A plague on both their houses (2024)

From the October 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

This issue is published before the US presidential elections on 5 November so we are unable to comment on the result. But we can analyse the campaign and what is at stake.

Most elections under capitalism are simply about which band of professional politicians shall occupy executive and ministerial posts. In other words, about a change of personnel to continue with the same basic policies. This was the case in the recent UK elections. On some occasions, however, the capitalist class are split on some key economic issue and the only way this can be settled is via the ballot box.

In Britain, this was the case over whether or not the British state should remain part of the European Union. One section of the capitalist class wanted to withdraw to avoid EU regulation of their financial activities while another section, the majority, wanted to stay in.

In a capitalist political democracy the only way of settling such conflicts of interests within the capitalist class is to put the matter to the electorate to decide, an electorate overwhelmingly composed of workers. The rival sections of the capitalist class each spend millions in propaganda to try to get workers to vote for their candidates. The section that wins gets its way. The government is formed by their political representatives who have a mandate to implement that section’s policy. In Britain those in favour of leaving won a referendum and a subsequent general election, so Britain left. Had the vote gone the other way Britain would have remained in the EU.

In such elections there is something more than a mere change of personnel at stake — for the capitalist class, though not for the working class, whose interests are opposed to all sections of the capitalist class and who are not required to take sides.

The current presidential election in the United States is one such example. The basic split in the capitalist class there is the old one between those who favour free trade and those who favour protectionism, which has foreign policy implications. Harris represents that section which favours the status quo and support for existing international bodies set up to promote freer trade. Trump represents those who want to protect US manufacturing industry from outside competition by imposing a tariff on all imports. Harris wants to continue the war in Ukraine and bombing Gaza. Trump just wants to bomb Gaza.

If the election was a contest as to which candidate has the least unpleasant personality Harris would be the lesser evil. But that’s not the issue. It’s which section of the US capitalist class shall get its way, a matter of indifference to workers and of equal opposition to both by socialists.

Because it is the working class electorate that will decide, both sides have to spin their policy in a way that will dupe workers into supporting them. Thus Trump courts the Christian right and other social conservatives while Harris presents herself as a champion of liberal values. Trump’s appeal is mainly to whites, Harris’s mainly to voters of colour. Trump mainly to men. Harris mainly to women. But none of these is the real issue, even though how voters react to them will decide which section of the US capitalist class gets its way.

The US system for electing the president is peculiar. In other countries with elected presidents, the candidate who wins is the one who gets the most votes, whether in a first or second round. In the US this is not necessarily the case — it is the candidate who wins the most votes in an electoral college composed of members representing the states that make up the union, whose number broadly reflects the electorate of each state and who (except in a couple of small states) vote as a bloc. When Trump won in 2016 he got fewer votes than Hilary Clinton but more in the electoral college. This was because Clinton won easily in California and New York but this didn’t increase her representation in the Electoral College. Who wins here is decided by who wins in a number of key ‘swing’ states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia but also smaller ones like Arizona. This is not fully democratic but is the procedure that has evolved in the United States for deciding who shall chair the executive committee of its ruling class.

Under the US constitution, the president cannot get their way unless their party has a majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. The House of Representatives is elected on a normal democratic basis from constituencies of roughly equal size. Only one-third of the Senate is elected every two years, a constitutional arrangement put in place by the Founding Fathers to prevent a majority for any radical proposal (such as land reform) getting its way for at least six years.

The Democratic Party leaders got Biden to withdraw as they were afraid that, if he stayed as their candidate, they risked not winning a majority in the House of Representatives and Senate, and so not being in a position to block what Trump might do that would be against the interest of the US capitalist class as a whole. In fact, their strategy is just as much aimed at this as at electing Harris as President so that, if she loses, they will still be able to block Trump doing something the section of the US capitalist class they represent doesn’t want, such as abandoning Ukraine or starting a world tariff war.

Trump is portrayed by some of those who support Harris as a ‘fascist’ who wants to install himself as dictator. This is an exaggeration for vote-catching purposes. A more sober assessment is given by one of Trump’s economic advisers, Stephen Moore of the notorious right-wing think-tank The Heritage Foundation. When asked what Trump would do if elected President again, he said that ‘Trump would be pragmatic in office and focus on the needs of business to drive economic growth’ (tinyurl.com/2n4ftxp3). Perhaps not so different, then, than what the new Labour government here has said is its approach.

Tiny Tips (2024)

The Tiny Tips column from the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Billionaire wealth has risen by more than 1,000 percent since 1989, with the number of billionaires tripling to 164 since 2010. Over the same period, the average worker lost £10,200 through wage suppression enforced through record-low strike activity policed by the trade union bureaucracy. One-fifth of people in the UK live in poverty, and 25 percent of all children. Nearly 3 million rely on food banks. For the poorest 10 percent of UK households, living standards have fallen by 20 percent compared with 2019–20—a drop in income of £4,600. 

(WSWS, tinyurl.com/mjajcj6m)

Pastor Mboro is a self-styled prophet with thousands of followers across South Africa. He has claimed to perform miracles such as healing people during sermons and delivering a fish from the womb of a pregnant woman. 

(BBC tinyurl.com/58t68xuj)

The book begins with a poignant reminder that we are all migrants: ‘Even if you are not a migrant, your ancestors were. If they had not migrated, you would not be alive’. 

