Man and the Natural World (1987)

Book Review from the October 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Keith Thomas: Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800 (Penguin, 1984)

In his book Keith Thomas surveys the changing view of nature in England between 1500 and 1800. He uses a wide variety of contemporary sources to show what people thought about the landscape and its flora and fauna. He makes the point that whereas:

Nowadays one cannot open a newspaper without encountering some impassioned debate about culling grey seals or cutting down trees in Hampton Court or saving an endangered species of wild animal.

Only a few hundred years ago the idea that human cultivation was something to be resisted rather than encouraged would have been unintelligible.

What was it that altered the way people view the natural world? The author's answer is that although the intellectual potential for concern for the natural world had always existed, the attitude only flourished with changes in the way society organised its production. Talking about the emergence of the animal rights movement, Thomas says:

the triumph of the new attitude was closely linked to the growth of towns and the emergence of an industrial order in which animals became increasingly marginal to the processes of production.

Similarly, the growth of towns led to a new longing for the countryside and the progress of cultivation fostered a taste for weeds, mountains and unsubdued nature. Even then, the concern did not extend to the point where actual human well-being was threatened (for example, butchers whose livelihood depended on slaughtering animals did not share the new compassion) which goes a long way towards explaining why even today when many people are concerned about animal welfare, river pollution and rainforest depletion and so, the problems still persist.

The world's resources are not owned by everybody. They are owned by a small minority who use nature to produce goods to be sold in order to make profits. Production for profit means that costs must be kept as low as possible. In this atmosphere the cheapest methods of production must be used and the cheapest methods are rarely those which have a minimal impact on nature. (Take battery farming for instance, which is a direct outcome of the search for higher profits).

As long as production is carried on for making profits and not for needs the same problems of pollution, resource depletion and species extinction will remain. But the message of Keith Thomas' book is that peoples' ideas and outlooks can and do change and the fact that more and more people are becoming concerned about the way the environment is abused is encouraging. But campaigning for new laws and more conservation areas is not the answer. We need to get rid of a society where a small minority can manipulate nature for their own ends and replace it with one where we all have a real say in how nature is used.

John Morgan

The beauty myth (1993)

From the July 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Stay young and beautiful/If you want to be loved" runs the old song. Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth is, among other things, a book about the way women and men are manipulated by a system based on property and profit. She covers in depth the various manifestations of an imposed and unpredictable beauty ideal for women—at work, in the media, in health and most importantly as a hugely inappropriate low self-esteem felt by, probably, a majority of women.

Women have traditionally been seen to be vain, that is, overly concerned with their appearance. What has not been recognized is the extent to which this "vanity" is in fact a manifestation of a feeling of personal inadequacy. Women feel inadequate to the task of matching the latest fashionable ideal of "beauty", the achievement of which, alone, can make them feel acceptable—to their lovers, the world at large and to themselves.

This ideal has varied from the voluptuous Rubenesque-type figure to the anorexic "Twiggy" of the '60s and '70s. Whatever it is at any one time it can never be achieved by most women, since all women vary in size, shape and appearance.

Naomi Wolf puts the problem down to two phenomena—one is the power relation between men and women and the other is the demand of commerce. Women's lack of self-esteem serves any desire men may have to control women's lives, since someone with low self-esteem is more manipulable than someone who is confident. It also serves the demands of commerce, since the sale of beauty products and plastic surgery is dependent upon women feeling they are nor beautiful enough as they are.

Property relationship

Any desire on the part of men to control women's lives needs to be regarded seriously as it is a threat to the possibility of democracy and equality between all people and hence represents a serious obstacle to the achievement of socialism. From a young age, males are taught that in order to be "masculine", that is, in order to feel adequate, they must dominate women, or at the very least, appear to.

Keeping someone's self-esteem low is the one way of maintaining dominance and the impossible demands of the beauty myth serve this purpose well. The wish to dominate women is very much tied up with property. It is likely that, with the emergence of property society, women came to be regarded as men's property alongside land, animals, slaves and so on. One of the main features of a piece of property is that it (she) is under the owner's (his) control.

The property basis of relations between men and women is constantly under threat, since women are on the whole strong and intelligent human beings whom men often feel inclined to genuinely love and respect. The lengths to which societies have gone to keep women under control, are quite extraordinary—clitoradectomy, foot-binding, malnutrition, enforced childbearing, institutionalized wife-beating, death by stoning . . . the list is endless. The demands of "beauty" represent just one, primarily psychological, means of control.

The other thread of the problem is peculiar to late 20th century capitalism; the requirement of business to make money has led to the development of highly advanced psychological manipulative techniques. The beauty ideal is being thoroughly exploited in this respect.

Naomi Wolf has this to say on the subject of ageing in women:

When grey and white reflect in her hair  . . . you could call it silver or moonlight  . . . she is darker, stronger, looser, tougher, sexier. The maturing of a woman who has continued to grow is a beautiful thing to behold.

The point of this passage is to show the extent to which we are usually manipulated into seeing the ageing process in a negative way. Men and women alike are conditioned to see "beauty" and hence "loveability" in a woman within the framework of an ideal which involves looking "young" and "slim". The extent to which women will go, and in some cases are expected to go, to try and fit this ideal, is frightening.

Commercial pressures

Cosmetic surgery in the USA is commonplace and is being commercially pushed in Europe. Cosmetic surgery involves a good deal of pain and actual damage to the human body. It has occasionally been fatal. It affects the physical health of the person undergoing it adversely. "If your ad revenue or your seven figure salary or your privileged sexual status depend on it, it [ageing in women] is an operable condition".

One of women's main enemies in this respect is ironically also one of women's best friends—the women's magazine. These days filled with articles and comment on interesting contemporary topics, the women's magazine unfortunately also reinforces that impossible, undermining expectation of beauty so thoroughly described by Naomi Wolf.

The main reason for this is 20th century capitalist commercial practice.

The magazines are dependent for revenue upon advertizing and the editorial content of the magazines must reflect this. A magazine which does not push "beauty" is threatened with loss of revenue from advertizing. Cosmetic surgery is the latest ghastly trend in this scenario.

This exemplifies capitalism's ultimate double bind—that, in order to meet people's needs, it must first be ruthless to them, since a business, or "going concern", must put money-making before all else in order to ensure its continued existence. And without its continued existence it cannot meet any human needs at all.

Naomi Wolf's proposed solution is another wave of feminism. Like the trades union movement, the feminist movements of this century have been useful in fighting for improved conditions within the framework of capitalism. However, as with trade unionism, feminism's successes are always under threat of sabotage or outright reversal. The real solution to women's oppression lies within a framework of a completely different economic system, one not based on property and the pursuit of profit.

