The Anti-Fascists. A criticism and our reply. (1925)

Letter to the Editors from the June 1925 issue of the Socialist Standard

The National Union for Combating Fascism,

29, Slack, Heptonstall, Hebden Bridge, Yks.,

April 29th, 1925.

The Editor,

Socialist Standard.

Comrade :

It is only by chance that I have come across your criticism of the above organisation in your April issue. If any such criticism had been made in “The Clear Light” we should have made very sure that the party so criticised would have had a paper sent to him so that he could meet the attack.

The nature of your attack is such that you can hardly refuse me space in your paper in which to meet it, but I am not prepared even to meet it until Mr. “H” steps from behind the cover of his initial and substantiates his insinuation that behind the N.U.C.F. are people of the itching palm, eager for subscriptions and donations for purposes not associated with socialist integrity. Doubtless he will say that he made no accusation; but he made a certain impression and I challenge him to withdraw his statement.

Fraternally,

Alfred Holdsworth, Editor,

“The Clear Light.”

Our Reply.

The offending passage was this : “Behind the rank and file of sincere but panicky people who join these freak parties, whether nominally ‘advanced’ or ‘reactionary,’ are usually to be found numerous job-hunters moved by an itch to lay hands on donations and subscriptions. We need not discriminate between the personalities of the N.U.C.F., for as regards possible harm to the cause of socialism there never was much to choose between the unscrupulous and the foggy-minded.”

We understood at the time that a copy of the “S.S.” came regularly into the hands of the Editor of the “Clear Light.” For this omission we offer our apology.

Otherwise we have nothing to withdraw or to apologise for. The only statement made is that there is usually a certain feature associated with freak organisations of this kind. We do not attach great importance to the matter, but the N.U.C.F. could quite easily make its position clear by freely opening all its books and meetings to the public as does the Socialist Party.

Mr. Holdsworth is quite at liberty to use our columns for the purpose of replying to the criticisms of his organisation, and if he does not avail himself of this offer the responsibility rests with him and not with us.

Editorial Committee

New Publications. (1925)

Party News from the June 1925 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our readers will readily appreciate the hard struggle an organisation like the S.P.G.B. has to raise the necessary funds to continue the publication of new pamphlets on Socialism. Since the object of the S.P.G.B. is the establishment of Socialism and nothing less, unlike other Political Parties—Capitalist and pseudo-labour—we are not likely to receive any assistance from benevolent or vote catching millionaires. No, we are dependent upon you—our members and sympathisers—the Working Class. Fresh literature, which will supply the Working Class with much needed Socialist education, is constantly needed, and the S.P.G.B. is trying to fill the bill though necessarily handicapped by lack of funds. However, in response to the great demand, we have just reprinted the second edition of “Socialism and Religion” and this admirable pamphlet is now on sale (see advert, in another column). The MS. of another pamphlet, one that is long overdue, is now ready. The title will be “Socialism,” and it is a comprehensive brochure of 48 pages, covering every phase of the Socialist position and is the official statement of the Party, of the case for Socialism. We are only held up for want of cash to pay for printing, and we address this appeal to all those who desire the propagation of Socialism to continue. It rests entirely with you whether or not we shall be able to publish this new pamphlet during the coming propaganda season and we urge all to put their shoulder to the wheel to make this possible. Send along your donation—no matter how small—to the Publications Fund Committee, 17, Mount Pleasant, W.C.1.

A Look Round. (1925)

From the June 1925 issue of the Socialist Standard

These birth controllers! 

When we read that “it is from among the population of ‘can’t works,’ and ‘won’t works,’ and ‘ca-cannys’ that we are chiefly recruiting our population,” we anticipate the superior person with the chemist shop economy :—

  “Ignorant people and paid agitators talk of “change of system,” when what we really need is “change of individuals”—health, strength, character, these will allow us in future to increase slowly, but for the moment we need a drastic operation to stop the cancer of poverty which is slowly degenerating our fine nation.”— (Bessie Drysdale, New Generation, March.)

