Not democratic (1970)

Book Review from the March 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Greek Tragedy, by Constantine Tsoucalas. Penguin. 6s.

THE Socialist Party of Great Britain has always argued that in places like Britain where there is a more or less democratic State — that is, where the state machine, including the armed forces, is under the control of a popularly-elected government — a Socialist majority can win power peacefully in an election.

Others (few of whom really share our view that there must be a Socialist majority before there can be Socialism) argue that the capitalists will never allow their rule to be overthrown by peaceful means.

The Greek Colonels’ coup in April 1967 seems, on the face of it, to give some validity to this argument. For here, a few days before the start of an election campaign which a radical democratic party was expected to win, the armed forces supported by the King and prominent businessmen imposed a military dictatorship.

However, a closer study of the facts shows that this coup does not disprove our proposition. Constantine Tsoucalas’ book clearly shows that Greece did not have a democratic State before 1967: there was a parliament though elections to it were often rigged, but even this had no control over the armed forces.

This was a legacy of British occupation after the war. By agreement with state-capitalist Russia. Greece (which had strategic importance for control over trade routes through the Eastern Mediterranean and over the oil fields of the Middle East) was assigned to British capitalism’s sphere of influence. The British government had been faced with a problem since the bulk of the armed men in the Greek resistance, who were set to take over when the German army left, were under “communist” leadership. Tsoucalas describes how the British government built up a rival military force out of the Royalists in the old Greek Army and even out of former collaborators. Their political puppets, on the other hand, were chosen from the pre-war liberals and republicans. Writes Tsocalas:

The double structure of power, democratic in the political facade but Royalist-fascist in the forces of coercion, which was gradually built up from 1943, was to be a crucial factor in the future. For the construction of the new Army as an autonomous entity, not subject of governmental authority, did not end with the termination of the civil war. Despite the fact that the right wing was in power between 1952 and 1963, the army remained ‘untouchable’. Under the nominal authority of the King, the special status of the armed forces which was planned by the British in 1944-6 became the dominating characteristic in the Greek political game.

The government’s rigging of the 1961 election was so blatant that it provoked a popular reaction which further strengthened the opposition Centre Union. This party, which had adopted a vague programme of democratic reform, won the 1963 elections and its leader, the ageing George Papandreou (a former British puppet), became prime minister. His government curtailed the activities of the secret police and put through some minor reforms of the State structure, but

despite changes in the senior personnel of the police, despite the atmosphere of freedom, despite the liberalisation of the trade unions, the most important weapon of the Right—the Army, stronghold and last resort of the system of vested interests—was not touched at all.

In 1965 Papandreou was ousted as prime minister in a sordid manoeuvre in which some of his parliamentary supporters were persuaded to abandon him by offers of Ministerial posts and perhaps also of money. The Centre Union, again in opposition despite popular support, moved towards a more radical position. The radicals’ leader, Papandreou’s son Andreas, made it clear that if elected his party would this time carry out a thoroughgoing democratic reform of the State: putting the King in his constitutional place; purging the Army and subjecting it to government control; ending the vested interests in government contracts of certain Greek tycoons by a policy of State enterprise. Faced with this prospect, which they could no longer ward off by rigging elections or corrupting politicians, the Army, the King and the tycoons resorted to a military coup and dictatorship.

The Colonels’ coup was thus not the overthrow of an already established democratic State, but a bid to prevent the establishment of such a modern capitalist political structure. A coup in an essentially undemocratic State faced with the election victory of a democratic reform party has no relevance to our proposition that a socialist majority can win control of an already established democratic State through elections.

Adam Buick

The Choice is Yours: More of the Same or an End to the Profit System? (1999)

From the May 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

These European elections will be the last major elections of the twentieth century, the last chance this millennium for us, the working class, to vote for ourselves for a change.

So what are the choices?