Nicky Snell

The Passing of Mao (1976)

From the October 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

The death of Mao Tse-Tung has been anticipated for many years in speculations over who would be his successor. Now it has happened and drawn world-wide attention to China. Ostensibly the interest is in the passing of a celebrated national leader; practically, it is in whether there will be changes of policy and how they will affect China's relationship with the rest of the world.

The history of China since 1949 closely resembles that of Russia thirty years before. The Communist revolutions in both countries were the taking of political power so that capitalism could develop and the entry to the modern world be made. Like Lenin, Mao provided a figurehead, and as with Lenin a version of Marxism was put out in his name to create a social vision to gain mass support for modernization. The projection of Mao's personality has been carried much further than Lenin's; but behind this cultivated charisma has stood a ruling class strongly conscious of its economic aims.

The phrase for China in these conditions is "Mao's China", implying that his personal and political qualities have been the chief factor. The effect of this "great man" view of history is to make it dependent on the emergence of outstanding individuals; but the opposite is true. Individuals are given opportunities by crises and the pressure of new developments, and these make them "great". But for the 1939-45 war Churchill would have remained any unpopular minor statesman. Napoleon was the product of post-revolution conditions in France. The rise of Mussolini and Hitler was primarily the result of the failure of social-democracy in Europe and the effects of the 1929 depression on Germany. In some circumstances history appears almost to go looking for some nonentity or a lunatic to elevate into a "great man".

Of course the day-to-day behaviour of individuals, once they have political power, produces effects of its own. But what makes them "great" is precisely that their ambitions and whims are not incompatible with the wider requirements of the time. The shifts and innovations in Chinese policy under Mao have had a plain coherence in aiming at the achievement of world power status as quickly as possible. Like Russia in the nineteen-twenties, China in the 'sixties had to put every effort into increasing agricultural production and speeding-up capital accumulation. The slogans and mystical dicta of Mao provided a sanctified image of the methods necessary to reach these goals.

The "power struggle" expected after Mao's death is a feature of one-party states. In nations with the traditional structure of parliamentary democracy the struggles for political power are among parties with electoral programmes. Where this does not exist, the conflicts are among small groups and the individuals they nominate. This reinforces the idea of personalities triumphing through strength, though in practice they may be only puppets. In both cases, what are they struggling for? Political power means control of the state machinery which administers capitalism.

We know that whoever wins the American election is charged with doing his best for capitalism in the United States. The same is true of whatever political change takes place in China. The new figureheads, and whoever may depose them, will inevitably claim that they are the true heirs and interpreters of Mao. However, if Mao's doctrines do not suit the future development of China they can be revised and even rejected. The Chinese leadership twenty-five years ago were wholehearted Stalinists. The split was not simply a political one, but a realization that Stalin;s own bending of Marx's theories and Lenin's viewpoints were not applicable to the situation in China.

As was the case with Russia, the leaders of other countries have realized what they are dealing with in China—a capitalist state differing from their own only in scale. In a China Quarterly essay reproduced in  China Under Mao (1966) Benjamin Schwartz remarked: "Among many Americans there is in fact the latent assumption that a fully modernised society will look exactly like the United States with all its social and cultural specificities." The reactions to Mao's death were particularly interesting since in the last five years the Chinese government has become amiable to the west. Thus, on television in Britain Edward Heath spoke about his meeting with Mao: a Conservative leader singing the praises of a Communist one. The American President said Mao "had the vision and imagination to open the doors to the United States". The obvious interest of the western nations is in whether Mao's successors will carry on this policy with its economic and military potentialities; while the Russian leaders hope for a change advantageous in the same way to them.

It is, of course, a tragedy that these developments of capitalism have taken place in the name of Marxism. Marx's vision of "human society" has provided an attractive wrapping for power-seekers, and his unique analysis of the capitalist system has been used in the so-called Communist countries as a guide to exploitation. However, workers all over the world have the opportunity to find out for themselves what Marx wrote and meant—most of all, that capitalism in whatever guise cannot be run in their interests.

Robert Barltrop

Edward Upward and the British Communist Party (1988)

From the February 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Edward Upward is the pseudonym of Allan Chalmers. He was born in Romford in 1903, educated at Repton School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge where he obtained a degree in history and English. After a life-time of public school teaching Upward retired to the Isle of Wight, where he still lives.

Upward occupies a minor, but interesting, place in British literature; although his literary career has spanned almost fifty years his output is small, consisting of just six novels. His early writing, however, augmented by contributions to New Country, New Writing and Left Review.

Upward belonged to the group of literary intellectuals who were attracted to the British Communist Party in the 1930s. The group included the poets W. H. Auden, Cecil Day Lewis, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice and the novelist Christopher Isherwood, a close friend of Upward's at Cambridge. Upward influenced Auden, Spender and Isherwood, in their early years as writers, particularly during their flirtation with Communism. He wrote the trilogy The Spiral Ascent which, for all its faults, provides a remarkable document of Communist Party membership in the 1930s and 1940s. Unlike the "fellow-travellers" Auden and Isherwood, who defected to America, and Spender who accepted a knighthood, Upward has clung, almost tenaciously, to the Leninist dogma of his youth. And in 1986, at the age of 83 he produced a book of short stories, The Night Walk with the same heavy-handed dogmatism which marred his early works.

The Spiral Ascent consists of In the Thirties (1962), The Rotten Elements (1969) and No Home But the Struggle (1977) which traces the career of Alan Sebrill, a publci schoolmaster, who joins the Communist Party in the 1930s and remains a member for sixteen years, finally resigning because of the revisionist policy of the British Communist Party. Sebrill retires to the Isle of Wight and involvement with CND movement in the final book.

Sebrill's arguments with Aldershaw, another schoolmaster, provides an interesting insight into Communist Party members' ideas. Aldershaw asserts that Marx's conviction that advanced capitalism would provide the conditions for socialism to replace it was mistaken because the Russian revolution took place in an economically backward country. In reply Sebrill makes the same mistake in failing to appreciate that the Russian revolution was a coup d'etat which replaced serfdom with state capitalism and states that capitalism had to be broken at its weakest point. When Aldershaw says: "Tyranny has often been violently overthrown, but it has never yet developed gradually into liberty. Dictatorship of whatever kind is an absolute evil." Sebrill replies: " . . . I don't agree that all dictatorships are equally bad. It depends upon what or whom they are directed against."

When Sebrill applies for membership of the Communist Party he is asked why he wants to join. He wants to say that "the independence of the middle class was being increasingly undermined and would soon cease to exist and that the only hope for members of his class was to go over to the side of the workers against the monopoly capitalists". However, he feels that this sounds too abstract and talks about the dishonesty which he, as a teacher, is compelled to practice to keep his job.

