Get it Straight in 1958 (1958)

From the January 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

Everybody knows that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line: a simple, unanswerable, self-evident proposition. Who, then, could fail to think and act on it? Well, in the matter of getting Socialism almost everybody acted otherwise. It remained for small bodies of Socialists, like those who formed the S.P.G.B., to insist that the straight line from capitalism to Socialism is the shortest way and the only way. This takes us back to old arguments that have largely been forgotten but which ought to be remembered and studied by all who want Socialism.

What was needed ?
In the earlier days of the Socialist movement there were men and women who had the Socialist idea and knew what was needed, but who rejected the S.P.G.B. They did so for reasons that seemed to them convincing. They agreed that, for the fundamental social change, there must be a Socialist majority, politically organised, gaining democratic control by taking the machinery of government out of the hands of the capitalists. But when they looked at the workers who had to be won over to Socialism they were dismayed. They saw millions of men and women, ignorant of Socialist principles, harassed with problems of getting a living, supporting the Liberal and Tory parties, dazzled by monarchy, loving a Lord, and awed by the power, wealth and knowledge of the rich. It would, they said, take half a century to turn this depressing human material into a political army for Socialism. What was needed was a quicker way. Something must be done immediately to ease the hardships of the poor and improve capitalism, and in the course of doing this the grateful workers would turn readily to Socialism. So they said to the S.P.G.B.: “You mean well and your case is logical, but logic is not enough. The slow, hard progress on the direct, uphill road to Socialism is theoretically right, but impossible in practice. Human beings being what they are we must leave the straight road and come back later on.”

The Bye-ways of Social Reform
So they laid their plans and revised their programmes. They undertook to keep the great Socialist objective before their eyes, though rather a long way off, but would, for the moment, concentrate on the day-to-day practical things, like minimum wages, old age pensions, abolishing war, getting rid of the Monarchy and the House of Lords. Naturally this would take a lot of energy away from propagating Socialism, and meant turning aside from the main road to go into bye-ways; but only for a time, they said. Then, with an invigorated working class behind them, happier and freed from the worry of war, they would come back to the high road and prove to the S.P.G.B. that the roundabout way was the quickest in the end.

Time to take stock
Now the temporary turning aside into the bye-ways has gone on for half a century and we can examine it again in the light of experience. What do we find? The promised reforms we have in plenty, contributed by Liberal, Tory and Labour Governments in profusion, though without weakening capitalism. But something has gone wrong with the plan. Instead of being freed to come back to the main job of getting Socialism, the Labour Party is now wholly absorbed in trying to win still more reforms, many of them the same ones that they promised to introduce quickly at the beginning. Now they are arguing about which kind of reformed House of Lords we are to have; about ways of modernising the monarchy; about further plans for getting the trade unions under Labour Government to accept “wage restraint”; about whether to fight wars with or without the H bomb.

If they had been the Tory Party, aiming to keep capitalism going as long as possible and willing to make concessions in the shape of social reforms to dissuade the workers from demanding Socialism, it could be said that the original plan had worked very well indeed. But some of the early supporters of the Labour Party genuinely did not look at it in that way. They really did aim at Socialism. But the attractive side roads or social reform led only into the morass of capitalist politics and now they are hopelessly bogged down in it. They have not come back to the high road that leads to Socialism. They have forgotten all about the road and the objective at the end of it.

A striking case in point is the fate of what was perhaps their best proposal, to get good, cheap houses for the workers. The intention was admirable and it seemed especially attractive because many Liberals and Tories were prepared in the interest of efficiency to support it, too; at least they appeared to be willing. Indeed it was a Liberal-Tory government that first introduced rent control and the Labour Party was glad to support it. Then the Labour Party found that the purpose of that Coalition government measure in 1915 had a snag: it was not intended to be low rents with high wages, but low rents to make it possible to keep wages down. Such an idea had not entered the heads of the early Labour Party advocates of rent control, but when the Labour Government came to administer capitalism in 1945 they convinced themselves that the “economic situation” (that is, the economic situation of British capitalism) left them no alternative but to link rent control with the late Sir Sir Stafford Cripps’ “wage restraint." That was one bitter pill that they swallowed. Now events have forced them to swallow another, for they have discovered that rent control, by keeping rents below an “ economic level" makes it not worth while for landlords to keep homes in repair, so that slums have been produced in the past 12 years at a rate faster than when the Labour Party began. They have, therefore, like the Tories, abandoned rent control. As the Manchester Guardian rightly says:—

  “Rent control—the freezing of the rents paid to private landlords for house property—has no serious defenders as a policy for present application. Notwithstanding its rash promise to 'repeal' the Rent Act, the Labour Party has long recognised that the need to conserve our decaying stock of houses makes a change of policy imperative, and that whether the new policy be Conservative or Socialist, rents must go up." —(Manchester Guardian, 5/12/57).

Now the Labour Party is back where it started, looking for another cure for the housing problem within capitalism. But it is not just the housing reform that has misfiled, it is the whole theory of social reform as a means of getting Socialism. Capitalism nullifies them all and thwarts the reformers' intentions. The reformist policy has not brought Socialism nearer and it has destroyed what socialist interest there was originally in the minds of those who joined the Labour Party to get Socialism. The Party that was to show the S.P.G.B. how to reach Socialism quickly has become merely Her Majesty's Official Opposition, an alternative government for capitalism. Even for the purpose of getting concessions from the propertied class they were wrong. As the S.P.G.B. maintained at the time, if the energy devoted to reforms had been used instead to build up a militant Socialist movement the propertied class would have hurried forward with reforms in the hope, though a vain one, of buying it off.

The shortest distance between two points is still a straight line.

Edgar Hardcastle

Notes By The Way: Robbing the Thrifty (1958)

The Notes By The Way column from the January 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

Robbing the Thrifty

Elsewhere in this issue (Fifty Years Ago) two contrasting quotations are given, the first relating to the vast army of people who, forty years ago, were dependent on the Poor Law and the second a quotation from Colin Clark about the 1,700,000 now receiving National Assistance. As he says, the so-called Welfare State has done little more than change the name from Poor Relief to National Assistance.

His main point is, however, the way in which Labour and Tory Governments, by steadily raising the cost of living—60 per cent. since 1947—have whittled away the purchasing power of savings and fixed pensions.

  “While the social services are handing out benefits to some, the Government, through its financial policy, has been robbing the meagre savings of the humble and the weak and driving them back on to the bread line. Not a record to be proud of."

While this was happening to the humble and weak the rich and powerful had great opportunities for adding to their wealth through the rise of prices of company shares and properties of all kinds. Many great new fortunes have been made under the “Welfare State,” while the governments, the Trades Union Congress and the National Savings Committee were preaching thrift to those who could least afford it, and deploring the growth of gambling and football pools.

The Savings Racket in Russia

If the Labour and Tory governments in Britain have whittled away the value of savings by their policy of raising the cost of living, the government in Russia has achieved the same end by much more drastic methods.

In 1947, when they revalued the currency, issuing new currency in place of the old (but much less of it) they cancelled one-third or one-half of all deposits in Savings Banks above 3,000 roubles (about £143), and cancelled two-thirds of the face value of most State bonds. Thus, the worker who had invested £100 found himself owning only £33.

Earlier this year a still more drastic action was taken, particulars of which were given in Soviet News (10th April, 1957). published by the Russian Embassy in London. (See also Economist, 20th April, 1957.) The announcement was made by Mr. Krushchev. He stated that the total amount of loans outstanding was 260,000 million roubles (about £24,000 million), so that the cost of the tax free lottery prizes paid out on the bonds in place of interest must have been nearly £900 million a year, an amount much bigger than the cost of interest on the British National Debt.

Mr. Krushchev blandly explained that the Russian government has decided to raise no more loans, and as this could not be done “unless the payment of winnings and redemptions on the previous loans was suspended at the same time,” the government also proposed to postpone the payment of winnings for a period of 20 to 25 years.” Instead, they would repay the 260,000 million roubles at the rate of about 13,000 million roubles a year (about £1,200 million), but without interest or lottery prizes until the end of 25 years.

Mr. Krushchev did not say that the Russian government was going to do this: they were merely proposing it. and would only carry it out if the Russian workers approved! The same issue of Soviet News reported that the Russian workers had approved.

