Rear View: Help! (2019)

The Rear View Column from the January 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Help!

Last year Save the Children issued an emergency alert: ‘In war-torn Yemen, 85,000 children may have died from starvation since start of crisis. Families are forced to choose between food and other necessities, like water and medicine. 13 million people face starvation – many of them children. Please help.’ Nobody can fail to be moved by the pictures and accounts of the latest group of people starving unnecessarily. It really is an obscene crime against humanity that people should be dying of starvation in a world which is not only capable of producing enough to feed everybody but even has enough food stockpiled to stop it straightaway. Help comes with understanding: food, like every other commodity in the modern world, is produced primarily for profit, as this headline from Asia Times (31 October) attests: ‘In Yemen, plenty of food but few have the cash to buy it’. And: ‘While agriculture and food distribution suffer from the war, food remains available in markets across the country — but few can afford it. “All kinds of food and other items are available in the market. The problem is not a shortage of food in markets but that we do not have money to buy food that is now expensive,” Sofi said’ (Middle East Eye, 9 November).

Want

Such analysis by two mainstream media outlets puts that of the Trotskyist International Committee of the Fourth International to shame. An article titled ‘At least 85,000 child deaths in Yemen highlight Saudi-US war crimes’ (wsws.org, 23 November) blames American imperialism and fails to mention that those with money in Yemen can, and do, have access to food as well as medicine. To be sure, Yemen being the battlefield for one of capitalism’s endemic wars complicates matters — and whenever war breaks out it is our class which suffers the most — but famines only affect those whose access to money or land has collapsed for some reason. Famines are a social not a natural phenomenon.

War

Wars are never fought in our interests. War often results when conflicts of interest between states over markets, sources of raw materials, energy supplies, trade routes, exploitable populations and areas of strategic importance cannot be resolved by other means. The article ‘Yemen Genocide About Oil Control’ (globalresearch.ca, 20 November) supports this view. ‘Yemen is a strategically key geopolitical stretch of land at the critical connecting point of the Red Sea which links to the Mediterranean via the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean. It’s the site of one of the world’s most strategic shipping choke points, the Bab el Mandab, a narrow passage a mere 18 miles distance from Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, making it one of the US Department of Energy’s Oil Transit Chokepoints. According to the US Department of Energy an estimated 4.7 million barrels of oil passes through Bab el Mandab in both directions daily, including oil bound for China.’ The same article concludes: ‘[Prince Mohammed bin] Salman not surprisingly claimed it was a war of Iran-led “imperialists” against the forces of Saudi-led “freedom-loving” Sunnis. China now has its first overseas military base across from Yemen in Djibouti, next door to the US whose Camp Lemonnier is the largest American permanent military base in Africa. Former colonial occupier France is also there. There is far more at stake in Yemen than we are being told.’

Peace?

When some semblance of peace is restored and the strategic port of Hodeidah is once again open for business, any food aid which arrives will likely be calculated using capitalism’s calculus. Protecting the market for food in Yemen is in fact a key factor shaping the so-called ‘food aid’ policies of governments and the UN. They know that to make available for free distribution anything but minimal amounts of food per starving person would be to undermine local markets and local market-oriented production, leading to more people coming to lose their access rights to food. And of course they are right. Given the market system this is exactly what would happen. So, quite apart from financial cost considerations, they deliberately limit the amount of free food they supply. Market forces will likely prevent the immediate starvation in Yemen being solved in the way that it would be, almost literally overnight, in a sane society, one that would have to be based on the common ownership of resources: transporting the food from the warehouses of Europe to the towns and villages of the former country of Yemen.

Curate’s egg (2019)

Book Review from the January 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Rupturing the Dialectic. The Struggle Against Work, Money and Financialization’. By Harry Cleaver. (AK Press. 2018)

Cleaver has a novel view of capitalism: that capitalists are not so much interested in profits as in imposing work on people as a means of social control. So, for him, the class struggle is between those who want to impose work (the capitalists) and those who resist work (housewives, students and schoolkids as such as well as wage and salary workers). It’s a point of view but not that of Marx.

For someone who has taught and written on how to ‘read’ Marx, he makes a whole range of classic errors (workers not being able to buy back all they produce as the cause of crises, taxation as a burden on the working class, secondary exploitation of workers by banks). On one point he is open about ‘revising Marx’ (his words). Marx’s theory of interest was that it is a share of surplus value created in the value-producing sector of the economy and which the capitalists there allow to go to banks for performing a function that they would otherwise have to tie up some of their capital in doing themselves. Cleaver’s view is that interest is a payment for a service and that it is derived from the surplus value produced by bank workers.

Despite this, Cleaver recognises ‘that getting rid of money and markets entirely is not only a necessary condition for getting rid of capitalism but also desirable in its own right’ (page 228) and devotes six pages to arguing well the case for this. But then it’s downhill again as in the following sixty pages he describes various ways for gradually marginalising the use of money under capitalism which he thinks wage and salary workers (and housewives and students) should struggle for.

Besides free or subsidised services, price and rent controls, lower taxes on consumer goods, and limits on interest on consumer credit, paradoxically he also includes higher wages and overtime pay on the grounds that the more money people have, either the less time they need to work or the more they can spend on campaigning for the reforms he lists.

Despite having been a professor of economics he appears not to understand the effect of free or subsidised goods and services on wage levels: that if workers don’t have to pay the full price of something then they don’t need to be paid so much by their employer to recreate their labour power and so their money wage will tend to fall (even if their standard of living won’t). Maybe he is assuming that workers could successfully resist this. That would be in line with the basic mistake of the ‘autonomist Marxists’ of imagining that workers have more power as purveyors of labour power than they actually have.

Adam Buick

Our Future on Earth (2019)

From the January 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

The workers of the world are yet to unite to accomplish their over-a-century-long pending task of overcoming what Thorstein Veblen called ‘the predatory phase’ of human development. They have yet to move on to the phase of ‘an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’ (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels), by transforming human society into ‘a planetary community of production and consumption’ (Albert Einstein). With the disappearance of classes from within liberated humanity, humans will leave behind their prehistory and enter into the realm of free history, as Marx envisaged.

Material abundance has been knocking at our door since about the beginning of the past century waiting for us to accept it and create a fulfilling life for the whole of humanity. What is still lacking is the working class’s will, unity, and action country-wise and worldwide. Their social consciousness remains crippled by glorification of power and success and all-pervading competition. This ongoing alienated cultural constitution, ‘crippling of the social consciousness of individuals’ (Albert Einstein), has kept us arrested in a devastating ‘Escape from freedom’ or ‘Fear of Freedom’ (Erich Fromm). In the name of freedom we are preoccupied with ‘freedom from’ (‘negative freedom’) – bourgeois freedom, vulgar freedom – while what we need is ‘freedom to’ (‘positive freedom’) – socialist freedom, real freedom – a freedom to lead a harmonious and humane life.

Progress in science and technology has given rise to Artificial Intelligence and robotics which is making this freedom more and more viable.

Marx’s long-term prediction
Marx and Engels didn’t live to see the precise future course of scientific and technological developments and their specific forms of manifestation (ie artificial intelligence, robotics) which would emerge from the hectic pursuit of profit. They were dealing mainly with capital’s fledgling period. So in capital’s ascending phase when the productive forces were developing within the womb of an expanding and globe-conquering capitalist mode and relations of production, they could only anticipate the forthcoming historical trends. Marx’s materialist conception of history had imbued him with penetrating insight and profound predictive power whereby he foresaw the impending state of affairs with their far-reaching consequences. As he observed in 1858:

  ‘Invention then becomes a business, and the application of science to direct production itself becomes a prospect which determines and solicits it. But this is not the road along which machinery, by and large, arose, and even less the road on which it progresses in detail. This road is, rather, dissection– through the division of labour, which gradually transforms the workers’ operations into more and more mechanical ones, so that at a certain point a mechanism can step into their places. … Thus, the specific mode of working here appears directly as becoming transferred from the worker to capital in the form of machine, and its own labour capacity devalued thereby. Hence the workers’ struggle against machinery. What was the living worker’s activity becomes the activity of the machine … the progress of technology, or the application of this science to production … Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself. (What holds for machinery holds likewise for the combination of human activities and the development of human intercourse.)’ (Marx, Grundrisse, Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1981, pp. 704-709).