Thus, Upward portrays his misconception of class. Sebrill's "middle class" ideas are considered too abstract for the workers in the branch yet the fact that he has to be dishonest to hold on to a job that he cannot afford to lose demonstrates his working class status.

In the second volume we find Sebrill married to Elsie, another Party member. A considerable portion of the book is devoted to their struggle to accommodate the frequently changing policies of the Communist Party in the late 1940s. Clearly, they are dismayed by the Party's support for conscription and its enthusiasm for nationalisation. After agonising over the theoretical correctness of Party policy and trying to justify the somersaults of the Party line they conclude: "Perhaps there's nothing wrong with the Party's policy at all." Eventually, after being accused of "international factionalism" by the Party hierarchy and further disenchantment with the Party's revisionist line they resign.

Upward's confusion over class interest; his complete misunderstanding of the way that Lenin's state capitalist views opposed Marx's ideas of a democratic, moneyless society makes it doubtful if he has any understanding of socialism at all. Like Upward, socialists wish to end capitalism but this will not be achieved by a dictatorial vanguard suppressing political opponents, undercover workers or leaders, but by workers understanding, wanting and working for socialism.

Old age has not dimmed Upward's vision as The Night Walk clearly shows. At times his attempts at self-vindication are uncomfortably strained, but occasionally a story provides a glimpse of his ability. In The Procession a painter watches his own funeral: the death of the painter he could have been, and The Poet Who Died expresses grief for an old friend who abandoned poetry for politics. In both of these stories Upward could, perhaps unwittingly, have been writing about himself.

Carl Pinel

Further Reading:

Socialist Standard May 1980: Literary lefties in the 1930s

Violence breeds violence (1966)

From the October 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

No single incident could capture the absurd tragedy of Capitalist society more than the recent killing of three London policemen in Braybrook Street, Shepherds Bush. In one moment was expressed all its frustration, waste, violence and inequalities. To an onlooker whose mind was not steeped in the attitudes of propertied society, the whole event would have been quite incomprehensible if not completely lunatic. First of all there was sudden death in the streets of the city, cruel and vindictive murder, the instant production of a litter of corpses. This was followed swiftly by the most intense police enquiries that produced the oddest of spectacles, for example, 75 tall uniformed men in a long line, on hands and knees fingering through the grass for little metal objects. Later there came the ugly aftermath of hundreds of grim-faced detectives, revolver in hand, staggering through the foliage of Epping Forest, hunting for a man. What was their mission? If need be to kill him, but at least to lock him for the rest of his life. Here undoubtedly was waste, frustration and violence; and the background of it all was formed by the inequalities of capitalist society.

It was a tragedy; killings always are, and so are the reprisals of the state taken in the name of so-called law and order. But the added tragedy of the whole affair will be the little that society will learn from it. The hang 'em and flog 'em brigade will have an outing, but in the meantime, important questions will probably remain unanswered.

Unless we are educated otherwise, it is an almost automatic response to entirely blame some individual for crimes. It is a response which follows from the prejudices of a fragmented individualistic society. It follows also from the religious idea that during their lives men make a conscious decision to become either good or evil. It also serves as a convenient scapegoat, which divests ourselves of personal involvement, to find some individual upon whom we can heap all guilt.

If our explanation of the incident stops at finding three men guilty and we satisfy ourselves that our duty has been done by applying a suitable punishment, then we shall be back where we were before the killings occurred, except, of course, that three policemen will be dead and other men will probably spend the rest of their lives in prison. We shall not only have done nothing to prevent this kind of violence occurring, but by failing to face up to all the factors involved, we ensure that it will happen again. When it comes to those acts of violence that meet with disapproval, where does the responsibility begin and where does it end? It is not just that capitalism has no consistent basis from which it can condemn violence; it is a society that constantly generates violence. Furthermore there can be no escaping the fact the code of honesty and the sanctity of private property expresses the material interests of men who have got everything—wealth, power and privilege. Thus the attempt to uphold morality under capitalism breaks up into cynicism.

It is not uncommon for an environment that is completely sterile of human warmth and love to produce psychopathic individuals with an acute tendency to violence. Some individuals whose abandonment dates from birth, never have the opportunity to learn by experience that all human relationships should exist at some level of mutual regard and affection. Hence their responses to other human beings are completely numbed. Such persons usually have suffered the worst ravages of an inhospitable background of ignorance, poverty and emotional insecurity.

It is not yet known if it is this kind of individual involved in the Braybrook Street killings. Whether it is or not, society does little to help such people. Apart from maintaining at its almost degenerate extreme the kind of conditions that produce such psychopaths, Capitalism presents them with a bewildering set of hypocritical and contradictory values. They are set a very fine dividing line between violence which is socially approved and violence which is penalised. It must be remembered that one of the suspects was trained in the jungle warfare and skilled as a sniper in the Malayan campaign against guerillas, a campaign where the torture of prisoners was common procedure.

A glance at the photograph in The Guardian of the Gorbals tenement where another of the suspects was arrested revealed instantly the vile and ugly surroundings which is presumably supposed to bring out the best in people. This in a society which glamourises wealth and comfort and gives people little opportunity to fight their way out of the prison of such poverty, short of crime.

We are not confronted then by a conflict of good men and bad men. We are not concerned with men who at one point in time, faced with the choice of either leading useful lives or becoming violent criminals, made a conscious decision to become anti-social. No individual exists in a social vacuum. His attitudes and actions must always be related to the whole social background, and the history of an individual's personal circumstances.

Socialists do not excuse all anti-social human actions on grounds of "the system", but we hope that we add to our condemnation a knowledge of all the existing social forces at work to produce given results. This is necessary because without it, condemnation is negative and without purpose. In a sense, there is a curious anti-ethical unity between the violent killer and those who condemn him out of hand. It is all very well to go round with the collection box for the widows' fund, but sympathy and a burning sense of outrage is made redundant when it is accompanied by a shallow hatred for the killer or demands for the return of hanging and flogging. All we are left with is continued violence at one moment disapproved and then inverted to become upheld. In the long run it feeds off itself.

The useful lesson is that capitalism basically through its inherent privilege and underprivilege and its inability to generate a sincere human relationships produces on the one hand crime and violence and on the other its repressive counterpart—Borstals, prisons, etc. The sufferings and misery of men in prisons year in and year out in defence of property interests is no less repugnant to Socialists than the actions of violent criminals.

The plain fact is that capitalism cannot work without prisons, and that some men will remain sufficiently undeterred by their horror to engage in crime, violent or otherwise.