Firstly, you could vote for more of the same. The same old leaders, with the same old lies, promising everything, delivering nothing. You could vote for more unemployment and poverty, more stress and anxiety for yourself and in future for your children. For the continued threat to the environment and the planet we live on, for continued global warming, the destruction of the ozone layer, and pollution on an unprecedented scale.

You could vote for permanent global economic uncertainty and the threat of economic crises, which are part and parcel of the way society is organised today. A society organised on the basis of profit above all else, profit for a few while the majority have to take their chances on capitalism's roulette wheel. A society that says to us: "No profit, no production", "Can't pay, then can't have".

In Europe alone 20 million people are unemployed, simply because no profit can be made from their labour. Europe, alone, stockpiles millions of tons of food, destroys just as much and also, obscenely, pays farmers not to produce food. While at the same time pensioners in Britain and elsewhere must choose between keeping warm or eating. In the wider world hundreds of millions die of hunger or hunger-related diseases. The rich continue to get richer while the poor steadily get poorer.

If that is what you want, then vote for one of the other parties. Because that is what you will get.

But we do have a choice

We can say "enough is enough!"

The alternative is simple. A society in which the things we need to live are produced directly for human use. Where the means and instruments for producing things are owned in common by us all, not as now by no more than 5% of the population.

What this means specifically is that, quite simply, food will be produced to eat, clothes to wear, and houses to live in, to name but three examples, not as at present for the profit of a few. That production will be on the basis of voluntary co-operation, not the anarchy of competition we have today. As we co-operate to produce the things we need to live, by using the commonly-owned means of production and distribution, so we then take freely of the products of our labour.

No more leaders. The new society will of necessity be a truly democratic society, with decisions which affect us being taken by us. No more national boundaries, but a world-wide society, to replace the outdated system of global capitalism we have at present where production for profit is a hindrance to the fulfilment of human need.

No more classes. A society without employers or employees, haves and have-nots, simply people co-operating on a free and equal basis to produce the things we all need to live. A society where human beings will be able to live in harmony with nature, not like present society where pollution carries on unabated because to deal with it eats into the profits of the few.

These then are the choices:

• Carry on regardless with a society which has not, nor can, solve the problems we face today since they are part and parcel of it. Or we can elect to change things and bring about a society of co-operation not competition. A society of equality not inequality. A society of production to satisfy human need, not to satisfy the drive for profits for a few.
• We in THE SOCIALIST PARTY cannot bring this society about for you, nor are we offering to. Only you can, by working together and acting for yourselves. If there is a majority of people who understand and want this change and work to bring it about then it will happen.

If you agree with us, you can show this by voting for the list presented in these elections by THE SOCIALIST PARTY.

Europe - or the World? (1994)

European Election Statement from the May 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Most people would agree that the results of elections make very little difference to the way we live. Our problems stay the same. Governments can't keep their promises because they are out to run a system which is not for our benefit. It is a system that puts profit and money before everything and it is run for the benefit of a few.

As producers we create the things we need but we don't own them. We have to buy them - we have to pay, pay and pay again. We are forever in debt - paying the mortgage or the rent, the council tax, the gas, water and electricity bills. We can't have food and clothing unless first we pay - so someone can get a profit.

We don't build the hospitals we need and we don't clean up the environment and always it's for the same reason - there isn't the money. In Europe there are 40 million unemployed because there is no profit in giving them jobs. Food is withheld in store whilst people go without. Building workers are idle whilst families are homeless. This is the system of economic oppression that controls our lives and makes us slaves to money and profit.

It's no use electing people to run this mad system - we have to get rid of it. This can only be done by a majority of people who want a world run solely for our needs and are prepared to work for it. It depends on our ability to cooperate with each other in our mutual interests. All of us have this ability so the urgent and vital work of building a sane world is the great challenge in front of us.

The aim is to take the land, factories, resources, energy and transport systems out of the hands of those who own and control them. We depend on these means of life, we produced them - and now we must take them back. They must be made freely available to the community as a whole and used solely for the benefit of everyone.

We can only achieve a world of unity by working in voluntary cooperation. Not working for wages, which is part of the present system of economic exploitation, but working together producing the things that each of us needs. This is the only way to live as a true community and we can do it.

With the entire productive system made freely available to the whole community and brought under its democratic control; with cooperation and production solely for needs, the economic burdens which cripple our lives will be immediately removed. For example, with housing, all rents, mortgage debts and council taxes will be abolished. Every person will have security of tenure in the place where they live and from this basis the building industry will be geared to providing every person with decent housing. Similarly, with the abolition of the market and its buying and selling, food, clothing and all other goods and services will become freely available.

• If you agree that everybody should have an equal say in the ways things are run;

•  If you agree that building hospitals, schools and amenities, and cleaning up the environment should be free from the constraints of the money profit system;

•  If you agree that stored up food should be distributed to those who need it, and that stockpiled building materials should be used for the construction of homes;

•  If you agree that we should run the world democratically and in each other's interests through voluntary cooperation, then you should not only vote for the Socialist Party candidate to express your agreement, you should contact us with a view to finding out more and to joining us help build a new sane society.

The four seats in which Socialists are standing in the June 9 elections to the European Parliament are:

BIRMINGHAM EAST (covering Edgbaston, Erdington, Hall Green, Hodge Hill, Northfield, Selly Oak, Small Heath, Sparkbrook and Yardley).

Candidate: Ron Cook.

Contact address: Ron Cook, 11 Dagger I.ane, West Bromwich B71 4BT (Tel: 021-533 1712).

GLASGOW (all Glasgow).

Candidate: Jim Fleming.

Contact address: Dick Donnellv, 112 Napiershall Street,

Glasgow G20 6HT (Tel: 041-333 0822).

LONDON CENTRAL (Camden, Islington, Westminster, Kensington, Chelsea and Fulham).

Candidate: Clifford Shipper

Contact address: Gavin Sinclair, 78 Park Avenue South, N8

8LS (Tel: 071-278 6676).

LOTHIANS (Edinburgh, Linlithgow, Livingston, Bathgate and Dalkeith).

Candidate: John McGregor.

Contact address: Derek Devine, 1 Lochrin Place, Tollcross,

Edinburgh IT 13 8QX (Tel: 031-228 1347).

If you want to help, or want more information about the campaign in your area, write to or phone the contact above, or write to 52 Clapham High St, London SW4 7UN.

European Election Manifesto (1989)

From the June 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Following the elections of 1979 and 1984, this June sees the third direct election of the European Parliament. For those elections the Socialist Party issued statements under the title "Eurocapitalism or World Socialism?" The choice between a destructive system which served privileged interests and a sane society which served human needs was the important issue then. Tragically capitalism remains, to menace us all.

MILLIONS UNEMPLOYED

Millions remain unemployed. It is impossible to calculate the amount of useful wealth that could have been produced had not billions of workdays been lost because workers could not be employed for the profit of a few. What is certain is that in socialism all these workers in industry, transport, building and farming could have been co-operating to provide the things necessary for the wellbeing of the community: things like homes, hospitals, and useful goods of every kind. Instead men and women are being forced by the profit system into idleness, living on the dole alongside millions of pensioners existing on their meagre state hand-outs. Many remain homeless and despairing.

These are the bitter conditions of life endured by those at the lowest end of the scale of poverty. For those with a job trying to provide for themselves and their families, the purchase of a home means mortgaging their lives for years to come. Not just the need for a home but every necessity is subject to the ability to pay. For the majority life remains dominated by the relentless grind of wage-working and paying the food, gas, electricity, water and clothing bills, and repaying debts to banks and financial companies. As ever for workers, the market is an economic tyranny which breeds insecurity. Whether it is the 'common market' or not makes no difference.

ARMED CAMP

Forty years after the second World War, Europe is still an armed camp. Millions are producing the means of waging further war. In addition the competitive industrial system pollutes the Earth threatening all life.

The EEC was not set up to deal with the problems of poverty, insecurity and war. In 1979 we said that the Common Market was a "political and trading arrangement entered into by the various European States in order to further the interests of their capitalists". The last ten years has only confirmed the truth of this. In 1984 we pointed out that, in the overall interests of profit, the so-called European Community was paying farmers to destroy cattle, tear up orchards, plough back vegetables, dump fruit and restrict milk, meat and cereal production. Alongside this destruction of food, millions have died throughout the world from disease related to starvation or poverty. In Europe itself millions live below the official poverty line and would have benefited from this food. They did not have the money to buy it, so it was destroyed. The prices of commodities and the sanctity of profit come before human needs.

PAID NOT TO GROW

It is now intended by EEC governments that these policies should continue. In June 1988 it was announced that a so-called "set aside" scheme would come into force for the 1988-89 crop production year. Under this scheme annual payments of up to ￡200 per hectare are being offered to farmers who agree to take at least one fifth of their arable land out of production for the next five years. This imitates the policies of another major agricultural producer, the USA, which in 1983 took 82 million acres out of food production so as to protect the prices of food commodities.

The EEC will reach a new phase in 1992 when further trade barriers will be removed to establish the single market. This heralds a new freedom for investment and marketing to move across traditional European boundaries aimed at the maximum and most efficient exploitation of workers. The EEC can never achieve a genuine community of common interests. The basis of its operation is the class monopoly of the means of life by a privileged minority of capitalists. It may be a business community, but this leaves workers in the same exploited position where they must sell themselves for a wage or salary, when it is profitable for the capitalists to employ them, that is.

REPEATED FAILURES

When we examine the policies of the Labour, Conservative and other reformist parties, we find the same old glib promises put out over the years. These parties are depressing and irrelevant. They take no account of experience and offer nothing but repeated failure. These parties stand for running capitalism and their differences are minor compared to their common aim of running the profit system. Nor have the Communist Parties anything to offer except the state capitalism which even the Russian rulers now admit has failed. The Greens are right to denounce the degradation of the environment but in blaming this on "industrialism" and "bigness" they have yet to realise that this is inherent in capitalist competition.

At this time, towards the end of the 20th Century, when we look back on over 100 years of violence and misery in Europe, and when poised on the brink of further frightening dangers, it is obvious that a very different political approach must be taken. The time is long overdue for scrapping the entire system of capitalism. It is out of date. Its class interests and its priority of profits before human needs can no longer serve any useful purpose so far as the majority are concerned.

ABOLISH THE PROFIT SYSTEM

If we are to place the aim of European unity on a sound and practical basis then the idea that it can be realised under any system of Euro-capitalism must be abandoned. Nor can unity be established in Europe separate from the rest of the world. Unity can only stem from a common interest amongst all people to co-operate in the production and distribution of goods and services directly for need. This is only possible with the means of production owned and controlled by the whole world community.

There can be an important place for a European Assembly as one part of a system of world democratic administration. Socialism would need such bodies at local, regional and world levels and the task of adapting the European Parliament would be straightforward. However, democratic procedures mean nothing unless society has real powers to translate democratic decisions into action. In socialism this would come from the abolition of the uncontrolled and anti-social forces of the market and the disappearance of the profit motive.

PRODUCE FOR NEED

Socialism will remove all economic constraints on social action and will involve the abolition of not just the "Common Market" but all buying and selling. One of the myths of capitalism is that nothing can happen without the use of money. Part of this myth is that productive resources consist of money capital, but in the real world of production money never produced anything. Goods and services are produced by the mental and physical energies of men and women and it is only because goods are bought and sold that money is needed. Money is used under capitalism as part of the system of exploitation where workers receive as wages or salaries only a portion of the total wealth they produce. In reality, capital investment limits social action to what is profitable: with the abolition of the market the entire structure of production would be released to be used solely for the community's needs.

We must stress the urgency of promoting the growth of the socialist movement. This is the only practical activity which is being directed at the solution of social problems. Support for parties seeking to participate in the administration of capitalism through the European Parliament will prove as futile now as it did in 1979 and 1984. The constructive alternative is to help to build a world of common ownership, democratic control and production directly for human needs.

For the first time the Socialist Party will be putting forward a candidate for election to the European Parliament, in the Tyne and Wear constituency. Those in that area who want Socialism will be able to register this by voting for the Socialist Party candidate. Elsewhere they can do so by writing the words "World Socialism" across their ballot paper.

The Executive Committee

The Socialist Party of Great Britain

London, May 1989

Common Market: A Bore or an Opportunity? (1984)

From the May 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

If the Common Market seems such a bore to so many people that's because, quite simply, it really is. As its name suggests, it is about tariffs, quotas, customs duties and other such matters of vital interest to capitalist firms but of no importance whatsoever to the great majority of us who have to work for a wage or a salary for a living. It's a businessmen's club whose main concern is buying and selling. All the same, if we want to understand why our capitalist rulers and their political servants are getting agitated over this matter we are forced to consider the world of free trade areas, customs unions and other trading arrangements.

Not even a Common Market

The Treaty of Rome, which set up the Common Market, was signed in 1957 by six European states (France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries) with the aim of creating a single vast market in Europe for industrial goods and agricultural products to be called, pompously, the "European Economic Community" (EEC). In 1973 the Six were joined, after protracted negotiations, by Britain, Ireland and Denmark and in 1981 by Greece. Spain and Portugal are waiting on the doorstep with 1 January 1986 provisionally fixed as the date for their entry.

The establishment of a European "common market" is an ambitious project in that it involves creating the same sort of trading conditions throughout Europe as now exist singly in each of the member states. In other words, not simply the abolition of customs duties but the establishment of uniform tax and monetary conditions too. Ultimately it implies, if not a single European state, at least a single European currency and a single European economic policy.

As anyone crossing a European frontier knows, this is far from being the case at the moment. VAT rates, not to mention other taxes, differ from country to country. The rates of exchange of European currencies fluctuate and have to be periodically adjusted. Europe is far from being a genuine common market, as Geoffrey Howe complained (on behalf of the "business community" who alone are really concerned) at a meeting of the Common Market Council of Ministers last September:

“The principle of the free circulation of goods and people and the free offer of services within the European Community is one of the foundation stones of the Treaty of Rome. Twenty-five years after signature however, it is still not a reality. The Community has got little further than the abolition of tariffs. This falls well short of our business community's expectations. What they experience day by day is a range of non tariff barriers and administrative measures which impede a true common market for both goods and services, which seriously add to the cost of trading across frontiers, and which indeed are in danger of growing, despite recent efforts to make progress in this area” (paper presented to Special EEC Council of Ministers meeting, 20/21 September 1983).

At the moment the Common Market is essentially only a customs or tariff union.

An EEC document explains:

“In international law, a customs union consists of an economic area comprising members who undertake contractually: (i) to refrain from applying to one another any customs duties, charges having equivalent effect, or quantitative restrictions; (ii) to apply a common external customs tariff to countries not within the union. ("The Customs Union", European Documentation, No 6/1983.)

So, in the EEC, there are no customs duties on trade between its member states while goods entering into the area are subject to a uniform tariff no matter which country imports them. This latter means that the EEC enters the world market as a single trading bloc; the biggest in the world in fact.

“The Community's common external tariff means that it is seen as a single trading partner by other world trading powers. By volume of trade, it is well ahead of its partners. Averaging imports and exports, the Community has 19% of world trade, compared to 14% for the United States and 8% for Japan” ("The External Trade of the European Community", European File, December 1983).

As a matter of fact, the main economic conflict in the world today is not, as might be imagined from listening to Reagan, between America and Russia but between America, Japan and the EEC as these three trading groups jostle each other for markets, investment outlets and sources of raw materials. Even some of the political and military conflicts are not what they seem. For instance, the conflict in Central America is not so much between America and Russia as between America and the EEC, with America trying to prevent the EEC countries from entering its traditional hunting-ground.

The British ruling class made the choice to join the European trading bloc in the late 1960s. It wasn't a unanimous decision since it meant sacrificing the commercial interests of certain sections of the capitalist class: those who imported from outside Europe, especially the Commonwealth, and who would now face tariff barriers where none existed before.

The Labour Party made itself completely ridiculous over the Common Market, supporting it when in office and opposing it when out of office, but opposing it on the most inward-looking, nationalist grounds. Since the Labour Party accepts

capitalism, to make its opposition to the Common Market seem less ridiculous, it had to come up with suggested alternative markets for Britain's capitalists; these ranged from Britain's internal market protected by tariffs to the underdeveloped countries and the state capitalist bloc. Needless to say, the capitalist class wasn't convinced and even began to write off the Labour Party as the alternative government of capitalism to the Tories that it has traditionally been, creating and grooming the SDP to take over this role.

In opposing the Common Market the Labour Party in effect chose to identify itself with the interests of the more backward-looking sections of the capitalist class rather than with those which stood to benefit from the creation of a vast customs-free trade area in Western Europe.

The agricultural anomaly

Since the aim of the Common Market is essentially to create the conditions for freer trade and since trade in Europe is mainly trade in industrial goods, why has the Common Market adopted a "Common Agricultural Policy"? Or rather, why did it adopt one so early in its evolution (since the long-term aim of a true common market would indeed have to involve agricultural products too)?

The Common Market could have chosen to allow its member states to pursue their own agricultural policies, subsidising and protecting their farmers in the ways their national governments thought fit, while pressing ahead with progress towards complete free trade in industrial goods. This was the option taken by the European Free Trade Area (EFTA), set up as a sort of rival to the Common Market around Britain in 1959 and which still survives but is now dominated by Sweden and Switzerland (in fact free trade in industrial goods exists between EFTA and the Common Market so the whole of Western Europe is already a vast industrial free trade area). There is free trade among the EFTA countries in industrial goods but each country is left to pursue its own agricultural policy. Thus, although farmers in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Switzerland, Austria and Portugal are subsidised like farmers in the rest of Europe, this is done by the national governments concerned, not by an inter-governmental organisation.

The answer to "the Common Market having an agricultural policy lies in the conditions under which the Treaty of Rome was signed:

“It is important to appreciate that the Rome Treaty was a delicate balance of the national interests of the contracting parties. Let us consider West Germany and France in terms of trade outlets. In the case of West Germany the prospect of free trade in industrial goods, and free access to the French market in particular, was extremely inviting. In the case of France the relative efficiency of her agriculture (particularly her grain producers) as compared with West Germany held out the prospect that in a free Community agricultural market she would make substantial inroads into the West German market. This was obviously likely to result if the common price level of grain, for example, was set well below the West German level but at or above the French level. Agriculture had therefore to be included (D. Swann, The Economics of the Common Market, 1970, p.78).

Or, as a more recent Common Market propaganda document puts it, "Community countries most dependent on agriculture inevitably made free trade in farm produce a fundamental condition of their willingness to open their markets to the industrial goods of their neighbours" (European File, March 1984, p.12). In other words, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) was the price industrial Germany had to pay to have a European-wide market for its industrial goods. De Gaulle kept the British capitalist class waiting on the doorstep until it too agreed to pay this price.

What the adoption of the CAP meant was that farm prices and farm subsidies are fixed annually by Common Market Agriculture Ministers meeting in Brussels. In view of the large number of lobbies and vested interests involved it is not surprising that these sessions have often lasted all night before coming up with a compromise agreement. So, with the CAP, European farmers are subsidised, feather-bedded as the Americans say, from European funds rather than directly from national funds. Up to 70 per cent in fact of the Common Market's total budget is devoted to agriculture. Since it is the industrial countries, Germany and Britain, which contribute proportionately more to the Common Market budget, they are at the same time paying proportionately more towards subsidising European farmers. This is what the famous "budget issue" is all about, with Britain complaining loudly and Germany more discreetly.

The fact that agricultural policy is decided at European level has meant that decisions to stockpile or destroy agricultural so-called "surpluses" (butter mountains, wine lakes, bulldozing of tomatoes, pouring diesel oil on peaches) are made in Brussels, not in the national capitals. This has given rise to the illusion that it is the Common Market that is responsible for these actions, thus allowing anti-Marketeers to turn people's legitimate indignation at this destruction of food and productive capacity against the Common Market. But this is to mistake the real cause. It is capitalism, not the Common Market, that is responsible. Milk, for instance, was being poured down disused mineshafts before Britain joined the Common Market and this would happen again from time to time even if Britain withdrew. All the Common Market has done in this respect is to centralise the process by which these decisions are made, but it is the logic of capitalism that imposes such decisions whether they are made at European or national level.

The British capitalist class's campaign against its "unfair" contribution to the Common Market budget has involved trying to drum up mass support through such exhibitions of mindless nationalism as the Sun's anti-French campaigns. But this issue does not concern wage and salary earners. It is not "our money" that is going to subsidise French, or for that matter British, farmers. The only money that is ours is what we are paid as wages and salaries plus any state hand-outs to which we may be entitled. What we produce over and above this belongs to the capitalists to use as they think fit. We have no control over what they do with the wealth they take from us and certainly no interest in taking sides when they fall out over how to use it.

If Heath and his Tory government negotiated a bad deal for the British capitalist class in 1972 (as it now seems) that's too bad for them, but we have no interest in allowing ourselves to be stirred up by them as a means of trying to renegotiate a better deal today.

A single crumb

Since the Common Market represents to a certain extent a normal stage of development of capitalism ― towards bigger trading units and bigger markets ― it would be surprising if it didn't bring a few marginal improvements for workers. We've scraped the bottom of the barrel and have only been able to come up with one relatively insignificant change which could be seen as an improvement compared with what happened before; namely, the free movement of labour. But we hasten to add, this change does not warrant abandoning a position of complete indifference to the Common Market. We merely note it as a consequence of an inevitable trend under capitalism to break down national frontiers and national differences.

We appreciate too that the free movement of labour is only a corollary of free trade in other commodities since what we are talking about here is free trade throughout the Common Market in the commodity labour-power. All the same, this has meant that workers have been able to travel freely over a larger area than previously (even if this is only a return to a situation which existed in Europe before 1914) and this is a real, if marginal, improvement.

The first thing to notice about the European Parliament is that it is not really a Parliament. Real decision-making power in the Common Market lies with the Council of Ministers from the various member states who come to decisions on the basis of proposals from the European Commission in Brussels. The so-called Parliament is merely a sort of advisory committee that is consulted in the course of this decision-making process.

When elections to the European Parliament take place workers in countries with a total population of 270 million (320 million if and when Spain and Portugal join) are being given the opportunity to express their views at the same time. At the moment they misuse this opportunity by confining their support for capitalism but, when the socialist movement has reached a more developed stage this will provide an occasion for socialists to demonstrate their strength across frontiers, to turn these at the moment meaningless elections into a Europe-wide referendum on the issue of "socialism or capitalism"?

Elections to the European Parliament are taking place next month, on 14 June. Socialists will be able to express their support for world socialism by writing "WORLD SOCIALISM" "SOCIALISME MONDIALE", "WELTSOZIALISMUS", "SOCIALISMO MONDIALO" across their ballot paper.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain will not now be contesting the forthcoming European Election in Central London. We will, however, be mounting an intensive propaganda campaign, during which your help will still be needed. Please contact the Parliamentary Committee at Head Office for details.