Not understanding what it implies, the birth controller thinks it ignorant to talk and organise for a “change of system.” To suggest a change of “individuals” while retaining a system that enslaves and degrades the masses, is as meaningless as the Christian talk of “Change of Heart.” Apparently the writer is ignorant of the fact that even in the days of chattel slavery human labour power produced considerably more than was needed to maintain the producers. The machinery and applied science of to-day has laid the foundation of a society in which (when capitalist ownership is abolished) all could enjoy luxury with a minimum of effort. Did the workers’ conditions improve after the great slaughter of 1914-18? Have the Malthusian advocates never heard of wheat burnt as fuel, or fish given away as manure in order to inflate market prices? Don’t they know that capitalist statisticians admit that an idle few take nine-tenths of the wealth the workers produce to-day? The Socialist seeks through the self-interest of the workers to change the system because that system is run in the interest of those who are parasites on the social organism. If urging the producers of wealth to gain the comfort for themselves that they make possible for others is an ignorant proposal, then the sooner the workers become ignoramuses the better.

* * *

If Marx had only been English.

Experience has taught us that our opponents’ claim to be able to show the fallacies of Socialist principles never materialises in written or oral debate. It is easy to impute to Socialists a travesty of Marx’s teaching. When equal opportunity to state their case is allowed to those whose principles are based on such teaching, those scientifically based principles win easily. This fact was given emphasis in a recent debate with one of our comrades at Leyton. Despite our opponents’ claim to be able to show Marx’s Labour theory of value unsound, his efforts merely resulted in a lengthy discourse upon the nationality and exile of Marx, coupled with a number of puerile contradictions. The former cheap sneer relies upon that virus of Nationalism. A clerical gent, whose intellectual offerings in an anti-Socialist journal are on a level with the flat earth theory, has also something to say on the matter. Let it speak :—

  “England is no land to change her generous ideals for the enslaving and destructive principles of a German Jew who rewarded her kindness to him in his exile with an unquenchable hatred.—(Prebendary Gough, New Voice, Mar.)

Think of some of the generous ideals capitalism generates for the workers—wars, poverty, prostitution, filthy slums, and the hopeful outlook of the scrap heap. How sad it would be to abandon such ideals for the constructive proposals embodied in the life-work of Marx. That work is summarised in our principles. Their application would abolish the cause of such anomalies by the establishment of the Co-operative Commonwealth.

* * *

Capitalism's incentive.

What solicitude our opponents profess to have for the future welfare of the people with talents. Under Socialism, they tell us, ability would decline owing to lack of incentive. An interesting sidelight on the treatment meted out to-day to those who show any ability above the average is contained in the following. Out of a list of pensions (15) granted during the year ending March 31st, 1924, under the provisions of the Civil List Act, 1910, totalling £1,190, we quote the following average cases :—

  “Mr. William Poel, in recognition of his services in connection with the advancement of dramatic production, £100. Miss Charlotte Mew in recognition of the merit of her poetic works, £15. Mr. Robert Dunlop in recognition of his services to historical study, £15. Dr. Alice Lee, D.Sc., in recognition of her services to the cause of scientific research, £10.”— (Whittakers, 1925.)

What silent commentary upon present-day incentive ! Scarcely a week passes but we read of enormous sums changing hands in the buying and selling of the dolls of the wealthy drones. A glaring headline informs us that it cost “£30,000 to dress a Venus— 2 fur coats £12/100,” etc. (“Star,” 13/3/25). For the labours of those who render some useful service to posterity—an amount truly indicative of our masters’ canting pretence for the welfare of ability. Socialism would encourage excellence in every branch of human activity. Freed from the uncertainty of the future, and with the best conditions prevailing for all, those who may excel will not be relegated to obscurity on a capitalist pittance. They will merit something infinitely greater, the approbation and respect of the whole of society, whose interests will be their own.

W. E. MacHaffie

Editorial: Goodbye to Bambi (2007)

Editorial from the June 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Enfeebled by their thrashing at the polls in 1997, the most damaging comment the Tories could think of about Tony Blair was to liken him to a political Bambi – a young, doe-eyed innocent deficient in any ambition or ability to control the wild beasts in his party and their scheming to bring back Clause Four. Those who were closer to the New Labour heart knew differently. Even before all the results were in on that night in May 1997, an iron discipline was being imposed on Bambi’s party. Jonathan Freedland, a Guardian reporter and a Labour supporter, was unable to celebrate Blair’s victory because he was brusquely ejected from the Hall as he was in a “forbidden zone” there. Three years later another Guardian writer, Andrew Rawnsley, recalled the situation: “Power within the party had been concentrated at the top. Discipline was everything. Dissenters were ruthlessly smothered and marginalized”.

