The failure of limited protest (1984)

From the June 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

For many thousands of workers the merest sight of Margaret Thatcher is enough to induce emotions of disgust and anger. The sound of her fur-lined, cultivated voice, mouthing those greed-based sentiments of the profit mentality, is enough to inspire curses in the working class imagination as ferocious in their intent as they are impotent in realisation. The clones who comprise the government, dancing like maladjusted puppets to the dogma of salvation through suffering, have led many workers to regard 1979 as the beginning of an epoch of despair: the age of Thatcherism.

Of course, they are wrong. Not about the undisguised defence of privilege exhibited by the grotesque face of Toryism; about that workers are right to feel sickened. But short memories will only lead to remedies which ignore what really needs to be remedied and. despite the distortion of history perpetrated by those who pretend that capitalism caused no problems before 1979. the fact is that workers had plenty to complain about when Thatcher was still an aspirant to Number Ten and James Callaghan was its inhabitant. Before 1979 there was unemployment: it doubled under the last Labour government; before 1979 there were cuts in public expenditure: all through the mid-seventies hospitals were being closed, social service provisions contracted and "Fight the Cuts" demos taking place; before 1979 there were strikes which were treated with all the foul contempt of capitalist government: the firemen, the non-unionised workers at Grunwick. the workers in the nationalised car and steel industry; the health and social service workers in the so-called Winter of Discontent — industrial problems did not start for them with “Thatcherism". Before 1979 there were nuclear weapons being produced on a frightening scale; indeed, it was the last Labour Cabinet, including Tony Benn, which secretly introduced Polaris behind the backs of their own MPs; before 1979 there were thousands of old people dying of cold each winter; before 1979 there were soldiers sent to fire rubber bullets on the streets of Belfast; before 1979 there were parents who could not afford to feed their children properly — indeed, Frank Field, then the head of the Child Poverty Action Group, wrote a pamphlet stating that children were worse off under the Labour government than they had been under the previous Tory one — he is now a Labour MP. Hard times did not begin for the workers in 1979 simply because one set of administrators of capitalism was replaced by another. Neither is it true to say that before the recession started life for workers was easy or happy. Capitalism never started turning rough for the working class — it always has been and it always will be.

Thatcherism, the phoney catchphrase of those who protest against the symptoms instead of the disease, is a meaningless, diversionary term. The assumption behind the assault on Thatcherism is that if only a less obnoxious gang of opportunists were running capitalism — and pretty well any would be less obnoxious — the system would inflict less hardship on the wage and salary earning class. That contention resembles the old leftist belief that if only Labour governments were led by decent chaps, as opposed to the opportunist rogues who always seem to be at the top, then Labour in office would perform miracles with capitalism. Socialists, in exposing the myth that social problems are caused by incompetent or insincere leaders, cannot over-emphasise the crucial point that governments do not control capitalism: it is the system which controls the governments. In short, those running the system are faced with a very limited set of choices about how to organise it, because the economic laws of capitalist exploitation are not susceptible to significant modification.

Governments running a system concerned above all else to ensure that rent, interest and profit are secured for the capitalist minority are bound to anger and frustrate workers. After all, workers have no real material interest in capitalist prosperity; indeed, the capitalists' privilege is obtained at the expense of our relative poverty. In Britain the richest ten percent own more than half of all the accumulated wealth and just one per cent own more between them than the poorest eighty per cent. There is a class division arising out of diametrically opposed material interests. Faced with a multitude of problems arising out of the system where production is for profit rather than need, workers become frustrated, angry and determined to do something to change things. Socialists depend on this active desire to change society: every worker who decides to do something to protest against the way things are — however misguided that action might be — is, at least, proof of the fact that workers are discontented and not brainwashed. After all, if workers were wholly contented and totally indoctrinated, there would not be any socialists.

