Inequality Kills (2022)

From the March 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

January 2022 saw the release of Oxfam’s report, provocatively entitled Inequality Kills. Produced to ‘inform public debate on development and humanitarian policy issues’, the report focused on three broad areas: 1) The unprecedented rise in billionaire wealth during Covid-19, 2) Economic Violence (the impact of inequalities in health, gender-based violence, climate change and hunger) and 3) Solutions (importance of social movements, and policies around pre-distribution and re-distribution).

Although likely using inflammatory language for dramatic effect, Inequality Kills is comprehensive and includes multiple, detailed and scientifically researched sources of information. Sixty pages and 321 footnotes are accompanied by a summary and a note on methodology describing how the organisation came to their conclusions and how they decided upon what to highlight and what questions should be asked.

Their message is that we are making an unequal world even more unequal and that the pandemic has pushed us into a yet more grave position regarding environmental damage, a decrease in women’s rights, an increase in gender inequalities and more barriers for ‘racialised groups’.

The forewords feature comment from Jayati Ghosh, a development economist and Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA, but possibly more strikingly, Abigail Disney, a member of the multinational entertainment and media conglomerate family, who is described as a documentary filmmaker [and] activist and lets us know that ‘The answer to these complicated problems is ironically simple: taxes’ and ‘There is more than enough money to solve most of the world’s problems. It’s just being held in the hands of millionaires and billionaires who aren’t paying their fair share.’

As mentioned in the report, Abigail Disney is a member of the ‘Patriotic Millionaires’, an organisation that ‘focus[ses] on three “first” principles: a highly progressive tax system, a liveable minimum wage, and equal political representation for all citizens’ (p 5). Do Oxfam consider that both this organisation and the idea of philanthropy are useful to their position?

In Inequality Kills, a number of statistics are shown in bold, eye-catching infographics, such as the below.

The authors take a stab at the contemporary issue of the single person or business space-race and Jeff Bezos and his somewhat phallic rocket in particular, in a section entitled ‘The Billionaire Variant’ linking the pandemic to the rise in wealth of the richest on the planet.

‘In July 2021, the world’s richest man launched himself and his friends into space in his luxury rocket while millions were dying needlessly below him because they could not access vaccines or afford food. Jeff Bezos’ own iconic Marie Antoinette “let them eat cake” moment will forever be more accurately quoted: “I want to thank every Amazon employee and customer because you guys paid for all of this.” The increase in Bezos’ fortune alone during the pandemic could pay for everyone on earth to be safely vaccinated’ (pp 9-10).

There is scant mention, however, of how or why this situation came to be. How was it possible for a commercial trader, reminiscent of nineteenth century Britain, to increase his wealth in this way? What is the root cause of the problem? Does it take much discussion after reading the report or do we already know the answer? If we know the answer, what are the friends and associates of the wealthy capitalists going to do about it? By design, there are more questions than answers, but how helpful is this methodology?

The report is around 15,000 words long and the word ‘capitalism’ only appears twice, with one of these referring to ‘shareholder capitalism’; the other appearing in a section entitled ‘Economic Violence’:

‘That people in poverty, women and girls, and racialized groups are so often disproportionately killed or harmed, more than those who are rich and privileged, is not an accidental error in today’s dominant form of capitalism, but a core part of it’ (p.12).

The report does not explain what today’s dominant form of capitalism is, so how are we to discuss how to improve or solve it?

A cursory search of various social media platforms show that the report is only mentioned by groups linked to Oxfam itself, with a focus on the amount of billionaires compared to poorer people from an Indian perspective, and by ‘green’ groups and relatively small-reach left-leaning individuals and ‘think tanks’. Features can be found in The Morning Star and Socialist Worker.

It now does not take much searching to find that even the ‘centre-left’ of mainstream politics has woken up to the idea that capitalism is in itself and is the instigator of, damage by design. Foreign Affairs Magazine, published by the US Council on Foreign Relations, was founded essentially as a ‘sister’ of Chatham House in Britain and has close links to the Democratic Party. They state that their ‘goal is to start a conversation about the need for Americans to better understand the world’. Their 2013 article, Capitalism and Inequality, What the Right and the Left Get Wrong describes the problem at hand: ‘Inequality is an inevitable product of capitalist activity, and expanding equality of opportunity only increases it.’

The authors would also have done well to closely read Bambra, Lynch and Smith’s The Unequal Pandemic, published in January 2021, which describes how pandemic-based and other outstanding ‘inequalities are a political choice: with governments effectively choosing who lives and who dies.’ Oxfam’s report may not be able to change this ever-pervasive fact, even if it was their original aim.

So who is the report for really? Are the people that need to discuss the issues raised, going to act on them? Perhaps the most pertinent quote in the report comes from Greta Thunberg, made at the latest pre-COP26 Youth Summit:

‘The climate crisis is of course only a symptom of a much larger crisis. A crisis based on the idea that some people are worth more than others (…]) It is very naïve to believe that we can solve this crisis without confronting the roots of it’ (p.34).

TJ

SPGB Summer School: The Class Divide (2022)

Party News from the March 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

The richest 10% of people own more than 80% of global wealth, and the 10 richest men have six times more wealth than that of the poorest 3.1 billion people combined.

These vast inequalities in wealth reflect how society is split into two classes: the capitalist class who get their wealth through owning industries and corporations, and the working class who rely on wages or benefits to buy what is needed.

The Socialist Party’s weekend of talks and discussion looks at why capitalism is divided into classes and how the antagonism between them impacts on the way we live. What is ‘class consciousness’ and how does it develop? To what extent is it meaningful to say that there is a middle class? What classes were there before capitalism, in previous stages of history? And what could a future classless society be like?

Full residential cost (including accommodation and meals Friday evening to Sunday afternoon) is £100; the concessionary rate is £50. Book here or send a cheque (payable to the Socialist Party of Great Britain) with your contact details to Summer School, The Socialist Party, 52 Clapham High Street, London, SW4 7UN. Day visitors are welcome, but please book by e-mail in advance.

E-mail enquiries to spgbschool@yahoo.co.uk.

What’s in a word? (2022)

From the March 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

The word ‘socialism’ peppers current political discussion. When Boris Johnson was seeking respite from his well-known recent setbacks by announcing a limit to rises in people’s energy bills, a Tory MP got up in the parliament to say that the Conservative Party should not be supporting socialist policies. In the United States, right-wing opponents of Joe Biden never cease to refer to his policies as ‘socialism’. And when we hear reference to what happened over much of the 20th century in Russia and Eastern Europe and still very much happens in countries like Cuba and China, the word ‘socialism’ is often used as a quick and convenient way to describe it, whether coming from detractors or supporters. Clearly, when people use the word in these different cases to characterise a form of government or government policy, they do not all have the same idea in their mind. But what unites all these uses is the idea that the state is taking charge of economic matters and attempting to control what would otherwise be determined by market forces.

Giant Ponzi scam

It’s also a word that pops up almost as a matter of course when people are trying to describe not just state control of an economy but also state dictatorship over people’s everyday lives. This has happened recently, for example, in two quite separate BBC Radio 4 programmes on Albania. A documentary entitled The Great Pyramids of Albania looked back to 1996 when a large proportion of the Albanian population fell victim to a giant ‘Ponzi’ scheme. People sold their houses, land and livestock to buy into pyramid schemes that were doomed to fail. By the end of that year, what was basically a rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul scheme had swallowed up almost 50 per cent of the country’s annual income and affected the lives of most of its population. The programme’s presenter tried to explain the psychology which hooked people into trusting this scheme, how the mass delusion evolved and then what were its dire consequences (a violent civil war in fact) once it became clear that no one was getting their money back and some had lost everything. But he did not do this without referring on a number of occasions to what had preceded this in the period from the end of the second world war to 1991 as ‘socialism’ and its end as ‘the fall of socialism’. During most of that time, what had happened was that Albania had been ruled in a direly oppressive way by a ruthless Stalin-style dictator, Enver Hoxha, who succeeded in establishing personal control not only over the economy but also over the country’s political system.

