Cuttings and comments. (1905)

From the July 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Every man born on the soil of England had a right to claim work.” Thus the Lord Bishop of Ripon. But who disputes the right to claim ? Certainly not the Bishop’s friends of the capitalist-class. Why indeed should they ? The more men claiming the keener the competition and the lower the wages. Now if every man born on the soil of England put in a claim for the whole product of his toil and refused to allow the capitalist to non-suit the claim, there might, it is true, still be unemployment, but only because the worker would not require to work so hard nor so often. And as he would receive all the wealth he produced, there would be none left for my Lord Bishop, who would perforce have to work himself.

—o—

William Sotting, aged 74, shot himself, having been forced to the conclusion that “Old men are like old dogs, and ought to be shot when they are past work.” According to the dictum of American capitalism, when a man reaches the age of 40 he should be taken out and shot as useless for further profit-making. Here is a case in which the views of exploiter and exploited coincide. Ergo, there is no class war as Keir Hardie would say!

—o—

Referring to certain Trade Union amendments which he had heard were to be moved to the Government “Unemployed” Bill—that unqualified absurdity in which the S.D.F. have claimed their influence is apparent—the writer of the labour column in the Echo says: “It seems to be quite certain that Mr. Balfour will consent to none of these amendments, and, what is more, a Liberal Government would not assent to them either.” As the attitude of both Liberal and Tory Governments towards labour is the same, the Echo writer has doubtless spoken truly, although in speaking truly he is not following the precedent set by other Liberal scribes whose business it is to induce Trade Unionists to lend their support to Liberalism, on the ground that Liberalism is infinitely better than Toryism. If he gives the game away so inartistically, the Echo writer we fear, will not for long remain unacquainted with the order of the sack.

—o—

Mr. William Crooks, M.P., L.C.C, has been talking again, this time to a World interviewer. “There is no snobbish or social distinction when once you get inside the House of Commons” he says; only “wonderful and splendid kindness” for Labour members apparently. He did not add “so long as they do as their capitalist fellow members want them to do,”—the addendum necessary to make the statement entirely true.

—o—

Mr. Crooks also has a remedy for the overpopulation of cities and the misery resulting from unemployment. He unburdened himself of it to the World man thus :

“It is to be found on the land, the mother of us all. You go through England and see what vast stretches of beautiful and uncultivated soil there are. Why don’t some of these wealthy landowners say : ‘Hang it all, I will give up some acres or so to these poor under-fed devils, shove up some tin houses and train them in agriculture’ ? They are no good at first. They hardly know the difference between a brick and a lump of clay. But they can learn, and they can quickly pick up their strength, and turn into good farm labourers, worth their 2s. 6d. a day in England and their 6s. 6d. a day in Canada. The experiment has been tried on a small scale and has proved successful. But we leave it to the hobby of an American philanthropist, and our own wealthy classes won’t lend a hand.”

This “remedy,” though couched in unpolished and homely phraseology, hath an ancient and fishlike smell. We seem to have heard of the “shove ’em back on the land” cure, as Mr. Crooks would say, before. It is much the same as the reafforestation (or firewood manufacture) cure favoured by other ”Labour Leaders,” and pre-supposes capitalist production without a large army of unemployed. Which, as the youngest of economic fledglings would be able to show, is ridiculous. Mr. Crooks should read more and talk less.

—o—

” A Rose by any other name—

“A woman applied to Mr. Rose at the Tower Bridge Police Court for a pair of boots for her young daughter from the funds of the poor box. In refusing the application, Mr. Rose said he was averse to giving boots in the summer because he did not consider them as a necessity. Children could go to school without boots, especially this weather, or with canvas shoes, which could be bought for a shilling, or slippers.”

—o—

Mr. Rose is no doubt a most worthy person, and has spoken according to his lights. If his lights are not very bright or his sympathy with working-class want not over strong, the fault is not his. The brutality of his indifference simply reflects the training he has received, the atmosphere he has moved in from his youth up. It is a not unusual expression of the callous cult of capitalism.

—o—

Mr. Rose is not to blame, but his reply to the woman asking for boots is strongly reminiscent of the reply of Foullon, of unsavory memory, of whom it is recorded that, in the days which preceded the French Revolution, he replied to the people who cried aloud for bread that they should eat grass. Foulon was the product his time and was not to blame. But his latter end found Foullon hanging from a lamp-post his mouth stuffed full of his grass.

—o—

Philosophic dissertations upon individual responsibility—or lack of it—have no great weight with the ill-educated striking against oppressive conditions. They personify the causes of their misery, and the persons selected are generally those who have been most brutally indifferent to the unhappiness of their position, or who have in some other manner been associated with the maintenance of the system spelling oppression : at these they strike.

—o—

We do not pretend to view this method of striking with favour. We are in existence as a political party in order to educate the working-class so that they may strike effectively at the ballot box without having recourse to the lamppost. The lamp-post has had its day. But the representative of capitalism who speaks as Mr. Rose has spoken, is none the less in a dangerous position, because he emphasizes the existence of the gulf which yawns between his class and the oppressed and poverty-stricken working-class, and so helps to prepare the material out of which the Socialist Party will fashion the weapon that shall presently sweep capitalism out of existence altogether—the weapon of a class-conscious, well organised, working class. Mr. Rose is therefore in the dangerous position of contributing to the destruction of the form of society upon which his position depends.

A. J. M. Gray

Brothers in Arms. (1905)

Snippet from the July 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard

Major Roper Caldbeck declares that the average soldier’s pension is 8s. 2d. per week, whilst that of the officers is £4 a week ! But of course. Capital and Labour are brothers, and the interests of the working-class soldier and exploiting-class officer are identical.

The Truth about Camborne. (1905)

From the July 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard

Much interest was manifested last month concerning the electoral activities of the Social-Democratic Federation, when it was publicly asserted, on oath, that the candidature of Cllr. Jack Jones, S.D.F., for the Mining Division of Cornwall, was being financed by “Tory gold.”

The allegation was made at a public meeting held at the Public Hall, Camborne, on Saturday, June 3rd, when Mr. James Lightwood read documents, which he and his wife had sworn to. The following are the essential extracts :

“I, James Lightwood, solemnly and sincerely declare as follows :—

“For several years past I was superintendent of a number of model dwellings situate in Seaward Street, East Finsbury, which Mr. Richards, K.C., represents in Parliament as a Conservative. I became very friendly with Mr. Richards, and on more than one occasion have I discussed with him and his friends the political aspect of the Housing question.

“I had an interview with Mr. Richards some days prior to the 23rd of January, 1904, at my house. He told me he had a friend who was coming up from Redruth. He said ‘He is a fine fellow, you will like him very much.’ As he was going he said to my wife,’ Mrs. Lightwood, how would you like to see your husband an M.P. ? ‘She replied ‘He is happier as he is.’

“On the 23rd of January, 1904, I received from, Mr. Richards a postcard in the following words :—

“Dear Mr. Lightwood,—I shall call on you on Saturday between 5 and 5.15 with a friend from Redruth, and if you are free I hope you will wait in for me or write when you will be free Saturday or Sunday after 6.

H. C. Richards.”

“On the evening of the same day I received the postcard, Mr. Richards called as appointed. He brought with him a gentleman whom he then introduced to me as the gentleman from Redruth. This gentleman was Mr. Cheux, the Unionist Agent for the Mining Division of Cornwall. On this introduction Mr. Richards left, as he said he had to be off to the House. Mr. Cheux said that he had been deputed by a wealthy gentleman in Cornwall, who was a great sympathiser with the Socialist movement, to find a man who would, stand as a candidate for the Mining Division. He said he wanted me to be the candidate, as Mr. Richards had spoken very highly of my qualifications. I declined to consider the matter. He pressed me as he said I was a Cornishman, a native of the Mining Division, and that I had worked in the mines as a boy (all of which was true). I told him that even if my qualifications were sufficient, I could not go down into the constituency without a local mandate. I suggested his applying to the Labour party for a man, but he demurred. I then suggested his applying to the Social Democratic Federation.