The suggestion of the Economist as to the reason for this move is that the size and cost of the debt had become so large (nearly half the annual budget) that it had become “a real burden” on State finances. The British Chancellor of the Exchequer must be envious of his Russian opposite number's freedom of action.

The Elusive "Middle Class” Again

In the Observer (1/12/57) Mr. Alan Day had an article on “Inflation and the Middle Classes,” discussing whether it is true, as some Tories say, that “the middle classes” have suffered more harshly from inflation than have other people.

He agreed that “one section” have undoubtedly been badly squeezed—"the pensioners and other retired people living on fixed-money incomes." He also agreed that the same is true of “the elderly working classes," but with the difference that the former have been on a higher standard of living and therefore have farther to fall before they can qualify for national assistance.

Apart from this, Mr. Day believes that the "middle classes" as a whole have not been badly hit, though some of them (he mentions "classics masters” as an example) have suffered because they are less in demand than they used to be. The others have had their salaries raised with the cost of living, though, as Mr. Day points out, it is done with less publicity than the raising of wages of railwaymen. dockers, etc.

But what is of more interest is what Mr. Day means by "middle classes." He deals in the main with people who sell their mental and physical energies, just like dockers, but who call their pay salaries instead of wages. In short, they are members of the working class, and the name "middle class" is inapplicable.

Mr. Day admits this. He confesses that he cannot define the term and writes:—

  “The only possible definition is that people are in the middle class when they think they are.”

But surely the remedy is too simple. If people can belong to a non-existent class merely by thinking that they belong to it, all they have to do about their problem of low pay is to think that their pay isn’t low. Or, since they think the working class are better off, why not think themselves into the working class? Or, better still, why not "think" instead of day-dreaming? Think about capitalism and their working class status in it; then think about Socialism, in which they would be able to live and work as intelligent members of a free society, no longer hag-ridden by notions about class.

One in Ten Americans is a Slum Dweller

Under the above heading the Daily Mail reports a survey made in America by the magazine "Fortune."

  “To-day, some 17,000,000 Americans live in dwellings that are beyond rehabilitation—decayed, dirty, rat-infested, without decent heat or light or plumbing.”

The Daily Mail says that, according to the survey, in America’s biggest and richest cities like San Francisco, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and Houston, the number of people crowding into slums is growing proportionately faster than the population of the city as a whole.

The major reason for the slums is said to be "prosperity itself,” because, as jobs are to be had, people come in from small towns and farms, the South, and Puerto Rico.

Horizontal Alcoholics

Many writers have used the theme of a visitor from another planet as a means of taking a fresh look at the imbecilities of our world. Naturally, he cannot see any more or any deeper than his creator and most of the creators, being accepters of the present structure of society, have seen the odd little evils and missed the accustomed big ones. All the same, a visitor from another planet which had a developed capitalist system, and who was blind to the major evils of capitalism, might well blink at some of the crazier activities of official and unofficial legislators and moralisers. A latest example comes from Washington, U.S.A., and was reported in the Daily Telegraph (30/11/57).

Because the local legislature believes "that people are liable to drink more standing up," they made a law requiring that people who want to drink in public must do so sitting down.

The local Restaurant proprietors do not like this and want the few repealed. They point out that, to escape the law, drinkers pop over into Maryland, "where they can drink standing up. This means they can escape tipping."

Until some years ago there was another law which ruled that drinks had to be mixed out of sight of the customers, "so that non-drinkers would not be tempted. It was changed when some bartenders were found making Martinis with olives which customers had left in their glasses."

It recalls the Defence Regulation that at one time made it illegal to treat other people to drinks. (Or is it one of those many laws that exist still but are ignored?).

Does the Washington law allow the customers to take their drinks lying down?

New York Stock Exchange and the British Labour Party

The Daily Herald in a leading article (25/11/57) smugly reports that the President of the New York Stock Exchange—“no Socialist he”—has borrowed from the British Labour Party the idea of government investment in company shares, for that is what he is advising the American government to do "for small firms that need money to grow bigger.”

According to the Herald this proves that "the temple of private enterprise in Wall-street ” has been forced to go in for "public enterprise,” "because it is necessary for the efficiency of industry.”

We are not much concerned with the Herald’s belief that boards of directors will be more efficient and careful when handling government money than when handling shareholders' money, except to say that it is difficult to think of any single reason why it should be so.

What interests us more is that the Herald should so easily manage to get the thing upside down. When the temple of capitalism borrows an idea from the Labour Party all it shows is what queer ideas the Labour Party has, and how much the Herald has changed since its early days when it would have scoffed at the proposal.

A Straw in the Wind

The General Secretary of the Communist Party, Mr. John Gollan, in his report to his executive committee after his visit to Moscow, referred to the question of "Unity of the Socialist Parties and the Communist Parties.” (Daily Worker, 2/12/57.)

Mr. Gollan and the British Communist Party will now and for as long as the instruction holds, describe the British Labour Party as a Socialist Party, likewise the Labour parties in other countries. It was not always so. In 1929 the Communist Party’s election programme "Class Against Class” had this of the Labour Party

  “This Party is the third capitalist party. It lays claim to the title of Socialist Party, but has nothing to do with Socialism.”

At other times they have called the Labour Party social fascists and similar abusive names. Is it that the Labour Party keeps changing? Not at all. It merely means that the Russian government wants a new tactic to be employed towards the Labour Party so overnight it becomes a "Socialist party.” Who knows what it will be called by the end of 1958.

Edgar Hardcastle

50 Years Ago: Vast Army on Poor Relief (1958)

The 50 Years Ago column from the January 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

  “There is a vast army of men and women wretchedly poor, living under abject and squalid conditions, and existing on a pittance eked out by the poor rate and private charity.” (Statement by Home Secretary, quoted in Socialist Standard, January, 1908.)

Vast Army on National Assistance (1958)

  “We make a lot of silly statements about our so- called Welfare State, in which poverty has been abolished and provision made for everyone. But the number of people on Poor Relief (we now call it National Assistance, but this is only a change of name) now number 1,700,000, nearly as high as the figure for the worst depression years, and very much higher than it was in the years before 1914. when practically none of our present social services were in existence.”

[The economist, Colin Clark, in The Cost of Living, p. 7.]

The Managerial Society Part Three — Fabian Version (1958)

From the January 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part Two

Management is a nice neutral word to describe capitalist property relations. It has no harsh ring of class antagonism, no hint of social conflict. The word is greatly in favour with Tories and Labourites. Once Labourites talked about capitalism and even hard-faced capitalists, but that was long ago. Now, according to the new Fabians, capitalism has gone, and capitalists— including the hard-faced ones—have been displaced from power by—Management. Some of the new thinkers now refer to capitalism in the past tense, just as historians refer to Rome or feudalism.

Capitalists without Capitalism
Although capitalism has gone, vide Crosland and others, capitalists still linger on, presumably through sheer inertia. It appears, however, that they are but vestigial survivals in the socio-economic body, like the appendix. Time and the managed enterprise plus State planning will wither them away. Actually it was not the new Fabians who pioneered the notion of a departed capitalism, but an old-time Labourite, Mr. Morrison, who in a more remote past used to talk in an old-fashioned way about the capitalist system. Nevertheless with the return of the 1945 Labour Government—which he regarded as a “victory for Socialism,” he declared: “The Labour Party does not propose to abolish the profit motive” (Observer, 28/10/46). In the same speech we were told the “new order” would be based on the recognition that “Management must in future recognise Labour as a service and not as a commodity.” He added that “this new status of the worker would, however, involve new duties as well as new rights.” It may be recorded that, “The victory for Socialism” was unblemished by any attempt of counter-revolution on the part of the capitalists.

To show that by 1948 class antagonism had been abolished, Mr. Morrison in another speech (Observer, 14/3/48) assured us that

  “The modern worker is or should be a responsible partner in industry . . . knocking at the manager’s door with ideas and suggestions.”

After that it was easy for Mr. Morrison to define Socialism as

  “The assertion of social responsibility for matters which are properly of social concern.”

This, of course, is crass confusion. The terms social and Socialism do not mean the same thing apart from the fact that both are derived from society. Anything from the issuing of licences to the supervision of brothels can be of social concern, but they have nothing to do with Socialism, which means the establishment of a social organisation based on free and social access to the agencies of production and distribution.