The Hoxha dictatorship

And it was the Hoxha period of Albanian history that the second recent BBC programme on that country focused on, via a recently published memoir entitled Coming of Age at the End of History, written by a woman who had lived through it. In it the author, Lea Ypi, describes how people were conditioned to believe that the one-party rule they were living under was ‘freedom and democracy’, and that this was what ‘socialism’ was. She describes reinforcing mechanisms such as the loyalty to Hoxha and the Party sworn by pupils in school every morning. But prying ears were everywhere and any hint of non-adherence to the system could lead to dire consequences ranging from dismissal from work, to ‘re-education’, to prison or to execution, and such things happened frequently. The title of the Albanian song accompanying the programme, A Pickaxe in One Hand, a Rifle in the Other, used as a signature tune by Albanian state radio, captures well the tenor of a regime characterised in the author’s memoir as ‘an open-air prison’. Once she had finished her schooldays, Ypi tells how she left Albania, studied philosophy and politics and ended up as what she is today, a Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics. Yet her memoir suggests that she is teaching her students that what happened under Hoxha was socialism, even though one might think that, with her knowledge of political theory, she would know that to label what happened in Albania in that way is an outright perversion of the word’s original meaning.

Was Albania socialist?

Of course, no one has a patent on words, especially those describing ideas rather than concrete objects. Yet, when the word ‘socialism’ was popularised in the 19th century by such writers as Marx and Engels, it clearly meant an entirely different society from the one that existed then and still exists now based on buying and selling and private or state ownership of the means of living. It meant a society of free access to all goods and services based on the concept of from each according to ability to each according to need and presupposed the abolition of the wages system. Yet the dictatorial regimes, run along state-capitalist lines, that later called themselves socialist (and/or Marxist) were the polar opposite of anything Marx and Engels would have recognised as the society of ‘freedom from necessity’ which they described as ‘socialism’ or ‘communism’ (they used the terms more or less synonymously). While we must recognise that many people do not want to see the kind of society advocated by Marx and Engels but instead prefer one of the many slightly different varieties of capitalism that exist at present (‘free market’ capitalism, state capitalism, ‘mixed’ economy, etc), it does not seem unreasonable to expect them, if only to achieve some kind of clarity of thought for themselves, not to throw the word ‘socialism’ around willy-nilly. If the title of ‘socialism’ is given to any of these varieties, it betrays a lack of understanding of the concept historically and can only serve to mislead those looking for genuine solutions to the many-faceted problems perpetually thrown up by the capitalist organisation of society.

Howard Moss

Bird’s Eye View: Religion – Thy Name Is Superstition (2022)

The Bird’s Eye View Column from the March 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Religion – Thy Name Is Superstition

‘A Pakistani court has sentenced a Muslim woman to death for committing “blasphemy” by sharing images deemed to be insulting to Islam’s Prophet Muhammad and one of his wives, also considered a holy personage by many Muslims. The trial court in the northern Pakistani city of Rawalpindi on Wednesday sentenced Aneeqa Ateeq under the country’s strict blasphemy laws, which impose a mandatory death penalty for insulting the Prophet Muhammad’ (aljazeera.com, 20 December).

Pakistan is one of thirteen countries, all of a Muslim majority, where blasphemy is punishable by death. The past lies like a nightmare upon the present: ‘Two years after Michelle, 15, was kidnapped, sold, forced to convert to Islam and married to a stranger, relatives still ostracise her. “My aunts and uncles have left us, and my two older brothers, till a few months ago, were not even talking to me,” said Michelle, talking to IPS over the phone from Faisalabad, in the Punjab province of Pakistan. They believe she has brought dishonour to them. Her captors and even the cleric who officiated the marriage are free despite committing multiple offences, including abduction, trafficking and rape. “There are several laws that can be invoked for tackling offences, such as kidnapping and abductions,” lamented Peter Jacob, executive director of the Center for Social Justice (CSJ), a research and advocacy organisation. “But the prosecution has failed to do so”’ (ipsnews.net, 19 January). According to one Dr. S. Faizi: ‘It is important that Muslims reclaim the Quran, discarding the distorting interpretations by patriarchal men’ (countercurrents.org, 18 January). The humanist and feminist author, 59-year-old Taslima Nasrin, who was born in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh, from where she is banished, her books banned and bounty placed on her head) would likely disagree, having stated: ‘The Quran can no longer serve as the basis of our law. A thousand years ago it may have been useful for fending off barbarism. But we live in modern times, the era of science and technology. The Quran has become superfluous. It stands in the way of progress and the way of women’s emancipation’ (Index, September/October 1994).

Bad science

Believe it or not, religion was humans’ first attempt at science. We could not explain the forces of nature, the rising and setting of the Sun, phases of the moon, etc., and ascribed them to the supernatural. Viewed through the lens of the materialist conception of history, it can be seen as a necessary adjunct to our development. Yet religion has long served the interests of the minority master class. Science too. Science itself has become bourgeois and is dependent upon capitalism for its operation and expansion. In 1850s America a Dr Cartwright identified a condition, drapetomania, that caused black slaves to flee plantations. Russian psychiatrists famously aided Stalin by diagnosing dissidents as insane. Contemporary examples include the sociobiology of E.O. Wilson and Steven Pinker’s evolutionary psychology. An article titled ‘Capitalists Only “Trust the Science” When It Suits Their Agenda’ (leftvoice, 21 January) explores this theme further.

’Even when ‘good’ research is done, the products of that research still exist in a social milieu: not all research or results see the light of day in publication and distribution. That information must still navigate a web of entities with vested interests in the ‘outcomes’ of science. Often, when a study uncovers information that certain entities (the funding agency, the university, the government, corporations in a particular industry) don’t like, they bury or discredit the study. For example, Katherine M. Flegal has been the victim of a 15-year-long campaign to discredit her research demonstrating that being “overweight” is not actually a risk factor for health. Some resistance to her work comes from the weight loss and health insurance industries, but some of it also comes from another classic abuser of “science”: Big Tobacco. When analyzing the data from another study, Flegal found that some of the perceived risks of obesity were actually due to smoking, which had not been accounted for in the original study’.

Reflecting last year on how her 2005 and 2013 papers were received, Dr. Flegal concluded: ‘Scientific findings should be evaluated on their merits, not on the basis of whether they fit a desired narrative’. Indeed.

Good science

‘In an admirable, longstanding tradition, heedful Americans are taking multiple, pragmatic, science-based precautions against a virus that […] has killed 900,000 people, […] and is still infecting almost 700,000 people a day. LOL. Just kidding. In moronic fact, […] crackpots still roam the land, spewing their crazy. […] Add to their ranks […] Christopher Key, who as bonkers head of the Vaccine Police […] now advocates […] drinking urine to ward off COVID. He cites […] “antidotal” evidence, to support urine therapy; he himself has been drinking his own urine for 23 years, evidently proving, “God’s given us everything we need,” except perhaps a working brain’ (commondreams.org, 12 January).

