An ahistorical nitwit replies (2003)

From the August 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the March issue of the Socialist Standard there appeared a short item in the Voice from the Back column that has obviously annoyed a supporter of capitalism. It was criticising an article in the Observer of 9 February and has led the Observer writer to describe us as “ahistorical nitwits clinging to a fundamentalism every bit as odd as the Islamic variant”. To put our readers in the picture we will set forth what has been said, and will also put in our own tuppenceworth. It is up to you to decide.

In March we wrote:

“You can always rely on journalists to write nonsense whenever they are dealing with capitalism and socialism. Take the recent example of Will Hutton writing in the Observer (9 February). 'Socialism and social democracy are secular forms of Christianity whose insistence on justice, fairness and equality have palpable Christian roots, while Christian Democracy's embrace of market capitalism is qualified by its Catholic commitment to a just wage, just prices and just profits – and that work should be a source of human dignity.' It would be difficult to find a sentence with more nonsense if you spent a year searching. Socialism is a materialist view that opposes the slavish notions of Christianity. The source of all profit is the surplus value that the workers produce over their wages. To speak of 'just wages' is as daft as 'just robbery'.”

Will Hutton was sent a copy, to which he replied:

“I receive over 100 e-mails a day regularly – sometimes over 200. I don't know where to begin with the criticism. It rests on the belief that the values which socialism promotes somehow did not exist before socialism; and that socialism has a monopoly of concepts like justice – hence the mockery of the just wage. If early socialist thinkers had been as poor as this, the ideas would have got nowhere. Sadly today's champions are ahistoric nitwits clinging to a socialist fundamentalism every bit as odd as the Islamic variant. That is why they have so little influence. If you don't see the pedigree of values upon which socialism rests and is built, you don't deserve to be in the game.”

Wow! Take that you, bounder and other put downs. Now let's take a look at the real world. The Catholic Church's “just wages, just prices and just profits” and commitment to “human dignity” is a historical nonsense. Has Hutton heard of the inquisition? Or the Pope's support of Franco and Mussolini? The Catholic Church, like the Protestant Church is a whole-hearted supporter of private property.

More importantly than Hutton's strange views about socialism and christianity is that he doesn't challenge the basic premise of socialism that profit is derived from the unpaid labour of the working class. Hutton is a very talented worker who sells his ability for a wage or a salary to a member of the capitalist class. He is dependent on a wage or a salary, just like, this “ahistoric nitwit”. Men and women of the working class produce all the wealth of the world. Even silly articles in the Observer. The proprietor has got to fill the spaces between the adverts after all.

Richard Donnelly

Who Will Do The Dirty Work? (1974)

From the September 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

"But who will do the dirty work" demand critics of Socialism. Well, it all depends on what one means by dirty work. Socialists look upon as dirty work that carried out by the armed forces of states and nations the world over. Killing, maiming, mutilation and brutality of infinite variety are part and parcel of the effects of capitalism the world over, and along with armed forces, would disappear in a Socialist world.

But such capitalist atrocities are not what the opponents of Socialism mean by dirty work. They are referring to menial, monotonous, poorly paid and unpleasant work.

Menial jobs in the sense of servants waiting upon masters would disappear under Socialism. No one need be servile in a society in which all the good things of life are freely available to everyone.

"But who will sweep the streets?" some demand. This old chestnut us well on the way out as, even under capitalism, many roads are cleaned by specially designed vehicles operated by the drivers. Most other "dirty" jobs could now be taken care of by vehicles or automatons in a similar way. But in any case these jobs cannot be described as lowly occupations. Who is to say who, amongst the manual, clerical and professional workers are the most useful or valuable to society when all are essential?

Public lavatory attendants are often cited as those having to do dirty work. But this is a job which some can and do take pride in. I have heard such attendants boasting of the spotless condition of "their" toilets. Indeed, on at least one occasion, one of those workers, interviewed on the air, staggered hardened radio interviewers by the obvious pride he took in his work.

Many jobs are thought to be unpleasant because of the poor levels of subsistence associated with them. Under Socialism there would be no poorly- (or well-) paid jobs. Work would be done because it would be necessary and because people would enjoy their part in it.

The navvy is often thought of as having a "dirty job" and he certainly gets dirty doing it (but then, so do professional footballers and nobody thinks of them as having to do "dirty work") but then there can be pride in the skill and strength needed to wield a fourteen-pound hammer, which explains why some people like watching navvies at work on a building site. There is a parallel between watching a navvy wield the hammer and watching a golfer wield a club. The latter isn't manual labour merely because the golf doesn't usually have to wield the club in order to earn a living (and might well arrive for the game in a Bentley!)

The jobs of nurses and doctors are glamourized with the business of sterility and asepsis—the scrubbing of hands, the dramatic life-saving operation, the laying of cooling hands on fevered brows, the taking of temperatures and the giving of "miracle" injections. In fact doctors and nurses get their hands far more unpleasantly dirty than people realize. Nursing can be a heavy, dirty job, especially mental and geriatric nursing, entailing cleaning and changing the clothes of incontinent patients. Yet nurses do it out of choice and, as most people realize, could hardly be pursuing their vocation for monetary reward!

As a medical student I hated the subject of pathology and couldn't imagine anyone wanting to carry out post-mortems or squinting down microscopes for a living. But practically all the pathologists I ever met brimmed with enthusiasm for their job.

It takes all types to make a world—fortunately for the Socialist.

Most medical students like and are keen about their calling, but not all. At least one would have settled for a "lowlier" lot in life. He told me he was darn sure he wouldn't go through six years of rigorous study to be a doctor if he could earn as much driving a cart.

Another medic who qualified without being dedicated was a square peg in a round hole, due to being the son of a wealthy family who wanted him to "do medicine". He just wasn't cut out for it and disliked it. He liked to get his hands dirty tinkering with motor cars and things mechanical in general. But his mother had a social status to preserve and simply "had to have a doctor in the family".