Enter the New Fabians
After this the new Fabians began to feverishly explore the “new social order” via the New Fabian Essays. Mr. Anthony Crosland, one of the contributors, is certain that capitalism has been abolished. What he isn’t certain about is the form of society which has replaced it, so he plumps for calling it “Statism,” and it becomes his version of the Managerial Society. All it amounts to is the fact that vast units of capital and the enlargement of the State’s economic functions have replaced the laissez-faire capitalism of the 19th century. But even laissez-faire was not a universal feature of capitalism. The U.S.A., Germany, Italy, Japan, etc., all began as capitalist countries, with marked State intervention, so there must be some feature more fundamental to capitalism than laissez-faire. If, of course, State intervention into the economic life of a country is “Statism,” or ” Socialism,” as the new Fabians hold, then the countries just mentioned have never had capitalism. Such are the startling conclusions drawn from the logic of Mr. Crosland.

It is a Marxist commonplace and acutely analysed long ago by Engels, that the growth of monopoly capital is a logical development from laissez-faire. Thus we can say —capitalism is dead, long live capitalism. If the elastic and highly competitive character of 19th century capitalism led by its very nature to monopolistic forms, this does not mean that competition has been eliminated, but, on the contrary, re-enacted on a vaster scale.

Old Fallacies of New Fabians
Because Crossman, Crosland, Roy Jenkins, Albu, and other Fabians believe, as did old-time Fabians, that State economic activity is Socialism, and because they limit capitalism to mean merely the uninhibited free play of market forces, for them State enterprise and the existence of huge formations of monopolistic and semi-monopolistic capitals is the negation of capitalism. Having restricted the content of capitalism to mean laissez-faire, they see State intervention and government policy entwined with capital interests as the decline and fall of the system. They fail to see that the transformation of 19th century State policy from non-intervention in economic organisation to active participation, was not due to so-called Socialist tendencies, but to the challenge by other powers to England’s economic supremacy.

Just as both old and new Fabians have not taken into account the fact that for English 19th century free trade competition there was substituted international competition, in which tariffs and protection were legitimate aids, and for the cut-throat competition of the free market there is substituted the cut-throat competition of the international units of capital. Add to this the colonial policies of the Big Powers, the export of capital and the search for spheres of influence and it is not hard to see how capitalist economics and politics go hand in hand.

Again, it was not socialistic tendencies, but world competition which compelled governments to undertake to subsidise or nationalise those industries whose services and commodities are vital to the needs of the capitalist economy as a whole, i.e., coal, gas,, electric power, transport, etc. And the need for State intervention becomes especially urgent where conflicting interests prevent these industries, when privately owned, from carrying out the necessary reorganisation. Again, the necessity of supplying cheap services and facilities for industry as a whole may mean a rate of profit or a slow rate of return unattractive to outside sources of investment or that private funds have ample and more lucrative avenues elsewhere. In that case it becomes necessary for the government to reorganise certain basic industries essential for the entire economy.

Because Labourites have represented large-scale formations of capital as a development towards Socialism and nationalisation as its stepping-stone, they are forced to maintain that the coalescing of large industry with State enterprise is the virtual elimination of capitalism and its replacement by a managerial system which constitutes the transitional period of Socialism. In such a way has Burnham’s theory been Fabianised or paralysed.

The State and the Classes
Although the Fabians have “abolished capitalism” they have not abolished the State. But they say it is no longer the executive committee of one class but “the social instrument of all classes.” Thus the army, air force, police, judiciary, etc., are all at the disposal of the working class if and when they care to use them unless, of course, another class wants to use them at the same time. Then one supposes it is a question of priorities. No doubt, when workers are on strike, especially in a big way, they may take note of such useful information.

The Fabians have, however, abolished classes, or almost. Thus Mr. Crossman in a broadcast (August, 1948) :—

  “In the Marxist sense there is no longer a bourgeoisie only a vestigial group to remind us of its former dominance. There is no more a proletariat in the Marxist sense, only a remnant to remind us of past miseries.”

Having eliminated the main division of capitalism, the odds and ends left seem hardly worth classifying, although Mr. Crossman still speaks of classes.

Now many Fabians who criticise Marx at least know someone who has read Marx, or someone who knows somebody who has. But such important sources of information do not seem to be available to Mr. Crossman. Otherwise even he might have known that Marx classified bourgeoisie and proletariat as property owners and those who possessed only their capacities to work. The class structure of capitalism—and this is the essence of capitalism, said Marx—is the division between owners of capital and wage-workers, whose means of livelihood consisted of selling their services to the former. Whether the capitalist is a man of great wealth or only moderately so, or whether the propertyless wage worker—proletarian—receives high or low wages does not determine the social relation which capital owners and employees enter into. It is ownership of means of production which is the basis of capitalist society.

That this division between owners and non-owners, in spite of two Labour Governments and fair shares for all, still holds good, can be statistically verified. The Oxford Institute of Statistics tells us 80 per cent. of capital is owned by 10 per cent. of the population, and that 1 per cent. own half of the entire capital.

Mr. Crossman might even get a few facts about the class division of wealth from some of his Labour cohorts. Writing in the Sunday Pictorial (27/11/55), Mr. Wilfred Fienburg, Labour M.P., stated :—

  “Let us face it, there ARE two classes in Britain to-day . . . one-tenth owns nine-tenths of the wealth and there are the others, 45,000,000 others, who own practically no wealth at all.”

And Professor W. Arthur Lewis writing on the Distribution of Property, Socialist Commentary, December, 1955, said:—

  “Two-thirds of the private property in this country is owned by less than 4% of the population. This uneven distribution lies at the root of most of the evils with which Socialists have been concerned in the economic sphere— especially the uneven distribution of income and economic power.”

Yet Mr. Crosland calmly asserts :—

  “It is no longer true that property relationships determine the distribution of economic power.” (New Fabian Essays, page 38)

Concentration of Wealth
In spite of the fact that, according to the new Fabians, capitalism is going or is gone, the concentration of wealth into fewer hands is still a marked phenomenon of this “non-capitalist society.” In fact, Mr. Bevan, a fellow-member of the same party as Mr. Crosland says :—

  “Even among the wealthy classes the concentration of wealth in the upper layers is disturbing—200 companies out of 176,000 in Britain take more than a quarter of all profits A little over 1 % take 60% of the profits.”—(Reynolds News, 15/5/55.)

While Margaret Hall on “Monopoly Policy” in The British Economy (p. 422), says :—

  “By the mid-twentieth century the concentration of economic power was accepted as the normal evolution of the advanced capitalist systems.”

So, in spite of the fact that, according to some of the new Fabians there has been a dispersal of wealth and economic power, there has been no dispersal in ownership. Neither has Mr. Crosland’s non-capitalist society altered the trends of the concentration of capital.

The Mixed Economy
The mixed economy, as it is called by “the new thinkers” to describe extant capitalism is supposed to be the British way of effecting a happy compromise between capitalism and Socialism. It is neither happy nor a compromise. Actually, over nine-tenths of manufacture, building, trade, and finance is privately owned and the remainder of State enterprise—power and railways—are themselves, as we have said, economic appendages to private enterprise. Even people like Mr. Morrison have never envisaged the mixed economy as more than a two-tenths State industry and eight-tenths private industry. Thus the mixed economy has a whisky and soda flavour. Mostly the spirit of private enterprise and a dash of nationalisation to take off the raw edge—but hardly a mixture.

Propaganda Value of the Managerial Society
The concept of a Managerial Society seeks to soft-peddle working class resentment and feeling in the struggles over the division of wealth. Now, the bloated, top-hatted, cigar-smoking capitalist of old-style Labour cartoons has been faded out. Instead we have managers who, though they seek profits, are really interested in the skills and techniques of management and who, unlike the capitalists, are workers, a special kind of worker, but still workers, and between one section of workers and other sections of workers there should be a general unanimity of interests, not conflict. Under the old capitalist society it was division and struggle. Under the managerial set-up it is, or should be, co-operation and collaboration, and if vide Mr. Crosland we might not be “all Socialist now,” we are at least all workers now.

In this way have the new Fabians presented the Managerial Society or, as they alternatively call it—British Socialism.

Ted Wilmott

Beggar’s belief (1999)

From the January 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

  Capitalism creates a mass of people who are permanently unemployed and then has to devise means to control them.