Horrific catastrophe – only 12 years to go?
Now that automation, artificial intelligence and robots are quite capable of performing much of the world’s necessary and useful laborious work, humanity is on the brink of a forthcoming leisure society, Marx’s all-encompassing scientific society. Once we enter its knowledgeable domain, having emancipated humankind from its perilously degenerating slavery of capital, it will be indispensable for us to counter as far as we can the threat of extinction, especially in view of the catastrophic survival warning about having just 12 years in hand to deal with global warming, as reported by the Guardian, London: ‘We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN – Urgent changes needed to cut risk of extreme heat, draught, floods and poverty, says IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]. Overwhelmed by climate change? Here’s what you can do… The world’s leading climate scientists have warned there is only a dozen years for global warming to be kept to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which even half a degree will significantly worsen the risks of draught, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people. … The authors of the landmark report by the UN IPCC released on Monday say urgent and unprecedented changes are needed to reach the target, which they say is affordable and feasible although it lies at the most ambitious end of the Paris agreement pledge to keep temperatures between 1.5C and 2C. The half-degree difference could also prevent corals from being completely eradicated and ease pressure on the Arctic, according to the 1.5C study, which was launched after approval at a final plenary of all 195 countries in Incheon in South Korea that saw delegates hugging one another with some in tears’ (8 October).

Save Earth’s environment
First, we are required to reduce and reverse the currently devastating emission levels of the greenhouse gases – water vapour, carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), ozone (O3), chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), hydrofluorocarbons (incl. HCFCs and HFCs) – in order to avoid the threatening trends of ongoing global overwarming. The hostile climate catastrophe has to be dealt with by discontinuing uses of fossil fuels – coal, petrol, diesel, kerosene etc. and substituting solar and other forms of renewable energy. We have also to get rid of the perilous plastic pollution that exists. We have to discontinue the destruction of forests together with their flora and fauna by substituting all the various uses of timber logs with fibreglass and conserving and restore our lost forests to create an eco-friendly atmosphere which will absorb and retard the swollen carbon emissions. This done, we will overcome the hazards over our present homeland – the planet Earth; we will be free from the fear of our species going the same way as the dinosaurs of extinction from the Earth’s environment. Not that global warming to levels, even well above the IPCC’s threshold of a 1.5C addition to the current average global temperature compared to pre-industrial times, would threaten the human species with complete extinction. If high enough it would cause many millions of deaths but some humans would survive even if in very difficult conditions.

As necessity is the mother of invention, even if we remove the current threat from global overwarming, circumstances – the exhaustion of the Sun – will eventually prompt us to realise that we need to get out of the periphery of Earth to explore new homes elsewhere and move on to becoming a Universal Community of Scientific Beings – star-trekking beings. As Marx said, ‘Circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances’. Thus eventually humans will have to make their circumstances anew once again.  Of course becoming star-trekking beings is a very long way off as it will be a few billions of years before the Sun begins to burn out. ‘Will the Sun Ever Burn Out? Yes, the sun will eventually burn out. But not for a long, long time. The Sun has used up about half of its hydrogen fuel in the last 4.6 billion years, since its birth. It still has enough hydrogen to last about another 5 billion years.’ (From space.com)  So this wouldn’t be a way-out from a more immediate threat from global overwarming. But that time will eventually inexorably come.

Binay Sarkar

Almeria’s Greenhouses: The Dark Side of Agri-Capitalism (2019)

From the January 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Part One: Mar de Plastico

In Almeria province in Southern Spain there is to be found the largest greenhouse complex in the world, an area roughly the size of the Isle of Wight. Nothing quite prepares you for the sheer scale of it all – or the brutal ugliness. Driving through it can be a disorientating experience. As far as the eye can see, covering the coastal plain and lapping the mountain range behind, is a shimmering sea of plastic.

The first greenhouses were erected in the early 1960s. Prior to that Almeria province was considered the poorest region in Spain, a barren desolate place, Europe’s only desert and the backdrop of many Spaghetti Westerns and films like Lawrence of Arabia. However, it wasn’t always like that.

Historical Background

At one time, according to Robert Wolosin, the area had extensive pine and oak forests as well as abundant fauna (including bear, lynx and roe deer), despite its meagre rainfall (2006, El Milagro de Almeria, Espana: A Political Ecology of landscape change and Greenhouse Agriculture). Successive waves of human occupation incrementally transformed this landscape to what it has become today. Key to this was the overexploitation and export of local resources linked to the extraction of economic surpluses.

Anthropogenic influences on the environment can be traced back to Roman times and even earlier. After the collapse of the Roman Empire in the 5th century, the habitat largely reverted to its earlier state, only to undergo a further transformation under the Nasrid Moorish dynasty (711-1492). The Moors introduced elaborate irrigation technology and new crops like citrus and almonds. Under them, the city of Almeria itself grew to briefly become the second richest city in Europe after Constantinople, linking the hinterland to the wider world of Mediterranean trade.

The Christian ‘Reconquista’ (re-conquest) of Spain completed in 1492, signalled a new chapter in the region’s environmental history. Feudal lords leased out land for sheep farming to provide wool for the Italian textile industry. The decline of that market in the 1600s and the availability of abundant land, subsequently encouraged a shift towards low-yield, extensive ‘dry’ farming (mainly cereals) necessitating the removal of yet more vegetation cover. Pastures and woodland were recklessly put under the plough, rendering the soil vulnerable to erosion, in a manner reminiscent of Dustbowl years of the 1930s when ecologically inappropriate, commercially-driven, farming techniques were introduced on the vast prairies of North America.

The final, and most devastating, blow to Almeria’s once forested, if fragile, environment was delivered in the early 19th century when, as Wolosin notes, tens of thousands of acres of vegetation cover was lost and half a million evergreen oaks were felled to, among other things, serve the needs of the local mining industry, then experiencing a boom. The growth of the mining sector – Almeria province at that time accounted for 80 percent of Spain’s lead production – also encouraged inward migration and the resultant increase in population exerted additional pressure on the local environment. However, by the late 19th century the mining industry went into a sharp decline because of falling prices but also, ironically, because of a self-inflicted shortage of wood needed to fuel the foundries. With mining in decline and farming adversely affected by centuries of environmental abuse, the province succumbed to significant depopulation.

Such was the parlous state that Almeria found itself in the early 20th century before the advent of the greenhouses:

 ‘An area once known for forests, streams, and a wide array of plant and animal life is now parched, cracked, and shadeless’ (ibid).

The ‘Ecological transition’

Putting this in a wider context Wolosin, citing the environmentalist Heinrich Walter, remarks that the Mediterranean region, and Almeria in particular, are ‘the best and most tragic example of how mankind has removed the foundations for his existence through the overexploitation of natural resources’. How this came about can be usefully understood in terms of the concept of the ‘ecological transition’ pioneered by John Bennett in his book The Ecological Transition: Cultural Anthropology and Human Adaptation (1976).

According to Bennett, there is a spectrum of human adaptations – from a local community completely reliant upon, and adapted to, its own immediate resource base right through to the kind of globalised system of production that characterises modern capitalism. In this latter case, the local community no longer depends entirely on its own resources to meet all its needs but, increasingly, on the ability of other communities to supply some, or even most, of those needs. In other words, environmental adaptation to the immediate constraints of nature gives way to the cultural adaptation of communities to each other.

The classical economist, David Ricardo, advanced his theory of ‘comparative advantage’ in support of this development. It benefits a nation, he argued, to specialise in what it is best at producing while relying on other nations to supply it with goods it is not particularly adept at producing. This reduces the opportunity costs of producing goods across all nations, leaving everyone better off from the resultant increase in global trade.