Thus, under Socialism there would be no clean or dirty work—only useful work due to society having within itself a ready hand wherever there is a human need.

R. B. Gill

Sad news - Dick Donnelly

Sad news reaches us via the Socialist Courier blog:

Sadly, the Socialist Courier blog has to inform its visitors that Richard "Dick" Donnelly has died. He had been a member of Glasgow branch of the Socialist Party since the mid-1950s and was a regular outdoor and indoor speaker and frequently a contributor to this blog. Dick would probably be the first to tell the branch, "Don't Mourn - Organise!"

The Socialist Party website has a few recordings of Dick that are well worth listening to:

• The Principles of Socialism  (16 April 1976)
• How Can a Real Revolution Be Achieved? Debate between Dick Donnelly, SPGB, and Albert Meltzer, 'Black Flag' (anarchist) (12 February 1987)
• Why Socialism Is Still Relevant (12 June 2004)

He was one of the best (and funniest) socialist speakers I ever had the pleasure to listen to. This is a massive loss to both the SPGB and to its Glasgow Branch. Condolences to both his friends and family.

I will make a point of posting some of Dick's articles and reviews from the Socialist Standard on the blog in the coming days.  

The Illusions of Sir Oswald Mosley (1930)

From the July 1930 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sir Oswald Mosley has resigned from the Labour Ministry and made a great noise with his proposals to deal with unemployment. Though they are largely taken from the official Labour programme (Labour and the Nation) the Mosley plans are criticised and opposed by "official" Labour. An examination of his schemes shows that they are borrowed very largely from the Liberal Party programme, and hence Lloyd George sings their praise.

Raising the school age, pensioning some workers over 60, and making roads, bridges, etc.—these comprise the cream of Mosley's programme.

Do they deal with the cause of unemployment? Will they absorb the unemployed? Will they stop industry adding to the army of out-of works? The answer is No! Like Lloyd George's platform call, "We can conquer unemployment," the Mosley schemes play with effects and merely carry on the ordinary repair work the capitalists need to make their industry more effective.

Take cheap wage slaves over 60 out of the factory. Does that mean younger and more expensive workers will be employed instead?

Past experience shows that women and machinery will be used to keep down costs whenever production expenses are raised by legislation or Union activity. Young boys and girls taken out of the factory will provide another inducement to rationalisation by means of machinery, etc., and so, instead of older workers being employed, cheaper methods of production will prevent the increased employment of older workers.

Mosley and Lloyd George schemes—like the Labour Party policy, official or otherwise—simply mean that the ordinary and normal work of making repairs to capitalism is boomed as special relief work. Where it is not that, it is like making new roads—an attempt to increase the efficiency of capitalist production and distribution of goods.

Thirty shillings per week as a retirement pension may sound inspiring to Mr. Mosley, the millionaire, but it simply means the most pressing poverty for a married couple after a lifetime of toil.

Lloyd George and the Liberal manufacturers are uniting with the Labour Party on a common capitalist programme, not to solve unemployment—but to capture votes and pretend they are helping the workers. Both Liberal, Labour and Tory pin their hopes on rationalisation, which increases unemployment faster than relief work provides work.

None of these parties of capitalism face the fact that modern industry constantly and continuously produces an unemployed army of workers. The only way to cure unemployment is to stop the cause—the class ownership of the means of production.

Adolph Kohn

Where Leaders Lead (1997)

Book Review from the September 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Seizure of State Power by M. Velli. Phoenix Press, London. £4.50

Originally published in 1972 by the US group Black and Red as part of a "Manual for Revolutionary Leaders", this is a skit on the case for a revolutionary leadership put forward by Maoists and other Leninists.

If a bit belaboured (and the fact that it is printed as a 120-page essay with no chapters or subheadings doesn't make for any easier reading), it is nevertheless a good criticism of the Leninist idea of a vanguard party which seizes power supposedly on behalf of the workers and then rules in their name.

The author points to a contradiction in "classical revolutionary theory"which, on the one hand, presents the workers' revolution as an event in which workers emancipate themselves through their own self-organisation and activity, while on the other hand, insisting on the need for a vanguard party to bring the revolution to a successful conclusion by seizing state power.

But, says Velli, if the workers really were organised to emancipate themselves, why would they need a vanguard party to act for them? Surely they would simply go ahead and dissolve capitalism and the state.

The fact is, he argues, that a mass independent conscious working class movement is not a precondition for the seizure of power by a vanguard party. The situation is the exact reverse. It is only where workers are not yet capable of emancipating themselves—because most of them still have a "psychology of dependence" which leads them to believe that they must have leaders to tell them what to do—that a revolutionary vanguard has any chance of being able to seize power.

Historically, Velli points out, this has only happened in economically backward countries which, as a result, only have an undeveloped and inexperienced working class. This, Velli argues, fits in with the vanguard's real role which is, not to bring about the emancipation of the workers at all, but to do what the capitalist class did in the West: to organise the primitive accumulation of capital and break in the working class to industrial discipline and methods of control. But this, the author says, must not be openly stated.

For those who haven't worked it out already the M in Velli's name stands for "Machia".

Adam Buick

The unions we deserve (2000)

Book Review from the May 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

All Power to the Imagination!: Revolutionary Class Struggle In Trade Unions and the Petty Bourgeois Fetish of Organisational Purity by Dave Douglass. Class War Federation, P.O. Box 467, London E8 3QX.

This is really interesting and readable book, despite some horrendous comments on "national liberation", particularly relating to Ireland. The author is a life-long mineworker and NUM activist who is also a member of the IWW and the section of Class War which decided to continue with the CW paper and federation. The aim of this book is basically to attack the argument popular in some anarchist and left-communist circles that trade unions are inherently tools of the capitalist establishment that act to stifle workers' militancy and so on.