(Impact Investor, tinyurl.com/4xuemy6c)

I meet Najwa Abdul Awa, holding an image of her dead son. I ask her if she’s scared about what might be around the corner. ‘Of course not’, she replies with a smile. ‘I sent my first son for martyrdom with pride. And I’m willing to send my second and my third son too. We will not stop, she says, until Israel vanishes’. 

(Sky News, tinyurl.com/mxx8rm33)

The pro-Palestinian organizers gathered for ‘coffee with comrades’ …The main speaker, a University of Massachusetts Amherst PhD candidate, took the stage. He donned a keffiyeh and a Cuban Communist Party cap emblazoned with a red star, and began discussing readings by Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Leila Khaled, a former Palestinian militant and first woman to hijack an airplane. ‘Our political system is falling apart’, William Chaney, the PhD candidate, said in an interview just before his lecture began. ‘If we want to leave the world better, we have to look back and learn lessons’.

 (Boston Globe, tinyurl.com/5ductrb3)

In America, 1 in 4 cancer patients go bankrupt or lose their homes because of the outrageously high cost of care and 68,000 die a year because they can’t afford healthcare. 

(Common Dreams, tinyurl.com/wptkejj2)

… the great lie of nationalism: the fact that there is no organic bond between an ethnic group and a specific terrain, that no stretch of soil belongs by divine or natural right to those who speak a particular language or have a certain skin-colour. The country was never yours to claim back. Immigrants haven’t robbed you of what was never your property in the first place. 

(UnHerd, tinyurl.com/2d8a9ah2)

In general, human beings are remarkably altruistic. Rather than feeling destructive impulses, most of us feel a natural impulse to help others, to nurture their development and alleviate suffering. 

(The Conversation, tinyurl.com/2u85xn4w)

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

Halo Halo! (2024)

The Halo Halo! column from the October 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Russian priests have joined a long list of various clergymen of various nations in their channelling Bob Dylan’s With God On Our Side. Giving a blessing to a nuclear weapon is possible even though such arms ‘have tremendous destructive power’, Konstantin Tatarintsev, an archpriest of the Russian Orthodox Church, and first deputy head of the Synodal Department for the Armed Forces and Law Enforcement Services, told RIA Novosti (August). Sanctifying something that ‘sows death’ might normally be considered ‘unacceptable,’ [not normally, always], he said. Nuclear arms are also ‘the weapons of containment’, he explained. Their purpose is to ensure that no other nations that possess such weapons could use them against Russia, adding that ‘it is a guarantee of peace’. Mutually Assured Destruction.

According to Tatarintsev, the prayer used to bless a weapon goes back to the Middle Ages. It places a personal spiritual responsibility on its wielder not to misuse it for evil ends. He also said that pretty much any weapon, including the nuclear triad, can be considered ‘sacred’ when it is used to protect ‘our fatherland and the holy sites located on its territory’.

#    #    #    #

Worshippers in Ohio have been left stunned after a 75 year-old statue of the Virgin appeared to blink as they gazed upon her – with photos capturing the mysterious moment. The International Pilgrim Virgin Statue of Our Lady of Fatima was making its way across the region as part of a tour when it allegedly shut and open its eyes on 2 August while on display at the Basilica of St. John the Baptist. [Allegedly being the operative word.] The statue has visited more than 100 countries, including Russia and China, and is believed to be the closest likeness of a documented apparition of Mary in 1917 said to be ‘worthy of belief’ by the Catholic Church. Many who have visited the statue have since claimed they’ve witnessed medical miracles, including a young boy some believe was cured of malaria (Daily Mail, 10 August 2024).

This recalls a piece in the September 2023 Halo column which bears repeating:

Does anyone remember the Only Fools and Horses episode, The Miracle of Peckham, where Del Boy scams money from exploiting a weeping statue of Mary in the local church? The ‘miracle’ occurs because the lead of the church roof has been nicked and when it rains the water drips down and off the face of the statue. Has the Pope seen this episode and is it one of his favourites?

Miracles don’t happen! The pontiff has been berating his flock for believing in ‘miracles’ and weeping Madonnas in particular. ‘Apparitions of the Virgin Mary are “not always real”, he said, in what appears to be an indirect reference to a woman who drew thousands of pilgrims to pray before a statue that she claimed shed tears of blood.’ ‘The Madonna has never drawn [attention] to herself,’ he said (Guardian, 4 June 2023).

Who are the biggest charlatans? The Catholic church or those preying upon unthinking believers?

DC

Labour landslides: then and now (2024)

From the October 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

It was to no one’s surprise that a Labour government was elected in 2024. The Tory administration was falling apart, the opinion polls were deafening, and Labour presented itself as ready to take over. On the other hand, it was to everyone’s surprise that a Labour government was elected in 1945. Britain was one of the allied powers that had defeated Hitler with its highly popular Conservative prime minister ready to continue in office, there were no opinion polls to take into account, and the only experience the Labour Party had previously had of power was brief and bitter. And yet, in the July 1945 election, what happened would nowadays be called a landslide – for Labour. Can what happened to Labour then and in the years that followed be compared to what is happening to it now and may happen in the future?

Welfare state

It is often said that Labour’s triumph in 1945 shocked its leader, Clement Attlee, who claimed that he had seen reducing the Conservative majority as his best hope. But rather than depending on the views or hopes of political leaders, election results, as has often been demonstrated, hinge more on what has been called ‘a readiness for change’ among the electorate. And this is the likely explanation here. The report drawn up by the Liberal Party’s Sir William Beveridge in 1942 proposed what it called ‘social insurance’ for the British population, a plan for the state to provide social security (eg, sickness and unemployment pay, old-age pensions, free healthcare) for everyone. This was followed in 1944 by a government committee recommending the nationalisation of services such as gas and electricity.

