Democracy, ancient and modern (2013)

Book Review from the May 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

The History of Democracy: A Marxist Interpretation, by Brian S. Roper. Pluto Press, 2013

It is ironic that, just at a time when the undemocratic nature of the SWP’s internal structure is being exposed to the public glare, an SWP sympathiser should bring out a book on democracy.

Roper’s basic thesis is that the Ancient World produced two different models of democracy – Athenian direct democracy and Roman representative democracy – and that bourgeois democracy conforms to the latter. Rome, even in its republican days, was always ruled by an oligarchy of patricians; the plebs only had a say through representatives, magistrates who were either rich plebs or patricians starting their political career.

To make his point, Roper examines the English, American and French revolutions and has no difficulty in demonstrating that their leaders rejected the concept of universal manhood suffrage; where they did accept a fairly wide franchise they imposed property qualifications on those who could be elected. Some of the New England towns practised direct democracy but the US constitution and that of its states practised what Thomas Hamilton called ‘representative democracy’, where the people were represented by those who had more property. The French republic had a similar constitution before it was overthrown by Napoleon.

The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw popular struggles in all capitalist countries to remove property qualifications and extend the franchise. It is a pity that Roper hardly goes into these, but those in Germany, Belgium and Russia gave rise to interesting discussions within the Marxist-oriented Social Democratic movement as to the tactics of the struggle and why it was important. He mentions Rosa Luxemburg’s pamphlet on the Mass Strike but omits to mention that she was advocating this as a tactic in both Russia and Germany to obtain the vote and political democracy.

Marx himself supported the Chartist demand for a parliament elected by universal suffrage and with paid MPs and later campaigns to extend the vote to more workers. Roper does not discuss the extent to which this – where workers could in theory represent themselves – could still be called a ‘representative democracy’ in the sense Hamilton meant it but continues to use the term as if it was.

In the eulogy which Marx drafted for the First International on the Paris Commune of 1871 after its suppression, he offered a different model: a federation of municipalities elected by universal suffrage where these would send mandated delegates to a central assembly; in other words, a parliament which would only be indirectly elected. Whether this would be more democratic than a directly elected one remains a matter for debate.

Roper completely ignores Marx’s view that, under certain circumstances, the workers might be able to win control of political power via the ballot box, so turning universal suffrage from an instrument for duping people into an agent of emancipation.

According to Roper, ‘the experience of the Commune highlighted the need for a centralised revolutionary party to exercise leadership within the working class during the course of the revolution in order to ensure that capitalism and parliamentary democracy are successfully overthrown and replaced by socialist democracy.’

By ‘socialist democracy’ he means the system that was supposedly established in Russia after the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917, based on ‘soviets’ (workers’ councils), in which the direct democracy of a workplace assembly would be the basic unit and which would elect delegates to wider decision-making bodies. Whilst it is true that directly elected parliaments have been hi-jacked by leadership-run parties dominated by MPs who refuse to consider themselves delegates, it is also true that the Russian soviets were taken over and manipulated by the vanguard party that the Bolsheviks were. They never did function as they were supposed to. What happened could even be used to reach the opposite conclusion to Roper’s on the Paris Commune: the dangers of the existence of a centralised party seeking to exercise leadership over the working class.

This is not a work of original research but to a large extent a rehash of the writings of SWP theorists such as Alex Callinicos and the late Chris Harman.

Adam Buick

Jack finds out about capitalism (1973)

From the January 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Labour Party Apologetics (1948)

Book Review from the July 1948 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. John Parker's book, "Labour Marches On" (Penguin, 1s. 6d.) is a haven of peace after the exhausting thunder of its companion volume, Hogg's "Case For Conservatism." Mr. Parker writes quietly and modestly, and makes one think of him as a nice, modest man. After reading his book one realises that, in the matter of political understanding, he has plenty to be modest about.

Mr. Parker's case is that the Labour Party represents "the latest attempt of the forces of the Left to extend the rights of the common people against the forces of privilege which always tend to support the political Right." This, of course, means less than nothing, though it does seem a pity that in such a blaze of jargon the words "progressive" and "reactionary" have been left out. However, Mr. Parker goes on to inform us that two main strains went to the creation of the Labour Party: "the Socialist Idea" and the desire of the Trade Unions to secure representation in Parliament. Had he stuck to the latter in talking about the origins of the Labour Party, Mr. Parker would have been on fairly safe ground; as it is, he insists on the former, and thereby reveals that his "Socialist Idea" is as knock-kneed as most of the other ideas that march through "Labour Marches On."

"Socialism," says Mr. parker, "means the ownership or control of the main resources of the community on behalf of the community," but it turns out that all he means is nationalisation. Fortunately, we know that Socialism is nothing of the sort, and that the Parker definition is only a particularly juicy specimen from the bag of carrots that the Labour Party keeps for dangling before working-class noses. What Mr. Parker needs to be told is that capitalism, the system in which the whole community does not the means of production, does not become any more acceptable when it is dressed up in the terminology of the Left Book Club. The working class is concerned, not with the question of who administers wage-slavery, but with the existence of wage-slavery.

According to Mr. Parker, the whole conception of Socialism owes its existence almost entirely to those clever Fabian Society people. Mr. Parker is himself a Fabian, by the way. He tells us how it was the Fabian's hope to establish Socialism through the Liberal party, and how that hope was raised when many Fabians were adopted as Liberal candidates in the early 1900s. As the Liberal Party was, had always been, and is today an avowedly capitalist party, it would seem that the Fabians' "Socialism" was not altogether what it made itself out to be. Their hopes went awry, alas, because "Lloyd George did not become a Socialist"! There is a cursory mention of "the German refugee, Karl Marx," who merits no more than three lines because his writings "had far more effect upon Socialists outside this country." If Mr. Parker was not, like his fellow-Labourites, bound hand and foot by nationalism, he might not dismiss any Socialist as ineffective on such a ground.

There are the usual excuses for the failure of the two previous Labour Governments to produce the goods. Mr. Parker describes the period after 1918: "Most of the fine talk of 'Homes for Heroes' failed to materialise . . . profiteering was rampant . . . strikes and unemployment were soon the order of the day." Things are scarcely different in 1948. However, the Labour Party took advantage of these conditions and gained sufficient support for the first Labour Government to come to power in 1923. Of their short-lived reign, Mr. Parker says: "Labour was thus called on to take office for the first time without having anything like a majority for carrying out its specifically Socialist programme; in fact it was dependent for day to day support unpin the Liberal Party." This, of course, is the standard Labour excuse for that sorry episode. However, listen to another writer: ". . . this reason for the inability of the 1924 Labour Government to do anything tangible for the benefit of its supporters will not bear examination. The Liberal Party, which formed the necessary support of the Labour Government in the House of Commons, was anxious to press on with the extension of that system of social services which it had initiated." That was Mr. Strachey, that was. ("The Menace of Fascism").

Of the second Labour fiasco, Mr. Parker says the blame must be apportioned in part to the world economic slump and in part to ineffective leadership. Listen again to Mr. Strachey: "To their dismay, the Labour Ministers discovered that the real task of anyone who chose to administer the Government for British Capitalism was to apportion the sacrifices which the crisis was making necessary . . . And somehow or other it seemed inevitable that, under the existing economic system, by far the heaviest penalties should fall on the workers."

The remainder of "Labour Marches On" is the familiar hotch-potch of nationalisation, social security, promises of full employment and the like. We are concerned here principally with the historical case that Mr. Parker puts forward for supporting the Labour Party as a Socialist Party. As Strachey pointed out (in the days before he became a Labour Minister, of course) the previous Labour Governments failed for the precise reason that their object was not Socialism. Like the present Government, they discovered that capitalism can only be run in one way—against the interests of the working class. The Labour Party does not represent the desire of the workers for Socialism but, on the contrary, gains its support from their lack of political consciousness.