Pieter Lawrence

The Question. (1911)

From the March 1911 issue of the Socialist Standard

What is a Labour man? He who has sold
His class and their Cause in the shambles of Gold,
For pelf, and a place in the council of Greed,
Weaving snares for those dupes Want and Ignorance breed,
Where the offspring of Toil, from the cot to the grave,
Are consigned to the mart of the modern wage-slave. 

Here "organised Labour" support and applaud
The Thugs of all progress, Cant, Falsehood and Fraud;
And, like autumn leaves borne on the blast of the storm,
They are whirled in the vortex of futile reform.
Against the class currents they struggle in vain,
Till they sink, where no trace of their efforts remain. 

When Knowledge imparts to the people her power.
Slavish fear shall depart from their hearts in that hour;
And thrusting aside tyrant forms of the past,
Revolution shall crown them with glory at last.
The Labour pest, hurled from its seat of ill-fame,
Shall be hailed a political relic of shame.
Then time in its fulness will give Freedom birth,
When the Socialist era shall gladden the earth.

F. G. Thompson.

Remembering the Past (2004)

From the May 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

  Next month will be the centenary of the formation of the Socialist Party of Great Britain in 1904. To mark this, the Socialist Standard will be expanded to 48 pages (the price will remain the same), with articles about the activities of the Socialist Party over the decades and how others have seen these as well as on our specific contributions to the development of socialist theory. In anticipation, we publish below some of the contributions we have received.

Glasgow Branch

To say times were hard when Glasgow branch was formed in 1924 would be a serious understatement. The branch consisted of working men, only some of whom had jobs, and money was so scarce that in the early days branch meetings were sometimes held in the open because members couldn’t afford to rent a hall.

If funds were lacking then energy and commitment were not, so members threw themselves into making the party known in the city. John Higgins, the first branch secretary, was particularly effective at this and his meetings Glasgow Green gave many Glaswegians their first introduction to the party’s case.

To branch members knowledge meant everything and they were determined to have as much of it as they could, so classes on Marxist theory, logic, etc, were an essential feature, but the main activity was always indoor and, especially, outdoor meetings. Glasgow branch always had a reputation for having first-class speakers and even our opponents, whatever else they thought of us, conceded that.

Two outstanding examples of this were Alex Shaw and Tony Mulheron. Shaw was an old-time street corner orator with an ability to have his audiences in stitches – his lampooning of some of Glasgow’s left-wing folk heroes, especially the “Red Clydesiders”, was hilarious. Mulheron, by contrast, was in his element on the indoor platform. Tony was extremely articulate and had a witty, flamboyant speaking style that could turn even the driest-sounding theoretical subject into an entertainment.

During the war activities were stepped up. Ever more meetings were held and new, younger speakers came forward. The wartime scene was brightened by visits from London speakers taking a break from the Blitz and, later on, doodlebugs and V2 rockets.

After “peace” was declared the momentum was maintained and the branch’s biggest ever audiences attended meetings at the St. Andrew’s Halls and the Cosmo cinema. Membership increased and the branch even acquired its own premises. In 1949 a second branch was formed in the city and this lasted until 1961.

In the late 1950s an influx of younger members revitalised activities, and in the 1960s candidates were fielded in three parliamentary and five municipal elections. More outdoor speaking stances were opened and there were public debates aplenty with Labourites, Leninists and others.

Added to all this was a winter programme of Sunday evening indoor meetings which ran from October to April and continued for many years. This meant that members had to wrack their brains to come up with titles for around 30 meetings every winter!

Today the old propaganda methods, which were the branch’s strength, are all but finished. People will no longer come to indoor meetings or stop and listen to those held outdoors, and this means that the branch has had to adapt to the new situation. Now we organize day schools, discussion groups, hand out leaflets at demos, provide speakers and other assistance for party activities elsewhere in the country etc.

Glasgow branch has for eighty years played its part in the party’s activities. Its members have, in the past, given generously of their time, effort and abilities, and today’s members, despite very different and difficult conditions, strive to maintain this record.

 V.V.

Memories of Camberwell Branch

At the end of World War II and a landslide victory for the Labour Party, there was a greater public interest in politics. The Communist Party had a large number of members as a result of pro-Russia sentiment at the end of the war. During this period the Camberwell Branch was formed with about a dozen members. A decent room was hired from the Labour Party in Camberwell. The local MP Freda Corbett used to enter the room apologising for disturbing the meeting. She was unaware of the fact that we were not the Labour Party. When the SPGB contested Paddington North in 1945, realising we were not the Labour Party we were given notice to quit.

The branch held meetings on Sundays at East Street, Walworth market place. These took place at 12 o’clock midday. The local stall-holders regarded our arrival with suspicion and puzzlement. They could not figure out what was in it for us. However, when we sold Party literature and took collections they considered we were getting the proceeds.

The meetings were successful. Only one meeting could be held at a time because of Home Office regulations. The Communist Party who, locally, had many more members were competing with us for the pitch and on one or two occasions they succeeded. The Camberwell Branch forced a vote to get to the meeting site earlier in order to “book the pitch”. This resulted in us getting there at one o’clock in the morning, so the pitch could be occupied. The Communist Party stopped competing and disappeared from East Street for many months.

A handful of dedicated socialists saw off an organisation with several hundred local members. The Communist Party today is virtually non-existent . . . The Socialist Party is still alive.

T.L.

Sweden

Since the beginning of the 1970s there have been socialists in Sweden, sharing the ideas of the World Socialist Movement. For a number of years some of them produced a journal, Världssocialism (World Socialism). Many of the articles in it were translations from the Socialist Standard.

After several years of informal work with Världssocialism and other socialist activities a handful of socialists living in Uppsala and Stockholm decided to organise themselves formally as Världssocialistiska Gruppen (the World Socialist Group). At its first meeting in Uppsala on Saturday 20 January 1979 the group adopted a slightly modified version of the Object and Declaration of Principles of the Companion Parties of Socialism. The modifications had to do with the fact that the Group was not a political party, but had as its object to work for the formation of a Socialist Party in Sweden.

The work of the Group centred on the production of a series of pamphlets called Världssocialistiska häften. The first of these booklets was a translation of the SPGB-pamphlet Questions of the Day. Other issues of Världssocialistiska häften dealt with Soviet state capitalism, capitalism and war, Marxism 100 years after Marx´ death, and how life is in capitalism and can be in socialism.

Most of the members and a few sympathizers were in their twenties when the group was formed. After a few years, as some of them established families or got jobs in other places -- and one or two lost interest in socialism altogether - it became increasingly difficult to maintain organised activities. During the past ten years or so Världssocialistiska Gruppen, although not formally dissolved, has not carried out any organised activities. Individual members read the Socialist Standard and sometimes see each other.

