The nationalist curriculum (1989)

From the November 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Remember school history lessons? Long streams of dates and names. Dates of battles; names of great leaders; “our” army against them, the enemy; stories of Popes and Princes and other collections of pimps and ponces. History tests consisted of learning all of this seemingly meaningless stuff. Glorious Revolution 1688; the two Jacobite rebellions. 1715 and 1745; Great Reform Act 1832; Indian Mutiny—when the hell was the Indian Mutiny? Refer to the textbook and commit the date to memory. As long as you know that it happened and when it happened, let's not get ourselves bogged down in why it happened. For most of us, school history did not concern itself much with the question Why—the question which is at the root of all historical understanding.

History is a vital aspect of knowledge for those who want to comprehend and change the world. If we know where we have been (not just ourselves, but countless generations before us), then we can determine where we want to go. History is the key to the future. Once we become conscious of the fact that humans have not always lived as we live now, that history is a long story of contending classes oppressing and fighting oppression, and that our class is the class that will end all oppression, we can have confidence to play an intelligent part in the making of our own history. History is pointless if it is simply the study of dead men. When Thomas Carlyle asserted that "the History of the World is but the biography of great men” he could not have been more wrong. Great men do not make history; what happens in society is not the product of Bad King Johns and Good Queen Elizabeths, but is a reflection of the interaction of material forces of which individuals are only ever a part, not independent controllers. The only useful history is that which, however indirectly, can help us become conscious of what we can do to change the history of which we are now a part.

As Orwell warned, those who control the past can control the present. In Nineteen Eighty Four he depicted a fearful society in which the state manipulates the collective memory. If an event in the past is no longer regarded as useful to the authorities all reference to it is destroyed. A people who cannot remember where they used to be are in no position to challenge where they are now. Historically controlled, the present is something that workers come to accept as an unquestionable normality. Orwell was not merely inventing nightmares. In Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia the deletion from the record of history of disruptive facts was a carefully organised campaign.

Now that the crimes of the Stalinist historians are beginning to be rectified by modern East European historians, who are trying to recover at least some of the truth of the state-distorted past, here in Britain the government has embarked on a campaign to control the teaching of history which would have brought a sparkle to Stalin’s eye. The Tories, with their new national curriculum by which they want the state to determine what children in schools shall be taught, are seeking to reform the history syllabus. In recent years history teaching has improved. There have tended to be less dates, less big names, less propaganda on behalf of national pride and our masters' morals, the traditional emphases of history in schools.

In its documents relating to history in the new national curriculum, the state has called for a return to greater emphasis upon the teaching of hard facts. They have also called for much more concentration on the importance of Britain in history. One of the main sins of the more recent, enlightened history teachers has been to stress the significance of history as a global investigation. We are citizens of the world and this makes it of limited value to learn only, or mainly, about the story of one little island where we happen to have been born. The flag-waving nationalists who control education are not happy about this. A return to more nationally-centred history teaching is being required from now on. Or else.

Telling Lies Last Century

Like most of their authoritarian attempts to pull the workers into line by curtailing freedom, there is nothing new about the ideas of modern Tories. What they are now calling for was the educational norm in schools during the last century. In her lucid and comprehensive study of school history textbooks between 1800 and 1914 History For Their Masters (New York. 1970). Valerie Chancellor cites numerous illustrations of how history teaching was used as a means of pro-capitalist indoctrination. History textbooks were used in those times (as they are still, but less blatantly) to demonstrate three ideas: that England was the greatest nation on earth; that all other countries were inferior or racially unsound; that working-class movements and revolutionary movements are by definition harmful and to be avoided.

Textbook nationalism in the last century knew no bounds. Writing of the importance of using history for patriotic purposes, one reviewer wrote that ‘‘it is no light matter to animate the rising youth of England with a spirit of dignified pride in the great traditions of a glorious past and a noble future which is ours”. Explaining the rise of the British Empire, one textbook writer explains that:

We have seen England and Great Britain growing larger and larger, stronger and stronger, more and more free, more and more intelligent, until our Empire has grown to be the greatest, most powerful and most respected on the face of the globe . . .

It is odd to think that some of the children forced to read such nonsense would not have even had a pair of boots to wear as they did so. As with the Empire, so with the history of the British constitution, children were taught to celebrate this undemocratic system:

This is the best of all forms of government and it continues in England to this day. By this form of government, the good of all ranks is consulted, and, if either the king or the lords or the people attempt to exceed the limits of the power assigned to them, the others are ready to see that all things are properly balanced.

How handy it is for the people—the majority—to be kept in check by lords and kings, an unelected minority! In war. the victory of the British—it is mainly the victories that were talked about, then as now—was regarded as an act of god and a reflection of the wickedness of any national group that dared to take on our rulers. For example, one textbook, writing about Henry V's gang winning at Agin- court. pointed out that

The French people had at that period of their history arrived at a dreadful pitch of wickedness and nothing . . . appears more clear than that Henry was an especial instrument of Providence to humiliate and chastise them.

If the British were always right, foreigners were usually in the wrong, often due to no fault of their own—it was the high price paid for being mere foreigners. Writing rather petulantly about the Chinese resistence against British opium trading in the 1840s, one textbook writer noted that "the Chinese are a very cold kind of people and do not like strangers to go among them". Other groups of people did not escape from such crude racist stereotyping. One history book, co-written by Kipling, explains that freed West Indian slaves were

lazy, vicious and incapable of serious improvement or of work except under compulsion. In such a climate a few bananas will sustain the life of a negro quite sufficiently; why should he work to get more than this? He is quite happy and quite useless and spends any extra wages which he may earn upon finery.

Another textbook describes how under the “able guidance" of a strong British Viceroy in India "the natives soon learned to recognise the justice and sound sense of their conquerors and gradually settled down to peaceful work in the rice-fields". As for the Irish, one textbook described them of “incapable of ruling themselves and impatient of rule by others”. In a quite obscene historical comment on the Irish famine, published in a textbook of 1848. children were told that

The hand of charity was willingly stretched forth in England for their relief: government and the nation united in aiding that unhappy people; and but for the timely aid afforded, the whole country would have been one vast scene of death and destruction. Would that the pen of the historian could record that this aid was followed by a nation's gratitude! But this was not so.

Textbook descriptions of working-class movements were carefully put in such a way as to depict the majority as a mindless mob. The Chartists, who were simply asking for the right to vote, were described in one textbook as "mechanics, labourers, and others of the lower classes who were led by demagogues to desire a People's Charter"’. Another textbook, written by one Lady Calcott, stated that the Chartists

thought this would be a good time to try and frighten the Queen and government into granting their foolish and dangerous wishes . . . But the people of England loved the Queen too well, and were too well satisfied with the government of their country to let the Chartists do any mischief.

History writers for children tended to take the same approach to all workers' efforts to change their social position. In Kipling's textbook Peterloo is dismissed in one sentence; “At one riot in Manchester in 1819 the soldiers had to be called and several people were shot”. Apart from the factual error—the workers murdered at Peterloo were not shot—this description turns history on its head; the truth is that the middle-class militia rioted against the workers, fearing that the right to free speech might lead on to more dangerous changes in society. The Peasants' Revolt (against the poll tax, let the present government note) of 1381 was dismissed as another dangerous move by people who should play no part in history: "When the common people have got arms in their hands, and feel themselves masters, they are apt to run into the most dangerous excesses”.

As one textbook writer noted, in the course of a description of the English revolution (by the capitalists against the aristocracy) in the 17th century.

It is ever so with revolutions. A few violent men take the lead; their voice and their activity seem to multiply their numbers; the great body of the people either indolent or pusillanimous are led in triumph at the chariot wheels of paltry faction.

It is interesting to note that Mrs Thatcher wishes to see a return to Victorian values. We can only assume, from the authoritarian nature of her government's new efforts towards statist centralisation in history teaching, that it is her aim to see school history returning to the absurdities and crass indoctrination of that age.