It is hardly necessary to say that the present Government will go the way of its predecessors. Socialism is not a promised land to which the working class will be guided by clear-sighted, high-minded leaders. When it comes, it will come through the action of the working class itself, without the need for leaders. Neither is Socialism the pet idea of Fabian intellectuals. There is only one "main strain" that leads to Socialism and that is the ever-worsening conditions of the present system. It might perhaps be said that in one way the Labour Party will contribute to the coming of Socialism, and that is by showing the working class than no amount of "planning" and no number of reforms can alter the basic facts of capitalism, and that the problems and paradoxes of that system will remain until it is abolished.

Robert Barltrop  

What's wrong with prostitution? (1981)

From the August 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Do you consider that prostitution would be a good job for your daughter? The pay can be good but the career prospects are poor. She'd meet lots of people, but the hours would be anti-social. There's a small risk of being murdered—but Popes, Princes and Presidents share the same occupational hazard so she'd be in good company. She would provide a valuable service breaking in the youngsters and catering for some peculiar personal preferences. There's plenty of variety in the job—unlike most of the usual jobs for women, like typing and shop assisting. No—you would not put your daughter on the streets because you see prostitution as sordid and shameful. As St. Paul wrote (Corinthians VII) "It is good for a man not to touch a woman. Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife  . . . for it is better to marry than to burn."

A prostitute is a living denial of the set of values carefully instilled in us from childhood. Sex is for making babies. "Daddy put a seed in mummy's tummy". How about that for a whole set of attitudes and prejudices neatly encapsulated? A caring parent explaining the facts of life often gets the reaction "You and daddy did that three times!" followed by "why don't you do it again and we can have a baby brother?" The caring parent—if she doesn't duck out of the responsibility at this stage—is faced some time later with trying to explain contraception, abortion, extra-marital sex, VD, prostitution, pornography and rape, and has to add a whole new dimension, which is necessarily negative, to the "making babies" bit.

Do you want your daughter to marry? We all want affection, companionship and sex. Our society's approved provision for these needs is marriage—a formal, legal, sacred union of one man with one woman for life. We are taught from childhood to seek happiness in one exclusive relationship, and when we go into this full of expectation and are disappointed, we feel ashamed rather than cheated. For this reason much of the pain, loneliness and frustration which is the reality of marriage to many people is covered up and denied. The prescribed "Happy ever after" package handed out by society is a lucky dip—often dreary but bearable, sometimes full of cruelty and pain, seldom fulfilling, and never completely satisfying.

In real life the handsome princes turn into toads—pathetic frustrated toads—some of them capable of extreme cruelty and violence. There are not, as is popularly imagined, all unemployed drunken labourers or immigrants with different marital practices than ours. A wife who is beaten by her "respectable, educated husband, is no less trapped in her three-bedroom semi than a West Indian wife, supposedly accepting her customary beatings in her one room slum. A battered wife hides her bruises and smothers her screams to avoid the embarrassment of revealing her failure. When, in desperation, she leaves, she can lose everything—even her children. If a wife leaves her husband to escape his cruelty, she discovers the Catch 22 situation of a system geared to protection of men's rights. She may have to put her children into "care" or leave them behind, and then fend for herself. Her husband's assault, if not actually tolerated by the legal system, can result in his being bound over, fined or put on probation, given a endless chances to undertake to reform even after years of perpetual violence. He may even given custody of their children.

Convention allows a man to treat a woman he "owns" as he pleases. This extends to women bought for his temporary use—the prostitute whose function is to provide sexual relief where a wife is unavailable or unwilling. Their very existence is an embarrassment to the system—pointing to its inadequacy, hanging out its dirty washing. They are regarded as less than human and expendable. Peter Sutcliffe butchered eight prostitutes, merely thrilling and titillating the readers of trashy papers. Only when he murdered an "innocent" victim were the news-reading public directed to be outraged.

Socialists are optimists. We insist that the mess that is human society to-day can be changed if we all decide to change it. We made it, no demented divine power ordered it from above, so we can think it out and get it right. We assert that all the problems which need resolving are part of the property society that began in a simple way 10,000 years ago with the agricultural revolution. This is too short a time for evolution by natural selection to have advanced at all. Before then, from the early hominids twelve million years ago to modern people (homo sapiens sapiens) 50,000 years ago, the human race was evolving genetically. The characteristics which made them successful, and which are part of our genetic code to-day, were the ability to organise into co-operating groups, dividing their labour to get sufficient for their groups, and deliberately sharing it out. It is probable that the females, being perpetually sexually receptive, helped to keep the protecting, hunting males in the group, making sex a vital aspect of social relationships them as now.

The human brain developed the capacity to react and respond to the complex demands of social organisation and co-operative hunting. There is no reason to suppose that a hunting animal has a single gene for aggression—implying a natural hostility even towards its own kind. Other co-operating hunters, like man's best friend in its wild state, direct their aggression only at their prey and are gentle towards all the members of their own group. Ten thousand years ago some of our own kind stopped wandering, settled and farmed, grew crops and herded animals. The notion of ownership and property began at this point with the need to build defences and keep out pilferers. The males, being larger and more mobile, did the protecting and the females became part of the property being protected, and thereby were reduced to the level of the ox and ass.

Consideration of our remote past has limited value—Socialists do not advocate a return to the simple life except for those who would like it. Learning from and building on others' experience is vitally necessary to our survival. We depend almost completely on other people's skills and knowledge, each of us contributes our little bit of effort and expertise to the joint endeavor. However, just as we are capable of learning and communicating, so we can analyse and criticise. We can probe to the root of the problems that beset us, below the network of daily irritations and frustrations until pattern of causation is discovered. The cause is ownership and control, property—the fence around the the settlement 10,000 years ago. A simple division between owners and "protected" exists today, but to no useful purpose. The owners have long since delegated even the protecting to workers and sit securely, fattened parasites, while we meekly teach our children that this is how life is and must inevitably be.

The suffering and abuse of women is inseparable the social system in which we live. Prostitution in, for example, Hulme in Manchester, is a product of the system that builds slums in the skies where vandalism and muggings , alcoholism and drug dependence are part of the tawdry and squalid lives of the poor. A girl who kept the favour of a violent father by accepting his advances, leaving home for the big city to find work in hotels drifted naturally into prostitution. Though she is offensive to "respectable" conforming people, she provides a service which is human and valuable to emotional misfits who use her.

The rest of us, pushing pens and pressing buttons in our pointless, meaningless jobs, perpetuate our frustration, which we carry home and take out on our tired, boring, penny-pinching partners. Women, like some other groups in the working class, have a double struggle—to improve their position in relation to men, and with all workers, to hold their position in the quicksand of the wages system. There is a difference of degree only between the housewife and the prostitute. Both are victims of the cockeyed algebra of the market system—the more personal the service, the less pay and status.

There is little value in diagnosis without a cure, but the cure has to come from awareness of the cause of the disease. It has to come through growing dissatisfaction, leading to questioning and consciousness. The worker, the wife, the prostitute, all innocent but jointly responsible for their continuing exploitation, must resist and rebel. The cure is far simpler than the disease. We will dismiss all manifestations of poverty and control—wages, money, law and state—take down all the fences and establish one world where all the human race will share the good things that we have learned to make. Freed from the dictates of the law and the confines of convention, relationships between men and women will find harmony. Marriage and prostitution will have no meaning when people may work together, live together, love together in any way they choose.

Chris Marsh

They called it peace (1985)

From the May 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

VE Day in Britain was a typically bright and sunny late spring day, cloaked in a certain air of unreality. It had been obvious for several weeks that Germany was collapsing and that the war in Europe was drawing to a close. Hitler was dead and it was just a matter of time before the end. Over the radio came a stream of announcements in German, accompanied by martial music, that were later revealed to be false messages put out to spread confusion in a Germany that was sinking into chaos. In fact the choice of day was bungled. It had been intended to announce the final surrender on 9 May—the day the surrender was to be ratified at a stage-managed ceremony in Berlin—but the news was leaked by an American reporter and so the Western powers celebrated a day earlier. 