Ricardo’s theory is based on a number of unrealistic assumptions but, here, we are concerned only with the particular counter argument bound up with the aforementioned concept of the ‘ecological transition’ – namely, that by reducing the local community’s reliance on its own natural resources, this tends to ‘desensitise’ it to the need to prudently operate within the limits of these resources. This does not mean those limits are necessarily fixed and unchangeable – human intervention can, for instance, sometimes significantly enhance the fertility and hence, ‘carrying capacity’, of the soil. Nor does it mean a community will inevitably set about despoiling its own environment if it can rely on others to supply what it needs – there are other factors involved besides this – but this does nevertheless create the conditions which can greatly amplify the environmental impact of those other factors.

The collapse of the Roman Empire is a classic example. In part, the expansion of that empire was driven by the need to secure an adequate food supply to meet the needs of Rome itself – at its height, a city of one million people – and its vast armies. Grain tributes were exacted from conquered territories all around the Mediterranean basin which profoundly altered the region’s ecology. Widespread deforestation occurred to permit intensive cereal farming leading to soil exhaustion and desertification. The resultant decline in output, in turn, prompted the empire to further expand its territory, eventually reaching the point at which its supply lines were so over-stretched that it became increasingly vulnerable to external threats.

In modern capitalism, it is not so much tribute as the quest for profit that drives economic activity. But with capitalism, we see also the same preoccupation with short term interests over long term sustainability. According to Friedrich Engels:

 ‘As individual capitalists are engaged in production and exchange for the sake of immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate results must first be taken into account . . . What cared the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down the forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertiliser for one generation of highly profitable coffee trees – what cared they that heavy tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the unprotected upper stratum of soil, leaving behind only bare rock! In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about the immediate, most tangible result, and then surprise is expressed that the more remote effects of actions directed to this end turn out to be quite different, are mostly quite opposite in character’ (1876, The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man).

These words have a particularly modern ring to them in the light of the multiple and escalating environmental crises facing humanity today. The underlying mechanism driving this development is plain to see. Business enterprises strive to ‘externalise’ their production costs as far as possible in order to maximise their commercial gains under a system of market competition – or face commercial ruin. However, just because those costs are made to disappear from the accountant’s ledger book, this does not mean they cease to exist. The burden of those costs is born not just by the wider community but the very physical environment itself upon which we ultimately depend.

In response, capitalism has tended to promote technological ‘solutions’ to these very problems it has itself engendered. But can such an approach ever truly succeed in ensuring we keep our heads above the water or will the rising tide of ‘externalities’ eventually engulf us all?

A Spanish ‘El Dorado’

This is a question we might well ask in turning to consider that particularly remarkable example of capitalist enterprise and innovation: the greenhouses of Almeria.

In the 1950s, under Franco, a model irrigation project was launched in that sparsely populated zone, now under plastic, with the aim of resettling landless peasants there. It was the peasants themselves who initially developed the basic technology of greenhouse production – including the use of polythene rather than glass, attached to a simple framework of wood or metal – capitalising on the region’s natural advantages such as its abundant sunshine and the virtual absence of frost, to give them a competitive edge in the market for early vegetables. At first, it was the local, then the wider national market they supplied but, with Spain joining the EU in 1986, production became truly transnational. Europe, as a whole, now relies for most of the year on Spain to provide almost a third of its demand for fresh fruit and salad crops – a figure rising to half during the cold winter months – much of this coming from Almeria’s greenhouses which generate an annual revenue of about €2 billion.

As the industry expanded so did the role of intermediaries in financing, marketing and basic R&D. Indeed, the institutional architecture that has been built up around the greenhouse industry itself is, today, extraordinarily complex and closely coordinated. Downward and Taylor quote Almeria’s Director of Agriculture as saying: ‘This is the most social level of agriculture in the world, not even the best communist system would have achieved what has been achieved in Almeria… and by people who maybe 50 years ago would have only had a herd of goats’ (Journal of Environmental Management, January 2007).

Remarkably, given the highly ‘socialised’ nature of the industry, the ownership of the greenhouses themselves remains firmly family-based with about 13,500 small scale producers operating in the greenhouse belt typically on plots of somewhat over 2 hectares. This helps to explain the popularity of the greenhouses among the locals who widely regard this development as an ‘economic miracle’ and have prospered as a result. However, it is a miracle bought at a considerable cost which calls into question the sustainability of this model of development – not least, as we shall see, in an era of growing concern about climate change.

(Part 2 follows next month)

Robin Cox

What’s new about Tory racism? (1984)

From the April 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Shock! Horror! Have you heard the latest rumour? According to the media . . .  according to "usually reliable sources", it seems that racists have been "infiltrating” the Conservative Party. Oh. the awful scandal of it. After all these years of tolerance and open-mindedness, the party at which Enoch Powell was once the most popular guest has allowed the whiff of racism to stain its reputation. Could it have been that when Margaret Thatcher made her 1979 speech about British folk feeling swamped by aliens, her harmless words were misinterpreted by racists who imagined — perish the thought — that she was trying to lure the "paki-basher vote” away from the National Front?

Well, now it is all out in the open. The political advisor to the Monday Club has resigned, staling that it has been taken over by racist infiltrators. A BBC Panorama documentary exposed the alleged manoeuvrings of Tory Action, a band of right-wing loonies who apparently resent the fact that Thatcher has committed the sin of appointing Jews as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Home Secretary. Certain Tory MPs. including the last relic of the Empire. Harvey Proctor, are accused in a recent Young Conservative report of having close links with known racists, including members of several barmy fascist outfits, such as the National Front. The new Tory chairman. John Selwyn Gummer. has promised to take firm action (in the tradition of his predecessor) against any members of the Conservative Party who are discovered to hold racist views. Perhaps Gummer should make a study of Tory party history before he asserts with such self-righteous hypocrisy that his party would never tolerate racist infiltration.

Back in the 1880s there was a steady flow of immigrants entering Britain in order to escape from anti-semitic persecution in Russia and Poland. In 1894 the Marquess of Salisbury introduced a Bill in the House of Lords which was intended to diminish the number of immigrants entering Britain, that is, to increase the number of Jewish workers who would be destined to stay in Eastern Europe to face murder and persecution. By 1898 Salisbury was the Tory Prime Minister and a similar Bill was placed before the Lords by Lord Hardwicke, who declared that:

  It would be a very serious matter if the type of population which is now to be found in many districts of the East End. where there is a strong alien element, were to become at all a common type in the poorer districts of our large cities. It would mean, my Lords, that these classes would become to a great extent non-English in character, and that, both in physique and in moral and social customs, they had fallen below our present by no means elevated standard.

Tory racism was more explicitly expressed in 1902. when Major Williams Evans Gordon, the Conservative MP for Stepney —an area of dense immigrant settlement— moved an amendment to the Queen's Speech calling for control of immigration. His speech is too rambling to quote in full (it was made in the House of Lords on 29 January 1902 and is worth reading) but, to give an idea of his approach, here are some samples: "Not a day passes but English families are ruthlessly turned out to make room for foreign invaders . . . It is only a matter of time before the population becomes entirely foreign . . . The working classes know that new buildings are erected not for them but for strangers from abroad . . . A storm is brewing which, if it be allowed to burst, will have deplorable results". In order to encourage the brewing-process, Evans Gordon formed the openly anti-semitic British Brothers’ League and organised a rally at the People’s Palace in the Mile End Road. Stepney which, according to contemporary accounts, was identical in its racist style and content to the more recent gatherings of the National Front.

So influential was backbench Tory racism that, in 1904, the Balfour government introduced legislation to deal with "the alien problem”. This was opposed by most Liberals — although by no means all of that party were opposed to the racist sentiments of the government; for example, the Liberal MP. Cathcart Watson, referred to the Jewish immigrants as “the refuse and scum of other nations" (Hansard, 18 February 1903).

By 1905 Balfour’s Bill had been dropped. but the Tory racists were not happy. A number of capitalists in the West Midlands, for instance, were concerned that the introduction of cheap labour power into the East End sweatshops of London would interfere with market competition. In the by-election at Stalybridge in 1905 the Tories distributed a leaflet to all electors in which they tried to attack the Liberals for being "soft on immigration”:

  “Let them all come" is the radical cry. The radicals, by their obstruction to the Aliens Bill, are evidently glad to see all foreigners who are criminals, who suffer from loathsome diseases, who are turned out in disgrace by their fellow-countrymen, who are paupers who fill the streets with profligacy and disorder.