This position has led some revolutionaries to declare themselves "outside and against the unions"—though whether in practice they would choose not to join a union is another thing. The point about all this, as is brought home by Douglass, is that unions are essentially about workers uniting to defend themselves within capitalism. To criticise "the unions" for being reformist misses the point, as a union and its membership are one and the same. Workers are not "reformist" because "the unions" make them so; rather the level of political consciousness within a union will be a reflection of the general consciousness of the working class at the time. As Douglass points out, trade unions are not ideological monoliths—the processes of class struggle go on within unions.

If more militant members are losing the arguments then this reflects a wider passivity: something that is hardly surprising given the shattering defeats organised labour has suffered in Britain in recent decades. Trade unions can only be as militant and class conscious (and effective) as their memberships are, which must depend on the wider situation. Though this isn't to take away from the damage done by union bosses, whose frequent knighthoods and other "honours" are tawdry campaign medals minted by the real bosses, whose class interests they have served. However, to create a dichotomy between "the unions" and "the workers" can only lead to a distorted analysis of the uses and limitations of union struggle.

As a way of illustrating the dangers of this "against the unions" position Douglass points to the direct correlation between declines in union membership and the decrease in days lost (or won) in strikes. Hardly surprising—but if "the unions" were really responsible for holding back working-class combativity shouldn't the opposite be the case? In reality, non-union workers have not "broken free" from the unions—falls in membership are symptoms of the hammering the working class as a whole has taken. On the other hand, resistance to the attacks of capital is generally stronger in those sectors where there is still significant unionisation. There are some signs however that union membership and general combativity are rising. And let's not forget that this is vital if our class is to develop some of the solidarity and self-confidence essential for the final abolition of wage slavery.

Interestingly, one of the few sources quoted with any sort of approval by Douglass is the October 1994 edition of Spartacus, a publication put together by Socialist Party comrades in Norwich. He generally agrees with the case put in an article called "Socialism and Trade Unions":

"[T]he essence of the trade union is workers uniting to protect their interests in the workplace, and . . . ultimately the union and the workers are one and the same thing. If these workers have reformist outlook on life, i.e. believe that capitalism can be made to run in the interests of all, the unions must therefore have the same outlook; on the other hand if there were more revolutionary workers in the unions—and in society generally—then the unions would have a more revolutionary outlook, no longer harbouring any illusions about 'common national interests' or other such rubbish. That would not in any way alter the essential nature and role of the trade unions as the defensive organisations of the working class; but it would make them far more effective fulfilling that role" (p.10 - quoted from Spartacus).

Ben Malcolm

Wall Street (1988)

Film Review from the August 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

For once a film that has been a box office success is worth going to see. Wall Street is a thoroughly believable portrait of the world of the New York stock market. It has excellent acting performances by Michael Douglas as the ruthless corrupt tycoon Gordon Gecko and by Charlie Sheen as Gecko's young conscience-ridden apprentice. Both have slick but convincing dialogue to deliver and scenes which, while having loads of technical detail about financial dealings that go right over your head, are so tightly held together as to keep you riveted for the whole two hours.

The film has social messages too. And what better way to deliver them than to make them part of a powerful human drama? The director, Oliver Stone, has already shown his moral and political concerns with films like Salvador and the recent one about the Vietnam war, Platoon. Wall Street, it has been said, is a condemnation of the capitalist ethic, of the institutionalised greed the market system represents. In one key scene in the film, Gecko addresses a hall full of shareholders and, making no apology for his ruthless dealings, says of the market:

"Greed is right. Greed is good. Greed clarifies." Of course, coming from the mouth of an absolute stinker, this is a speech whose message to the filmgoer can only be the reverse of what was intended.

But does the filmgoer actually leave the cinema thinking the market is bad? Well, yes and no. In the end the apprentice escapes the clutches of his sorcerer and helps deliver him to justice. But the justice he delivers him is a law that classifies as illegal some of the dealings Gecko has been involved in, so-called "insider dealings". So, from this point of view, profit-making through the market is seen as fine as long as it takes place within the rules laid down by the profit-making system. Yet, at the same time, in its representation of the way in which the millions of people who run society are powerless pawns of the market and can see their livelihoods and futures upset by it at any time, Wall Street will set many people thinking that there must surely be a better, saner way of organising the way we live and produce. The film itself doesn't go so far as to suggest one, but then if it had it would probably have been more didactic, less watchable, and no doubt less of a box-office success.

Howard Moss

Terms and Terminological Inexactitudes (1940)

From the July 1940 issue of the Socialist Standard

All of the opponents of the S.P.G.B. have at some time or other twitted us with being hidebound to terms. What we insist—as we invariably do—that Capitalism and Socialism are different and distinct systems of society, both of which have predominant features that can be defined and described, we are told that because certain feudal remnants remain in Capitalism or because the capitalist state imposes restrictions on the freedom of action of the capitalist, therefore complete definition is impossible, and all definition should be abandoned. Where such looseness of thought has led can be seen in the depressing spectacle of social reformers who year after year hopefully propose new modifications of Capitalism believing that it will some day cease to be itself and become its opposite. They can only cherish such vain hope because they do not know how to recognise what are the basic, unchanging, features of the Capitalist system of society.

There are others whose inaccurate use of terms is due to indifference rather than ignorance; they change their terms to suit their policy. Thus, during the past few years, as policy has changed the same persons have been able to describe Russia as Socialist and as Capitalist (the Express newspaper is a case in point); others have looked round Europe and have been able to discern democracy in this or that country where earlier and later they could see only dictatorship. Hitler and Mussolini have been much to the fore in this verbal juggling. Both have claimed at times to be upholders of revolution and at others to be guardians of tradition. Both have pretended in some places and at some times that they stand for Socialism and working-class interests against Capitalism and the "pluto-democracies." Hitler, after years of hostility to Bolshevism, chose last year to discover close affinities between the Nazi and Bolshevist systems. Mussolini, likewise, while building warships for the Russians, declared that Fascism is a bulwark against Bolshevist encroachments on Christian civilisation. On the other hand, he has at times denounced Bolshevism, not for being anti-Capitalist, but for being "State super-Capitalism carried to its most ferocious expression" (The Times, November 2, 1936). All of which brings us to a point which needs no labouring in the utter confusion of thought which clouds political discussion at the present time, that there can be no progress towards the goal of a better social system without a clear perception of the nature and laws of the system now in being.