In Stalin’s Footsteps

As we have shown, Thatcher is trying to go down the path previously travelled by Stalin. In the name of uniting the Russian Empire, the most atrocious distortions of political and cultural history were imposed on the republics of the USSR. Also, in order to defend his dictatorship over the Communist Party, Stalin had to destroy all recollection in the public consciousness of earlier Bolshevik traditions. Bukharin is just now being rehabilitated by Russian historians. It will be interesting to see whether they start to discuss his ABC of Communism, in which Bukharin and Preobrazhensky argued that communism entailed the abolition of money. Trotsky (the butcher of Krondstadt. who deserves no kindly memories from socialists) is still a virtual non-person in Russian history books.

In Zimbabwe, which calls itself a "socialist state", textbook writers are now doing their best to distort what socialism really means. This is very useful for the Mugabe government: if children learn from history that “socialism" has always been the kind of state-capitalist scenario presided over by Mugabe, then they will be less likely to resist against such rule. Consider this description of Stalin’s rule in Russia, as published in a contemporary Zimbabwean history book for schoolchildren called People Making History:

Stalin called for greater sacrifices from the workers. He also introduced a system of higher pay for skilled workers. In spite of hardships, the USSR was able to develop its own heavy industries. Slowly the government also started building other factories to produce consumer goods. By the end of the second Five-Year Plan the Soviet Union's industrial production was the third highest in the world. Life slowly began to improve for the workers . . . Stalin's economic revolution was a great achievement.

That several million workers and peasants were killed for the sake of this development of Russian state capitalism is passed over in one sentence.

Whose History?

The past does not belong to the state. It is not the property of a class. In a quite awful pamphlet put out by the quite awful Centre for Policy Studies History in Peril—May Parents Preserve It (1987), Alan Beattie proposes the effective privatisation of history. In his view history should be put into the marketplace and that which buyers want to learn about should be promoted. Presumably, unprofitable history, like that concerning the lives and struggles of the poor and the weak, would ended up like disused coalmines—rich with resources, but untouched.

To some extent history is already privatised: if you want to publish a book about a theme which is not considered by the publishing elite to be "historically relevant” (relevance is a concept usually determined by book sales managers), then the book will not see publication or major distribution. Privatised history is bad. but nationalised history is no better. The state is making sure that it has a tight control over what subjects scholars are given to research in British universities. These controls are inevitably political, often quite transparently so. University history lecturers are having to watch their backs these days. In a period of harsh job-cutting it only takes a few rumours that you are putting unacceptable interpretations to students to make employment difficult. Students are also under threat: they need to fight hard for the better jobs, and that requires them to conform to what their paymasters want them to think. If it is true that ten or twenty years ago universities, polytechnics and sixth-form colleges were places where young workers could take time to open their minds to new ideas, these days they do so at their economic peril, and tend to feel unable to do so at all. Thee tyranny of the market strikes again.

As workers we can have no greater weapon in our struggle against the bosses than knowledge. Understanding history is to us as powerful as all the filthy weapons that our class enemies can muster to defend their minority power. Once we see that history is about people—people who are just like us—making changes to their material environment, we can make the most conscious change of all: that of bringing society under social control. That is the greatest and noblest task which history places before us. and no amount of distortion or persecution by our class enemies will stop socialists from pursuing that task, inspired by the history of class-conscious workers who have struggled before we were born.

Steve Coleman

Letter to the Editors: Is socialism practical (1989)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is socialism practical?

Dear Editors,

Your principles are excellent but their implementation in the foreseeable future is, I’m afraid, impracticable. May I make two points in this regard?

First, you say that goods will be distributed according to needs. How would that need be assessed? Or would assessment not be necessary because goods would be available in any quantity, at any time, to anybody? If that were the case, then an increased production of goods would be imperative, which raises the question of "to what level?" From which follows the setting of a standard of living throughout the world. The task of satisfying such a high demand would be unimaginable and would surely be impossible at the level of the Western industrial states, or anything like it. What would the people in those countries do when they found that their standard of living was reduced?

My second point concerns the increased production necessary under my first point. We already complain, with every justification, that growth (i.e. increased production) involves ever-increasing pollution. There seems to be no readily available solution of that problem which, surely, your actions would make worse. How would you solve it?

W. F. Whitehead, 

Burnley

Reply:

In socialism, a society of production for use with free access to the means of life, an individual's needs will be determined by individuals themselves. They are, after all, best placed to do so!

The revolutionary change to socialism will require a majority of workers consciously and democratically deciding that this is in their interest as a class. They will appreciate that plans and preparations need to be made before the change-over from capitalism to socialism to ensure a smooth transition to production for use and free access. Capitalism is run from top to bottom by the working class (the employing class having long ago become economically redundant). As workers we have the knowledge and skills, and have developed the means of production to the level needed for the implementation of socialism. All that is lacking is political consciousness and the determination to win control of the machinery of the state to convert the means of life from private and state ownership to common ownership by the whole of society.

The gathering of information and projections of likely demand for goods and services should present few difficulties. For example, the development of the "bar code” system in retailing could easily be adapted to measure trends and facilitate distribution and to assess likely future needs. The larger the number covered by such estimates the smaller the effects of any sudden or unforeseen fluctuations.

Certainly, it would be one of the first tasks of a socialist society to increase the amount of goods produced to ensure enough for all. You doubt whether this can be achieved. We think your doubts are unjustified. A report by the World Commission on Environment and Development was published in 1987 entitled Our Common Future (the Brundtland report). In it were quoted the UN Industrial Development Organisation estimates that, for the consumption of manufactured goods in developing countries (the "Third World") to be raised to current industrial country levels, world industrial output would have to be increased by 2.6 times. But even under capitalism, with its production restricted to what can be sold at a profit, the output of goods increased by seven times between 1950 and 1987. Freed from the constraints of the profit motive and with the ending of the waste of the world's resources represented by armaments, banking, buying and selling and other such activities, socialism will have little difficulty in producing sufficient wealth to enable the whole of the world's people to live in comfort and decency.

Nor is your fear well-founded that the increased production necessary to do this will result in increasing pollution. Manufacturing industry is already implementing pollution control measures where it pays it to do so. A 1984 OECD survey concluded that expenditure on environmental measures over a period of twenty years had positive effects on the capitalist economy. According to the Brundtland report, "the benefits, including health, property and ecosystem damage avoided . . . have generally exceeded costs”. Clearly we have the knowledge and techniques to avoid environmental pollution—only capitalism's drive for profit prevents their immediate implementation. However, if in socialism it can be demonstrated that a productive process cannot be operated without unacceptable damage to the environment (for example, nuclear fission energy production) then it will have to be abandoned and alternatives developed in its place.

Finally, you ask how would we solve this problem. We do not exist as a political party to try to solve within capitalism the problems that it generates. We exist as a party to be used by the working class to win control of political power for the sole purpose of abolishing capitalism and establishing socialism. We cannot by minority, or "vanguard", action do it for you. If you agree with our principles then we invite you to join with us in the urgently necessary task of spreading socialist ideas. Your efforts can then help bring socialism into the "foreseeable future”.

Editors.

The Decline of the Music Hall (1956)

From the February 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

In his boyhood, this writer went often to the Palace. No royal residence this; it was in the High Street, and men sold hot potatoes and chestnuts outside. Inside, it was all plush and pilasters. cherubs and chandeliers, with three gold-painted balconies receding one above another into the incredibly high domed roof. The higher you went the cheaper it was, from two shillings in the front stalls to fourpence in the gallery, where the seats were wooden steps and the tickets metal discs. There, his young blood chilled at "Sweeney Todd"; heard and saw Harry Champion, Kate Carney and Vesta Victoria, and joined in choruses which now are almost folk-songs—“Any Old Iron," “Waiting at the Church.” and “Nellie Dean."

The Palace was a roaring music-hall in the days before the wireless and the talkies. Now it is near-derelict. By itself, that might mean little: there are derelict churches, but-the mumbo-jumbery goes on. In this case, however, a minor epoch in social life has come to an end. Indeed, it had ended before the last few unsuccessful attempts to keep the Palace open with repertory, bands and nude shows. Along with the Palace, fifty others in London are boarded-up or become cinemas now: the music-hall, once the great working-class entertainment, is dead.

