Newbury — Let's bypass reformism
Dear Editors,
Last February I was tempted to attend a rally protesting about the proposed Newbury Bypass. This is a government road scheme brought about by local and regional business pressure for a quicker transport route via Newbury because the present route is having a negative effect on profits. Local business believes that a bypass around Newbury would reduce traffic and congestion, which at present is quite substantial and would thus increase their efficiency and profits.
It happens that I am sickened by this proposal. The new bypass will have a large and damaging effect on the environment. The road will pass through a government-designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and many other protected areas containing unique wildlife. Twelve unique archaeological sites will also be destroyed.
I didn’t attend this rally despite the temptation to stand with my fellow workers to try and stop this destructive scheme. I am not prepared to try and achieve small meaningless victories against the capitalists. Environmental factors will always come second to profits under capitalism and this is the essential problem.
At best the protests about the Newbury bypass may change its route or, if they are very lucky, may stop the scheme all together. But next week month or year where will the reformist protesters be? At another road protest, development protest, and law (e.g. Criminal Justice Bill) rally or possibly helping the thousands of homeless or maybe even helping the millions of people starving in the world? The list could go on forever because reforms will never eradicate capitalism’s inherent problems.
It saddened me that so much solidarity and so much organisation and commitment was being shown by workers for such a small and limited target. Just imagine if such activity was aimed at establishing socialism. The working class couldn’t help but sit up and listen to what we were saying despite media lies and other efforts by the capitalist class. One socialist is worth a million reformist rallies because the "left” can hold as many rallies as they like and make little difference to the ugly face of capitalism whilst one socialist is a clear step towards a society where such protests will not be necessary. In socialism there will be no conflict between profits and the environment and no conflict between the needs of people and profit because there won’t be production for profit.
Let's forget about reforms and work towards taking what is ours because only then will environmental destruction and all the rest of capitalism’s disasters stop occurring.
Forget about dulling the pains of the symptoms, let’s unite to cure the disease of capitalism.
Colin Skelly,
South Ascot, Berks
It doesn’t have to be like this
Dear Editors,
We have a choice. But who are we? We are the working class, a majority suffering from the manipulation and intimidation of a privileged minority. Why do we let them get away with it? We have a choice!
They keep on telling us with their own devious brainwashing techniques, through schooling, university education methods and other more sophisticated types of propaganda, how to be good little citizens in this ever-changing world of technology.
How nice it would be if all the tales of leisure and pleasure were true; alas, for the majority of us. the reality could not be more harsh, despairing or demoralising.
I relate my own personal experience as a victim of the society which we all inhabit.
I have recently parted company with my employer of some six years, to find myself depending on state handouts to support my wife, two children, mortgage etc. A story familiar, no doubt, to many thousands of families. My income more than halved.
The irony is that with less money now than I have ever had in the last 16 years of selling my mental and physical skills to the highest bidder, not forgetting the necessity to purchase essentials like food to eat. clothes to keep warm, the feet remains that I have never—throughout my working life—experienced such feelings of overwhelming satisfaction, and pleasure which I derive from simple things in life (as we know it), like being able to go to a library, taking a stroll in the park, enjoying the local wildlife, all at no direct expense. The true value of some of the most breathtaking scenery in this otherwise spoiled, war-torn world is awesome.
I have just left behind sixteen miserable years of being stuck in a fume-filled factory churning out poxy pop group fly-posters, laboriously and repetitively standing in front of a manual hand-operated printing table, sometimes for up to fourteen hours a day, in order to achieve a decent wage to be able to "afford” essential commodities and appliances like cookers, washing machines, fridges, etc. or other less necessary items like portable CD players, and that other all-mod-con, the glorious television, on which programmes of interest are few and far between. I used to waste many an hour glued to the likes of Dale Winton, churning out his usual "camp” (or should it be crap) style of innuendo and obscenity. all in the name of entertainment.
The more I think and wonder at the complexity of the world-wide capitalist system which the majority of us have to endure, and the minority have on their side, the more I ask myself, why? Why do we continue to restrict ourselves to its unforgiving grasp?
It doesn’t have to be like this. We have the power, the resources, the technology and the communication skills to free ourselves from its relentless torture, but only we the working class can do it The master class will not volunteer to do it for us. They depend on our skills, our labour. Let us not be denied the true fruits of these labours. Throw down your shackles, fellow workers, rid this world of the ongoing bloodbath that we see. night after night on our TV screens.
P.E.
Scotland
Objection to military service project
Dear Editors,
I am at present preparing a project on changing attitudes in Britain to objection to military service. In particular the project would deal with objection to military service on political grounds. It would inevitably have to deal with the Socialist Party’s unique stance in this matter.
The project will contain original material not available elsewhere. It would be most helpful if any readers would be willing to give me access to any letters, diaries, recollections, or other material relating to experiences of objectors to military service whether in peace or in wartime. Please write to me at the address below. Also if anyone is willing to talk to me about their experiences would they please contact me by letter in the first instance.
Please write to: Gwynn Thomas, c/o History Common Room, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, Essex, C04 3SQ.
A policy of equalizing misery?