The Labour Party was enthusiastic about the programme, calling it a new ‘welfare state’, while the Conservatives were lukewarm. And this may well have been the main driver of the electorate’s preference for Labour. The way George Orwell put it, in an article published in late 1945, was that Labour had seized an opportunity it did not create. At the same time Orwell expressed doubt that Labour would end up delivering on all of its manifesto, which proclaimed:

‘The Labour Party is a Socialist Party, and proud of it. Its ultimate purpose at home is the establishment of the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain—free, democratic, efficient, progressive, public-spirited, its material resources organized in the service of the British people.’

What then happened when Labour came to power is a matter of historical record. Coal, gas, electricity, iron and steel, railways, civil aviation, telecommunications and the Bank of England were nationalised with full compensation to their previous owners.

General state benefits for the unemployed, sick and aged were brought in. A National Health Service was established supplying health care free of charge with staff at hospitals becoming government employees. There is no doubt that these represented significantly beneficial change for the vast majority of British workers.

However, even though the Labour Party had proclaimed itself to be ‘a Socialist Party’, this was certainly not socialism in the sense we understand it as a society of free access to all goods and services. In fact Labour now in office made no attempt to challenge the existing social order of capitalism, whereby the vast majority of the wealth was owned by a tiny minority and production and distribution of the means of life took place on the basis of profit rather than need. What it sought to do in fact was to make that order more secure by suggesting to workers that, via nationalisation, they had more of a stake in it and that, with ‘social security’, protest and challenge to the existing system were unnecessary since, whatever their circumstances, they could rely on being looked after ‘from the cradle to the grave’.

Downhill

In reality the unspoken rationale of Labour’s ‘welfare state’ was to try to make production more efficient and more cost effective by the state having more control over it and to remove unnecessary hindrances to workers’ productivity by trying to create a more benign form of capitalism. Yet none of this could prevent the usual crises that beset the market system from presenting themselves. After an initial ‘honeymoon’ period, prices began to rise causing workers to press for wage increases and to industrial unrest. Labour’s response was a policy of ‘wage restraint’, which brought it into collision with striking workers, leading, for example, to the use of troops to replace dockers for unloading ships.

Later things went further downhill when there was a financial crisis and a run on the pound led to devaluation and further price rises. And, with the ‘free’ health service becoming unpredictably expensive, plans were made for charges to be brought in for prescriptions as well as for NHS dentures and spectacles. As it all unravelled, it became increasingly clear, if it had not been already, that no Party committed to running the buying and selling system of capitalism in any form could adjust it to work in the interests of the majority class in society, those obliged to sell their energies to an employer for a wage or salary in order to survive. Yet this was evidently not clear enough to most members of that majority class – the working class – when in 1951, if with no great enthusiasm, they voted capitalism’s other team, the Tories, back into office. Never more than on that occasion did the words of the old socialist dictum ring true: ‘Governments are not elected, they are dismissed’.

Landslide to where?

That’s something that can also be said of the outcome of this year’s election. No one would claim that that there was any great love among the electorate for Keir Starmer and his Labour Party, yet this time too, as in 1945, Labour gained a landslide victory over the outgoing Tories. What this showed is that, as ever in capitalism, governments – in this case the Tories – do not control the system they are meant to manage. The system, or to be more specific, the market, which is its beating heart, has a mind of its own, an unpredictable one, and all governments can do is tinker at its edges and hope that somehow such tinkering will keep the pieces in place. If they try anything too drastic, it is very likely to make the situation worse, as Prime Minister Truss found to her – and her party’s – cost just a short time ago.

So how is Starmer who, like his Labour counterparts did in 1945, has called himself a socialist, planning to tinker? His election manifesto, ‘Our Plan to Change Britain’, held out such promises as ‘a rebuilding of our country, so that it once again serves the interests of working people’, ‘to drag my Party away from the dead end of gesture politics and return it once more to the service of working people’, and ‘to kickstart economic growth by reforming Britain’s economy’. It’s obviously quite unclear what all this means – if anything. But in stating that ‘the economy is about things like money, businesses and buying and selling things’, it is clear what kind of society he’s wedded to.

And what does another of his promises, to ‘focus on long-term strategy, not short-term distractions’, mean? How, in fact, in the hurly-burly of capitalist politics, can any party focus on much more than ‘short-term distractions’? After just a few weeks in power, in fact, Labour are already finding themselves having to face a whole cluster of ‘short-term distractions’ – race riots and a dearth of places for offenders in prisons already full to bursting, a potential ‘run on the pound’ leading them to scrap the winter fuel allowance for pensioners who may already struggle to put the heating on, and cash-strapped universities on the verge of bankruptcy. They’re blaming the previous Tory administration for leaving ‘a black hole in the economy’, and they’re saying, despite all the fine rhetoric in their manifesto, that ‘things will get worse before they get better’ and that we must ’accept short-term pain for long-term good’. They are clearly not about to have the same ‘honeymoon’ period’ as their counterparts in the 1940s.