In the 1930s the Tories, who like to claim these days that they were the great opponents of Nazi anti-semitism, were busy trying to prevent Jewish immigrants from escaping from the concentration camps of Germany be entering Britain. One example of several was the question asked in the House of Commons by Edward Doran, the Conservative MP for Tottenham, on 9 March 1933:

  Will the Home Secretary take steps to prevent any alien Jews entering this country from Germany? Hundreds of thousands of Jews are now leaving Germany and scurrying from there to this country . . .

It must be beyond historical doubt that there were many German Jews — probably thousands — who were sent to their deaths by the Nazis because they had failed in their efforts to be accepted as immigrants into Britain and other countries operating racist policies.

In the 1950s British capitalism was in a period of expansion and it was necessary to import labour power from the Commonwealth countries. Most Tories dropped their old racist views, tempted to favour the idea of a multi-racial society by the knowledge that black labour power would be cheap and obedient. During this period Tory racism was relatively isolated, but still there were some who stuck to their gut feelings, such as Sir Cyril Osborne who declared that “This is a white man’s country and I want it to remain so" (Daily Mail, 7 February 1961). Racism was nothing new for the Mail, which, in the 1930s, had supported Moseley’s Blackshirt fascists. On 4 December 1964, Osborne was writing in The Spectator that "If unlimited immigration were allowed, we should ultimately become a chocolate-coloured, Afro-Asian mixed society. That I do not want”.

Osborne represented a strand of base Toryism which has always existed within the British ruling class. By and large it is not the outlook of the modern capitalist, who is prepared to exploit without caring about the colour of the workers’ skins. In the years of expansion the Osbornes were in a minority and most racists tended to form themselves into specifically anti-immigrant organisations, such as the League of St. George. At the same time there were a few nutters like Colin Jordan and John Tyndall who resented the defeat of Nazism and wanted to organise Nuremberg Rallies in Church Halls in Peckham; these outfits were regarded by the capitalist class as socially undesirable fools — a description with which socialists could agree.

In the 1959 General Election racism was not an issue, except in Brixton where the Tory candidate tried to win votes on an anti-black manifesto. It was in the 1960s that candidates for parliament began to see the tactical use of stirring up anti-immigration feelings in order to prove their patriotism. In October 1963 Sir Edward Boyle addressed a rally of four hundred Southall residents in which he promised that a future Tory government would set up special schools for Asian children in order to segregate them from the children of white residents. In the run-up to the 1964 election racism was used as a major propaganda weapon by several Tory candidates, especially in Birmingham and the Black Country. On 6 October 1964, Alec Douglas-Home made a speech in Bradford — specially chosen as an area with a large immigrant population — in which he defended Tory immigration policies by stating that:

 What had been a trickle of immigrants from the Commonwealth was developing into a flood. We saw that if it was not brought under control it would create very serious social and economic problems. . .

In fact, Home lost the 1964 election and it was the Labour government which was left with the dirty work — which it willingly undertook — of passing legislation designed to exclude non-white British passport-holders from entering Britain.

Workers need be under no illusion: the Labour Party has a record of carrying into effect racist policies when in office, even if many of their members are opposed to racism in sentiment. As for the Tories, they cannot stand before workers making pious noises about how much they are opposed to racism. Those of us with memories will recall the Smethwick by-election campaign, in which the Tory candidate pandered to the most disgusting racist prejudices; we recall the "rivers of blood” speech which won Enoch Powell a degree of popularity in his old party which few of its leaders have ever enjoyed; we recall the 1983 Tory Party Conference at which the likes of Harvey Proctor were canvassing support for their schemes to repatriate black workers. Indeed, these may be exceptions to the more discrete national chauvinism which infests the minds of more diplomatic Tory politicians, but there need be no doubt whatsoever that the Conservative Party includes within it a substantial body of opinion which is hostile to the idea of non-British people being allowed to live in harmony alongside British people.

Why does racism exist? Partly, it is a relic of the ideology which the British ruling class used to defend their imperial activities in the past; partly it is a reflection of outdated nationalism which teaches inhabitants of one country to believe that they are superior to others. The ruling class will use racism to divide workers when it is opportune to do so, and they will use immigrants as scapegoats when capitalist crises require workers to be thrown out of employment.

The Socialist Party is hostile to racism in all of its forms. Our Principles make clear that socialism will involve the emancipation of all human beings, without distinction of race or sex. For us, the division in society is between exploiters and exploited; all workers are our brothers and sisters, whatever may be stamped on their passports, whatever colour their skin happens to be. Socialism holds out the prospect of one world inhabited by one people, emancipated consciously and politically from the ignorance of racist thinking.

Steve Coleman

Abundance is Feasible (1984)

Book Review from the April 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

In his latest book, The Economics of Feasible Socialism, (published last year by George Allen and Unwin) Alec Nove, who has made his reputation as an expert on the Russian economy, sets out his ideas on the kind of “socialism” he believes to be “feasible” within “the lifetime of a child already conceived”. His sights are not set very high, as the only alternative to private capitalism that he sees as possible in this period is the sort of milk-and-water state capitalism that might be advocated by a Labour or even an SDP supporter. In fact Nove even recognises that there would continue to be “extremists” in his “socialism” who would denounce it as state capitalism and urge workers to continue fighting for higher wages and better conditions. Indeed there would.

But it is not this part of his book that is interesting but rather the first chapter entitled “The Legacy of Marx” in which he attempts to show that socialism as a moneyless, wageless, stateless world commonwealth is not feasible, at least not in the next 70 or so years. He declares his position right from the first page:

  I feel increasingly ill-disposed towards those latter-day Marxists who airily ascribe all the world’s evils to ‘capitalism’, dismiss the Soviet experience as irrelevant, and substitute for hard thinking an image of a post-revolutionary world in which there would be no economic problems at all (or where any problems that might arise would be handled smoothly by the ‘associated producers’ of a world commonwealth).

Nove seems to have in mind people like Sweezy, Mandel, Bettelheim and Bertell Ollman but clearly socialists also fall into the category of those towards whom he is ill-disposed, even if we are not exactly “latter-day” Marxists. As a matter of fact we are the only group of people consistently defending the point of view Nove sets out to demolish since the people mentioned above basically agree with him that all that is feasible immediately is not a moneyless society, but some sort of “transitional society” lasting for up to two generations during which money, wages, the state and the rest would have to continue to exist.

Nove summarises Marx’s position as follows:

  Marx appears to have believed that technical progress already made under capitalism had fundamentally solved the problem of production, but that the shackles imposed on the forces of production by the capitalist system prevented  ‘the absolute development of social productivity of  labour’, such as would make possible ‘continual relative overproduction’. Marx is well aware that needs expand with rising production . . . Evidently there would still be scarcity in relation to needs at first, but, it seems, not for long. 

  Let us define abundance as a sufficiency to meet requirements at zero price, leaving no reasonable person dissatisfied or seeking more of anything (or at least of anything re- producible). This concept plays a crucial role in Marx’s vision of socialism/communism. Let us observe the consequences of—and then consider the consequences of not—accepting this assumption. 

 Abundance removes conflict over resource allocation, since by definition there is enough for everyone, and so there are no mutually exclusive choices, no opportunity is forgone and therefore there is no opportunity-cost. The golden age, a communist steady-state equilibrium, will have been reached. Gradual change, growth, will be simple and painless. The task of planning becomes one of simple routine; the role of economics is virtually eliminated. There is then no reason for various individuals and groups to compete, to take possession for their own use of what is freely available to all . . . If other goods were as easily and freely available as water is in Scotland, then new human attitudes would develop: acquisitiveness would wither away; property rights, and crimes related to property, would also vanish, not because the citizens would have become ‘good’ by reading Marxist books but because acquisitiveness would have lost all purpose. In other words, Marx did not say that, under socialism, there would be no conflicts over the allocation of scarce resources (oil, fish, iron ore, stockings, or whatever) but that these and other resources would not be scarce.

