Provincial Propaganda Tour - A Report (1928)

From the October 1928 issue of the Socialist Standard

A motor propaganda tour was organised with a view to stimulating interest in the Party in provincial centres. In view of the difficulties imposed by finance, breakdowns, and bad weather the results were exceedingly satisfactory and full of promise for the future. The following is a brief record of the tour:-

August 25th.—Left London via the Great North Road. Reached Coventry at dusk. A small meeting was held which was not very good owing to the lateness of the day. At night-fall the van set off for Birmingham. Halfway to Birmingham the tent was pitched for the night.

August 26th.—Broke camp and headed for Birmingham. At about 11.15 the Bull Ring was reached and by 11.30 a good meeting was in progress. An audience of 500 odd listened attentively, but were dispersed by rain. An evening meeting was commenced at 7 o'clock, the audience, estimated at 1,500 was scattered by a sudden downpour of rain. Despite these setbacks 200 odd remained to listen in the pouring rain. The attempted meetings of other organisations failed completely. Arrangements for a further two meetings to take place on Monday, the 27th, were cancelled owing to bad weather. Departed for Hanley.

August 27th.—Engine trouble having developed, Hanley was not reached till night-time. A very hearty welcome was received from local comrades.

August 28th.—An evening meeting with an estimated audience of 300 was carried on despite police interference.

August 29th.—An audience of about 500 at a meeting in Hanley Market Place.

August 30th.—The suburbs of Burslem were next visited. The going was heavy all the way and the rain persisted. A good meeting was held.

August 31st.— Left Hanley for Manchester. Tent pitched on the outskirts and entered the town next morning.

September 1st.— An afternoon meeting held in the suburbs of Manchester. Police interference and the threat of a summons were overcome. In the evening a large meeting was held in the centre of Manchester (Oxford Road) with very good results.

September 2nd.—This being a Sunday, meetings were held in the morning, afternoon, and the evening. The morning meeting was poor but in the afternoon the Tour had its best meeting in Stevenson's Square, the audience numbering a good thousand. In the evening held a meeting in opposition to the Eccles Labour Candidate.

September 3rd.—Departure for Sheffield. Spent night on the moors. Engine trouble.

September 4th.—Engine failure upset arrangements of Sheffield.

September 7th.—Resumed journey to Nottingham, arriving there in the evening. An audience captured from The Economic League provided an interesting meeting.

September 8th.—Derby was next in view, but owing to engine trouble it was not reached till night-fall, and once again an evening meeting was lost.

September 9th.—A small morning and a large evening meeting was held in Derby Market Place. A group of sympathisers was discovered and a number of membership forms were left with an ex-member for distribution with a view to forming a Branch. These sympathisers were also linked up with the Burton Comrades.

September 10th.—Burton was reached at nightfall, an evening meeting having again been lost through engine trouble.

September 11th.—Held a meeting which was considered quite good in view of the fact that the town is owned by the Brewers and the Burton workers are therefore wary of Socialist activities.

September 12th.—A good midday meeting at Swadlincote (a mining area). The van next headed for Leicester. Nothing could be done at Leicester because the roads were filled with stalls, it being Market Day.

September 13th.—Northampton provided a good meeting which was maintained in spite of a "dog fight" between the supporters of the Brewers and the Teetotallers.

September 14th.—The van left for London, and covered the 60 odd miles without a hitch.

Total Collections: £5 18s. 5d.

Total Literature Sales: £3 10s. 10d.

Are the Workers Lazy? (1975)

From the August 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

On July 24th The Sun published the first of 1400 letters it had invited and received on "who is to blame for our present economic crisis". The writer — "A. Worker" — subtracted pensioners, at-schools, servicemen, officials and prisoners from the population and reached his point: "Balance left to do the work, 900,000; people who won't work, 880,000."

The sentiment no doubt went down as well with most of The Sun's readers as the other items (a girl flashing her bosoms and a pop star who owes £750,000 income-tax) on the same page. Proverbially, dogs do not eat other dogs; but workers snarling at one another with allegations of greed and indolence gives perennial pleasure to the capitalist class and those who think like them. Interestingly, the next day the headlines — including The Sun's — were all about unemployment going above a million. Would that have altered "A. Worker's: calculation, had he known? Not at all. One of the features of the nineteen-thirties' depression was frequent assertions by the powerful, and the conviction of the comfortable and ignorant, that the unemployed did not want work.

The answer to the assertion that the characteristic of the working class is to loll about all day is simply to look around. Tower-blocks rise swiftly, motorways spread across the country; the harvest is gathered and transformed into daily bread; post a letter today and it arrives a hundred miles away tomorrow — all done by inert, won't-raise-a-finger people is it? The fact is that capitalism nags everyone to work, from birth. It is the yardstick of school reports: "Works well", "Must work harder", "Steady worker", with "Lazy" the depth of disgrace. Hymns and sermons are full of exhortations to it: "Work, for the night is coming" (whatever that means); "the Lord's work"; "good works". The bee and the ant are held up as ideals to imitate.

Conditioned thus, people eye one another's efforts and comment on public performance like roadsweepers'. "Work fascinates me. I can watch it for hours", said Jerome in Three Men in a Boat. But — and here is the point — the criticism of slothfulness is only of him who has a lot to do and cannot be seen at it all the time. Having the means to do nothing is another matter and leads (or did, until not long ago) to being called a "gentleman" and bowed — and scraped-to. Only the working class can be lazy; the rich twiddle their thumbs or doze in clubs, but that sis how they Carry All the Responsibility. The fairly abrupt disappearance of the "gentleman" bit was due only to changes in the tax laws that made unearned income a disadvantageous category and caused capitalists to arrange nominal occupations ("director") for themselves.

The aspect which is carefully concealed, in fact, is that the working class is condemned to work. Born into the capitalist system, the only way to get a living is to sell one's sole possession: labour-power. No wonder people think about work so much — without it, they may go hungry. "Plenty of work" is an allure, the prospect of work which goes on and on and has lots of hours. And what does the working class get for it? Wages, while the fat and the profits go to the owning class. There was "plenty of work" (a few thousand years' ago) when the Pyramids and the Great Wall of China were under construction, too.

The "people who won't work" of The Sun's thick-skulled  contributor are a myth. It is a tragedy that working people should believe in it. It provides them, of course, with a fear when Socialism is mentioned: what about "the lazy people", the mass of good-for-nothings who would sponge on others' honest efforts? The gullible worker who talks like this never sees that he is repeating what his masters say, and they mean him as well. This is, indeed, a curious habit among proprietors of saying they "built" or "made" or "provided" almost anything. They know, of course, that the workers did it, but the workers are of no account.

It can be said also that for most people work is what they can get,and devoid of the capacity to interest. Part of the definition of work, commonly, is that it is something dull or unpleasant: if (by rare good fortune) one does something agreeable or even enjoyable it is not reckoned to be truly work. The division between work-time and leisure-time is a matter of the hours for which the sale of labour-power is made, but it is also stopping doing tedious things at half-past five and looking for pleasure the day does not contain.

Oh yes, men and women work, lifelong. They have no choice: the non-workers are those who live by exploitation. Socialism will end that, and make work rewarding in every sense. And the first step towards it is to reject the inanities The Sun deals in, and see what the working-class position really is.

Robert Barltrop

Mixed Media: Bowie's Piano Man (2015)

Book Review from the June 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bowie's Piano Man: The Life of Mike Garson by Clifford Slapper is a musical biography of the avant-garde jazz pianist who has worked with David Bowie over the last forty years.

Garson came of age musically in the 1960s when people would 'listen to Bartok, John Coltrane and Jimi Hendrix all in the same day', and he had his big break in 1965 in Greenwich Village when Elvin Jones, renowned drummer with John Coltrane called on Garson to replace a pianist.  Slapper describes the influences of jazz pianists Cecil Taylor, Erroll Garner, Herbie Hancock, and Bill Evans on the young Garson. Jim Merod concluded that Garson is 'within the circle of genuinely masterful jazz pianists including Bill Evans, Art Tatum and Thelonius Monk.'