The S.P.G.B.'s insistence on the value of definition of terms and clarity of thought has never been more necessary than it is at the present critical juncture.

Is It Work We Want? (1923)

From the January 1923 issue of the Socialist Standard

"It is work we want, not charity," said a spokesman of the unemployed at a street corner meeting. This sums up the outlook of the average worker of to-day. He can see no other method of life than toiling or existing on charity. The fear of having to beg for bread, or go into the workhouse, spurs him on to find a job, though the conditions of work become ever more degrading.

How strange that such a view should find general acceptance among people already worn out with work; and at a time when wealth can be produced with such ease and abundance! It is stranger still that some must work hard and spend niggardly, whilst others work not and yet spend lavishly. If the former cease work for a brief while they come suddenly to the end of their resources; the latter buy palaces and furnish them brilliantly, live in magnificence, and yet at the end of their days they are more wealthy than at the commencement.

Who brings the rare jewels from far lands? Who sows and reaps that we all may live? Who drives the flying locomotive, the liners, the great cranes, the electric plant, and the plough? Who toils in sorrow and wretchedness that others may enjoy the best fruits of this wonderful old earth? Who is this strange being that makes possible for others an almost unlimited pleasure, beauty, and luxury, and takes for himself what is miserable, ugly, and poor? Who else but they who are born with the curse of slavery upon their brows?

Day after day, week after week, and year after year, thousands upon thousands of human beings do little more than eat, drink, sleep, and work. To the mass of the people the solitude of the mountain pass is unknown. Each day they—the "lucky" ones—must be at work to perform their allotted tasks.

Is it a pleasure to toil until limbs refuse to perform their accustomed tasks? Is it healthy to eschew fresh air and sunshine and pass the greater part of one's life in poisonous atmosphere? Is it intelligent to stagger with work-worn limbs and work-dimmed eyes along the thorny path of toil in order that parasites may prosper?

Through thousands of years a large part of the earth's inhabitants have fretted out their lives in slavery. Yet slavery, though hoary, had a beginning at a definite stage in the evolution of mankind. There was a period far back in the past when slavery was unknown. Just as certain definite social conditions in a past age brought slavery into existence, so other definite social conditions will bring it to an end.

It is leisure and idleness the worker needs (leisure to enjoy and idleness to recuperate), and yet he pursues work like a hound on the trail. How high above him, in one respect, is the "ignorant" savage of Herman Melville's "Typee," who worked little and laughed and sang long? And yet the worker does not pursue work because he loves the burden of toil; he does so because, as a rule, unless he works he cannot obtain the wherewithal to live. It is not a fault of his, but a misfortune—he is born into slavery.

So powerful is the influence of a part of his environment upon the worker, and so heavy is the weight of more recent tradition, that he believes slavery to be an eternal institution. A mighty thinker of the past, one Aristotle, shared this belief; but he made a profound qualification—there would be slavery, he said, until tools and machines were self-operating. We are now at the period when this is possible. With a touch of the hand mighty masses of machinery are set in motion which perform astonishing evolutions and accomplish wonderful results. With proper organisation little work on the part of man is required to turn out vast quantities of the necessaries of life.

Through succeeding ages, a privileged class has thrived upon the produce of an oppressed class, and it is the same to-day. In the past conditions were such that could not promise ease and comfort for the many, except where nature was particularly liberal and the population comparatively small. The needful things were produced by simple tools with much labour. Now all is changed. The needful things are produced by complicated tools with little labour. The conditions are such that they promise ease and comfort, leisure and luxury, to the many. But this promise can only be fulfilled when the many own the product of their energy.

GILMAC.

Terrorism and political violence (2004)

From the July 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

It has become a commonplace to declare that ‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.’ But has violence ever been an effective political tool and, if so, is it still? The American ruling class has declared ‘war on terrorism’ in an attempt to legitimise their own use of political violence around the world. But both the US and their enemies are indulging in an identical activity. The question therefore arises as to whether humankind’s political problems are ever resolved through military conflict.

It is possible to trace the history of warfare back to the origins of private property in Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Levant some 5,500 years ago. The initial raising of armies to defend the agricultural surplus from raiding nomads soon became used to attack other city-states. The once elected warlords evolved into permanent kings whose main role became the protection of their class’s power and wealth. The first imperial regimes emerged together with those who struggled against such oppressive empires. Those who opposed any established power regimes have been demonised by their enemies ever since. It is these ‘resistance’ movements who have used political violence (terrorism) in an attempt to destroy and replace existing (usually) imperial regimes. We will not discuss the historical logic of the violence between states but this is where the seeds of internal political conflict are invariably sown. That the subsequent ‘terrorists’ are almost always armed and trained by a state is well documented and  such regimes show staggering hypocrisy by demonising their own students when they turn on their teachers. History has given a very mixed reception (usually dependant on their success) to these heroes or criminals: Spartacists, Thugees, Dog Soldiers, Boxers, Mau-Mau, Assassins – the list is endless. Since violence was used to impose political regimes, many have concluded that it is only through such conflict that they can be destroyed. Before we attempt to analyse whether history backs up this logic let us take a detour to try and understand why our culture is so immersed in the cult of the warrior and the belief that violence can resolve human problems.