When you doubt ‘our’ leaders or science alone can save us, and begin to question the ‘alternative facts,’ distortions, lies and misinformation of mainstream media, conspiracy cranks and fundamentalist fakirs, consider instead scientific socialism which provides an analysis of the capitalist system that explains how wealth comes to be produced and distributed and who gets what from the pool of social production. It is able to place this in an historical context showing the development of its productive relationships from past systems. It is also able to define the economic limitations of political action within the system and reliably predict the results of various political policies. Another world is possible, one where scientific progress comes hand in hand with societal progress, which is in turn driven by personal betterment of every member of that society. Let’s make it so.

Confusion compounded (2022)

Book Review from the March 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Pound and the Fury. Why Anger and Confusion Reign in an Economy Paralysed by Myth. By Jack Mosse. 168 pages. Manchester University Press, 2021.

To explain why ‘for decades, our economy has failed to work for ordinary citizens’, Mosse had the idea of asking various groups of people what they thought the ‘economy’ was and how they thought it worked. He interviewed people on a nearby estate, people working in asset management, civil service economists, and journalists on a magazine advising small investors. It worked and makes interesting reading. Those in the estate thought that the economy is a conspiracy of the rich and powerful to keep them poor; the asset managers and civil servants saw it as ‘an autonomous natural entity’; the financial journalists came across as simple conmen.

The trouble is that Mosse himself is confused about economics, as revealed by his comments on the answers and in his final chapter on ‘Demythologising the economy’. Early on (p.27) he states his belief that ‘money can be magicked up out of thin air’ by banks. In fact, some of those he interviewed had a more accurate understanding than he does.

He criticises the asset managers and the civil servants for ‘reifying’ the economy ‘as an entity operating according to its own autonomous logic‘ with the result that ’human actors are understood as merely complying with the irresistible base force that drives the economy’ (p. 60-1).

Actually, that is not a bad description of how the capitalist economy does operate. Human actors (capitalists, workers, governments) do have to submit to the logic of the system in the end. The asset managers and civil servants misunderstand the system as an expression of human nature. Mosse calls seeing the economy as an autonomous natural force ‘reifying’. The word Marx used was ‘fetishism’ – humans attributing autonomous power to and being dominated by something that ultimately they create. Humans could cease to be dominated by the outcome of their activity if they changed that activity from producing wealth for sale on a market with a view to profit to producing directly to satisfy people’s needs. This is possible only on the basis of the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources; with this, the ‘economy’ would then cease to operate and humans would be in control of what they produce.

Mosse’s alternative proposal is just to tinker with the banking system while leaving the rest of capitalism unchanged. He attributes to private banks a power which they do not possess. When he says that ‘governments, as well as private banks, create money out of nowhere’, he is only half right. The government, normally via its central bank, can create money, or at least money-tokens, at will (but this will have consequences). Banks cannot. They can only lend what they have themselves borrowed; they don’t create new money, they only redistribute money that already exists. The myth that they can create money out of thin air arises because modern economics has come to define making a bank loan as ‘creating’ money. Banks do make loans of course but not out of thin air.

Having two different definitions of money creation only causes confusion of which Mosse is a victim. He needs to explain, if banks can ‘magic money out of thin air’, how come that during the crash of 2008 they had to be bailed out by the government? Why did they not use their supposed ability to create money to bail themselves out?

He gets himself into another contradiction when discussing one of the reforms proposed by Positive Money – ‘to ban private credit creation’ (p. 137). This turns out not to be stopping banks lending altogether (as it ought logically to mean if banks create money whenever they make a loan), but to allow them to re-lend only money deposited with them. This would mean that they would no longer be able to use the money market to borrow money from other banks and financial institutions to re-lend. Mosse concedes that this ‘draconian policy’ would provoke ‘a huge immediate shock effect on all kinds of economic activity, which would dwarf any previous banking crisis’. Yes, it would.

Seeming to realise the impracticality of that particular money reform, he turns to another funny money theory, so-called ‘Modern Monetary Theory’. MMT is based on the fact that governments do have the power to create money-tokens out of nothing. It argues that all a government has to do is to decide what it wants to spend money on and then create the money; governments don’t really need either to tax or to borrow. Given certain unrealistic conditions a government could perhaps do this but the most likely outcome would be Zimbabwe-style roaring inflation.

It is a pity than Mosse has let himself be influenced by monetary reformers and so ends up propagating confused and confusing myths himself. Despite this, the chapters – four-fifths of the book – where he interviews people are worth reading as good reporting.

Adam Buick

Life and Times: The Beer Festival (2022)

The Life and Times column from the March 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the frequent objections to the possibility of socialism is that it proposes a moneyless society. After all, no one willingly works for free. This truism runs counter to examples of how, even under money-driven capitalism, a great deal of work is undertaken freely.

I am going to outline one example which centres on a community beer festival. Over the last weekend in November, 2021, such a festival ran in the village hall within the Metropolitan Borough of Barnsley. Running from mid-Friday afternoon through to late Sunday afternoon, it eventually raised, that is made a profit of, over £10,000.

The first thing that needs to be acknowledged here is that this is hardly an exemplar of socialism. The whole purpose of the festival was to raise money to fund local community projects, the motivation was blatantly profit.

How could it be otherwise? There was a time during the prominence of Arthur Scargill and the militancy of the NUM that the area around Barnsley was referred to in the media as the People’s Republic of South Yorkshire. More of a nod to Soviet-style state capitalism than anything to do with actual socialism.

Barnsley, just like anywhere else in the world, at present abides by the rules of capitalism. This means community events and projects require money. However, just as the seeds of capitalism were nurtured and gradually grew under the previous system, feudalism, so it is possible to identify a similar sowing of socialist notions under present capitalist conditions.

The thing to note is that apart from myself, none of those involved in organising and running the festival would identify as socialists. Rather the contrary, especially those who are local business men and women. This demonstrates that a willingness to give time and effort for free does not have to be motivated by ideology.

And there was a considerable amount of time and effort given by those involved, beginning with an organising group that began meeting in July. At this point those who were prepared to plan the event came to the fore. They met regularly and identified all the component parts of a festival and the arrangements that needed to be made to realise those plans.

Then the business people came in, the ones involved in the licensing trade and brewing whose direct commercial interests ran counter to the festival in that the local pubs would lose custom over that weekend. Nonetheless, on top of running their own businesses, they worked hard to source and arrange the supply of beers from a wide range of breweries, not just their own.

Other local business people sponsored the barrels, and this at a time when Covid lockdowns had affected them over a long period. Admittedly, as sponsors there was an advertising aspect, but I suspect this brought more local kudos than actual profit.

The event itself was run entirely by volunteers. From those who the day before set up the bars, primed the pumps and cleaned the lines, decorated the hall, arranged the furniture and so on, to those who pulled the pints and generally ran the event and then dismantled it all and cleared it away on the Monday.

On Friday evening the local primary schools came along with teachers and parents to sing carols around the Christmas tree, then on the Saturday, local singers and musicians performed for free.

To reiterate, I am not claiming this as an example of socialism in action. Patently, money remained the driving force behind it all and commercial profits were made by the breweries whose beer was sold.

Yet all of the work required for the festival to take place was given freely, and in a commercial context. How much more likely is it that people will be willing to contribute their labour in a society without commercial pressures, especially for the common good?

It is surely clear that the motivation was the wellbeing of the community, the common good and this elicited a great deal of local support from the wider community. If this is possible under capitalism in straitened times then there are clear grounds for positing a society where this is the norm.

Also, the wide range of people freely giving what they could of their time and energy is a practical demonstration that ’from each according to their ability’ is not just a theoretical aspiration. And even while those people would not necessarily identify as socialists, indeed they probably represent the main political parties in their voting habits, they willingly acted in practical ways that surely encourage the presently small number of socialists.