Socialists stand in uncompromising opposition to reformism. We reject all attempts to make capitalism run efficiently from the working class point of view. That does not mean that we have nothing in common with reformist workers — in fact, we have much to agree about. They want change and so do we; they envisage the possibility of eradicating unpleasant features of society which conservatives say are inevitable, and so do we; they are anxious to alert their fellow workers to particular problems and so are we. Where is the big difference, then? Socialists are aware that the changes which reformists want are futile for three reasons: firstly, they are usually directed to just one problem of capitalism, leaving all the others intact and, even in relation to these "single issues”, the reformists are often willing to compromise (abolish nuclear bombs, but keep conventional ones, for example); secondly, the reformist is unaware of the fact that capitalism produces social problems as a matter of course, and that therefore it is as idealistic to seek to eradicate mass starvation without ending production for profit as it would be to abolish the spots without curing measles; thirdly, socialists want more than to make capitalism tolerable for the working class — we want to end capitalism and, in so doing, to abolish wage slavery as a permanent social condition for the vast majority of people.

The reformist answer to the case for revolution — it will have been going through some of our readers' minds as they looked at the three reasons we have stated for opposing reformism — is that, whatever its limitations, at least the reformists are doing something. Indeed, they are; they are voicing their frustration and that is no bad thing. But a man with a toothache who expresses his frustration by sending a petition to the optician is doing no more than diverting his energies from the practical solution which is to be found in the dentist's surgery. Of course, workers who are mugged and demand that the government publicly flogs criminals are doing something, as are women workers, who, feeling oppressed, conceive of liberation for them as the oppression of men by women. Wrong solutions to real frustration arising out of real problems will not change society.

Consider the hundreds — indeed, thousands — of social problems which could be listed; have the reformists been successful in removing them? Under both Labour and Tory governments unemployment has shot up. How many marches have there been demanding that the government ends unemployment? In the mid-1970s the Right To Work Campaign was formed in order to organise workers, especially the unemployed, for the purpose of demanding employment. The failure of that campaign — which has fallen to pieces — shows why the three socialist reasons for opposing reformism are valid: firstly, it was a single issue campaign, directed at solving one problem which was supposed to be the big problem —no attention was given to the nature of the work which workers would be employed to do, such as making bombs or doing monotonous tasks: all that was asked for was the "right to work”; secondly, the campaign confined itself to seeking change within capitalism, without recognising that there is no right to be employed in a society where production is monopolised by a class which will only pay wages or salaries if it is profitable for workers to be exploited; thirdly, the campaign limited itself to pleading to be employed, or exploited — a miserable and degrading achievement, even if it had been won. But the fact is that all the marches, petitions, slogans, speeches and demands have not created any change in the lengthening dole queues. A decade of reformist short-cuts to end unemployment — and a century of reformist politicians promising to create full employment — and there are now more unemployed workers than in 1974, or in 1884 for that matter. Reformists have organised hundreds of futile campaigns which have used up the tremendous energy of angry and demanding workers.

Since 1979 the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament has come back to life. Its membership has increased with a rapidity which leads many of its activists to believe that something is bound to happen. What they have not realised is that the "something" which is happening has happened before workers join CND: having been won to the cause of opposing nuclear weapons, and having signed the CND membership form, that is the end of the road for CNDers, not the beginning. As an organisation which seeks to humanise warfare within the capitalist system, CND is like a monk who enters a brothel in order to convert it into an art gallery. Either one destroys the system which creates war or one has to accept that the wars created by the system are bound to utilise the most devastating machinery of destruction available. Some reformists in CND will argue that, while agreeing with the socialist critique of CND, the very value of the campaign is that it teaches workers that its aims cannot be achieved within capitalism. According to this dishonest tactic, much advocated by leftists within many reformist organisations, the function of the “socialist reformist” is to hang around the reform campaigns, urging workers to demand the unrealisable and then, when the suckers have discovered that capitalism cannot deliver the goods, you recruit them into a leftist party. If that is why many leftist groups are active in CND, their tactic has been remarkably unsuccessful: since 1979 CND's membership has increased seventeen-fold, while the membership figures of the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers' Party and the Workers' Revolutionary Party have fallen rapidly.