In 1728 John Gay wrote The Beggar’s Opera for the London stage. It was an attack on the corruption of Robert Walpole’s government of private men and on the self-interested motivations that were now to drive society. It featured a central character called Mr. Peachum, a turn-key (gaoler), who aided, organised and fenced for the criminal fraternity of London (representing the cut-throat selfishness of Walpole’s ministers) and then turned them in to the authorities when they were no longer profitable to him.

It is not surprising that such a play should appear with the arrival of capitalism within society, with its emphasis on mercenary personal gain replacing any notion of loyalty or community. It is also not surprising that a prison was the chosen setting, nor that the law was seen as a corrupt tool in the hands of a selfish few. What is surprising, is how durable this image from the dawn of Modernity has turned out to be.

The prison was a common feature of 18th century writing, because it was emerging as a new and devastating weapon in the class war. Under feudalism the population could be controlled by fear, by selected spectacular public executions, to keep the whole thing running. Emergent industrial capitalism, however, needed a disciplined workforce, ready to clock on and work like machines, and obey. For industrial capitalism, gory punishments and executions were wasteful, and did not create sufficient internal discipline. Other methods were required.

Thus, with the advance of capitalism, we see less and less reliance on execution as a means of social control, and more and more on the rise of the prison. It is telling that the prominent liberal philosopher Jeremy Bentham advanced, for his idea of a Utilitarian Utopia, the Panopticon, a prison/workhouse/school, wherein from a central tower an observer could see into all the individual cells, without being seen themself. The idea was that the uncertainty of not being detected would prevent the inhabitants from stepping out of line, and thus there would be no offences. This was a fantasy of the factory, perfectly compliant workers, in their place, and knowing their own duty and work. It is also an image from which capitalism has never been able to escape, because it is precisely that discipline that it needs to function. This applies not just in the workplace, but in the whole of society.

Surplus population

The big problem for capitalism is that it contains the seeds for its own discord, so whenever social discipline breaks down prison is deployed to try and patch things up. The prison remains as a solid reminder of the anti-social nature of capitalism.

Capitalism creates such social breakdown because its creates a “surplus population”. Capitalism can, to keep up the compulsion on the workers to work, only fully maintain those workers who succeed in selling their labour power. Some of the rest are maintained at a lower level as an “industrial reserve army” to be used in the event of production expanding. Beyond them is a stagnant pool of the permanently unemployed who are regarded as “unemployable”. In recent years, as economic growth has slowed and the introduction of labour-saving methods continued, the size of this pool has grown. As far as the capitalist is concerned these workers, since they are on no use to them, can go hang (quite literally in the past).

Thus Noam Chomsky has spoken of “a kind of superfluous population there’s no point in educating because there’s nothing to do with them. You put them in prison because we’re a civilized people and you don’t send death squads out to murder them” (interview with David Barsamian, 1971).

The facts for America bear this out. In California education budgets have been slashed, and prison officers earn 30 percent more than lecturers, with a massive increase in the use of prisons. In that state alone over 130,000 people were held in prison in 1995, and it was still rising then. California has allocated $3.2 billion extra to its prison budget since 1992. Nor is California alone, and nor is it the worst. In 1993 California had 607 prisoners per 100,000 population, Texas had 700, and Georgia had 730. The combined totals of the three most populated European states (France, UK, Germany) only reached 84 per 100,000 head of population in the same year. In 1997 in the USA the figure was 645.

In 1995 5.4 million Americans were within the prison system (that includes remand, on parole, in prison, etc.), which works out as about 5 percent of the adult male population. The prison system has been deployed, to great effect, both to ameliorate the unemployment statistics (all those prisoners don’t show up) and to control the “socially excluded”. Within the vast network of controls, the US poor are being restrained and disciplined. This is on top of the increasing number of restraints being imposed by the American “welfare” system.

In recent years in Britain, both under the Tories and Labour, the prison population has began to shoot up as our masters, realising the bankrupt nature of their policies, and the stagnant nature of modern capitalism, decided to copy the US model. According to Home Office Statistics for 1997, there were 61,114 people in prison in the UK, 5,833 more than the previous year, and increase of 11 percent. The prison population has increased by 37 percent since 1993 (when it was 44,570), and it is clear that it is the greater use of custodial sentences that has caused that increase. The number of prisoners per 100,000 head of population has also increased to 111 (120 in England and Wales, 119, in Scotland and 95 in Northern Ireland), second only to Portugal in Europe.

What’s more is the increasing use of private prisons, selling them to a whole bunch of Peachums, to make a profit from locking up the poor (Gay is still with us). The massive amount of spending on prisons is going to create a demand to keep the prisons full (which will be complemented by police arrest quotas), to justify the payments and swell the security firms’ profits. As the system gets more and more expanded, more firms are being allowed a slice of the prison cake. In August this year, two months after the 1000th convict was tagged for home detention (a cheap and easy modern equivalent of the Panopticon, to enable the government to extend prison control even further), the government announced the winning firms that had tendered to administer these schemes.

The Curfew Orders which necessitate tagging are a way of subtly increasing the effect of prison, and controlling the numerous “petty offenders” for whom prison is too expensive and wasteful and option

More discipline

In April, the government announced that it was going to extend its “Welfare to Work” scheme to some lucky young prisoners, to help them find work (and thus buck the 76 percent recidivism rate for young offenders). This linking (apart from being a naked attempt to try and use their “captive audience” to increase the success figure for the New Deal) demonstrates the intrinsic values of the New Con, that it is a device by which the government is trying to control the surplus population, and allocate them to work, whenever they can find it for them. Already they are embarking on making it mandatory for single mothers to attend their initial New Deal interviews. Increasingly more and more strings are attached to “welfare”. Inspectors can call round at recipients homes and look round for signs of co-habitation, with a de-facto search warrant, under threat of extra-judicial punishment (removal of benefits).

Prison is also a device by which to promote and re-enforce racial division in society (as if creating a “criminal class” isn’t divisive enough). In Britain 1.5 percent of the British male population are Caribbean, however a staggering 10.4 percent of the British male prison population are likewise Caribbean. Of the female prison population, 12.9 percent were Caribbean, while only 1.8 percent of the general female population are.

The racism aspect is worsened when one considers that some 2,720 immigrants are held in “Detention Centres” as what the Home Office euphemistically calls “non-Criminal Prisoners”, part of the government’s attempts to prevent immigrants entering the country.

Also prison was used extensively for fine defaulters, of whom some 6,300 found their way to gaol, helping victimise the poor of society even more.

It is worth remembering, that throughout the Thatcher Years, police pay awards were significantly above other public sector pay awards (such as nurses and teachers), as the government fought to secure the loyalty of the police force. The result of this can be seen in the difference between the police involvement in the Miners’ Strike (with an illegal national police force being established, and the miners’ freedom of movement restricted) and recent events in Australia, where the police refused to intervene in the dockers’ dispute telling the government straight that they should fight their own battles. Also, increasingly, local councils are reliant on Close Circuit Television Cameras (with ever increasing sophistication) to keep an eye on us and ensure we are behaving (that damned panoptic eye again). We are not judged to be responsible enough to go about our own lives.

Other attacks on basic liberties abound, police stop and search powers are increased, the right to silence is removed, the right to trial by jury is decreased, freedom of movement is restricted. The change of government has made no difference. Increasingly the state is trying to shape and control our lives through bureaucracy or through the police.

The only solution open to capitalism now, faced with social decay and chaos, is to criminalise the “surplus population”, to lock them up, to take control of them and increase discipline throughout society. Capitalism’s only solutions are brutal and barbaric, and in 1997 70 inmates of prisons killed themselves.

Socialism offers to end the social conditions that cause that breakdown and necessitate enforced discipline, offering instead self-worth, and freedom of association in production, a strong inclusive social identity. The prison is not a symbol of capitalism. Capitalism is a prison, and it is imperative for us to try and break out of it.

Pik Smeet

Going for Oil (1999)

From the January 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The US State Department once described oil as “the greatest material prize in world history”. Considering its value to present-day society and the lengths the US has gone in order to control an ever-greater share of the world supply of black gold, this would seem a fair description.