Slapper details Garson's work with Bowie beginning with the 1973 album Aladdin Sane, which he expressively describes as 'the arrival of Aladdin Sane was the 1970s equivalent of joining the first passenger jet into space.' The album lyrics describe New York City's urban decay, decadence, drug addiction, violence and death just prior to some catastrophe. Garson's piano parts on Aladdin Sane are exquisitely beautiful cascading notes. Nicholas Pegg wrote that 'Garson's breathtaking jazz/blues inflections forcibly steer away from pure rock'n'roll, creating a vigorous hybrid somewhere between the Stones and Kurt Weill.' The song Time is Brechtian Cabaret, and it is interesting to compare with the cabaret music of Jacques Brel and Weimar Marxists Brecht-Weill. Garson used the old stride piano style from the 1920s which 'sounds like those old-fashioned rinky-tink bar-room pianos.' There are a number of links between Brecht-Weill and Bowie-Garson; Brecht-Weill's Alabama Song was recorded by Bowie in 1978, Bowie had the title role in the 1982 BBC TV dramatisation of Brecht's Baal, and at his father's funeral at his request Garson played Weill's September Song and Brecht-Weill's Mack the Knife.

Garson's sweeping piano runs were a key feature on the songs We are the Dead, 1984, and Big Brother on Bowie's 1974 album Diamond Dogs which was based on George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty Four. The lyrics describe a dystopian post-apocalypse nightmare, and highlight Bowie's political anxieties about leadership, submission to authority and conformist beliefs. Bowie later said it was an 'apocalyptic kind of view of our city life... it just coincided with the first economic disasters in New York.' Allan Tannenbaum's New York in the 70s describes how 'economic stagnation coupled with inflation created a sense of malaise', in 1975 New York City was on the verge of bankruptcy, then AIDS devastated the gay and artistic community (see Larry Kramer's Reports from the Holocaust.)

Garson was a Scientologist in the 1970s but Slapper does not elaborate on Bowie's 1997 Q magazine interview where he says Scientology had caused 'one or two problems', although Garson does say he 'went through a period of being overbearing in his attempts to persuade others to take an interest in his spiritual beliefs.' David Buckley wrote that Garson's ' proselytising efforts had converted both Trevor Bolder and Woody Woodmansey', and D'Agostino in Glam Musik quotes Bowie: 'He tried it on with me a bit until we had a fight about it. He was so po-faced. Very serious guy. We used to call him Garson the Parson.' William S Burroughs believed that Scientology might help where psychoanalysis had failed, and that auditing techniques could do more in ten hours than psychoanalysis could do in ten years but he was 'disgusted by the authoritarian organisation and the stupidly fascistic utterances of L Ron Hubbard. The aim of Scientology, complete freedom from past conditioning, was perverted to become a new form of conditioning. He had hoped to find a method of personal emancipation and had found another Control System. It was like a State, with its own courts and own police' (Literary Outlaw, Ted Morgan)

Garson 'has a lot of faith in humanity and the goodness of human nature', and the need to spread the idea of connecting to something bigger and deeper through an exploration of artistic creation. Garson says 'everybody is innately connected to God, and is God', and 'We are indeed all deeply interconnected' which evokes Jung's 'collective unconscious.' Garson, and Slapper to some extent, appear to have sympathy for the Jungian concept of 'synchronicity.'

Garson's spirituality can find echoes in Erich Fromm's Marx's Concept of Man: 'For Spinoza, Goethe, Hegel, as well as for Marx, man is alive only inasmuch as he is productive, inasmuch as he grasps the world outside of himself in the act of expressing his own specific human powers, and of grasping the world with these powers. In this productive process, man realizes his own essence, which in theological language is nothing other than his return to God.'

Garson sees creative artists 'projecting what the future society is supposed to be', and the positive social significance of art and creativity which we see in William Morris's Art, Labour and Socialism.  Slapper writes 'there is plenty of evidence showing how the human brain is capable of great cooperation and collective creativity. Every performance by every orchestra bears testimony to this.'

Bowie's Piano Man is a welcome addition to my bookshelf and sits between the bookends of The Complete David Bowie by Nicholas Pegg, and Strange Fascination – David Bowie: The Definitive Story by David Buckley.

Steve Clayton

Bowie's Piano Man can be ordered at the following link. 

Letters:The Outlook for Socialism (1948)

Letters to the Editors from the May 1948 issue of the Socialist Standard

A reader who was present at an S.P.G.B. meeting and heard members of the audience trying to shout down the speaker writes as follows:

"In view of the fact it was practically impossible to hear the Speaker, the very able Mr. Cash, for the cries from the crowd, "We want Mosley," and "Down with the Communists" (what an insult to hurl at an S.P.G.B.'er!) I should just like to know how you propose to teach the Socialism of Karl Marx to a crowd of this description. Perhaps you could enlighten me in the columns of the Socialist Standard. Perhaps!!!

Yours, etc., R.S.B."

Reply.

It is certainly true that there are some workers who not only do not accept or even know the Socialist case but do not want to listen. They do not want to hear anything that challenges their own opinions and prejudices and they try to prevent their opponents from getting a hearing. They try to shout down Socialists and anyone else who disagrees with them. They are a bye-product of Capitalism. They prefer violence to argument. Some—but by no means all of them—find their way into the ranks of the Fascists. Communists sometimes try the same methods. On the other hand our correspondent should remember that it is an exception for S.P.G.B. meetings to be disorderly and we have had some debates with Communists and some with Fascists that have been conducted without any disturbance. Our meetings compare favourably in that respect with the meetings of all other organisations. There is an important difference between our meetings and those of other parties, it is the fact that audiences know that they will be allowed to ask questions and get on our platform to state their case against the S.P.G.B. This right of opposition may not always impress those other opponents of the S.P.G.B.—and they are the great majority—who are willing to listen and state their case in an orderly fashion. In short we can usually rely on the good sense of the majority of workers to deter a disorderly minority. And this brings us to the very important point that in the last resort it is what the majority want that determines the course of events. When the majority understand and accept Socialism we shall not have to be concerned with the awkward minority. They will fall into line when they find the majority against them.

Ed. Comm.

Lambeth By-Election Report (1978)

From the May 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Readers who watched the ITN News at Ten on Friday 14th April saw a film of Tory leader, Margaret Thatcher, walking the streets of Lambeth Central grovelling for a few by-election votes for her party. Suddenly a black girl rushed up to her and thrust a manifesto into her hands. "What's this?" says the vote-catcher, looking confused. "The Socialist Party of Great Britain?". The film stopped abruptly. The newsreader smiled and continued churning out the propaganda. What had happened to Thatcher had gone on throughout Lambeth Central in the weeks leading up to the April 20th by-election. For the first time in their lives thousands of people have been given the chance to consider our political alternative. Seven thousand manifestoes handed out or put through doors; thousands of election bulletins given away; about a thousand Socialist Standards sold; over a hundred posters plastering the area; three loudspeaker vans blasting the constituency with the case for revolution; six well attended public meetings. The workers of Lambeth Central were unable to ignore the impact of such a campaign.

Urban squalor

There are certainly some good reasons for them to give some thought to Socialism. Lambeth Central is a classical example of the kind of urban squalor which is the lot of the working class under a system which puts profits before need. Unemployment, especially severe amongst blacks, is the highest in London. In Brixton alone there are 7,456 unemployed according to the Department of Employment. There are 18,000 constituents on the housing list, which means they are either living in sub-standard houses or are homeless. As you tour the streets of Lambeth Central  derelict houses which the council haven't the money to renovate are in abundance—inhabited slums are even more frequent. After more than forty years of Labour representation in parliament by Marcus Lipton, the problems facing workers in Lambeth Central haven't gone away. No wonder there was a sense of political cynicism expressed by many people as the loudspeaker cars of the professional reformists once again descended upon them like ice cream vans, each offering a variety of flavours, all tasting the same. Many workers were unwilling to consider any political ideas, rejecting politics as being either too difficult to comprehend or else as an indecent game played at their expense. "Whoever you vote for the government wins" said one man. Because of despair with reformism some workers were attracted to the so-called extreme candidates, by which is meant those parties committed to the vigorous implementation of failed Labour and Tory policies.