According to Blair (and to most other politicians) “The only purpose of being in politics is to make things happen” – which leads to the questions of what are the “things” and whether it is worthwhile, in terms of human interests, that they should “happen”. Naturally, Blair is quite clear in the matter. In his farewell speech to the party members in his Sedgefield constituency he congratulated himself on what he had made happen during his ten years in Number Ten: “As for my own leadership, throughout these ten years . . . one thing was clear to me – without the Labour party allowing me to lead it, nothing could ever have been done” and in more detail: “ . . . more jobs, fewer unemployed, better health and education results, lower crime, and economic growth in every quarter . . .The British are special, the world knows it, in our innermost thoughts we know it . . . This is the greatest nation on Earth”.

These extravagant claims are based on a number of minor changes in working class conditions which some people – Labour politicians – may choose to interpret as improvements but which, compared to the everyday grinding problems of capitalism, are insignificant. For example we were invited to vote for Blair’s party because they legislated for an increase in paid maternity leave from 18 to 29 weeks; because there has been a rise in rate of employment of lone parents, so that the poverty of people with children may be just a little less severe; because during Blair’s ten years at the helm recorded crime fell, after the passage of no less than 53 criminal justice bills, some of which have created a crisis of overcrowding in the prison service while alarmingly eroding some civil liberties.

At the same time the number of children officially assessed as living in relative poverty rose by 100,000 to 2.8 million, making nonsense of Labour’s stated objective of cutting this figure by half by 2010. Then there has been the matter of governmental sleaze, in which Labour assured us they would be a refreshing improvement after the Tories but which began with the Bernie Ecclestone affair and which was exposed in the recent scandal of the award of honours to anyone rich enough to “lend” the party large sums of money. And of course there has been Iraq, which deserves to be the event by which Blair is best remembered – the war which he secretly agreed with Bush to support, which he attempted to justify with lies about the existence of powerful weapons and which has now plunged that hapless country into a chaos of murder and destruction.

Blair began his time as prime minister with high hopes from an electorate deceived by the Labour Party’s propaganda machine that here was a new, fresh leader to usher us into a secure future. It took some years to expose him as a typically ruthless and manipulative, if highly skilled, practitioner of the cynical art of capitalism’s politics. He will not be missed.

Pathfinders: Digging Up Old Bones (2007)

The Pathfinders Column from the June 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Politics and ideologies are in reality best understood not as imponderable excursions into the deeper truths of society but as products mass-produced off a production line and sitting on ideological supermarket shelves with brightly coloured labels, often red, blue, yellow or green or some novel mix thereof. One thing which you cannot fail to have noticed about commodities generally, and which these ‘soft’ commodities share with ‘hard goods’ like washing machines, cleaning products and tinned spaghetti is the inane compulsion to keep rebranding themselves with the legend NEW! in a big starburst banner just next to the price. As with NEW! pasta shapes, so with NEW! Labour. As with NEW! blue-whiteness, so with NEW! blue sky thinking. As with ‘revolutionary’ NEW! hair colour, or our special NEW! improved recipe, the manufacturers are challenging you to do what is probably impossible, and spot a difference that doesn’t exist, due to a change they didn’t make on a formula they didn’t modify. Why the manufacturers do this, in a fast-changing world where novelty has a short shelf-life, is too obvious to need spelling out, but one has a deep-rooted suspicion that many consumers too are so accustomed to these everyday revolutions that they would manage to find a difference between ‘old’ cola and ‘new’ cola even if there wasn’t one. This may be because they desire to see themselves as sophisticated and discerning customers with subtle palates that can detect changes at homeopathic levels, and thus they delude themselves and their peers, and in so doing become accessories to the grand illusion, perfectly trained pavlovian customers of capitalism.

Anyone who remembers, say, the adverts of the 1970s will have a strange feeling of detached deja-vu when seeing modern commercials for ‘revolutionary new products’ such as sunglasses that react to light (aka ‘reactolites’ in the 1970s ), but the feeling is somehow detached because nobody seems to remark on the fact that this is yesterday’s leftovers being served up as fresh. Perhaps to the extent that we stop bothering to protest, we join those consumers who can detect non-existent changes to recipes and in our own way become complicit in the grand illusion, finally for the sake of a quiet life pretending we don’t remember or don’t care. Meanwhile those who don’t remember previous incarnations will of course be under the happy impression that they are getting the newest and the brightest and the best of everything.

So it is part of the heavy labour of any forward-looking revolutionary to be backward-looking as well, in order to recall all the previous times society, debates, ideas and individuals have trod the same paths and been down the same blind alleys, and to remind those who are listening that the most heavily signposted routes are usually the ones that don’t go anywhere. And where politics, or its twisted and malicious great-aunt, religion, impact on the one truly novel field of human endeavour, science, the same dead hands of bigotry beckon us down the same old cul-de-sacs, winding along scenic back roads that skirt the evidence and obscure the real lay of the land.