Just as its acrid smell has carried US profit-mongers, and indeed their war machine, over the entire globe, siding with all manner of tyrants, engaging in who knows how many atrocities in the process, so too is it now luring the US to a region of the world bedevilled by unrest manifesting itself in ethnic rivalry and border disputes and ruled by power-hungry and corrupt governments—The Caspian.

Long ago, the black sticky stuff that bubbled to the surface to be poured into leather bags and sold by camel trains throughout the Caspian region aroused no great interest. Now, a new type of entrepreneur is on the scene—the world’s oil companies, perhaps the most unscrupulous of capitalists.

Eighty of the world’s biggest oil companies have been wheeling and dealing in Baku and other Caspian cities since the collapse of Soviet state capitalism in 1989. No-one knows for sure just how much oil awaits them. Proven resources, according to BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy, are 17 billion barrels and that yet to be found ranges from 20 billion bbls (International Institute for Strategic Studies) to a 1996 estimate of 178 billion bbls—the latter perhaps making the Caspian one of the most important oil-producing regions in the world. However, a generally accepted figure is that of 50 billion bbls and worth some $4 trillion at today’s prices—a sum that hints instantly at trouble.

US oil companies have long since sweetened the former Soviet republics of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan with $2 billions-worth of investment, reviving to an extent their collapsed economies—or rather making them ripe for milking—and at the same time making them less dependent on Russia. Moreover, US oil giants have lobbied on behalf of Caspian governments in Washington, extolling the virtues of their political causes.

Already this is bearing fruit, with Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan signing deals worth £40 billion with the West. Azerbaijan has signed deals with 10 consortia so far, the biggest shareholder being BP and Amoco.

While the former Soviet republics are adamant they should be free to exploit their own wealth, Russia and Iran, the two remaining countries whose shores are lapped by the Caspian, have other thoughts. Both are major oil producers themselves and have genuine fears of what a Caspian oil boom could mean to their own interests. When we consider that oil is pumped out of Kazakhstan, for instance, three times cheaper than out of Siberia, it is understandable that Russian capitalists fear a tremendous fall in their profits as oil begins to pour out of their former states through more efficient outlets.

Both Russia and Iran insist on a fair share of the development of the Caspian oil fields and argue strenuously that pipelines should be allowed to pass through their own territory. Russia has suggested that countries bordering the Caspian should each carry out offshore production inside a 72 kilometre zone and that the waters should be shared. And both Russia and Iran have backed their claim to shared waters by pointing to their naval forces (Russia has 90 naval craft in the Caspian).

Like Russia, Iran is also wary of US interest in the region, believing the Clinton administration is trying to marginalise Teheran’s role in the Caspian and, like Russia, argues for “fairness”, Teheran insisting that negotiations on who drills where on the Caspian seabed be carried out by all concerned, with Iran maintaining the right to veto any decision it construes as being detrimental to its own interests.

Teheran is also rumoured to be contemplating ways to upset US plans to take Iran out of the Caspian equation, one being to offer a better price for oil that could be won in Europe.

For their part, the US claim they want the oil to flow out through numerous pipelines, thus allowing no country to monopolise it. In June, Clinton was heard singing the praises of Iran as it moved towards “democracy”. He spoke of how Iran was “changing in a positive way” and how the US was seeking a “genuine reconciliation” with Iran. And just as the US dismiss trying to undermine Iran’s interests in the Caspian, they similarly claim no opposition to oil pipelines running through Russia, so long as Russia does not control the valves.

The biggest argument at present seems to be over which direction the oil should flow out of the Caspian. It is a debate that can only intensify the longer it rages. The arrival of the US (mainly since 1995) and the preparedness of the former soviet republics to foster a strong relationship with Washington suggests trouble ahead.

As the International Herald Tribune recently reported:

  The drive by US companies to exploit these resources already has produced a political realignment of historical dimensions including an unprecedented American presence in a region that has been under continuous Russian control since the mid 18th Century (5 October 1998).

With the demand for oil expected to increase by 30 percent in the next 20 years, we have every reason for keeping a close eye on developments in the Caspian. At the moment, the region is relatively stable, but history teaches us troops could be mobilised overnight when profits are threatened and that deals are only as strong as the paper they are written on when “the greatest material prize in world history” is at stake.

John Bissett

A Reply to CND (1999)

From the January 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Thank you for your circular letter “Trident—what the bloody hell for?”, delivered through my letterbox.

You talk about the “astounding”, “shocking”, and “sickening” nature of the government’s current actions and beliefs, but forgive me: what about yours?

This government, like all governments, represents the interests of the state; and the state acts as a collective for the interests of society’s owning class (landowners, landlords, entrepreneurs and other capitalists). In pursuit of the interests of the capitalist class the state will, as Brecht put it, “make war as a continuation of business by other means”. The idea that given the likelihood of war it is either possible or sensible to discriminate as between particular kinds of weapons—voting against nuclear weapons but in favour of others—now that really is “astounding”, “shocking”, and “sickening”. It is also mind-bendingly foolish.

If you are opposed to war and all that it represents—as any right thinking person should be—you will advocate policies and take actions which will make war impossible, by removing its causes. That is, you will seek to transform society in the interests of human beings as a whole, without restriction to so-called race, nationality or gender, by establishing socialism in place of capitalism.

To do what you do—to object to some weapons which might be used in wars, whilst implicitly tolerating others—is to accept the inevitability of war, and the social system which underpins it. Your efforts, because they oppose only certain kinds of war, and not war itself, serve, whether intentionally or otherwise, to make war more likely. Your literature obscures and obfuscates. It makes the likelihood of enlightenment and desirable change the more difficult. However concerned you may feel about the welfare of the human race, your actions betray the very constituency you claim to serve.

Campaigning against nuclear weapons is an irrelevance. Nuclear weapons are unlikely to be used in East Timor, or Kosovo, or central Africa, or any of the other myriad “trouble spots” across the globe. Tens of millions of people have been killed since the end of World War II, and not a nuclear weapon fired in action. Are you unconcerned about such matters? By what contorted logic does “manner of death” come to mean more to you than “fact of death”?

I accept that most members of CND are well motivated: that to use a cliché, “they care”. But actions if they are to be effective require more than refined sensibilities. It is not enough that behaviour is well motivated: if it is to be effective it must be appropriate. An effective parent knows that it isn’t enough to want to act in a child’s interest; that if you are to be effective, you need also to know what to do. Members of CND need to learn just what is involved in keeping people free from the tyranny of death by war—whether at the hands of nuclear weapons or acceptable (sic) alternatives—and free also from poverty and famine, and poor health and abject lifestyles, and all the other social ills which are celebrated daily by capitalism.

If you really care about people you will want to campaign for their enlightenment; for an absence of nuclear weapons and war—in a word, for socialism.

Michael Gill

50 Years Ago: A Letter from Ireland (1999)

The 50 Years Ago column from the January 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

And now “Dev.” and Costello, and the other “great Irish leaders,” are hitting their headlines with speeches railing against Partition in Ireland. Well, in conclusion, let me say that we Socialists in Ireland equally desire, and ceaselessly work for, the ending of Partition, also—but we never get any headlines in the Press. Oh, no; for the Partition we speak against is not a geographical one but an economic one. The Partition we oppose is that between the rich and poor, between the capitalist class and the working class. That is the Partition, a universal one, which Socialists everywhere seek to abolish, and that I suggest, is the only Partition which you, and all other workers, ought to concentrate on and bend all your efforts towards removing.

National boundaries may be altered—may even disappear—but such re-arrangements of things, geographical can in no way abolish, or even lessen, the poverty of the many. The solution to that problem will not be found by struggling for Empires or Republics (whether of the 26- or 32-County variety), but by striving for the World Socialist Commonwealth.

So—Yours for Socialism,

Chris Walsh 

(Dublin Socialist Group)

[From the Socialist Standard, January 1949]

Contradictions in Euroland (1999)

From the January 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Only a few weeks before the launch of the single currency in Europe and just when things should have been coming together, a public row broke out between the monetarist European central bankers of Frankfurt and the French and German governments.

Put simply, the politicians (especially the new German government under Gerhard Schröder and his Finance Minister Oscar Lafontaine, the Sun’s latest bugbear) are talking of reflating Euroland—the 11 member states who adopted the euro as their common currency on 1 January—with extra government borrowing and spending in order to deal with structural unemployment. Of course, this attempt to revive discredited Keynesianism has not gone down well with the “orthodox” central bankers who think this will threaten the strength and stability of the euro. Such a clash of opinions is highly significant, with Wim Duisenberg, the President of the new European Central Bank (ECB), publicly condemning such economic “recklessness”.