Ever since Homer’s tales of the heroic deeds of the Greeks at Troy western culture has been saturated with a military ethos. We cannot imagine Malory, Shakespeare, Cervantes or Fenimore Cooper without Lancelot, Macbeth, Don Quixote or Hawkeye. Such is the central place it occupies in our story-telling that we can hardly conceive of drama itself without a conflict of some kind within the narrative. As we have seen, the very origins of private property produced a warrior elite who subsequently became a ruling aristocracy and it this class who were the patrons of the creators of culture. Given the moral dualism of Christianity it was not difficult for the rulers to characterise their opposing city, or later, nation states as evil. War became described as a struggle between good and evil – the relevant designations were, of course, dependent on which side you were on.  After six millennia of warfare the idea that it still represents a way to resolve problems is still an insidious part of our culture – not because it has proven to be so but because the ruling classes need us to believe in it. As evidence for this, let us consider the outcome of the longest and most bloody conflict of the last century between two of Europe’s ruling classes – Britain and Germany.

It is still a matter of great debate who actually started the war of 1914-18; some say it was provoked by France to recover territory lost during the Franco-Prussian conflict whilst others believe it an inevitable consequence of Germany’s need for an empire. What is not disputable is that the opposing economic interests of the ruling classes concerned were vital in their decision to go to war. They utilised the martial cultural traditions of their nations to convince the populations to slaughter each other. History shows that nothing was resolved by the allied ‘victory’ of 1918 because, as a consequence of the imposed terms of the German surrender, the whole thing erupted again in 1939. Again millions died, but did the fighting end with the defeat of Nazism? The Russian Empire was formed out of the division of Europe after 1945, as was much of the ‘third world’ where they and the U.S. fought out the ‘cold war’. Even today we still endure the consequences of the two world wars where the victors redrew the world map according to their interests – Palestine, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Chechnya, etc. All we can be say about the direct result of war is that the ruling class of one nation state replaces another. Clearly this is not why those who fought the war did so, thus we can say with some legitimacy that war has not resolved the problems it was (at least in propaganda terms) supposed to. Can we also make this claim for the results of terrorist campaigns?

Many leaders of movements for ‘national liberation’ (terrorists) have subsequently become part of the ruling class they once fought. Israel, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Northern Ireland and many others now enjoy the fruits of their murderous campaigns. But what has become of the promises made during the struggle? Most who killed and were killed did so in the belief that they were creating a better and more just society than the one they lived in. In cases such as Zimbabwe things seem to have become worse in some respects. The exploitation and murderous repression of the Palestinians has plunged Israel into a nightmare of endless violence. The Irish  ruling class seem incapable of resolving their internecine power struggle . So again it would appear that violence has failed to deliver a better life to those who indulged in it and suffered from it. Why? One obvious reason is the inability of humankind to learn from its history. An understanding of history is far and away the most important component of any political consciousness. Before any course of political action is undertaken we must make an effort to understand how the world came to be the way it is. A motorcar cannot be repaired without some knowledge of how it works and no amount of moral outrage and violent action will resolve the problem. War and its bastard progeny we call terrorism, together with the regimes both have brought into the world, are the problem and not the solution.

Socialists have always opposed both violent struggles for ‘national liberation’ and the ‘legitimate’ wars fought between nation states. We see that causing more of it cannot lead to an end to the suffering in the world. War and all organised violence can only be stopped when it is rejected by those who alone must fight it. The ruling class and their media, political ideology, establishment history and all the other paraphernalia of the capitalist propaganda machine can never acknowledge this because to do so would illegitemise the origins of their own power. As to the other myth they peddle concerning mankind’s inherent violence, we can only look within ourselves for the answer. If you sincerely believe in the efficacy of violence to solve your own and the world’s problems then you simply deny the evidence of history.

Andrew Westley

Global March of the Gurus (2005)

Book Review from the January 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World. By Francis Wheen, Fourth Estate, 2004.

A few years ago Wheen had a critically and commercially successful biography of Karl Marx. This survey – A Short History of Modern Delusions, as the book’s subtitle puts it – takes 1979 as the decisive year. In that year two key events occurred that shaped the modern world: Margaret Thatcher came to power in Britain and Ayatollah Khomeini returned to dominate Iran.

The link between the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism is uncontroversial. The Shah of Iran was a stooge of western governments, there to guarantee oil supplies. The ideology used to remove him therefore took the form of an anti-western Islam. This ideology then spread through the Middle East and beyond. But Wheen’s interpretation of Thatcher’s rise and the global spread of free market fundamentalism is less convincing. In Wheen’s account, the old status quo (which he clearly favours) was overthrown by New Right zealots spouting mumbo-jumbo. Or put another way, the post-war consensus on the mixed economy, guided by government intervention and Keynesian economics, was supplanted by monetarism, privatisation and the worship of market forces. Of course these facts are not in dispute and Thatcherite/Blairite ideology is mumbo-jumbo dressed-up as common sense (“we are all ‘Thatcherite’ now,” said Peter Mandelson, Labour MP, in 2002). However, what Wheen fails to appreciate is why the post-war consensus was so easily swept away. In the 1970s the long post-war boom had come to an end and the Keynesian status quo was perceived to be a failure in dealing with recession and high unemployment. Hence the spread of free market mumbo-jumbo.

Wheen sets great store by the Enlightenment values of reason and progress. This book is far more wide ranging than space here permits us to discuss. Cults, gurus, irrational panics and post-modernists are all subject to a withering criticism very much in the style of George Orwell. Despite the reservations above, this is a superb piece of work and it will be an invaluable resource for socialists.

Lew Higgins

Pathfinders: Yo-Yos a-Go-Go (2015)

The Pathfinders Column from the February 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

What on earth is going on with the price of oil? For the past five years it’s been stable at somewhere north of $115 a barrel, but since last June it’s fallen by 40 percent to below $70.

The fall in price has caused pandemonium in energy boardrooms just as companies have been sinking unprecedented amounts into R&D looking for new sources of the increasingly hard-to-get black gold and other fossil fuels – an estimated $670 billion last year alone. Samsung are just in the process of launching Prelude, the biggest ship ever built, with a water displacement equal to the world’s six largest aircraft carriers combined (BBC Online, 16 December 2014). Its purpose? To act as a giant floating platform to exploit deep-ocean natural gas fields and liquefy the gas on the spot instead of pumping it through expensive pipelines to existing facilities on shore. Prelude is supposed to be the prelude to an entire fleet of LNG monsters, but now that the rug has been pulled from under it, it may turn out to be the world’s largest floating white elephant instead.