Hopefully there are people in Sweden who in the not too distant future will find that they agree with the object and principles of the World Socialist Movement and then take action in order to reawaken the group. To achieve its object, the establishment of a Socialist Party in Sweden, will be a tiny task compared with bringing about the object of such a party.

Åke Spross, Uppsala, Sweden

Socialist jailed in Sweden - "Times" uninterested (1973)

From the February 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

We publish below a copy of a letter sent to the Editor of The Times but not published.

Sir,

Presumably it was the unexpectedness of the suggestion in the Freedom House study that civil rights are at risk in Sweden that led you to headline (2/1/73) this aspect of Peter Strafford's report from New York. It comes as no surprise to us. At this very moment our comrade Ake Spross, who shares our stand against all war whether classed as national defence or imperialist aggression, is in prison for refusing to join the army of a country much publicised as a haven for G.I.'s objections to their government's current war. His incarceration may be less harsh in other countries but the very efficiency of Swedish state-capitalism will ensure that upon release employment prospects in his chosen field will be considerably diminished.  Sweden as a refuge evidently does not extend to the Socialist objectors to service in her own forces.

Yours truly,

K. Knight,

2 January 1973                                                                                           General Secretary

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Someone else's fantasy (1987)

Film Review from the December 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Rita, Sue and Bob Too! generated considerable local interest in Bradford where I saw the film. It was, after all, written by local dramatist Andrea Dunbar and set in and around Bradford's own Buttershaw estate. What I had expected was cinema vérité along the lines of Letter to Brezhnev - a witty, honest, warts-and-all look at working-class life in Kirkby. The two films do share some common features: both are concerned with two girls, loud-mouthed and looking for escape. In Letter to Brezhnev it was the kind of escape that comes when work ends and "life" begins; getting dressed up, night-clubbing and, ultimately, for one of them, "romance" with a Russian sailor and the irony of "escape" to a country that, according to western propaganda, most people want to escape from.

Rita and Sue (Siobhan Finneran and Michelle Holmes), by contrast, are schoolgirls seeking to escape from the deprived conditions of a rundown estate where they are variously subjected to drunken fatehrs, family violence and dismantled motorcycles in the kitchen (the contemporary equivalent of the "coal in the bath: stereotype of working-class life?). Their escape, at first, consists in little more than baby-sitting in a posh house where they can not only enjoy the home comforts on offer but get paid for it as well.

However the baby-sitting quickly degenerates into an excuse for indulging someone else's fantasy (or so it seems) of the over-sexed older man and two insatiable under-aged girls. He is Bob (George Costigan) whose children Rita and Sue mind while he is out with his wife. While driving the girls home he makes a detour to take in a quick one (or, in this case, two) on the way. This sexual encounter is, we are supposed to believe, such an ecstatic experience for all concerned that the girls throw caution to the wind and take every opportunity to take turns at being first. If this sounds like the kind of sexual fantasy peddled by soft-porn newspapers, then Bob's wife is presented in equally hackneyed form as the reason for his peccadiloes—hysterical, uptight and disinterested in sex.

She discovers that hubby is screwing the babysitters, takes the kids and leaves him. Bob promptly installs Rita (or was it Sue)) who is by now pregnant, as his new housekeeper in the matrimonial home. At this point the story becomes as rapid as Bob's couplings. Sue, furious at what she sees as her best mate's betrayal, takes up with a romantically inclined Pakistani and quickly moves into an unromantic back-to-back with him and his sister's family. Rita has a miscarriage and Sue visits her in hospital. Bob gives her a lift home. They are seen by the Pakistani boyfriend who becomes jealous and violent. Sue kicks him in the balls and leaves him to return to the ménage à trois with Bob and Sue, in what we are supposed to see as a happy ending.

The film purports to be "progressive" although it's difficult to see why. It uses a number of pernicious stereotypes of working-class people—drunken, amoral, depraved—while at the same time the only too real squalor, deprivation and poverty of life at the bottom of the heap is portrayed as something that can be escaped from through sex. Now, it may well be the case that for some people some of the time, sex is a refuge from the harsh reality of capitalism. It is certainly "sold" to us in that way. But the depiction of sex in this film, while depressingly realistic, no doubt (we were treated to an extended lecture on condoms which would probably qualify as an AIDS commercial), was not an answer but very much part of the problem.

Janie Percy-Smith 

Letter From Europe: Communists in Government (1981)

The Letter From Europe Column from the August 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

After the zig . . . the zag. After denouncing for the past three years or so years Francois Mitterrand and his PS as reformists, who simply wanted to "manage the crisis" and run capitalism, the French Communist Party (PC) now has four Ministers in the government formed by Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy, following the sweeping PS victory in the June General Elections.

The PC will now itself be participating in the government of capitalism. Not for the first time though, since it also had Ministers from 1944 to 1947. At the time PC leaders toured the country urging workers to work harder and denouncing strikes as a "weapon of the trusts". It was probably partly in the hope that they will again do this that Mitterrand decided to admit them to his government (he didn't have to, since his party has an absolute majority in the National Assembly.)

In this respect there was a significant phrase in the agreement signed in the night of 22/3 June between the PS and the PC and which paved the way for the appointment of the PC Ministers. After stating that the two parties pledged themselves to apply Mitterrand's election programme with "flawless solidarity" at government level, it went on to state they would do the same at regional and local level and "in the enterprises". In other words, the PC cells in the factories are also committed to applying and defending the policies of the PS-PC government. Since its cells in the factories are the means by which the PC controls the main trade union federation, the CGT, in effect this organisation too will tend to become, in Lenin's contemptuous phrase describing his idea of the role of trade unions under the Bolsheviks, a "transmission belt" for the PS-PC government. Of course this won't be easy to implement and in the long run the workers will spontaneously kick against it, but once again it shows how being linked to a political party weakens the effectiveness of trade unions in the defence of their members' wages and conditions.

This pledge is also contrary to what the PC was saying right up to the first round of the presidential elections on 26 April, that "change" could only be imposed by the struggle of the workers and not left to a PS President. We could quote many passages to this effect from Charles Fiterman, the No. 2 in the PC hierarchy and now Minister of Transport. For instance, in Avancees No 5, March 1981), after warning against giving a blank cheque to Mitterrand and as a miracle man ("homme providentiel"), he wrote that the PC "calls on the workers not to delegate their responsibilities, but to struggle to impose change". It was certainly because the PC had employed such language that the PS used its immensely superior bargaining position after the General Election to impose the insertion of this reference to solidarity "in the enterprises" on the PC. Has the PC sincerely accepted this? We doubt it (people who change their line so often and so rapidly just can't be sincere), but then that's not our problem.