Hard though some of the parties tried, racism was not raised as a major issue in the campaign. The openly racist National Front is weak in Lambeth Central, an area in which a quarter of the inhabitants are black and where black and white workers have a long tradition of living and working together. Our bulletin on immigration exposed the red herring that coloured immigration causes social problems, pointing out that racism and nationalism foster division amongst the working class.

With eleven candidates in the election, Socialist propaganda was not only up against the traditional parties of capitalism, but a number of parties claiming to be socialist. Excluding Labour, which by now has lost even the pretence of being anything but a boss's party, there were four parties other than the SPGB claiming to stand for socialism: the Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Unity, and Workers Revolutionary Party and the South London People's Front. Each claimed to be more revolutionary than the rest. What were they standing for? Common ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution? An end to class society? "Yes, well it's a good idea in theory", they all said, but in the "meantime" it was "pragmatic" to offer the workers a list of sterile reforms: the WRP manifesto promised that if Corin Redgrave was elected he'd smash NATO and restore wage differentials; Socialist Unity promised, amongst other "revolutionary" measures that would make your eyes pop out, that they would end spectacle charges. The ruling class must be trembling at the very thought. The WRP manifesto claimed that Corin Redgrave was standing in the election to show it be a "fraud and a sham". Rather like joining the army to strike a blow for pacifism.

Reformist rhetoric

Party members attended opponents meetings which were used to sell and give away literature. Members comprised a third of the audience to hear Tony Benn talk his way round the last six Labour governments; at the Liberal meeting we suffered Cyril Smith addressing an almost hall; we were prevented by the police from entering a so-called public meeting of the National Front; at the SWP meeting we cringed at the reformist rhetoric of Paul Foot. Large crowds attended our own meetings: workers who were treated as political adults instead of voting fodder.

Socialist Standard prize for the most irrelevant election meeting of the campaign has to go to the one held by the Maoist, South London People's Front, the title of which was "Why there is no inflation in Albania". About as useful as a meeting on why there are no Albanians in Brixton, Prize for the most unreasonable person to be canvassed goes to the man who said, "I'm voting National Front. Hitler did a good job in Germany. I should know, I fought against him in the last war". Prize for the silliest reform goes to the laugh-a-minute WRP who promise, if elected, to "put an end to the commodity market".

As in all elections, the workers of Lambeth Central were faced with a choice: more capitalism or social revolution. We call upon the few workers who cast a vote for Socialism to join the party and build the number of workers who will say YES to revolution at the next election.

Steve Coleman

Addendum

From the SPGB discussion forum, dated 03/12/13

1978 Lambeth by-election

This by-election, held on 20 April 1978, has come back into the news as a result of the Maoist cult "slavery" case because they (and us and the IMG, SWP, WRP and 6 other candidates, making 11 in all) contested this by-election. We contacted our candidate, Barry McNeeney (who is no longer a member), to see if he remembered the cult candidate. He didn't but sent us some interesting recollections of the election. Here's an extract (the full version will go into our historical archives at Head Office).

It was a snap election, called, campaigned, polled and the result announced within the university Easter vacation.

I was a second-year philosophy mature student under a professor who specialised in dishonest arguments [...] Richard Swinburne went on to become a professor of religion at Oxford University [...]

On the Friday morning of the Socialist Party of Great Britain conference at Conway Hall it was observed from the floor that the party headquarters were in the constituency. "But we have no candidate", the chairman replied. Harry Young asked me, "Do you want to stand, Barry?" "...Yes", I replied.

Harry then proposed  me as the party candidate, somebody else seconded me and the delegates agreed. I was taken away for the parliamentary candidates test. This was conducted at the head office in Clapham High Street. The examiners were Harry Walters, Harry Young and [Ron Cook]. There were a lot of questions about surplus value and the economics of exploitation, the materialist conception of history, the development of society through time and what the working class had to do to effect a socialist revolution through the ballot box.

I steered round such trick question as:

"Can the workers buy back with their wages all of the commodities they produce in a week?" (Short answer: exploitation takes place at the point of production, not consumption.) [....]

They passed me.

We set up a table on the pavement outside head office with literature and posters advertising our candidacy in the by-election and button-holing passers-by -- by telling them if they had read our literature and developed a socialist consciousness, they could vote for a genuine socialist candidate here and now.

"But who is he?" many asked. It was eerie to answer with my name; "We're not asking you to vote for a character, or celebrity, but for a way of reorganising society by democratic agreement", was frequently said.

Ronnie Weidberg had two public address systems with megaphones that could be attached to the roof of a car. We toured many streets in the constituency while I spoke into the microphone. The socialist case reverberated from the tower blocks, in snatches.

Harry Young and I teamed up from door-to-door canvassing. We encountered no hostility. A seventy-five year old and a thirty-two year old talking about a classless, moneyless world community are idealists, at a glance. We shook the loyalty of many die-hard Labour supporters and got invited in for coffee by a few floating voters.

There were a lot of candidates for the election. We met up with the Liberal and her entourage. I asked her to tell me her case. Then put the SPGB case to her, pointing out that "the science of the possible" can be expanded if the majority of people have knowledge and conviction.

We made enough noise to attract media attention. A BBC television crew turned up at head office while we were outside on the pavement. They filmed the bullet-proof window, then pushed the camera in my face, "Right you've got one minute", the director said.

Desperately, I grabbed the nearest passer-by, who happened to be a beautiful, black twenty year old woman. "You're on television. Do you have a vote in this election?" I whispered to her. "Yes", she said, terrified. I put the most charming and winning argument I could to her in a minute, while she smiled at the camera, nodded and answered in monosyllables. When it was over I pressed a copy of the Socialist Standard into her hand and thanked her.

The one-minute recording was screened on BBC six o'clock news, on the day before the election, I think. Afterwards the announcer smiled and shook his head.

I wrote an article for the local Caribbean newspaper recounting this and other experiences with black people over the years. They liked it but would not publish it until the election was over, lest it be seen as an endorsement. I don't know whether they did.

Barry McNeeney

Those War Films (1960)

From the January 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

War films, like Westerns, are always in fashion. From Hollywood and elsewhere, there flows a constant stream of films about heroism, cowardice, battles, bombings and butchery generally. So, at regular intervals, we sit transfixed in our cinema seats, while jet planes zoom overhead and the U.S. marines go in to finish off yet another bunch of anti-democratic savages. Satisfying? Maybe. Harmless? Improbable. But useful? Very rarely.

War is, after all, a serious subject. Yet, of the enormous number of films that have been made about war, one can count on one's fingers those which say something intelligent, useful or constructive about it.

Generally speaking, war films, like thrillers and westerns, follow well-defined patterns and fall into a few set groups. The commonest kind is the heroic battle-story with a slender plot and perhaps a little love interest. The hero, rugged and clean-living, goes into battle and, after inevitable setbacks, crushes the enemy practically single-handed. Sometimes he dies at the end, murmuring beautiful thoughts and accompanied by a celestial choir.

In these films the sort of thing that one remembers is, perhaps, Robert Taylor defending Bataan single-handed against hordes of Japs; or Veronica Lake gallantly walking into the enemy camp with a bosom loaded down with hand-grenades; and other similar epics of true-to-life bravery. Occasionally the story is more sophisticated and the background a little less false. But, basically, the same pattern is there—heroism, and the defeat of an evil enemy.

Why should one object to this ostensibly harmless kind of fairy tale? What is important is that the audience is expected to participate by identifying itself with the hero and the victorious army. It is objectionable for films to blatantly glorify the sordid business of killing. It is harmful to glamorise the slaughter of one's fellow-men. Above all, it is dangerous to suggest, as these films do, that war is inevitable and necessary and that "fighting for one's country" is a natural and desirable thing.