Environmentalists will be delighted that new drilling projects in the Arctic are likely to be shelved, ditto further exploitation of the super-dirty Canadian tar sands. Meanwhile anti-fracking campaigners in the north of England will be ecstatic that Lancashire County Council have vetoed Cuadrilla’s plans to drill for shale gas at two sites near Blackpool, and even more so at the fact that fracking companies who have sunk millions into new drilling sites across the world have been left high and dry with ‘stranded assets’ as the oil price crash has wiped out the value of ‘alternative’ shale and left their operations uneconomic.

Motorists too will be able to celebrate by flooring it in their gas-guzzlers, while shrinking gas bills are expected to lead to a warm glow among household consumers. Providing of course that the energy companies heed the government’s urgent demands to lower their tariffs in line with the price fall. But energy companies won’t be too keen to respond, and not just for the obvious reason that they make more money out of customers that way, but also because, as they are fond of pleading, oil prices can go up as well as down, and they don’t want to catch themselves flat-footed with a price cut just as Brent crude decides to go stratospheric.

So, good news all round then? Well not exactly. Low oil prices will encourage consumption, which will wipe the smile of the faces of those environmentalists, considering that 14 out of the last 15 years have been the warmest on record (BBC Online, 16 January) and that sea level rise is now estimated to be 25 percent steeper than previously thought (BBC Online, 14 January). Still,New Scientist finds reasons to be cheerful, with an optimistic guess that the price-crash might spell the beginning of the end of the world’s oil dependency (‘Over a barrel’, 17 January).

Wholesale gas prices have also dropped 20 percent since November, and may drop further. China is moving away from coal and towards gas, which will stiffen the price, but then on the other hand, Japan is moving away from gas and back towards nuclear, which will weaken it.

Worse news is to follow for the benighted energy corporations, bless ‘em, with a new paper (Nature, 8 January) which could be seen as kicking them when they’re down. Building on estimates by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that, in order to keep within the target global temperature increase of 2^oC, total carbon emissions from now until 2050 cannot exceed 1,240 gigatonnes, the report authors quietly went about their sums, totting up the actual potential gigatonnage that’s left in the ground. Their conclusion was that with remaining reserves (defined as recoverable under present economic conditions) equating to nearly 2,900 gigatonnes, and total recoverable resources around 11,000 gigatonnes ‘the disparity between what resources and reserves exist and what can be emitted while avoiding a temperature rise greater than the agreed 2^o C limit is therefore stark.’ In other words, about a third of oil reserves, 50 percent of gas and 80 percent of coal must be left in the ground. To the industry’s argument of mitigation through proposed Carbon Capture and Sequestration schemes (CCS) the authors give short shrift. CCS is too little, too expensive, too uncertain and too late anyway. The damage has already been done. There’s no more wiggle room.

Worried, the Bank of England is conducting an enquiry into the risk of a global economic crash if governments are reckless enough to pay attention to climate scientists and start tightening the climate change rules, rendering fossil assets essentially worthless. However Shell and other firms are more sanguine, seeing no great risk to their business model because they don’t believe that politicians, for all their bluster, will stick to their promises on carbon limits (BBC Online, 7 January). Which sounds about right.

So why did the price drop? Partly because, with global warming, northern winters are getting milder. Partly because the recession has led to low economic activity and therefore low oil consumption. Partly because America got carried away with its fracking bonanza and stopped importing oil, unintentionally creating a world glut. And partly because Saudi Arabia, OPEC’s leading producer, is refusing to curb output because it’s having a price war with Iran and Russia. With $900 billion in cash reserves Saudi Arabia can easily afford to sell low (their extraction costs are around $6 a barrel) thus murdering the opposition, as well as all those Yankee frackers who thought they were riding the gravy train (Economist, 8 December 2014).

In other words, the price drop is due to a number of contingent factors which may or may not apply at any given point in the future. Now that quantitative easing has been applied in Europe, the oil price has seen a 2 percent uptick. If OPEC decides to curb output, the oil price will rocket and with it the value of shale assets. The plan to turn the Arctic into an oil well will be back on the table, and the Canadian tar pits will start to look inviting again.

What’s so weird about capitalism, and not in a good way, is how a global fall in the price of one key commodity can reverse global policy overnight. It’s even worse with ‘long latency’ commodities where changes at industrial source take years to feed through to the market, by which time they may have precisely the wrong effect and start a panic.

How is humanity supposed to plan for the future, given this yo-yo economics? How are we supposed to make our civilisation sustainable, and guarantee a planet in good health for our descendants? We can’t, basically. For that we would need a steady-state economy, with patterns of production and consumption that didn’t keep yo-yoing up and down unpredictably and didn’t depend on thousands of fast-buck investors who at any moment might either blow it into a giant gas bubble or drain every last gasp out of it. Gambling in a casino might be fun, if you can afford to flutter. But it’s no way to run a planet.

PJS

Editorial: A Century for Socialism (2004)

Editorial from the June 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Welcome to this special edition of the Socialist Standard, a commemorative issue marking one hundred years in the political life of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. When our Party was formed on 12th June 1904, in a hall in a little alley off Fetter Lane, Fleet Street, London, the founder members would rightly have viewed the possibility of our existence a century later in something of a negative light. The aim of the Socialist Party has always been ‘socialism and nothing but’ and the founder members conceived the Party as a mechanism through which socialist ideas could be rapidly spread and, potentially, through which the working class of wage and salary earners could come to political power. The subsequent creation of socialism would render the need for a socialist party redundant and so, one hundred years on, the very continued existence of the Socialist Party of Great Britain is indicative of the fact that the system of society the founder members were dedicated to overthrowing – capitalism – is still with us.