People went through a repeat performance of 1918. Church bells were rung, floodlights were turned on, there was dancing in the streets and street parties, and the usual crowds outside Buckingham Palace. The mood was more realistic than in 1918. Just as in September 1939 there had been an absence of the hysteria of 1914, so in 1945 there were no wild expectations. People had at least learned enough to realise that this was not going to be a World Fit for Heroes and there was a complete absence of the Hang the Kaiser type of nonsense, the overwhelming feelings were of relief and concern about what lay ahead. After all, the first World War had only ended 27 years before, so people in early middle life could clearly remember what had followed it: a brief period of full employment and a slump that lasted, with fluctuations, until 1939. During all that time there were never less than a million unemployed, which served to keep down workers' wages, and even those who were children in the 1920s had vivid memories of the heroes of yesterday, often minus limbs, singing and playing for money in the streets. In 1945 prophesies were rife that there would be a couple of million unemployed, and war with Japan still had some time to run. 

Wartime censorship was still in operation and decisions which were to shape future events hidden from the public. People who had grown up with the concept of an "Empire on which the sun never sets" had no idea that in not much more than a generation only a few distant outposts would remain. And while Hamburg and Dresden were in the past, the dropping of the atom bomb was still to come: an event that would make total annihilation a possibility. But perhaps the most important unknown fact was the deterioration of the relationship with Russia. 

This latter was to present the authorities with one of their most difficult problems that of convincing people that those gallant, smiling heroic soldiers were in fact a menace to be feared. But they had had practice in such things in 1941, when they had to undo the propaganda efforts of the previous two years. From the signing of the Non-Aggression 'Pact with Germany just before the outbreak of war, through the invasion of eastern Poland and the attack on Finland, the Soviet Union was portrayed as a tyranny. The British Communist Party opposed the war and the Daily Worker was suppressed. When, in June 1941, the Germans invaded Russia, a complete change around took place. The propaganda machine was turned on full blast and for four years everything Russian became not only fashionable, but admirable. Russian faces looked down from hoardings and out from our news papers and magazines, Russian tunes poured from the radio, with dance-band singers trying to sound like Cossacks. while Russian films drew long queues to the box office. Russia was portrayed as a kind of democracy, different from the West but still a democracy. Joseph Stalin was really a kindly old chap who smoked a pipe and had a sense of humour. The purges and show trials were portrayed as being aimed solely at Nazi Fifth Columnists. The Daily Worker was restored and used the same strip cartoons that had opposed the war to support it. 

But on VE Day the public were blissfully unaware of this and Russian flags were carried with the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes. The media—newspapers and magazines, radio and films—consciously sought to create a feeling that the war had blown away much that was stuffy and stale and that we were about to emerge into an exciting new world. This had started quite abruptly at the end of 1940 after the collapse of France and the beginning of the Blitz. With no introduction or build-up, just as if they had turned on a tap, the authorities started to talk about a new world. This was not the crude old stuff of the 1914-18 war, but much more subtle. Committees were set up and reports were issued covering every aspect of the economy. The most famous was the Beveridge Plan which, even from a capitalist point of view, hardly merited the claim to be "the hope of salvation for the future of the people of this country". However the propaganda machine pushed it until it became part of modern folklore. Planning Boards were set up for the development of town and country and to prevent the ugliness of pre-war urban sprawl. The bombing had laid bare large areas of the City of London and grandiose schemes were drawn up to lay these out with wide boulevards and open up a vista of St. Paul's from the Thames, with gardens and walks. But capitalism does not allow some of the most expensive land in the world to become flowerbeds. The result can be seen today in the City's forest of gigantic office blocks. 

Alongside this, throughout the war, every effort was made to encourage discussion and education as a morale booster, and to allay the boredom of the troops who during the build-up to D Day had been kept in comparative inaction. Radio programmes like the Brains Trust and the lunch-time concerts in an empty National Gallery were part of this, as was the effort of the Army Bureau of Current Affairs, who sent out fortnightly pamphlets to Army units for discussion. One result of this was to produce a swing to the Left in political thinking, which helped to produce the Labour victory at the 1945 General Election. 

During the war a political truce had prevailed and government was by coalition, on VE Day the truce was still intact but behind the scenes it was breaking up. Party leaders began to make veiled political speeches and after VE Day a General Election was called. This took place on 5 July but the count was delayed until 25 July to allow time for postal votes from the Armed Forces to come in. It was a quiet affair conducted on an out-of-date register and it resulted in a sweeping Labour victory. This was greeted by exaggerated hopes and fears. The Left saw it as the beginning of socialism which would sweep away the problems of the world, while some of the sillier Tories feared that they would be dispossessed, or at least lose their savings. Neither fears nor hopes were justified as all the Labour government could do was to run the country in the interest of the British capitalist class. Not that they had the slightest intention of doing anything else.

The Conservative Party were badly shaken by their defeat. For twenty years they had had things their own way; they had undoubtedly lost touch with grassroots feelings and their organisation had become obsolete. After a period of sulking because the electorate had had the cheek to throw them out, they began a steady climb back. They did what they would have shunned before the war and went out on to the streets. We were treated to the sight of top Tories slumming and ex-Cabinet Ministers were prepared to debate with anybody. They even found a few Tory working men who could be relied on to drop their aitches at the right place and address Tory women delegates in flowered hats as "mate". They went over big with the well-heeled delegates at the annual conference. Once they began to pick up again, the Tories dropped all this kind of stuff.

The Labour government began with a massive programme of nationalisation, which they called socialism, and found it difficult to get the British economy going again after the war. They gradually became more and more unpopular. Fascism had been discredited during the war but was soon to rear its ugly head again. 

There is no doubt that many men coming back from active service were determined that their children should grow up in a better world and that what they saw as the errors of the past should not be repeated. Unfortunately it was the inevitable workings of capitalism with which they were dealing. Slowly this political interest faded and for some years, once the immediate post war shortages had eased. things on the surface appeared much improved. Mass unemployment did not appear for many years and during the "never had it so good" era many people thought that the world had learned how to deal with such things as slumps. There were other problems of capitalism, principally the chronic housing shortage. People had jobs but nowhere decent to live. Love on the Dole was replaced by Cathy Come Home—and In Which We Serve by The War Game. 

Les Dale

Marie Stopes, Reformer (1973)

From the October 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

There are no good or bad reforms. Some people believe there are bad and good reformers. A prototype of the former might be, say, David Lloyd George. Cynical, ruthless, utterly venal and depraved, be actually told the House of Commons during the first World War that he could have put one million more men in the trenches by 1916 if it bad adopted his Health Insurance Act in its entirety in 1911. 

Another such slick operator was the Labour Party's Herbert Morrison, who knew very well what it was all about, but chose to kid the voters that the London Transport Act was "an installment of Socialism". On the other side of the coin, our admiration is often asked for the genuinely sincere and self-sacrificing idealist who, consumed by the justice or logic (apparent) of some proposal, devotes his or her life to its implementation. Such a one was undoubtedly Marie Carmichael Stopes. 

Holder of practically every scholarship that could be held by a woman in this country, she went to Munich to qualify as a Doctor of Philosophy. This last was used to whip up feeling against her, exploiting anti-German prejudice in 1919-20, by Dr. Halliday Sutherland, author of the book Birth Control. 

After two unsatisfactory attempts at marriage—the first a purely platonic relationship with a Japanese professor of botany, the second with an American botanist who was incapable—she finally met and married Humphrey Verdon Roe, a partner in the Avro aircraft firm (later of Lancaster bomber fame) and therefore a wealthy man. 

Marie herself was one of the most highly qualified botanists in the world, the first woman lecturer at Manchester University, and Staff researcher into the origin of coal. In this post she was sent all over the world by the Board of Trade, receiving £600 a year (£200 more than an MP in those days), and was the author of twenty-five volumes of data on her subject. After the second marriage disaster she went to Northumberland, and started in 1914 the first rough draft of the book which four years later outraged the Catholic Church, "startled the world", and precipitated a libel action which lasted six months and went to the House of Lords. 

Its title was Married Love. What was the main simple proposition which so upset people, especially men? The idea Marie put up was that women also could, and should, enjoy sexual intercourse; that they couldn't if they were terrified most of the time that it would result in another unwanted baby; that marriages could not be happy under those circumstances and that if women could be protected against incessant pregnancy by contraception, marriages would last and be successful. 