So it is with the ‘controversy’ over Darwinian evolution. Just when you think, after the recent court judgments in America against it, that creationism is becoming a laughing stock and the American public are finally becoming tired of being caricatured as vegetable-brained hicks who praise the Lord and marry their sisters, the debate convulses once again, a bubble emerges from the fetid swamp, and a NEW! argument explodes over the scenery. Neoconservatives, it seems, are now at war with the religious right in an attempt to reclaim Darwin as the ideological figurehead, not of the scientific liberal progressive agenda, but of red-blooded two-fisted Republican screw-the-other-guy frontier capitalist values (‘A Split Emerges as Conservatives Discuss Darwin’, New York Times, May 5). The argument of the neo-cons is of course that evolution, being ‘red in tooth and claw’, and involving the ‘survival of the fittest’, is perfectly suited to the conservative view of capitalism. Never mind that the first of these phrases was coined by T H Huxley and the second by Herbert Spencer, Darwin is held up as the perfect justification for any amount of callous disregard by the rich of the vast majority of the world’s poor population, and the only people persistently getting in the way of this wonderful ‘proof’ of capitalism’s natural and therefore inevitable provenance are those silly religious evangelists who don’t seem to understand how to intelligently design capitalism’s propaganda machine.

And it is at this point that the reactolite factor sets in. People new to this debate might screw up their eyes, dazzled by the spectacle of conservatives being pro-Darwin and fighting their own religious brethren. But there’s more. What would they make of the logical extension to this scenario, which is the emergence of a liberal progressive element opposed to evolution? Yet the world has seen it all before, where the conservatives championed Darwin and the liberal progressives championed creationism. It was a sell-out gig, it was a set-up, it ruined careers, and it made history. It was the Scopes Monkey trial of 1925, a trial so bizarre that the defendant deliberately got himself accused as a teacher of evolution even though he was actually a football coach, where his friends were on the prosecution counsel, and where the jury was instructed by the defence not to find him innocent. The story of this world-famous publicity stunt, engineered entirely by the defendant and his team of bible-baiters, is hugely entertaining and too long to indulge here (but look it up in Wikipedia).

Why the pro-evolution lobby, and people like Clarence Darrow and H L Mencken, would want to crucify the religious right in public is not difficult for any scientifically-minded progressive to comprehend, especially one with a sense of humour. But, asked Stephen Jay Gould, in his perceptive article on the subject, what on earth possessed a liberal and progressive, three-times Presidential candidate like William Jennings Bryan, a man who had devoted his life to social reform, to lead the prosecution, in what he must have known was an ambush (see Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life, 1999)? Bryan, ever since lampooned as the villain of the piece, was according to Gould motivated not so much by any fondness for the theory of creationism or its adherents as by a truly messianic hatred of the iniquitous implications of what had already by then become known as Social Darwinism, a vicious ideology of social callousness which owed more to Spencer than Darwin and whose consequences in social inequality and poverty Bryan had spent his life trying to battle. Gould, himself a lifelong bitter opponent of creationists, nevertheless manages to paint a sympathetic portrait of a decent man consigned to history as a buffoon, who found himself on the wrong side for the right reasons.

To socialists this is all old hat now, and they won’t be tempted into the debate between neo-cons and evangelists in the neo-neo-Darwin saga. They know that Darwin wasn’t a social Darwinist, that capitalism doesn’t show the survival of the fittest but in fact destroys the healthy host and preserves the degenerate and useless parasite, and also that the enemy of your religious enemy is not necessarily your friend. Those addicted to the NEW! however might end up scratching their heads over this one.

Paddy Shannon

The Illusion of Freedom (2007)

From the June 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

We are always being told that we live in a free society, but do we?

It would appear that a ban has been introduced on spontaneous protest within one kilometre of Parliament. According to a recent feature in the Sunday Times, as a form of low-key protest against this, a man called Neil Goodwin regularly dresses up as Charlie Chaplin’s tramp, holds a placard carrying the slogan “Not Aloud” and stands within the vicinity. This means, of course, that he is liable to get into trouble, and he has indeed been arrested several times. Many of the passing crowd think he is a tourist attraction and on one occasion, when a policeman told him to move on, one of them said, “It’s a free country, isn’t it?”, whereupon the man is said to have shook his head ruefully.