Alternative team

So how do the two Labour governments – the 1945 one and the 2024 one – compare? The earlier one came to office in the shadow of the 1930s’ economic depression and then six years of war, and so virtually any steps it took were perceived as representing more stability and security than Britain’s workers previously had. But after 3-4 years of what has been called ‘rebuilding space’, the reality of capitalism’s priorities set in and led to it losing the favour of the electorate and being dismissed from office in 1951. The current Labour government, as we have seen, seems to be running into trouble more quickly than its post-war predecessor, again under the pressures of needing to give priority to profit-making over meeting people’s needs. Yet it would be premature to predict that it will be less or more long-lived than the 1945 government, since we cannot foresee the precise effects that the twists and turns of the market system will have on the alternative team for managing British capitalism that is currently in office.

Howard Moss

New translation of Das Kapital (2024)

Book Review from the October 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capital. Critique of Political Economy, volume 1. By Karl Marx. Translated by Paul Reitter. (Princeton University Press. £24.50.)

The fruit of five years’ work, Paul Reitter’s new translation of Das Kapital was published last month. It lives up to its claim to be a translation into colloquial (American) English, especially as regards the descriptive and historical parts. It really does read like something written this century as opposed to the now rather clunky original 1887 translation by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling under Engels’s direction.

However, there are some words that cannot be said to be colloquial, in particular valorization, metabolize and subsumption which don’t appear in the 1887 translation and, in the case of the first two, could not have done. They first appeared in the 1976 Penguin translation by Ben Fowkes. Reitter has added a fourth — thingly. The 1887 version translates them as, respectively, ‘production of surplus value’, ‘material change (or circulation)’, and ‘subjection’. These are clearly more colloquial. As to thingly, this was translated as ‘material’, but most people will probably read it as ‘thingy’, which won’t be too wide of the mark.

Reitter has taken great care and there can be no doubt that his translations here are an accurate literal translation of the native German words, but, as with all translations, the question is who is the translation for. At one time Capital was read and studied in the working class movement. Now, unfortunately, it is read mainly by academics in the field of Marx studies. For them, such words present no problem and interpreting their meaning provides ample room for learned disputations, and, for those whose first language is English, puts them in a position to follow the arguments by those whose first language is German. Fair enough, but they don’t make it easier for ordinary working-class militants who want to understand how capitalism works and how they are exploited.

Metabolism is now acceptable and perhaps subsumption too but not valorization. It hardly existed in 1887 and is now used, in economics, to mean the same as ‘monetarization,’ making money out of something. Of course this is what capital is used for too but so are many other things that have nothing to do with workers being used to produce surplus value for capitalists (and all to do with putting a price on everything). The word ‘valorization’ blunts, even obscures, that what’s involved is the exploitation of workers.

For example, in Reitter’s (and Fowkes’s) translation, the title of the chapter which introduces the concept of surplus value is ‘The Labor Process and the Valorization Process’. In the 1887 translation it’s ‘The Labour Process and the Process of Producing Surplus Value’. Further, even of itself, ‘valorization’ doesn’t bring out in a clear and immediately comprehensible way what Marx was getting at. The 1887 translation defines capital as ‘self-expanding value’, which conveys the idea of capitalist production as a spontaneous process of producing surplus value. For Reitter, it is ‘self-valorizing value’. Thus, Reitter’s ‘capital’s life process is nothing but its own movement as self-valorizing value’ (p. 280) compares unfavourably, in terms of easier understanding, with 1887’s ‘the life-process of capital consists only in its movement as value constantly expanding, constantly multiplying itself’ (end of the chapter on ‘The Rate and the Mass of Surplus-Value’).

This is not to dismiss the usefulness of Reitter’s work. Not at all. You just need to read ‘expansion of value’ every time the words ‘valorization’ or ‘valorize’ occur. His translation reads well and is accompanied by 50 pages of very useful end-notes to explain his choice of words as well as Marx’s citations (in Latin, Greek, French and Italian) and references to now obscure persons. It will stand the test of time and can be recommended for those who want to read in modern English Marx’s own exposition of his abstract-labour theory of value and his description, from a working-class point of view, of how the working class in England came into being, its working and living conditions in and up to the 1860s, and struggles to limit the working day.

It is unfortunate that the publishers haven’t let readers simply read Marx in his own words. Instead they have chosen to introduce the new translation with both a 15-page Foreword and a 30-page Editor’s Introduction, both claiming to set out what Marx meant. Both are decidedly unhelpful and undermine the rest of the book. The Preface is mainly gibberish by someone who dismisses as ‘fantasy’ what she calls ‘a perfectly rational, controlled and transparent communist political economy on the far side of a capitalist epoch’; according to her, Capital is a work of philosophy, a ‘deep ontological and epistemological critique of capitalism’. The Editor, too, sees Marx as basically a philosopher and opines that in Capital ‘nowhere really does Marx condemn the capital system or call for revolution’. But, then, both of them are philosophers who only want to interpret the world.

Reitter’s translation is of the 2nd German edition (1873), the 1887 translation is of the 3rd German edition (1883) while Fowkes’s was of the 4th German edition (1890). So now all three German re-editions are available in English. Not that there is any significant difference between them. One inconvenience, though, is that the chapter numbers in Reitter’s translation don’t always correspond to those in the other two which readers in English of Marx have become used to.

Adam Buick

Blogger's Note:

The April 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard carried a review of Ben Fowkes' translation of Capital by the same reviewer.

Alan Johnstone (2024)

From the October 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Readers will have noticed that there have been no articles for a while from ALJO who wrote the Material World column and was a prolific contributor to our blog. We ourselves have not heard from him in Thailand for well over a year.