The book was a bombshell. Twenty-eight editions, translated into thirteen foreign languages; beautifully written, with a delicacy even her detractors could not deny. Marie rapidly discovered that she had lifted the lid of a seething cauldron. Letters poured in, in thousands, from unhappy wives (and husbands). So much so that a second book Wise Parenthood; dealing more fully with the mechanics of birth control, was issued — with the same success. 

Now Marie, with her husband, who supported her ideas quite independently and could finance her, took the step which to the Catholic Church was the last straw. Like all good reformers, they decided to do something "practical". They rented a small house in the slums of Islington in London and opened the first free birth-control clinic. No fees were charged, no inquisitive questions asked. Poor women came in hundreds to be fitted with the rubber check pessary which so upset Halliday Sutherland and his Church. They claimed that it was dangerous and that this woman, with a German degree, was experimenting on poor women like rabbits. 

Marie and her husband naively challenged Sutherland to debate, without result. Then, filled with indignation at the downright misrepresentation, she issued a writ for libel against Sutherland on 12th May 1922. The cream of the medical profession was called in witness, dividing itself about evenly for and against the rubber cheek pessary, But what some of the gynecologists' evidence revealed was staggering. 

There was the woman who said she was kicked downstairs "every time she announced another baby". The girl of 22 who bad had six children since 16, all aborted by her mother. The two mental defectives who had spawned ten children, all mentally or physically deficient. The dozens of couples who had been married for years without children, due to sheer ignorance of simple physical functions. 

Asked by Sir Patrick Hastings what was the object of the Society she had founded, Marie Stopes replied: 

The object of the Society is to counteract the steady evil which has been growing for many years of the reduction of the birth rate on the part of the wise, thrifty, well contented and generally sound members of our community; and the reckless breeding of the C3 end, the semi-feeble-minded, the careless, who are proportionately increasing because of the slowing of the birth rate at the other end of the scale. It was in order to try to right that grave social danger that I embarked on this work.

Question: 

Is the reduction of the birth rate any part at all of your campaign? 

Answer::

Not reduction in the total birth rate, but reduction in the birth rate at the wrong part and increase of the birth rate at the right end of the social scale.

And there you have it! Poor Marie may have been one of the world's greatest experts on coal, but she was a babe unborn in economics. Summed up, her idea was: More kids for the rich, less for the poor. 

Now, it is certainly true that the capitalists do not like a falling working-class birth rate. And when it falls they take measures to increase it, the most popular being family allowances. As reference to our pamphlet Family Allowances will show, by the simple expedient of a government grant, the wages of single childless men and women are reduced to pay a premium or bonus to those producing children. 

Dictators in the past have dramatized the situation. Stalin, by issuing a medal and a certificate to the fecund — "Mother of the Soviet Union" — while Mussolini gave the fruitful ones a suite of furniture. More practical, of course, because you can put kids to bed on a sofa but they cannot eat medals. 

Marie lost her case in the Lords, having won it on appeal. There is evidence that, like so many dedicated reformers, she was obsessed, In 1920 she had written an appeal to the Bishops' Convocation of the Church of England claiming that she was "God's Prophet". Funnily enough, the Bishops craftily adopted most of her points about marriage forty years later; while even today, exponents of the over-population theory still quote her. 

Had Marie studied economics with the avidity she displayed in botany, she might have discovered that whether the "right end" of the social scale, the wealthy, have large or small families is immaterial. What is decisive is that they have large bank balances. Nevertheless, we can remember Marie Stopes with regard for the fact that she chucked away comfort, affluence and status to fight for what she thought right, suffering abuse and punishment, She exposed the sexual subjection of working-class women, spread an enormous amount of knowledge previously proscribed; and if today millions of working-class girls are no longer as ignorant as Mum was, a certain amount of credit must go to Marie Stopes. 

Horatio

Murder in Mexico: The Assassination of Leon Trotsky (1950)

Book Review from the May 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

On August 20th, 1940, in the suburb of Coyoacan on the outskirts of Mexico City, in a house he had transformed into a veritable armed fortress in the vain attempt to escape the long arm of Stalin, Leon Trotsky was assassinated—by a man he had trusted as a friend, and who played the part patiently for three months awaiting an opportunity to be alone with his victim just long enough to drive an ice-pick into his head. 

So perished Trotsky, the man who believed that all and every means—lying, treachery, intimidation, violence, and murder—were justified to attain the end. He died, treacherously and horribly, the victim finally of his own violent creed. 

So also, after many unsuccessful attempts, did Stalin finally settle accounts with his last and most dangerous enemy—and henceforth could sleep in peace. 

"Murder in Mexico" (published by Secker and Warburg, 236p., 9s. 6d.) is the straight and unassuming account of the events that led up to Trotsky's assassination and of the investigations that followed. The names of two authors appear on the jacket, but the main part of the book, and the most interesting and informative, is that contributed by General Sanchez Salazar, ex-Chief of the Mexican Secret Police and the one responsible for Trotsky's safety whilst he was in Mexico, as well as being the official called upon to investigate the first and unsuccessful attempt on his life in May, 1940, and the second and successful attempt three months later. 

The remainder, consisting of an introduction and three or four other chapters, is the work of Julian Gorkin, Spanish ex-Communist turned anti-Stalinist. Apart from some observations on the machinations of the O.G.P.U., later N.K.V.D., now M.V.D., and a few speculations on some of the things mentioned elsewhere by Salazar, his contributions add little to the book. Except, perhaps, one thing. This is when he calmly tells us in his introduction that the reason why many of the important documents that should have been used at the murderer's trial are missing is because he, Gorkin, has taken personal charge of them, has hidden them in a secret place where Soviet agents will not be able to lay hands on them, and is holding on to them as guarantees for the statements contained in the book! Nor is this the only strange sidelight on the ways of Mexican law and politics revealed by this somewhat unusual book. 

SALAZAR'S STORY. 

It is Salazar's story, however, interesting, and the one with which we are most concerned. 

Trotsky came to Mexico from Norway, after the authorities there had become so nervous of his presence in their territory and the trouble it might cause that they finally compelled him to leave. This was in 1937. 

By May, 1940, he had established himself in a house on the outskirts of the capital, Mexico City, and turned it into an armed camp. The former iron railings had been replaced by high concrete walls with towers, from which machine-guns covered the streets outside and the open spaces inside. The only door was of thick steel through the grille of which callers were first of all identified under a strong electric light. For it to be opened, the agreement of two guards was necessary. The whole house and walls were interlaced with electric wires which automatically set off alarms, warning the guards and occupants inside, and a special armed police guard outside. Trotsky himself always worked with a loaded revolver by his side. 

Yet in spite of all these elaborate precautions, Trotsky only escaped by a hairsbreadth when an attempt was made on his life in May, 1940. Early in the morning of the 24th, about twenty men succeeded in getting into the building and riddled his bedroom with machine-gun bullets, from which he only managed to escape by hiding under the bed and relying on the bad and hasty marksmanship of his attackers. It was discovered afterwards by Salazar that Trotsky had in fact been betrayed by one of bis own secretaries, an American called Sheldon, who had opened the door to his assailants and later gone off with them. Salazar then conducted an intensive hunt for Sheldon and actually found him a month later—buried in quick-lime in the garden of a lonely house some miles away from the city. Sheldon had been killed to ensure that he remained quiet. 

Salazar was still working on this case three months later when he heard that what the G.P.D. had failed to do the first time they had succeeded in doing the next—by means of one man, and not twenty. This time, Jacques Mornard, a man of many aliases, and with high recommendations from some Trotskyists in the United States, had wormed his way into Trotsky's confidence, using the additional bait that he was engaged in writing an article dealing with the splits between the various Trotskyist factions in America. Trotsky promised to look at it and give him his advice. On two occasions they went into his study to consider it. The first time was a rehearsal—the second time, Jacques Mornard, alias Jacson, alias Mercader, alias Torkof, etc., killed him. 