It is true that many reformist actions alert workers to aspects of capitalism which need to be exposed. For example, the women of Greenham Common have won sympathy from some workers attracted to the simple, emotional appeal of women who do not want to be destroyed in a holocaust. But the Greenham reformists insisted that they would do more than that. They said that Cruise missiles would not be allowed in or out of the American base at Greenham; on both of these counts they have failed utterly. Furthermore, there are many workers who are unable to relate to the ritualistic displays exhibited by the Greenham reformists, preferring to be convinced by logical argument rather than old Welsh folk songs and wild, animalistic noises. It is unpopular to go against the tide of “radical” support for reform campaigns, such as that at Greenham Common; in doing so, socialists are always open to the accusation that we are no different from the Tories. But we must expose futile waste of energy on illusory attempts to change society, because the need to end a system which threatens to blow us all up is more important than humouring the naive sentiments of self-righteous reformists.

Even more unpopular is the socialist opposition to the charity business — another branch of the reformist strategy. In one way the charity brigade is quite open about what they are doing: they do not seek to eradicate problems, but to alleviate them and help those suffering from them. Like the other well-intentioned campaigns which socialists oppose, we are not going to attack the genuine motivations of the thousands of workers who are trying to make capitalism a little better to live in. Once again, we can have nothing but respect for the energy and concern of those who engage in charitable work, but we are bound to point them to the evidence which demonstrates that charities are not even succeeding in their minimal task of making the victims of capitalism suffer a little less. The hard facts are that there are now more homeless people than when Shelter was established, more old people dying of the cold than when Help The Aged was formed, more starving people than when Oxfam came on the scene. And what frustrates socialists is that if just one tenth of the human and financial resources which have gone into the sticking plaster campaigns had gone into the party which exists to end the social system which creates the bloody wounds, we would be much nearer to achieving socialism than we are today.

They used to say that there will never be riots on the streets of Britain. Then along came Brixton, Toxteth, Bristol and the other riots which erupted as an echo of working class fear and desperation. The riots were seen by some idealists as the beginning of the end for capitalism. Were they? In fact, the government's response was quite simple: stick a bit of cheap, reformist plaster over the worst slums and build a few community centres with posters on the wall reminding the wage slaves that they are human beings. The riots have led to no real improvement for the vast majority of workers, and rioting never will. How can a system which regards legalised robbery as Order ever function in a way which offers dignity to the exploited class?

What about local government? If only we can elect sincere reformists on to the councils, we are told, we can always rely on the councillors to attend to local improvements. In London a local council was elected which pledged itself to reducing fares: the response of the High Court and the House of Lords was to inform them that the object of capitalism is to make profits, not to serve needs, so the promise of cheap fares gave way to the economic law which regards efficiency as measurable solely in terms of profit and loss. Similarly, the reformist council in Liverpool made radical noises about placing social needs before monetary considerations. They were soon informed by Neil Kinnock, and others more experienced in the task of running the profit system that government responsibility means being accountable to the needs of capital, not those of wage labour. And, not leaving anything to chance, the state has laws which say that councillors who commit local authorities to spending more than is economically acceptable within capitalism can be removed from office, surcharged for hundreds of thousands of pounds, and even sent to prison. There are, without doubt, a number of very decent councillors who took on the hard work involved because they saw local government as a way of helping workers to get a better deal. When are they going to learn that under capitalism the only deal ever given to the working class leaves the cards of any worth firmly in the hands of a parasite class?

Workers have nothing to gain by engaging in protests which stop short of confronting the social system as a whole; half-loaves will not satisfy the appetite which most of us have for the best society can produce. That is not to say that socialists oppose reforms or that we deny the usefulness of reforms to certain workers — often at the expense of other workers. Our argument is not that workers would be better off without reforms, although we would certainly be better off without many of them.