Fifty years ago there were seventy of them in London, and a comparable number in the big provincial cities and in Paris and New York. In addition, there were a good many local theatres providing stuff which had a clear relationship to the music-hall—domestic comedy, melodrama, and such pieces de resistance as Lawson’s “Humanity," in which an entire room (furniture, doors, pictures, and, of course, piles of crockery) was smashed nightly. Today there are not more than a dozen variety theatres in London, and the decline has been similar elsewhere.

Chief among the immediate causes is, of course, the rise of the cinema. In 1914 moving pictures were a novelty, but by the end of the war they were an American industry with a ready market in Britain. That in itself was not catastrophic to the music-hall, however. In the nineteen-twenties most cinemas were small and anything but Regal, Majestic or Super (at one bearing the last name you sat on wooden forms, and the pictures blurred when trains went by), films flourished. undoubtedly, but older people were prejudiced against them and the higher-income groups looked down on them.

The catastrophe was the coming of talking pictures. Within a year of their arrival, bigger and better cinemas were going up all over Britain; the first victims of the talkies, in fact, were the small picture-houses—either gobbled up or pushed out of business by the syndicates. The new cinemas’ splendour, in every architectural style from Byzantine to Classical Revival, put the old Palace in the shade. And admission was cheap: bear in mind that talkies arrived in Britain in 1929, at the beginning of the slump. Mass unemployment may have contributed a great deal to cinema-addiction. For threepence or fourpence you could not merely buy a dream; you could sit for several hours in warmth and comfort (some cinemas even gave cups of tea in the afternoons).

The reasons for the music-hall's decay go deeper, however. The appearance of a new social pursuit does not necessarily mean the decline of another. It may be an addition, not an alternative. The rise of television, for example, has not ousted the cinema, which in 1955 showed increases in admissions and takings over previous years. What has passed is not a form of entertainment but the social pattern of which it was part—the sort of life which produced music-halls and the social consciousness which was expressed in them.

The music-hall was not an off-shoot of the theatre: it had different roots and a different function. It originated simply as tavern entertainment, the singing of cheerful songs with choruses for everyone to join in. Because public houses were centres of social life, popular entertainment remained in them; the more so since the upper class made “serious” music and the theatre its own amusements. Thus developed the “free-and-easy,” where a chairman gave order to the proceedings but they remained an accompaniment to eating and drinking.

The music-hall as such began when public houses made special accommodation for entertainment—"saloon theatres,” where the audience ate, drank and smoked through it all. In the mid-nineteenth century there were frequent prosecutions for presenting bits of drama and opera, those being outside the licensed province of the saloons; when the restrictions and prosecutions ended, music-halls on the theatre pattern began to be built. Most music-hall buildings date from between 1880 and 1900.

In one sense, the decline of the music-hall could be said to have begun then, with the setting-up of the foot-light barrier and the performers becoming highly-paid artistes. In fact, however, the old traditions persisted. There was still a lot of drinking in music-halls, though it had to be done outside the auditorium (according to accounts, the appearance of a weak turn would provoke a wholesale exodus to the bars); conviviality remained the keynote, and performers used the same material for years, knowing that their audiences expected and wanted to join in long-familiar songs.

The essence of the music-hall was what the modern entertainments industry calls “audience participation.” That was not merely a matter of singing choruses and shouting responses; it involved the whole of the music-hall’s material. The performers had the same working-class background as the audiences (respectable people 60 years ago would rarely let their sons and daughters go on the ordinary stage, let alone the music-halls): Harry Champion was not a man who “did” Cockney songs but a real, raucous, Cockney-speaking Cockney. Their humour was less devised than distilled from everyday life in pub, street and kitchen; so, too, their sentiment.

Neither the humour nor the sentiment goes down today, of course. Both came from a recognition of common (often earthy) joys and misfortunes. Albert Chevalier personating the old man rescued from the workhouse and singing “My Old Dutch ” brought tears to the eyes of strong men—because the separation of husband from wife in the workhouse was all too often the fate of the old. Something similar can be said of almost every music-hall song. They celebrated food and drink, made wry humour out of nagging wives and perfidious husbands, were sentimental over illness, absence and death.

For various reasons, that background faded and when it had happened the music-hall was dead. The State assumed more and more responsibility for children, the ill and the old. Popular newspapers and magazines pushed ideas of genteelness at the newly board-school taught public; the man who had met his doom at Trinity Church kept quiet about it. And beer-drinking diminished, as public houses ceased to be centres of social life; with it, the scenes and episodes which were its consequences.

The decline of the music-hall is part of the disintegration of community life which has taken place in this century. There is nothing communal about the cinema: everybodv comes in and goes out at a different time from everybody else, appreciation is individual, and the performance goes on regardless of the audience's response. A good many people, in fact, scarcely go to see the film at all (at least one cinema in East London before the war had double seats for the amorously inclined). The cinema is entertainment for a society congested with lonely individuals, where life is too split-up and “private" to allow either the communal enjovment or the common recognition of poverty and misfortune from which the music-hall drew its vigour.

Mention is often made of a seeming loss of vitality from everyday life in the last 25 or 30 years. George Orwell, in “The Road to Wigan Pier,” refers to a “Punch” cartoon of the nineteenth century in which a bunch of street-boys are saying: “ 'Ere comes a swell! Let's frighten 'is ’oss!” and comments that nowadays “they would be much likelier to hang round in vague hopes of a tip.” The music-hall of not so many years ago would provide much more food for that contention, when the audiences were uninhibited in their reactions to performers. The writer once heard a character actor break off a Shakespeare declamation to say: “Yes, and if I come up there you won’t be so — clever, my lad!”

The real point, however, is that so much of former communal activity and responsibility for living has now been handed over to authority-bearing specialists. It used to be the poor that helped the poor: now it is the State. Similarly, former objects of common concern, sentiment and indignation are now the subjects of State ministration. “Standing up for one’s rights” nowadays means writing letters of complaint to the right quarters.

It is too easily taken for granted that the days of the music-hall were “bad old days” (except by those who assume the very opposite because “a pound was a pound,” as if everyone really did have five times as much money before 1914). Obviously there is not much to be said for drunkenness, street fights and so on that were common sights, and still less to be said for the workhouse system of those days. What is overlooked is that the breaking-up of community life has created different sorts of problems. A good deal is heard today about the increase in incidence of mental and nervous diseases, but few people ask why it is happening.

One reason, at least, is that the atomizing of social life frustrates one of man’s greatest needs—for recognition and acceptance by his fellows. Twentieth-century civilization is an unsatisfactory world for most of the people in it, largely for that reason. In spite of the mechanization of work and leisure, neither gives much satisfaction to most men and women: the mass frustration and lack of fulfilment implicit in 99 out of a 100 films and novels is itself a condemnation of modem civilization.

The first object of social organization is the satisfaction of people’s needs: that is what first brought men out of caves and trees to form tribes and communities. Our society does not do that. Indeed, it does not aim at doing it: it places sale and profit above all other things, and makes commodities of the means of satisfying needs. The world represented by the music-hall had many undesirable features: because ours is in some ways different, that does not mean it is in many ways better.

Robert Barltrop

Time running out, say scientists (1989)

From the September 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

   Humans would have to make wide-reaching changes in attitude and lifestyles quickly if they are to survive the changes begun by pollution and deforestation. scientists told an Auckland symposium at the weekend.
   Scientists and researchers said the human race might die out without a new spirit of co-operation and collectivism. They said it was becoming increasingly likely that the planet would reorganise its systems to rid itself of pollution, the greenhouse effect, and ozone depletion. While the planet would survive, there was a fair chance the human race would not, they said.