Although Mornard was plainly determined to kill Trotsky whatever the consequences, (when arrested be was found with a knife and loaded revolver as well as the ice-axe), he was not such a fanatic as to disregard his own life completely. That is why he left a car outside the house with the engine running, and why he used the ice-axe instead of the noisy revolver. When, however, he hit Trotsky, the latter uttered such a terrible scream that his secretaries were on the scene in a few moments, and would have battered Mornard to death had not Trotsky, though gravely injured, still possessed sufficient acuteness to tell them to keep him alive. 

After this, the rest of the book inevitably becomes something of an anti-climax, but is nevertheless extremely interesting for the light it throws on Mornard himself, his confederates, and the methods they used to achieve their aim. Mornard, for example, when arrested, had a prepared "confession" in his pocket in which, of all things, he posed as a disillusioned Trotskyist! 

The two other main conspirators succeeded in getting away. One was never found. The other, a well-known Mexican artist called Siqueiros, was arrested by Salazar, but eventually escaped as a result of some strange, and not wholly explained jiggery-pokery in Mexican high circles. As for Mornard, he is still serving his twenty-year sentence (the maximum penalty under Mexican law). Until 1947, his was a life of luxury. He wanted for nothing, and everything possible was done to make him comfortable. No expense was spared—good food, wines, the best cigarettes, radio, an excellent library—all were his. So scandalous did the abuses become that the Mexican Government was eventually compelled to take action. When they did so, they found that the Prison Secretary was a Communist, and the Chief of the Prison Delegation, to whom be was responsible, was another. These were both dismissed, and some of Mornard's privileges taken away from him, but from all accounts he is still enjoying a fairly easy time. 

When be comes out of prison—what then? Perhaps, as he has kept his mouth shut so far, nothing will happen to him. Perhaps, on the other band, just to be on the safe side, somebody will put a bullet through his head as happened to Sheldon. We wonder. No doubt Mornard, locked away in bis cell in Mexico City, sometimes wonders too. 

The above, briefly, is the bare bones of Salazar's story. For the flesh and blood you will have to read the book. It is well worth reading, not, be it remembered, because it is a work of monumental importance to the Socialist movement, but simply because it is a light, readable, well-authenticated account of an event which, although of little importance in itself to the struggle for Socialism, is nevertheless something upon which Socialists may find it useful to be informed. And if, in addition, it reads as easily and as interestingly as any good detective novel, well—who would complain about that? 

Stan Hampson

Massacre of fruit (1972)

From the October 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Next time you pay 3p. (at least) for a peach, remember that the sight of a tractor crushing huge mounds of these plump, juicy fruits prior to their mass burial is boringly familiar to those who live in the "California of Europe", Italy's main fruit-growing area in the Romagna. 

We all know, of course, from those regular newspaper reports and prompt television documentaries that the practice is not confined to this area of Italy, or even of Europe. But this year's slaughter of unmarketable fruit threaten to assume vaster, even more unimaginable proportions than in the past. Last year's figures of several hundred thousand tons of peaches, pears and apples destroyed may well look small when this season's wastage is revealed. 

Even more dramatically, figures of "slaughtered" fruit only represent a small proportion of all the fruit actually "withdrawn from sale". The rest of it is used mainly for fruit juices, wine-making and animal feed (although the animals obstinately refuse to understand that peach stones are for spitting out not swallowing and that they are not supposed to turn their noses up at regular feed when the seasonal supply of succulent pears runs out). 

EEC Policy 

When membership of the Common Market guaranteed Italian farmers markets and high fixed prices for all the fruit they could produce, fruit growing underwent an Eldoradan boom from one end of the peninsula to the other. As was to be expected however, the mad scramble for sales and profits quickly subordinated quality to quantity with the result that Italian fruit soon developed a reputation for being second best to more tasty varieties produced in other parts of the world. So when unpalatability plus inefficient and over-bureaucratic distribution methods caused sales to drop, the EEC authority was forced to step in and in accordance with their price-fixing agreement to buy up the 'surplus' and put it to the 'uses' described above. 

They could not (and cannot) allow it to be released for sale at rock-bottom prices, as the immediate effect, of this would be to competitively force down the price of other fruit on the market and hit the farming profits they are in business to support. 

Don't Give it Away 

But why, instead of destroying the surplus fruit, don't they distribute it free to the wide areas of the world which have food shortages and malnutrition as a permanent problem? Low quality food, after all, is better than no food at all and such a practice could scarcely have a direct effect on market prices in the countries where the fruit is actually sold. They don't, quite simply because the expense involved in such a procedure would exceed the cost of allowing the unsaleable fruit to be grown and then destroying it. Besides a solution like this would be entirely unacceptable to the governments of "shortage" countries, as free goods would constitute the most dangerous kind of competition to goods being sold on the market there. And who knows, apart from the damage to these countries' economies (i.e. the profit prospects of those owning and controlling the means by which commodities are produced), a taste of free access, even on such a limited scale, might cause highly inconvenient social unrest? 

So with production and distribution tied to the need to maximise profit, such a method of disposing of "surplus" goods is right out. In our present worldwide system of buying and selling human need is a poor match for market demand, that is, need backed up by ready cash. 

Italian fruit, French vegetables, Common Market milk and butter, British eggs and potatoes, Canadian wheat and Japanese rice. It's the same depressing and wasteful story the earth over (including no doubt, if information were released, Russia with its so-called "planned" economy). And nothing on earth can be more anarchical and anti-social than a system which dumps and destroys all it cannot sell at a profit. What but working-class ignorance and inertia stand in the way of a society which would plan its resources rationally for the satisfaction of worldwide human needs? 

Howard Moss

Marx and the Anarchists (1980)

Book Review from the July 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Karl Marx and the Anarchists by Paul Thomas (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980) £15.00.

This excellent book is a running commentary on Marx's fierce battles with crackpots he regarded as disasters to the socialist movement: the anarchists Max Stirner, P. J. Proudhon and Michael Bakunin. One of its principal merits is that it debunks, with the support of voluminous and correctly interpreted quotations, the idea that Marx was a dogmatic old bully, hopelessly impatient and irritable with anyone who dared to dissent from his views.

Stirner's sole claim to fame is his book, The Ego and his Own, which was purported to be a rebellious challenge to all the established institutions but is actually a pathetic rehash of Hegelian idealism. The greater part of The German Ideology, Marx and Engels' "settlement" with German philosophy, consists of the reply to "Saint Max", as they called him. Proudhon wrote so much, with so many contradictions, that it is impossible to list them all. Suffice it to say that one keen observer (Albert Hirschmann) has pointed out that Milton Friedman's arguments today were originally put forward by Proudhon in the 1840s. Bakunin was opposed to writing, on the grounds that "action", not books, was necessary (although he did write a partly autobiographical work, and the short God and the State).

All three anarchists did immense harm to the socialist cause, Stirner, with his ridiculous "personal rebellions", opposed any form of organisation or educational work, as did Bakunin and Proudhon. The latter spread more confusion than anybody in France, with his opposition to strikes, trade unions and political parties; while Bakunin succeeded in having the First International dissolved by Marx's supporters rather than allow it to be turned into a terrorist conspiracy practising robberies and assassinations. Each one of them extolled the virtues of the criminal lumpen-proletariat who, they claimed, were the real "rebels" because they had "nothing to lose"; Bakunin went so far as to advocate arson, brigandage and burglaries.

No supporter of the Socialist Party of Great Britain who reads the book can fail to be struck by the correspondence of Marx's replies to these anarchists with our Declaration of Principles. (For example, Marx's reference to the "parliamentary idiocy" of the German workers' movement in 1879: "The point was not to pursue the franchise as though it were a Workers' Holy Grail, but to transform it from the institute of fraud . . .  into an instrument of emancipation", p, 345.) Thomas also shows that, on the questions of democracy and working class understanding Marx shares our, and not Lenin's view: "We cannot, therefore, co-operate with people who openly state that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves" (1879).