Reformist Euphoria
At the moment it is all euphoria in trade union circles and a number of measure have improved, for the time being at least, the situation of many workers. The minimum wage, family allowances, pensions, rent allowances have all been increased. The big question, however, is: will it last? Will this increase in workers' purchasing power be sustained or will it be eaten up by rising prices or taken away by austerity?

Unlike the Labour Party in Britain or the SPD in Germany, the PS in France has never really had any experience of governing capitalism, at least not on its own. This is why reformist illusions about the ability of the government to make the economy work in the interests of ordinary people are so strongly entrenched in the PS, at all levels including Ministers.

Take their economic thinking. It is simple and apparently logical: the way out of the crisis is to give workers more money to spend; their purchases will then stimulate production so starting off the process of recovery. This underconsumptionist view of the cause and way out of the crisis is shared by the PC, but is quite mistaken and a policy based upon it can only lead to one result: increased inflation while the crisis, which is a world crisis, continues.

The Minister of Finance, Jacques Delors (who had some experience of governing capitalism when he was adviser to a Gaullist Prime Minster between 1969 and 1972) understands a little more how capitalism works than most of his colleagues (relatively speaking that is, since although not a crude underconsumptionist he is still a Keynsian). He defends the new government's policy of increasing popular consumption, not as a way out of the crisis but as an anticipation of the recovery he sees coming in the world economy: "we are wanting to anticipate, but in a reasonable way, the recovery of the economy at world level" (Le Nouvel Observateur, 1 June).

The reflation measures already taken by the Government . . .  are a limited anticipation of the recovery of the world economy which the experts foresee for the end of this year or the beginning og the next. (The Times 24 June).

In other words, he at least recognises that the crisis in France is not caused by internal underconsumption (and so cannot be solved by increasing purchasing power) but that it is part of the general world capitalist crisis. This was in fact what ex-President Giscard and his Prime Minister Barre tried to explain during the presidential election campaign, but they weren't able to convince people. PS (and PC) propaganda to the effect that Barre deliberately chose to keep the crisis and unemployment going because they were heartless men was more successful. Now—poetic justice perhaps—they in turn have been given a chance to run capitalism in a crisis. They will discover that the policy a government pursues is not a question of the feelings or motives of its members—of being concerned—but of what the economic situation permits, and dictates.

Riding for a Fall
If Delors is proved wrong in his prediction/hope that the recovery in the world economy will begin within a year, where will the government be then?  Unemployment will not have been reduced (except by converting some of the into civil servants) but inflation will have increased. The government has proclaimed that its social reform measures will not be financed by the printing press, but partly by taxing the rich and partly from the extra tax and social security contributions that would result from the increased employment it hopes its policies will bring.

If unemployment remains at a high level, as it inevitably will of the world economy doesn't recover, they will be faced with a gaping budgetary deficit. They will then have a choice: cut back on the social reform measures or have recourse to the printing press. If other reformist governments who want to appear friendly to the trade unions are anything to go by, they will choose the latter. The resulting inflation will not only cut the value of the social benefits but also put up French export prices and make French goods less competitive on the world market, so aggravating the crisis and undermining the Franc.

This is the most likely result of the new PS-PC government's current policy. It will fail completely and within a year or so they will be faced with growing working class discontent over persisting unemployment and rising prices which they will not be able to satisfy, since the continuing crisis will force them to recognise that under capitalism priority must be given to profits and profit-making rather than to social reforms and popular consumption.

The crunch will then come and they will be forced, like all governments of capitalism sooner or later, to take openly anti-working class measures. The question will then be to see how the PC acts—will it swallow the austerity measures in the name of "flawless solidarity" or will Fitterman and his colleagues resign? This will be a problem not only for the PC Ministers but also for those from CRES wing of the PS, including its leader Jean-Pierre Chevenement, the Minister for Research, whose economic analysis is very close to that of the PC and who declared in a policy statement submitted to the 1977 PS Congress:

The Left must not allow itself to be caught in the cog-wheels of a supposed good management of capitalism, precisely when this problem has become insoluble. It must at the same time avoid letting itself become dragged into the spiral of inflation and external deficit which leads to subservience to international money-lenders and inevitably to the application of a policy of austerity, in short to a return in strength of the Right (Ceres par luimeme, p. 159. Our translation).

Since in fact there is no chance of the CERES/PC policy of a native French state capitalism behind tariff walls being adopted (which of course is no solution either), this is precisely what will happen. Will Chevenement and the others then resign or will they, like Tony Benn under Wilson and Callaghan, find some excuse for staying on?

If, on the other hand, by a stroke of luck, Delors' gamble comes off and the world economy does not recover within the next year this would not disprove the socialist case against reformism, even if Delors himself went down in French history as an economic wizard! In fact, it would not have been the policy of the PS-PC government that caused the recovery, but capitalism at world level as it naturally moved on from the crisis and slump stage, a process over which neither the French nor any other government has any control and which would have come about quite independently of their actions.

Adam Buick (Luxemburg) 

Syriza: The return of left-wing reformism? (2015)

From the February 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Syriza emerged from the recent Greek elections as the party with the most votes. But what is it? And what does it stand for?

Syriza is the acronym of the Greek for ‘Coalition of the Radical Left’ and is made up of various left-wing and Green groups, including a part of the old Communist Party and some Trotskyists. It is a bit like Left Unity in this country which in fact aspires to be like them. Set up in 2004, it already emerged from the May 2012 elections as the main opposition party and topped the poll in Greece in last year’s Euro elections.

At the beginning of the campaign Counterfire (one of the SWP fragments) claimed that ‘Greece could be about to elect the most radical government of the left in Europe since the 1930s.’ This is presumably a reference to the Popular Front government that came to power in France in 1936 but the claim is open to question. If you examine Syriza’s programme it is far less radical than that of the government in Portugal that ruled immediately after the overthrow of the dictatorship there in 1974, than the ‘common programme’ of the PS/PCF government that came to power under Mitterrand in France in 1981, and arguably even than the British Labour Party’s 1945 election manifesto.

What is different is that some of the people who might end up as ministers and their top advisers are not the usual professional politicians and careerists but leftwing intellectuals like those behind Counterfire. Not that that will make any difference as to what they will be able to do in office.

One of them, John Milios, described as ‘chief economist of Syriza’ and one of their MPs, interviewed in the Guardian (23 December), declared ‘I am a Marxist … The majority [in Syriza] are.’ He himself is a Marx-scholar who has written extensively about Marx’s views, including his theory of crises. Presumably, then, he must have some idea of what’s involved in taking responsibility for governing within capitalism. In any event, the programme his interviewer recorded him as outlining accepted that a Syriza government would have to govern in the context of capitalism, and capitalism in a period of economic crisis and austerity:

‘Milios rolls off the party’s priorities one by one. It would make concerted efforts to help those hardest hit by the crisis – free electricity for Greeks who have had supplies cut off, food stamps distributed in schools, healthcare for those who need it, rents covered for the homeless, the restoration of the minimum wage to pre-crisis levels of €750 a month and a moratorium on private debt repayments to banks above 30% of disposable income.’