So opened a news item that appeared on 27 March in the Wellington newspaper The Dominion under the heading "Scientists issue 'last chance' warning". Professor John Morton was quoted as saying that it looked as if humanity was likely to fail while another lecturer. Edward Goldsmith, was equally pessimistic. Economic and industrial policies, he said, had caused "the most terrible soil erosion and deforestation and were altering the ozone layer and climates", adding that “if our policies remain unchanged there is no question about it. there is no way man can survive another forty years".

The seriousness of the threat facing the human race right now needs no further comment. What does is the implication of the comments of the scientists that "policy" is the problem and that “policies" are the cure. Despite commendable scientific endeavour in their special disciplines, they have yet to apply it to humanity in general. What we have is a particular system of society which has evolved from the relatively short historical period of private property society that is in its closing stages.

Far from the policies of governments dictating the way in which wealth is produced and distributed, it is in fact the reverse. Policies are dictated by the world-wide system of capitalism. A way to look at this is to think of a boat being tossed on the waves of the ocean, the boat is the human race and the ocean is the market system (the buying and selling of goods).

Goods are produced for sale and not for direct consumption to satisfy human needs. The competition to sell goods causes a constant vicious circle which goes like this: Profits falling due to overproduction — introduce new technology to reduce costs (spend a large proportion of profits on new capital) — sell goods in larger quantities by undercutting competitors' prices because of reduced costs — competitors forced to introduce new technology — back to the same situation where started — introduce more technology, expand capital base.

The incessant drive to maximise profits means that enterprises generally will strive to reduce costs. The disposal of wastes is a large cost to enterprises, and they will try to do it as cheaply as possible — they will bury it in trenches, pump it into the waterways, exhaust it into the air. and a variety of other polluting methods. This is not from any malicious intent but because competition forces this upon them.

Often because of political pressures governments will try and legislate to prevent pollution. In some cases this has worked, but more often it is ineffectual. Also, to worsen the problem, enterprises and governments when faced with a choice of raw materials and producer goods are forced to take the least expensive route, again due to competition. This often means that the more environmentally harmful substances are used.

To sum up, we are faced with the most serious problem ever to confront the human race next to the nuclear war threat, and workers are continuing to support a system of society which is the basic cause of both problems.

If the scientists were forced to sit down and apply their techniques of scientific investigation to human society and its evolution. they would come up with only one answer: the establishment of a system of society where production will be for direct use, goods and services will be free to all, and where all will have a direct democratic input because they are social equals. Only then can we make rational decisions concerning production and our environment without the shackles of the market system. But then it is up to us and not the scientists to establish this system.

Dave Tildesley
World Socialist Party of New Zealand

Workers dig garbage in Philippines (1989)

From the September 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Smokey Mountain in Tondo, Metro-Manila, is a mountain of garbage. It is the largest of several open dumps that receive the 2,700 tons of trash per day produced by the highly urban province of Metro-Manila. It is also the home of thousands of workers, many of them children, who make a living from what is thrown away by others. Along the nearby Honorio Lopez Boulevard there are hundreds of shops whose line of business is recyclable junk, ranging from bottles to paper, and from hardware to scrap metal.

Garbage is first searched by street scavengers, who push carts around residential districts and search garbage cans. Many of them work at night in order to reach the garbage cans before the garbage collectors, who collect during the day. The garbage is first searched by the garbage collectors themselves. Only afterwards does the garbage reach the dumps. The workers who live and work in Smokey Mountain consider themselves lucky, because scavenging is an honest living. There is a local saying: "While there is garbage. there is hope”.

Such a life would not exist if everything were free. However, for everything to be free, we first need to own the means of producing and distributing the things we need. The people who own these means (such as factories, farms, ships, etc), the capitalists, will only pay workers to operate them if the products can be sold at a profit. This is not because they are bad people, but because that is the only way they can remain capitalists, and therefore retain their comfortable life-style. If they were to give the products away, they would go bust, and a competitor would take over. There is nothing they can do. Only the workers have the power to change things.

So, workers dig garbage in order to find things to sell for money to pay for food while food is stockpiled in warehouses in the pursuit of profit. The price of that most basic food in the Philippines, rice, has soared There is no real shortage of rice. Rice distributing cartels have been hoarding it. The government has been forced to import rice from the USA to increase the supply on the market (and therefore bring the price down) in order to prevent food riots. At the same time there are many unemployed agricultural workers. Most of them move to Metro-Manila to find work, only to end up squatting in places such as Smokey Mountain. 

In a socialist world everything will be free, because you do not need to pay for something if you already own it. We will be able to choose to produce things with very little waste. We will be able to choose to process our waste in a clean environment. We will be able to make these choices because we will own and control the means for producing and distributing the things we will use. Smokey Mountain will fall, and never rise again.

Kaibigan

American Notes. (1932)

From the June 1932 issue of the Socialist Standard

Only a few years ago articles were appearing in the press of the U.S.A., informing all and sundry that there would be no more crises like there had been in the past. Lord bless you, No! The capitalists here had solved the problem, they had adopted a new method, known as mass production and standardisation. Wages were no longer to be based on the cost of production of the labour-power of the worker (in other words, the cost of enabling the wage-worker to be an efficient wealth producer and to keep him in that condition), they were now to be based on the worker’s output. The instalment plan was also boosted as a way to get rid of surplus products. Lots of propaganda was broadcasted for the wage-slaves’ especial benefit; we were given to understand that there were no classes in this great country and at the same time that any worker who had a little ambition and grit could get out of his class with very little effort.

Another sample of the same kind of piffle said that there are no classes here, that the workers are rapidly becoming capitalists themselves, directly aided by the older capitalists. No longer did the benevolent employers want all the profits. They were now anxious to hand some of it over to the workers, and advised them to buy a share or so of stock in the company employing them, to be paid, of course, out of their wages at so much per week. In some cases the wage-slaves were so ungrateful as not to care much for this great opportunity, and were frequently fired, since the employer disliked having unappreciative “partners" around. But it has been given out by a statistician that the shares thus held are like our American beer, something like one-half of 1 per cent, of the total shares issued. These shares do not give any control of the concerns, the holders having no voting rights.

Lately, the outlook has changed. Wage reductions have taken place to the extent of eleven or twelve billions of dollars, and the end is not yet in sight. Firms are still cutting their wages bill, and there is very little opposition being put up by the working class, as the labour market is very much in favour of the masters. These reductions have been going on in spite of all the talk that wages should not be reduced, that we cannot expect to have prosperity if the capitalists can’t get rid of their goods, and that if the workers’ wages are cut down they cannot buy back the products. But in spite of some capitalists seeing this contradiction, they have fallen into line with the rest and reduced wages.

In the Southern States, due to changed methods of farming, it is claimed that about six millions of people will have to give up this method of making a livelihood. They are petty farmers, share workers and croppers who* are finding that they cannot make a living and will be forced into wage-slavery. The income of these land operators is very low. In 1921 the average,-income of the Black farmer was 32 cents per day for each member of the family; renters, 14 cents; Black croppers, 18 cents; White croppers, 8 cents. The family income given for Chatham county, North Carolina, varied from $625 to $153 per year, making an average of $424 per year.

In these Southern states there is cheap power, and plenty of low-priced labour- power. The Chambers of Commerce of these States invite the capitalists to come South because of the attraction of cheap land, low taxes and easy labour laws. The State of Georgia, for instance, allows sixty hours’ work per week; no limit is put on the working day as long as the hours worked in any one week do not exceed sixty. These, and many other things, are called to the employer’s attention, in spite of the officials of capitalist concerns believing that wage reductions will worsen the depression. It is stated that factories have been opening up in the Southland at the rate of one every four days for the last five years. Here are some of the. firms that have established themselves in the South territory: Standard Oil, United States Steel, Proctor & Gamble, Goodrich and Goodyear Rubber Companies, Dupont Explosives. These and many more were listed in an article which stated that the rush down in this low-wage belt puts the Klondike gold rush in the shade. These companies know, if they do not take advantage of the conditions prevailing, others soon will, because of the larger profits expected. At the end of the year 1927, 67 per cent, of all the cotton goods in the United States was manufactured in Southern States.

