other’s throats in terms of competition for sales and profits. They may resemble another group viewed in similar terms, the criminal community.

Another use, and a very frequent one, is the international community. This might be taken to refer to the General Assembly of the United Nations, but it usually has a rather more specific meaning. Noam Chomsky points out (www.chomsky.info/articles/200209--.htm) that it often just means the United States and some allies and clients, and he refers to this by the label Intcom. The international community in this sense is those who rule the most powerful capitalist state plus those who hang onto its coattails. Whenever you read or hear about the international community, you should ask yourself who it really includes: does it perhaps mean a tiny but extremely powerful and influential group of people who do indeed see themselves as ‘distinct in some respect from the larger society’? Of course, it is nice for them if they can pass themselves off as representing the consensus of the world’s population.

The Socialist Party’s Object speaks of the means of production being owned and controlled ‘by and in the interest of the whole community’. This means what it says: all the people of the Earth will own the land, factories, offices and so on in common. And we will form a true community, one with shared interests but not distinct from or in opposition to anyone else or any other group. The global community of World Socialism will truly be a positive notion, offering support and opportunity for all those who are part of it.

Paul Bennett

Leigh Burr-Parti: Whom did you do in the second Great War? (1976)

From the July 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Let’s Make a Real Socialist Revolution (1967)

From the November 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Revolution” has an exciting ring. It is an advertiser’s word, a punchy politician’s word. Like all such words it is over-used, and losing a lot of its force. Every new model of car has its half-dozen or so revolutionary innovations, and every new model of politician calls for a revolution in our approach to this, that and the other.

Clearly at least one meaning of the word is a very big change. That is why the adman and the MP use it so often. They spend their days trying to pretend to us that little things are big.

When socialists say that we need a revolution, we too are calling for a very big change. But we are not using the word as a sales gimmick. In the sort of world we want there will be no private or government ownership, no money, no state and no armies. You must agree that this kind of sweeping change would indeed deserve the name “revolution.”

We need a revolution because the world’s most terrible problems, such as war, poverty and loneliness, cannot be solved any other way. Reformers, social workers, charitable individuals, priests and other well-meaning folk, have all failed. By now most of them realise they will never actually solve the problems they are tackling. They are like nurses on a battlefield: all they can do is to keep slapping on the bandages and hope that somehow the slaughter will stop. And to many of them occurs the agonising thought that they are helping to keep it going.

If revolution is the only answer, why can’t people see that this is so? Because they are trained not to see it. The brainwashing we get at school, on television and in the news, papers tells us that things are getting better all the time, that it is good to be patriotic, that everything hinges on “our” balance of payments, that we have a duty to work harder, that the sweet life is within our reach.

But the most effective indoctrination does not come through the mass media. It comes from our family, friends and workmates. We all desperately need the acceptance and approval of other people, at 1east someother people. In the homes, factories, offices, pubs, bingo halls and shops these words are uttered thousands of times a day: “You can’t change human nature.” “Just look after number one.” “Why don’t they go back where they came from?” “We fought for these youngsters and look how they repay us.” “Britain’s going to the dogs.”

These are ritual statements. The people who make them don’t want to discuss them, have probably never speculated that they might be wrong. Every society has its stabilising platitudes, along with more or less universally accepted codes of conduct and belief, but that does not mean they cannot be changed if they are called into question strongly enough. For the moment, however, the workers continue to accept the “rules of the game”. It is quite all right to put on a uniform and kill thousands of little boys and girls with bombs and napalm, but perfectly hateful to kill one little girl on Cannock Chase . . . that’s just one of the rules, no more open to question than "Fiddle the company but don’t fiddle your mates." In the same way, most people will readily condemn those who live off the Social Security when they could be working, but will vigorously defend the rights of the much larger number of people who live in luxury yet never work because they own capital.

It must also be admitted that the routine of life under capitalism does not always tend to arouse a questioning or critical attitude. Our work is miserable so we live for our "free" time. But our jobs so mould our outlooks and sap away our exhilaration that even during our leisure we cannot live life to the full. So we seek to tickle our tired selves with ever-hotter, ever-faster, ever-shallower experiences, or we are frightened into a frantic drive to get more personal possessions, since these seem to give a measure of security. We are so involved in the daily struggle to make a living that we have no time for living. Nor, in most cases, for thinking. People prefer to be lulled.

Many workers can clearly see the vast gulf between the pampered minority who own the world, and the rest of us, the propertyless wage-slaves. But they think the way out is merely their own individual advancement, not a social revolution. Obviously there is nothing wrong with a person’s wishing to move up within capitalism: it is inevitable that workers will want to do so. But rags to riches stories are rare: that is why they make headlines. Under feudalism the ambition of the capitalists was first of all only to become feudal lords, and some did. But eventually the interests of the capitalists became so much opposed to feudalism that they had to destroy it. In the same way the modern working class is learning that any progress within the confines of capitalism leaves the roots of the problems untouched, and often creates new problems.