Alan joined the Edinburgh Branch in 1970 while a teenager and rejoined in 2003. Before his retirement he worked for Royal Mail and was an active member of the Communication Workers Union.

If anyone has any information about him or his whereabouts could they please get in touch with us.

Party News: three leaflets (2024)

Party News from the October 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

To end the rage, end capitalism

The media love it when racists riot, because disaster sells.

There’s less interest in the real story, of cooperation, of solidarity against racism, of mutual support, shown by the vast majority of people.

People like you, here at this event.

There are those who say that humans are by nature greedy, selfish and cruel, and that peaceful and cooperative co-existence will never be possible.

That’s nothing but an excuse to justify a violent, warring system that, deep down, we all hate, in which billionaires lounge on their yachts while the rest of us scrape by, obey their stupid laws, and do all the hard work of running society.

It’s capitalism that drives many to a nameless rage they take out on innocent people around them through racism, homophobia and domestic violence.

And it’s capitalism that has become, to quote campaigner George Monbiot, ‘a weapon pointed at the world’, a system of runaway profiteering that is threatening our collective survival.

It’s time to declare we’ve hit peak capitalism.

We can do so much better.

We have the tech and the know-how to upgrade to a sustainable world of democratic common ownership, with no nation states, leaders, rich elites or money.

Making everything free will make everyone free.

Making everyone free will end the rage.

If you want this, say so – tell people you want to move beyond capitalism, because you’ll be surprised how many agree with you.

And contact us to help get the message out.

– Leaflet handed out at ongoing anti-racism events.

Green capitalism? No chance!

We need rational stewardship of the biosphere for our survival.

But the world is in the hands of a tiny capitalist minority, all in furious competition with each other to stay ahead of the pack.

All their grubby investment decisions are taken in private and only for profit. There’s no overall rationality, no ‘grand design’. It’s a crazy casino.

Environmentalists say you can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet, and that’s true. So can we tame the casino? Can we magically rig capitalism so it pursues only modest or even zero growth?

That would be a feat for the ages, like turning a tiger vegetarian, or convincing a Great White shark to give back to the community.

Capital only wants to do one thing, make a profit, faster and faster, on and on, and bugger the externalities. You’ll never make it change. You’ll never make it green.

The only way to get rational stewardship is to get rid of capitalism.

We need to take the world into collective democratic ownership, with no market system or production for profit, and no rich class of irresponsible gamblers to ruin it for the rest of us.

– Leaflet handed out at Green Party Conference in September.

Against all capitalism’s wars

Why this war with all the death and destruction wars bring? It’s not, as it might seem, another example of an undying enmity between two groups – Jews and Arabs – but a fight between different capitalist factions over land, resources and strategic routes. And not just between the government of Israel and the Hamas regime in Gaza. The greater issue is who controls the oilfields in the Persian Gulf and the trade route out of it, with Israel being supported by the West to counter the threat from Iran and Iran promoting militant Islamism to undermine Israel.

In Gaza, the Hamas organisation, who are both anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic, came to power via elections in 2007 with the stated aim ‘to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine’. But that was the end of any form of democracy there and, in their time in office, they have crushed multiple protests by rivals, expelling their officials to make sure there would never be a round of elections and killing dozens of their own people, many of them civilians. During that time the people of Gaza have been plunged increasingly into poverty with, for example, 40 percent unemployment, with their leaders enriching themselves assisted by backers from other Arab countries and enjoying multi-million-dollar land deals, luxury villas and black market fuel from Egypt.

The continuing oppression by Israel (a country by the way where 25 percent of households live on the poverty line) has also of course been a significant factor, as its government has sought to facilitate the enrichment of its own capitalist class by grabbing land and keeping a tight lid on protest. Now the lid has come off- and in the most horrific way.

There is no excuse for the horrors unleashed on innocent people by Hamas nor for Israel’s savage retaliation, killing thousands, attacking hospitals, depriving a land of food, water and power and flattening its infrastructure regardless of what may happen to the inhabitants in the short and long term. No wonder there are calls for a ceasefire to alleviate the sufferings of the people of Gaza.

Of course Israel’s government will support its own capitalist class to the hilt – after all that is its role. And it is all part of a playbook, which we see played out time and time again as governments representing their capitalist classes fail to resolve conflicts by diplomacy and resort to horrifying violence. We can only repeat the same thing we have always said when this has happened – that workers (in this case Arab and Israeli ones) have no interest in fighting one another but have a common interest in uniting with workers throughout the world to abolish capitalism and establish socialism, a world without borders where the Earth’s resources will belong to all humanity and are used to produce what people need, not profits for the few who currently own and control these resources.

– Leaflet handed out at anti-Gaza War protests.

SPGB October Events (2024)

Party News from the October 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our general discussion meetings are held on Zoom. To connect to a meeting, enter https://zoom.us/wc/join/7421974305 in your browser. Then follow instructions on screen and wait to be admitted to the meeting.

*Update*

Tonight's SPGB Zoom Meeting.

"Lenin: Anti-Tsarist revolutionary who succeeded or revolutionary socialist who failed?"

Speaker Adam Buick

4th October 7.30pm (Greenwich Mean Time)

#Socialism #Lenin  #SPGB

To join the meeting click https://zoom.us/j/7421974305

Onward, Christian soldiers (1977)

From the October 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

“The armed forces must be prepared to play a new rôle in enforcing democracy in Britain should the present system of government break down.” Thus, the Very Reverend John Field Lister, the Provost of Wakefield Cathedral, as reported in the Yorkshire Post of 15th July.