To this effect, today, ownership of the means of living (the factories, farms, offices, communication systems and so on) is still in the hands of a minority social class that can live a luxurious existence without having to work.Virtually all the useful work in society is being done by the majority, a class of people forced by economic compulsion to sell their working energies for a wage or a salary that is less in value than what they produce. It is a society characterised by extremes of wealth and poverty, by wars and chaos and by a meanness of spirit that undermines much that is decent about human beings. For the  last hundred years the Socialist Party has been waging a war of our own – against capitalism and for  socialism. We have waged a war too against all the political parties who have supported capitalism, including those that have done so while paying lip-service to socialism. The achievement of socialism has been our sole objective, because our understanding of capitalist society and its working has told us that it is a system capable of change over time but not change that can abolish its fundamental defects. Capitalism has altered over the last century, but not fundamentally so and all the problems associated with it in 1904 are still present today, with some new and unforeseen ones too.

Technological powers

In one sense, capitalism is the most successful social system that has ever existed in that the working class, through its collective efforts, has been able to develop the powers of production to previously undreamed-of heights, from putting a man on the moon to mapping the human genome. But these powers of production are wasted and distorted by a system that puts profit before needs as a matter of course and where collective effort is destabilised by competition and division. A society that can now send spaceships to Mars but which cannot adequately feed, clothe and house the world’s population despite the massive technological resources at its disposal is a society that is seriously and fundamentally flawed.

One hundred years ago the men and women who founded the Socialist Party came to a significant political conclusion, which is just as important now as it was then. This was that capitalism, through creating an interconnected world-wide division of labour and unparalleled leaps in productivity (whereby ten years in its lifespan is equal to one hundred years and more of previous  systems like feudalism), has created the conditions of potential abundance necessary for its own replacement and also a social class of wage and salary earners with the incentive to organise for this. What pioneers of the socialist movement like Marx, Engels and Morris envisaged as socialism or communism, had become a practical possibility and tinkering with an inherently defective system like capitalism a waste of time and energy in the light of it.

The founders of the Socialist Party recognised that the time was ripe for the working class to organise itself consciously and politically to democratically take control of the state machine in countries across the world, dispossessing the owning class of capitalists and socialising production on an international basis. In doing so the working class would consciously create a system where human activity would be carried out solely and directly to meet the needs and desires of the population, and where all the defining categories of capitalism had been abolished: production for profit, money, national frontiers, the class system and – as a result – the enforcer of class society itself, the state.

Reformism

At the time of our Party’s foundation other politicalactivists agreed that this type of society was possible and desirable, but disagreed about how it could be created. Due to what they took to be the backward intellectual development of the working class, they thought that  capitalism would need to be gradually transformed into socialism by a series of reform measures. They labelled the founder members of the Socialist Party and others who thought on similar lines ‘impossibilists’, people who were demanding the impossible when piecemeal and gradual reform was all that was realistic. This was the substance of our break in 1904 with our parent body, the Social Democratic Federation, and the basis for our criticism of other organisations of the time like the Independent Labour Party and the Fabian Society.

Organisations like the SDF that had a paper commitment to socialism were in practice swamped by people who were attracted by their reform programmes rather than their supposed commitment to abolishing capitalism. In these circumstances, those who viewed reforms as a stepping-stone to socialism were themselves swamped by people for whom reforms were simply an end in themselves, palliating the worst excesses of the system. The history of the Labour Party – formed out of the Labour Representation Committee in 1906 – is a case in point. More than any other organisation in Britain, the Labour Party developed as a body hoping to reform capitalism into something vaguely humane. Today, in 2004, the modern Labour Party stands as an organisation which has instead been turned by capitalism into something rather more than vaguely inhumane. From Keir Hardie and  Ramsay MacDonald onwards it has steadily drifted towards where it is today – a party which has abandoned any hope of seriously changing society for the better but which now markets itself as the most efficient managerial team for British Capitalism PLC instead.

Over decades, millions of workers the world over have invested their hopes in so-called ‘practical’, ‘possibilist’ organisations like the Labour Party, hoping against hope that they would be able to neuter the market economy when, in reality, the market economy has successfully neutered them. As such, the damage these organisations have done the socialist movement is colossal. That they turned out to be the real ‘impossibilists’ – demanding an unattainable humanised capitalism – is one of the greatest tragedies of the last century, made all the greater because it was so utterly predictable.

Vanguard politics

Unfortunately for the socialist movement, the reformist distraction has not been the only one, however. Another political tendency emerged, principally out of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in 1917, claiming that they had found another route to socialism. However sincere some of their number may have been at the outset – and whatever their laudable success at curtailing Russia’s part in the First World War – Lenin’s Bolsheviks proved to be a political tendency that set the clock back for socialism at least as much as reformism did. In claiming that socialism could be created by a political minority without the will and participation of the majority of the population, and through their wilful confusion of socialism with nationalisation and state-run capitalism generally (a type of opportunism also shared – over time – by the reformists), they shamelessly distorted the socialist political programme.

The Socialist Party was the first organisation in Britain (and possibly the world) to foresee the disastrous state capitalist outcome of the Bolshevik takeover but we gained no satisfaction in doing so. Even now, years after the collapse of the Kremlin’s empire, the association of socialist and communist ideas with state capitalism, minority action and political dictatorship is one of the greatest barriers to socialist understanding. Today, both reformism and Bolshevik-style vanguardism stand discredited. As ostensible attempts to create socialism they didn’t just fail, they were positively injurious to the one strategy that could have brought about a better society during the last century. The modern far left – by combining the two elements together in an unfortunate mix – have opted for the worst of both worlds and rightly are politically marginalized because of it.

Looking forwards

From our standpoint in 2004, the Socialist Party of Great Britain and our companion parties abroad in the World Socialist Movement regard our situation with both pride and sadness. Sadness because two political currents we warned against most vehemently – reformism and vanguardism – succeeded in derailing the socialist project so spectacularly, but pride because of the part we have played in keeping the alternative vision alive.