Another (and much smaller) category of films is the semi-documentary type, usually without love-interest, in which the portrayal of the fighting is much closer to reality. A few of these films have been extremely good, A Walk in the Sun, for instance, telling of one brief sortie by an American patrol in the Italian campaign. The Polish film Kanal is also worthy of mention, with its horrifying account of the crushing of the Warsaw uprising and the miserable and wretched deaths suffered by the survivors, either in the sewers of Warsaw or at the hands of the Germans. It is interesting to see, however, that this otherwise admirable film makes no mention of the Russian army which stood outside Warsaw for weeks, allowing their "allies" to be butchered in the sewers. But, of course, one should not expect too much from film-makers in countries now dominated by their Russian "liberators."

Probably the best of this type of film is the Finnish film The Unknown Soldier, which portrays the tiny, ill-equipped Finnish army in its war against Russia. In this, war is stripped of glamour and adventure and shown for what it is—a brutal and fearful business. This kind of film may, and sometimes does, inspire a genuine horror of war an all that goes with it, which in itself is a good thing. However, as these films never put forward a positive point of view, or any alternative to war, the overall effect is to make people think that war is a terrible and terrifying thing, but also that it is necessary and justifiable in the right circumstances.

During the war, and shortly after, there was a spate of documentary films, most of them made by the Crown Film Unit. The intention was to boost morale and convince the public that our cause was just and that victory would inevitably come. Some of them were well-made (for example, Fires Were Started), and did at least give an unsentimental and fairly accurate picture of what went on in the war. Many documentaries, notably The March of Time series, held out extravagant promises of the wonderful world that was to be ours after the war, a world freed from economic disasters, international tension and all the unpleasant things that occurred before the war. This is one good reason why these films are never shown today.

Since the war, we have had the opportunity of seeing documentaries that put the other side's point of view—Blitzkreig, for instance. Although the uniforms are different, the message is the same—"We are right and the enemy is wrong."

Another fairly common type of war-film is the prison-camp story, with the usual ingredients of escape, brutal punishment, cheerful and heroic prisoners and bullying prison-camp commanders. The pattern of these films is much the same as the heroic battle-epic. The prisoners attempt to escape because it is their duty to get back home to fight again. So insistent is the escape theme in films like The Wooden Horse and The Colditz Story and many others, that one gets the misleading impression that prison-camp life consisted of never-ending escape attempts, and that captured soldiers couldn't get back in the front line quick enough. Some of these films have depicted revolting brutality, not so much from a desire for authenticity, but rather to encourage national hatreds. One of the few prison-camp films to explore the possibilities of genuine human contact between captors and captives was La Grande Illusion, a French film, which itself was made long before the Second World War.

The one comes to the very few films about war which put forward a clear point of view—that war is unjustifiable, perhaps, or that war is harmful to all who take part in it. One or two even suggest that the war leaders and officers are not disinterested saints, but people with a vested interest in warfare. Attack, for example, did this badly, by showing the harm caused by a fanatical officer, but negatived this point by suggesting that "good" officers would have solved the problem. Paths of Glory, on the other hand, presented a picture of army officers scheming and competing like business men, and the disastrous effect this had on the men at the bottom, many of whom died as a result.

The films where a humanist or pacifist view is presented are few and far between. Apart from Paths of Glory, there is the old All Quiet on the Western Front, with its sympathetic portrayal of the German soldiers in the First World War. It had the temerity to suggest that German soldiers were human, too, with the same wants and desires, and cutting the same poor figure in the muddy trenches as their counterparts on the allied side. La Grande Illusion put forward a similar point of view, and exposed "the great illusion" of national enmity.

The result of the tally is not a very encouraging one—a handful of worthwhile films: a negative but accurate ones; and an enormous number of misleading, sentimental and harmful films glorifying war, extolling films, and justifying cruelty and murder. Cynics will say that the public are only getting what they deserve. Maybe, but this is only half of the story. Films themselves are the outcome of social forces, and at the same time help to fashion the climate of opinion in which they appear. So it is that Capitalism, a harmful and irrational system, produces the harmful and irrational by-product—war. This engenders the phony justifications for national enmities, which war films reflect and help to bolster up.

This process is endless—post-war situations produce new justifications and new hatreds, which themselves help to make new wars possible. The only thing that will stem this tide is knowledge and criticism. Working people are gradually coming to realise that wars are not glamorous affairs, that battles are not mere backdrops for heroes, and that national hatreds are not natural and praiseworthy.

One hopes that this trend will be reflected in the cinema, and that if films do deal with war, they will approach it in a critical, constructive and conscious way. Perhaps this is expecting too much of Capitalism, but if the cinema doesn't catch up, one at least knows that the working class eventually will.

Albert Ivimey

Editorial: Labourism: the end of the road (1994)

Editorial from the August 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

So Tony Blair is the new leader of the Labour Party. A man whose insincerity is patent, reflected by his permanent false smile. A barrister, his profession is to sell his advocacy skills to anyone wishing to hire them, equally prepared to argue that white is black as that black is white.

Such flexibility is a useful — indeed essential — ingredient in the make-up of capitalist politicians who want to succeed. Because, when in office, they are called on to find plausible explanations for all the unpopular measures which the workings of capitalism force them to adopt. But for a Leader of the Labour Party?

Why not? Since when has the Labour Party not been a haunt of capitalist politicians? In recent years unsuccessful rather than successful ones, it is true. But that's the point. The professional politicians who lead the Labour Party have the same ambitions as their counterparts in the Tory Party: to enter the corridors of power and taste the fruits of office. Membership of a mere shadow cabinet is not the goal.

It is because they believe that Blair can bring them these fruits — by dishing the Liberals in the South of England — that the majority of Labour MPs backed him. But what about the rank-and-file Labour and trade union members who, for the first time, had a direct vote in the election of a Labour leader? What made them vote for a man like Blair who so obviously has nothing whatever in common with them? A man who could just as easily have been a Tory politician as a Labour one - in fact who nearly was.

During the campaign the candidates all felt compelled to pronounce a word that has not been heard in polite Labour circles for a long time: "socialism". Not that this was something to be welcomed. The less the Labour Party is associated with the word "socialism" the better, as far as we are concerned.

We would be only too happy if Labour politicians were never to use the word again. In view of their record over the years in administering capitalism in the only way possible — in the interest of those who live off profits and against the interest of the rest of us — they have no right to use it. They have brought on it nothing but shame.

But cynical politicians that they are, the three candidates calculated that, faced with an electorate of Labour and trade union activists rather than the voters generally, this might pick up a few votes for them. Even Blair let is be known that he was a bit of a "Christian Socialist" (whatever that might be).

Christian maybe, but Socialist never. He openly supports the market economy and all that goes with it: profit-making, keeping wages down to be competitive, means-testing state benefits, maintaining weapons of mass destruction, export or die, etc, etc, etc. So, of course, do Prescott and Beckett, not that that prevented the SWP from arguing in its own tortuous way for a vote for Beckett "without enthusiasm" but only as Deputy Leader not Leader (work that one out if you can).

As Blair re-assured capitalist investors via the Financial Times (11 June): "We want a dynamic market economy. It is not merely that I, as it were, with hesitation acknowledge that this is the way we have to go. I say that it is positively in the public interest to have a dynamic market economy."

Nobody who can praise the capitalist economy in this way can be a Socialist, even if his conscience might lead him to toss beggars a few coppers rather than kick them.

But the candidates needn't have bothered to pretend to be socialists. It wasn't "socialism" that swayed the Labour rank-and-file but the same consideration that swayed the MPs: who was the person most likely to get disillusioned Tory voters to vote Labour rather than for Paddy Ashdown and his Literal Demagogues? Who, in other words, was the best Liberal look-alike?

Blair's election means that the Labour Party will now complete even more rapidly its transformation into a Liberal party. Labourism, as the doctrine that the working class can improve its position by sending trade unionists into Parliament to enact pro-worker reforms within capitalism, is dead.

We are back in the situation that existed a hundred years ago, before the Labour Party was formed, when both the major parties were united in their commitment to uphold and promote the profit-driven market economy that is capitalism. In those days the choice at election times was between Sir Graball d'Encloseland and Mr Samuel Sweater. Today it is between Alan B'Stard and T D'Stard. It's back to square one, a measure of the complete failure of Labourism to do anything about getting rid of capitalism.