This is but one of many examples throughout society of people working for free for the common good. There’s a long way to go to realise socialism as a worldwide system, but this was one small step, be it, in the circumstances, an unsteady one.

Dave Alton

What Marx Really Meant (1983)

Party News from the March 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marxisms for all (1983)

From the March 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

We are all Marxists now — if the badges are anything to go by. A Marxist is a radical thing to be, and it’s such less bother than becoming a vegetarian or getting yourself Born Again. Yes, the fashion for Marxism has a big future — as long as it doesn't get out of hand.

The attraction is that there are just so many Marxisms to choose from. When you get tired of one you can attach yourself to another. There’s Russian Marxism: you can bore your fellow workers at union meetings with how rents in Leningrad haven’t gone up for forty years — and the need for “anti-Soviet wreckers” to be sent for a long holiday in People’s Siberia (a sort of Leninist Disneyland). Then there's Chinese Marxism: if you take that option you get your script supplied in a Little Red Book: “He who does not work his sweet and sour balls off for the State is a counter-revolutionary tapeworm". Plenty of clichés are provided with Chinese Marxism, but the grey and grey uniform can be a trifle offputting. Let us not forget Albanian Marxism. All Albanian Marxists will insist on telling you (whether you want to hear or not) that there is no inflation in Albania. As a matter of fact there's not much money in Albania either. Of course, there's Polish Marxism: the latest joke in Gdansk is that "A spectre is haunting Leninism — the spectre of trade union consciousness" (subtle, but subversive). A bit of the old African Marxism is always worth consulting if you want to see the Old Man’s words distorted; a good example is Mugabe’s “National Socialism'”— a free copy of The Marxist Misprint to the first person who tells us where that little phrase was used before.

For those who don’t fancy Marxism there are plenty of other "isms" to print on your chest. There’s Leninism — the game for people who like the sound of Marxist slogans, but detest their meanings. Trotskyism is for ideologists, who’ve been everywhere and want to spend the rest of their days infiltrating Labour Party sleeping clubs. (No wonder they call them "bedsit socialists".) There’s feminism for men who feel sorry for women, anarchism for individuals who feel sorry for themselves and masochism for Labourites who have high hopes and always end up feeling sorry.

There are some who say that Marxism is more than a badge. More than a chant. More than a tone of voice even. What more do they expect — ideas? Yes: Marxism is a way of thinking about the world. It is not a dogma to be repeated parrot-fashion by tired old secular monks or a slogan to be scrawled on a wall by a rebel who runs away. To be a Marxist is to understand the world you live in. And to change it. The educators need to be educated — the uneducated need to discover the power within them. The world can be ours — those who pose as revolutionaries are in our way.

Steve Coleman

The birth of Nazism (1983)

From the March 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fifty years ago. Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany with the support of more than ten million workers. The horrors of the following twelve years will never be forgotten. Many thousands across the world still bear the mental scars from their time in the concentration camps at Auschwitz, Dachau and elsewhere, or lost friends or relatives in the holocaust. The first camp was opened on 22 March, 1933, for the incarceration of officials of the Communist and Social Democratic Parties. The West German government is this year mounting a campaign to remind people of the perils of Nazism, but they are presenting it as an aberration, a terrible slip which could have been avoided if only people had been a little more careful. This is not a fair representation of the facts. There were fascist regimes in the thirties in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Yugoslavia, much of Latin America and elsewhere. If we are serious about wanting to avoid a repetition, we must be prepared to examine the way in which these governments evolved.

In Germany (as in Italy and elsewhere) the late nineteenth century had seen a vast increase in industrial productivity, but no corresponding modernisation of the political process. East of the Elbe, there still remained the old, aristocratic class of Junkers — Prussian imperial landowners — whose influence held back the advance of the more modern industrial capitalists based around the Rhine. In the second half of the nineteenth century the German population increased from thirty-five to sixty million. The rise of the social-democratic movement was met by the two-pronged approach of social welfare reform and Bismarck's repressive Anti-Socialist Laws. The First World War was pursued under the military dictatorship of Hindenburg and Ludendorffs Supreme Army Command, which was accepted by the five parties of the generally ineffectual Reichstag, or parliament. The failure of the Schlieffen plan in 1914 led to four years of persistent and devastating trench warfare. as German workers were slaughtered like cattle in the name of expanding German capitalist control of world markets.

By 1918, discontent with the war was rife. A million munitions workers went on strike. The old military regime collapsed against a background of destruction and decay. Demobilisation crises were turned into dole queues. A parliamentary constitution was drawn up at Weimar, but proved to be little more than an empty formality. Capitalism had reached one of its gravest crises yet in central Europe, and there was something of a political vacuum in Germany in the early twenties. Germany had long traditions of nationalism, racism and social darwinism among its shopkeepers, professionals and white-collar workers. There was also a class of relatively new industrial capitalists, in possession of huge, twentieth-century steel and coal combines, such as the Vereinigte Stahlwerke, formed in the 1920s. Krupp told his employees: “We want only loyal workers who are grateful from the bottom of their hearts for the bread which we let them earn” (G. Raphael. Krupp et Thyssen, 1925).

Long before the war, iron and steel workers owners had been giving large donations to the German Union to Fight Against Social Democracy. Thyssen said in a statement to the Journal des Débuts, 7 February 1924. "Democracy with us represents — nothing". There was, however, a conflict of interests within the capitalist class between heavy industry, represented for example by Stinnes and Thyssen. who opposed the terms of the Versailles Treaty which had been the basis of the Weimar Republic, and the lighter finished goods industry. or Fertigindustrie represented by Rathenau and the powerful AEG (General Electric Association). The latter sector was more inclined to try to mould a class “alliance" between workers and employers. through corporatism. They were more nationalist and protectionist.

Under the Dawes Plan of the twenties. American capital flowed into the industrial centre of Germany. The productive machinery was expanded and its capacity grew rapidly. Market demand lagged behind. and by the beginning of 1929 there were already more than two million unemployed. Since the bouts of depression in the late nineteenth century, and through the infamous hyper-inflation of the early nineteen-twenties, capital accumulation had been as disturbingly erratic in Germany as anywhere else in the world. The final crisis which led to the rise of Nazism was yet to come. In the 1928 elections less than a million people voted for the Nazis. Four years later, they polled almost fourteen million. The only comparable change which occurred in Germany over the same period. was the rise in unemployment, which by 1932 stood at six million. The formation of the Hitler government was announced on 30 January 1933, and the dictatorship was fully consolidated by the end of 1934. Hitler openly rode to power on the promise to solve the problem of unemployment by purging Germany of Jews, gipsies, trade-union militants, “traitors" and communists. and by expanding militarily to conquer world markets. He was offering capitalist solutions to the old capitalist problems of market demand, despite the Nazi claims to be revolutionary.

It was in 1930, just when the expansion sponsored by the Dawes Flan was reaching its peak and there was a greater reliance than ever on selling German industrial products to foreign buyers, that the world crisis came and the bottom fell out of international markets. The Vienna Credit-Anstalt bank failed on 11 May 1931. Profits plummeted and the industrialists looked to the state to suppress wage levels by disregarding union contracts, and to grant subsidies, tax exemptions and orders. Politicians like Brüning and von Papen who. together with von Schleicher had tended to represent the chemical and electrical goods industries rather than iron or steel, took some steps in this direction. Brüning's decrees reduced wages and "social expenditures”. He believed that he could allow the Nazis into power and manipulate them in accordance with the interests he represented. The owners of heavy industry were looking with increasing interest at Hitler’s party. Hitler’s accession to power was discussed between him and von Papen on 4 January 1933 at the home of a Cologne banker, von Schröder, who had connections with Rhenish-Westphalian heavy industry (Benoist-Mechin. Histoire de Varmee allentande, V.ll, 1938).