In 1927, in 16 States known as Southern Territory, there were 37,350 manufacturing establishments, employing 1,679,798 workers, engaged in making more than 200 different products. In the United States as a whole, the manufacturing establishments were 191,866, with 8,353,793 workers: There is no doubt that there has been quite an increase in the South since 1927.

The wage paid by these new masters is considerably lower than the Northern wage-rate. The average rate in all industries, in Georgia, $702; Alabama, $884; Tennessee, $773 ; in North and South Carolina, $632 per year. Compare wages in the North: Massachusetts, $1,228 ; Pennsylvania, $1,382; Ohio, $1,448; for the United States as a whole, $1,300. These figures are taken from the Census of Manufacturers in 1927. It was there shown that the worker in the North is more productive than the worker of the South; that the difference in output was 7.2 per cent. But it cost the Pennsylvania employer $847 more wages to get this increase, thus leaving the advantage to the Southern field at the rate of 20.4 per cent. This is the magnet that is attracting the capitalists to the South.

Now, also, these companies do not have any unions to contend with, as this new crop of wage-slaves have not, as yet, had much experience in their new status. What they get in wages looks to them like a small fortune, the employers appear to them like great benefactors, and trade union organisers are given short shrift. They have no strikes to interfere with them. Even the staffs of the American Federation of Labour get from 10 to 20 per cent less wages than those in the North. So business is flocking to the low wage area in spite of the past assurances to the workers that a “high wage scale" would be maintained.

There is not much talk about high wages now. We hear that what is needed is cheaper goods, “so that the benefit to the consumers will be enlarged ”; this is to be the enticement to get the public to buy the surplus, the magic wand to induce the people to spend. All sorts of suggestions are being advocated here to get us out of the depression. The capitalists told us that high tariffs would solve the problem, so the tariffs were increased. Now we are told that high tariffs are one of the causes of the depression, and must be lowered. Prohibition is another red-herring that is being dragged out; we are told that if it were not for this law, if light wine and beer were allowed to come back, this would bring back prosperity. They forget that in other capitalist countries, where Prohibition is not the law, the crisis, also prevails. A Bond issue of five billions is being suggested, to carry on public works, but is not receiving much support at the present, since this would mean higher taxes, and we are told that what is needed, is lower taxes.

How are the workers reacting to the changed conditions here? They are looking for all kinds of solutions to the fix they find themselves in. Hunger marches are taking place, some of them organised by the Communist Party. The latest one was led by a sky pilot. Of course, the parson’s gang was looked upon as being made up of good, loyal American citizens, and considerable discretion was shown in handling them by the powers that be. While the other marches were allowed, the authorities did not view them with so much favour. The slaves are ready to back up any scheme that promises to solve their problems; unemployed insurance, the lifting of Prohibition, lower tariffs, trade with Russia, almost anything but the real solution. The Communist Party here is making a great noise about trade with Russia, and about the dole for the unemployed. They think that if they can get the wage-slaves to rally for the dole and other reforms, then these slaves will be good material and can be led to fight for Socialism at the behest of the leaders. They have not yet learned the lesson that capitalist politicians can advocate all these reforms and use them to get into office. In fact, at present they are certainly in a more favourable position to get into office than the Communist Party is. Like the reformist “Socialist Party” here, when Liberal candidates were put up by the capitalist parties, the "Socialist” ranks were depleted. This has occurred more than once, and each time we heard great cries front these so-called Socialists that “the capitalists have stolen our thunder." To get elected on a real Socialist platform is far from the minds of the leaders of either of these parties. What they are after is something to get them into office as quickly as possible. Having their ears to the ground, listening to what the workers are concerned about, they put these things in their programmes. Thus they catch the unwary, and to them what the hell else matters as long as they can get to the pie counter on the shoulders of the backward workers. The results of this kind of “tactics” have been amply demonstrated by the Labour Party in England, Social-Democratic Party in Germany, Socialist Party of America, and others elsewhere. Instead of accomplishing, what they claim, the effect is just the opposite; workers lose interest when they see that these parties, on getting into power, are as helpless as the openly capitalist parties in face of the social problem.

There can be only one solution to this problem as far as the workers are concerned, and that is a change of ownership of the productive forces, from the present form to one where they will be held in common by and in the interest of Society. All else is of no account.

Taffy Brown 

              (Workers’ Socialist Party, U.S.A.)

Crime - legal and illegal (2003)

From the May 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Crime, according to the Collins Dictionary, is “an act or omission punishable by law”. This definition is more or less what you would expect to find but nevertheless it's somewhat chilling. Nowhere is there any requirement for this “act or omission” to be either benevolent or malevolent; pro-human or anti-human. It simply has to be “prohibited by law”.

So what actually is “law”? When it comes down to basics, law is what any dominant authority actually deems to be law. Putting it crudely, if a yob wielding a screwdriver accosts you in an alleyway demanding possession of your wallet, he is effectively defining the law, albeit an extremely localised and fleeting version of it, and failure to comply, a “crime” punishable in the obvious manner.

Naturally the law undergoes a process of considerable tarting up as it rises through the scale until at national level, recorded in masses of leather-bound volumes, endorsed by an array of pompous blokes in wigs, ermine, mitres and crowns, and further supported by a compliant media, the whole idea of law and crime, or rather, statutory crime, can be readily presented to the population at large as somehow legitimate, permanent and operating in everyone's best interests.

Since the dawn of civilisation humans have lived in a variety of types of society – slave, feudal and, of course, currently capitalist. These societies have however had one thing in common; they have all featured minority ownership of the prevailing wealth of that society. Naturally, they have also featured minority control, via the law and the machinery of government. Needless to say, our metaphorical yob, suitably tooled-up, is lurking constantly in the background to concentrate the mind of the non-owning majority on compliance.

Legalised robbery

In modern capitalist society, ownership of the land, factories, transport, etc. is concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority, the capitalist class, comprising around 5 percent of the population. In essence this minority employs the other 95 percent, the working class, to produce wealth and otherwise run society in its entirety. By paying them a monetary wage which represents only part of the wealth they produce, and creaming off the surplus for themselves, the capitalists maintain a privileged lifestyle whilst the working class endures varying degrees of poverty, both relative and absolute.

You may think that this situation is a bit unfair. But scrutinise the statute books until you're blue in the face and you'll find that it's all perfectly legal. But try, if you dare, to redress the balance a little; pinch a few paperclips or whatever from your workplace or life a couple of designer garments from a boutique, and you'll have those selfsame statute books flung in your face. Shock, horror, you will have committed a crime.

So there we have it. On the one hand, the everyday ongoing, but legal theft perpetrated by the capitalist class on the working class, and statutory crime, which likewise is the everyday ongoing reaction from the working class to try to claw back some of its losses; to make up its wages, so to speak. Unfortunately at present there is no class consciousness informing this, and the victims will all too frequently be fellow members of the working class.

Numerically speaking, big heists such as the Great Train Robbery and the Millennium Dome Diamond Raid are rare. In reality, petty larceny is very much the norm.

According to crime figures, around 95 percent of all statutory crime is property-related. This breaks down very roughly as follows: 25 percent theft from or of motor vehicles, 25 percent burglary, 30 percent other forms of theft – fraud, forgery, shoplifting etc., and 15 percent criminal damage to property. The remaining five percent comprises four percent violence against the person and one percent sexual offences.

The capitalist class in Britain numbers around 3 million people, only a small proportion of whom are in the public eye. Via the media, we peasants are entreated to revere and adulate our titled aristocracy and royalty for the fine example they set us, and to respect and emulate the new-wealth, self-made brigade – the “entrepreneurs”, the “innovators”, the “wealth-creators”, the “providers of jobs”.

What incredible effrontery. What appalling self-congratulatory arrogance. These philanthropists are after one thing and one thing only – a fast buck. Bear this in mind at all times.