Indeed, for those who remember the Maastricht “convergence criteria” and the Amsterdam “stability pact”, the politicians would seem to be wanting a major U-turn, but a closer inspection reveals the “Euro-fudge” which has always been there.

The process of closer integration in Europe has been driven in recent years by the Franco-German axis. In monetary terms this has been characterised by the “franc fort” (strong franc) policy whereby France pegged the franc to the German mark and its satellite currencies. France has always wanted Germany to cede more on the politics of economic and monetary union and not least on the idea of an “economic government” for Europe.

Germany used to favour a “strong” euro to replace the mark. France has been less orthodox and sought to weaken monetary policy with references to growth and employment targets. With the coming to power in Bonn of the new Red-Green coalition, it would appear that Germany is coming round to the French view.

Such a policy mess does not bode well for Euroland. There is also the plan to expand the EU eastwards, which must mean structural adjustments to the Common Agricultural Policy and fiscal transfers from the richer and “Club Med” states to the new entrants. Quite how such a plan is designed to sit with the single currency is anybody’s guess.

Further, the EU and the US have locked into yet another trade row, this time about banana imports which some commentators see as one of the first moves towards protectionism as the world economy faces recession. Indeed, this is the real context—the world crisis of capitalism. Faced with ever-increasing concentration of capital, the EU plan is to forge together in order to take on the big boys, the US and Japan.

Where does this leave Blair? After nailing his colours to the European mast is it any wonder he is so worried about the new direction for Europe proposed by Lafontaine and the others? It is, after all, a bit Old Labour and Mr Murdoch will be even less pleased with New Labour for getting caught up with such corporatism.

Dave Flynn

Editorial: The side show (1999)

Editorial from the January 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Reform of the House of Lords, changing the voting system, elected local mayors, these are the issues the politicians and media have wanted us to get interested in recently. But why, when a recession is looming, are they trying to get us so worked up about constitutional issues?

The experience of the three previous recessions since 1973 has taught politicians that they can do nothing to stop a recession coming. All they can do is brace themselves and wait for it to pass by. There is, however, one field where a government does have some power to change things—the constitution. The Blair government has been exploiting this to the full, in a bid to avoid losing credibility through appearing to be completely powerless.

The House of Lords is to be reformed. This was an issue when the Socialist Party was formed in 1904. At that time and for many years afterwards the Labour Party campaigned for the abolition pure and simple of the House of Lords. Like the Monarchy this is indeed an anti-democratic relic of feudalism which will have no place in a socialist society. (It may have no place in a modern capitalist society either, but that’s for supporters of capitalism to decide.)

Attlee, as pre-war Labour leader, once unwisely said that if he was ever offered a seat in the Lords he would call himself Lord Love-A-Duck of Limehouse. When the offer came he bottled out, and his son now sits in the Lords as the second Earl Attlee of Walthamstow. As a hereditary he may (or, it now seems, may not) be booted out by Blair and be replaced by some superannuated hack nominated by one or other of the main political parties who will still be entitled to call themselves Baron or Baroness.

As to electoral changes, the unelected but non-hereditary (which, apparently, makes it alright) Baron Jenkins in his Report commissioned by the government recommended a complicated hybrid system whose main aim would seem to be to give his party—the Liberal Democrats—more MPs. In the days when a spade was called a spade this would have been known as gerrymandering.

But this is to fall into the trap of discussing these constitutional reforms seriously. The fact is that they are completely irrelevant as far as the real, social and economic problems people face are concerned. They won’t make any difference to these, and they aren’t even democratic.

Blair’s battle with the Lords is a side-show that should not distract us from the real issue. What is required is not constitutional reform but social revolution—a change in the basis of society from class ownership and production for profit to common ownership by all and production to satisfy people’s needs. This is the only framework—which will end the privileges of wealth and not just of birth—within which the urgent problems of pollution, mass unemployment, transport chaos, a crumbling health service, social breakdown and so on and so on can be solved in a rational way.

Proper Gander: ‘All I Can Think About Is The Housing’ (2020)

The Proper Gander Column from the January 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

A recent edition of Dispatches (Channel 4) highlighted the difficulties faced by women facing homelessness while being pregnant. Born Homeless followed three expectant mothers living in London, and was narrated by one of these, Sam. She is about to be evicted from her room in a shared house because the property isn’t set up for households with children. She approached Lambeth council for assistance months before, but didn’t get much help, presumably because it has been swamped with homeless applications and there aren’t enough affordable properties for people to move to. The day before her eviction is due, Sam returns to the council but can’t see her case officer and so has to wait three hours to be seen by duty staff. A blunt, unhelpful housing officer arranges a placement in temporary accommodation, which turns out to be a dull, unhygienic room in a house shared with seven others. 

Councils have a legal duty under the Housing Act 1996 to place homeless pregnant women or families with children in temporary accommodation. Sam is luckier than many others. Her placement is in the same area as she lived in before, whereas she could have been placed miles away from her support network or in a hotel room without cooking or laundry facilities. On moving day, Sam says ‘what makes me emotional with it all is… if it’s gonna affect the baby… You just don’t want anything to interfere with the development… I do not want to put the baby in there, I myself don’t even wanna go in there’. Her concerns aren’t just with the poor physical condition of the accommodation, but also the strain of her situation. As Clare Livingstone, Professional Policy Advisor at The Royal College of Midwives says, ‘we know that homelessness leads to stress and ill health in pregnancy and that there are potentially adverse effects for the babies of these vulnerable mothers’ (LINK).

Sam complains to the council about the shared house and gets moved to a more suitable self-contained (but still temporary) flat, acknowledging that having a camera crew with her probably helped make this happen. Guidelines say that homeless households containing children or pregnant women should only be in a shared house or hotel for up to six weeks before being transferred to self-contained temporary accommodation. Sam says that when she was training to be a social worker, she was supposed to put the welfare of children first, but finds out first-hand that the practicalities of what the system can provide go against this.

The programme also follows Temi, who has been living in hostels and ‘sofa surfing’ with friends or relatives in London for three years. She says ‘to be honest I haven’t really felt the full joy that I’m actually gonna be a mum again, you know. I’m excited and all that but I’m just worried with the space… I’m supposed to be resting and it’s just all I can think about is the housing’. Temi and her two children are staying in sub-standard temporary accommodation with water dripping from the ceiling. She goes to Hackney council to ask about another placement, and is told that they won’t be moved until after her baby is born. When she gives birth she refuses to leave the hospital to go back to the temporary accommodation which will now be even more overcrowded. The council places her somewhere larger, and again, would this have happened without her being with a camera crew?

There are no figures on how many women are pregnant and homeless. An indication of the extent of the problem comes from a survey of 300 midwives across the country carried out by the programme makers and the Royal College of Midwives. Virtually all the survey respondents said that they had seen a pregnant woman who was homeless or at risk of homelessness in the previous six months. Even more worrying, 81 percent had seen at least one pregnant woman who was sleeping rough. (ibid)

There are figures for the number of homeless households which include children. According to the Office of National Statistics, the number of families with children in temporary accommodation in England has rocketed from 37,190 in 2012 to 61,610 in 2018, with a reduction in numbers in Wales (1,250 to 798) and Scotland (3,487 to 3,349). Families with children comprise around 70 percent of the total number of households in temporary accommodation, 93,705 in 2018 (LINK). But these figures only represent a fraction of those with housing difficulties, as they don’t include single people in hostels or sleeping rough, nor those ‘sofa surfing’ or threatened with homelessness after receiving an eviction notice.

The third family appearing in the documentary is Kady and her two children, who are living in a cramped one bedroom flat provided as temporary accommodation. They have been there for 18 months, competing with 10,000 others on the council’s waiting list for rehousing. Larger families requiring a three or four bedroom property are likely to be waiting particularly long to get social housing, probably years. There is less of a shortage of bigger houses in the private sector, but many of these are owned by landlords who have realised they can make more money by renting rooms individually to students or through councils as temporary accommodation. Most remaining private sector properties are likely to be too expensive or refused to households reliant on benefits.