Apart from one or two snide expressions, this is not too bad as an outline of Marx’s position, indeed of the general socialist position (since Marx did not invent the idea of socialism but merely joined an already existing movement, helping to clarify its ideas). If anything, it errs by painting too rosy a picture of socialism. For instance, while it is true that in socialism we will be able to meet everybody’s material needs, it is not the case that there would be “no mutually exclusive choices” in socialism.

A decision to produce so much of some reproducible good will indeed not be a decision to produce less or none of some other good since resources will be adequate to produce both goods in the desired quantities, but this does not apply in the case of land. A piece of land can only be used for one purpose—build a factory on it and it can’t then be used as a playing field—and this will continue to be the case in socialism. Such decisions over land use will have to be settled consciously and democratically in the light of the preferences of those concerned.

Nove, however, has an interest in painting socialism as a problem-less “golden age” so as to be able to denounce it as “millenarian”, “utopian”, “far-fetched”, “never-never land”, “religious”, to mention just some of the terms of abuse he employs against socialism in the course of his book. He is however honest enough to admit that to prove his case he must show that abundance, as “supply balancing demand at zero price” or as we would prefer to express it where resources are sufficient to meet human needs, does not exist and could not be made to exist within “the lifetime of a child already conceived”.

“It is my contention”, he writes, “that abundance in this sense is an unacceptable assumption”:

  Over a fifty-year worldwide perspective, even on optimistic political, geological and technical assumptions, it is surely far-fetched to imagine that there will be enough for all at zero price. Saturation of demand for particular products is possible, which might bring them into the same category as water in Scotland. But is it conceivable, can it be seriously envisaged, that the world’s citizenry would be able to take whatever they wanted (even ‘reasonably’ wanted) from the amply supplied public stores. . ?

As evidence for this view he can do no more than come up with such discredited prophets of doom as the Club of Rome and the Brandt Commission and a reference to starving millions in India and China! This won’t do and is unworthy of anyone who is seriously interested in investigating whether the world’s people can avoid millions starving to death and millions more being killed in wars and other conflicts such as will be the case if socialism and abundance are not feasible and capitalism and scarcity the only possibility for the next two or more generations.

The evidence is overwhelmingly against Nove’s contention that the world’s resources, and humanity’s knowledge of how to use them, are not sufficient to adequately feed, clothe, shelter and otherwise provide for the needs of its population. We could quote from any number of technologists, agronomists, nutritionists and other scientists, but will confine ourselves to quoting W. David Hopper writing in the special issue of the Scientific American on “Food and Agriculture” that came out in September 1976:

  It is important to recognise that the world’s food problem does not arise from any ‘environment’. The limitations on abundance are to be found in the social and political structures of nations and in the economic relations among them. The unexploited global food resource is there, between Cancer and Capricorn. The successful husbandry of that resource depends upon the will and the actions of men.

So abundance already exists potentially today and it is clear that every new technological development makes the case for socialism even stronger. Nove is on especially weak ground since he contends not only that abundance could not be brought about today, but also that it is unlikely to be able to be brought into existence within the next fifty years. But technical development will continue during this period and two important advances in particular can be expected.

First, the practical application of nuclear fusion in electricity generating stations (thus providing virtually limitless energy) and the discovery of an efficient system of storing electricity (which will allow, for instance, electricity generated in off-peak periods to be stored for later use as well as allowing other forms of energy such as the sun’s rays and the wind, to be converted into electricity and stored in that form). Arthur C. Clarke in the second (1973) edition of his Profiles of the Future estimated that the first of these advances would be achieved in the 1990s and the second towards the end of the 1980s.

We hasten to add that we are not suggesting that these advances in themselves will automatically bring about socialism nor that socialism could not be established without them. We are merely pointing out that the abundance is not at all “far-fetched” as Nove claims, and certainly not in the 50-70 years to come.

In his discussion of individual consumption Nove only sees two possibilities: either individual choice expressed through purchasing power (“voting with the rouble” as the Russian economic reformers to whom he is sympathetic put it) or some bureaucratic decision as to what people should be given to consume. He adds that even if the decision about what people should be supplied with for their individual consumption were taken democratically, this still would not be superior to the market since why should 5 per cent decide what the other 49 per cent should consume? So why not leave the choice, he asks, up to the individual? Why not indeed, and this is precisely what will happen in socialism, as Nove himself vaguely recognises:

  …no better method for arriving at consumer choice is known than that of allowing the consumer to choose, and (save on farfetched assumptions of ‘abundance’) this means choosing by using his or her purchasing power, by buying in shops. . .

In other words, if the assumption of abundance is not regarded as “far-fetched” (which, as we have seen it is not) then there is an even “better method” of ensuring individual consumer choice than voting with money: free access, where there is no regulation of consumption and where, as Nove puts it, “everyone takes from the common stores the amount that he needs, and he determines what he needs”.

As can be seen, Nove is attacking socialism as we (and Marx) understand it. His arguments are very weak, but the important thing is that people should have begun to discuss socialism—as a moneyless, wageless, tradeless world commonwealth—as at least a theoretical possibility. This helps get the idea of socialism into circulation and when people realise that abundance is not far-fetched but, on the contrary, within our reach, then they can realise that a world of free access, without either bureaucratic planning or a market economy, is perfectly feasible.

In this paradoxical way then Nove has unintentionally done socialism a favour.

Adam Buick

European Elections: an appeal (1984)

Party News from the April 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Comrades, an appeal for support. The Parliamentary Committee of the Socialist Party, with Islington Branch and other members, are organising to contest the forthcoming European Election. The chance to bring the socialist case to workers beyond our national confines should be of concern to all socialists. The manifesto is being prepared now.

The advantages of contesting elections arc obvious, especially to Islington Branch members, who have seen a steady growth of their Branch since the last General Election which the Party contested. Elections also focus propaganda activities at a time when politics is a matter of widespread debate. So let this Election be an opportunity for all socialists to rally in support of our efforts. A general meeting to organise our campaign will be held on Thursday 26 April at 7.30 at the Prince Albert Pub. Wharfdalc Road, London N1.

World Socialist Party of Ireland (1984)

Party News from the April 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Belfast Branch of the WSPI is maintaining the high level of activity commenced in June of last year. The Branch meets on the 1st and 3rd Wednesdays of each month at the Ulster People's College, 30 Adelaide Park, Belfast.

In order to ensure the interest of visitors, a short public meeting on a pre-arranged subject takes place between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. and is followed by a Branch Business Meeting. Additionally, the Branch organises at least one Sunday meeting in the College each month. These meetings are advertised by leaflets, 3,000 of which are distributed door-to-door.

The Party has been trying to organise public debates—especially with organisations which mis-use the word “socialist”. All such groups and organisations have been challenged but, unfortunately, our opponents fight shy of this excellent opportunity to state their case! The latest refusal came from the Communist Party. Our secretary had written to the CP requesting a debate, and after many weeks we got our answer, verbally— through a CP member: the Communist Party was too busy! The thought occurs that maybe they are busy “boring from within"—a task they must be performing very quietly, especially since there is no “mass party” of Labour fakirs here. Beneath the political cowardice of the CP's response is the comforting thought that even their leaders must know that their record and policies arc indefensible.

Next month, the Party is putting on one of the special weeks of socialist activity that have now become a feature of our propaganda strategy. Comrade Coleman of Islington Branch of the SPGB will be our working guest and speak at meetings in Belfast and Derry—or Londonderry. if you like. By either name it is an area of the grossest deprivation and a fitting monument to the obscene system that creates the material conditions in which prisoners of poverty quarrel over the name of their prison.

Press Secretary, WSPI

Leninism v Democratic Socialism (1984)

From the April 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the end of the nineteenth century the peasantry accounted for eighty-five per cent of the total Russian population of one hundred and fifty million. The “revolutionary" activities of the most recent past had been confined to a group of intellectuals who believed in “going to the people", that is to say mingling with the peasantry at large so as to spread their ideas. These Narodniks. as they were known, held that the revolutionary potential to overthrow the tyranny of Tsardom lay with the mass of peasants. This was understandable since at the time Russia, in terms of industrial development, was backward in comparison with the more highly developed Western economies, with their correspondingly large urban working class.