Aside from all this, the overwhelming bulk of the capitalist class are unsung and anonymous. They are the inheritors of old wealth; the descendants of medieval merchants, New World traders, eighteenth and nineteenth century industrial capitalists, etc. – the swindlers, slave-dealers and tyrants of a bygone age. They may well, for the most part, be perfectly decent people; they can hardly, after all, be condemned for the particular environment into whey they happen to have been born. One thing however, is certain. If they, along with the other members of their class, collectively disappeared tomorrow from the fact of the Earth, the buses would still run, the factories and farms still produce, the hospitals still function. All as normal. These people are non-productive, surplus to requirement, useless. They are economic parasites.

The capitalist system is legalised theft; real crime, through and through. The working class is employed solely to facilitate the profit process. Where profits cannot be realised because of the prevailing phase of the economic cycle, workers are thrown on the scrap heap, goods stockpiled, food destroyed, houses left unbuilt and land uncultivated. As a result, we have massive and ongoing worldwide deprivation, starvation, disease, premature death.

Again, when rival groupings of capitalists find themselves in conflict over colonies or raw materials, the working class is mustered to resolve the situation. Murdering or being murdered in your country's cause is perfectly lawful. Unleash a missile or bomb on some defenceless city slaughtering countless thousands of innocents and you'll have a nice shiny medal pinned on your chest. Kill one person, back on Civvy Street, in a momentary act of anger or desperation and they'll lock you up for life.

Ninety-five percent of statutory crime, as already indicated, is property-related. The great bulk of the residual five percent (violence against the person and sexual, offences), can be attributed to the everyday stresses and alienations that are part and parcel of our existence in capitalist society. We are conditioned into seeing our fellow workers, with whom, economically, we have everything in common, as rivals; as competitors for jobs and houses.

Where those fellow workers also happen to possess characteristics that proclaim the greater diversity of our species, be it skin pigmentation, accent, age, gender, sexual proclivity, disability; whatever then they are all the more readily identifiable as potential targets for abuse or violence. The real enemy, capitalism itself, sits unchallenged, safely clear of the firing line.

Social behaviour

The system is almost entirely responsible for statutory crime. In socialist society, common ownership and production solely for use would prevail. There would be no legalised theft; there could not be legalised theft. Likewise, almost all statutory crime would fade away. Theft would not exist. What would there be to steal? Your own property?

People will, naturally, retain their capacity to discuss, disagree and quarrel. Likewise, romantic creatures that we are, situations will periodically arise where two persons desire the same person or partner; the Eternal Triangle as it's rather prosaically known. Consequently, tempers may flare; fists (and handbags) may be brandished. Inevitably therefore, there will be occasional, recourse to acts of violence and accordingly there will, be a need for procedures to restrain the protagonists and address the causes.

Others, too, will suffer from mental illness, brain damage, simply draw an unlucky ticket in the genetic lottery and behave, not criminally, but non-socially.

So within socialist society there will, we suggest, be regulation of sorts and maybe even places of detention. But will the inmates find themselves banged up and slopping out? Surely not. We would think that their very inability to participate appropriately in society would be sufficient reason to extend to them the finest care, compassion and support that we can muster.

Henri Charrière's book Papillon is a very moving true-life account of life in the penal colonies of French Guyana. During one of his several escapes Charrière lived with a Venezuelan Indian tribe, the Goajira, and he recounted with great warmth, their uncomplicated communistic lifestyle, describing how they lived with a commonality of purpose, without money, without judges, without laws. The barbaric punishments meted out by “civilised” Europeans to their miscreant fellows would have been totally beyond their comprehension.

We suggest that it will be pretty much like this in socialist society. Although it will be global as opposed to tribal, people will still live in small localised communities and, freed from capitalism's physical and mental shackles, will spontaneously look out for one another. It is after all our nature to do so. What need will there be for a mass of laws to oversee this process?

Capitalism's politicians are a contemptible and shameless bunch; none more so than our current messenger-boy-in-chief, Tony Blair. Nevertheless, we are indebted to the dear chap for providing the grand finale for this article. During the last general election, he chuntered endlessly on about being “Tough on crime; tough on the causes of crime”.

Socialists would readily endorse these sentiments but would take things just a little bit further than his own wishy-washy, and by no means original, list of measures. If you really want to be “Tough on crime; tough on the causes of crime”, the solution is very simple – abolish capitalism and establish socialism.

Andrew Armitage

Why do we allow it? (1989)

From the August 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sometimes I’m surprised that I've managed to exist on this planet for forty years. Things may not always have been easy, but compared with a lot of others I haven’t suffered any great drama or personal tragedy during that time. It might be said that the worst part of my daily round is having to go out every weekday to earn the money that keeps us somewhere between being poor and rich. A fairly average life really.

I don’t take much notice of what the media says. Although I have to obtain hard news of what's going on in the world from somewhere, I know that the media is owned and controlled by the small minority who own most of the wealth, and so I only ever believe half of what I hear or see. It's my opinion that forty year's slog under capitalism tends to make you a bit hard and a bit cynical. I'm not an unfeeling human being, but I've been reading about disasters and catastrophes for so long that it tends not to have any effect any more.

One day in April, I was browsing through the Guardian when I came across the photograph. I was surprised by my response to it. The intense emotions it aroused are with me still. A toddler, a girl of twenty-three months, stares out at me from the newspaper. She's holding a half-eaten apple. A doll lies beside her. She is a very pretty girl. Her body is covered in shrapnel. Her right foot is missing. Her name is Adele. and she is Lebanese. She was wounded when her grandparents' house was hit by an artillery shell. Her eyes are old beyond her years.

Those of us who reside in this sceptred isle, this blessed plot, this England, are not on the whole an unsympathetic, uncaring load of citizens. But we have our own problems. After we've been at work all day it doesn’t leave much time to do things we like and want to do. Weekends pass so quickly. What wouldn't we give to be rich and employ some other poor sod to create our wealth for us! 430,000 people, the top one per cent, own 18 per cent of the UK's private wealth. The top 10 per cent own over half. 840,000 individuals, the top two per cent, own 80 per cent of company shares and 73 per cent of all land. I guess I was born to the wrong parents.

Belonging to the bottom 90 per cent means that your priorities tend to be different to those of the ruling class, that small minority who own the means of production and distribution. The building society owns the house: you'd have to have at least 30 million quid to even make no. 200 of Britain's richest two hundred, and my wages, like most people's, don't even stretch beyond the end of the week. So what option have you got? As a member of the vast majority whose only means of living is to sell the only thing they possess, their labour power, their ability to work, I suppose you’ll have to stick with the day job.

There are plenty of apologists for capitalism around to tell me how fortunate I am to be living in a free and democratic enterprise culture. I could be a black in South Africa oppressed by apartheid. I could be a famine victim in Sudan. I could be an exploited worker in South Korea. I could be trying to survive in Argentina with its forty thousand per cent inflation rate. I could be a dispossessed Aborigine in Australia. I could be subject to political repression in Eastern Europe. I could be subject to state torture and murder in Latin America. I could be a bomb attack victim of the IRA in Northern Ireland. I could be a dead student in China. I could be living in a cardboard box on the streets of London. I could be a little girl with her right foot blown off.

The world has been called a “global village". The prevailing system of society throughout the world is capitalism, albeit in different stages of development. In 1683 Montanari wrote in Della Moneta:

Intercourse between nations spans the whole globe to such an extent that one may almost say all the world is but a single city in which a permanent fair comprising all commodities is sold.

Capital knows no boundaries. Its concern is not with the quality of life for the vast majority who own only their ability to sell their labour power in order to live. Its concern is the ruthless pursuit of profit irrespective of the damage done to the planet and to people's lives.

Why in the world do we continue to put up with it? Why do we, who use our physical and mental abilities to run capitalism for the benefit of the capitalists, put our faith in leaders who promise us the earth, but only after it has been devastated by capitalism? Why, when capitalism is based upon the economic exploitation of a majority by a minority, do we take pride in “paying our way”, “living within our means", “never owing anyone a cent”? Why, when the only thing between us and socialism, a system of society based upon production for need, not profit—a wageless, moneyless, classless, stateless, leaderless society—is a lack of understanding and desire for socialism on the part of the majority of the working class, do we deny ourselves real freedom? Freedom from hunger, poverty, want and oppression.