The families featured in Born Homeless need somewhere secure and comfortable to live even more than other people do, but whether they get this depends on what they can afford. On a low income and with a shortage of cheaper houses, they will face a long struggle to get out of temporary accommodation into somewhere better. The root of the problem is how housing is a commodity, and it can’t be anything else under capitalism. The value of a property, whether in the private or social housing sector, is measured in pounds rather than by how well it satisfies people’s needs.

Mike Foster

Party Election Results (2020)

Party News from the January 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Here are the results of the two seats we contested in last month’s general election: 

• Cardiff North: Lab 25605 (61.2%) Con 8426 LD 6298 Brexit 1006 Gwalad 280 Ind 119 Soc 88 (0.2%).
• Folkestone and Hythe: Con 35473 (60.1%) Lab 14146 LD 5755 Green 2708 Ind 576 SDP 190 YPP 80 Soc 69 (0.1%).

Kent and Sussex Branch report: The last time we contested Folkestone and Hythe, in 2015, our candidate got 68 votes. 2015 was of course in the pre-Corbyn Labour Party period, but then we also had TUSC (ex-Militant SPEW coalition) on the ballot paper. Not an easy comparison, but if people were tempted by leftist reformism or Brexit issues, 2019 was probably their year to be so. Labour almost doubled their vote in this period. During this campaign we distributed 56,500 leaflets via Royal Mail, 5,000 copies of the first edition of the local ‘World News’ flyer to Folkestone Harbour and other selected parts of the constituency including Cheriton, Sandgate and Hythe, and inserts in last weekend’s i-newspaper (among 160,000 in the southern region).

Of course it’s not really the votes that are so important at this stage, but the fact that for an outlay of under £1,500 we got our leaflet delivered through 56,500 letter boxes, plus our propaganda free several times in local newspaper columns and candidate interviews on BBC TV and the Academy FM Community Radio Station.

In Cardiff, which we were contesting for the first time, we distributed 45,500 via Royal Mail with more leaflets and literature distributed at street stalls in the constituency. An advertisement was inserted in the South Wales Echo and our candidate, with all the others, answered set questions on Wales Online (tinyurl.com/t3tu3uq)

What causes war (1971)

From the January 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nowadays every government, every political organisation proclaims itself for peace, against war. We hear no more that war is glorious, beautiful, sweet, that it purifies the spirit. It is no longer possible wholly to hide the terrible, suffering-causing nature of war. So the master classes have changed their propaganda tactics: we learn that our rulers strive ceaselessly for peace, but the aggressive rulers of some other country threaten us. In certain circumstances war is a necessary evil—we are struggling for freedom, human dignity—in fact, we make war for peace:

  We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun. (Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Peking 1967.)

The ruling classes of every country and their governments are themselves the people who make peace, human dignity, real democracy and real socialism and so on, impossible. Do you believe such are the motives of any “side” in any war? But if not, what does cause war ?

Maybe governments misunderstand each other’s desires? But they possess information services, often secret, much more reliable and detailed than those at the disposal of the general public. Often it is convenient for them to pretend ignorance or lack of understanding.

The aim of war is the protection and advancement of the economic interests of the capitalist classes of every country, each in competition against the others—for example, to protect or gain markets, sources of raw materials, trade routes. Mainly war is a struggle between imperialisms, for example, the Second World War between Germany-ltaly-Japan and America-Russia-Britain-China. Now we have a three-cornered conflict: China against Russia and both against America. All three fought on the same side in the Second World War!

Those who control these powers must aim to protect and extend their own spheres of influence. Each power either is or would like to be an imperialist power, but the ambitions and interests of one state often must conflict with those of another. Political discord occurs, and when one government judges that “national interests,” that is, capitalist interests, are intolerably threatened, war explodes.

Of course, the struggle is often not directly between great powers, but between their puppet states, e.g. Vietnam, Germany at present, Korea. Often the inhabitants of a puppet state imagine that they are fighting for “national independence,” e.g. Hungary 1956. Vietnam now, when in fact they are fighting for a rival empire. In the world of today small states cannot be independent. And independence, that is, exploitation by fellow nationals alone, is not something worth fighting for to the working class.

So our position is: We are against every war, and both sides of every war. Wars are struggles between capitalist interests; no army fights for the interests of any working class. Only in a truly socialist world-wide society will war disappear, because while the capitalist world social order lasts, the roots of war remain. So the only way to lasting peace is through a new world order—without money, armaments, classes, nations.

S. S.

Shadow of a Gunman: The Irish Republican Army (1971)

From the January 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sinn Fein was formed in 1905 and its numerous political utterances between then and the establishment of Partition leave no doubt that it represented the interests of the rising capitalist class in the South of Ireland in their struggle to achieve political autonomy in order to legislate political conditions suitable to the growth of a fledgling capitalism.

The Sinn Fein Policy Statement of 1917 summarised the utterances and actions of the organisation over the previous twelve years and made nonsense of the noble-sounding sentiments expressed by Pearse on the steps of the GPO in Dublin in 1916. The capitalist class of every country when they are striving for power pay lip-service to noble sentiments in order to rally the working class in support of their struggle and the honeyed phrases of the Declaration of the Irish Republic, with its generalisations about the Irish Nation being the property of the Irish people, were a far cry from the practical economic aspirations of the native capitalists, expressed in Sinn Fein’s Policy Statement:

  No possibility would be left as far as Sinn Fein were concerned for a syndicate of unscrupulous English capitalists to crush out the Home Manufacturer and the Home Trader (Our italics).

Despite the play with words, “English capitalists” as opposed to “Home Manufacturer”, there can be no doubt about Sinn Fein’s meaning: they stood for protection of the native capitalists from the competition of “foreign” capitalists. Indeed the Policy statement spells it out:

  Protection means rendering the native manufacturer equal to meet foreign competition. If a manufacturer cannot produce as cheaply as an English or other foreigner only because his foreign competitor has larger resources at his disposal, then it is the first duty of the Irish Nation to accord protection to that Irish manufacturer.

This is what it was all about then! This was the bitter reality of the poet’s songs, the patriot’s dreams, the worker’s sacrifices; this was the prize for heroism, sacrifice, murder and counter-murder, bitterness and division. The promised pot of gold at the end of the patriotic rainbow was for the Irish “manufacturer” and the “home trader”; for the worker the only gold was on his new badge of slavery, the national flag that was to adorn his poverty, fly over his slum and replace the Union Jack as a symbol of his political ignorance.

And it could not have been otherwise. Despite the heady romantics of Pearse and the phrase-mongering of James Connolly the political and economic conditions that then prevailed excluded completely the possibility of an alternative to capitalism. The purpose of the struggle was, and could only have been the political stewardship of that system; the flag that symbolised the claim of the native capitalists bore as little relevance to the problems of the working class then, as it does today.

National struggles, especially when they are waged by the very weak against the very strong, are always seen in a romantic light. They are the material for songs and romantic novels and the new masters that emerge from such struggles are not adverse to the fictions and heroics which later purport to be history—"history” which becomes an important ingredient in the fog of ignorance essential in the exploitation of the “nation’s” working class.

Our purpose here is not to deny the bravery and self-sacrificing of those who contributed these qualities in the so-called fight for freedom. Such qualities were not the preserve of one side in the struggle—they are to be found in the unfortunate combatants of any war; often, sadly, they are to be found in inverse ratio to the amount of reasoned political thought on the part of their contributors.

Our object is to show that whatever the ideas, or lack of ideas, of the membership of the Sinn Fein movement and its militant arm, the IRA, the only thing they could have achieved—and its achievement was consciously desired by the political leadership of the movement—was the maintenance of the same old failed system of capitalism out of which all working class problems arise. This was true of the IRA yesterday; it is equally true today.

If we leave aside the romantics and “principles” and get down to the facts of working class life, now or in the Twenties, it will be seen that the problems that affected the working class in Ireland under English rule were similar to the problems of the working class throughout the world of capitalism. The facts of working class life were (and since the Six Day War, namely the memory of those are!) poverty, insecurity, unemployment, homelessness, slums, as well as the violent contention, war and violence which form an inevitable sackcloth to such conditions and the economic circumstances in which they arise. These miseries did not originate in “foreign” rule any more than they can be assuaged or eradicated by “home” rule. The French, English, German or Russian worker under his “own” government, lived with these problems in the same way as the Irish worker or the Indian worker, living under a “foreign” government.