Instead of Labour gradually changing capitalism into something better, capitalism changed Labour into another openly pro-capitalist party as committed to the profit system and the market economy as the Tories and Liberals.

Labour never was a socialist party, so socialists never had any place in it. This is now even more true than ever. The place of socialists is in a separate Socialist party, committed to democratic action to bring about a society of common ownership, democratic control and production directly for use not profit, and with it an end both to class privilege and the market economy.

Marx and the workers' movement (1982)

From the August 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx was not just a passive commentator on the British political scene in the 1850s. He was also a participant in the Chartist movement, at least until 1856, and in the campaign waged by David Urquhart (1805-1877) against what the latter saw as "the Russian menace".

After its failure in February 1848 and the repression which followed, Chartism was never again a mass movement. The National Charter Association, and its Executive, did however survive as an organisation, though many former Chartist leaders got involved in other movements. Fergus O'Connor, who had been elected MP for Nottingham in 1847 (the only Chartist ever to be elected as such) lost his seat in the 1852 election. He was later declared insane and died in a mental asylum in 1855 (Marx's generous obituary of him appeared in the Neue Oder Zeitung (NOZ) on 15 September).

Bronterre O'Brien formed a separate organisation in which emphasis was put on the social changes to be made once the Charter had given the working class political power, such as the nationalisation of land and the railways and the establishment of a single State bank. The O'Brienites became in fact a distinct sect within the British working class movement which survived into the 1880s, whose members Marx was to meet later during his second period of participation in the working class movement in Britain between 1864 and 1872.

Others campaigned to repeal the so-called "taxes on knowledge" — the stamp duty and taxes on paper and advertisements which artificially raised the price of newspapers to a level beyond which many workers could afford. Others, such as Harney, supported Urquhart's anti-Russia campaign. The Chartist Executive split in 1852 on the question of whether or not to co-operate with the middle class Radicals to achieve the aims of the Charter. Those who, grouped around Ernest Jones, wanted Chartism to continue to be a working class movement hostile to the capitalist middle class set up their own organisation.

Of the Chartist leaders in 1848 it was thus Jones who emerged as the champion of militant Chartism in the 1850s. He had been released from his two-year prison term for sedition at the end of 1850 and in 1851 started his own paper, Notes to the People, which the following year became a weekly called The People's Paper. Marx, who was in close touch with Jones, contributed articles to this paper from 1852 to 1856.

In the 1852 General Election, as Marx reported in the New York Daily Tribune (NYDT), Chartists put up a number of candidates, including Jones at Halifax. He polled — and this was not reported by Marx — a mere 37 votes, a confirmation that the vast majority of workers were excluded from the vote, but also of the decline of Chartism since 1847, in the same constituency, Jones had polled 280 votes. But the Chartist movement had always had its ups and downs, corresponding with periods of depression and prosperity.

The early 1850s were a period of prosperity, though not of working class inactivity. The widescale emigration of the period temporarily put the working class in a stronger bargaining position. Successful strikes for higher wages became more and more frequent. The culminating point of this strike movement was the year 1853. Jones decided that the time was ripe for a Chartist campaign in the industrial districts of England and in June left London for the North to address a number of mass meetings, a speaking tour given good coverage by Marx in the NYDT.

While Jones was in the North one of the biggest industrial disputes of the 1850s was brewing: the lock-out of the Preston cotton workers. Preston was one of the three main centres of the Lancashire cotton-spinning industry, the other two being Ashton and Stockport. In the summer of 1853 the cotton spinners of Stockport went on strike for a 10 per cent wage increase — which they won, thanks to financial aid from other groups of workers. In the autumn the cotton spinners of Preston, joined by the weavers, made a similar demand on their employers.The employers' answer was a general lock-out and by October 18,000 workers in Preston were without work or wages.

Once again a solidarity campaign was launched by the trade unions to raise money from other sections of the working class. Ernest Jones joined and played a prominent part in this campaign. he suggested the calling of a "Labour Parliament", to be composed of delegates from workers and trade unions in the Lancashire area. In November a Chartist meeting in Manchester voted for the calling of such a congress, referring to the need for "a united and mass movement of the working classes, based on a national organisation, and guided by one directing body" (quoted by Marx in NYDT, 12 December 1853). The Labour Parliament did not in fact meet until March 1854, by which time the Preston workers were well on the way to defeat. Marx was elected an honorary delegate and, unable to attend, sent a fine statement of his faith in the capacity of the working class to emancipate itself, which was published in the People's Paper.

Marx covered extensively the 1853 strike wave for the NYDT, describing his series of articles on the subject as his "history of strikes" (letter to Engels, 30 September 1853). Basing himself on an analysis of economic trends, he had said right from the start that the Preston workers were likely to fail as they had left their demand for a wage increase too late. They should have demanded it earlier in 1853 or in 1852 as there were signs, even in September and October 1853, of a downturn in activity. Under these circumstances, Marx argued, the employers were likely to welcome a stoppage of work while they cleared the surplus stocks that were building up.

This may well have been one of the employers' considerations, but they probably did not expect that the workers would put up such a fight before being finally defeated. The lock-out had begun in October 1853. By March 1854, when the Labour Parliament met, the Preston workers had still refused to give in. The employers then resorted to employing blacklegs, both men and women, from the agricultural districts of Ireland. The workers naturally opposed this and the employers had a number of their leaders arrested for "molesting and obstructing" the blacklegs. The workers held out for another month or so before going back in May without the wage increase they had originally demanded, though the charges against their arrested leaders were not proceeded with. This was a defeat for the working class, but the Preston workers' determination and the support they had from other workers, which had allowed them to hold out for seven months, must have had some effect on the employers, making them think twice before again taking on the cotton workers in this way.

Marx, as we have noted, did not really expect this and other strikes to succeed in view of the changed economic situation. This is not to say that he was not in favour of the strikes taking place. Far from it. The workers had to test the situation. As Marx said, in a comment which shows the extent to which he had grasped trade union tactics:

Under certain circumstances, there is for the workingman no other means of ascertaining whether he is or not paid to the actual value of his labour, but to strike or to threaten to do so" (NYDT, 17 October 1853).

Further, if workers did not fight to maintain their living standards they would be reduced to the level of slaves, incapable of emancipating themselves. Criticising those socialists and others who opposed strikes Marx wrote:

I am, on the very contrary, convinced that the alternative rise and fall of wages, and the continual conflicts between masters and men resulting therefrom, are, in the present organisation of industry, the indispensable means of holding up the spirit of the labouring classes, of combining them into one great association against the encroachments of the ruling class, and of preventing them from becoming apathetic, thoughtless, more or less well-fed instruments of production. In a state of society founded upon the antagonism of classes, if we want to prevent slavery in fact as well as in name, we must accept war. In order to rightly appreciate the value of strikes and combinations, we must not allow ourselves to be blinded by the apparent insignificance of their economical results, but hold, above all things, in view their political consequences. Without the great alternative phases of dullness, prosperity, over-excitement, crisis and distress, which modern industry traverses in periodically recurring cycles, with the ups and downs of wages resulting from them, as with the constant warfare between masters and men closely corresponding with those variations in wages and profits, the working classes of Great Britain would be a heartbroken, a weak-minded, a worn-out, unresisting mass, whose self-emancipation would prove as impossible as that of the slaves of Ancient Greece and Rome. We must not forget that strikes and combinations among the serfs were the hot-beds of the mediaeval communes, and that those communes have been in their turn, the source of life of the now ruling bourgeoisie (NYDT, 14 July 1853).