Why do we allow a minority to kid us, to con us, to brainwash us into believing that capitalism is the best of all possible worlds, when the evidence of our daily lives tells us otherwise? How many more Adeles have to ask us, why in the world did this happen to me? When are we going to supply not the answer, but the solution?

Dave Coogan

Between the Lines: Is Russia Socialist? (1989)

The Between the Lines column from the July 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is Russia Socialist? 

Take a Russian journalist, a British one. a couple of Russian dissidents (one of whom spent fifteen years in a psychiatric hospital for wanting to be free of the state dictatorship), a Labour MP (who used to be a Stalinist) and a Stalinist who still is a Stalinist, and put them in a studio for three hours. Let them talk. Now, whoever put the vodka there to make the setting complete was not amongst the most far-thinking persons to be found working for Channel Four. After two and a half hours of After Dark (midnight. 3 June. C4) Denis Healey and Vladimir Bukovsky were like two empty bottles of undiluted alcohol waiting to get completely smashed.

Intoxication aside (and who is to say that it did not benefit the forthrightness of the discussion?). this was a TV debate which should have taken place fifty years ago and saved everybody a lot of wasted time since. The Russian state-capitalist dictatorship was put on trial and found guilty. Its crime is that an arrogant, centralised bureaucratic elite has dominated a population of unfree and exploited wage slaves, and done so in the fraudulent name of socialism. While Stalinists have had the audacity to sit in the West talking about the liberated citizens of Eastern Europe, "the liberated citizens" have been living as wage slaves, too frightened to complain or combine in case they are arrested for crimes against the state. Will glasnost change anything? To expect tyrants to democratise themselves is a fantasy. Despite the great optimism exhibited by the British contributors towards Gorbachev's reforms, the Russian guests were less impressed. Political dictatorships don't die, less still do they commit suicide: they must be destroyed. The fate of the brave young workers of China was showing that as the programme was being broadcast.

After three hours of fascinating and often penetrating live talk about the nature of life under the Russian Empire and the possibilities of change, not one contributor adequately addressed the question of whether all of this misery was actually socialism. Healey, the ex-Stalinist. said that it wasn't and Doyle, the current Stalinist, said that it was. but neither explained why. If only there had been a socialist present to expose the state capitalist nature of the Russian regime and to point out how Leninist statism inevitably creates such dictatorships over the working class. Instead, we had to be content with the satisfying sight of seeing Bukovsky telling Healey to shut his mouth. Pour that man another vodka—with my compliments.

Laughing at people

Ruby Wax did a documentary about Russia a few months ago. It was around the same time that she did the programme about the ridiculously empty people to be found lounging their lives away on the beaches of Miami In fact, most of what Ruby Wax has ever had to say has been about the stupidity of rather pathetic characters who are trotted before the camera to make us laugh.

Her new series, Wax On Wheels (10.30 pm. C4). is of this sort: Ruby tours round Britain looking for weirdo workers to tell their life stories in three and a quarter minutes while Wax makes faces at them. She has talked to a football hooligan and a whore and a man who lives in a hovel in Scotland so that he can find spiritual meaning—or something. The show works on the basis of the assumption that everyone wants to be on the telly, even if it's only to be set up for public ridicule. It is a horrible reflection of the alienated lives which so many workers lead that the assumption is probably true: to be seen clapping in the audience of Wogan is probably the ambition of more than a few workers—to be allowed to speak is a luxury to be bought at any human cost. So. rather tasteless TV producers have no shortage of willing victims to choose from when they are going for easy laughs.

In fairness, Ruby Wax is a witty executioner of personalities. But the fashion for this kind of insult-TV is growing, and in general the insulters are neither witty nor decent. On ITV there is a show in which workers are invited on to reveal their secret desires. One man wanted to drive a Rolls Royce. His dream came true, with a chauffeur's hat to wear, just in case he ran away with himself. A woman came on who wanted to have a bath in champagne with a rugby team. After her there came a woman whose secret desire was to be chained to a railway track. I switched off at that point.

No doubt there are long waiting lists of human targets pleading for the chance to be allowed on the box to be ridiculed. The ones who don't make it on to this show might stand a chance on Cilia Black's Blind Date where the proles are invited to line up to be abused by a TV-engineered "partner'' of the opposite sex. At 1 a.m. on Saturday mornings ITV has reached the nadir of humiliation-TV with an uncouth lout called James Whale whose principal talent seems to be the kind of abuse which would make the average fifth former seem like Oscar Wilde by comparison. Three weeks ago he had on a man from the Lord's Day Observance Society. As one watched the man undergoing his three minute ridicule session (three minutes is about the full life span of the average TV abuse slot) it became clear that, however outdated and absurd the ideas of this man are—and they are—, that is no excuse to insult him in public for having the honesty to stand up for them.

The notion that TV has a right to make fools out of people with something serious to say. or to expose as fools those people who have little or no control over their lives, is yet another part of the capitalist culture which regards workers are affable and exploitable dummies, to be milked for money and then mocked for fun. A few hundred years ago they had public hangings where you could laugh at the misfortunes of the luckless wage slave. But with Japanese game shows and Jeremy Beadle, who needs to go out of the house for a good old laugh?

Steve Coleman

Austrian Democracy (1956)

From the January 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

In their political innocence or inexperience, a number of workers in a Vienna automobile factory left the “Socialist" - party - controlled Trade Union as a protest against the Union’s passive attitude to various grievances including a 50 per cent, increase of the city’s tramway and bus fares. Others distributed leaflets calling upon fellow-workers to join another union—with the result that the factory owners, supported by the "Socialist” trade union, sacked the malcontents. Is Vienna in Russia? No, but your confusion is pardonable for the reason that the city is called "red” Vienna, and that such things as victimising people for expressing opposite political views are thought to be typical only for countries behind the iron curtain. Let us further enlighten you and say that if such persecution does not happen here on a larger scale, it is because among the 100,000 State employees and workers of the huge “red” Vienna's municipal enterprises there are few innocent or foolhardy enough to risk their jobs, i.e., the only share of the country’s wealth that Capitalism has left them after centuries of struggle and technical progress. The mass of the workers at the Post-Office, on the State railways and other nationalized industries, on the municipal tramways and buses, in the electricity and gas works and the rest of the huge municipal profit-making concerns know that the much vaunted freedom of speech, of criticism and democracy, does not go so far as to allow open criticism of the State’s exploiting system to pass with impunity. Even though that punishment is not as severe as in "right to work’’—Russia where malcontents and those guilty of “subversive activity” are deported to forced labour camps, workers in our "free world” are wary of jeopardizing their jobs.

Let us hope that the victims, having probably been cured of their error of accepting the shadow for the substance of democracy, will now also have learned that, as far as the workers are concerned, the rest of the wordy professions of equality, freedom of association, independence and social justice are little more than illusions, deceit and fraud. .

As was only to be expected, the incidents at the automobile factory, while embarrassing to the Socialist Party., were a welcome opportunity to their opponents, who are not slow to make political capital out of it. The Federal Chancellor, whose party dealt that crushing blow to Austrian social democracy in 1934, now poses as the Lord Protector of democracy. He declined to attend the opening session of the Trade Union Congress that happened to be sitting in Vienna, "until this matter has been satisfactorily cleared up, until justice is done to the victims, and democracy restored ”!