The Narodniks, as typified by the "People’s Will” group, believed in terrorism and teaching of anarchy as the means to revolution. They were responsible for the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. and the subsequent treatment of their members when caught did little to deter others from following the futile policy of violent minority action. In fact, six years later, Lenin’s brother Alexander was executed for complicity in a plot to assassinate Alexander III. under the auspices of the same organisation.

The "People’s Will" had been formed after a split in the Narodnik organisation "Land and Freedom”, which was set up in 1876 under the influence of the prominent anarchist Bakunin, who advocated such measures as the razing of capital cities and, when drinking, toasted "the destruction of public order and the unleashing of evil passions".

Concurrent with the establishment, at the turn of the century, of large-scale Russian industry, there arose a movement known as the League of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class, whose number came to include one Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov. This Ulyanov, who became better known as Lenin, was a keen follower of Plekhanov, who had previously split from the "People’s Will" on the issue of individual terrorism. Plekhanov had founded the “Liberation of Labour" group, dedicated to rejection of the old Narodnik ideas in favour of using the incipient industrial working class as the agent of revolution. Through his association with Plekhanov, Lenin began to formulate an idea for a new party organisation using new tactics based on this growing proletariat. Arrested in 1895 for distributing agitational pamphlets, the subsequent period of exile gave him time to consolidate these ideas.

Professional revolutionaries 
Lenin made no secret of his desire to build an organisation of revolutionary leaders who would devote their abilities to imposing their will on the ignorant mass of porkers. The arrogance of this policy is clearly shown in the 1902 pamphlet ‘What is to he Done?': “As I have stated repeatedly, by ‘wise men’ in connection with organisation, I mean professional revolutionaries". [1]

On the question of “vanguardist” professionals. Marx and Engels had unequivocally stated some twenty years previously:

  When the International was formed we expressly formulated the battle cry: the emancipation of the working class must be achieved by the working class itself. We cannot therefore co-operate with people who openly state that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves and must be freed from above by philanthropic persons from the upper and lower middle classes. [2]

This compares interestingly with Lenin’s blatant leadership policy:

  The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness . . . The theory of Socialism, however, grew out of the philosophical, historical and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals. By their social status, the founders of modern Scientific Socialism, Marx and Engels, belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia. [3]

Nobody who claims to take a scientific view of history could deny that What is to be Done? was a reflection of the conditions of the day — conspiracy and violent minority action being a logical product of a non-democratic feudal system of society. But in fact Lenin did not abandon the policy of elitism even when the justification for it had disappeared. Fifteen years later he announced that if it were necessary for everybody to have developed intellectually to the level of desiring socialism, then we would have to wait five hundred years. [4] There is a wealth of evidence scattered throughout Lenin’s political career to show his contempt for the ability of the workers to understand socialism, and his conviction that they would have to be led to it by an elite of professionals. In 1917 a former colleague of Lenin’s described him as “a candidate for a European throne vacant for thirty years, the throne of Bakunin". [5]

Lenin had never really departed from the policy advocated by Peter Tkachev, who some twenty-seven years earlier stated:

  A real revolution can only be brought about in one way: through the seizure of power by revolutionists . . .
  The revolutionary minority, having freed the people from the yoke of fear and terror, provides an opportunity for the people to manifest their revolutionary destructive power. [6]

Views on the coming revolution
After the Second Party Congress of 1903 the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party split into two on the issue of whether the party should be constituted as a democratic mass party or as a small, centralised, disciplined elite. Tactical differences also developed between the “Bolsheviks” and “Mensheviks” (from the Russian words for majority and minority respectively). Both groups saw the necessity for Russia to undergo a preliminary capitalist revolution before socialism could even be considered—a view quite in accordance with the Marxian Materialist Conception of History. No one expressed this formulation more forcefully than Lenin, who wrote quite unambiguously that "Marxism has irrevocably broken with the Narodnik and anarchist gibberish that Russia for instance can bypass capitalist development, [7] and that . . . the democratic revolution will not immediately overstep the bounds of bourgeois social economic relationships.” [8]

The Mensheviks maintained that the proletariat, the working class, had no hope of gaining political power for their own ends without the prior establishment of this “bourgeois-democratic” regime. Only under these circumstances, with workers meanwhile negotiating some interim reforms, could conditions develop under which the working class would be able to lake power for themselves in order to establish socialism.

The Mensheviks therefore postponed any direct revolutionary action to some remote unforeseeable future, and openly advocated support for the up-and-coming Russian capitalist class in its struggle for supremacy over the reigning autocracy. The Mensheviks were therefore the faction most closely to be associated with the “revisionist” tendency in the German Social Democratic Workers’ Party, as propounded by Eduard Bernstein. These members rejected conspiratorial organisation in favour of what was considered by the Bolsheviks to be a too-deterministic approach.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks took the attitude that, due to the weakness of the developing capitalist class in Russia at that time, their coming superiority as a class could only be effected if helped by an alliance between the proletariat and the numerically superior peasantry. Under this dictatorship of workers and peasants, the richer section of the peasantry could then be dispensed with, leaving the working class and the “semi-proletarian” element of the peasantry in control:

  The proletariat must carry through to completion the democratic revolution, by uniting itself to the mass of the peasantry, in order to crush by force the opposition of the autocracy and to paralyse the instability of the bourgeoisie. The proletariat must complete the Socialist revolution by uniting to itself the mass of semi-proletarian elements in the population, in order to break by force the opposition of the bourgeoisie and to paralyse the instability of the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie. [9]

Dictatorship of the proletariat
It is significant that this peasant/worker alliance was not originally intended to constitute the "dictatorship of the proletariat” — a phrase used by Marx when he was optimistic about the establishment of socialism in the near future. He envisaged a situation where the workers would have taken democratic control but the forces of wealth production had not yet been sufficiently developed to allow free access. Hence the need for a democratic society with the proletariat in political control but not yet fully at the level where it would be possible to have access based on the principle “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs”. [10]

This idea of “dictatorship” was later used by Lenin to justify a “two-stage” theory of socialist development, made necessary by his (at first) unique interpretation of the events at the end of 1917. The Bolshevik idea was that there would follow, in the wake of their seizure of power, a series of revolutions in Western Europe, thereby consolidating the world revolution.

The third opinion on the debate over the nature of the coming revolution was provided by Leon Trotsky, who argued that the proletariat, having carried out the initial revolution, could scarcely be expected to relinquish state power afterwards. He held that the revolution would become "permanent” through the institution by the workers of nationalisation measures, while waiting for the rest of the European workers to take the lead from Russia's good example. Originally, Lenin maintained that the peasants and European workers would have to support the revolution from the outset. Trotsky arguing on the other hand that their support would constitute the final phase of the revolution.

So, Lenin's revolutionary horizon was at first no broader than a “dictatorship" of workers and peasants. This attitude was to change dramatically after the first, February, revolution of 1917. After his return in April. Lenin published his famous April Theses, one of which was that the worldwide socialist revolution had, in fact, begun. Most of Lenin's own comrades were staggered by this interpretation, even to the extent that he was interrupted with cries of, “delerium, the delerium of a madman”, [11] and it was widely believed that he would come to his senses when he had time properly to assess the true situation.

What is to be done?
Leninist and Trotskyist organisations to this day attempt to discredit the use of the. admittedly limited, democratic institutions as a vehicle for social revolution. "Parliamentary Cretinism”, to use Marx's term, is indeed doomed to failure — meaning the use of the capitalist institution to pass legislative reforms which are supposed to lead, ultimately, to a "fairer” society. However, the system of more-or-less democracy which goes with the Parliamentary institution can serve as a useful measure of the prerequisite for a successful revolution — working class consciousness.