This, of course, is the same perspective of a political movement — here described as "one great association" — of the working class developing out of trade union struggles that Marx had learnt from the experience of the pre-1848 Chartist movement and had expressed both in the Poverty of Philosophy and in the Communist Manifesto. For Marx, it was this that was the importance of the 1853 strike wave. Even if the strikes failed economically, they would have helped raise the political consciousness of the workers:

. . .  should, as I suppose, the depression prove lasting, the work people will soon get the worst of it, and have to struggle — very unsuccessfully — against reduction. But then their activity will soon be carried over to the political field, and the new organisation of trades, gained in strikes, will be of immense value to them (NYDT, 17 October 1853).

and,

I have repeatedly stated that the turn-outs of the men, by beginning at too late an epoch, when the opportunities afforded by the unprecedented prosperity were already vanishing away, could not prove successful in an economical point of view, or as far as their immediate end was concerned. But they have done their work. They have revolutionized the industrial proletariat, and, stirred up by dear food and cheap labour, the political consequences will show themselves in due time (NYDT, 16 December 1853).

Marx was a little over-optimistic here. There was to be no Chartist revival. After the defeat of the Preston workers, the Labour Parliament quietly disappeared. Jones returned to London. An important factor in this ebbing of working class activity was the fact that since March 1854 Britain had been at war with Russia in the Crimea (a war which, incidentally, both Jones and Marx urged the workers to support). The war dragged on for two years and it was only in 1855 that Jones relaunched agitation for the traditional Chartist demand for the reform of Parliament to achieve an effective universal male suffrage. Marx once again let his enthusiasm carry him away, declaring in the NOZ of 6 March 1855:

A few months more, and the crisis in the manufacturing districts will reach the 1842 level, if not surpass it. But as soon as its effect is generally felt by the working classes, the political movement, which among these classes has been more or less drowsing for the past six years and has retained only the cadres for new agitation, will begin again.

In June Marx attended a mass meeting in Hyde Park to protest against proposals before Parliament to tighten up the law on Sunday opening and drinking. It was obviously the first time that he had ever seen a meeting of this size and he was so carried away that he reported for the NOZ (28 June) that "the English Revolution began yesterday in Hyde Park". In fact of course it was nothing of the sort and over the next few years even the Chartist "cadres", faced with the passivity of the working class, began to to become disillusioned and demoralised.

Marx continued his collaboration with Jones and the People's Paper during 1856. In April he made one of the speeches at a dinner held to mark the fifth anniversary of the paper's first issue, his first public speech in English. Once again he expressed his confidence in the ability of the working class to take humanity on to the next stage in social evolution.

1857 was an election year and Jones was, as on previous occasions, a candidate, this time in Nottingham, O'Connor's old constituency. This was the election Palmerston had called to get a vote of confidence for his administration and in which the Radicals suffered a serious reverse.

Jones' paper was now in financial difficulties and the working class appeared to be completely apathetic; there were no strike waves, nor political discontent. This led Jones to reconsider his whole strategy and to drop his opposition to collaboration with the middle class Radicals to achieve democratic reforms. In fact he went so far as to be prepared to give up all the demands of the Charter except universal suffrage, thus ceasing in effect to be a Chartist. The deal he hoped to make with the middle class radicals was their accepting universal suffrage in return for the Chartists (whom Jones presumed to speak for) giving up the demand for secret ballots. This deal was to be made at a Chartist-Radical conference which Jones was planning to call. When Jones made this proposal in November 1857 Marx broke with him; thus the article on the "Divine Right of the Hohenzollern" which had appeared on 13 December1856 turned out to be the last article marx wrote for the People's Paper.

Jones' Conference took part in London in February 1858, but did not result in much. Jones was disowned by other Chartists, including Bronterre O'Brien, who proclaimed their loyalty to all six points of the original Charter. Financial difficulties forced Jones to sell the People's Paper to a Radical newspaper group later that year and it thus appeared as a separate publication. Jones resumed his profession as a barrister, though he was again a candidate in Nottingham in the 1859 election.

The question of co-operation with the Radicals had been a controversial issue within the Radical movement right from the start, from the time of the first Chartist Convention in 1839. This was because the working class and the capitalist class did in fact have an interest in the extension of the franchise, the former to gain a weapon they could use later to achieve their own emancipation, the latter to weaken the political power and privileges of the landlord class. Not even Marx was opposed on principle to a co-operation between the working class and the capitalist middle class to achieve the democratisation of the British political system. What Marx was opposed to was the working class giving up its political autonomy and becoming just the tail-end of the middle class Radicals.

Marx always accepted that the Radicals had a role to play in the fight for political democracy in Britain. Indeed he was very interested in the conditions which might lead them to fight for this in a determined way. He described the Radicals as "the party of the self-conscious bourgeoisie: (NYDT, 25 August 1852), by which he meant the class-conscious section of the bourgeoisie, the section which realised that there was a conflict of interest between their class and the landlord class which could only be settled when the latter had been deprived of its power and privileges. Thus John Bright stated in a speech quoted by Marx in another NYDT article that "everything the country has gained since the revolution of 1688 . . . has been gained in a manly contest of the industrial and commercial classes against the aristocratic and and privileged classes of the country" (NYDT, 23 February 1853). This was the sort of talk from the capitalist middle class that Marx liked to hear. He wanted their "manly contest" against the landlord class to be successful, so as to create the conditions for a straight fight between the capitalist class and the working class, in which the newly-won vote would be a weapon in the hands of the workers.

So the question at issue between him and Jones was not over whether or not there should be an alliance between the working class and the capitalist class to achieve the Charter (effective universal suffrage) but over how this alliance should arise. Marx wanted, if you like, the middle class to ally itself to the working class rather than the working class to ally itself to the middle class.

In 1850 Marx and Engels had written:

Despite this split and the emergence of more extreme demands, the Chartists, remembering the circumstances under which the Corn Laws were repealed, still suspect that in the next crisis they will once again have to form an alliance with the industrial bourgeoisie, the Financial Reformers, and that they will have to help them defeat their enemies, forcing concessions from them in their turn. This will certainly be the position of the Chartists in the next crisis (Neue Rheinische Zeitung Revue, May-October 1850).

This conclusion was based at that time on their experience of the abortive German bourgeois revolution and the roles the middle class and the working class had played in it. But greater familiarity with the English political scene did not lead Marx to alter this view. In one of a series of articles he wrote for the People's Paper analysing Gladstone's 1853 budget, he discussed what might happen if Gladstone's proposal to bring taxes on income from landed property into line with those on other incomes was rejected by the landed interest in Parliament:

If, however, the country party once more obtain the upper hand, the middle class cannot get rid of them without remodelling the rotten oligarchic parliament and then it is no longer in their power to agitate for a limited reform, but they must go the whole length of the people's demands. The people, of course, can never without abandoning their principles and their interests, join and appeal to the middle class but for the bourgeoisie, it would not be the first time that they are forced to throw themselves on the shoulders of the people (PP, 30 April 1853).

Marx felt, in other words, that the working class should concentrate on building up its own strong, independent political movement, which the capitalist middle class would then be obliged to offer concessions to, in order to win its support for the struggle against the landlord class. Jones had once favoured this policy too, and Marx had supported him for doing so, but Jones was now proposing to go to the middle class party — the Radicals — offering them concessions in return for working class support. For Marx, such a policy meant the working class "abandoning both their principles and their interests" and he severely criticised it.

Marx, it should be added, was equally critical of the capitalist middle class for not waging thoroughly enough the "manly contest . . . against the aristocratic and privileged classes of the country" of which Bright had spoken. He noted how they accepted aristocratic government as long as it pursued policies in their own economic interest and were only prepared to struggle against it when it departed from this tacit understanding by bringing in some measure to benefit the landlords at the expense of the capitalists. This led Marx to favour what the French call la politique du pire, to support the worst alternative, in this case to prefer a reactionary aristocratic government defending the privileges of the landlord class to an aristocratic government which pursued capitalist class policies. Only in this way, Marx suggested, could the middle class be goaded into taking action to end the political privileges of the landlord class, so clearing the way for the working class to use the resulting political democracy in its own interest, against the capitalist class.