But surely in Britain, we live in a free society with the right to protest? It’s a democracy after all; we have a choice of leaders to vote for. And in between elections, there are a whole host of issues we can give our voices to in order to make a difference to the world around us, knowing that we won’t get jailed for our views or actions. So maybe our tramp is just an eccentric exception.

People power is in evidence everywhere and more and more we see individuals and groups “standing up for their rights”: minorities of every kind have a voice. The right for a woman of a certain religious persuasion to wear a black mask over her face while teaching…the right for gay couples to adopt children…it sometimes seems we have rights spilling out of our ears.

And democracy, it would seem, is proliferating with the advance of technology – through participation in phone-ins and on-line voting you can give your view on everything from road pricing to who should be ejected from Big Brother.

Again, society is so much less formal than it used to be. Everybody is on first name terms and we dress more casually than previous generations. It can be easy to believe it when we’re told that class doesn’t exist any more and that we no longer have any superiors to doff our caps to.

And what about all that freedom of choice for the consumer? The range of brands and products you can buy in any high street store or supermarket is mind-boggling.

Big business, too, is seemingly much more aware of our needs than it used to be. We have an increasing number of companies practising “customer care”, “responsible companies”, trying their hardest to please customers and employees alike. And if they do something we don’t like, we can sue them.

But we don’t have to scratch the surface very hard to see that our tramp in the first paragraph is only one small example of the ways in which our freedom is restricted.

A lapse into Grumpy Old Man mode evokes cash-strapped local councils trying to squeeze more and more money out of us and at the same time clobbering us with a barrage of regulations: smoking bans, parking fines, fines for not putting rubbish in the correct recycling container, or, as happened to one no doubt bemused man, for momentarily placing a drinks can on the pavement while tying a shoelace.

In the aftermath of terrorist attacks, we are herded like cattle to be searched at airport queues for anything that may be vaguely dangerous.

On a more sinister note, there is a government proposal that children are to be fingerprinted when applying for a passport. Additionally, according to Labour’s recent crime review, every child will be assessed to see if they are likely to turn to crime. Those that comply with a certain profile will be “actively managed” by social services. Also mentioned in the review are ID cards, mobile fingerprint readers, crowd scanners and an expansion of the DNA database of people who have committed no crime. It seems we are all to be guilty until proven to be responsible adults.

Looking at the wider world, we have innocent people routinely held in prisons, with that bastion of western democracy, the United States, habitually ignoring Habeas Corpus in places like Guantanamo Bay.

There are millions of people worldwide, many of them children, working in conditions that rival those of the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries look like a fairground game. Not to mention the number of people working for pittances in call centres and other soul-destroying jobs.

So what is the truth of it? Are we more free or less free than we used to be? On the one hand, we seem more prepared to stand up against authoritarianism. But on the other hand, there seems to be a lot more of it to stand up to.

By and large, any concession of rights and privileges by our leaders, any freedoms won by trade union activity or direct action, are limited in nature. Governments as a whole, acting on behalf of capitalism, concede just as much freedom as they think we need to do our jobs effectively and keep contributing to “the economy” (for which read the profits of the rich minority).

In some ways capitalism has had to relax its attitude to the people who produce its profits. The rigid old social divisions were counter-productive, and people are more street-wise as a result – but don’t use their power effectively. Efforts are mostly directed towards ameliorating one narrow aspect of the capitalist machine while leaving capitalism itself, and the repressive governments that do its bidding, alive and well.

As proof of this, the newspapers every now and then toss their rich lists at us, to rub our noses in the widening gap between the ultra-rich and the rest of us. This despite the ever increasing competitiveness that compels businesses to spend less and make their goods and services as cheaply as possible. The resulting squeeze hits the ordinary working person, while our lords and masters rake in ever increasing profits.

And as long as we hit our deadlines and keep the money rolling in for our bosses, it doesn’t matter what we wear while doing it, or whether we call our boss Richard instead of Mr Branson. We still know our place. And what capitalism gives us with one hand, it takes away with the other much larger one.

Capitalism limits our freedom in so many ways because it rations us by the amount of money we earn and carries with it a mass of rules to make sure we don’t overstep the mark. Most of us in Britain are undoubtedly more fortunate than many in other parts of the world, but we are all chained to our jobs, our pensions (if we are lucky enough to have either), and to our governments.

So how do we really become free? If the examples above haven’t made it obvious, we need to realize that it’s not a free country in any meaningful sense. Then we need to question some ingrained attitudes.