Marx held that, on every count, political action was the "first duty" of the working class. This book makes clear his views on dictatorship and democracy; the transformation of the State apparatus; the necessity of working class knowledge; the indispensability of trade unions; and the transformation of working class mentality. Above all, however, it documents his insistence on the need for a working class political party active in the struggle for socialism. It remains to add that, whether Marx considered it imperative or not, it happens to be right.

Horatio

Food for Thought (1948)

From the October 1948 issue of the Socialist Standard

During his directorship of the United Nations' Food and Agriculturist Organisation Sir John Boyd Orr won the approval of many people for his work in organising the supply or food to the devastated countries of Europe. Since his retirement from that post he has been tackling the problem of food production for all the peoples of the world. His approach is the direct one; his ideals mere wishful thinking, because conflicting interests in capitalist society, national and international, permit of no direct methods for the provision of a full life for all. 

Among many other things he said (Daily Herald, 29/7/48):

A world of peace and friendship, a world with the plenty which modern science had made possible was a great ideal. But those in power had no patience with such an ideal. They said it was not practical politics.

Within the structure of capitalism it is possible that the politicians are right. Inside the nation a capitalist is guaranteed protection while accumulating wealth by exploitation, providing he observes the rules of the game. Between nations the case is different. The right to trade, to colonise, and to have access to raw materials and natural resources outside their own boundaries must be wangled, bluffed or taken by force of arms. A nation having taken possession can only hold its gains by superior strength. Consequently it is futile to suggest, as Sir John does that: 

If half the effort being spent making tanks, guns. aeroplanes or atomic bombs was diverted to producing the primary necessities of life, gross poverty would be eliminated for the world within the lifetime of our children.

For each nation to cut its fighting forces by half, to convince the governments of all nations of such a necessity, while each is suspicious of its neighbours and scheming to over-reach them, such an idea is, to say the least, laughable. Moreover, Sir John only suggests a reduction in armed strength—or equipment—by half. Even he could hardly visualise capitalism being run without armed forces to deal with dissatisfied sections of the workers from time to time. 

Next Sir John says: 

A world government may evolve from the United Nations' Food, Economic, Financial and other organisations.

But he gives no hint as to which nation will be at the head. Nor does he show how the differences between nations can be reconciled to bring about collaboration in a common policy that would be of lasting benefit to the workers. He says: "Politics was but the shadow of economics" but overlooks the fact that all the power is in political control of armed force. Those who control the political machinery of any nation make the laws designed to regulate production and exchange; and by tariffs, taxes and subsidies encourage or hinder trade in the various industries according to the interests they represent. 

In one of his broadcasts Sir John suggested that the agriculturists and food producers of the world should get together and tackle the problem of world food production by mutual agreement, on the principle that they are the actual people concerned with the production of these commodities. But the very fact that these people are concerned with commodity production makes them suspect. In the past such collaboration between the captains of industry has invariably resulted in limitation, or restriction of output in order to control prices in their own interests. Rings and combines are just as common among agriculturists as other interests. They are not philanthropists but capitalists, in business to make profits. They hold the community to ransom whenever their products fall behind demand. In the past they burned millions of tons of wheat and coffee. Even since the war vegetables have been ploughed back into the soil, fruit has been allowed to rot, and hundreds of tons of fish thrown back into the sea or sold as manure to keep up prices. 

But Sir John still has hopes, in spite of the callous indifference to the needs of the people that is so prominent a feature in the normal life of those with guaranteed incomes derived from industrial enterprise, or to be exact, exploitation. He says: 

These United Nations' organisations throw a light along the road to world peace and plenty . . .  Have we the common sense, the decency, the moral purpose to follow the light? 

Unfortunately these qualities have little or nothing to do with the question. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and Sir John hasn't even mapped out a road to his Utopia; while facing him is the inexorable machinery of capitalist finance and power-politics, blind and deaf to common-sense appeals, in their lust for power. 

Then:

If the decision lay with the people, he had no doubt what the answer would be. Where they had not been too bedevilled to think for themselves, they all wanted the things the organisation stood for. 

To bedevil means to confuse, and the vast majority of the workers are in a hopeless muddle of confused thinking on political and economic questions. The class that appropriates the major portion of the wealth produced, without contributing towards its production, must be deeply interested in obscuring the method by which it is achieved. The majority of capitalists are, no doubt, quite ignorant of the scientific explanation of surplus value. Yet they all know that the system in some way guarantees them wealth and privilege without effort on their part. Consequently they welcome any theory that keeps clear of this fact, and encourage any shallow, but plausible ideas that only deal with day-to-day occurrences on the surface of capitalist events, This flood of bedevilment is a free-for-all. Politicians, economists and journalists all take a hand, many of them finding it pays extremely well; especially the politicians. The so-called Labour, Fabian and Communist parties are responsible for much of the confusion.

Next Sir John says: 

The carrying out of a world food plan alone would bring a great expansion of world industry and trade such as occurred in the 19th century. 

That possibility should certainly gain capitalist support for Sir John, because the more work there is for the workers, the greater the amount of surplus value from which capitalist incomes are derived, while the workers still only get wages that barely cover their cost of living. But Sir John overlooks one important factor. During the 19th century Britain had a flying start in the race for markets. Today every capitalist country is in the race, and the share of each will diminish with the ever-increasing fierceness of the international race for markets. 

"If food production could not be doubled in the next 25 years," warned Sir John, "we were heading for disaster." Due presumably, to the estimated enormous increase in the world's population on top of tbe present food shortage. We are not told the nature of the disaster that threatens, but unlike Malthus, who visualised the time when there would only be standing room on the earth, Sir John reveals the forces already operating to avert the disaster—whatever it is—when he says: 

Of every three families in the world today, two suffered premature death for lack of adequate food and shelter. 

Sir John may hope that a world government might set a limit to the process. But such a government, especially by agreement, is just a dream, while world government by conquest is a nightmare even to the capitalist and his political stooges. 

Next he says: 

The first right of man was food and shelter to maintain life. The masses today demanded this. And they would get it because they were in a vast majority.

Not merely because they are in a majority, nor because they demand them, will they get these things. They have first to understand why they lack them now. At present the workers, between them, possess all the scientific and technical knowledge, and actually carry out all the work of production and distribution. Their failure to satisfy the needs of all is due to the incubus of trade, commerce and finance; the capitalist machinery of appropriation, that limits production to what the market can absorb. The workers must get rid of this incubus. To do so they must organise politically as a class, in opposition to all parties which maintain the present system. Only when they control the political machinery through their delegates, pledged to carry out the wishes of the workers, will they be enabled to control production and distribution in accordance with their needs. 

One of the greatest obstacles to a clear understanding of their position by the workers, is the bedevilment, or confusion, much of it considered and deliberate, referred to by Sir John Boyd Orr. However laudable his ideals and aspirations his assumption that they can be realised by a world government of capitalists is a false and dangerous fallacy. It is the working-class that suffers under capitalism, and it is only by the conscious and organised efforts of that class that emancipation can be achieved.

F. Foan

The Execution of Imre Nagy (1958)

From the August 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

Since the announcement on June 17th of the execution of Imre Nagy and his associates, various notables outside the Soviet bloc have hastened to express their opinions on these latest Communist murders. Lord Lansdowne in the House of Lords on the 19th June, speaking on behalf of the Conservative Government, welcomed "The opportunity to place on record the horror and indignation which this latest shameful act has aroused." Although these sentiments are, undoubtedly, true, they border on the hypocritical coming from the Tories after their support of two World Wars and many smaller ones; and that the death of four men should induce a feeling of revulsion in the ex-general Eisenhower appears somewhat surprising. Nevertheless, their one-sided wrath at the duplicity of the Communists has aroused members of the working class to demonstrate. Hungarian emigres and Nationals have attacked Soviet Embassies in Germany and Denmark, while Russians have retaliated, in Moscow, at this affront to their "national honour." 

Imre Nagy, the central figure, is lamented in the West for his actions during the Hungarian Revolt of 1956. For those workers who consider that his memory 'is worthy of demonstration or enshrining as a hero in the struggle for emancipation, let us take a closer look at his life and the aims of the 1956 Rebellion. 