Socialist understanding starts off with all the recognition of the problems and all the anger about them which reformists show. Our opposition to capitalism is not academic, but is based on material experience — the same experience which leads one worker to join CND and another to pass the begging bowl around for charity and another to work for the election of reformists on the local council. But, we ask, what is the cause of these problems? The answer staring us in the face is that we are living in a world which organises itself on the basis of producing goods and services with a view to profit. World capitalism forces workers’ needs to be secondary to the purpose of making profits so that capitalists can stay rich. It is because there is no likelihood of profit that over three million workers in Britain are currently unemployed; it is lack of profit in selling food which leads to thirty million deaths from starvation each year; it is the race for markets and profits which is the essential cause of war and the weapons which threaten us; it is because it is not profitable to provide heat for old people that thousands of them die of hypothermia; it is because it is not profitable to invest in the health service that workers must wait for years at the end of the queue for hospital beds; and it is because it is unprofitable to build decent houses for workers who can only afford cheap accommodation that slums exist. In short, production for profit is at the root of virtually every modern social problem. (Of course, there are natural problems, such as earthquakes, which neither reform nor revolution could eradicate.) The socialist response is to make the one revolutionary demand to abolish capitalism and, in so doing, to carry out the job which all the separate reformist protesters are trying to do — but to complete them all in one fell swoop.

Socialist revolution involves much, much more than simply getting rid of Maggie and putting Neil in her place. After all, they are both mere reflections of the system which teaches workers to place their faith in leaders. Socialist revolution does not mean student revolutionaries knocking off policemen's helmets or me and my mates storming the House of Commons and coming on Radio Four after The Archers to announce a proletarian dictatorship and that from now on everyone is required to be happy and spectacle charges have been abolished. Revolution, as far as socialists are concerned, is not an act of mere destruction or re-arrangement but one of constructing a fundamentally new social system, built up out of the material conditions which capitalism has created.

Socialism and nothing less is the object of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. But as we have been advocating this for a very long time, are not reformists entitled to tell us that the failure of the revolutionary movement to win over a majority of workers is as much a demonstration that we are wrong as is the failure of reformists to achieve their limited aims? The answer is that socialists are not criticising reformists because they have failed to win support — on the contrary, millions of workers have been attracted to the slogans of reform; our disagreement with the reformists is based on the fact that, even with mass working class support for their aims, they have failed to change society in such a way which leaves them with no more reforms to enact. Indeed, the essential problem about the reformist strategy for change is that it envisages no prospect that the problems will be solved and reforms will not be necessary. In this sense, reformism presents the working class with a never-ending operation of gradual improvement to a fundamentally rotten structure. Socialism, on the other hand, has never been tried and has never had support from millions of workers. We are not able to force workers to be socialists, and we would not wish to do so if we could, because only conscious men and women of the working class who want socialism will be able to establish the new social system.

The failure of limited protest is, in one sense, a tragic reflection of working class political ignorance. One could, if one were interested in drawing negative conclusions, envisage the possibility that workers will go on for years and even decades, wasting their discontent and their strength on futile efforts to make capitalism run in the interest of the majority. There is no certainty that workers will turn their attention from attacking the effects to abolishing the cause. But workers do inevitably learn from history and it is to the lesson of revolutionary success which the experience of reformist failure must lead. It is. therefore, to workers who have swallowed the illusions of partial change, and have become disillusioned, that socialists present the case for fundamental social change. Instead of banning nuclear bombs, let us ban every weapon from the face of the earth, by removing the cause of their existence. Instead of pleading for better let us demand the best. And to those who, with a sneer, tell us that they have no time for such grand aims because they are engaged in bread and butter politics. we respond that they are free to demonstrate for their bread and butter but we social revolutionaries will not be content until we have the strawberries and cream.

Steve Coleman