And, more generally, as he put it in another interview:

‘”We are going to boost growth and combat the humanitarian disaster.” Syriza’s recipe for boosting growth is through a fiscal stimulus, targeted at lower incomes in order to boost their spending power’(http://news.yahoo.com/greek-leftists-wont-run-deficits-policymaker-says-193856885.html).

Syriza is not even promising to run a budget deficit to ‘boost spending power’, only not to run a surplus as the outgoing government was planning. But it’s still based on Keynes’s discredited theory of ‘demand management’ which says that the problem in a slump is not enough spending rather than not enough prospects for profit-making.

A Syriza government might, by taking some of the measures outlined above by Milios, be able to mitigate a little the ‘humanitarian disaster’ in Greece where there’s been a massive increase in destitution leading to, among other things,  an increase in mental ill-health, suicides and the infant mortality rate. But it won’t be able to boost the accumulation of capital.

No Podeis
Meanwhile in Spain a similar party, Podemos (‘We Can’) has gone up in the opinion polls. Its policy is the same as Syriza’s, if perhaps a little bolder as it envisages some nationalisations. What they mainly have in common is a commitment to ‘boost growth’ by government action to boost consumer spending, as described in Left Flank (another SWP fragment):

‘Its analysis is that the crisis is fundamentally one of “under-consumption” (which [Podemos leader] Iglesias agrees is “the problem”) caused by mushrooming socio-economic inequalities under neoliberalism (including a sharp decline in wages’ share of GDP) – a view that overlaps with those of Thomas Piketty, Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman. The solution is thus to increase consumer demand through expansionist public spending (àla Keynes). They then neatly tot up how exactly this can be funded though measures such as combating relatively high levels of tax fraud (mostly carried out by the rich), reintroducing inheritance and property taxes, and debt restructuring.’

It is not as if this has not been tried before. The PS/PCF government in France tried to ‘relaunch’ the economy in 1981 by increasing ‘popular consumption’, putting up the minimum wage and other benefits. It didn’t work. In fact it failed miserably, leading to three devaluations in two years and ending in a U-turn to a policy of austerity.

The reason why it failed – and why a Syriza and Podemos government would fail too – is that capitalism is not a system geared to meeting people’s needs, not even those they can pay for. It is a profit-driven system in which priority has to be given to profits and profit-making. Since the government cannot just magic into existence the resources to increase ‘popular consumption’, and that in the end these have to come one way or the other (taxation, borrowing, currency inflation) from profits, such a policy undermines the driving force of the capitalist system, provoking an economic crisis. Which was what happened in France.

There is another aspect to the breakthroughs achieved by Syriza and Podemos. They represent a revival of the old Social Democratic tradition of a reformist party using some Marxist terminology, at least in the two countries concerned. The equivalent of the Labour Party in Spain, the PSOE, is still called, believe it or not, the ‘Socialist Workers Party’ but, like the Labour Party and similar parties in other countries, has long since given up any idea of replacing capitalism and has settled for offering itself as an alternative team for managing capitalism in Spain.

That millions of people in Spain and Greece are prepared to vote again for parties that say they are against capitalism must mean something. Of course these are not explicit and deliberate votes for socialism but only for the parties voted for to do something about the effects of capitalism. This, however, is not something these parties will be able to deliver because it is not in their power to do so. They have been set the impossible task of trying to reform capitalism so as to make it work other than as a system that has to put making profits before meeting people’s needs and which periodically plunges the economy into crisis and depression.

There is no alternative under capitalism. The only way out is to get rid of it altogether and replace it with a system based on productive resources being commonly owned and democratically controlled, so they can be used to provide what people need in accordance with the principle ‘from each according to ability, to each according to needs.’

Adam Buick

Editorial: Missed opportunities, shattered dreams (1991)

Editorial from the November 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

The turn of the Twentieth Century was a time of high political hopes. There was a sense that great progress was possible. The sciences were expanding and the machine age had brought increased powers of production. In the industrialised countries workers were winning the vote. In combination these means of creating abundant wealth and the entry of more people into the democratic process held out the prospect of a new age of enlightenment, peace and material security.

The working class debate about how its best interests could be served had been going on for over fifty years and by 1900 there was a clear choice between Revolution and Reform.

The arguments in favour of reform were fatally seductive; they appeared to present an easy way forward. In this view, all that was required was the election of a "working class government". Then, through a programme of reforms, such measures as nationalisation and "taxing the rich out of existence", the problems of poverty and unemployment would be solved, social privilege would be abolished and a new world of equality would be here to stay.

Socialists said "no", by that route a new society was impossible. Such a "working class government" would be compelled to run the capitalist system and would have to yield to the vile priorities of profits before needs. Such a government would be trapped by economic forces which it could not control. Being in this position it would e forced to do things in opposition to its stated aims. It would not be able to solve social problems or alter the class-ridden nature of capitalist society. Socialists said that reformism would be a waste of time and would lead to disastrous consequences. Tragically, the socialist arguments were ignored.

A hundred years have passed since the choice between socialism and reformism was clarified. Soon, we will enter a new century, yet still reformist politicians appear like ghosts of their predecessors, mouthing slogans and empty promises, desperate to forget their past failures. They generate a phoney optimism which echoes back across a century in which more people have been killed in wars and more have starved to death than at any other time.

Land has been taken out of production, food has been destroyed, machinery has been left idle and the ravages of economic crises have meant countless billions of work-days lost through unemployment (under the last Labour government unemployment doubled). In a socialist society these productive resources would have been used to provide for needs. Instead, they have been squandered to protect class privilege and profit.

The human cost of the reformist choice has been high, with governments steering capitalism crisis to crisis whilst under the illusion that somehow they could make the profit system serve the needs of the whole community. As socialists said, and as bitter experience has shown, the reformists were always the impossibilists.

There can be no doubt whatsoever that if the socialist choice had been taken up at the beginning of the century by a majority of workers, since that time we would have created a society and a world fit for people to live in. Without doubt, a world of common ownership and cooperation organised solely for needs would have provided enough quality food, housing, clothing, clean water, sanitation, energy for heating, lighting cooking, health and education services, entertainment, communications, means of travel and recreation, for the entire human family. Freed from the economic constraints of capitalism, socialism would have provided these, and without destruction of the environment, through relationships of shared common goals.