Born in 1896, Nagy was an apprentice locksmith until his conscription into the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War. He fought on the Italian and Russian fronts, where he was taken prisoner and sent to Siberia. When the 1917 Revolution began in Russia be fought for the Bolsheviks and took Soviet citizenship in 1918. Returning to Hungary the following year, he was given a minor post in the Bela Kun communist regime. When this was superseded by the Horthy Regency in 1921, Nagy fled to France. He was ordered back soon after and was subsequently arrested. On his release he went to Russia and studied agricultural reform. During the Second World War he was employed on the propaganda Kossuth Radio in Moscow, and when Hungary exchanged the joys of German Capitalism for the delights of the Soviet variety in 1944, Nagy was appointed Minister of Agriculture. "He took an important part in planning and enforcing Communist agrarian reform" (Times, 25/8/56). This "reform" entailed the forcible collectivisation of farms and the elimination of any opposition in the usual callous Soviet method. 

The year 1953 saw cracks appear in the colonial empire of Russia, culminating in the Berlin Uprising of June. In order to preserve their domination, the Communists began instituting "lenient" policies throughout Eastern Europe. Nagy, who enjoyed the mysterious reputation of a "moderate." became Premier in July to implement the policy in Hungary. This position he retained until April, 1955, when he was made a scapegoat for the failure of this policy to satisfy the demands of the Hungarian population and the Soviet war-machine, The ups and downs of Communist political manoeuvring led to his "rehabilitation" in August, 1956, and his formal re-acceptance into the Party on October 14th. 

Ten days later, following the outbreak of the Rebellion, he was reinstated as Prime Minister on the demands of sources within the Party in an attempt to placate the insurgents. Nagy's conduct throughout the fighting altered from determined opposition to final support even to the extent of the dissolution of the one-party system, as he was out-manoeuvred by events. His first action on being confirmed in office was to speak over Budapest radio demanding the cessation of the revolt: "Many misguided workers have turned against the state. I am calling on all Hungarians to be firm against these provocateurs," quoted the Manchester Guardian of the 25th October, 1956. The report goes on: "Therefore we have decided that all who surrender their arms and stop fighting will not be affected by martial law." The next day this paper commented on a later speech: "The announcement by Mr. Nagy, that Soviet troops would withdraw from the fighting as soon as peace and order were restored, implies a determination to rely on the Russians to the very end." 

By the 28th the rebels appeared to be winning and a cease-fire order was given to Government troops. It was also announced that Russian troops were withdrawing. The rebels demanded the following terms from the Nagy Government:- 

(1) The establishment of a democracy of the Western type.
(2) The free formation of parties of all types.
(3) Free elections.
(4) An armistice for the insurgents and complete withdrawal of all Soviet forces. 

Nagy, still hoping to retain some vestiges of the Communist dictatorship, side-stepped the first three demands and attempted to placate the Nationalist sentiment of the insurrectionists with his counter-proposals:- 

(1) An armistice for all who took part in the fighting.
(2) The creation of a new police force based on the Army and workers' and youth groups.
(3) Dissolution of the Secret Police.
(4) The reinstatement of the Kossuth coat-of-arms in place of the Communist insignia.
(5) The restoration of the 15th March as a national holiday. 

This date is the anniversary of the Kossuth rebellion of 1848, which was put down by the then Russian Czar. 

Sudden developments once again forced Nagy to adopt a different stand, so that on the 30th October, he announced the abolition of the one party system and formed a Government, including Agrarians and Social Democrats. Nagy had thus appeared to have overcome a difficult situation while still retaining the Premiership. 

On the 31st October, 1956, Britain and France attacked Suez, forfeiting their "holier than thou" advantage over the Russians. Regrouping its forces the Soviet Union recommenced the occupation of Hungary the following day. By the 4th November the revolt "bad been ruthlessly crushed and Russian domination was firmly reimposed. Nagy foolishly left the Yugoslav Embassy, where he had taken refuge, after promise of safe-conduct and was imprisoned until his recent execution. (From his long experience, he should have known better than to trust fellow Communists.) 

Much speculation has been forthcoming on the identity of the person who requested Russian aid, as he gave them the scant "legality" they required to "justify" their intervention and consequently helped make certain the failure of the rebellion. This call was made on October 24th—the day of Nagy's investiture as Premier. Subsequently it was stated that they were not summoned by Nagy, but by Hegedus, the then Prime Minister, and Geroe, the Party Secretary. Victor Zorgan in the Manchester Guardian, of the 31st October, does not appear convinced of the truth of the statement and hints at another reason for its publication. "This, if the population believes it—as it is quite likely to—will greatly enhance Mr. Nagy's shaken prestige and will help him to remain at the head of the government." Whether Nagy enlisted Soviet help or not, as has been shown he was willing to condone its employment. 

For workers the conclusion is obvious. Although winning the sympathy of the Western Powers, who will support anything against Soviet interests, Nagy is not worthy of working class commiseration. He was a lifelong Communist and was as thoroughly steeped in blood and misery as those who have invariably toed the Party line. While the 1956 Uprising in its widest form would have made no fundamental difference to the workers, its object being to leave the Hungarian capitalist class to exploit them unfettered by the demands of their Soviet counterparts. Their sole gain would have been the ability to cry their grievances unchallenged, but without Socialist knowledge this concession is useless. And the conditions which give rise to dictatorship would still remain. 

'Essig'

Obituary: Les Cox (2008)

Obituary from the August 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

We regret to have to report the death in June of our comrade Les Cox at the age of 81. Les joined the old Fulham branch of the Socialist Party in 1948, after a short spell in the Young Communist League, and was subsequently a member of the Paddington, Westminster and, latterly, West London branches. He was a well-known member of the Executive Committee for many years as well as filling other Party posts such as Trustee and being on the Standing Orders Committee.

He was a candidate for the Party in elections in London on a number of occasions and an effective and engaging Party speaker over several decades, including at Speakers’ Corner, Hyde Park. Influenced by logical positivism, when questioned about religion he refused to mention the word “god” on the grounds that as it didn’t refer to anything it was meaningless.

In debates within the Party he always took a tolerant position, except with regard to infringements of democracy.

Les also did maintenance work at our head office, including the installation of the fascia (with brass screws). He had left school at the age of 14 and was trained as a carpenter.

As a conscientious objector to national service after the war, he was exempted as long as he continued to work in this trade as it was regarded as essential to post-war reconstruction.

Later he had to seek a lighter job and went to work at the head office of ICI near where he lived, first as a lift attendant but eventually – ironically for a socialist – as a clerk in the department keeping a record of the shareholders.

Les lived and worked all his life in the area on both sides of Chelsea Bridge in London and was involved in the local working class community there, being an active member of the tenants association on the council estate where he lived. He refused to buy his council house. A Party member spoke at his non-religious funeral at Mortlake crematorium.

-------------------------

Blogger's Note:  There's a brief ten minute audio interview with Les Cox about his early life, and how he came to join the SPGB, at the following link.

Coming up for Orwell (1971)

From the March 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

The various collections of George Orwell's essays and short pieces reached their ultimate point in the four volumes published at ten guineas in 1968, and now brought out by Penguin for ten shillings each*. The writings are presented chronologically, and to them are added a great many letters which Orwell wrote to various people. Each volume has a few pages' biographical notes on the writer in the period it covers. George Woodcock's book# is a personal and critical study rather than a life-story (it was Orwell's wish that no biography of him should be written) and as such goes well with the collected work. Together these books display the author of Homage to Catalonia, Wigan Pier and Nineteen Eighty-Four fully enough for some assessment to be made. What should the verdict on Orwell be? 

At his worst — in the preposterous naïveté of The Lion and the Unicorn, or the hack propagandizing of his war-time contributions to Partisan Review — it is simple enough: a muddle-head or a penny-a-liner, or both. The problem arises because nearly everyone has not only enjoyed other writings of Orwell, but warmed to their sentiments. He had a knack of putting his finger exactly on an ordinary person's feelings in an unfair or idiotic world. It is illustrated perfectly in an essay about the pleasures of spring in London. At the end he remarks: 

How many a time have I stood watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who would stop me enjoying this if they could. But luckily they can't. 