This gem of current religious philosophy was delivered on the occasion of the laying-up of the regimental colours of the First Battalion of the Coldstream Guards at Wakefield Cathedral. He went on to say: “More and more nations are finding that government is almost impossible to carry out. This may be because democracy is a Christian concept and that without it, it cannot succeed.

“When governments break down, then we have seen in one country after another that the military have to be brought in. It might well be that in the years which lie before us the armed forces will have a new and different rô1e to play, and how important that role will be.” There followed some all-too-familiar references to the power of the unions, the possibility of a general strike, etc., etc.

It is to be hoped that the guardsmen on the receiving end of this will have learned something about their function in the eyes of supporters of the capitalist class. They are themselves members of that same working class they may be ordered to suppress.

Richard Cooper

So They Say: The Reason Why (1977)

The So They Say Column from the October 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Reason Why

A bewildered assistant is no assistant at all; the Conservatives have got one of theirs, Margot Lawrence, “flummoxed”. Judging by her contribution to the columns of the Daily Telegraph on the 30th August, this is probably no difficult achievement in any event. She became concerned to clarify the “highly emotive phrase” “production for use, not profit”, which some dastardly Socialists argue from time to time. Writing under the title “Isn’t production for profit?” she is puzzled why the Conservatives are “failing to use the strongest argument in their own book”:

That production for use is production for profit, the two are intertwined and inseparable.

Notwithstanding Margot Lawrence’s view that “almost all people do have enough money for what they really need”, we suggest that one of the reasons the rest of the Conservative Party does not argue along the lines she proposes is that such a contention could not be sustained.

Production in capitalist society is carried on because the owners of the means of production realize a profit from selling their commodities. All of these commodities are considered useful by the purchaser, whether they be the lawn-mowers used as an illustration in the article or weapons of mass destruction used in war. When production in certain fields would be unprofitable however, no owner will advance capital for such production. Vast numbers of the world’s population do not starve because food would not be “useful”, they starve because it is unprofitable to feed them.

When the Socialist says “production for use”, he is saying: abandon the form of society in which society’s needs are assessed in terms of the minority’s requirement for profit.

Problems and . . . More Problems

We give below two excerpts from newspapers which illustrate this particular point. Capitalism has an apparently uncanny ability to produce social problems. A study of the foundations on which it is based show in fact that it cannot fail to do otherwise. Although it would be naive to suggest that Socialist society will not face problems, we will be able to devote our fullest efforts towards solving them and preventing new problems from arising.

In capitalism we have surely reached a pinnacle of absurdity when the means are available to solve, for instance, the problem of starvation, but the possible avenues for tackling the first problem, through only partial application, create a “problem” of precisely the opposite nature. We are sometimes asked what Socialism will be like: we can predict now that the newspapers of Socialism will not need to carry items like these.

The Community [EECJ is being chased by an ever-increasing milk surplus. It is about to operate what is described in the jargon of Brussels as a “corresponsibility levy”, in other words a penalty against farmers for producing too much milk . . . Milk is a tiresome commodity for the EEC to handle since it is expensive to store and difficult to sell to anybody else . . . the official intervention stores are often the only outlet for it.

The Times, 5th September 77

Asia’s major hope for future development, the “green revolution”, is now failing to keep pace with the rapid growth ir. population, and this will condemn a quarter of mankind to continued poverty,, hunger, malnutrition and unemployment.

The Times, 6th September 77

First Things First

The well known Conservative bull-frog, Reginald Maudling, has been croaking on the difficulties faced by industrialists because of the governing consideration of profitability. The aforementioned Margot Lawrence would do well to note his passionate comments. Mr. Maudling, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, had this to say in a published letter:

With the possible exception of the strike-ridden motor car industry, it seems to me clear that potential supply is far greater than existing demand. Maybe potential supply has been reduced by discouraging investment, but there is no doubt whatsoever from every bit of evidence that emerges from industry, that what is holding back supply at the moment is not capacity, but inadequate demand.

The Times, 2nd September 77

He was writing a week before Ford Motor Company’s decision to build an £180m engine plant in South Wales, but even so his comments do not seem so wide of the mark, as Ford is making it clear “that the new plant did not point to plans for a huge increase in total car production”.

The problem of “inadequate demand" seems an odd one at first glance. Can this be anything other than a campaign of stubbornness by members of the working class? Why, at the present moment the majority are forced to live in circumstances where the watchword is Cheapness; one-and-a-half million of the blighters are out of work entirely. You would think they were able to make plenty of “adequate” demands for the sake of the frustrated industrialists. “Ah, but wait a minute,” will say the latter. "They may have plenty of demands —but have they got the money to go with them?”

Miracle Man

It may not be the second coming, but it is a present-day equivalent. When the Associated Television Corporation began making their fiction-film Jesus of Nazareth, we recall Lew Grade, the group chairman and chief executive, muttering about it being made because it would be meaningful, important and so on. Some may have mistakenly imagined these comments related to the content of the film.

Zeffirelli’s majestic production of ‘Jesus of Nazareth" was first shown in this country on Palm Sunday, 3rd April 1977. It achieved immediate success both at home and abroad. In Britain, the audiences amounted to 21 million viewers; in the USA to over 91 million and in Italy 84 per cent saw the film. I have no hesitation in saying that this film, representing ATV's largest single film-production investment, will prove an asset of inestimable wealth to the company and provide a valuable annuity over the years to come.