Eurocapitalism or World Socialism? (1979)

From the May 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The European Parliament which you, together with workers in 8 other countries, are being called upon to elect for the first time directly by universal suffrage is not really a parliament in the traditional sense. In view of its very limited powers it would more properly be called a "consultative committee". Real parliamentary powers - to make laws and to fix the budget - are exercised in the Common Market by meetings of Ministers from the nine Member-States. Nevertheless, since if a political institution is to exist it is better that it be elected rather than appointed, the Socialist Party of Great Britain and its sympathisers in other European countries are taking part in this election campaign.

WORLD SOCIALISM

We are using this occasion when people will not be thinking exclusively in national terms to put forward the socialist proposition that the only solution of today's social problems is the establishment of a world community without frontiers based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of wealth production and distribution, with production solely for use not sale or profit. On this basis the world-wide productive apparatus could turn out the abundance that it is technically capable of but which it is prevented from doing today by the restrictions of capitalism and its rule of "no profit, no production". This would permit society to implement the long-standing socialist principle of "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs". In other words, free access for every man, woman and child to what they need to live and enjoy life. This, we say, is technically possible; but first the means for producing wealth must become the common heritage of all mankind, the only basis on which the purpose of production can be changed from profit making to satisfying human needs.

Socialism cannot be established in one country. The very existence of the Common Market shows that even under capitalism the Nation-State has become too small a framework for the productive apparatus. Capitalism is already, and has been for many years, a world system; it exists in state capitalist Russia and China as well as in the West, and functions through the world market as a single economic system. This is why the new, higher social development. Socialism, which will replace it must be a world system too.

There are those who see the constant internationalisation of production and life, including the Common Market itself, as a threat to "national sovereignty". This reactionary position has been officially adopted by most of the Communist parties of Europe, thus showing that they have no right whatsoever to call themselves "socialist" or "communists". Socialism, as we have explained, can only be a world-wide system and socialists do not defend capitalist national independence. On the contrary, one of our criticisms of capitalism is precisely that it has divided the world into competing and armed "Nation-States" whose conflicts mean that war is always going on in some part of the world. What we want is not national independence but a socialist world without frontiers.

THE CAPITALIST COMMON MARKET

As to the Common Market itself, or to use the somewhat grandiose title it has given itself, "the European Community", it is a political and trading arrangement entered into by various European States in order to further the interests of their capitalists. Though an expression of the growing internationalisation of the world, it is not a step in the direction of world unity, nor was it meant to be. If anything, it is a step towards the creation of a new super-power to rival Russia and the United States, opening up the terrifying prospect that the wars of he future will be between continents rather than Nation-States. Already a three-sided trade war is building up between Europe, Japan and the United States.

This does not mean, however, that we are to be lumped with opponents of the Common Market. It merely means that we regard the whole arrangement, and arguments about it, as quite irrelevant from a working class point of view. What trading alliances a particular country makes concern only its capitalists not its workers.

CAPITALISM

The basis of capitalist society is the monopoly by a minority class of the means for producing and distributing wealth and the consequent division of society into two antagonistic classes: those who own and control the means of production and those who, excluded from such ownership and control, are obliged to sell their mental and physical energies for a wage or salary in order to gain a living. Under capitalism there is therefore no common social interest but a conflict of interest between these two classes over wages and working conditions, and ultimately over the ownership and control of the means of wealth production and distribution.

The interest of the working class lies in the abolition of capitalism and its replacement by socialism. Capitalism is a class society based on the exploitation and restricted consumption of the working class which can only work in one way: as a profit-making system in the interest of those who live off profits drawn from their ownership and control of the means of production. Despite repeated futile attempts, by Labour, Social Democratic and other governments in all countries, capitalism cannot be reformed so as to function in the interest of the majority. It is not the reform of capitalism that should be sought but is abolition.

The choice between capitalism or socialism is the issue that the Socialist Party of Great Britain and its sympathisers in other countries are raising in this election. Those who want and understand socialism can show this by writing "SOZIALISMUS", "SOCIALISMO", "SOCIALISME", as the case may be, across their ballot paper.

The workers have no country

Workers of the world unite.

Executive Committee

The Socialist Party of Great Britain

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