Thus, in the same article on Gladstone's budget in the People's Paper, immediately preceding the passage we have already quoted, Marx wrote that the defeat of Gladstone's proposal to equalise taxes on landed and other incomes

would certainly promote the interests of the people. One thing is clear: as long as an aristocratic coalition does the work required from them by the manufacturing and trading class, the latter will neither make any political effort themselves, nor allow the working class to carry their own political movement (PP, 30 April 1853)

Marx was deluding himself if he really thought that a reactionary government, whether under Palmerston or the Tories, would lead to a "revolutionary" situation. Certainly Palmerston's victory in 1857 did goad the radicals into insisting more forcefully on the need for an extension of the franchise; but how wrong Marx's assessment was can be seen from the fact that Lord Palmerston's personal opposition to reform delayed, without inciting any serious popular discontent, any move in this direction till after his death in 1865 and that the Second Reform Act, when it came in 1867, was passed under a Tory government.

The 1850s ended with another lock-out that assumed national importance. For some years trade unions in the building industry had been agitating for a reduction in their working day from 10 to 9 hours. In the summer of 1859 one employer dismissed a trade unionist for having taken part in a delegation to him to put forward this demand. His fellow workers naturally responded by going on strike. The London building employers decided to use the occasion to try to break the power of the building trades' unions. They locked out their workers, saying that they would only re-employ those who agreed to sign a "document" repudiating trade unionism. Other trade unions throughout the country rallied round the building workers and the dispute continued for six months. It was finally settled in February 1860 in a draw: the workers dropped their demand for a 9-hour day and the employers withdrew "the document".

A direct result of the builder's lock-out and the solidarity movement around it was the creation of the London Trades Council in May 1860, at a meeting called by the builders' strike committee. Trades Councils, which already existed in some other towns and cities, were committees formed by delegates from the various trade unions in a particular area. They were mainly concerned with trade union matters, but also provided an opportunity for trade unionists to discuss broader political questions. Some of those who were prominent in the London Trades Council were very much interested in politics, not just matters of immediate concern to workers such as the law on trade unions or the extension of the franchise, but also in foreign questions like the American Civil War and the campaign for Italian unity. It was this new generation of working-class militants who were to replace Jones as Marx's contacts when he resumed participation in the working-class movement in Britain in 1864.

Adam Buick

Nottingham Branch Report. (1911)

From the June 1911 issue of the Socialist Standard

DIRTY ANTI-SOCIALIST UNION TRICK AT THE LACE TOWN.

Since the formation of the Nottingham Branch last July we have been spreading that working-class enlightenment which must precede the workers' emancipation. We soon got to grips with the enemy, and a debate was fixed up with a follower of the "meek and lowly one." Comrade Anderson did the needful, and we disposed of a good deal of literature and increased our membership, besides showing the antagonism between Socialism and religion—a gratifying result.

Next the Anti-Socialist Union made an appearance and held at meeting on the Market Square. We promptly challenged the speaker. a Mr. Glover, to debate, and to our surprise and delight, he accepted the challenge, and said he would be prepared to meet our representative on the following Sunday. Evidently he was unaware that a branch of the S.P.G.B. existed in Nottingham, as I will shortly show.

We made the necessary arrangements for the debate, and them on the Saturday our opponent informed the branch that owing to the religious objections of his Conservative friends, he could not debate on the Sabbath. Yet on the same day he advertised the debate in the local Press, and was in the Market Place with his carriage on the Sunday night.

Mr. Glover's object was obvious. He asked from the carriage if there was an I.L.P. man who would take the platform. A member of the S.D.P. got up, and, as might be expected, Mr. Glover dealt with the reform position, the refusal of the Labour Party to support the Woolwich amendment, Right to Work Bill, etc.

The brave defender of capitalism, after this honest and clean and typical Anti-Socialist manoeuvre, wrote to the head office of his Union saying that the "Socialist Party" had funked the debate.

This proves our contention that the A.S.U. have nothing to fear from such conglomerations of freaks as the S.D.P. and the I.L.P.

Several lectures have been given at the Notts Cosmopolitan Debating Society by our comrades Anderson, Fitzgerald, Neumann, Kent and Watts, on subjects appertaining to that working class education which it is our mission to extend. Space will not permit me to give an account of all the good work done by these lectures. The last of them was on "Socialism and Religion" and our comrade the lecturer gave the "rainbow-chasers" something to chase.

One apathetic reformer wanted to know when we are going to stop pulling to pieces and begin to construct. The answer was when we have cleared the rubbish out of the way.

S. 

The Edwardians (1954)

From the June 1954 issue of the Socialist Standard

We all sniggered, not long ago, over Uncle Fred's best suit in the family album; whatever could Aunt Alice have seen in him? Now, perhaps, we know, because what they wore before 1914 is a cult in 1954. Spiv clothes are out and Edwardians are in at the dance halls and on the monkey-parades—dull colours, baggy velvet-collared jackets, drainpipe trousers, straggly ties. Not quite the same as Uncle Fred, though: to-day's model stands in a crepe-soled plinth and is crowned with an elegant perm.

Something new in the world of fashion is often something old. In the last four or five years, reminiscent styles of one sort and another have recurred persistently, from spectacular waistcoats to the flat caps that were introduced to southern England by north-country football fans in the late nineteenth century. The full Edwardian rig first became news for the picture papers when popular dandies adopted it—a comedian, a politician and a film actor.

Then, in 1953, it jumped to the headlines: a fight among Edwardian-dressed adolescents on Clapham Common. One died of stab wounds and another was hanged for it. People became aware that the costume was no longer merely a sartorial idiosyncrasy. More drab and uneasy-looking as it passed into the too-cheap, too-smart gents' outfitters, it was multiplying as the dress of truculent youthful gangs. With increasing frequency it was mentioned in court cases of offensive rowdyism. In a few months its wearers were christened "Teddy Boys"; it has become, in fact, the hoodlums' uniform.

The same ideals and circumstances lead to the same attire often enough. You can usually tell the artists from the visitors at an exhibition; a shorthand-typist is not likely to be taken for a factory girl, nor a Conservative for an anarchist. The most famous example from recent years is the spiv, who established a cartoonists' golden age with his drape and his shoulder-padding and his fist-sized tie-knot. There is nothing unconventional or new in the assumption of a common, near-uniform dress by suburban larrikins. In the past, when an adolescent's income was shillings instead of pounds, the same tendency was exhibited from time to time but on a lesser scale; before 1939 there were "trilby-hat gangs" on the corners and round the coffee-stalls.

The public concern about the "Teddy Boys" is concern over the behaviour-patterns that are the grounds for their association. Ideals in uniforms have a more organised, impressive look about them; and by and large it is delinquency that wears the Edwardian uniform. Delinquency, not crime—and there is a considerable difference. A black marketeer or a street bookmaker is not a delinquent; on the other hand, a bunch of young men who make a street intolerable to passer-by may not be criminals but are obviously delinquents—that is, they have a consciously anti-social pattern of behaviour.

What causes delinquency? Everybody knows: the bishops, the leader-writers, the psychologists, the headmasters—they all know. Unhappy homes, insufficient religious teaching, low moral standards, American comics, amusement arcades — the whole modern "anatomie of abuses." And, as is often the case, the more remedies are proposed the worse the thing becomes. While the Edwardians flourish, the serious, train-their-character youth movements wane; the Boy Scouts, which in the 'twenties and 'thirties sent thousands of hairy-kneed sixteen years-olds hiking through the countryside at summer week-ends, now is a little-boys' affair. The "Teddy Boys" have their own character and their own culture.

Mostly, they are youths between leaving school and being conscripted. That in itself is an obvious important factor: the sense of aimlessness, of having time to kill, must be tremendous. Here are you: kept at school up to fifteen, and at eighteen they want you again. In the meantime, for three years only is your life your own—except that whatever you propose, the State inexorably disposes at the end of the three years. And when you are in "the bleedin' Kate," there sis generally one of two things: either fighting or twenty months of organised time-killing. The Edwardians lack purpose in life—and it isn't surprising.

There is, too, the desire for manliness, which is seen largely in terms of loudness, roughness and "seeking the bubble reputation." The desire is probably more potent to-day than at any previous time. One reason is that a soldier, even an eighteen-year old one, must be a man, and perhaps a stronger reason is that there is no longer any segregation or much reticence between the sexes. A girl of seventeen has achieved womanhood in appearance and, as often as not, in experience, too; her male counterpart, lacking her natural and circumstantial aids, can only make valiant efforts towards corresponding ends.