The Times 8th September 1977

Lord Grade (as he is now called) had taken a full page advertisement to publicise ATV’s results. Although he refers to the “inestimable wealth” resulting from the film, share-holders like to have their information in more precise terms.

The results speak from themselves. The pre-tax profit figure is £11,161,000, the highest in the 22 years history of the company, and shows an increase of 81 per cent over 1976.

Thus we learn, in the words of the good book, exactly what it shall profit a man.

Tony D'Arcy

50 Years Ago: Does capitalism need the House of Lords (1977)

The 50 Years Ago column from the October 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

For years we have warned the workers against the danger of Labour Governments. Capitalism can be administered, as regards essentials, only in one way—the Capitalist way . . . The Queensland railwaymen [employed in a nationalized industry] tried to help some workers who were on strike in the sugar industry. The “Labour” Government met this sympathetic action by dismissing the 11,000 railway employees, and was able to force them to desert the strikers and go back to work. Thus Queensland is vindicated as a territory which is still safe for Capitalism.

#    #    #    #

For those who imagine that the existence and powers of a House of Lords are questions of first-class importance, it is useful to remember that Queensland long ago abolished its Upper House. When it is necessary to crush revolt among the workers, a single chamber in the hands of a “Labour” Government in Queensland can be as drastic and as brutal as anything England or the U.S.A. can show, and what is of more importance from a Capitalist standpoint, it can act so much more promptly than can a cumbersome two-chamber system.

[From an editorial "Capitalism in Queensland—Ferocious Labour Government". Socialist Standard, October 1927.]

Letter: Sitting duck rules (1977)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sitting duck rules

Thank you for publishing my letter plus your reply. However, I'm afraid that good at criticizing the status quo (who isn’t? It’s a sitting duck) you weaken completely when asked for your alternative.

Without money, how can it be decided whether I’m to have the use of a pair of low-quality, plastic shoes (the present reality), or of a Rolls Royce (which, of course, I richly deserve)?

Without the need for money, how on earth am I (and a few million others) going to get up and go to work each day?

Politics is the art of the possible and. having recently exceeded the allotted three-score and ten, the SPGB should seriously consider what Marx and Engels would think, say and do were they here today.

With or without class and money, the tough-minded people—the aggressive, assertive minority—will pursue their interests at the expense of the rest, who have neither the energy nor courage to oppose them. What humanity needs most is for the powerful and influential, in all walks of life, to decide to co-operate with each other for the good of all.

Allan Bula

Guildford

Reply:

Though you speak of money as an indispensable facility, on your own evidence it is not: instead of enabling you to get things, it prevents you from doing so. How was it “decided” that you have low-grade plastic shoes? Obviously, you want better ones but your choice is nullified by your pay-packet. Nor does the capitalist class or the government "decide” that you shall have only so much money. The government (any government) would like to have everyone in work, well paid and contented; it does not choose but is forced into policies which have the opposite effects. For the capitalist class as a whole, workers are customers. Each capitalist would like all the others’ employees to have plenty of money to buy his wares; but he must try to keep his own employees’ wages down. No "decision” is made. It is the way capitalism operates.

You need to reason this out. The sellers of wealth are the owners of it. If common ownership existed, there would be no owning class; the means of living and the products would belong to everyone. Can you explain what basis there would be for buying and selling, and what function money could possibly have? As for its being an incentive, you clearly see it as the reward of labour. Yet you acknowledge (see above) that it provides an inadequate reward for you. We are saying that Socialism would provide incomparably better material rewards, and therefore as much incentive as you need.

Without class there are no interests and no powerful people: power is political. Since a class society produces competing interests, it is impossible for "the powerful and influential” to co-operate "for the good of all” (you say this yourself in the preceding sentence). But society has been and is ruled by so-called strong men, and the .result in your own words is that the status quo is “a sitting duck”—i.e. has almost nothing to be said in its favour. Why do you think it will be different in the future? Socialists take the realistic attitude that a change of rulers makes no difference because the problems are produced by the class structure of capitalist society. Your view is the Utopian one.

Editors.

Letter: Class and Ideology (1977)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Class and Ideology

You accused Harold Walsby of holding that the working class is "mentally inferior”. Challenged to support this you produce statements that the working class does not understand or accept Socialism. But in order to show that Walsby held them to be mentally inferior you have to show him saying or implying that some other group is mentally superior to it. You have failed to support your accusation.

You describe as "absurd” my statement that “in acceptance or rejection of Socialism there is no significant difference between workers and capitalists”. My evidence is that although the majority of capitalists do not accept Socialism, a tiny majority do accept it. Similarly with the workers. Although the overwhelming majority of workers do not accept it, a tiny minority do, and show this by belonging to the SPGB.

It will be more fruitful to try and get to the root of the difference between Walsby and the SP. It is not the case that the working class accepts Socialism and the capitalist class opposes it. Class position does not correspond with acceptance or rejection of Socialism, and is not coming to do so. What does determine it? The ideology of the person concerned. All of us begin life with the same ideology. Some of us move on to a more sophisticated one, some of those to a more sophisticated one still, and so on. The result is the existence of a number of ideological groups forming, very roughly, a pyramid. The SPGB is the political expression of an ideology very close to the top of the pyramid, an ideology, therefore, with a very small group attached to it.