As against this nauseating show of hypocrisy, another incident glaringly portrays the real attitude of governments towards the working class. It arose over the handling of affairs in connection with the execution of the State Treaty after the end of the Russian control over hundreds of large and small industrial enterprises. As is now common knowledge, the return of part of these Concerns was made subject to a payment of 150 million dollars to Russia in addition to a whole series of other heavy concessions (see SOCIALIST STANDARD for July 1955). With so much talk of Austria re-entering at last into possession of her patrimony (Austria for the Austrians, you know), and the ofher usual platitudes and patriotic tunes, the illusion is ever fostered that the country belongs to the people—all evidence to the contrary, as an for example their continued poverty—notwithstanding. In reality, the Concerns which had been seized as war-booty (German property) were owned by a bunch of international Capitalist investors. The American, British. Dutch interests in the Austrian oil fields and other industries are notorious, while the others are less widely known. Certainly not a particle of any of these sources of wealth belongs to the workers employed therein, and it must be a matter of perfect indifference to them whether the shareholders are Austrian or foreigners. Indeed, it would be hard for any foreign exploiter to beat German and Austrian Capitalists’ talents for organizing the extraction of surplus-value, i.e., profit, from other people’s labour.

Yet, a delegation of workers from the Austrian Fiat Automobile Works could be induced by labour leaders to go to the Finance-Ministry and demand the cancellation of a meeting of shareholders which was to formally sanction the re-transfer of the Italian Fiat’s 51 per cent, holding. Since the workers are generally acquiescing in a small clique owning and controlling all the means and instruments of wealth production and distribution, why— you may ask—should, they single out this particular Concern for their protestations? What difference would it make to them if the Fiat Works were even to renounce all their rights and titles to the factory in favour of Austria, i.e., the Austrian Capitalist State?

Of course it would make no difference to the slaves producing the goods, but the Austrian CAPITALISTS who have to pay 4,000 million Austrian Schillings to Russia for relinquishing their control over these Concerns, now fear that their money will all be “thrown out of the window." "What happens today with Austro-Fiat," the Arbeiter-Zeitung laments, “can to-morrow happen with dozens of other enterprises." In the end, they say, “ it would come to this that of all the German property for which 4 we * must pay 4,000 million to Russia, nothing is left to the Republic.** 44 We may only pay, but do not get anything for it.”

So the workers were mobilized, i.e., misused for and misled into some action (there was also a short strike) on behalf of their masters. How State employees fare under Capitalism, the railway, postal and all other workers know only too well. And as there can be no question of the Italian Fiat owners handing over to the WORKERS, it is clear that their position could not alter even one iota under any other transfer of property rights.

But, as already said, some of the workers having been persuaded that their interests were at stake, a delegation went to see the Finance Ministry to demand the cancellation of the shareholders' meeting. The reply of the State Secretary (a political rival of the S.P.) was not only a sharp refusal of the workers’ demand, but he added defiantly that he would do everything he could to ensure the holding of the meeting. He pointed out that the shares were rightly in the hands of the Italian Fiat group and that they could decide what was to be done. (The meeting has since been held.) At the same time the State Secretary bluntly told the workers’ delegates "to mind their own business.” Socialists will not be accused of holding briefs for Capitalists or their henchmen, but we must agree with this one, advising the workers to mind their own business. Their business is, of course, not to assist Capitalist cliques in fighting out their quarrels with one another, whether in State chancellories or on the battlefields, but to organize and vote for the removal of Capitalism and its managers, administrators and labour leaders, from the face of the earth.

Of the few freedoms that have not yet become mere illusions, the Right to Vote is the most important. With dependency on the employing class (private or State) for your means of livelihood, there can be no real democracy for you. Yet it is still enough, at least in the Western world, to lay the evil ghost that is haunting humanity, to exorcise the demon capital, to oust it from its nefarious rule, and to lay the foundations for a sane order of things: Socialism, whenever the people are ready and wish to . have it.

The working-class hold the overwhelming majority of the votes, and there can be no question of sacking or otherwise victimizing you for casting your vote AGAINST the continuation of the present barbaric system, and FOR revolutionary Socialism. By such action you can at the same time help your brothers behind the iron curtain to rid themselves from the Bolshevik octopus and nightmare.

Therefore, when you are again asked to vote, remember it is the most important thing in your lives! Only, to cast an intelligent vote, presupposes UNDERSTANDING of the functioning of the decrepit system under which you live—knowledge that will almost automatically introduce you to Socialism and answer the questions and doubts which may assail you, concerning its practicability. To disseminate and impart that essential knowledge, is the purpose of the S.P.G.B. and companion parties. Year in, year out, their members, pamphlets and periodicals, do their best to spread the message of Socialism.

Perusing some former editions of the SOCIALIST STANDARD, this writer chanced upon a Comrade’s "Christmas Carol" in last December’s issue, ending with the words with which I wish to end my to-day’s message:

"Understand . . . understand . . . understand”!

Rudolf Frank

Not people's power (1989)

From the June 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

A correspondent in The Philippines analyses the situation there three years after the coming to power of President Corazon Aquino.

A demonstration organized by the trade union organization KMU (Kilusang Mayo Uno, or First of May Movement) took place in Manila on March 30. Only a few hundred people turned up and so the march to Malacanang Palace, where President Aquino lives, was cancelled. Instead a rally was held in front of the Senate Building which was the assembly point and, later, at the offices of DOLE (Department of Labor and Employment) located nearby.

There were a few reporters present but no account of the demonstration was published in the next day's papers. If the demonstration had been violent maybe it would have been reported, but there was no violence at all. Nor were there any police around except for two soldiers at the entrance to the Senate Building. The demonstrators were trade unionists who had been shot at and whose fellow workers had been hurt or killed on picket lines. This should make those who believe that people are violent by nature think again.

Most of the demonstrators were workers from M.Greenfield Inc and Golden Taxicab Co in Manila. They were protesting against violence inflicted on trade unionists all over the country. They were also protesting against Senator Herrera's Bill. This Bill retains the anti-labor laws of the Marcos dictatorship. but also adds new ones. Strikes against "the national interest'' are to be forbidden. Picketed workplaces will be allowed to operate. Illegal strikers can be imprisoned for up to three years. Senator Herrera is the Secretary-General of the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (TUCP). The TUCP is a right-wing trade union organization set up during the Marcos dictatorship. It competes with the left- wing KMU for trade union recruits.

It is ironic that the KMU is attacking the "US-backed Aquino government" now because the KMU was one of several left-wing organizations that supported the Aquino coup against the Marcos dictatorship in February 1986. Since then the government has governed.

In November 1986 the KMU chairman Rolando Olalia was murdered. In January 1987, 19 people demonstrating for land reform were shot dead at Mendiola Bridge on the way to the presidential palace. Six of them were KMU members. In September 1987, the Secretary-General of the leftist umbrella group BAYAN (Bagong Alyansang Makabayan. or New Patriotic Federation), Lean Alejandro, was ambushed and killed. In 1988 President Aquino created the Citizens Armed Force Geographical Units (CAFGU). which are armed civilian reservists recruited to fight New People's Army (NPA) guerrillas and sympathisers. They are popularly known as local vigilante death squads. The NPA is the armed wing of the illegal Communist Party of the Philippines which is fighting to establish a state-capitalist regime in this country. Most of the cause-oriented groups, left-wing political parties, and trade unions affiliated to the KMU are labelled as "Communist infiltrated” by the military.

Task Force Detainees of the Philippines (TFDP). a church-based torture documentation group, claims that at least 12,120 persons have been victims of military action from March 1986 (Aquino's first month in power) to June 1988. Of these, 507 were “salvaged" (private political killings by right-wing soldiers, police or civilians). 149 kidnapped, 137 massacred, and 11,327 arrested and detained without trial. All of the organizations mentioned above which now are strong opponents of the Aquino government were strong supporters of Aquino during the February 1986 coup. Chrispin Beltran, the new KMU Chairman, was quoted as saying; “We say this is an undeclared state of martial law with a liberal facade”. 

It is not surprising that most people ignored the call to demonstrate on March 30. The experience of the last three years has made most people disillusioned and apathetic. Exploitation cannot be removed by changing a leader. Exploitation will end when we stop giving power to leaders and instead use our power for ourselves. Let us create a world-wide society where the production and distribution of the things we want are democratically controlled by us all. Let us not be well governed. Let us govern ourselves well.

Kaibigan