Several supposed causes of delinquency have already been mentioned. The most commonly cited—probably because it is the favourite with the clergy and at school prizegivings—is lack of religious teaching. Strangely enough, the Edwardians have had more of that than most people. The 1944 Education Act gave religion a stronger footing in the schools than at any time since compulsory education began—and not every generation is subjected within a decade to pietistic profusions for a victory, a monarch's death and a coronation. It may be argued that religion teaching is only effective in the home; but no religion is more family-based, and more exacting, than Catholicism, and no cities have more crime and delinquency that those with large Catholic populations, like Liverpool and Glasgow.

Certainly no-one would deny that broken or unhappy homes contribute to delinquency; overcrowded homes, too. The absence of stability and affection can and does give rise to emotional conflicts, frustrations and resentments against society. Plenty of delinquents come from apparently good homes, however. There is a good deal of glib talk about adjustment and maladjustment, psychiatric terms that have passed into popular currency. Adjustment means a condition of harmony with the social environment; what of the person, then, who us adjusted to European civilisation in this present age? A. S. Neill, the high priest of "progressive" education, has written much about his achievements in adjusting recalcitrant or delinquent children from well-to-do homes. What is achieved? They are in harmony with predatoriness, violence, suspicion and power; in harmony—with a diseased society.

Delinquency is a way in which people react to personal or group situations. More important still, the reaction is something learned from society. The whole behaviour-pattern of the "Teddy Boys"—the shiftlessness, the truculence, the irresponsibility—is their reaction to what society has given them and their display of what it has taught them. Behind them is the entire structure of western urban civilisation which, Frankenstein-like, creates its monsters and lives in fear of them.

There is no quick, easy answer to the problem. It is not enough to think of this or that, of broken homes or a sense of frustration, as the cause. You must ask why the family is disintegrating; why so many people in our world are frustrated and unhappy. Social misconduct is no more the result of deliberate personal choice that it is the product of heredity or constitution (and that myth, thank goodness, has long been exploded). Society, through the law and the majority of public opinion, assumes that the delinquent is merely malicious, and deals accordingly with him. "You want a damn good thrashing," five East London Edwardians were told last week before the magistrate fined them. And even where there is better understanding, the social circumstances to which delinquency is a reaction remain.

The driving force of our society is profit. All its institutions and ideals are shaped by that motive. So, in consequence, are its problems, and while the basis remains they will remain; or, if one apparent problem disappears it does so only to be replaced by another. A few years ago it was the spivs; now it is the Edwardians. The real answer to delinquency can only be found by establishing a social situation which will not set some in conflict and teach them lessons of power and fear. And that means not punitive legislation, not religious teaching, but the abolition of profit-based society.

Robert Barltrop

Complicity (2015)

From the June 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Whilst discussing the Atlantic slave trade of the past and the part played in it by the British a friend said that he felt some guilt about it. This, no doubt, was due to the part that his ‘nationality’ plays in his sense of identity. The ‘sins of the fathers’ were, for him, visited upon all who are ‘British’. In contrast to this I felt that the guilt was to be focused on the ruling class of the time and that he was blameless for their crimes.

However a case could be made that if we do not oppose the criminal actions of the ruling class of our own time then we are, indeed, complicit. This is compounded by the fact that much of the wealth that gives the capitalist elite their power in this country was derived originally from the slave trade. While underlining the continuity and importance of history this fact also illustrates the difficulty in allocating collective responsibility for the actions of some members of a community. That there must be some level of collective culpability is surely indisputable since we would all take some moral responsibility for our actions (or inactions) and this must include our political activities.

This year sees the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration/death camps and the complicity of the German population in their existence is still hotly debated by historians. Nobody would dispute that the members of the Nazi Party were complicit in these terrible crimes but what of those who voted for them originally and can those who did nothing to oppose the Nazis gaining power be exonerated from some culpability? Merely pointing at Hitler and Himmler and claiming to be ‘just obeying their orders’ provides no moral or political justification for committing inhuman acts. After they came to power there’s no doubting the level of fear that forced many into actions they would never otherwise countenance but there were many who were, to some degree, ideologically sympathetic -- and not just in Germany. Some would shrug or throw their arms in the air saying something like: ‘That’s an extreme example which could never happen again’ or ‘Any attempt to explain the Holocaust would be merely a rationalisation since the magnitude of the crime is incomprehensible’.

In contrast to merely despairing about ’the human condition’ socialists seek to explain Nazi rule in its historical and political context because of its importance in warning us of what can happen during one of capitalism’s inevitable episodes of extreme economic and political instability. This period also has important lessons for us in respect of keeping a close eye on the actions of those who would take advantage of such instability, both of the left and right wing. Above all it teaches us that any level of moral and political complacency towards the activities of our ‘leaders’ can and does lead to disaster - we must accept responsibility for the actions of those who do so in our name unless we oppose them politically.

It has long been recognised that people acting in a group can behave differently than they would as individuals. Lynch mobs and football hooligans are classic examples of this type of tribal behaviour. Nation states rely on this psychology in times of war as the individuals who compose their armies would never ‘cold-bloodedly’ murder another human being in their everyday lives. Of course all kinds of political conditioning are needed for this to happen but perhaps we can pick out one that might help explain the seemingly complacent attitude that many exhibit when nations murder in their name. Because of the numbers involved - sometimes millions when nations are at war – there is a kind of dilution of moral responsibility. Someone who would suffer great guilt if their actions or inactions were to cause a family member, friend or neighbour an injury (let alone their death) does not feel the same level of responsibility for the deaths and injuries that occur in a war that they supported (or did not oppose).

After the conflict dies down (wars rarely end neatly) the subsequent analysis might reveal that the causes were not quite what was claimed (as with the recent Iraq war) and so a debate ensues where blame is apportioned. The leaders and their advisers are questioned but rarely condemned or punished for their mistakes or crimes. But what of the people who let it all happen in their name? This is when the ‘dilution’ of moral and political responsibility comes into focus. Bush and Blair take the lion’s share of any guilt (which, of course, they strongly refute) then the ’intelligence’ community (for ‘sexing up’ the WMD dossiers), then perhaps the military leaders or even the oil companies etc., so that any culpability that is left is felt to be so negligible that it’s not worthy of consideration. Such a contrast to individual moral responsibility - nobody would defend their immoral activities by claiming that the murder they committed was somehow diminished by the volume of the other murders carried out that year or that the person they beat up suffered less injury than the victim of another thug. We socialists are appalled by the level of complacency shown by the mainstream political parties, voters and the politically cynical in this regard. How and why did we get to such a position where seemingly nobody takes responsibility for their political actions? 

At the heart of this we have the contradiction inherent within capitalist culture where, on the one hand, we are told that everyone is a competitor and there’s ‘no such thing as society’ and on the other hand we are told that we’re part of a ‘nation‘. The latter designation is usually only called upon in times of war or when some group are to be demonised as ‘immigrants’. Liberals tend to think of the world purely in terms of individuals as their ideology forbids any group or class consciousness and this is partly why they find the concept of collective complicity so difficult. Another reason for absence of any feelings of political responsibility for the actions of the state is because of the ‘professionalisation’ of politics. Westminster seems to many to be another world where ex public school boys play some kind of exotic role playing game that somehow decides national policy. The majority are completely alienated by this anachronistic theatrical nonsense and feel no relationship with (or responsibility for) the strange decisions that are made there.

In an integrated global economic and political structure like capitalism nobody can escape the consequences of its existence. We are all responsible for what happens in the world because capitalism has truly made it ‘one world’ –  in this respect, there’s no ‘third world’ or ‘developed world’. As long as we allow the political elite to do the bidding of the parasite class we are all complicit in their crimes. Only working for socialism can provide you with an ‘alibi’ should one ever be needed. When the majority feel morally and politically responsible for the world, as most do about their actions in their ‘private lives’, then we are all finally motivated to change things.

  ‘What did you do during the war daddy?’

  ‘I opposed the war and what caused it before it began, my son’.

Wez.