Some historians have understandably viewed the fifteen years of the Weimar Republic as merely a formal interlude between the militarised empire and the Third Reich. In the first year after the end of the First World War workers spontaneously set up democractic councils across Germany. In the absence of a clearly pronounced, majority rejection of all forms of capitalism and support for socialism, however. this situation did not last long. If the working class was going to continue producing wealth for their employers to market profitably, rather than for free distribution and use. a government of authority had to evolve to administer the resulting process of the accumulation of capital for a minority and of poverty for the rest. It was not long before the new, "social democratic" government was using the old. imperial troops, reorganised as “Freikorps", to shoot down any who felt that the government was not "social" or not “democratic” enough. Licbknecht and Luxemburg were clubbed to death by cavalry officers, on their way to prison.

At Versailles, crushing peace terms were forced on Germany. Hitler was later to use the reparations, enforced disarmament. territorial annexations and "war guilt" clause to support the "stab-in-the-back" legend, according to which liberal German politicians engineered the military defeat of the First World War as the foundation of their fifteen-year republic. The new German government in 1919, on the other hand, were so anxious to reassert their patriotism that they borrowed the language of socialism and made a public declaration that the settlement would condemn German workers to “wage slavery in the hands of foreign capitalism". The war had given rise to a number of new parties, and the parliamentary coalitions of the twenties mirrored the general instability which marked German capitalism throughout this period. The new republican constitution was steadily opposed by the military and judicial establishments, the civil service and the universities. The power of majority consent was clear while it lasted, however, as is demonstrated by the failure of the Kapp Putsch in March 1920. Military leaders had taken over the government offices, but strikes in gas, electricity and transport services helped to defeat the coup and uphold the Weimar Constitution.

Hitler and the NSDAP appealed to those who felt desperate at their social impotence. Rather than solving the problem by taking power democratically into their own hands, they were giving themselves an identity by fitting into a rigid hierarchical state, in which labour and capital would "work together" with the dictatorship as paternalistic arbiter, and in which any frustration could be taken out violently on a scapegoat chosen and legitimised by the state. In the thirties, with the terrible contradiction between twentieth-century technology and the waste and destruction of the First World War, the Wall Street Crash and mass unemployment, the defence of property became more brutal than ever, with Stalinist Russia as an Eastern reflection of the fascism of Central Europe. Fascism was not an alternative to capitalism; it was a way of running it when other approaches seemed bankrupt. In 1925. Hitler stated that his party would fight "against the Jew as a person, and against Marxism as a cause” (F. Carsten, The Rise of Fascism, page 123). In the desperate search for a scapegoat for the problems produced by the profit system, Jews were accused of being both impoverished communists and wealthy capitalists.

When Hitler campaigned as a nationalist against the Young Plan of reparations payments, he was joined by Hugenberg and his powerful Scherl publishing house. Some Ruhr industrialists, such as Kirdorf and Thyssen, began to make large contributions to Nazi Party funds. On 28 September 1930 in the Sunday Express, Hitler declared that the "socialism" of the Nazis "has nothing to do with Marxian Socialism. Marxism is anti-property; true socialism is not". Most of the Sturmabteilung private army of 300,000 were recruited from the young unemployed. The many young civil servants, office workers, farm labourers and others who flocked to the fascists in 1930 and 1931 out of fear of "godless communism" had little or no property to defend. They were suffering from generations of propaganda which teaches workers to defend our bosses' property and privilege, even though it is this very property and privilege which make us poor.

The regime which was set up in the thirties predictably based itself on the interests of the heavy industrial capitalists. The military was incorporated into the party. Finance capital was discriminated against for the sake of industrial capital. Marxism was attacked, so that the regime could claim to be neither “capitalist" (in the sense of favouring finance) nor "communist" (in the sense of favouring state capital). Both the finance and state sectors were labelled as “jewish” and incorporated into the universal scapegoat. State discipline was imposed in every sector of life. The Reichs Labour Front was used as an instrument for the control of labour. Unemployment reduced as the slump reached its bottom and armaments and other heavy industrial production was encouraged and picked up again. Real wages are said to have increased by 2.8 per cent a year on average from 1933 to 1939. but the working week was lengthened and the “national income*' was increasing at an annual average rate of 8.2 per cent (Fascism. ed. W. Laqueur. p. 425).

From looking at the specific social roots of Nazism in Germany, it becomes clear that this was a social phenomenon which, far from occurring by accident, was very firmly rooted in the conditions of the time. It is not a great step to realise that they are also in many ways the conditions of the time we are living in fifty years later. There are very many people who sincerely express horror at the vicious authoritarianism and anti-semitism of the Nazi regime, but are rather less ready to oppose the underlying social fabric from which it arose. Hitler used the Jews as a scapegoat for unemployment and poverty. This was not a freak accident of history. Workers were being thrown on the dole when their bosses did not find them profitable enough.

The socialist reponse to this problem is that wealth production should be organised democratically for direct, free use rather than for sale at a profit. But such a solution threatens the property of the powerful minority, who use their control of the means of communication in an effort to convince workers that the socialist solution is either unworkable or undesirable. Having swallowed this message, what was left? With six million on the dole, almost any easy remedy for such a problem would get a hearing. What was the central motivating force of Hitler's propaganda, apart from anti-semitism? It was his nationalism. He claimed to be able to stand for the united, national interest of all Germans, to be able to bind labour and capital together, and end social strife, despite the fact that these two social forces are in constant conflict, in Russia as much as in Germany. The cornerstone of fascism was nationalism. And yet, which modern Labour MP does not advocate a certain degree of nationalism, such as import controls or coming out of the EEC, all in good moderation, of course?

The lesson we must learn from what happened fifty hears ago, if we are serious about being responsible for avoiding its repetition, is that no such movement lives in a vacuum. It was the classical problems of the capitalist trade cycle, of inflation, financial crisis, the anarchy of competition and falling market demand which led to the mass unemployment on which Hitler rode to power. In the more long-term perspective. all social events of the last two hundred years have taken place within the framework of world capitalism, with its class division and profit motive. As such, this form of society must be held responsible for every war, every suicide and every dictator it has generated.

Clifford Slapper

Running Commentary: Retired unhurt (1983)

The Running Commentary column from the March 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Retired unhurt

Before he became a well-known television tyre salesman, Robert Mark worked as the chief of London’s police but he may not have enjoyed the job because he once described the Met as an organisation where corruption was routine. Under his rule there was a re-organisation in which some policemen found themselves moved to less sensitive work and others were persuaded to slip quietly out of the Force.

Then came the bible salesman. David McNee called himself Hammer because he claimed to have battered the criminals of Glasgow into submission. His success was not apparent to anyone who actually observed or experienced the agonies of that impoverished, violent city. McNee asserted that he hated crime through a stern religious conviction, which might have misled many people into believing that under his dour management corruption in the Met would wither and die along with improper police practices. The evidence shows that nothing of the sort happened. Most efforts at exposure continued to be frustrated in the traditional way, or succumbed through lack of official support.

So McNee left the Met in no better shape than when he arrived with his burning religious zeal. Even worse, there were important, unanswered questions about illegal police activities on the London streets; for example, the killing of Blair Peach, the riots in Brixton.