For those who might still think that the building of world socialism is too big a job, and who therefore might still be attracted to what appears to be the "easier" reformist option, we say, look at the tragic consequences of the same decision made in the past. For those who want a better world the so-called reformist option is no option at all—it is a guarantee of continued disaster.

Action Replay: Football - The January Transfer Window (2015)

The Action Replay Column from the January 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

In English football, the winter transfer window lasts from the 1st January - 31stJanuary. Football clubs can transfer home based and foreign players into their playing staff. Such a transfer is completed by registering the player into the new club through FIFA. ‘Transfer window’ is the unofficial term used by the media for ‘registration period’ as described in the FIFA Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Player.

Steve Coppell, former manager of Reading called for the transfer window to be scrapped in favour of the previous system, where transfer deals could be made throughout the season. Coppell considered that the transfer window bred panic and encouraged ‘scurrilous’ transfer activity. Last season, Arsene Wenger the Arsenal manager asked for the January transfer window to be limited to two transfers per window and claimed it is ‘unfair’ in its current form. Manuel Pellegrini the Manchester City manager backed Wenger by saying that transfer window was unbalanced in favour of big clubs, and said ‘a club with money can take the best players from the other teams’. Rather ironic given that Manchester City are one of the biggest spending clubs in the transfer market.

Arsenal and Manchester City are examples of how supporters help fund their clubs. The cost of a season ticket at Manchester City is £860 whereas at Arsenal it’s a staggering £2,013. A Manchester City football shirt costs £55, while Hull City’s retail at £39.99.The overseas fan base of Manchester City, Manchester United, Arsenal and Liverpool benefit massively from shirts sales in the Far East e.g. Singapore.

People who complain that footballers in the Premier League are overpaid need to understand that Premiership football is big business where billions of pounds circulate throughout a season. Football under capitalism is shaped by the market, and revenue streams from season and match day tickets contribute to the large financial outlay required annually.

So now we await the latest scramble for ‘human flesh’ as clubs argue about a player’s value based on goals scored, shots blocked, assists, and clean sheets – all are phrases and statistics in football’s lexicon that serve to attribute the ‘value’ of a human being as a football commodity.

Kevin

Provincial Propaganda Tour (1933)

From the August 1933 issue of the Socialist Standard

A few years ago splendid work was done in the provinces by a small party of London members touring from place to place. Apart from gaining new readers and sympathisers, and making the Party in areas where no propaganda has been carried on before, there is the very valuable encouragement such visits bring to provincial groups and isolated members.

On Friday, June 30th, a party of four—Comrades Bellingham, Turner, L. Otway and Mrs. Otway—left head office for a short motor tour, carrying camping equipment.

The first meeting was held in the Bull Ring at Birmingham, on June 30th, with an audience of 350, and literature sales of 2s. 11d.—a good start achieved against the obstacle of several rival meetings. Questions and Communist opposition were dealt with at considerable length.

Arriving at Manchester the next day, the party had to tackle four meetings, which had been advertised for Saturday and Sunday. At the Saturday meeting, although the audience was by no means large, keen interest was shown and literature to the value of 6s. 9d. was sold. All the Manchester meetings were not equally satisfactory, but the last, held in Platt's Field, drew an audience of 400. Manchester members assisted on the platform and the branch was very pleased with the results of the week-end visit.

On Monday a good meeting was held at Liverpool, and another on Tuesday at Birkenhead—two areas in which relatively little propaganda has been carried on by the S.P.G.B.

At Eccles, on Wednesday, a meeting was carried on from 7.20 to 11 p.m., amidst lively opposition from Communist and Labour Party supporters. The audience, however, listened sympathetically to our speakers.

Two meetings were held at Sheffield, on July 6th and 7th, with assistance from local comrades.

The tour ended with a good meeting at Hull on Saturday, July 8th.

Most of the time the party camped out and were thus enabled to cover much ground at a minimum cost, although, of course, the necessity of funding camping sites and making all preparations threw a great deal of work on the four members. All four assisted at meetings, either as speakers or chairmen, selling literature and taking up collections, etc.

The distance covered was about 550 miles, and the times and arrangements made in advance were kept to the letter. At a total of eleven meetings literature sales amounted to £2 3s. 10d. and collections to 18s. 7d.—a highly satisfactory result in face of the widespread unemployment and destitution in many places visited.

The members of the party greatly regretted that it was not possible to make their tour of longer duration. They, and the members of the branches visited on route, have no doubt that excellent work has been done in this short period.

It is impossible to mention by name all the local comrades who attended the meetings, gave hospitality, and helped the tour in every possible way. The four comrades greatly appreciated the welcome and assistance they everywhere received.

Spade Work in Hull

Much-needed propaganda has been carried on with good effect in Hull during recent weeks, by Comrade Cash, who is staying there at the invitation of a local comrade. In about two weeks, at the end of June and beginning of July, ten meetings were held, with an average audience of about 60 or 70, and with small but steady sales of literature. In view of the difficulty of gathering an audience almost single-handed, and in view of many unfavourable local conditions, the interest aroused has been quite satisfactory. With continuous propaganda good progress could be made here. Hull members and sympathisers are urged to give their support. 

Barcelona! (1909)

From the September 1909 issue of the Socialist Standard

The workers of Catalonia and of the industrial city of Barcelona have risen in revolt against their oppressors—and have been crushed. A shady mining concern with international capitalist interests involved had been established in the territory of the Riff tribes of Morocco, close by the town of Melilla, which is occupied by the Spaniards. The natives, suspecting that this forbode them no good, took steps to turn out the invaders, the representatives of the modern enslavers, the international capitalists. As a consequence the Spanish workers were called upon to turn out and, at the risk of life and limb, protect their masters property—were ordered to go to Africa and massacre a foreign people with who they have no quarrel. Now Barcelona, at least, has, like Paris, the revolutionary tradition, and there has been plenty of anti-militarist, direct-action, aye, Anarchist propaganda, there. Doubtless also many of its toilers argued that, since lives must be risked, 'twere better to risk them fighting the real enemy at home, the monopolisers of the means of life, rather then in fighting the brown-faced Moors against whom they had no enmity. And so after speeches and strikes came barricades. However, modern artillery and magazine rifles, handled as these were by often unwilling soldiers, made short work of all these and there is now a further collapse of "direct action" to record. Hitherto the Spanish workers, very generally, disdained Parliamentary action. Perhaps events will show them the need for using the means to hand, namely, the political machinery, however backward that machinery and however difficult the obstacles may be. It is good to note the spirit of revolt in the Spanish workers. When they have got over their present Anarchistic tendency they will make rapid strides, like the quick-witted people they are, to their freedom in Socialism. 

H. J. H.