In a word, the problems of the working class in Ireland were, and remain, the problems of the working class of the world and originate in the class stratification of capitalist society. Given capitalism, these problems were inevitable; they could not then, no more than they can now, be “planned” out of the system. They did not arise out of the “evil” intentions, nor the blundering or stupidity of governments, “home” or “foreign”, no more than they could be planned, prayed or fought away by brave, sincere or wise men. They were the facts of capitalism and would continue to exist for as long as the working class, the only class with an economic interest in bringing about a real change, accepted that system.

In Ireland at the turn of the century the leaders of Sinn Fein were, as we have seen, concerned with the sectional interests of the rising Irish capitalist class. They did not take issue with the fact that the system of capitalism promoted by the dominant British capitalist class resulted in poverty and misery for the working class and small farmers in Ireland—and England. Their concern was not at the fact of exploitation but rather at the identity of the exploiters—at the fact that “English manufacturers (were) squeezing out their less-powerful Irish rivals”.

Sinn Fein’s was not a cry from the heart at the plight of the people of Ireland but a protest from the pocket of the new bandit against the fact that the older, more resourceful bandit was not giving him a “fair” opportunity to carry out his plunder.

But the fledgling native capitalists were not themselves capable of changing the political conditions that thwarted their exploitative function. They needed the battalions of the working class behind them to give point to their argument but to rally the working class they had to appeal to working class interests by falsely identifying the plight of the working class with the rule of the foreign capitalists.

In 1905 Sinn Fein’s demands were limited to the idea of Ireland having such measure of political control as would allow for the restriction of foreign, mainly British competition in order that Irish capitalism could develop behind tariff walls and a quota system of imports. This was to be within the framework of an Ireland “hereditary to the (British) Crown . . . with King, Lords and Commons for Ireland”. Such evident self-seeking on the part of native capitalism was not especially conducive to this task of rallying the workers and this, along with the declining value of the system of Empire Preference, turned the Party’s propaganda increasingly towards the idea of complete separatism that it had engendered in its militant wing.

Predictably, propaganda by deed took over and the Irish Republican Army evolved into an effective weapon waging war on the forces of British capitalism in Ireland.

The IRA was composed mainly of young workers and farmers largely unaware of the economic pressures that had given rise to the struggle. They were “fighting for Ireland”! Ireland was an abstraction, a vision, a “principle”; Ireland was the opposite of what they knew and lived with, but then they did not know that all that was hateful in the Ireland they knew was the product of centuries of class rule culminated now in the harsher vulgarities of capitalism and all that was possible for the Ireland of their vision was a continuation of the same old miseries. The law would remain to enshrine the right of one class to exploit another even if the immediate enforcers of that Law wore different uniforms. Only a flag would be changed.

When the needs of the native capitalists had been served in the treaty of 1921 the capitalist class were satisfied. For them it was a matter of regret that some sections of the IRA did not see in the establishment of conditions compatible with the economic needs of capitalism the fulfilment of their vision and if that vision—largely compounded of romanticism, heroics and a sense of comradeship—impelled such sections of the IRA to the continuance of the struggle, then it was to be put down with all the viciousness at the command of the new forces of “law and order”.

The IRA had fulfilled its purpose; it had served the class interests of Irish capitalism and by its very nature, apart from its lofty and ill-defined notions of “freedom”, it could not have done otherwise. After the Civil War and the desertion of its leadership to the more mundane and profitable offices of capitalism such fragments as continued to exist deteriorated into a political gang that canalised the genuine discontent and revolutionary fervour of some sections of the working class, North and South, into the dream of a tomorrow that was bit the pale reflection of the sad ghosts of yesterday.

During the decades that have passed the principal and tragic preoccupation of the IRA has been the useless sacrifice of the lives of young Irish workers on the altar of romanticism. Many of its members have been killed by the forces of “law and order” it helped to create in the South. Still more have died in futile adventurism in the North and thousands of young workers have spent the best years of their lives in jails in both parts of Ireland.

Inevitably years of stagnation and infiltration by informers and police spies have brought their toll of viciousness, intimidation and death within the organisation. The counter-espionage activities of police agents have at different times caused havoc and leaks in the form of young men’s bodies have often been plugged with lead after arbitrary conviction by drum-head court martial. In the early Forties, after a senseless bombing campaign in England, the “major leak” scare ran rife in the movement; after numerous bullets and some tar-and-feathers had failed to stop the stream of information to the authorities the IRA discovered that the movement’s own chief-of-staff was an informer!

Possibly the only positive role played by the IRA since the Civil War was that ascribed to it by the Unionist Party—and that mainly falsely. No Unionist politician ever faced an election without discovering an IRA plot. At different times throughout the last four decades the IRA was largely a figment of the imagination of the Stormont Government—in the mid-Forties the organisation could not have mustered a platoon of volunteers in the City of Belfast—but it was a useful device for stampeding those workers who were tempted to stray from the paths of Unionism. It was an almost farcical reciprocity: the Unionist Party created the conditions in which the IRA continued its tenuous existence; the IRA helped to maintain a political climate in Northern Ireland conducive to the continuance of Unionist rule.

What has it all been for . . . the tragic deaths, the beatings, the imprisonments? “For Ireland”, answers the mocking voice of yesterday.

But there are two Irelands: there is the Ireland of the capitalist class which is doing quite nicely for itself and has no need for, nor interest in, the IRA; and there is the Ireland of the working class. What do they, the working class, owe the IRA? North and South for nearly six decades now members of the working class have contributed their blood in the cause of “Mother Ireland”—and yet their problems remain. If it is accepted that these problems have their roots in capitalism and will disappear only when the alternative to capitalism, Socialism, becomes the system of social organisation then it must be recognised that the IRA have played their part in thwarting the essential unity of the working class, rendering division within the working class more deep and waylaying the working class into the blind alley of nationalism.

The organisation has declined in strength since 1922 but since then its real menace has mainly been to its own members. But the situation following on the rioting in Northern Ireland has given the IRA a new lease of life and it is true to say that from the point of view of the working class it now constitutes a dangerous ingredient in the Irish situation.

In the years following the collapse of the IRA’s last military activities in the late Fifties a growing section within the movement began to promote the ideas of constitutional political action along the now-fashionable “left-wing” lines. Inevitably the latter-day ideas of one of Republicanism’s patron Saints, James Connolly, began to take greater prominence in the thinking of the leadership and, just as inevitably, the nationalistic state-capitalist implications of these ideas has led the movement in the direction of the “Communist” Party.

The events in Northern Ireland since 1968 caused a split in the ranks of the IRA but while the immediate problems posed by the troubles in the North may have triggered off this split it was the growing influence of Leninist ideas within the movement, and the effect these had on dividing the IRA’s reaction to events in the North, that formed the core of the division.

The breakaway element, or “Provisionals”, as they have come to be known, were led by those who resented the growing influence of “Communist” ideas in the organisation. Not only did such people feel that politics was an irrelevancy within the context of the Republican ideal of a thirty-two county Irish republic but the new political bias in the movement clashed with their Catholicism. When the Catholics of the North were under attack such elements saw the defence of their fellow-Catholics as an immediate priority and when this course was resisted by the official leadership the long-brewing dissension and division came into the open.

The result is that there are now two IRA’s in Ireland and to confuse matters still more the “official” group, that has moved away from the uncomplicated formula of a Republic, and now pursue a contradiction-in-terms which they refer to as a “Socialist Workers’ Republic”, are known as the “Traditional IRA” while the breakaway group still espouse the traditional cause—even if they are, at least in the troubled areas of Belfast, a mere anti-Protestant counterpart of the Ulster Volunteer Force.

The “Provisionals”, in an attempt to maintain their claim to the title IRA are beginning to refer to the other group as the National Liberation Front—a title which demonstrates not only the real differences that led up to the split but also places the “traditionals”, in the view of their erstwhile ex-comrades, in the position of stooges for the “Communist” Party.

Members of the working class, whether in the IRA or lending support to that organisation should realise that Nationalism is the tool of capitalism. The working class have no country—they have the choice of enduring the miseries of capitalism within the confines of national frontiers or enjoying freedom in a Socialist World.

Richard Montague