Who has not had the same thought in a hundred situations — or can resist a writer who expresses it so lucidly? 

This is the prime appeal of Animal Farm. Despite his harsh experience in Spain of Communist motivation, it is doubtful if Orwell ever had enough knowledge of political theory and history for Animal Farm to have the depths attributed to it. In reality it is a quite unsophisticated book, a plain man's bitter-funny version of how things were in Soviet Russia. Its sparkle comes partly from Orwell's skill with words and phrases, partly from that talent for touching on how people felt about it all. Moses the Crow is a perfect image for organized religion as apprehended by the working class; rulers do look like pigs to underdog eyes. Likewise, The Road to Wigan Pier derived much of its success from describing explicitly how the fad-ridden Left of the 'thirties looked to hard-up working men —" ... every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist and feminist in England . . .  This kind of thing is by itself sufficient to alienate plenty of decent people." 

Orwell's fluent fellow-feeling is what makes him such a likeable writer. It is also, however, the wallpaper over the cracks and inadequacies of three-quarters of his thought. The phrases and sentences quoted here do not stand up, for all their first-glance attractiveness. To speak of important persons wanting to prevent one's enjoyment is really playing to the gallery, and a piece of gross misdirection about the nature of social grievances. The phrase "plenty of decent people" means politically uncommitted people specifically, the miners he had been among and admired so much; but if one grants the admiration for their role in society, does that make their opinions superior? The attack on fruit juice, sandals, feminism etc. has to be seen in the context of attitudes in the 'thirties, of course. But Orwell follows it with his well-known story about the two I.L.P.  men in shorts and pistachio shirts on a bus, displaying in their dress the Bohemian crankiness associated with the Left. One, he says, was "obscenely bald" as well; and this pointless, shoddy item in the diatribe serves to cast doubt on the sense of all the rest of it. 

In many ways, Orwell is like a man marching to throw open some pearly gates and abolish mendicancy, who never gets near the gates because he keeps stopping to tell beggars he is on their side. Every discussion of him makes much of his obsession with "class", his upbringing and early life as a police officer in the East. The common theory is of his trying to expiate Eton and Burma by identification with the working class — certainly be referred to that background often in his writings, apart from the pieces specifically about Burma. The fact is, however, that Orwell had no comprehension of what class meant in society. 

It is worth digressing here to point out that Orwell's presumed attempt to atone for a well-to-do upbringing is by no means unique. Among the leadership of the agitating Left today there are professional and business people whose main-spring is compunction over not having horny hands and greasy overalls, the stigmata of the bona fide exploited worker. Anyone who has observed them has seen the idealizing of the factory-bench man, the conviction that he has an instinctive wisdom about society that is denied them. This is exactly what Orwell felt. But one has to see that the guilt and the consequent radical outpourings arise from failure to understand what class really is. 

Woodcock, while pointing out and criticizing many of Orwell's weaknesses, passes this one. Indeed, he falls into it himself. Writing about Orwell's experience in Spain, he quotes a piece from the essay "Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War" where Orwell describes a militiaman shaking his hand in Barcelona: 

When I remember — oh, how vividly! — his shabby uniform and fierce, pathetic, innocent face, the complex side issues of the war seem to fade away and I see clearly that there was at any rate no doubt as to who was in the right. In spite of power politics and journalistic lying, the central issue of the war was the attempt of people like this to win the decent life which they knew to be their birthright. 

Woodcock goes on to quote a poem Orwell wrote about the same episode. It is, he says, "a lyrical summary of all that he [Orwell] learned from the Spanish Civil War"; the title of his own book is taken from its ending. Yet, for all their ardent feeling, both the passage and the verses are nonsense. Could Orwell or Woodcock really tell from looking at a soldier's rig-out and his face that his side was "in the right"; or — vide the poem — see something "no power can disinherit"? As for "the central issue of the war", Woodcock says only four pages earlier that Orwell was "still politically rather green' when he went to Spain and was under a series of misapprehensions as to what was going on. 

To say Orwell's chief talent was for the commonplace is not to denigrate his ability as a writer. His tours de force are the essays on boys' weekly papers, comic postcards and so on. He was able to see clearly enough the ideals and life-patterns they represented without having to go too far under the surface. For all his introspection, his analytical capability stopped near the surface. One of his least successful essays is "Decline of the English Murder" where, having described the social characteristics of some popular murder cases, he appears not to know what to say about them. More seriously, Orwell's justifications for supporting the war and working as a BBC propagandist were almost too superficial to be worth argument: that whoever in Britain refused to support the war was by default supporting the Nazis, that war propaganda was less dirty if "decent" people helped in it. 

The greatest part of his reputation, however, rests with Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is a melancholy thought that the reputation has derived largely from the things which have been read into the book, even wrongly attributed to it. It was taken by the Right as a massive indictment of Russia, by many of the Left as a guide to the doom awaiting us if the Right had its way; twenty-odd years after its publication its name is still a popular cry against bureaucracy. Nevertheless, the forms taken by society in Nineteen Eighty-Four were not generally Orwell's invention. They were a compound of Zamyatin's We, which had already contributed to Huxley's Brave New World several years before, and James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution. In the present volumes essays by Orwell on both these books are re-printed, showing how strongly they affected him. 

The impact of Nineteen Eighty-Four comes not from the hypothesis of a power-structure, but from the recognizability of the detail. Woodcock says: "The elements of this horrific new world Orwell saw existing in the world around him." They are in fact all extensions of agencies and tendencies in 1948, when the book was written; or today. The spying and hate-fomenting, the distortion of language and history for political ends, the exploitation of psychological knowledge, the State regulation of sexual life, are all arguable further developments from things happening in the present. This is usually seen as giving the book an impressive plausibility. Yet they bring it back also to Orwell's perennial identification with the everyday man's surface thoughts on life. What he is saying in innumerable instances, put simply, is "If it goes on like this, the next thing will be . . . " 

The failure of such logical-conclusion, this-is-how-we'll-end-up prophecies is that they attribute dominance to what in fact are subsidiary motives in society. One could say with equal logic, for example, that if the motives of most Conservatives were carried out there would be nothing on television but cricket and public hangings. If that sounds absurd, it is actually a parallel with Orwell's prediction of the city environment in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is the shabby, bomb-damaged austerity of 1948: evidently, Orwell thought the maintenance of such a standard suited the Labour Party and the bureaucracy, and had no hesitation in projecting it as a future inevitability. 

But the book's most fundamental weakness is the lack of any consideration of production and the class struggle. The characters in Nineteen Eighty-Four are all administrative workers. We gather that the "proles" booze and sing and do the necessary work. Do they acquiesce in it all the time? Is there no labour trouble or resentment of a chronically squalid life? Orwell's two chief characters rebel because of intellectual doubt in the man's case and sexual vitality in the woman's. These are fair enough sources of rebellious feeling, but they do not represent the substance of social unrest. True, Orwell has Winston Smith gaze admiringly at a blowzy, Florry-Capp prole woman and reflect vaguely on "people who had never learned to think but who were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world". This is not at all concrete, however, and does not answer the questions. (Nor does Woodcock's assertion of a "hidden truth which Bakunin once knew and which the Marxists have obscured — that the love of power is stronger and more perverting than any material or economic motive".) 

Politically, Orwell described himself as an anarchist at some times and a socialist at others: and both these avowals were qualified by a strong patriotism. He was not a socialist at all, of course — for him the word carried simply connotations of decency, brotherhood and the working man being admirable. Commentators invariably praise his refusal to accept political commitment, as showing his integrity. Perhaps; but it is also a luxurious position, in which one has one's cake and eats it without having to think about the ingredients. One has to wonder in what direction Orwell would have moved had he lived. It is hard to see his having become anything other than another of the writers who are rootless social critics, advancing commentaries with no standpoint of their own. 

Robert Barltrop

* The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, 4 vols.; The Crystal Spirit, A Study of George Orwell, by George Woodcock, Penguin Books.