Despite all the ideological cul-de-sacs and mass-produced soporifics, capitalism goes on sowing the seeds of its own-destruction. It demands healthy, educated slaves, workers trained to think clearly and critically. In the West, it promises an age of automated abundance and maximised happiness (after we’ve all tightened our belts for a few years, just to get us over these annoying little economic upsets). Soviet capitalism is lumbered with an even more onerous prospectus: it promises its workers the withering away of the state and free access to wealth – socialism, in fact. But in Russia, as everywhere else, the state is constantly extending its sophistication and scope, and cash becomes an ever more hallowed icon.

The present upheaval in China is but part of capitalism’s growing pains. However we should not discount the effect of capitalist revolutions on working class thinking. Marx’s researches were part of the welter of thought aroused by the French Revolution. The Great Proletarian Cultural Fiasco, though much of it is sublime idiocy, directly affects the lives of a fifth of the world’s population. It is helping to sweep away archaic family structures and other traditional “dead weights”. Capitalist revolutions have always appealed in their propaganda to the “broad masses”, and represented their aims as being the welfare of the majority, but ultimately this makes trouble for capitalism, because there are always some workers ungrateful enough to take their masters at their word, and to wonder why, after all, we never seem to reach the Promised Land.

In Europe and America we have seen the rapid growth of “peace movements” like CND, followed by their collapse as they came up against the stone wall of capitalism’s essential need for competition backed by violence. We have also seen a great deal of disillusionment, despair, and escapism – and the growing realisation that problems like war cannot be amputated, or treated in isolation, but are bound up with the whole organisation of society. The satire wave, Bob Dylan, the Provos, Hippies and Diggers are all signs that many thoughtful people – especially young people, not yet brought to heel by war or slump – are casting around for an answer.

The workers will increasingly see how deeply entrenched are the causes of their misery. Patches, tinkering and minor adjustments will in the years ahead seem more and more futile. The crying need for root and branch change will be obvious to ever greater numbers. The membership of the Socialist Party, and its six companion parties, will grow at a faster rate, and new parties will be established in more and more countries. As the socialist movement’s size grows, its ability to spread its ideas will also grow.

Faced with the spread of this determined, uncompromising movement, with its withering contempt for stock idols like “the national interest,” the promises of our rulers will become even wilder. To stem the socialist tide the capitalist parties will sink their differences and draw closer together, much as religions do today in the face of the world avalanche of atheism. Reforms now derided as Utopian will be two a penny - in an attempt to fob off the workers. Perhaps, for example, capitalism will provide a batch of free services, on the understanding that this is “the beginning” of a free society, but socialists will not be taken in.

Finally the time will come when a majority of workers, in the majority of countries, will send their delegates into the parliaments of the world, thus taking control of the state. From then on production will cease to be organised at the dictate of profits. Instead, the (now rather eccentric-sounding) principle will prevail that things will be produced to satisfy needs.

Immediately there will be a rapid growth in the amount and quality of useful goods produced. There will no longer be any patents, so all productive units will have access to the most advanced technical processes. There will no longer be any banks, stock exchanges, wages offices, advertising agencies, and although some of the workers previously in these fields will continue to be concerned with statistics relating to production and distribution, hundreds of millions will be released for housebuilding, food production and other rapidly-expanding sectors. It is reasonable to suppose that, since the revolution will not take anyone by surprise, many workers will have been, within capitalism, training themselves for their new occupations in socialism. Resources and manpower invested in armaments and the space race will be switched to the satisfying of human needs.

Onslaughts will be made upon centres of backwardness and destitution: these will not be given the ludicrous cinderella priority now awarded to “community development,” but instead the top priority now given to “Defence”. In fact, since socialism will grow directly out of capitalism, the present organisational machinery of the armed forces could be used for this end, since they are the best thing capitalism has developed for moving men and materials fast.

Socialism will be a planned society, not in the present-day sense of an authoritarian state empowered to sort out the conflicting interests of hundreds of profit-grabbing corporations, but as Engels put it nearly a century ago: “The seizure of the means of production by society puts an end to commodity production, and therewith to the domination of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by conscious organisation on a planned basis . . . The conditions of existence forming man’s environment, Which up to now have dominated man, at this point pass under the dominion and control of man, who now for the first time becomes the real conscious master of nature, because and in so far as he has become master of his own social organisation . . . It is humanity’s leap from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom.”

Steele