Marx and Engels recognised the growing value of using suffrage as an expression of popular will. Marx wrote in 1880:

  . . . collective appropriation must be striven for by all means that are available to the proletariat. including universal suffrage, which will thus be transformed from the instrument of fraud that it has been till now, into an instrument of emancipation. [12]

The out of date vanguardist methods of violent insurrection were finally laid to rest by Friedrich Engels at the end of the nineteenth century, when he wrote in his introduction to Marx's Class Struggles in France 1848-1850,

  The time is past for revolutions carried through by small minorities at the head of unconscious masses . . . the masses themselves must participate, must understand what is at stake and why they must act. That much the history of the last fifty years has taught us. But so that the masses may understand what is to be done, long and persistent work is required . . . even in France the Socialists realise more and more that no durable success is possible unless they win over in advance the great mass of the people. . . . The slow work of propaganda and parliamentary activity are here also recognised as the next task of the party. [13]

Soviets and the state
The soviet, or council, was the institution that flourished in Russia at the beginning of the abortive 1905 revolution, in the absence of any legally-sanctioned representative body of political opinion. Obviously, the form of democratic representation used by the working class depends ultimately on the prevailing political and economic conditions at that time. However, present-day advocates of the soviet as a means to "workers' control” are adamant that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready made state machinery, and wield for its own purposes"; [14] this is the article of faith still propounded in the Trotskyist paper Socialist Worker.

  It was however the view of Marx and Engels, authors of the above passage, that it was necessary for their workers to take control of the state machinery before it could be used against the capitalist class. This , seeming paradox was resolved some years later when Engels clarified the specific point in a letter to Bernstein:

  As to your former enquiry regarding the passage in the preface of the Manifesto. . . . It is simply a question of showing that the victorious proletariat must first refashion the old bureaucratic, administratively centralised state power before it can use it for its own purposes. . . . [15]

The state is after all the executive body of the ruling class, even if run from top to bottom by members of the working class. The army and the police force, by virtue of their particularly unpleasant manifestations of repression and brutality, have come to be regarded by some as a force unto themselves, impermeable to socialist ideas. The fact remains, however, that the police and army are made up of workers who are forced to sell their ability to work in whichever way they can. The members of these repressive state institutions are no less susceptible to socialist ideas than is any other body of people.

A democratically-expressed majority is the only way to ensure that there will be a sufficiently large number of people aware of how society will need to be run and prepared to assert it. As Rosa Luxemburg said, with regard to the Bolshevik closure of an unfavourable Constituent Assembly:
   . . . the remedy which Trotsky and Lenin have found, the elimination of democracy as such, is worse than the disease it is supposed to cure; for it stops up the very living source from which alone can come the correction of all the innate shortcomings of social institutions. That source is the active, untrammeled, energetic political life of the broadest masses of the people. [16]

P. G. Robinson

References
[1] What is to he Done?, p121 (Progress, Moscow 1978).
[2] Selected Correspondence — Marx and Engels, p307 (Progress 1975).
[3] Lenin, op.cit, p31.
[4] Ten Days that Shook the World, John Reed, p263 (Penguin).
[5] Quoted in The Bolshevik Revolution, Vol. I. E.H. Carr, p90 (Pelican 1983).
[6] Quoted in D. Shub’s biography, Lenin, p26 (Pelican 1966).
[7] "Two Tactics in Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution". Lenin, p76 Selected Works (Progress Moscow 1977).
[8] ibid, p82.
[9] ibid, p147.
[10] Critique of the Gotha Programme, p247 (Pelican Marx Library 1974).
[11] Carr, op.cit, p90.
[12] "Introduction to the Programme of French Workers’ Party". p247 (Pelican Marx Library 1974).
[13] Introduction to Marx’s "Class Struggles in Trance, 1848-1850". p18 (Progress 1972).
[14] Communist Manifesto, Preface to 1872 edition. p2 (Peking 1970).
[15] Selected Correspondence — Marx and Engels, p345. (Progress Moscow 1975).
[16] The Russian Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg. p38 (Slienger, London 1977).

This Month's Quotation: Oscar Wilde (1938)

The Front Page quote from the April 1938 issue of the Socialist Standard

"A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it. 

                                                                                Oscar Wilde

Will There Be Another War? (1938)

From the April 1938 issue of the Socialist Standard

At no time since the end of the Great War has the talk of war, the fear of war, the imminent probability of war, so weighed upon the minds of men and women as during the last few years. For a decade following the Great War the comforting reflection prevailed that it could not happen again, pacifist sentiment grew, and books and plays portraying the horrors of war became popular. Then events happened in rapid succession. Japan conquered Manchuria, Italy Abyssinia, and now Germany has marched into Austria and has wiped it out as an independent State—the latter event throwing the whole world into consternation, because of the implied threat to French and British capitalist interests. What is the explanation of the German invasion of Austria and why should British capitalists appear to be so shocked by it?

Quite obviously, the political union under one government of people speaking the same language and having the same traditions is in itself not a sufficient explanation. In fact, English statesmen, Tory and Labour, have approved the idea, and when a few years ago the attempt to form a customs union by Germany and Austria was frustrated by France the same Labour and Tory Pecksniffs wagged their heads sadly at the bitterness of the French. The explanation for the British capitalists’ concern is that the event threatens to bring the danger of war perilously near its own doorstep.

What is the position?

After the Great War, as part of the business of breaking up German alliances, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was broken up and Austria was created an “independent” State and maintained in that position by the allied enemies of German capitalism. Germany’s conquest of Austria means more than the surface appearance of just the union of German-speaking people. It means that German capitalism has recovered from the dismembered condition in which its victors left it after the Great War. It means that Germany has developed the economic, military and political power to throw off a dominance exercised over it by similar forces stronger than its own. Any capitalist who faces the realities of the capitalist world, who can see through the mealy-mouthed pieties which the event has provoked, knows that Germany could not have achieved the same result by any other means than those used. Germany has been undergoing industrial expansion, which until recent years had been restricted by the political situation inside Germany and by competitive forces outside it. In response to their needs, Nazism developed to solve the domestic problem for the German industrialists and the problem of their clash of interests with capitalist competitors outside Germany.

As Mr. Winston Churchill points out, the Nazi mastery of Vienna dominates all the roads, railways and rivers upon which the States of the Little Entente depend for their military cohesion, and all the countries of Central and South-Eastern Europe depend for their economic life. Vienna, the ancient capital of a once mighty empire, is the ganglion nerve-centre of the trade and communications of all countries of the Danube basin, and others besides.

Thus Germany has achieved a position of strategic military importance, besides gaining the power of economic dominance in Central Europe formerly possessed by France and her allies.

What, then, are the chances of war?

Unquestionably, the expansion of German capitalism will demand opportunities for raw materials and trade which will conflict with those powers who already have a grip on the world’s sources of supply and markets. Must—need—this conflict break into war? The plain and simple fact is that the factors likely to lead to war to-day are more alive than at any time since 1914. Enormous military machinery has been created at staggering costs, in order to defend existing possessions and advantages—or to gain them. This process has gone on because respective capitalists do not intend to concede what they have and because they cannot obtain what they have not without force. It would represent a bad investment if the purpose for which armaments were built up were forsaken. But what of the possibility that the fear of "war being the end of civilisation” will act as a brake? This pious sentiment is very little short of a wish-fulfilment. It is doubtful whether any capitalist really believes war would be continued to the point where “civilisation” was destroyed beyond power of recuperation. It is more likely that capitalists, if the armed conflict occurred, would hope for and aim at a short war of a violent and decisive nature—resulting, perhaps, by reason of its shortness and violence, in no greater

loss in cost and destruction of property than would a larger war fought with less effective military weapons. In short, the position is that in the present condition of the capitalist world a war fought out for that rich, ripe plum—the British Empire—is ever an imminent possibility.

But if war comes the workers will not be told that it is a quarrel over markets and trade, and fought out in the interests of the capitalists. They will be told anything but that—the humbug, the liar, the Press, the pulpit, the Labour leader, the Tory, the sincere and the insincere would join together to persuade the workers that it is war to preserve peace—democracy—the independence of Austria.

The independence of Austria! It is a lie and a myth. For twenty years the meaning of the word has been foreign to Austrian capitalist and worker. For twenty years Austrian capitalists have been in the pockets of the French and British capitalists. The rulers of Austria, whom Hitler suppressed, were Fascists, the tools, until Hitler stepped in, of Mussolini, the exterminators of Austrian democracy and of Austrian working-class industrial and political organisations, the bloody murderers of Austrian working men and women when the Christian-Fascists took power in 1934.