If a person possessing this ideology hears the Socialist case, he will probably accept it. A person possessing any other ideology will reject the case; it does not "fit” his ideology. This is why, whenever an SP branch is started in a "new” town it usually reaches a size comparable with that of established branches and then stops growing; all the people of the appropriate ideology in that area have been "collected”. Over seventy years the SP has proven that it is impossible to get a majority of Socialists. Walsby’s theory explains why this is, and opens the way, through recognition of the ideological structure of present society, to solution of our main social problems.

Geo. W. Walford

London N1.

Reply:

You acknowledge that Walsby held that the majority of workers would never understand Socialism, but object to our identifying this with the view that they are “mentally inferior”; we must show what other group he compared them with, you say. From Walsby’s writings, let us take the original quotation used in our January article: “an established fact—namely, that the average human intelligence is on the decline”, followed by a sentence accusing the SPGB of vacillating over "whether the workers have or have not the intelligence to establish Socialism”. "Decline” can only mean that the workers at a given time are inferior to a previous generation.

In your own statements, comparisons implying superiority and inferiority are made repeatedly. For example, the “more sophisticated ideology” and the "more sophisticated one still” which "some of us”—but not "the overwhelming majority of workers”—hold. You kindly place the SPGB “close to the top of the pyramid”, with the mass of the workers a long way down below. We do not think you are handicapped by language here: it would be possible to speak of a different ideology and a still more different one, and to use another geometrical shape if that was all you meant.

You misrepresent our answer to you on workers and capitalists. We pointed out (a) that most workers have not heard the Socialist case at all, and (b) that something more than minimal exposure to it is required as grounds for saying they have heard it and reject it. You accept that workers and capitalists are separate classes, but treat it statically; what is not mentioned in any of your three letters, although it was the starting-point of the article you criticized, is the class struggle.

None of us disputes "the existence in society of a number of ideological groups”. Where do they come from? The socialist case is that they arc produced by the class structure of society. A person raised in poverty has different assumptions and attitudes from those of a luxuriously-nurtured person. Of course further experience affects his attitudes; but that also is derived from a class-divided society. A capitalist may, as you suggest, accept Socialism as a system of ideas. That does not make him any less a capitalist, obliged to put his material interests before the “more sophisticated ideology” he may have acquired. (There are exceptional cases.)

The founders of the SPGB knew from earlier experience that the task they undertook was likely to be a slow one; other people, then and since, have understood Socialism but been unwilling to work for it for precisely that reason. Your thesis that a Party branch soaks up "all the people of the appropriate ideology” in its area is quite fantastic. Our branches, whether in suburbs or cities, would be pleased to have a situation in which this was tested—it would mean everyone had heard and considered the SPGB.

The remedy offered by Walsby and his followers for social problems consists of domination over the masses by intellectuals. We give three quotations.

Thus, in basing his ideas of achieving a scientifically controlled society upon an unconsciously motivated assumption—the mass-rationality assumption—the scientific intellectual is wasting much of his political time and energy. It is this assumption (with its associated repressed material) which today largely befogs the minds of those scientists—and others—who are striving for a society in which sub-atomic energy is no longer used for the destruction of man, but for his benefit and well-being.

("Atoms and Ideology” by Harold Walsby, in The New Age of Atomics)

Is the great mass of mankind through its inherent incapacity for scientific thought and understanding, doomed to eternal suffering?. . Concomitant with the rational superiority of these politically more enlightened people goes their inevitable numerical inferiority. Yet, year in and year out, with admirable though blind optimism and appalling ignorance as to the nature and structure of political development, they go on, fighting among themselves and vainly appealing to the masses with the same arguments and upon the same subject-matter which was instrumental in their own 'conversion.

(Understanding the Mass Mind, by Richard Tatham)

No longer are we confined to announcements as to how people ought to think, or as to the attitude they must adopt if civilisation is to be saved . . . not until this relationship between the intellectual and the mass is understood and accepted—and who is to do this if not the intellectuals? — will it become possible to control the development of society.

(The Intellectual and the People)

That takes us back to Plato, and men cast in higher moulds.

Editors.

Letter: Riches and poverty (1977)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Riches and poverty

One wonders what the inmates of London’s poorest streets find in common with the occupants of power in Buckingham Palace, for it was the humblest of homes that had the largest flags. Bunting hung from the houses that have been witness to cries of hungry families or the young and old in need of warmth. The monarchy never saw fit to look after the simplest needs of the working class outside its everyday use on the labour-profit market, or in war to fight under its flag for so-called freedom. The only freedom they (the state) cares about is its own safeguards—big business under the puppet system plus the old three party political collaborators. At the Guildhall we saw them feast luxuriously side by side with murderers from the Commonwealth, yet the very same wanted |to keep Amin out.

The Church of England are all part and parcel of this pomp for the Queen is its head. It has much in common with its stable-companion the Catholic dictatorship. The great wealth of the rich has only been built on deeds of plunder, piracy and wholesale murder and the wage-slave-profit market.

Until the real people cast their eyes and minds on the true and rightful road of Socialism, where all the everyday needs of life—food, light and heat, and a decent home free from the price and rent label for ever in a classless society dedicated to the welfare and health of all the people: this will be the highest law in the land. No longer will the evils of the money market be with us. That’s right, no banks, no profit-mongers, the end of the big business supermarkets. The network of landlords (private and state) will be an evil of the past—homes, like all building, will be for the use of the people not profit.

Once the abolition of money comes about, only then can you plan a rich and carefree future.

R. Bloomfield,

London SW8.

SPGB Meetings (1977)

Party News from the October 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard