Milner Tries To Excuse "Intervention". (1919)

From the January 1919 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Government are now making a frantic effort to throw dust in the eyes of the people on the question of what they are pleased to call the “British intervention in Russia.” The Secretary of State, Lord Milner, claims to have received a letter on the subject from a correspondent, and whether this is a put-up job or not, his statement purporting to be an answer to this letter is such a wishy-washy production as to be little else than a subject for derision and laughter.

Lord Milner states that:

    . . the Bolsheviks, whatever their ultimate object, were in fact assisting our enemies in every possible way.
    It was owing to their action that thousands of German troops were let loose to hurl themselves against our men on the Western Front. It was owing to their betrayal that Roumania, with all its rich resources of grain and oil, fell into the hands of the Germans.

These are deliberate lies. The facts are plain enough to view. Russians were beaten to a standstill under the regime of that advanced and enlightened ruler whom our bosses’ papers at that time referred to as “our Gallant Ally,” and some time previously had honoured with the name we still love to know him by—Bloody Nick.

It was under Nick’s generals that the “Russian Steam Roller” was reduced to impotence. The poor, unlettered moujik played his unwilling part in the war “according to plan.” He was the cheapest cannon-fodder in the whole arena, in the sense that there were enormous numbers of him, and he was probably the only soldier in the whole conflict who could be driven half armed and ill equipped into the slaughter merely as a stop-gap, a. mass of quivering, valueless flesh to keep the "enemy” busy while rival generals and statesmen squabbled over the questions command, and personal and “national” dignity.

So, in spite of the Allied liars who are casting about for excuses for attacking those who are threatening capitalist interests in Russia, defeat, complete and irretrievable, was the legacy left the Bolsheviks by their feudal and capitalist predecessors. Even had they desired it; even had the capitalist revolution not completed the ruin of the giant Russian military machine, the Bolsheviks had not the means to carry on the war against the powerful, victorious, and perfectly equipped German host. Already, under the capitalist Premier, Prince Lvoff, in 1914, the Russian forces had begun to melt away. Skulking Kerensky and his fellow butchers tried to keep them together by the usual means of wholesale slaughter, but their failure was ignonimous. It was not for want of the will to murder that they failed. “General Kornlioff is given orders that deserters and runaways are be shot,” declared the “Daily Chronicle” on the 24th July 1917. The war-mongers had their opportunity, and their failure proves beyond all refutation, that peace was the ardent desire of the Russian peoples. The very success of the Bolsheviks is based on this almost universal desire of the people of Russia for peace. No honest man with a knowledge of the facts can contend that the Bolsheviks find their chief support among those who understand Bolshevist principles. They found a war-sick people—a people who had been driven to war by organised military brutality and tyranny—they promised them peace and—wonder among politicians!—kept their promise. And this our British capitalist apologists call treachery, and "helping the Germans.”

The fact is that neither the Bolsheviks nor the Russian people ever made any promises to the Allies, or entered into any compact or treaty with them. All such contracts were entered into by the Tsarist gang. These ghouls did not represent the people, and the Allies knew it. They did not worry in those days about “only negotiating with governments representative of the people,” nor did they think it “an obligation of honour”—what language from one of the central figures of the South African outrage) “to save” those with whom they entered into the treaties. For they rushed to congratulate those who overthrew their allies, co-plotters, and partners, Bloody Nick and his circle. It never entered into their heads when they expressed gratification at the downfall of their partners in this awful crime, that “it would be an abominable betrayal, contrary to every British instinct of honour and humanity” to, “simply cause our own immediate purposes have been served, leave them to the tender mercies of their enemies.”

All the Allies' reasons for invading Russia, as put forward in Lord Milner’s letter, since they turn on the alleged German exploitation of Russian resources, cease to afford any pretext for the continued occupation of Russian territory by the Allies in view of the present military position of Germany. The only shred of excuse offered is that they must not leave the “thousands of Russians” who, ‘in the course of this Allied intervention" have “taken up arms and fought on the side of the Allies,” to “the tender mercies of their enemies before they have had time to arm, train, and organise so as to be strong enough to defend themselves.” This cant might go down but for the light shed upon it by other events. These (probably mythical) Russians are not the only people who have fought on the side of the Allies. To use a phrase Lord Milner is very fond of, “I say nothing of the poor, cast-off crippled soldier at home abandoned to the tender mercies of private charity. There are others. The Armenians, for example, they fought on the side of the Allies, yet the latter have not scrupled to abandon the poor remnants of an agonised people to the tender mercies of their enemies, the vengeful official Turk.

What Lord Milner really means can be read in his reference to the arming, training, and organising of the Russians who have fought on the Allied side. These Russians are the Russian capitalists and their hireling butchers. It is to arm and aid these, and to establish capitalist rule in the vast domains now under Bolshevik administration that our lads are now being kept from their homes. It is to assist in crushing out a working-class rising, that British sailors are firing at Bolsheviks on the shores of the Black Sea.

A. E. Jacomb

Communist Measures? (2017)

From the June 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the Guardian (10 May), Ellie Mae O'Hagan wrote of Marx, 'plenty of his proposals – just as radical when he wrote them – are common sense today. These include free education, abolition of child labour, a progressive income tax, a national bank, and closing the gap between town and countryside.' This is true but these, taken from the Communist Manifesto weren't what he meant by 'communism', as we explain here.

The main thing to realise about the Communist Manifesto is that it isn’t. It was originally published in German in 1848 and its title was Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (Manifesto of the Communist Party). The Manifesto was issued in the name of the Communist League, a loose grouping of German refugees in London, and no author was credited. In the previous year the Central Committee of the League had commissioned Marx to write a statement of general principles and issued him with editorial guidelines. The Central Committee then authorised it for publication. There was no Communist Party as we now understand that term but there can be little doubt that their Manifesto was a rallying cry for such an organisation.

The Manifesto was published in late February 1848, at about the same time as the revolutions of 1848 began – first in Paris, then in Berlin and many other European cities. The occurrence of widespread uprisings throughout Europe owed nothing to the Manifesto, though members of the League were not alone in anticipating such an event. The contributory factors were food shortages and starvation brought about by the spread of potato blight, chronic unemployment and falling wages caused by recession, frustration at the feudal bastions of reaction in government and revolutionary nationalism. In most cases it fell to members of the ‘petty bourgeoisie’ (shopkeepers, artisans, small farmers) to organise revolution. They had suffered economic hardship in the last few years, had the most to gain from a more progressive regime and potentially had the political clout to bring it about. The big capitalists had no such incentive, having done well in the recent capitalist industrialisation sweeping Europe, and so tended to ally themselves with the forces of conservative reaction. It was in this context that Marx and the League issued their Manifesto.

In the Chartist weekly newspaper Red Republican, in 1850, Helen Macfarlane produced the first English translation — only they gave it the title ‘German Communism: Manifesto of the German Communist Party’. To the Chartists, at least, the insertion of ‘German’ twice in the title indicates that the purpose of the Manifesto was obvious. In Macfarlane's translation the Manifesto begins: ‘A frightful hobgoblin stalks throughout Europe’. After 1848 it was soon translated into numerous languages and in different countries. It was again translated into English by Samuel Moore (who had translated volume 1 of Capital) and ‘revised in common’ with Engels for the ‘authorised’ 1888 edition. In that edition Engels claimed joint authorship, but he was not involved in writing the Manifesto. In the ‘authorised’ edition the opening declaration ‘A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism’ was something of an exaggeration. Marx borrowed this already well-known imagery from Lorenz von Stein's book on communism in France, published in 1842.

The Manifesto claimed to ‘not set up any sectarian principles of their own’. But what about Chartism? Chartism was a mass working class organisation demanding universal suffrage and other reforms. The Manifesto argued that ‘Chartists are infinitely closer to the communists than the democratic petty bourgeoisie or the so-called Radicals’. And yet, at this point, while the League did see themselves sharing some common ground, they were sufficiently different from Chartism to form a separate organisation. Despite what the Manifesto said, communists could be opposed to other working class organisations if there were important issues at stake. In fact the League had a communist objective which was not shared by Chartism, though some individuals in that organisation did share that objective. At this early stage of their political career, Marx, Engels and others used the term communism for their objective. Later they would use socialism and social democracy, but they all meant the same thing.

The theoretical concerns of the Manifesto are universal, but the concrete demands of the Manifesto were German. In the Manifesto, the League ‘turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution.’ That is the context within which the Manifesto was issued. Later in 1848 the Central Committee of the Communist League issued its ‘Demands of the Communist Party in Germany’. This seventeen-point programme updated the Manifesto's immediate demands to the changed German conditions. It argued: ‘It is to the German proletariat, the petit bourgeoisie, and the small peasantry to support these demands with all possible energy.’ In short, Marx, the League and the immediate measures in the Manifesto were encouraging a bourgeois-democratic revolution.

In the circumstances of the time it seemed logical to Marx and the League that they should accept that for the moment their interests coincided with those of the bourgeois democrats, until such time as the absolutist regimes had been overthrown, and should then continue their struggle against the new bourgeois regimes. It was assumed that ‘the bourgeois democratic governments’ could be placed in the situation of immediately losing ‘all backing among workers’ (Marx's Address to the Communist League, 1850).

At the end of its second section the Manifesto lists ten measures which ‘will, of course, be different in different countries’. And when the Manifesto was reprinted in 1872, Marx and Engels stated in the Preface that ‘no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section 2. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today.’ Germany had become a unified bourgeois state the year before. In fact, some of the measures at the end of Section 2 have since been implemented within clearly capitalist and state capitalist regimes.

Many commentators on the Manifesto only have eyes for the historically specific reformist demands (‘A heavy progressive or graduated income tax’) and are blind to the universally specific communist demands (‘the Communistic abolition of buying and selling’). For instance, in his Introduction to the Pluto Press edition of The Communist Manifesto (2008), while purporting to be sympathetic, David Harvey argues for the universal applicability of some of the reform demands while ignoring communism entirely (Socialist Standard book review, November 2008). His one word response to our astonishment was: ‘Predictable’.

Understanding context is important when reading historical documents. We will never know how history would have turned out if Marx had not written a Communist Manifesto, but the Manifesto of the Communist Party continues to create confusion as well as enlightenment.

Lew Higgins

New Pamphlet Out Soon (1968)

From the March 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

LABOUR GOVERNMENT AND SOCIALISM 1s. 3d (post free) Details below 

LABOUR FAILS AGAIN

Why are so many Labour voters disappointed? Why is there a swing to the other parties at by-elections? Why do more and more people not trouble to vote?

Why do so many people become cynical about politics and say that nothing makes any difference? Why have some trade unions that are affiliated to the Labour Party threatened to withhold contributions and to form an independent ‘trade union party'?

This new 36-page Socialist Party pamphlet, out soon, answers these questions and exposes the uselessness of this and previous Labour governments. It shows too how Labour’s avowed aim of ‘making capitalism work' leads them to support wage restraint, unemployment and profit-making.

"Experience proves beyond question", says the pamphlet, “that the position of wage and salary earners is the same whether capitalism is administered by a Conservative or by a Labour government. Some workers believe that this need not have happened if the Labour government had chosen to follow a different course. The Socialist Party of Great Britain does not take that view. What we have experienced has been the inevitable consequence of perpetuating capitalism. Within capitalism there is no escape from its economic laws".

You can order copies of this topical pamphlet by writing to the Socialist Party (Dept. SLG), 52 Clapham High Street, London, S.W.4.

What Marx Did Not Mean (1967)

Book Review from the July 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Essential Writings of Karl Marx edited by David Caute, Panther, 8s. 6d.

David Caute, we can safely say, is unable to understand what he reads. It is now fashionable to cast Marx as some Great Humanist Philosopher and to use this to challenge his claim to have adopted a scientific approach to the study of society, history and economics. Needless to say, Caute jumps on this bandwagon. In his introduction and notes he emphasises Marx’s early philosophical attitude to Man, the proletariat, capitalism, communism and the state. It is quite true that Marx was greatly influenced by the German philosophers of his day such as Feuerbach and especially Hegel. It was in fact his study of the implications of their theories that led Marx to take up the study of society and political economy. His theories in these fields should be judged on their merits and not dismissed out of hand because of his philosophical background.

Caute, as we have said, is ignorant. Let us give a few examples. He says that, in Marxian economics, “the value of a commodity was to be measured by the quantity of labour-time embodied in it”. As everyone who has the slightest knowledge of Marxian economics will know, this is not so. The value of a commodity is fixed by the amount of socially-necessary labour embodied in it. Even Caute is forced to add that Marx “made some qualifications(!) such as the concept of “socially necessary” which Caute then dismisses as “nebulous” (no reasons given).

Another example of Caute’s slip-shod method is this passage in which, to make any sense of it, the word “labour” has to be understood in two very different senses (and even then it's not what Marx wrote): 

Defining labour as variable capital, Marx calls the ratio of surplus value to variable capital the rate of exploitation. A reduction in the length of the working day need not reduce the rate of exploitation, because new machines may extract more labour in a given time.

No wonder Caute is unable to grasp the crucial difference in Marxian economics between “labour” and “labour power”.

Caute attributes to Marx the view that “a falling rate of profit is one of the symptoms of a decaying capitalism” without quoting at all from that part of Volume II of Capital where Marx discusses what he calls “the law of the falling tendency of the rate of profit”. But, having read this far, this is what you will have come to to expect from Caute. In this case he's clearly arguing against the vulgar pseudo-Marxism of pre-war fellow travellers. Perhaps the best distortion is this one:

Nor did he (Marx) regard all labour as productive of value. He excluded the labour of the capitalist, the banker and the merchant. This suggests that his theory of value was not simply, as he claimed, ‘the scientific expression of economic relations of present-day society’ but was also a moral theory.

Quite apart from the fact that Marx was trying to show how people like capitalists, bankers and merchants who did no work were still able to get a living from society, it is no contradiction in Marxian economics to say that if a factory-owner worked in his factory he would be producing value. The case of the merchant and the banker is a little more complicated since the wage-worker in these businesses themselves produce no value but only realise it for their employers. So, if only Caute knew it, some capitalists could produce value while some workers don't, somehow, if Caute ever read that far. If he wishes to get some idea of what Marx’s theory of value is we suggest he read an article in the LSE journal, Economica, of August 1963 by one of his more academic colleagues Thomas Sowell, entitled “Marxian Value Reconsidered”. Besides, Caute's bibliography shows that he is not aware of L. Boudin's Theoretical System of Karl Marx or of Kautsky's summary The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx.

There are many other inaccuracies in the presentation of Marx’s views: that what you think depends on what class you’re in; that surplus value exists outside capitalism; that there is increasing “pauperization” of workers; that there was no state or ruling class in Oriental society; that Marx worshipped violence; that a harsh dictatorship would follow the overthrow of capitalist rule; that crises get worse and worse. Caute also thinks that a “Marxist-Communist” revolution triumphed in Russia. It would take a book to sort out all these errors.

This selection of writings of Marx and Engels, like all of them, suffers from the defect that no attempt is made to evaluate the importance and significance of their various writings—the early manuscripts, letters, unpublished notes, publisher works, popular pamphlets and so on. Yet if you want such a handy collection don't get this Panther Book but get instead the Pelican Karl Marx. Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, edited by T. B. Bottomore and Maximiliein Rubel, at less than half the price.

Adam Buick

The Imperialist Victory. (1919)

From the January 1919 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capital’s Coalition has swept the country at the election. According to reports the Coalition Unionists number 334, Co. Liberals 135 and Co. Labour 10—a total of 479 out of 706 members. The rest consists of 28 Liberals, 62 Labourites, 50 Unionists, 73 Sinn Feiners, 7 Nationalists, and, about 7 Independents. The Sinn Feiners are pledged not to take their seats, so they can be deducted, while 50 Independent Unionists may be counted on to support the Government on most occasions. By adding these to the Coalition and deducting the Sinn Feiners from the Opposition, we get 529 Coalitionists against a total combination of 104. 

Even this does not complete the tale, for several "official” Labour men like Hodge, Clynes, and O'Grady, are strong supporters of the war and the Coalition. The Coalition thus has the largest majority ever returned to Parliament.

The most striking feature of the Election is the almost complete destruction of the Liberal Party as represented by the followers of Asquith. Leader and lieutenants alike have been swept aside by the Coalition flood. To cover up this crushing defeat Liberal newspapers are claiming that the Coalition possess seats far in excess of the proportion of votes cast for their men, and that in numerous instances candidates have been elected by a minority of the votes cast. True, but when has a Liberal resigned his seat because he (as in several cases) did not obtain a majority of the votes polled?

On behalf of the Labour Party Philip Snowden and Ramsay Macdonald point jubilantly to the  great increase in the votes cast for Labour Party candidates, forgetting to mention that the number of voters on the new register is more than double that at the previous election, and secondly that a much larger number of Labour Party candidates were put forward than ever before. When allowance is made for these facts the figures lose much of their seeming significance. Nor is this all. A large number of the “Labour" votes were given by opponents of the Labour Party’s programme. During the brief campaign the “Daily News" repeatedly urged the Liberals to vote for the Labour man where the fight was between a Labourite and Coalitionist, and in constituencies where a Liberal and a Labourite were opposing a Coalitionist, to vote for the best man, irrespective of label. In some cases Liberal and Tory combined to make the Labour man a present of the seat, as in the case of Crooks, O’Grady, Clynes, Wardle, and others who were returned unopposed. “Colonel’' Will Thorne had the support of the official Liberal and Tory parties, and only had an “Independent” to fight. Hodge at Gorton, Walsh at Ince, Tyson at Westhoughton, and Wilkie at Dundee were free from official Liberal or Tory opposition. J. Jones, C. W. Bowerman, J. Sexton, F. Roberts, R. Young, J. Guest, J. Davison, W. Bromfield, A. Onions, and W. Adamson had no Liberal opposition to face, while Capt. Smith, G. Spencer, R. Richardson, W. Carter, T. Grundy, G. Hirst, J. Williams, F. Rose, C. Edwards, and W. Graham had no official Unionist candidate run against them. This absence of a straight fight against the other parties shows how little the  votes cast for these candidates can be claimed, with any justification, as Labour votes.

Neil Maclean, one time Secretary of the S.L.P., now a member of the I.L.P., owes his seat far more to his position as organiser to the Scottish Wholesale Society than to any “Labour” principles he may have professed.

To show it had no “class bias” Holland with Boston returned a “Labour” man—W. S. Royce— who twice previously had contested Spalding as a Unionist and who is a wealthy landowner in the district, though at the moment of writing it is not clear whether he had the official endorsement of the National Labour Party. Anglesey returned the first titled “Labour” man to the House in the person of Brig. Gen. Sir Owen Thomas. We are getting on! We shall have “Labour” Lords next if the “widening process” of the Labour Party succeeds.

To have secured 62 seats out of 368 contests, and that only with all this arrangement and assistance from the capitalist parties, shows how small is the influence and power of the Labour Party.

Despite its affiliation with the Labour Party the I.L.P. has done even worse, for out of 50 candidates that it claims only three were elected. Like its pal the Liberal Party it has lost all its leaders—Snowden, Macdonald, Jowett, Anderson. This shows how much the leaders depended upon Liberal votes for the seats they held.

The intense disappointment felt by them at this is shown when Macdonald declares—

  Unfortunately the Labour Party lacks in men . . who would enable it to perform the functions of an official Parliamentary Opposition.—'Manchester Guardian.’

That is adepts in Parliamentary trickery and bargaining like himself, Snowden says of the new men:

  There are amongst them some of the most reactionary of the Trade Union leaders. There are amongst them men who have been most prominent amongst the Trade Union leaders in supporting every reactionary proposal the Government put forward.—“Labour Leader,” 2.1 19.

And as the I.L.P., by its alliance with the Labour Party, has supported these men in their actions, it is clear that the real trouble is not the reactionary character of these men, but the fact that they are “in” while Snowden & Co. are “out.”

The National Socialist Party—the Hyndman-Lee section that broke away from the B.S.P. on the question of the war—claims eleven candidates, of whom six were returned. But with the exception of Dan Irving, these successful candidates were run by the official Labour parties. They are J. O’Grady, W. Thorne, J. Jones, Ben Tillett, and A. Hayday. All are prominent T.U. officials, ran as “Labour” men, and the N.S.P. had no influence whatever on their return. Irving’s long career of trickery and bargaining in Burnley has at last been rewarded. He will, of course, obey the orders of his political masters, the capitalists.

Both Liberals and I.L.P. are stating that Lloyd George did not desire so overwhelming a majority as it places him completely in the hands of the Unionists. Our Ejection Manifesto had already pointed out that he was the tool of the Imperialists and was completely in their hands before the Election, and therefore he will be only continuing in the same position in the new Parliament. The “Daily Mail” admits this when it says (31.12 18):—

  Sir George Younger Lord Downham (Mr. Hayes Fisher) and Mr. Bonar Law have manoeuvred our gallant little Welsh wizard into a position in which he is almost entirely dependent upon the votes of those whom he so vigorously denounced at Limehouse a few years ago.

No one knows this better than LI. George himself, but he hopes to persuade some people that he is independent, and repeats the trick he played in 1906 of threatening to resign if 'the "great” measures promised, are not carried through. Speaking at Carnavon on Jan. 1st he said

  If the Government did not do their best to fulfill the promises made he would no longer be head of the Government, but would go back to the people and ask for a renewal of their confidence. -“Daily News," 2.1.19.

This is just as much cant and humbug as his similar statements in 1906. The last Government broke all its pledges, but it had the vigorous support of LI. George in all its dastardly actions. The same will be true in the future. Whatever his paymasters order him to do he will carry out, no matter what promises are broken or what crimes are contemplated.

This Election has been a great victory for the Imperialists. Riding the wave of relief and excitement consequent upon the signing of the Armistice, they have regained political power with a largely increased majority, and will be able to carry out their schemes practically unhampered. The workers will presently see their new position is worse than the old one, that the masters are more strongly entrenched than ever, and that the struggle to retain the old standard of living will be intensified and more bitter than before.,

When they apply this knowledge they will set to work to return a majority of their own representatives to Parliament for the purpose of wresting power from the master class and using that power to establish the common ownership of the means of life, whereby all will be able to enjoy life in the fullest sense of the word.

Jack Fitzgerald

The Meaning of Freedom (1973)

From the May 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

What is liberation? The words which need most careful use are, usually, those which are thought to be above it. In an essay on George Orwell published in 1948, George Woodcock remarks how Orwell continually talked of brotherhood, justice, decency and so on without ever giving specific meanings: they spoke for themselves. A minute’s thought over the everyday corruptions of those terms will show that they do nothing of the kind. Freedom is another. Assumed to be self-explanatory, it is all things to all men: hope, delusion, inducement, trap. What became of “the Four Freedoms”? Freedom fighters, where are you now?

In fact, freedom by itself is an insignificant word. Its importance comes with its expansion — freedom from what, or to do which. Freedom from may be considerable; its range can cover merciful release from some private burden, to the abolition of a political restraint. Nevertheless, freedom in that sense remains negative and limited to shifting a particular evil. It is, of course, the most popular sense, and the argument is often made that to pile up these removals of restraint (“extending areas of freedom”) must in the end lead to total and therefore positive social liberty.

The Line Drawn

However, the pursuit of the piecemeal does not work like that. The man who has obtained relief from a disability or restriction is simply released into the general slavery of his fellow-men. That is why rulers seldom mind, in the end, giving freedom from: liberation is a means of creating more slaves. The cracker-motto “freedoms” set out by Churchill and Roosevelt in the war were of this kind. Leaving aside that they were part of the sham currency of wartime promises and so unlikely to be taken seriously when the fever was over, it is worth observing that freedom from hunger and insecurity is had, more or less, by people in prison. In the days of mass unemployment, down-and-outs frequently committed minor offences to get regular food and beds for the winter.

Nobody pretends that freedom from privation is worth having on such terms, but the terms accepted in ordinary life are often surprising. The usual paternalistic saying is that society can approve “liberty but not licence”, and it is interesting that “licence” is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “excessive liberty”. What is being said, therefore, is that you may have liberty but not too much. The line of excess is drawn, inevitably, by the ruling class; and the liberty thus prescribed is already restricted to the limits of freedom from. Thus, to suppose that slices of freedom can be gained within capitalism and put together to make a free society is naive in the extreme.

Choice and Responsibility

The context in which "freedom” takes on positive meaning is freedom to. Individually, innumerable extensions might be given: what they add up to socially is freedom to choose. This is the all-embracing denial made by the authoritarianism of a class-divided society. Under it, for the ruled, choice is directly refused or made impossible. One’s station and way of life, loyalties, duties, means of expression are selected and hung on one. A free society is definable as such only in this way; in it, individual choice is sovereign.

All sovereignties have boundaries, however. The alternative point of view, the Stirnerite one which disfavours society itself for inhibiting the ego’s absolute demands, is still practised by a number of anarchists whose cult it is never to answer letters, keep appointments etc., as proof that they are free and spontaneous individuals not responsible to anyone. When the doctrine is stated like that, both its absurdity and its perniciousness are plainly visible: this is not freedom at all, because it depends on mutilating someone else’s freedom. Freedom is relative always to the fact that man exists only as a social creature.

In simple everyday experience, every relationship or contract voluntarily made is a limitation on freedom. A person joining a political group or a recreational organization has “tied” him- or herself by the acceptance of obligations, including the recognition of rules and majority decisions. Much has been written recently about growing numbers of couples who set up their homes and raise families without the formalities of marriage. Those who explain their viewpoint always emphasize that, so far from being rejected, the responsibilities and restraints generally are undertaken more deliberately. The fact that this is some people’s preference is not beside the point: it is the point.

The Way to Go

Freedom, then, means a state in which contracts are entered and obligations accepted, but by one’s conscious choice not a predetermined one. The comparison to be made is between a free society and the authoritarian system where the obligations remain while somebody else imposes the choice. What must be recognized, however, is that the obligations are there in both cases. Indeed, freedom implies responsibility where servitude does not; having the choices imposed and the decisions made for one is tolerable to many people because it is easy. Part of the tyranny of capitalism is to make a virtue of that kind of mental laziness and extol bromides like “liberty not licence” to try and keep responsible thought in check. 

Given comprehension of what freedom is, how is the free society obtained? The lack of freedom is not just a question of holding wrong outlooks. It derives from material conditions as much as from legal and moral restraint. The irony of the old saying that everyone is free to dine at the Savoy has innumerable applications. A poor or ill-educated person is not free to choose his work, or where he will live, or even whom he will mix with. Badly-housed people are restricted sexually, intellectually, and in a dozen other ways. Financial worries, insecurities, hostile circumstances of all kinds are obstructions to freedom.

But it does not follow that reforms of circumstances are the answer. That takes us back to the realm of freedom from, where capitalism's nature is to turn apparent gains into equivalent losses; at this, you can’t win. The creation of a free society can be accomplished only by changing the structure of society. The disabilities and oppressions which are everywhere are aspects and consequences of the basic enslavement by capitalism, the class-ownership of the means of living. To replace them with freedom of choice and make responsibility instead of imposition the keystone of social life, common ownership is the pre-requisite.

Socialist Emancipation

This is the failing-point of the various “liberation” movements which are pressing for attention today. The impulse which leads black people, women, homosexuals and other groups to organize in the face of their special problems is understandable, of course. Nevertheless, the belief that those problems can be solved by legislation, or exchanging rule by Them for rule by Us, can lead nowhere except out of one cage and into another. The fact is that we are all caged by capitalism. The indignation and energy now going into those protests should be used fruitfully in the Socialist movement which works for “the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex”.

Freedom is the natural — and immediate — concomitant of the establishment of Socialism. Nor is any abstract judicial freedom meant. The economic condition of Socialism, production for use, means free access by everyone to the material wealth of society. That is emancipation, and from it arises the freedom to choose the sort of life one wants. That is liberation.

Robert Barltrop

Incentive Under Socialism (1940)

From the November 1940 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many people are genuinely puzzled by the Socialist contention that production will go on under Socialism without the existing privileges and inequalities. “How," they ask, “will people be induced to work except under the incentive of wages and the possibility of getting into a higher-paid grade or of escaping into the ranks of the propertied class, who can live without working?" They are not much impressed with the answer that normal healthy human beings who have been educated to an understanding of the social system, and trained to perform useful work do not want to escape working. They want to work and need no more inducement than is given by the knowledge that work must be done to keep society going, and that they are playing their part in it along with their fellow men and women. One curious thing is that it is never himself that the questioner has in mind. He never says that he won't work, but will try to sponge on those who do; always it is some other fellow who will do this. The same blind spot exists when the defenders of capitalism try to justify their system and its supposed “principles" of distributing rewards. In the abstract they defend capitalism on the ground that it is good and necessary that each individual should be looking after himself and trying to get or grab as much as he can, but when it comes to particular cases (always concerned with the other fellow) they repudiate their own principle. Notice how they object to the unemployed receiving a miserly dole without having to work, but never object to the millionaires (most of them in that position through inheritance) being able to live in luxurious idleness. Read the angry letters in the Press objecting to certain workers having changed their jobs in war time in order to get more wages—letters usually written by men whose income is far higher than the one they complain about.

Of more interest are the attempts to state some kind of principle to justify the present system. In the course of a letter to the Times (June 27th, 1940), Mr. Maurice Hely-Hutchinson, M.P., laid down one such principle: —

  It seems unlikely that mankind will ever move forward except on the twin foundations of reward for accomplishment and of personal responsibility. It is axiomatic that there must be a hierarchy of incomes if there is to be a hierarchy of responsibility. 

At a superficial glance it may appear that that is a correct description of the present order of things since some attempt is often made to weigh up the responsibility of grades of workers working alongside each other in the same organisation. The foreman usually gets more pay than the men he orders about.

But what is this “hierarchy of responsibility," and why is it axiomatic? Always the responsibility is responsibility which goes up grade by grade to the owners of the business. That responsibility may conflict and often does conflict with responsibility for the safety of the workers and the responsibility for the interests of the population in general. Why is it axiomatic that the responsibility to the profit-seeking owner should over-ride other responsibilities? Why should the man who supervises road transport drivers and tries to speed them up be paid more for his responsibility to the owners than the careful (but possibly not so speedy) driver who is impressed with his responsibility to pedestrians?

When we leave the individual concern and look at capitalism as a whole the practice is equally at variance with any such principle. How does anyone decide that the head of one of the railways is worth £14,000 a year for his responsibility to shareholders when the train driver or signalmen, who have great responsibility for passengers' lives, receive about one-fiftieth of that amount?

On what principle do our millionaires enjoy their vast unearned incomes? Why does the President of the American concern of Lever Brothers receive a salary of £117,500 a year (News Chronicle, July 2nd, 1940); and does Mr. Hely-Hutchinson think that the responsibility of Shirley Temple, as indicated by her income of £76,750 in 1939, is all that much greater than his own as indicated by his £600 a year for being an M.P? Why, in the Post Office, does the Director-General get a higher salary than his own chief, the Postmaster-General? According to Mr. Hely-Hutchinson this goes dead against the axiom. And would he say that the responsibility of the £5,000 a year (“plus generous expenses”) directors of the Suez Canal is greater than that of the men who run the canal on the spot—the directors, by the way, perform their “responsible” functions in Paris?

Altogether, those who take it upon themselves to explain and apologise for the capitalist system put up a remarkably poor show. Before leaving the matter just observe the Daily Express. That journal is ordinarily energetic and unrepentant in its advocacy of capitalism and ridicule of the supposed impossibilities of Socialism. Often it has dealt with this question of incentive and argued that the only satisfactory incentive is the prospect of making money. But on November 2nd, 1940, its editorial was concerned with the urgent need to find a means of overcoming the night air raiders over London. Instead, however, of being consistent and urging the Government to give large sums of money to whoever would discover the answer to the problem, the Express urged that "the public should be given the names” of the scientists who are at work on the problem. “ Remember,” said the Express, “scientists are human beings. They, too, will flourish under a nation’s praise.” So here, when it comes to the point, the Daily Express is going to rely on mere praise as an inducement to scientists to work hard and fast on a critical problem.

That should be remembered when next the Express argues that Socialism will not work because of lack of incentive.

Edgar Hardcastle

Excursions of "Vanoc II" (1936)

Book Review from the August 1936 issue of the Socialist Standard

"I Am A Heretic," by "Vanoc II." (Peter Davies, 6/-.)

"Vanoc II' might easily be regarded among his contemporaries as the Iconoclast of Fleet Street, so ruthlessly has he written of all traditional bourgeois thought and custom. "I am a Heretic” comprises some of the many contributions which Vanoc made to the Sunday Referee, and those who read them at the time of their publication in that journal will, we think, readily read them again in their more permanent form. Vanoc wields a powerful pen and knows how to “get there” with a pungent broadside, and is ever-ready to “spike the enemy's guns” by the mere turn of the phrase.

It takes an able writer or debater who will first allow his opponents their points in controversy and then proceed to reveal that they possess nothing worth having. This Vanoc does to a nicety. When writing “ In Praise of Courage ” as this is expressed in military terms, he says: 

   “The men who fought and died on all sides and in all causes during the years 1914-1918 were brave. The front officers and men of all armies displayed bravery. This fact is not open to doubt. Nor is there any reason to suppose that bravery of the same kind will be lacking in a new war. . . .”
   “If history teaches us anything,” says Vanoc, “it is that military courage is one of the commonest attributes of men. In war, the enemy is just as brave as the friend; every soldier is aware of that fact. There were, it is true, cowardly Germans; but there were also cowardly British. But there was enough courage on both sides to ensure a record slaughter.”

Vanoc then contraposes this aspect of courage and calls attention to its purpose. “If history has shown the mass of men at all periods to be the possessors of military bravery, it also proves that they have been woefully deficient in civil courage. There have been millions of military heroes for one civil hero.”

The underlying reason for this, Vanoc understands well enough.

*  *  *  *

In a chapter on “An English Reformer,” Vanoc cites the case of William Wilberforce as an example of religious hypocrisy, consciously determined or otherwise, which raves against the effects of class exploitation, but persists in bolstering up the system of class rule.

“Wilberforce,” says Vanoc, “brought every argument that sentiment could sharpen and eloquence ennoble against slavery; but all his arguments were not so much a condemnation of slavery as a refutation of his own Christian ethic. When, for instance, he appealed for mercy for negro slaves,, he vindicated the fundamental social principle of Christianity—namely, the principle of inequality. For mercy between equals is an insult.”

“Even at the time when Wilberforce was denouncing the treatment of enslaved negroes, tens of thousands of his own countrymen were living in conditions that swine would have spurned." Here Vanoc strikes a note well worth understanding, when he says, that “sentimentalists who strike heroic attitudes are seldom capable of co-relating phenomena.” Possibly this may, to some extent, explain why Wilberforce “chaffered with his own conscience to the extent of acquiescing in the infamous Act of Parliament which brazenly acknowledged the right of slave traders to carry on business, provided that cargoes of slaves were limited by the tonnage of ships.”

*  *  *  *

In Karl Marx Vanoc sees one of the best-hated figures in history, and he asks: “Why do they hate this man who has been dead for fifty years? His very beard inspires invective, and bright defenders of capitalism have even probed into his digestive processes in order to discover the origin of the class war.” And why not? Marx himself experienced his enemies' hatred, and in some measure thoroughly enjoyed it.

The men who see the way the game of human exploitation is played and who, in addition, expose the rules of the game, must inevitably arouse the ire of those who live by the sweat of the other fellow's brow. Perhaps the subtle wisdom of Oscar Wilde’s words has a special significance here, namely, that it is not the choice of one's friends that matter so much, it is the choice of one's enemies that is important. In the sense of laying bare the foundations upon which capitalism and all class societies rest, Marx chose his enemies well.

“The driving forces behind Marx's pen,” says Vanoc, “were vision and logic—the rarest of all human qualities, the sign-manuals of creative greatness. Marx shares with the great poets the power to see, with the great scientists the ability to analyse and compare, and with the great musicians the courage to orchestrate his ideas to a passionately human theme.”

Here we may say that this is no mere idealistic hero-worship. Vanoc will readily concede that specific material conditions must form the basis of all social theory, but—and a big “but” it is— Marx saw what millions of others merely felt. and Marx let them know it.

*  *  *  *

On the subject of the so-called crisis in the world of science, Vanoc is just as comfortably at home with the bourgeois scientists and their mysticism as he is in other fields of thought. “It is true,” he says, “that natural occurrences and our perceptions of them are two quite different things, just as the movements of mercury in a thermometer are something quite different from the heat phenomenon which calls them forth. But, as we have seen, this does not do away with the fact that causal connections exist between the two series of occurrences, and through this our sense-perceptions become good instruments for exploring the true nature of the world.” This is from a discourse on “The Dance of the Atoms,” which is exceedingly well done.

It may seem a far cry from all this to the institution of Christmas, but Socialists will appreciate the fact of ideological forces being conditioned by deeply-laid economic facts. Vanoc has a dialogue with Father Christmas, and the venerable old patriarch of Christian tradition is disrobed, dewhiskered and debunked. Old Man Christmas descends from the chimney into Vanoc's study on Christmas Eve. After a slight altercation, Vanoc offers the other a drink, which is readily accepted, but “without a splash.” “Good luck!” says Father Christmas.

Vanoc II: “Good luck! I suppose I can wish a fraud good luck without doing more damage?” 

Father Christmas: “Why, of course you can. And you've no need to rub it in about being frauds. What am I among so many? As a business man—”

Vanoc II: “I've always admired you as such. As a business man you're the slickest thing in the calendar. The hot-cross-bun racket is good, but—”

Father Christmas: “No, no! It's too serious. There's not enough in it. Apart from selling the 'Bread of Life' itself, I think I can pride myself on being the most successful merchant of the mysteries. I can give you exact statistics—”

Vanoc II: “ Don't! They depress me.” 

Father Christmas: “There you go again! Always the Puritan!”

Vanoc II: “Not at all. I was thinking ”

Father Christmas: “No need to think about me and my works. We're just child's play. If it happens, incidentally, to be good business, I say, ‘Thank God !' ”

Vanoc II: “No doubt. But again you're putting the cart before the horse. For it isn't child's play that happens to be good business, but good business that happens to be child's play.” 

And so on is old Daddy Christmas exposed as a mere retailer of commodities, the cash nexus being the underlying reality by which the passage down, the chimney is facilitated. This is why Vanoc compels Christmas to admit that he visits some households more than others, and some not at all.

We have no hesitation in recommending Vanoc's book, even though he sometimes skates on the thin ice of “Bolshevism,” as he went chasing after the blood of Mussolini and Hitler.

Vanoc not only says good things, but says them with telling effect. In this sense, may we say “more power to his elbow”?

Robert Reynolds

Woman's Place (1976)

Book Review from the July 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life by Eli Zaretsky. Pluto Press, £1.00.

This short book was first published as a series of articles in Socialist Revolution (California) in 1973. Eli Zaretsky argues that while work outside the home has largely freed women from patriarchal constraints, the basis for their oppression now lies in their responsibility “for maintaining a private refuge from an impersonal society”. Work in the home is part of the economy, and there is increasing emphasis on “personal life” as something experienced outside work and society.

Zaretsky acknowledges the influence on his thinking of the women’s movement and “socialist currents”. This influence is obvious in his criticism of Marx and Engels. His book illustrates the confusion which arises from the failure to understand Marxian economics and the consequent absence of a clear definition of Socialism.

We read that Marx and Engels failed to see the necessity for dealing with “personal life”, including the oppression of women by men in the home, as a separate issue. Instead they believed that once individuals were freed from economic exploitation they would arrange their private lives according to earlier ideals of domestic and personal fulfilment. But: “The development of capitalism destroyed this hope and to a great extent ‘separated’ the socialist movement from the subsequent development of the family and of personal life among the proletariat” (p.63). In Russia and China the emancipation of women was part of “the ‘emancipation’ of the productive forces of society”, (p.106). Zaretsky claims that the experience in these countries, particularly China, demonstrates the “relevance of Engels’s emphasis on entry into social production to the emancipation of women.” However, the gains in personal freedom have been qualified — “substantial by the goal of developing production”.

In America, apparently, Engels’s idea of resolving the oppressiveness of the family by “revolutionizing the mode of production” has appeared “less and less plausible”. Despite the material benefits of a modern industrial society, education, the possibilities for economic independence and easier housework, women are still oppressed by their responsibilties in the sphere of personal life.

Certainly Engels did say that the emancipation of women becomes feasible when they can take part in social production and “when domestic duties require their attention in a minor degree”. But in looking to a time when women would no longer be economically dependent on men he did not mean by taking a job! He wrote of the full freedom of marriage becoming general after all economic considerations "have been removed by the ABOLITION OF CAPITALISTIC PRODUCTION and of the property relations created by it” (The Origin of the Family, p.99, Kerr edn.).

Marx saw that in giving women and children a decisive role in “the socially organized process of production”, a rôle to be fulfilled outside the home, large-scale industry was forming the economic foundation “for a higher form of the family and of the relations between the sexes”. However, in the same paragraph (Capital Vol. 1 p.496, Unwin edn.) he points out that in capitalism where the worker exists for the process of production, instead of this process existing for the worker, “it is a pestiferous source of corruption and slavery”.

Marx and Engels were looking at conditions in the 19th century, but they would not have been fooled by the undoubted improvements in working and social conditions which have since taken place (the relaxation in the tension of “the golden chain”). Within capitalism they saw the immense possibilities for the future of human relationships. But they did not expect this potential to be fully realized until after the revolutionary change from capitalism to Socialism. This revolution has not yet taken place. There are no Socialist countries!

The SPGB has never been in doubt about the class position of women — or the way to their emancipation. Most women, like most men, belong to the class which owns no part of the means of production, the working class. Their position in this class is not dependent on their being employed. (This definition is obviously not restricted to industrial workers.) There are many reasons for opposing capitalism. The limitations it places on the “personal life” of the majority is one of them. The oppression of women may pre-date capitalism but so do war and poverty. It is capitalism which now prevents their solution and the answer is obvious.

Working-class men and women must organize consciously and politically for the speedy establishment of Socialism. Then when social production is combined with common ownership of the means of production the whole of mankind will be freed from economic exploitation. Common ownership will mean production solely for use and free access to the social wealth. Surely the prerequisite to the arrangement of social production and personal life according to human interest and individual choice. Emancipation indeed!

Pat Deutz

The Problem of Racism (1976)

From the November 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

The riots at Notting Hill and in South Africa have once again sparked off discussion on the racial question. The Labour Party Executive (having supported and maintained the conditions which produced the riots in West London) is now running an anti-racialist campaign.

A great opportunity to debunk this and all the other rubbish about racism is readily to hand in the SPGB pamphlet The Problem of Racism. In easily understood language the whole question of “race” under capitalism is explained. Although published ten years ago, like so many Socialist statements it was prophetic.

For instance: “By trying to divide the Africans through tribalism, by building up vast internal security forces and by repressive legislation the Nationalists may ward off the inevitable for a time. Sooner or later Apartheid will go — capitalism must triumph in South Africa, peacefully or violently”.

Buy it, read it, and then go out and do battle with the Philistines.

THE PROBLEM OF RACISM PAMPHLET IS AVAILABLE FROM HEAD OFFICE PRICE 13 p. inc. POSTAGE.

No alternative (1985)

Editorial from the May 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Margaret Thatcher acquired the unlikely nickname of Tina not because of any fairylike quality but because it is an acronym of one of her earliest catch-phrases - There Is No Alternative. The message of TINA was clear: the government were aware that under their policies a lot of people were in acute suffering but there really was nothing else for it. Their policies may be tough but they were the only ideas which promised to eliminate problems which had been plaguing Britain for a very long time, which no other government had been resolute enough to deal with. If the people in the dole queues and the hospital waiting lists and the like would be patient, toughness would bring its reward in a prosperous, secure nation. Of course the government might try to curry favour by policies such as massive state investment in industry and public works; that might make things better for a while but would only postpone the inevitable. The Day of Reckoning, when it came, would be much more terrible for the delay. So the Thatcher government claimed that they were following the only possible way

One problem about this, for the government, was that it forced them to insist that their policies could be seen to be working. They have, after all, been in power for six years and it is time now for at least some of their pledges to be fulfilled, in the shape of better lives for the people. To argue in this way the government have had either to ignore little matters like the level of unemployment or to suggest that it had something to do with personal failings on the part of the unemployed. Thus Norman Tebbitt's incautious admonition to the workless, not to riot but to bike it around the country to search for non-existent jobs. Thus Nigel Lawson's lament that this year's Budget would have been an historic bonanza of state generosity except that the government had been forced to spend so much on the coal strike. Thus Thatcher's declaration last year, when interest rates began to rise and the pound/dollar exchange rate to fall, that this crisis could easily and quickly be ended if the miners went back to work. They did and it wasn't. Thus the Tories' claim that it is not their policy to reduce spending on things like hospitals, education and social services but only to re-arrange them so that they are better than ever.

TINA must mean that there is no poverty in Britain — nobody struggling to make ends meet on a wage or a paltry state benefit, nobody living in dank slums, nobody dying of the cold because they can't afford to heat their homes in the winter. TINA means ignoring reality because to face it — and this is a familiar story — to face reality would involve the government in an act of self exposure. showing them up as impotent or ignorant or deceitful.

These problems do not afflict socialists; we have no difficulty in facing reality — indeed it is our work constantly to illuminate it and to point to its lessons. The reality of TINA is that the Thatcher policies have failed. Six years of Tory rule have not built a country which is happy, secure and abundant. The social and bodily ills which disfigured Britain when Thatcher came to power are still here, in many cases even worse than they were in 1979. Socialists also point to the reality that the so-called opposition parties — Labour and the Liberal/ SDP Alliance — offer no hope of improving on the Tories' showing. In many ways the term of office of the last Labour government opened the way for the policies of Thatcher; the evidence is that if Labour had kept in power in 1979 they would have been forced to operate much as the Tories have done since then. There is no more optimism in the Alliance. Although they claim to be breaking the mould of the more established capitalist parties they are actually no more than a reconstitution, personally and politically, of the others' failures.

The opposition's fondness for blaming our current problems onto something called Thatcherism implies that the level of unemployment and of poverty in this country have been erected, piece by piece and person by person, by the will of the Prime Minister alone. On what is called the far left — that strange world of self-deception where reality is always barred from entry the priority is to smash the Tories (a policy which is never defined or described in any detail; meanwhile the workers continue to elect Tories to offices of various sorts). But there is never any encouragement from the loony left to consider what should follow, if the Tories were to be "smashed". In the past the working class have thrown out many a Tory government but, such has been their confusion, they have replaced them with other governments just as strongly committed to running capitalism. There is no point in changing one style of capitalism for another; if the world's problems are to be eliminated the radical, enduring solution of a new social order must be applied.

And here, it must be noted, we are not discussing just "Britain's problems", as would the Tories or the Labour Party or any of the other capitalist parties. The problems which matter are those of the working class world wide and there is no solution to them other than a world solution. Socialism will be a society different from capitalism in all ways, from its basis upwards and outwards. The means which human beings apply to produce wealth and distribute it will be in the ownership of the world's people. This will mean an end to production for sale and a beginning to production for human use, to meet human needs. Satisfying human needs must mean that wealth is communally available for all people to consume on equal rights of free access. It is hardly necessary to add. that such a society will not be divided into classes for the basis of class division — the private ownership of the means of life — will have been abolished. As class society is ended social relationships will change so that people will come into contact. and deal, with each other on the basis of a free and equal standing in society.

In such a world the problems which are the stuff of life for capitalism — war. poverty, famine, slums, avoidable deaths and disease — will have their cause removed and will, therefore, cease to trouble the human race. To establish socialism is the only way we can bring that about. The innumerable, agonisingly prolonged, attempts to reform capitalism have failed; it is now an historic monster which has the power to wipe most of us off the face of the earth. Socialism will work. It will be efficient. It will meet human needs. It will bring a world of peace, freedom and plenty. There is no alternative.

New Socialist Pamphlet on Ireland (1983)

From the May 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

IRELAND—PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE — THE Socialist Party of Great Britain and the World Socialist Party of Ireland. 30p 

The Irish Question has been for centuries a constantly recurring problem for the British ruling class. Since the coming into being of a mass urban and industrial working class in the 19th century — and it must not be forgotten that a large proportion of the working class in Britain today are descended from dispossessed Irish peasants who were forced by starvation to seek work in Britain in the last century — the working class too have been dragged into this affair. In Britain it impeded and slowed down working class unity for trade union ends, but in Ireland the consequences were even more serious, especially in the North where tragedy is the only appropriate term to describe the hatred and killings perpetrated by different sections of the working class on each other.

This 24-page pamphlet, written by a member of the Belfast Branch of the World Socialist Party of Ireland, gives a materialist analysis of the course of Irish history from the colonisation of Ulster in the 17th century to the current situation, sparked off by the civil rights campaign of the late 1960s and the reaction of the Unionist establishment. It shows that what on the surface appears to be a religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants was basically an economic conflict over access to land, the main means of production before the advent of industrial capitalism. In the 17th century Protestant tenant farmers settled in the North, or rather were settled by the British state on lands that had been taken from their previous occupants, the Gaels, who were Catholics, thus creating an antagonism which, in the circumstances, naturally took on a religious appearance. In the South, where the Catholic land-owning class had taken the side of the Royalists in the English Civil War, the Catholic peasants had imposed on them by Cromwell a new-exploiting landlord class who were Protestant, absentee and, through their agents in Ireland, ruthlessly rack renting.

From this time on Irish social history is one of a land war, sometimes open and violent, always latent and simmering, culminating towards the end of the 19th century in the victory, in effect, of the peasant class. Faced with mounting peasant unrest, the British government decided to buy out the Protestant landlord class and re-sell the land to the peasants. This abolition of the Protestant ascendancy represented the end of the Irish land question, but it by no means meant the end of the Irish problem for the British ruling class for, in the meantime, with its problems and conflicts, capitalism had come to Ireland.

Largely because of the different systems of land tenure in the North and in the rest of Ireland, capitalism did not develop uniformly in the whole island. In the 19th century it developed primarily in the North whose capitalist class — in textiles, shipbuilding and related engineering industries — became an integral part of the British ruling class, geared to producing for the British and Imperial markets. In the South on the other hand, capitalism never really reached the industrial stage and remained linked to farming and servicing the towns. In other words, the fledgling capitalist class in the South had at this time a completely different interest from the mature industrial capitalist class in the North East. Far from wanting to remain linked to the British market they wanted tariffs to protect them from the competition of the British capitalists. The mass of the Catholic peasants who formed the majority of the population in Ireland were, by and large, able to enrol under their banner demanding “Home Rule", and so the Northern capitalists were faced with a very real problem. There was a danger of their being cut off from Britain and its markets and sources of raw materials and condemned to decline behind the tariff walls of an inward-looking and protectionist Ireland.

To resist this threat, they too sought a mass basis by playing the Orange card (as Winston Churchill's father, Lord Randolph Churchill cynically put it). This involved enrolling the Protestant farmer and working class majority in the North East under their banner of “Union" (with the rest of Britain) through exploiting the dying embers of Catholic-Protestant sectarianism. In the end they won their way. In 1922 Ireland was partitioned: 26 of Ireland's 32 counties were handed over to the political control of the fledgling capitalist class of the South, the remaining six to that of the Northern capitalists within the framework of the United Kingdom. As the pamphlet explains it:

No one making a dispassionate assessment of the situation that resulted in the establishment of two separate states in Ireland in 1922 can escape the conclusion that the primary cause of conflict was the imbalance of economic development between the north and the south. The struggle was about the political needs of the capitalist class in Ireland, and that class, and its political representatives, were willing to sacrifice the lives of the working class, in the north and the south, in defence of a system that offered the working class, as a whole, only the continuation of its poverty.

The two political regimes resulting from the 1922 partition did, in fact, rival each other in their openly anti-working class nature. By the 1960s however the original uneven development of capitalism which had led to partition was beginning to disappear: some industry had developed in the South behind the dreaded tariff walls while the traditional industries of the North were declining, and multi-national capital was seeking to invest in Ireland irrespective of the border.

In these circumstances, the sectarianism which had sustained Partition could have been expected to decline and eventually die away, and this was what the capitalist class both in the North and in the South hoped would happen. But this was to underestimate the extent to which they had successfully poisoned the minds of the workers they had enrolled as pawns in their previous political battles. Sectarianism proved not to be something that could suddenly be switched off by the flick of a finger. We will again let the pamphlet explain in its own inimitable style:

History bad provided the capitalists and their political representatives with the means of disguising from the working class the nature of the conflict. The South was overwhelmingly Catholic, the North mainly Protestant. The northern politicians swept the gutters of history and recruited the holy-men of the Church and the Orange Order to whip up a vicious reaction to the threat of Home Rule. Their southern counterparts used the same tactics to infuse a vicious anti-working class patriotism. The legendmakers and the liars were at work; money and effort were both available to imbue the working class with hatred, bigotry and patriotic rubbish and. sadly, the putrid concoction was to last until the present — to inflicts its miseries on a divided working class and, ironically, to disturb the sensitive political nostrils of the heirs of the class that had introduced it onto the political scene.

Sectarianism had never served the interests of the working class, but for a number of decades now it has no longer served, as it once did, the interests of rival sections of the capitalist class in Ireland. Today it is senseless from all points of view; yet it still persists since capitalism, with the artificial scarcity it maintains, encourages competition between groups of workers for the relative crumbs it has to offer them. The pamphlet ends by explaining socialism and how it is the only solution to the problems facing workers not only in Ireland but throughout the world. In passing we must point out a misprint on page 7. The Catholic Emancipation Act (which emancipated the Catholic capitalist class in Ireland, not the mass of the irish peasants) was passed in 1829, not 1823.

This pamphlet should be in the hands of every socialist and every other person who wants to understand the present situation in Northern Ireland. Its lively, forthright style and its unique point of view make it easy and fascinating reading.

Adam Buick

A few words to non-socialists (1988)

From the February 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

You are not a socialist. You do not want to live in a society where all of the resources are commonly owned and democratically controlled where factories, farms, offices, mines and media belong to the whole community, regardless of race or sex. You do not stand for production solely for use: food grown simply so that it can be eaten, houses to be lived in. clothes to be worn, entertainment to be enjoyed. You do not want a society where all people have free access to all goods and services without having to buy them - a moneyless society. The idea of a world without national frontiers, states and the weapons of militarist murder does not motivate you to political action. You are just not a socialist.

Now, there are many ways of not being a socialist. You might be a violent anti-socialist who is committed to the defence of the capitalist status quo to the bitter end. Most workers are not passionate defenders of capitalism. Most of capitalism's victims, the working class, do not even know what capitalism is. Indeed, few capitalists are even dedicated advocates of their own system they just enjoy it while the fruits are there for them to pick. Most non-socialists are simply not bothered about the meaning of capitalism or socialism. They would describe themselves as non-political, occasionally becoming politically vocal about the odd issue, and, if they are feeling up to it, voting in elections once every four or five years - usually to keep the baddies out rather than with any real belief that the goodies are any good.

Most workers regard socialism as something to do with politics and politics as something profoundly boring. So, when the Socialist Standard seller approaches them in the street or pub. offering a good socialist read for only 30p, most workers look the other way in the hope that politics will ignore them. Politics is about power - about who has it and who does not and what the powerful can do to the powerless. If you are a worker, deprived of all kinds of basic powers over your own life - ranging from the age at which you can legally have sexual relations and with whom, to whether you and your family are to be blown to pieces in a nuclear war - politics does not leave you alone.

To the average worker in Britain socialism is a scare word. It is like AIDS and sin and Libya - you might not know quite what they mean or where they are, but you know that your mother wouldn't approve of them. Workers fear socialism. Long years of anti-socialist propaganda by those who have a direct class interest in workers' fear of freedom have seen to that.

Socialism, the non-socialist will tell you. is what exists in Russia. And China - which is a national enemy of Russia. And Albania - which is a national enemy of Russia and China. Socialism is what they have in Australia - and Spain - and Greece - because they have "socialist governments” in those countries, don't they? And then there was Attlee and Bevan and Wilson and Callaghan - they were supposed to have called themselves socialists. Tony Benn, Ken Livingstone, Arthur Scargill: these men even use the word "socialist'' so they must be the real thing, mustn't they? Adolf Hitler called himself a National Socialist. All very confusing.

The Leftists who talk about "socialist countries" and "socialist governments" and "socialist leaders" do immense damage to working-class understanding of socialism. Most workers look at leftism and its aim of turning private capitalism into state capitalism (which the Left calls socialism) and, quite rightly, they reject "socialism". Labels deceive.

Many workers think that socialism is a moral proposition: that it has something to do with being nice to people. Most socialists do try to live their lives as decent beings in an indecent world, but that is not what socialism is about. Socialism relates to the material conditions within which we are able to live and behave. Socialists who own factories must exploit their employees or else they go broke, socialists who are competing with other workers for jobs will not endure the punishment of the dole queue so that their fellow workers can live well. Capitalism is a dog-eat-dog system and socialists are not dogs who will not bite, but dogs who are barking in pursuit of a system where we do not need to bite. Socialism is about the co-operation of humankind for the sake of us all.

Some workers like the sound of socialism. It has the sort of sound to it as an idea, when you consider it carefully, which reasonable people tend to find attractive. Yes, it would be good if we could all share this world as one human family, but . . . But, says the non-socialist, things can never be that way. The non-socialist has a fundamental doubt about tomorrow ever being different from today. Which is a rather groundless doubt when you come to think about it. for it is the ceaseless lesson of history that the certainties of the past are repeatedly tossed aside by new ideas, new conditions, new certainties. Just as capitalism, with its world market and working class freed from the ties of feudal serfdom, once seemed like a utopian dream, so socialism is only a dream to those who imagine that the capitalist nightmare is unlike all previous historical epochs and will go on forever.

Once workers have been convinced that human nature is not a barrier to socialism, many non-socialists, while agreeing that socialism sounds worth having, are too tired, too apathetic, too busy with other things to get up and join the movement for socialism. They may offer support for The Socialist Party - perhaps even regard themselves as sympathisers. We are glad of their support. But a disorganised minority of workers who will be for socialism when it comes can and will do little or nothing to change history. Their visions will be lost in the mists of dust created by the bombs which are being prepared for use as you read this article.

There is no way of forcing the non-socialist to become a socialist. It will not happen by electing so-called socialist governments to bring about socialism for the workers even though they know nothing about it. Nor will it happen as a result of the efforts of the counter-productive Leninist sects which think that the workers can be marched to freedom with guns to their heads. There is no substitute for winning a majority of our fellow workers to understand and want socialism. The Socialist Party will not do this alone. If our efforts were the sole means of transforming society from capitalism to socialism the world would be in for a long wait. It is the capitalist system, with its relentless class struggle, which creates the material conditions within which socialists are made. The task of The Socialist Party is to take the discontent which capitalism provides for us and see that it is not wasted upon the politics of futility.

If you are a non-socialist you should think carefully about why that is. If - as will be the case with very many workers - you have never really thought about why you are not a socialist, never regarded yourself as a supporter of the capitalist system which enslaves you, then now is the time to consider your position. If you are an anti-socialist, then you have some obligation to tell us socialists why we are wrong. If you agree with what we are saying, then now is the time to do something about it: visit your local branch, place a regular order for the Socialist Standard. And if you agree with the Socialist Party, why not join?

This is not an academic article. It is not about whether Victoria was a good Queen or a useless old parasite. It is not an article for reading and then forgetting. It is an invitation to think and to act. It is that capacity which human beings possess to a higher degree than any other animal. Think, act - and who is to say what sort of world this shall be by 1990?

Steve Coleman