Dear Editors,
It is often stated by your writers’ commentary and your manifesto that one cannot criticize Marxism because it has never been practiced in the manner in which it was originally conceived. Putting aside the fact that such a statement is nothing more than a lame and covert attempt to shut off debate regarding the disadvantages of Marxism and socialism, I am writing to ask how you can justify your theory and what you would probably call the quasi-socialist or perhaps pseudo-socialist systems we have seen disintegrate since the fall of 1989. To be more precise, how do you explain the former USSR’s disintegration and the embracing of capitalism by formerly socialist regions, i.e. East Asia and S.E. Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe?
Consider this: in 1965, two-thirds of the world was decidedly socialist Today, three-quarters of the world is decidedly capitalist Capitalism has never self-destructed; nor does it appear to be on such a path as your theoretical doctrine always predicted. Instead, socialism, artificially supported by temporary subsidies, miserably collapsed from within.
Why is Sweden, as you reported in your summer of 1994 issues, approaching a level of debt equivalent to 120 percent of GDP? It certainly is not military spending. Indeed, it is the state's spending on social welfare policies which have bankrupted the one-time model welfare state in spite of the most confiscatory tax policies in Europe. Sweden has realised the hard way that it can no longer afford to provide a personal nurse for every wheelchair-bound citizen.
How do you explain the incredibly massive undertaking of Thatcherite privitization policies going on in France and Germany where 40 percent of the population used to work for the public sector? The answer seems to ring loud and clear everywhere; state-subsidised automotive, aerospace, telecom, banking and pharmaceutical industries could not break even, much less make a profit.
Economic growth is the greatest social priority. It allows for a level of self-reliance and prosperity which has empirically proven impossible in a socialist fraud of self-perpetuating transfer payments. The socialist experiment in confiscation and redistribution was criminal in its marginal tax rates of 98 percent on the last pound earned. How is anyone supposed to provide for himself if he can only keep 2p after 98p is confiscated by the government? Have you ever worked for a poor man?
It also seems to me useless for you to criticize New Labour. The Labour Party of the 70s was so held hostage to its now dead textbook and theory of Marxism that it blindly saw the market as an obstacle to success what with comments such as. “The company stinks and the Management stinks..." Now, however, the market is partly embraced by Labour as a partner, not a barrier, to success. Labour’s Keynesian approach to economics and public policy was thus thrown in the dustbin of history with the economic failures of the 70s. When your political culture fortunately changed, so did the vocabulary and context of the debate. This system of transfer payments can somehow sustain any country has been proven false over and over again in every country study you can possibly examine.
Socialism was relegated to the dustheap of history with the death of the British planned economy some twenty years ago. The ordinary citizen was shafted by socialism’s collectivist nightmare. something which was admired only by an élite few of intellectuals. What will you be saying and writing when 95 or 100 percent of the world is decidedly capitalist? Please answer these questions because the apparent reality is that your terribly theoretical mode of thinking will simply prove itself even more anachronistic and more irrelevant than it already is. The idea that capitalism would self-destruct and one would progress from capitalism to socialism was part of the self-licking ice lolly that you call your manifesto. As such, you are a minority within a minority which would like to be in the majority and the mainstream. but that has been an elusive “Mission Impossible".
Craig Thomson,
Falls Church,
Vermont USA.
Reply:
You may be a regular reader of the Socialist Standard but you clearly haven't taken much in. We never regarded Russia as being socialist—in fact we said right from the start that what the Bolsheviks were developing was a form of capitalism. State capitalism, to be precise. Nor have we ever advocated what you call "a Keynesian system of transfer payments" from rich to poor which the Labour Party once said it stood for—we predicted that this, too, would fail as capitalism just cannot be reformed so as to promote the welfare of the useful majority in society.
Ironically, you yourself confirm this last point by your comment on Sweden (which never was socialist either) that it "has realised the hard way that it can no longer afford to provide a personal nurse for every wheelchair-bound citizen”.
You don’t seem to realise the enormity of what you have conceded here. Every person in a wheelchair ought to be able to have the services of a personal nurse if they need one. but you are saying that this is impossible under capitalism. We agree with you, but you and us draw different conclusions. You see this as an argument for cutting back on welfare services. We see it as an argument for getting rid of capitalism. If capitalism can't afford comprehensive welfare services (which it can’t) then we can’t afford capitalism.
The reason why all the countries of the world are pursuing "Thatcherite" policies of privatisation and welfare cut-backs is. quite simply, to try to raise the rate of profit as a means of getting capitalism out of its current economic crisis.
As you correctly point out, governments are not actually engaged in the production of wealth, so their income has to come from taxing the wealth-creating sector of the economy. This taxation to pay for government spending ultimately falls on profits, but capitalism runs on profits. It is in fact variations in the rate of profit that determine the level of economic activity. A slump means that the rate of profit has fallen, and the only way out of a slump is through a rise in the rate of profit. Governments everywhere in recent years have been trying to do this by cutting back on their spending, so reducing the burden of taxation on profits (not always successfully, it has to be said).
This is the way capitalism works. It has to put making profits before meeting needs. It can work no other way. In this sense Thatcher was right to proclaim that “there is no alternative". Within capitalism there really is no alternative. In a wider context one does of course exist— but it lies outside capitalism, in establishing a society that will allow production to be geared to meeting people’s needs; which can only be on the basis of the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources. After all, how can we direct production towards meeting our needs if we don’t first own and control the means of production?
This is real socialism and has nothing in common with what has existed in Russia. Sweden or under Labour governments.
Editors
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