“On Thursday, January 28th, 1904, Mr. Lee, Secretary of the Social Democratic Federation, called on me. I knew Mr. Lee slightly. Mr. Lee said a gentleman from Redruth had asked him (Lee) to meet him at my house, and that they were anxious for me to become the candidate, and that a rich friend of the Redruth gentleman would find the money. Mr. Cheux did not, however, turn up while Mr. Lee was with me, .but a few minutes after Mr. Lee had gone he called. He apologised for being late and hurried off to catch Mr. Lee at the office of the Social Democratic Federation. On Feb. 5th, 1904, I received a letter from Mr. H. W. Lee; this letter was written on the ordinary note paper of the Social Democratic Federation, and was in words as follows :—

“Mr. J. Lightwood,

           4, Bartholomew Buildings, E.C.

Dear Comrade,

Shortly after I reached the office after seeing you last Thursday the gentleman came up. From what he said he seemed inclined towards you yourself running for the Camborne Division. Have you seen him since, and has he said anything more to you about your coming forward ? Because if you thought of doing anything in that direction, we should be perfectly willing, I am sure, to leave it at that.

To-day another gentleman has been up. He says he comes from the one who saw me last Thursday. I gave him the decision of the Committee, which was to the effect that before we could actually decide that someone from the S.D.F. should go down to Camborne, and prepare the way, so to speak; that is to say, it would not be the best tactics, to put a candidate down upon the Division unless some preparations had been made beforehand. To this proposal he readily agreed, and stated that he had been authorised to place something of the same suggestion before us. He says he will come in and see me again before next Tuesday, when the matter again comes forward for consideration.

I thought I would let you know how the matter stands at present, and I think I will call and see you on Saturday morning at about 11, if that will be convenient for you.

Yours fraternally,

H. W. Lee.”

“A few days after the receipt of this letter Mr. Lee again called, accompanied by Mr. Green, the Treasurer of the Social Democratic Federation, and Mr. Cheux, and a fourth gentleman. They were with me over an hour ; my wife gave them tea. They all urged me to accept the position of Socialist candidate, and Mr. Lee explained that my candidature would be endorsed by the Social Democratic Federation, and Mr. Cheux urged that his Socialist friend would pay the Federation all the expenses incurred, and that the Federation would remunerate rne for my trouble. I persisted in my refusal, although they continued to urge me for a long time, but when they found I was obstinate they left, and I understood the Social Democratic Federation would find another person to undertake the job.

“I have in my possession a number of letters in addition to those to which I have referred in this my Declaration. Some from Mr. Richards, some from Mr. Lee, some from Mr. Cheux, and some from Mr. Hamilton. As these letters relate to a matter at present the subject of litigation, I am informed I should not be justified in setting them out here.

James Lightwood.

“Declared this 29th day of May, 1905. Before me,

“F. E. B. Crawley,

“A Commissioner for Oaths.”

The Executive of the S.D.F. have issued an official pronouncement, and state that:—

“It is not true that the secretary of the Social Democratic Federation, Mr. H. W. Lee, approached Mr. Lightwood about the running of a Socialist candidate at Camborne. It was Mr. Lightwood who first called at the offices of the Social Democratic Federation. It is not true that our secretary arranged to meet the “gentleman from Redruth” at Mr. Lightwood’s office. It was Mr. Lightwood who arranged the meeting, stating the time when our secretary was to call. Mr. H. W. Lee consented to call, after consulting the Organisation Committee, who agreed that he should go with a ‘watching brief’ and report afterwards. It is not true that when Mr. J. F. Green, our treasurer, and the secretary called subsequently at Mr. Lightwood’s office they found Mr. Cheux there. Mr. Cheux, they assure us, is absolutely unknown to them, and his name has never been mentioned in connection with any proposed Socialist candidature in the Mining Division. It is not true that at the interview in question Mr. Lightwood was pressed to become the candidate, or that the Social Democratic Federation offered to pay his expenses.

“Mr. Lightwood, when in London, though not a member we believe of the Independent Labour Party, and certainly not of the Social Democratic Federation, was, nevertheless, known to members of both bodies in Clerkenwell and Finsbury as a sympathiser with the Socialist movement. We were the more disposed, therefore, to consider a proposal of the character mentioned coming from him than we might have been from an entire stranger. Moreover, we were anxious to take advantage of any bona-fide offer, as for some years past members of the Social Democratic Federation who knew the Mining Division have declared that it could be won in time by a Social Democratic candidate. The Social Democratic Federation would do nothing in the way of putting forward a Social-Democratic candidate at Camborne until propaganda work had been carried on and literature distributed in order to make our principles known among the people, and until enquiries conducted by the secretary and treasurer convinced them that the offer to assist financially in running a Socialist candidate in Camborne came from a sympathetic private, arid not a political party source.

“The one important point on which the whole of Mr. Lightwood’s statement centres is that the offer to assist financially the expenses of a Socialist candidate in the Mining Division came from, or was prompted by Mr. Reginald Cheux, acting as the election agent for Mr. Strauss, the Unionist candidate. That, if true, would undoubtedly suggest that the Unionist candidate believed that the presence of a Socialist candidate would be to his political advantage for which he was willing to pay. The Social Democratic Federation has always been willing to accept help from any quarter so long as no conditions are attached and no restrictions placed upon our speeches, and actions, providing always that the help comes from a private and sympathetic source, but not from a political party, centrally or locally, with a view to using Socialist work, organisation and influence for its own particular ends. We have been, and are still, convinced that the help for the Socialist candidature in the Mining Division is from a private and sympathetic source, and we see no reason, until Mr. Cheux’s connection with that assistance is established, to alter our opinion.”

Mr. R. F. Cheux has sent a communication to the Press in which he refers to Mr. Lightwood’s story as “preposterous” and “manifestly absurd ” but makes no denial of the statements excepting the following :—

“At present I need do no more than refer the public to the categorical denials of the officers of the Social Democratic Federation which have appeared in the columns of to-day’s Press, and to state that at the time of the select ‘tea party’ which Mr. Lightwood says took place at his house, and at which I was alleged to be present, I was as a matter of fact in Cornwall ”

The name of Mr. A. E. Fletcher having been mentioned in connection with the matter, that gentleman made the following statement to a representative of Reynold’s Newspaper:—

“My position is this. I was asked by the secretary of the S.D.F. if I would go down to Camborne as the Labour candidate, as they considered I was the one man who was acceptable to the miners of this division. A friend of the Socialist movement, who wished his name not to be mentioned, was prepared to pay the whole of the cost if a Labour candidate, acceptable to the miners, was adopted. He also said that the present Liberal candidate was a member of the Rosebery faction, who had offered to retire if a Labour candidate were adopted. I said, if these conditions were carried out, I would go and address a meeting, and that I had no ambition to go into Parliament, but my ambition was to further the Socialist cause; but if I were accepted as a Labour candidate I would stand. But I was not aware that Mr. Dunn’s promise to retire if a suitable Labour candidate was found was made two years ago, and I went down to Camborne. They listened to me, but the meeting was packed with Mr. Dunn’s men. They heckled me, and asked if Mr. Dunn’s promise was to be considered perpetual. I replied no, it could not be forever; but he was a Jingo and a member of the Rosebery faction, supported the Boer War, and so on. But his chief supporter said, ‘If you had been first in the field we should have adopted you.’ Finding I had been misinformed as to Mr. Dunn’s promise, and not being satisfied where the money was coming from, I retired. I am convinced that Mr. Lee, the secretary of the S.D.F., believed that the money was coming from a sympathetic source, and had no idea that it was to be supplied by the Tory party. In fact, he told me it was not coming from any political source.”

Mr. Lightwood’s promised further revelations will be awaited with interest, and in the meantime let us ask :—

1. Why Mr. and Mrs. Lightwood should render themselves liable to a criminal prosecution for perjury if they have sworn to lies ?
2. Whether Mr. H. W. Lee’s statement can be believed in view of the fact that at the Annual Conference of the S.D.F. At Shoreditch in 1903, he admitted that he had lied to the delegates at the previous Conference, and declared his intention of doing so again if he considered it necessary in the interests of the S.D.F. Is the present an occasion when it is necessary to lie “in the interests of the S.D.F.”?

It will be noticed :—

1. That although the S.D.F. now declare that they knew Mr. Lightwood only “as a sympathiser with the Socialist movement,” Mr. H. W. Lee wrote him the remarkable letter which Mr. Lightwood received on Feb. 5th, 1904. If that incriminating document is a forgery why has not the S.D.F. instituted proceedings against the forger ?
2. That although these negotiations with the mysterious unnamed gentlemen took place in Jan. and Feb., 1904, the members of the S.D.F., assembled in Annual Conferences at Easter, 1904 and Easter 1905, were told nothing of the circumstances. If the Executive of the S.D.F. cannot trust their own members, how can the members trust the Executive ?
3. That although the S.D.F deny that they know Mr. Cheux, they do not give the names of either of the gentlemen who interviewed them, and who were admittedly acting only as agents;
4. That the S.D.F. declare their willingness to accept help from any quarter, so long as no conditions are attached. But here there were conditions, viz., that the money should be used, not as the S.D.F. Executive thought best, but in making a three-cornered contest in a particular constituency,
5. That, with the exception of the last paragraph, Mr. Cheux’s letter is an evasion. Mr. Lightwood has sworn that he holds letters from Mr. Cheux ;
6. That the S.D.F. misled Mr. A. E. Fletcher concerning Mr. Dunn’s promise; 
7. That although the S.D.F. were convinced that the money came from a sympathetic private source, they could not satisfy Mr. Fletcher, who visited the constituency, on that point;
8. That the S.D.F. statement, which appeared in Justice, was preceded by an intimation that “another statement will be at once sent out to the branches.” In what respect will this differ from the public statement ?

Blogger's Note:

What is funny about reading about all this is that the former Conservative MP for Camborne mentioned, Arthur Strauss, and the future Liberal MP for Camborne, Albert Dunn, who was also mentioned in the piece, both ended up members of the Labour Party. Strauss stood as an independent Labour candidate at the 1918 'Khaki' General Election in Paddington North and Dunn stood as an official Labour candidate in St Ives at the 1918 and 1923 General Elections.  

West Ham. (1905)

Party News from the July 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard

I am happy to be able to report on behalf of the comrades of the West Ham Branch, considerable progress during the month. Comrades will be glad to hear that, as the result of our activities (together with the valuable assistance of the Romford Division boys—who are so modest that they would never be heard of if I didn’t mention them) in the adjoining district of East Ham, an East Ham Branch of the Party is in process of formation, and will probably be going strong by the time these lines come before the eyes of the expectant multitudes of Britain. London (and Watford) contains somewhere about a sixth of the population of this land of the free, and it is of the utmost importance that London be captured. The West Ham comrades have set their minds on establishing two other branches before the propaganda season is through. Where are the Branch Reporters ? Branch Reports are the antidote to dry-rot.

A. E. Jacomb

Jenks on politics. (1905)

From the July 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard

By Politics we mean the business of Government, that is to say, the control and management of people living together in a Society. A Society, again, is a group or mass of people, bound together by a certain common principle or object. A mere chance crowd is not a Society; it has no definite object, it collects and disperses at the whim of the moment, its members recognise no duties towards one another. It has no history, no organisation.

Professor Jenks.

Unemployment. (1905)

From the July 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Board of Trade state that in May 271 Trade Unions, with an aggregate membership of 575,512 reported 29,487, or 5.1 per cent. unemployed, as compared with 5.6 in April and 6.3 in May 1904.

Illuminations. (1905)

From the July 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard

[By the flashlight man.]

John Burns has been the chief supporter of Mr. J. Allen Baker, L.C.C., the Liberal candidate at the East Finsbury election.

o o o

Upon the L.C.C. Mr. Baker is a “Progressive,” the descriptive name by which the Liberals try to hide their identity in municipal matters. It is the old tale of the wolf in sheep’s clothing.

o o o

At Mr. Baker’s first public meeting the great J.B. said the candidate he was there to support had one great claim upon them, and it was enough—he was against the Government,

o o o

Whether a government of the capitalist faction of which Burns and Baker are such shining lights would be less capitalist than the present Burns did not state.

o o o

His reason for backing Baker is no better and no worse than the S.D.F. reason for backing Burns, Philip Stanhope, Lionel Holland, and other capitalist candidates at the last election—they were against the war.

o o o

Not the war which is being waged all over the world between the capitalist-class and the working-class, but the struggle for political supremacy between the dominant factions in South Africa.

o o o

It is true that, previous to urging the workers to vote for Burns, the S.D.F. had denounced him as “a self-seeker and a traitor to the cause of the people” ; had declared that he was “firmly caught in the nets of the Liberal party” ; that he covered his “recreancy and treachery with ambiguous and lying allegations of cowardice and knavery against those whom he had deserted” ; that they urged the workers of Battersea to shew their self-respect by treating him as the workers of New South Wales did Fitzgerald, Kelly and others— “kick out the traitors”—that they issued a cartoon depicting “Judas Burns betraying the Christ of Labour” to the Liberal Party, led by Asquith ; and declared that “such a creature should be hounded from out of the company of all decent folk.”

o o o

And after all this, my friends, they urged the workers of Battersea to vote for Burns, the Battersea S.D.F. supported him, and Councillor Jack Jones of West Ham canvassed for him!

o o o

One would think that the surest way to inspire confidence in the minds of the thinking working-class is to prove to them that you are reliable, that you mean what you say, that you are logical and consistent. But the S.D.F. thinks otherwise.

o o o

Philip Stanhope, for example, whom the S.D.F. supported at Burnley, H. M. Hyndman standing down, has been described by the S.D.F. as a “third-rate Liberal hack.” Most people understand this to mean a political prostitute. Did the S.D.F. mean this of Stanhope ? and if they did why did they withdraw Hyndman and urge the workers of Burnley to vote for such a person ?

o o o

Of course we know that statements have been made in Burnley and elsewhere concerning an alleged contribution to the funds of the S.D.F. which Stanhope made about the time of that election. But does anyone imagine that the political policy of the S.D.F. would be affected by contributions from outside sources to its funds ?

o o o

“Any Socialist who would compromise with capitalism, provided he can exact from the enemy some pennyworths of reform, is earning the scorn, not the gratitude, of his children’s children, who, like himself, will be born into slavery if no more heroic effort be made to break the chains of capitalism and wagedom. We do not want any opportunists in the S.D.F. We point out to them that there are organisations formed for the express purpose of getting pennyworths, and if not pennyworths then ‘ha’porths’ of Socialism, and we humbly give them leave to depart a body which calls upon its members to make unceasing, untiring efforts to prepare itself for the final struggle in the class war, which will not be a sham fight, followed by a march-past of Labour M.P.’s shouldering Blue Books, and the S.D.F. programme of palliatives embodied in Acts of Parliament.”

o o o

The above is an extract from a leading article in Justice. Of course, it is not of recent date. It is more than twelve years old, and was written by J. Hunter Watts.

o o o

It is an illumination showing the difference between then and now, between the S. D. F. was and what it is. And when we think of what it might have been we are sad.

Voice From The Back: Down the sink (2003)

The Voice From The Back Column from the August 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Down the sink

Angela O’Hagen, the campaign and communications manager of Oxfam in Scotland was so incensed by the plight of the poor in Mali and the Dominican Republic that she wrote to the Herald (26 June) about it. “Encouraged by Europe’s Common Agriculture Policy, Europe’s farmers are producing mountains of milk that no-one has the appetite for. Instead of pouring the milk down the sink, we dump our left-overs on the developing world undermining local dairy farmers in the likes of Dominican Republic and Mali who cannot compete against our artificially cheaper milk.” No, your eyes don’t deceive you, here is a spokesperson for Oxfam regretting that milk isn’t poured down the sink! Truly, capitalism is a mad house.

Hobson’s Choice

“Digby Jones, the Director-General of the CBI, yesterday argued for businesses to keep an opt-out on the European Working Time Directive that restricts the working week to an average of 48 hours . . . Mr Jones said, “This is about choice. People should have the right to say ‘no’ to long hours and the directive rightly gives them that protection. But they don’t want unions and politicians telling them when they can work, or for how long.” Times (26 June) Why would anyone want to work more than 48 hours? Could it be because they need the overtime pay? Could it be because they don’t want to be overlooked for promotion or, more likely, to be sacked?

It’s not funny

Bernard Manning is a stand-up comedian who has been accused of being a “foul-mouthed racist bigot”, but, as a report in This Week (28 June) of his trip to India shows, he is not stupid. “It was effin’ awful . . . You’re either wealthy in India or you’ve got eff all. The hotel was absolutely wonderful, and people were living high on the hog, beautiful meals, swimming pools, but you get out the front door and . . . effin’ poverty. There’s no in-between. You’ve got women queuing up for water and they’ve got an atom bomb! The last effin’ thing they need in India is an atom bomb! They want reservoirs and plenty of water coming through the tap. Effin’ upset me I can tell you.”

A voice from America

In the New York Times Magazine (6 July) there is a photograph of a woman wearing a flimsy looking plastic bag on her head. Underneath her photograph are the words of Darline Stephens of Anniston, Alabama. “ I live about 5 or 10 miles from chemical weapons. We’re over there searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but we have them here in our hometown. I didn’t know this stuff was at the Army Depot all these years. I just heard last year. It takes seven years to burn the chemicals to get rid of it all. We didn’t really believe they were going to burn something that could kill us until they told us to get our masks. My family lives payday to payday, so we sure can’t say, ‘Let’s quit our jobs and move.’ I wish we could. The government does some ignorant things – they just give us a plastic mask? If you could send our boys to war with real masks, I don’t understand why we can’t have the same masks. Everyone in the rescue squad and fire department has high-dollar masks. I just don’t understand why they think some people’s lives are worth more than ours. My son and I are Christians, so we’re saved. He knows where he’s going if he dies.”

Mind the gap

“Almost half the world’s population, or three billion people, live on little more than £1 a day and the gap between the world’s poorest 20 percent and its richest 20 percent has more than doubled since 1960, the International Labour organisation said.” Times (7 July) So where does that leave the notion that the market system would lead to prosperity for all?

Worse than Thatcher

The Labour MP Michael Meacher, formerly the environment minister, revealed in the Guardian (15 July) that the gap in income between the bottom 20 percent and the top 20 percent has increased under Labour. “The share of the bottom fifth has slipped back to 6 percent while the share of the top fifth has moved up to 46 percent. Therefore, the rich now have a bigger share of the nation’s post-tax income than at any time under Mrs Thatcher.”

The myth of the permanent arms economy (2003)

From the August 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

In March this year Michael Kidron, a former editor of International Socialism, the theoretical magazine of the group of the same name that later became the Socialist Workers Party, died. In an obituary published in Socialist Review in April, Tony Cliff’s successor as leader of the SWP, Chris Harman, described Kidron as “probably the most important Marxist economist of his generation”. This is a gross exaggeration, even if Kidron does have a minor place in the history of the ideas discussed amongst Marxists for the explanation he offered for the period of capitalist expansion that followed the Second World War as being due to government spending on arms.

Kidron first expounded his ideas in an article in 1967, then incorporated them into his most widely read book Western Capitalism Since the War, published the following year. Although he can’t really have thought that this period of expansion would go on for ever, he still chose to call his theory “the permanent arms economy”. We in the Socialist Party never accepted this as an explanation for the post-war boom and, as the columns of the Socialist Standard in the 1960s bear witness, were severely critical of it. As it happened, within five years of the publication of his book, events were to prove Kidron wrong and us right. The post-war boom came to an end in 1973, despite arms spending continuing at previous levels, thus ruling it out as an explanation both for the boom and its eventual end.

Our main opposition to Kidron’s theory was that it set out to explain a non-existent problem: why capitalism’s supposed built-in tendency to collapse into permanent slump and stagnation did not manifest itself after the war. In 1932—in the middle of the great depression of the Thirties—the Socialist Party published a pamphlet Why Capitalism Will Not Collapse  which we regard as one of our contributions to Marxian economic theory. The argument put forward in this pamphlet was that, while capitalism was an unstable system in the sense that economic activity under it proceeded in fits and starts, constantly swinging between booms and slumps, there was no reason to conclude that it had some economic flaw that would cause it to some day break down permanently. No slump would be permanent, because a slump itself sooner or later created the economic conditions for a subsequent recovery. Capitalism would not collapse of its own accord; it would have to be done to death, by the conscious political action of the working class.

At the time there were others who took a different view: either that capitalism was in the process of collapsing because productive capacity had come to permanently outstrip paying demand (underconsumptionism) or because the rate of profit had irreversibly fallen to too low a level.

The Thirties depression was followed by the Second World War, which both schools of collapsists saw, for different reasons, as a direct consequence of the slump and the only way out of it under capitalism. Most of those placing themselves in the Marxist tradition (including, if the truth be told, ourselves) thought that the war would be followed by another slump, just as the First World War had been. It wasn’t. In fact, it was followed by a long period of expansion punctuated only by relatively minor recessions. How was this to be explained?

We tended to explain it in terms of the specific facts of the period, such as post-war reconstruction and the expansion of the world market through the lowering of trade barriers. The Keynesians claimed that it was due to government intervention to manage the economy on the lines their founder had advocated. The collapsists had to think up a reason why the tendency to collapse into permanent slump and stagnation that they felt was built-in to capitalism had failed to operate. One such explanation was the “permanent war economy”. The underconsumptionists argued that it was government spending on “defence” that had made up for the supposed chronic lack of purchasing power. But arms spending was also offered, strangely, as an explanation by the fallen-rate-of-profit school.

It fell to Kidron to explain, on behalf of the Trotskyoid group to which he belonged (Tony Cliff’s), precisely how state spending on arms offset and even overcame the supposed tendency for capitalism to collapse due to the rate of profit falling to too low a level. Since the state had to obtain the money to spend on arms through taxes which ultimately fell on capitalist profits and other property incomes this theory was counter-intuitive, and so Kidron’s arguments had to be pretty tortuous.

In his article, “A Permanent Arms Economy”, which appeared in International Socialism 28 (Spring 1967), and which is trumpeted by the SWP to this day, Kidron started from a collapsist position:

“Common to most explanations of western capitalism’s stability and growth since the war is the assumption that the system would collapse into over-production and unemployment were it not for some special offsetting factor… This article shares the assumption”.

He went on to argue that the special offsetting mechanism was “a permanent arms budget”. His basic thesis was that, in government arms spending, capitalism had found a way of engineering growth without this leading to the drastic fall in the rate of profit that he believed, on a misreading of Marx, should normally have occurred. Government spending on arms constituted “a net addition to the market for consumer or ‘end’ goods” while, on the supply side, arms production, as non-productive consumption, was “the key, and seemingly permanent, offset to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall”.

Marx’s argument on the rate of profit had been different: that, since living labour is the sole source of profit, if it falls as a proportion of total capital, then, mathematically, the ratio of profit to total capital, i.e. the rate of profit, will also fall, unless offset by other factors. Marx was in fact aware that there would always be such ‘other factors’, so that for him any tendency for the rate of profit to fall for this reason would only be a very long-run and by no means continuous tendency.

That the capitalist market had expanded since the end of the war was an undeniable fact. The question was whether or not this was due to government spending on arms. The Keynesians argued that it was due to government spending as such, whether on arms or anything else. On the other hand, some economists were beginning to realise that the Keynesian argument that the post-war expansion had been caused by government spending was not true: the world market was expanding anyway due to other factors. Thus the Socialist Standard noted in November 1971, in an article “The End of Full Employment”:

“An examination of the causes of low post-war unemployment in Britain was made by Professor R. C. O. Matthews, himself broadly a supporter of Keynes, and published in the Economic Journal (September 1968). His conclusion was that, starting with the stimulus given by making good war damage of all kinds, a major cause was a prolonged investment boom and that ‘the decline of unemployment as compared with 1914 is to a large extent not a Keynesian phenomenon at all’”.

In seeing a species of government spending as having saved capitalism from its supposed tendency to collapse, Kidron had placed himself within the Keynesian framework. Which is why the theory of the “permanent arms economy” is better seen as a Leftwing Keynesian rather than a Marxist theory, as in fact Kidron himself was later to recognise (this theory has been revived today under the more accurate name of “military Keynesianism”). Kidron therefore had to face fellow Labour Party reformists (he, along with Cliff, was a paid-up member of the Labour Party at this time) who, basing themselves on Keynes, argued that a “permanent social reform budget”, with government spending on housing, education, hospitals, pensions, etc., would have the same effect.

Cartoon by Phil Evans from ‘More years of the Locust’

Kidron conceded that this was theoretically possible, but argued that this was not going to happen since any state that did this would put itself at a competitive disadvantage, as it would be diverting profits from being reinvested in the more efficient and up-to-date machinery and methods of production that would allow production costs to be reduced. This was true, and is in fact one reason why reformism within the framework of a single national state is never going to work. But it equally applies to state arms spending. This, too, is a diversion from productive investment that places states which spend more than average on it at a competitive disadvantage.

Kidron tried to get round this by arguing that arms spending was different from spending on social reforms in that, if one state spent more on arms, other states were forced to follow suit, so that none of them would be at a particular disadvantage. But he never could explain satisfactorily why this should be. While it was clear that America and Russia, struggling for world domination, were involved in an arms race, and that states like Britain and France that had pretensions about playing a world role had made a political decision to spend more on arms, there was no reason why all states should get into an arms race with each other. In fact, Germany and Japan did not spend the same proportion on arms as America, Britain and France, which gave them a competitive advantage and led to them being the “economic miracles” of that period; a fact we employed at the time to help us expose the fallacious theory of “the permanent arms economy”.

Today, the SWP likes to claim that the theory of the “permanent arms economy” did not imply that capitalism had found a permanent way of avoiding big slumps, but there was nothing Kidron wrote in the 1960s that suggested that the post-war boom he then believed had been caused by arms spending was going to come to an end in the 1970s. This was something added after the post-war boom had finally come to an end in 1973 (thus proving the theory wrong)—and it was added by Cliff and Harman not Kidron himself. By 1977 Kidron had come to recognise that he had been wrong to attribute the post-war boom to government arms spending; he now attributed it to the emergence in the West of “state capitalism”, by which he meant the state acting as a single national capital. And he concluded by admitting what we had always argued, that state spending on arms was a burden on capitalist expansion not a stimulant to it:

“ . . . it is hard to sustain the view that it was the permanent arms economy that fuelled the long boom. On the contrary, such expenditure must have worked towards stagnation. And if in reality heavy spending on arms coincided with an unprecedented expansion of capital, it can only be because the effects of arms spending were overpowered by the effects of something much more fundamental.” (“Two Insights Don’t Make a Theory”) .

So, in the end, Kidron did redeem himself from going down in history as a simple Leftwing Keynesian. The same cannot be said of IS and its successor, the SWP, which still clings to this discredited theory.

Adam Buick

Blogger's Note:

Kidron's Western Capitalism Since the War was reviewed in the October 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Has the Labour Party lost its way? (2003)

From the August 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

With trade unions and left wingers now talking about the re-formation of a Labour party, socialists ask why bother? The history of the Labour Party has been one long disaster for the working class. The short answer to the question of whether the Labour Party has lost its way is, no. Because what is currently the direction of its leaders has been part of its thinking throughout its existence. In power, as now, Labour has been a radical liberal party. This has not been a betrayal of its core principles or “values” but reflects its origins.

New Labour’s obsession with neo-liberal economics might seem like something of a new departure but the early Labour Party was tied to liberalism in a similar way. This argument should not be taken too far, as at least the collectivist currents in the early Labour Party made it feel like it was part of a movement to create a better society and many thought they were working towards a vaguely defined socialism. A collection of anecdotes of life in the Labour Party, Generating Socialism (Sutton, 1997; edited by Daniel Weinbren, foreword by Tony Benn, who else?) shows that many Labour members, however mistakenly, thought that socialism could be reached through Labourism. The optimism which could hold with Labour’s “rise” up to the mid-twentieth century, has turned into a marked pessimism associated with the supposed decline of the working class.

Nonetheless, the Labour Party was established not for socialist aims but to achieve political representation for working men. It was related to class struggle in that despite the trade unions’ reluctance to break away from the Liberal Party, industrial militancy and the Taff Vale decision which put their funds in danger meant that a strong feeling developed on the need for independent “Labour” representation in parliament. However, its socialist credentials were weak, as the Social Democratic Federation acknowledged when it withdrew from the Labour Representation Committee (which became the Labour Party in 1906) in 1901. Its social outlook was informed not by class-consciousness but, on its left-wing, by ethical protest at poverty and inequality as “wrong” and, on its right-wing, by an awareness that social dislocation caused by unregulated capitalism effected economic (capitalist) efficiency.

The Labour Party struggled to gain wide electoral support during its first ten years, gaining around fifty MPs by 1914. Its big break came with the first world war, which split the Liberal Party. Labour was active in the national government, supporting the war, but not tainted being tainted with its results. By the early 1920s, the Labour Party had emerged as the “progressive” party in British politics. While attracting such ex-Liberals at this time as Clement Attlee, it refused the affiliation of the Communist Party.

So why has the Labour Party been associated with the name of socialism? Largely because of its history of supporting nationalisation, often misleadingly called “public” or “social” ownership. This was the major problem for socialism in the twentieth-century—the standard dictionary definition being that nationalisation is socialism. The Labour Party’s commitment to nationalisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange dates from 1905 but was adopted most famously in Clause IV of its 1918 constitution. Its acknowledgment that exchange would continue after nationalisation demonstrated that the wages system, and thus capitalism, would continue after nationalisation, albeit state-run. In effect Clause IV was translated as state ownership of the “commanding heights” of the economy. Quite what was hoped to be achieved by bringing industry into state instead of private ownership was not very clear apart from as a vague and fuzzy means to “greater equality”.

With central planning nationalisation was supposed to transform capitalism into something that could be controlled by the state. This did not happen of course. On transferring coal, steel, iron, fuel, power and transport to state ownership after 1945, the performance of British industry in the world market still continued to decline and the state sector remained an arena of industrial struggle. The remarkable blind faith of the Labour Party in nationalisation was reduced from the Attlee government onwards. Sadly, this decline in the faith of nationalisation has been represented as the death of socialism.

There are still some in the Labour Party and in the various left-wing organisations who claim that vast swathes of British industry should be re-nationalised. This is why many see “New” Labour as a dramatic break with “Old” Labour. Jim Mortimer (an ex-Labour Party general secretary) describes New Labour, in a recent pamphlet The Formation of the Labour Party – Lessons for Today (2000), as apologists for capitalism and the new Clause IV as “a symbolic change to mark the abandonment of Labour’s traditional advocacy of a widening area of social [state] ownership”. However, as socialists, we would prefer to see declining faith in nationalisation and the Labour Party as a positive development. The results of Labour governments are no longer clothed in the misleading garb of collectivism but show what they essentially are—managers of capitalism. Electoral imperatives, present from early in Labour’s existence, have triumphed over reforming rhetoric.

It is often argued that state welfare and social security provision are examples of Labour’s success in “doing something”, legislating against poverty and providing municipal housing and so on. Such measures have no socialist credentials but, on the contrary, were developed in their post-war form by the Liberal Beveridge. Moreover, regulating legislation has been a feature of all capitalist government since the Factory Acts of the 1840s. The simple case is that systems of social welfare do not change the exploitative character of capitalism or even touch the surface of its symptoms. Poverty has not been reformed away and poor housing, unemployment, job insecurity and related ill-health remain very real concerns for the working class. In fact, New Labour, rather than betraying Labour’s welfare extension tradition, has merely continued previous Labour retrenchment begun in the 1970s.

The democratic record of the Labour Party reads equally dubiously. It has always had a very limited acceptance of party democracy. The block vote, for example, allowed the trades unions to dominate the party conference, initially to the advantage of Liberal moderates but more recently to that of the left-wing, whereupon it was replaced. Also, Blair is not new in being a “strong” leader. Before 1922 the Labour party did not have a formal leader but a series of chairmen. After Ramsay MacDonald assumed chairmanship in 1922, however, the party adopted a leadership that exercised strong control over the party, especially as the Parliamentary Labour Party did not, and still does not, have to obey its conference. As has often been observed, the Labour Party has always had a strong cult of personality, of loyalties and bitter rivalries over who was best to lead a passive working class.

At its formation and in its early years the Labour Party had little connection with the growth of a socialist minority or even with the more militant sections of reformists. There were always some trying to build a “fairer” society but what emerged from years of effort was not a slowly evolving socialism but a Labourism which increasingly judged itself on its electoral success, which depended on its ability not to rock the capitalist boat it was trying to steer.

Those who want another century of reformist advance and retreat can go ahead and form a new Labour Party. Those who, learning from the failures of the past, desire the socialist alternative should join those who have rejected reformism and sought instead to make socialists and work for socialism-and-nothing-but.

Colin Skelly

Letter: " . . .a sad deluded group of romantics" (2003)

Letter to the Editors from the August 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

" . . .a sad deluded group of romantics"

Dear Editors

For a few years I have subscribed to the Socialist Standard and have come to the conclusion that you are either very cynical or a sad deluded group of romantics. It’s all very cosy sitting at your word processor telling us that we should be out there ridding ourselves of the capitalist class and that the world would be a much better place under your brand of politics. (All dictators believe this.)

It is a logical process for those people without resources to vilify people who have wealth. (Just as in Cambodia it became a corrupt thing to have learning.) Hence your tirade against those people who have the imagination and flair to accumulate for themselves some of the Earth’s riches. Capitalism is just a handy label for those who have the get-up-and-go to create wealth. Yes, they are shrewd people – yes, they will exploit others but how else are things to be done?

Get up from your word processors and take a good hard look at the world. You will observe there are varying types in this human planet. The majority is an amorphous mass of Underlings. Their main preoccupation is obtaining food, shelter and pleasure. Their imagination goes no further than these three basic needs. At the top of this heap are the Doers – the leaders – the people with the strength of purpose to get things done. They see this indeterminate mass of Underlings with their three needs so they set out to provide them.

So don’t give us all that nonsense about exploitation. The leaders are doing what is necessary. They don’t sit in offices churning out political daydreams. They get off their backsides and do. They are the Doers. They are necessary for society to function by providing food-halls, living accommodation and pleasure-domes. Do you honestly believe the Underlings would manage to do all this on their own? Listen socialists it’s a real world out there with people hungry for food, shelter and pleasure and capitalism is a means to that end. And so what if the capitalist creams off a bit extra for his efforts! Surely he deserves it!

Phil McCormac, 

by email

Reply: 

You omit one detail: are you a Doer or an Underling? We suspect the latter. In which case there is a book about people like you, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell, set in a town called Mugsborough.

Mugs believe that it is capitalists, not workers by hand and by brain, who create wealth and that capitalists are doing us a favour by providing us with jobs. They believe that the world has always been divided into rich and poor, leaders and followers, rulers and ruled and that it always will be. They consider themselves and their fellow workers to be “underlings” incapable of running things ourselves.

Yet who, today, does run things from top to bottom? Who grows the food, who builds the houses, who mines the minerals, who transports them, who processes them, who fashions them into useful things, who does all the paper work for this, orders the supplies, draws up the designs – if not the people you call the “underlings”, we the majority class of wage and salary earners? The shareholding capitalist and the fat-cat company director are completely redundant as far as the actual work of wealth production is concerned – and new wealth can only be created by the application of human labour to materials that originally come from nature, not by speculating on the stock exchange or planning take-over bids. Their social role is purely parasitic: to cream off, as you put it, a part of the wealth created by the rest of us.

But don’t get us wrong. We don’t blame capitalists personally. They are just cogs in the system. If they didn’t exploit us, somebody else would. Either some other capitalist or maybe some state bureaucrat like in Cambodia or the former USSR. We blame the system. It’s based on the exploitation of the majority for profit. That’s why it must go and be replaced by a new and different system, based on common ownership democratic control and production of use, not profit.

What we are proposing is that the people who, today, run production and administration from top to bottom should get together and run things in their own interest, instead of as at present in the interest of a tiny minority. The first step towards this is to stop regarding ourselves as underlings, as eternal followers of those who regard themselves as our betters. Get up off your knees, Phil, don’t be a mug

—Editors 

News from the Madhouse (2003)

From the August 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Statistics

The United States, as the most powerful country in the world, must be the world’s leading producer of statistics. But for some reason the US has been very coy about producing any estimate of the numbers of Iraqis killed during the American attack. However, others outside officialdom are less reticent, and according to a Times (10 July) report on Iraq, “a group of British and US academics said that the civilian death toll from the war was at least 6000.” But the lack of official American figures does mean that all that suffering can be brushed under the carpet. An American writer in the Times (3 June) said that the Iraqi war was “pretty-close-to-bloodless”. The 2800 people killed in the 2001 attack on the World Trade Centre are fewer than half the probable figure of Iraqi civilian deaths. No American writer would ever describe the 11 September attack as “pretty-close-to-bloodless”. Of course, the twin towers attacks killed mainly Americans, while in Iraq it was mainly Iraqis who died. Perhaps that makes a difference.

Solitary confinement

But if you call your dead “victims”, instead of “heroes”, you may find people asking what is the point of supporting a system which results in so many dead victims. Describing them as “heroes”, or so the authorities hope, is a good way of getting people to rally behind the flag, and continue the merciless carnage which is part of capitalism. Private Jessica Lynch, for example, an American maintenance soldier, was in a vehicle at the back-end of an American convoy in Iraq, which lost its way and blundered into enemy territory. In an exchange of fire, she was badly injured, and captured by the Iraqis. She was taken to a nearby hospital in Nasiriyah, and her crushed arms and legs were put in plaster. The Americans discovered she was there, and decided the chance of rescuing a young, good-looking blonde was too good to miss. By that time Iraqi resistance was crumbling, but the desire for a propaganda coup was too strong. So special forces in helicopters, guns firing, stormed the hospital, capturing all the doctors and nurses and not really helping the patients, and triumphantly carried off Private Lynch.

According to the Times (21 June), the press was fed reports about her heroic resistance, fighting and killing Iraqis before being wounded several times herself. There are plans to make films about this exciting story. In fact, it seems, her gun jammed so she didn’t fire at all. Unfortunately, Private Lynch “has been unable to remember anything about the events which have propelled her into the public eye”, and, said the Times reporter, she is now “living in solitary confinement in the Walter Reed Army Medical Centre in Washington. Outside her door stands a military guard who prevents anyone except her medical helpers and her immediate family from seeing her. Each lunchtime Private Lynch goes to physiotherapy and works out alone.Other patients are banished from the gym for fear that the press will use them as a way to get to her.” A “hero”, kept in solitary confinement! It makes you wonder if they are helping her to remember what she has forgotten, i.e. all about her heroism. As the report said, “She is deliberately and falsely being portrayed as a hero in a war with few genuine heroes because the Americans would like to feel good about a war that has an ambiguous ending, and the entertainment industry needs to please them.”

Fishy story

In legal circles, there is a well-known story about a barrister, appearing for the defendant, who listened to the other side’s allegations, and wondered how on earth he was going to reply to them. At length his solicitor passed him a note: “No case; attack the plaintiff’s attorney.”

Ten Downing Street is acting on exactly the same principle in the aftermath of the Iraqi war. Much of the media—newspapers, radio, television—has been questioning some of the stories the government put out to justify their action in invading Iraq along with the Americans. Not having a convincing reply to many of these questions, Alastair Campbell (the Prime Minister’s main public relations adviser) decided to seize on one allegation broadcast on BBC television, to the effect that he had “sexed up” some of the information the government got from its so-called “intelligence services”, before issuing it as part of the government’s propaganda drive to persuade people of the necessity of war.

Whether this or that claim is one hundred per cent justified is of minor importance besides the government’s efforts to obscure the basic facts of the matter. America attacked and overthrew the Saddam Hussein regime because it needs to import a great deal of oil to keep its productive and distributive industries functioning. Saudi Arabia, with the world’s largest reserves of oil, is already firmly within the American sphere of influence; Iraq, with the world’s second largest reserves, was hostile to the United States, so had to be brought into line. Britain, and a few other countries, supported the United States because it is by a long way the most powerful country in the world. Some European countries have reacted to this enormous American power by stepping up their attempt to build a capitalist European federation which might in the future hope to rival the United States, and share in world leadership. Others, including Britain, think that a better bet is to go with the country which now has the leadership: in the jungle of world capitalism, the British rulers think, perhaps safety and prosperity lie in cosying up to the most ferocious predator.

Each group of capitalists, ruling in a particular country, does whatever it thinks is best for its own interests. Lots of advice is given, but the decision rests with each country’s ruling class. In Britain, there was a lot of feeling against going to war. Tony Blair, in his present role as right-hand man to the British ruling class, and administrator of British capitalism, ignored the widespread anti-war feeling, and did what he thought the British capitalist class would want him to do. So he went along with the American rulers, hoping that it would help to ensure the oil supplies which British industry needs and will need in the foreseeable future.

Whenever anyone makes an open, honest decision, he adds up all the possible reasons for and against, and arrives at a conclusion. When anyone reaches his conclusion first, and then has to make up his reasons afterwards, there are often a lot of problems. Tony Blair couldn’t announce that he was going to send British soldiers to fight in Iraq, which would involve killing and injuring Iraqi soldiers and civilians, as well as deaths and injuries among the British invading force, simply because he thought it was safer in the modern world for the British ruling class to ally with the single world superpower, and at the same time make sure British capitalism didn’t run out of oil. So reasons had to be made up afterwards. Hence the sudden discovery that Saddam Hussein is a nasty man, running a barbarous regime. Quite true, of course, but not enough to excuse a war which was almost impossible to square with capitalism’s own “international law”. The problems were, firstly, that the British government has supported and traded with this barbarous regime in the past, and, secondly, if that was the reason behind the war, Britain would have to attack many countries round the world, which have regimes just as tyrannical and murderous as Saddam’s. If only the “enemy” country would attack first, then the excuse for war would be obvious—resistance to aggression, which was trumpeted as a complete justification throughout the Second World War. But that wouldn’t do in this case, since America and Britain were going to be the ones committing the aggression. And it wouldn’t be very convincing to claim that Iraq, economically feeble after the Gulf War and the years of sanctions since then, was somehow going to get powerful enough to send an invasion fleet down the Persian Gulf and round the Arabian Sea, up the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal, then through the Mediterranean and past Gibraltar, and across the Bay of Biscay before finally invading Cornwall.

What could be done? So in comes the killer excuse—Saddam has weapons of mass destruction: nuclear or chemical or biological weapons which could be sent on a rocket across Europe to land on Basingstoke or thereabouts—and which would be ready for action in only forty-five minutes! (Exactly forty-five, apparently—not forty-four or forty-six minutes: or, as W. S. Gilbert put it, “corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative”.) All this is jazzed up in two official-sounding dossiers, which seek to prove the imminent danger. In due course awkward facts start to emerge—some of the material was taken from an ancient thesis which a student had submitted for his degree (and put on the internet), borrowed without acknowledgement and improved to make it more exciting; and allegations about Saddam trying to import uranium from the Niger republic in West Africa, which turn out to have been based mainly on forged documents.

When all this comes out in the newspapers and the media generally, no wonder Ten Downing Street try to defend themselves by picking out some uncertain bits of the criticism and demanding apologies. But since the Labour Party convinced millions of voters at the last two elections of the gigantic lie that they could run the capitalist system for the benefit of the working class—the great majority of ordinary people—then perhaps these other terminological inexactitudes seem to be very small beer.

Alwyn Edgar

50 Years Ago: Capital’s Coronation (2003)

The 50 Years Ago column from the August 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Since we may not, without dire consequences to the life of the Socialist Standard, record our view on what has been called “the greatest show ever,” we may at least refer readers to what our late and lamented comrade Jacomb wrote on the occasion of the crowning of George Wettin as King George V. (See Socialist Standard for June 1911.)

Those to whom it may seem remarkable that in spite of 10 years of devastating war there should be such a tremendous increase of wealth as illustrated by the present show, should bear in mind that with production and consumption of war material at top scale and speed profits and fortunes for factory owners and shareholders who formed this vast congregation of titled gentlemen and bejewelled ladies, were correspondingly big and easily capable of defraying whatever cost participation in the show involved.

And what have those who produced this vast wealth and fought for king and country in the past great and glorious wars to end war, what improvement in their material position have they to show in these 30 years of peace and 10 years of war?

If in writing on the show in June, 1911, our late comrade Jacomb referred among other thing to

“. . . the bestowing of a meal upon thousands of little children whom hunger makes glad to accept even such a trifle from hands so heavy-laden with wealth that they cannot feel the weight of the charitable grains they scatter, . . .”

here is what a London daily paper reported in connection with the 1953 show:-

“At East Grinstead the children who go to the Coronation party will, after they have had their tea, be stamped on the wrist with indelible ink. This will prevent them from getting more than their share of the refreshments.”

(Article by “R”, Socialist Standard, August 1953)

Debate: SPGB v. International Socialists (1975)

Party News from the August 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

The debate was held at the Clarendon Press Institute in Oxford, on Thursday 3rd July 1975. The SPGB was represented by J. D’Arcy and the I.S. by P. Gerhardt.

SPGB Opening Speech

The SPGB in opening defined their sole object, a system of society based on common ownership and distribution. They had no secondary object. During the past 70 years a number of organizations had claimed to be Socialist but on examination had different objectives. It was not only necessary that the working class should accept Socialism by definition, but also that they should understand its implications. An understanding of the implications was the test of Socialist understanding.

The SPGB case rested on 3 main points:- 1. Knowledge of the implications of Socialism; 2 Political organization within a revolutionary Party without leaders; 3. The conquest of political power through Parliament or International equivalents. The workers’ understanding of Socialism implied that they rejected the world of wages, prices, profits, employers, money, etc. The SPGB asked workers to re-think the whole purpose of their lives; this was revolutionary. Socialism could not be established by non-Socialists. Socialist workers would then make the SPGB a social force, an agent for revolution with the single purpose of abolishing capitalism and establishing Socialism, and seeking political power on this mandate. Political power was necessary, and Socialism could not be established without it. The way to political power was through Parliament and the vote.

I.S. (International Socialists) was a self-styled socialist party. It did not stand for Socialism but for State capitalism. Their pamphlet The Struggle for Workers’ Power (p. 8) describes Socialism: “Under Socialism the means of production are Nationalized without compensation and transferred into the hands of the workers”. They also refer to a workers’ State under workers’ control, that relies on the armed power of the workers’ militia. The Workers’ State defends the right to strike, the rights of Trade Unions. Socialist “wages” will be paid. Armaments expenditure will be cut and foreign debts cancelled. The SPGB regard this as State capitalism—borrowed from the early Bolsheviks who carried out the non-Socialist Russian revolution. I.S. believe the Russian revolution was Socialist, in 1920 under Lenin and Trotsky, but counter-revolutionary in 1928 under Stalin.

In fact Lenin led Russia to capitalism in 1918 and Stalin carried on the process. This unsound position of I.S. in relation to the Russian revolution is reflected in their general propaganda. They have been directly involved in every reformist campaign since their inception; recently in the anti-abortion Bill, the Common Market, Repeal of the Industrial Relations Act; support for Clay Cross councillors, rent strikes, squatters’ movements, Claimants’ Union, Shrewsbury pickets, Students’ Grant Campaign, Troops out of Ireland, and numerous other campaigns. In addition, they attach themselves to every industrial dispute uninvited and usually unwelcome. They hold the view that trade unions could be revolutionary organizations under proper leadership.

The SPGB say non-Socialist trade unionists cannot establish Socialism. I.S. reject the parliamentary road to Socialism, and talk of “smashing the State”, but do not say how this is to be done. The only thing which can smash the state is another state. Is the state to be smashed by armed revolt, general strikes, civil disobedience, or subversion? All these methods have been used here and abroad and have failed. They speak of workers’ control and workers’ councils, consisting of industrial workers running social affairs under Socialism. Why should industrial workers or any other section determine social need? Socialism means the democratic control by the whole community not just a section.

If I.S. reject the need for Socialist understanding how can we get Socialism? Advocacy of reforms does not promote Socialist understanding. On the contrary. Militancy and revolution are not the same thing. The economic conditions of capitalism tame the militant, but never the revolutionary. I.S. like the Communist Party, International Marxist Group, and other Left parties, are the small shop-keepers of social reform. The chain stores are run by the Labour and other large Parties. Posing as Intellectuals they have a contempt for the working class.

This can be summed up in a quotation from the Socialist Worker of 7th April 1973 during the election campaign: “The socialist case for voting Labour does not depend on any assumption that it will carry out its pledges. It will not, nor indeed cannot, carry them out, because it is committed to making capitalism work. We know it but millions of workers disagree . . . Power is the test, and we urge all our readers to swallow their distaste and vote Labour—vote Labour without illusions, but vote Labour.”

Considering that the is openly acknowledge that the Labour Party is a capitalist party, urging workers to vote for it was an act of treachery.

I.S. Opening Speech

The I.S. said that the SPGB was not Marxist and therefore was not a revolutionary party. The SPGB regarded political demands as a cul-de-sac. The I.S. worked for immediate partial demands and were also politically active in the trade unions. Marxism must be related to immediate demands. Marx supported this view in 1865 (First International and Communist Manifesto). Day-to-day participation in workers’ struggles helps them to Socialism. The struggle for reforms is clearly class struggle. Marx said the 10-hour bill had changed middle-class political economy to working-class political economy. Lenin claimed that it was not enough to be a revolutionary, workers must grasp every link in the chain. A quotation from the Socialist Standard stated that the SPGB did not support reforms. They lacked confidence in the working class, and showed idealism by assuming that capitalism can carry on reforms independently.

Marx recognised the revolutionary nature of trade unions; he never criticized their conservatism. Engels stated that trade unions and strikes were schools of war. Struggle could be pushed further beyond wages struggle. Marx and Engels over 100 years ago said that organization in trade unions was a sign of the maturity of the working class. How could the SPGB support wage demands and oppose reforms? Rent increases, wage freezes, cuts in public expenditure, were hidden wage reductions.

The SPGB said self-emancipation was the lynch-pin of Socialism. Do the uneducated masses have to wait to be educated by the SPGB? Engels on Feurbach said the workers got revolutionary ideas through revolutionary practice. The same point was made in The German Ideology. It is revolutionary acts which will enable workers to find the road to Socialism, not the SPGB. Marx and Engels dealing with the Paris Commune stated that the workers had taken revolution into their own hands. I.S. stood by Marx, and later Lenin, on the concept of workers seizing state power under workers’ control, which the SPGB denounce. The SPGB version of working-class self-emancipation through Parliament by merely voting for Socialist delegates was a wrong interpretation of Marx. Power did not reside in Parliament, it was merely a rubber stamp which can be snuffed away. Look at Portugal and Chile. The SPGB is a propaganda sect which abstains from the class struggle. Marx supported the Paris Commune, although he recognised it was not Socialist, because he wanted to keep up the morale of the workers. When has the SPGB been concerned with the morale of the workers on wage freezes, etc., Vietnamese revolution and the Portuguese revolution?

The SPGB originated from the SDF, and had carried over the inactivity of that organization in the class struggle. Members of the SPGB should leave it and join a real revolutionary organisation—the I.S. Action is the greatest educator on the face of the earth.

SPGB Second Speech

In reply, the SPGB stated that the issue of the debate was “Which party should the working class support?”, not what Marx and Engels said. I.S. must deal with the case of the SPGB as presented. The SPGB understands and accepts the main theories of Marx, the law of social growth, evolving class struggle, and the analysis of capitalism. Dealing with trade unions, Marx always maintained that if workers were unable to amalgamate to protect their living standards they would be incapable of forming a larger movement. It was Marx who used the famous phrase “the abolition of the wages system”, instead of the trade-union slogan of “a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work”. The entire energy of trade unions was used for higher wages and better working conditions. They bartered with capitalism about the terms under which they would work. It should be remembered that trade unions exist for the benefit of their own members and not for the benefit of the working class as a whole. The wages struggle was never ending, and in over 150 years had not produced a single revolutionary Socialist attitude. They were more entrenched behind the Government. The TUC was nothing other than a political party representing the industrial wing of the Labour Party. Trade Unions are not revolutionary — good or bad leadership made no difference.

The implication that Marx imagined that the workers need not obtain political power was nonsense. In an address to the First International he stated: “To conquer political power is the great duty of the working class”. This was consistent with his historical theory that class struggles are struggles about political power. The class which has political power controls society. If that is so, how do the workers get political power other than through Parliament? Why did the I.S. urge workers to support the Labour Party to political power? Why did they say power is the test, if political power is useless? Parliament is still the centre of the state machine. We are not interested at the moment in the Paris Commune—our case depends on the conditions of today. Does the advocacy by the I.S. of political demands lead to Socialism? There is nothing partial about the abortion and Common Market campaigns as advocated by I.S.. They went the whole hog. The entire literature of I.S. was devoted to these demands. They were too busy putting forward partial demands to the detriment of Socialism. The result was that workers became reform-minded. The SPGB consistently refused to engage in non-Socialist political activity for any reason. The issue was not whether a reform was good or bad, but the misguided efforts to get them. Non-Socialist reformist actions of any kind were detrimental to Socialism. Raising the morale of the worker, to which is referred, meant that you kept up his morale by offering reforms in the same way that the donkey was attracted by the carrot. It could be better if the worker had Socialist ideas with low morale rather than reformist ideas with high morale

I.S. Second Speech

Marx was concerned with the morale of the working class, and this is important. The Paris Commune is important for the lessons it gives to workers today; it still haunts the capitalists of Europe. The SPGB falsified Lenin about the smashing of the State machine. Lenin in fact was interested only in smashing the capitalist State machine. The SPGB also accused Lenin of falsifying Marx. The I.S. would not say here and now how workers could get control of the political machinery; they would have to find their own organs of power However, they should be warned against the futility of seeking their emancipation through Parliament. This was an illusion. There were many ways the worker could take away the property of the capitalist class; for example at the point of production.

SPGB : Conclusion

is nothing useful in trying to resurrect historical events like the Paris Commune unless you can apply them to the conditions of today. The Paris Communards did not smash the state, it was the state which smashed them. The seizure of power in similar circumstances today is impossible—the days of the barricades are over. The I.S. do not want to establish Socialism; they want the system of state capitalism with workers’ militia, nationalization and workers’ control. Workers with Socialist ideas can dispossess the capitalists through control of Parliament, and it is a lack of Socialist knowledge, not the failure of the parliamentary machine, which is responsible for the continuance of capitalism.