The independence of Austria is not at stake. British capitalist interests are; and when the miscalled Communist newspaper, the Daily Worker, headlines an article which demands that the British Government take action in defence of Austrian independence with the slogan, “Britain’s Honour at Stake,” they are playing the capitalist game of deluding the workers.

The Austrian question represents a quarrel between the capitalists of Europe over the wealth they own and want to own. The working-class bone is not at stake. Socialists will play no part in obscuring the issue in this quarrel or any future quarrel between the capitalists of Europe. 

Harry Waite

Here and There: More “Unity” (1938)

From the April 1938 issue of the Socialist Standard

More “Unity”

Lo! It has come to pass! The Communist Party, which has during the past few years been straining itself to demonstrate that it can, and will do, anything but expound Communism, has succeeded so well that it is now to the “right" of the Labour Party. Mr. William Gallacher, Communist M.P., during the debate on Anglo-Germanic relations in the House of Commons, said: —

  I am very happy to say that I agree entirely with the concluding remarks of the right hon. gentleman, the Member for Epping (Mr. Churchill)—his remarks about collective security. . . . (Daily Worker, March 16th, 1938.)

The Daily Worker went further in unctuous approval. It said: “Contrast Churchill’s speech with the thin gruel of Attlee or the indigestible suet pudding of Mr. Alexander.” Time was when no Communist could mention Churchill’s name without loathing and contempt. But now Churchill and Gallacher are brothers under the banner of "Collective Security,” behind whose screen the workers of this country may soon be persuaded and cajoled into giving their lives in defence of their masters' property. Much has happened since Lenin sent his clarion call to the workers of the western world to help the Russian Revolution by overthrowing the capitalists in their respective countries, and since Churchill spent £100,000,000 of the British capitalists' money in an attempt to overthrow the Bolshevists. Times have changed, and so have the Communists. “Collective Security” for the British capitalists and their allies has taken the place of “World Revolution.” But the modern Communist is imperturbable. The simple phrase that “conditions have changed” is sufficient to account in his mind for any change in the “Party line.” As one Communist, unable to explain glaring changes in C.P. policy, in an argument with one of our speakers in Hyde Park, said: "Ah, Mr. Speaker, you don't understand, it is dialectical materialism.” A Christian would have said: “It is the will of God!” Phrases—and both indicating a paralysis of mind.

Tragic!

#    #    #    #

Capitalism and Progress

What is progress? According to an article in the News Chronicle (March 4th) it means: —

  The relief of difficulties in everyone's life, the best possible use of all objects and their widest distribution.
   It means the fight against waste of energy and material. . . .

The article, “Pigeon-holed Inventions,” goes on to show that capitalism, rather than promote "the best possible use of all objects and their widest distribution,” works in the opposite direction. We are told, for example, that in Germany, soon after the War, the project was proposed of supplying Berlin with cheap gas by means of pipelines running under the earth direct from the coal districts of the Ruhr. The project was abandoned because the owners of the German railways would not permit the laying of the pipes under the soil over which their wide network of railways ran. They feared loss of revenue through losing the transport of coal to Berlin.

Another example. Who would deny the immeasurable advantages of a smokeless atmosphere? Nobody, of course. And, quite naturally, you will smile and say to yourself that only a Socialist could be guilty of the fantastic inference that anyone would prevent that if it were possible. Well, here’s the answer.

Professor Haber, “one of the most outstanding German war-time chemists,” constructed a completely reliable working smoke consumer, which could be employed in any chimney at a low running cost.

The secret consisted in making the smoke pass through an electric filter. He offered his invention to the German Admiralty, for one of his aims in constructing this consumer had been to render the German fleet almost invisible.

The invention was investigated and found to be excellent, but was not accepted. The German Admiralty were convinced that it would not be possible to keep the device secret, and the probable victory of the unlimited submarine warfare, just then started, would have been imperilled if enemy ships could no longer be traced by their smoke on the horizon.

And that was the last that was heard of that invention!

Another example. This time concerning that common little article of everyday use, the match. The writer records that an Austrian chemist discovered the everlasting match! What followed, it can be imagined, was in strict accord with the progressive principles of capitalist morality. That match was bought by the Swedish Match Trust for one million Swedish Kroner, and has reposed since in its secret safes to this day. The Trust could, however, preen itself with the disinterested reflection that several small European states who subsisted on the Trust’s loans were saved from economic ruin!

Other examples: The abandoning of the Channel tunnel, which was actually started, and a collective scheme to provide the whole of Europe with abundant electricity, both of which were killed because of military considerations and the petty jealousies and rivalries between competing capitalist interests.

Progress—Bunk!

As Marx said: “Capitalism becomes a fetter. . . .”

#    #    #    #

Wages and Brains

One of capitalism’s complacent lying boasts is that “brains” will send the man possessing them “to the top.” Possession of brains, it is assumed, is characterised by outward symbols, signifying the possessor to have had certain conventional opportunities to acquire “education”— accent, a degree, specialised knowledge, and all those things which most workers, by reason of environment, can never acquire. It is curious, therefore, that a group of these superior people, so carefully groomed in the capitalist process which denotes “education” and the possession of "brains,” should follow the example of the “lesser breed” and strike against their employers ”until better conditions are obtained.”

Yet it is so. A leaflet in our possession tells us that the tutors of the British Institute of Technology, and two Tutorial Institutes, men who hold university degrees and professional qualifications, are on strike to increase their average wage of £3 5s. 0d. a week. (Their students are prepared for posts up to £16 a week. Seems something wrong with the “brain” theory here.)

Recognition that organisation is necessary to obtain improved conditions is a hopeful sign that the “superior’’ ones may yet recognise the necessity for Socialism.

#    #    #    #

People in Glass Houses

Herr Hitler recently replied to several prominent English M.P.s, who had protested about his treatment of the opposition in Germany, by telling them that they should concern themselves with “the sentences passed by the British courts-martial in Jerusalem." Should your comfortable English complacency lead you to believe that that is just German spleen the following should prove disabusing: “. . . In the House of Commons I drew attention to the death sentence passed on Sheikh Farham Sadi, seventy-five years of age, by a military court in Palestine, for carrying firearms" — Major-General Sir Alfred Knox, in a letter to The Times (March 12th, 1938). Complacency will again infer, of course, that that's different; no British Government would treat its own subjects like that. Comforting thought, but history just does not support it. There can be found very few examples of political repression and vile economic conditions in the modern world for which parallel examples could not be found in English (even recent) history.

#    #    #    #

Another Crisis on the Way

With the passing of the worst period of the recent industrial crisis and the beginning of another brief span of expansion of production, our tabloid Press, labour leaders and City editors, all began to chorus the chant that there would (or could) be permanent prosperity. When figures for unemployment began to rise their optimism became tempered with a little caution. “Just a temporary recession," they all cried. This is, of course, very appropriate propaganda with which to fool the gullible. But there are people, who, like ourselves, are not fooled. Ministry of Labour officials, whose job it is to manage the unemployment insurance fund, have found themselves with a nett surplus of £60 millions, but instead of increasing benefits to the unemployed it, “for very sound reasons, bases its estimates on the anticipated duration of a trade cycle, and in these good years is laying by a reserve for the lean years that may follow" (The Times, March 4th, 1938). That the “lean years" are approaching has been brought home to the officials by the fact that the insurance fund produced in 1937 only a £20,000,000 surplus as against £40,000,000 for the year 1936.

When the next depression shows itself in unmistakable fashion, we shall, no doubt, see the spectacle of the present optimistic chorus chanting the refrain of a “permanent crisis," the “collapse of capitalism," and so forth.

Socialists, understanding capitalism, see in the rise and fall of production, in booms and slumps, just the normal working of capitalism—its pendulum, so to speak. And capitalism without its pendulum movement would not be capitalism. The poverty and insecurity of the workers can only be abolished when the condition on which the pendulum rests is abolished. That condition is the private ownership of the means and instruments of production.

#    #    #    #

Generosity

From the Evening Standard (March 1st, 1938): —

  “Lord McGowan, as chairman, presided at this afternoon's meeting.

  “I understand that his salary, now in the neighbourhood of £55,000, is being continued, although he has relinquished his duties as managing director of the company."

    £55,000 for not doing his job! 

Harry Waite