But somebody, somewhere — in fact quite a lot of them — thinks that the Hammer did a good job. Plainly he fits in well with ruling class requirements for filling important, sensitive jobs. First, he has retired on an index-linked pension of £22,000 a year. Then there is no lack of companies eager to employ him. Lord Matthews has taken him on as a non-executive director of Fleet Holdings; he has a similar post with the Clydesdale Bank paying him £5,000 a year and he gets £10,000 a year as a member of the board of British Airways.

This model of Christian rectitude, who was wont to discourse on the lack of moral restraint in society, has sold his memoirs to the busty Sunday Mirror whose gratitude extends to their paying him £120,000.

And in case anyone should doubt that all of this money-grubbing conforms to the unctuous moralising and denunciations of Christianity, McNee has taken yet another job. He is President of the National Bible Society of Scotland, to help teach the workers of that country to accept their depressed lot with meekness and gratitude.

Year of peace?

Having failed to cut London's fares because a judge said it was illegal to do so, Ken Livingstone’s GLC are turning their attention to rather wider issues.

In London, 1983 will be Peace Year — something which all Londoners will hope the other side remembers if World War III breaks out between now and December 31. Presumably to inform potential breakers of the peace, the GLC have invited several mayors from foreign cities. There will be peace conferences, peace concerts, peace community events.

Two defenceless and innocent shire horses will be named Peace and Friendship and will be in the Easter Parade in Regents Park. A statue (of a woman, of course; Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher have proved how much more peace loving women are than men) has been erected in the garden near Red Ken’s County Hall.

What does all this mean, apart from a bit more publicity for Livingstone and his party? The “peace” movement, like all the other movements, exists under the delusion that demonstrations, festivals, dedications, have some effect on the problem they are concerned about.

In fact, in themselves such movements are ineffective — except that, by contributing to the maintenance of the very conditions which cause the problems, they can be said actually to worsen the situation. While peace movements and anti-nuclear demonstrators proliferate, the bald fact is that the weapons have got more dreadful and more widespread.

What really counts is the idea behind a demonstration. Marching, or sitting down, against the effects of the social system we live under does nothing to end that system. So it leaves the root of the problems untouched, to flourish and propagate.

The example of Livingstone’s Labour Party is typically illustrative. In power, they have always clearly stood for the production, and when it suited their purposes the use, of nuclear weapons. That fact is not wiped away by their organising this spurious event now.

A demonstration properly against war, or weapons, could take only one form; it would be a demonstration against the very social system which gives rise to them and it would extend a long, long way beyond the boundaries of any city.

No joke

For some reason obscured by time and the complexities of upper-class japes, Private Eye relentlessly calls him Lord Whelks. Upper-class japes are, of course, always relentless. In other circles he is known as the noble Lord Matthews who at his peak was boss of the mighty Trafalgar House empire which encompassed ships, hotels, property, newspapers.

Now Matthews has stepped down on the peak and will be devoting more time to one of the combines which made a part of Trafalgar — Fleet Holdings, which includes the Express newspapers. He also threatens to make more speeches in the House of Lords, where they may well be hoping he will not inflict on them the world famous Express style: "There may for all I know be no truth in the rumour that Princess Diana is really a buxom go-go dancer. But I think we ought to be told".

For Matthews is really torn between patriotism and profit and an occasional difficulty in reconciling them has given him much anguish. He it was who wanted to register Trafalgar’s ships under flags of convenience and crew them with foreign seamen. Only an embarrassing splurge of publicity. inciting protest from those who stubbornly live in the days of Victorian naval power, excluded the QEII from this arrangement. Matthews made no secret about his motivation — British seamen, because of their trade union organisation, were higher paid than those he could recruit abroad.

This was the argument he used again, when one of the Trafalgar companies put out for tender the rebuilding of the Atlantic Conveyor, the container ship lost to an Exocet at the Falklands. Matthews was clear that the contract should go to the yard promising the cheapest deal. Patriotism is for the likes of those who perished with the Atlantic Conveyor, always useful to persuade workers to act against their interests, not for hard-nosed businessmen with allegiance to the profit figures.

But Matthews is no figure of fun; he must be taken very, very seriously. Not one of the modern, enlightened, smoother breed of capitalists, he represents the authentic morality of private property society in which achievement is maximum exploitation and the only worthwhile human being is one who can be profitably put to use.

Socialism better than striking (1983)

From the March 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

There are few plaudits from the media for workers who come out on strike; at such times it is more usual for the inbuilt assumption to operate, that the employers and the government are exercising reason and patience while the strikers, to get their own way, are putting the nation’s economy, health and safety at risk. This argument relies on the type of snap judgement and prejudice which exist most easily when reality is obscured and inconvenient facts are smothered. For example, in the water workers’ dispute the new Environment Minister, Tom King, condemned the strikers for refusing to put the matter to arbitration when the fact is that he himself, by planning to abolish the Water Council, has undermined the industry’s established arbitration machinery.

Many of the snap judgements are made by workers in frustration at having to cope with the effects of a strike. Nobody can be expected to be happy, as they contemplate a pavement awash from a broken, unrepaired water main, or queue at a dismal stand pipe, about a hardship so obviously avoidable. In sane terms, there is an immediate, constant human need for water; there is the equipment and the people to produce it as it is needed. Why can’t the two — needs and ability — match up? The common response, fed by the media, is blame the strikers, forgetting that the employers could easily finish the dispute by conceding the workers’ demands. Their refusal to so concede is, of course, based on arguments about economic survival, just as are the workers’ wage claims. It is those same arguments which sometimes lead to the employers imposing a lock-out or closing down a works regardless of the hardship this causes to the people who work there or who might need the works’ products.

Workers suffer the effects of a strike because, as mass consumers of commodities, they are the ones most vulnerable to a breakdown in supplies. For example, the recent health workers’ dispute caused anxiety and physical suffering to people who were waiting for treatment in National Health Service hospitals. The media made much of this, with heart-rending stories of delayed operations and frustrated treatment plans. No publicity was given to the fact that rich people were unaffected by the dispute for the simple reason that their class does not depend on an economy-straitened, mass-produced medical service like the NHS; they have access to the doctors and the clinics where strikes and disputes are unknown but where treatment costs hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pounds a day.

This contrast effectively illuminates the hypocrisy of the officially expressed concern for the welfare of sick people, for children and pensioners — the traditionally vulnerable source of so many human interest stories in the gutter press — when they are affected by a strike. The same compassion is notably absent when a government or a local authority, in the name of economy, attacks the welfare of those same vulnerable people by cutting services like home helps and day centres and by closing down hospitals and residential homes. When these assaults are made on people's lives they are represented as the fruits of prudence and reason.

The fact of the matter is that strikes and lock-outs are not matters of morality except that they conform to the basic morality of capitalism which is that of a social system operating on class antagonisms. The opposing classes of capitalism arise from the private ownership of the means of production and distribution, which means that the class which does not own those means is reduced in order to live to selling their labour power to the owners. This is not immoral; it is an essential, historical feature of capitalism.

Private ownership is also responsible for the character of wealth under capitalism — that of commodities, of goods which are produced primarily for sale and profit. This is all-pervading; even cases like medical treatment, which may seem superficially unconnected with commodity production, are in fact very much a part of the productive and exploitative processes of capitalism. NHS hospitals are like vehicle repair shops and servicing bays, where the machines are human beings who are patched and tuned up to get them back on the road of employment again. Commodity production is motivated by the realisation of profit and the accumulation of capital; unless there is a prospect of these there is no production. So closures, redundancies and the like are not affronts to an eternal human morality; they are inexorable products of the class-antagonistic nature of capitalist society.

Occasionally, among their crocodile tears, the media may crudely philosophise about the possibility that there is a better way of doing things. Indeed there is, although it is one not to be dreamed of in even the wilder recesses of Fleet Street. To say that capitalism essentially has a class antagonism is to say that it must divide the human race into two factions endlessly disputing over the division of wealth at a time when enough can be produced to satisfy everyone’s needs. It is to say that this social system cannot operate in the harmonious manner which modern productive powers enable and demand.

If the class antagonisms are essential to capitalism they can be assessed and remedied only by reference to the basic nature of the system and that, as we have said, is the private ownership of the means of life. There is only one way in which that basis can be changed; after private ownership the next step must be common, worldwide, human ownership. The alternative to capitalism is socialism.

As socialism changes the basis of society, so it will bring in changed social relationships which will immediately be expressed and recognised in human harmony. Social ownership of the means of living entails a classless society, a world of united people whose entire interests are entirely as one. So socialism will replace antagonism with co-operation; it will substitute abundance for scarcity and human welfare for minority dominance. Its morality will replace that of privilege and repression with open access and freedom. It is the true alternative to strikes and to all the other conflicts of capitalism.

50 Years Ago: American Investigators Borrow from Marx (1983)

The 50 Years Ago column from the March 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

We socialists have a saying that every ruling class helps to dig its own grave. As excellent evidence, consider the massive report first issued after three years of research by President Hoover’s Research Committee on Social Trends.

The Report is full of statistical matter which will be of invaluable use for us in our propaganda. Here, the present writer wishes to emphasise the open acceptance, though without acknowledgement, of course, of the basic proposition of Marxism. first laid down by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, eighty-five years ago and later stated by Marx as follows:

The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness. 

At a certain stage in their development, the material forces of production in society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or — what is but a legal expression for the same thing with the property relations within which they have been at work before. From forms of development of the forces of production, these turn into their fetters. Then comes the period of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation, the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed.

The above generalisation was for long completely ignored by the professional sociologists of the universities. Later it was condemned as a false and pernicious doctrine generally being misinterpreted out of all recognition. In recent years many historians have adopted it as the real clue to history and the only tool by which they could justify their claim to be "scientific historians". In "Recent Social Trends" the principle is stressed very clearly though the revolutionary conclusions drawn by Marx are not drawn by the Committee, or to be more specific, are only vaguely hinted at in their indefinite suggestions as to future changes. The following are extracts from the Introduction:

Scientific discoveries and inventions instigate changes, first in the economic organisations and social habits, which are most closely associated with them. The next set of changes occurs in organisations one step further removed, namely in institutions such as the family, the government. the school and the churches. Somewhat later, as a rule, come changes in social philosophies and codes of behaviour, though at times these may precede the others.  

(From an article by R.W. Housley, Socialist Standard, March 1933.)

Russian empire (1983)

Book Review from the March 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Gerard Chaliand, Report From Afghanistan (Penguin, 1982).

Based on two visits made to Afghanistan in October and November 1980. this report is a condemnation of Russia as “the bloodiest and most deceptive caricature in modern history, a cruel parody of the ideas that supposedly inspire it" (p. 7). Chaliand claims that all peoples have the right to self-determination, as defined by United Nations charter, and that Russia has violated that right.

Afghanistan is the only country outside the Warsaw Pact to have been occupied by Russian troops since the Second World War. Although the justification of the intervention of December 1979 was the threatened collapse of socialism in Afghanistan, the reality is that Russia now guards the Pakistani frontier only a few hundred kilometres from the Indian Ocean and also has a significant presence on Iran’s western border.

Modern Afghanistan was created towards the end of the nineteenth century as a buffer state between Tsarist Russia and the British Empire and has remained since that period largely undeveloped. The rural population is dominated by the mullahs, who have for decades opposed any reform which might threaten their influence or undermine traditional customs. In 1950 Russia and Afghanistan signed an economic agreement whereby Russia would provide sugar, cotton and oil in exchange for wool and raw cotton; $740 million of aid was provided for Afghanistan between 1954 and 1968 and in 1955 the Russo-Afghan Treaty of Neutrality and Non-Aggression was signed. There was the building of an airport at Kabul and a road through the Salang Pass from the Russian border to Kabul (the road used by Soviet troops in 1979). In 1967 Afghanistan and Russia signed a protocol guaranteeing the delivery of Afghan natural gas from 1967-1985.

On 24 April 1978 President Daud was overthrown and executed while attempting to arrest leading members of the Afghan left including Nur Mohammad Taraki, Babrak Karmal and Hafizullah Amin of the Democratic Party of the People of Afghanistan. The Democratic Republic of Afghanistan was proclaimed and recognised by Russia on 30 April with Taraki as President. There followed a breakdown between the Khalq and Parcham factions of the Party and hostility to the government from the population. Hafizullah Amin’s secret police and army troops were sent to subdue the resistance. On 27 July 1979 Amin became secretary of the Party and Central Committee and minister of defence. He was also prime minister and overseer of the secret police.

On 10 September Taraki, while visiting Moscow, agreed with Brezhnev to institute a programme of democratic nationalism and to invite the Parcham faction to rejoin the government. They had been ousted from key government posts in July 1978 with Karmal being sent as ambassador to Prague. Meanwhile Amin, who totally controlled the Khalq faction, arranged for the arrest of Taraki on 14 September. Taraki was then executed some weeks later. Amin now became head of state. Repression continued under Amin's rule, as did hostility to his government. The Russian military intervention began on 25 December 1979 and by 27 December Russian troops occupied Kabul. Amin was immediately overthrown and executed and Babrak Karmal was proclaimed president and prime minister.

Opposition to the government continued but Chaliand points out that because of "its leadership organisation, coordination and strategy . . . [it] is one of the weakest liberation struggles in the world today” (p. 47). The opposition is conservative in that it expresses no political alternative other than the retention of traditional customs and religious values. No reforms have been posited other than opposition to government and herein lies its weakness. There is no coordination of strategy among the individual factions which remain regionally based and regionally ambitious.

Chaliand argues that the Russians have not followed the strategy adopted by the Americans in Vietnam and have only sufficient troops to control the cities and principal roads. The strategy is one in which Russia

expects to draw the country into its economic sphere, taking advantage of the unexploited and underexploited natural resources like oil, uranium, chrome, manganese, copper, coal, iron, and semiprecious stones . . . during 1979 and 1980 the Soviets launched a number of economic projects to strengthen the industrial infrastructure of Afghanistan and increase its trade with Russia (p.66)

Opposition has been restricted to sabotaging roads, skirmishes outside forts and fortified villages and terrorist strikes on towns. Chaliand says that the West must recognise that this resistance is one of “a people fighting for their liberty" (p. 71) and that it should be supported. In this he is taking sides in a conflict of interests between rival capitalist spheres of influence.

Afghanistan is seen as a step in Russia's expansion of its empire by conquering neighbouring territories and in that it adds to the "tarnished image of socialism" (p. 76). This is a basic flaw in Chaliand’s argument. His major concern is in drawing attention to the shift of the regional balance in Western Asia away from the interests of Western Europe and America. He calls on the West to challenge Russia whenever and wherever it is necessary for we are entering an era of "open competition and antagonism between East and West” (p. 88). But that competition is not between “tarnished” socialism and free capitalism but between conflicting capitalist interests. Russia may hypocritically claim to have cast off the mantle of Tsarist imperialism but its action in seizing economic and political control of Afghanistan is no less imperialist in its outcome.

Chaliand’s report recognises the cynicism of Russia's position but ascribes that to a corrupted socialism rather than as another manifestation of the Soviet Union’s essential capitalism. To take sides in the conflict between opposing spheres of capitalist interests is to give credibility to the system which generates the very conditions that Chaliand laments. Rather he should emphasise the reality of capitalism at its most cynical; it is manifested in the annexation of Afghanistan.

Philip Bentley

Happy families (1983)

From the March 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

We feel that it is important to differentiate between sporadic "battering" which can be regarded as part of a normal marriage, particularly in certain cultural groups, and more persistent beating.

The Family Service Unit, from whose journal (Winter. 1973) this comment is taken, was set up over thirty years ago. to deal with the “problem family". During that time, the nuclear family has remained the most predominant home unit in society, but has come under increasing strain. The rise of capitalism has tended historically to break up pieces of stability, to fragment life into smaller and smaller atoms. The common lands were broken up under the Enclosures and the extended family was dislocated with the arrival of the factory system. Now the divorce rate has shot up, and there is an increasing number of single parent families and even of single people without children, often living in bedsits. There is a disturbing feeling of isolation, of alienation, especially in the rapidly growing cities where population is concentrated. as the profit machine grinds on its “labour unit costs” like grain in a mill:

Just a cast away, an island lost at sea. . .

I hope that someone gets my message in a bottle. . .

Walked out this morning. I don't believe

what I saw,

A hundred billion bottles washed up on the shore. (Sting, 1979) 

The problem of domestic violence is impossible to quantify because it takes place behind closed doors. For the same reason, its tragedies are numerous and very rarely charted. Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear by Erin Pizzey was published in 1974 and documented the incidence of wife-beating in London, where she had founded Chiswick Women's Aid in 1971 as a charitable refuge for the victims of violent attacks in the home. She described in horrible detail the cruel treatment suffered by the women who came to her for help. Violence was said often to arise out of arguments over money or some petty jealousy. The pathetic frustration of a worker, bullied at work and taking it out on the women and children he lived with, was shown to be the most common case, with Sunday nights having the highest rate of violence, presumably because of the prospect of starting work Monday morning. The NSPCC deal with tens of thousands of cases of child-abuse each year, and their reports have recently shown an increase in the rate of child-battering, which they ascribe to the recession. Apart from the increased feelings of frustration arising from unemployment, there are now more children being left all day on their own as two people have to work to earn the equivalent of what had once been brought home by one.

Erin Pizzey has now published a further book on this subject, Prone to Violence (co-written with Jeff Shapiro, Hamlyn, £1.75) which develops a theory of violence which was only hinted at in her earlier work. The 1974 book had concentrated on the problems faced by women who tried to get away from men who had been beating them up. She cited many obstacles which they faced, including the difficulty of getting somewhere to stay with children, and the worry of having to leave children with a man who might be violent towards them. She looked at the weak legal position of women in such cases, especially those who were co-habitees rather than wives, and concluded that

For generations the established charities and more recently the State social welfare services have been picking up the pieces after each individual family crisis. They've not asked or looked for the cause of the troubles or done anything to eradicate them (1974, page 90)

so that the end product of the nuclear family is sometimes a periodically crying wreck, defused by ECT at the hands of the “mental health" practitioners, when the antiseptic, family-planned, two-point-five- child model has not stultified as smoothly as it should.

In the new book, on the other hand, a number of particularly violent relationships are documented, and the suggestion is made that there are a number of people who have been conditioned from early childhood to seek violence as their sole means of gaining attention and feeling secure. This difference in analysis lies behind the two separate sets of refuges for battered wives which now exist. The National Federation of Women's Aids was formed by various feminist groups who saw domestic violence as being a problem of violent men attacking women, who wanted to get away as far and as quick as possible from those men. Erin Pizzey’s Women's Aid, now known more appropriately as Family Rescue, sees the problem in broader terms as consisting of the relationships existing between men and women, particularly of the violent kind. In Prone to Violence she has made her clearest statement yet of why she thinks many women go back to men who have beaten them up. A feminist review of the book in the Socialist Workers’ Party Socialist Review has predictably rejected Pizzey’s line of argument, suggesting instead that women went back to their previous assailants because of their weak economic and legal position, or even to get away from Pizzey herself!

Pizzey may seem the more reactionary partner to this dispute, in that she argues that some of the people involved in these relationships do in some way seek violence as a way of establishing themselves, rather than simply being put upon as helpless victims. In fact, however, apart from some reservations mentioned below, hers is potentially the more revolutionary position, since the solution to the problem expressed in this way would involve a total transformation of human relationships. The same irony exists in relation to the Left as a whole. It is often considered very militant to state that the working class is about to overthrow capitalism, if only one reformist leader were not standing in the way. The fact that most workers still accept capitalism and leaders, and that this is what stands in the way of revolution, holds greater potential for change, even if it seems a more bleak outlook.

Out of the seemingly endless conveyor belt of casualties of cramped working-class stress, Erin Pizzey came to the conclusion that the problem ran deeper than one simply of once-off attacker and victim. Often the people being beaten up came from disturbed family backgrounds. She asked why whole families were not taken into care:

By asking such questions, you are shaking the very foundations of a society that has never questioned its basic assumption that the privileged few should control the lives of everyone else. The class structure and social fabric of our society are so organised that any failure to comply with this assumption is met by a rigid and unyielding bureaucratic offensive . . . violent people are very frightened people. (Prone to Violence, pages 51,57).

She suggests that where a new born child is treated violently rather than gently (for example by parents who are themselves violent) it develops a relationship to its own body chemicals which is unbalanced, becoming “addicted” to feeding off its own adrenalin or cortisone (which has the opposite effect of adrenalin, inhibiting the blood flow). She analyses violent relationships as being based on such imbalances, and believes that the chemical manifestations of this can be inherited directly. This medical theory has not been proved or disproved, and at times appears bizarre, even sinister:

We hope to see pharmaceutical companies working to find a whole new spectrum of drugs that could be used to aid the internal work with the emotionally disabled. (Ibid. page 181)

However, much of the social commentary surrounding this is very perceptive. The need is clearly stated for human relationships to be based on a freshly harmonious footing, free from the frustrations and repression of ties of violence. Only in capitalist society, where even human beings have a price on their heads, is the arrival of a new person seen inevitably as an additional financial burden to bear. Two people or, increasingly, one person becomes responsible for the upbringing of that child. It is part of the obscene atomisation of capitalist society that this responsibility is exclusive to one or two people, rather than being social and shared. The stress and violence which often results from financial and emotional limitation, and the role of the closest protectors of the child as providers of its social conditioning, lead to unbalanced character development. This is a social problem of capitalism and the nuclear family, whether or not it manifests itself in the chemical way suggested by Pizzey and Shapiro. In any case, all such social phenomena must have some bodily or chemical manifestation even if Pizzey's theories of adrenalin and cortizone are fallacious.

These books do not have any solution to the problems they document, but by exposing the weaknesses of many claimed “solutions” they suggest a way out of relationships of torment and agony, through the conscious and free organisation of society. Even if some women and men seem to have a tendency to be attracted towards violence because it is the only way they know of asserting themselves, this is not the same as the crude and callous suggestion that someone who has been beaten up wanted it to happen. Nobody wants to suffer the tortures documented in these books. What people want is security and the chance to assert ourselves creatively. In a jungle society of competition and separation this can rarely be achieved directly, and so people resort to desperate means. The result is untold human misery, all of it unnecessary. The answer is for us to organise society rather than letting it organise us.

Clifford Slapper