The political positions of the Socialist Party were not handed down on tablets of stone in 1904. With the Object and Declaration of Principles as our guide we have developed our own analysis and political viewpoints as the last hundred years have worn on. Occasionally we may have made mistakes, but we are confident that our record over the last century stands for itself – of propagating the case for real socialism, in exposing the promises and trickery of the reformists and the vanguardists, in opposing the senseless butchery of the working class in two world wars and countless others, and in presenting a clear analysis of capitalism in language readily understandable to those whose interest lies in socialism.

In the pages of this special issue you will read about the remarkable men and women who have been members of our Party over the last hundred years and about the political input they have had to make. Without doubt, their contribution has been an immense one and we pay public tribute to them for it, but there is a lot more work still to be done.

Capitalism today stands as a social system that bears with it little by way of a positive perspective for humanity. In the major industrial centres of the system, significant rises in productivity coupled with trade union action by workers to win a half-decent share of the gains, have led to rising purchasing power for many. But capitalism and insecurity continue to go hand in hand and in the so-called ‘Third World’ millions starve every year while literally billions now live in disgusting conditions with no hope in sight for them. Everywhere on the planet capitalism has spread its malignant influence: creating a society where everything (and everyone) can be bought and sold, where an ‘every man for himself’ culture leads to escalating brutality, crime and violence and where the social codes built up during the system’s formative years have been undermined by a rampant drive to commercialisation, fostered by a distorted and ruthless individualism. In 2004, nationalism, political gangsterism, religious fundamentalism and terrorist atrocities are the order of the day in a system that neither knows or cares where it is heading.

In the first edition of the Socialist Standard we called upon our readership to “help speed the time when we shall herald in for ourselves and for our children, a brighter, a happier, and a nobler society than any the world has yet witnessed”. One hundred years later we are still here, and make the same plea, with the same force and urgency. No matter how inconvenient it may be for our political opponents, we are not going away until our job is done.

That day will come when the working class has seen through the lies and false promises that have proved such a distraction this last one hundred years. And it will come when the supposedly incredible idea of creating a world without wars and worries, money and markets is accepted as not only necessary for the sake of humanity, but recognised for being just as realisable as other once ‘impossible’ projects are today . . . like a man on the moon,or a spaceship to Mars.

Help The Aged (1977)

From the April 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Well this here's the story of old Jake Twist
Who wrote him a letter to a Socialist.
He said I do declare I like what I hear
About free cigarettes an' a glass o' free beer.
I was also told there'll be no cash
An' I must confess it sounded pretty brash
But when I got to thinking an' usin' my brain
The whole of the Case became mighty plain.
Singin' Hey Ho — Watcha know! 

There'll be no more fightin' in these here hills
An' no more trouble 'bout old folks' wills
There'll be nobody to lay down the law
Cos there'll be no point in robbin' no more
Well all o' this sure does seem fine
But you see I've reached the end o' the line.
I'm gettin' mighty close on seventy two
An' it seems too old to be helpin' you.
Singin' Hey Ho — Watcha know! 

Well Old Jake's letter was put in the post
An' he settled him down to skunk on toast.
Three days later there came a reply
And what it said hit him in the eye.
It said: Well ole man I'm ashamed o' you
Thinkin' you're too old at seventy two
Y'oughta know it ain't never too late
Cos I'm still here an' I'm a-ninety eight.
So it's Hey Hey — Watcha say!

Paul Breeze

Economics (2012)

Book Review from the October 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Remaking Scarcity – From Capitalist Inefficiency to Economic Democracy. By Costas Panayotakis, Pluto Press.

The subject of economics is commonly understood as being the problem of unlimited wants in the face of finite resources. Likewise socialism, communism and common ownership are seen as arising out of conditions which bring about the elimination of scarcity. Panayotakis, who describes himself as a “recovering economist”, frames the issue a little differently. For him scarcity itself is not necessarily the problem but rather it is the “the undemocratic determination of the configuration of scarcity that people live under” that leads to the social-ills of today.

This book is in effect in two halves, the first is a well written critique of many of the underlying assumptions that make up neo-classical economics and the second explores what Panayotakis calls “economic democracy” and compares two models for the operation of such a society. Panayotakis uses economic democracy “the principle that all citizens should have an equal voice over the goals and the operation of the economic system” as a yardstick to measure how successful an social system is. According to this measure and as would be expected, capitalism fares badly.

David Schweickart's conception of economic democracy is also put up against this measuring stick. Schweickart sees his system as achieving a balance between democracy, planning, and markets. Workers have democratic control of the companies they work for, firms trade between themselves and the general public and should the smooth functioning of this worker ran market economy be disrupted the State will step in to ensure that all is returned to a happy state of bliss. How close this proposal is to the current economic system is striking. Schweickart does not seem to realise that the problem with the market economy is not so much that the workers do not have democratic control of the means of production but that market forces ultimately control any decisions that have to be made, “accumulate or die” will remain the mantra until the competitive struggle for profits is removed. Panayotakis seems aware of these criticisms but does not really drive the point home.

To contrast with this “market-socialist” blueprint Panayotakis offers up the schemes of Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel. Commonly known as “Parecon” this system of participatory economics sees productive decisions co-ordinated by a network of workplace, neighbourhood, and facilitation councils which communicate amongst each other until pricing and production levels are agreed upon. However, in this system competition between enterprises is not eliminated, the law of value still operates, enterprises that fail to compete would go under and so the tension between profit and wages remains. Albert and Hahnel are trying to find political solutions to what is essentially an economic problem.

What is missing from this book is the argument for the type of classless, stateless and non-market system of free access which we would call world socialism. Economic democracy is as much a problem of economics as it is of democracy. A truly democratic economy cannot be realised until the economy is governed directly by human need.

DJP