We don’t have to live in a world full of leaders who do nothing but lead us up the garden path. We don’t have to accept that money is essential to making the world go round. And we don’t have to take for granted that oppression will always be with us.

We need to see the world as a whole because capitalism itself is a world-wide system and as such produces world-wide problems. The only effective route to freedom is its world-wide abolition and replacement with a classless, moneyless, world society without governments or national boundaries – socialism.

In socialism we wouldn’t be free to do whatever we wished. But the constraints on our personal freedom would be self-determined by local communities agreeing as equals and not imposed on us by the state or one of its local government offshoots. Whatever freedoms we decided to sacrifice would genuinely be for the good of the society we lived in, i.e. the people around us and the world at large.

Rod Shaw

Camouflaging class rule (2007)

From the June 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our society is routinely described in terms that camouflage the reality of exploitation and class rule.

The story goes like this. Everyone is basically equal. There is no ruling class as we are all citizens in a “democracy.” We live not in capitalism (that outmoded concept) but in a classless “market economy” where we are all consumers, taxpayers and investors (if only through our pension schemes). In some countries the camouflage is taken one step further: the social system is officially defined to be not just democratic but actually socialist. Those who insist on pointing out the reality behind the camouflage are labelled “extremists,” denied access to the mass media, and banished from respectable society.

This camouflage is so familiar to us that it is easy to assume it has always existed. In fact, it is quite a recent development in historical terms. Pre-industrial ruling classes never thought of pretending that they did not exist. On the contrary, they glorified or even deified themselves as intrinsically superior beings. The Greek philosopher Aristotle, who for many centuries was considered the fount of all wisdom, wrote that some people are slaves and others masters in accordance with their natures. Feudal law highlighted class by specifying in detail the dress appropriate to each class and making it illegal for people to wear clothes inappropriate to their station in life.

The situation started to change when the thinkers of the Enlightenment (such as Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu) questioned the doctrine of natural inequality as well as other received ideas. In 1789 revolutionaries overthrew the French monarchy and aristocracy in the name of the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. But some of them (Babeuf and his followers), disappointed that the revolution had failed to achieve these ideals, wanted to go further and strike at the roots of property itself. For the first time a ruling class felt the need for some camouflage.

In Britain, where the transition from feudalism to capitalism was accompanied by less political upheaval, the need for concealment did not become urgent until later. Democracy was condemned as a dangerous extremist notion, while the class structure continued to be sanctified by religion and custom. Nineteenth-century British economists like Ricardo and Adam Smith talked quite openly about the division of society into classes. They were closer in this respect to Marx than to their twentieth-century successors (see the article on Smith in January’s Socialist Standard). You may also recall a verse in the nineteenth-century hymn All Things Bright and Beautiful that goes:

“The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate, He made them high and lowly, And ordered their estate.”

British ruling class attitudes shifted in face of the growing movement for universal male suffrage represented by the working class Chartists. The capitalists began to wonder whether they had exaggerated the threat inherent in political democracy. Perhaps it would not endanger class privilege all that much, provided that at the same time they made greater efforts to indoctrinate the workers. That is why the 1867 Reform Act, which first extended the franchise to part of the working class (male householders), was followed by the 1870 Education Act, which first made provision for general elementary education. “We must educate our masters,” Chancellor of the Exchequer Robert Lowe cynically remarked.

By the early twentieth century the ideological transformation was complete. Capitalist society could now be defined as “democracy” and its demands imposed in the name of democracy, as when US president Woodrow Wilson christened World War One “a war to make the world safe for democracy.” The class structure was henceforth to be camouflaged rather than openly justified. It was also about this time that there appeared new economic theories – in particular, the marginalist school – in which class was no longer a central concept.

With the rise of the so-called “communist” regimes in Russia and elsewhere, a similar fate befell the word “socialism.” The new class system in these countries was defined as “socialism,” just as the old class system in the West was defined as “democracy.” But the essence of the matter was the same: in both cases, in mainstream or official discourse the real class structure of the society simply did not exist. In the countries under Communist Party rule, just to say that there was a ruling class was grounds for condemnation as a “Trotskyite” or “counterrevolutionary.” (For an example from the Chinese “cultural revolution” see http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1969/06/intro.htm)

The camouflaging of class rule generates endless hypocrisy, and hypocrisy is not one of the more appealing character traits. But, as poet Matthew Arnold remarked, “hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.” The prevalence of hypocrisy is a sign that it is no longer possible openly to justify certain evils, showing that there has after all been some progress in human thinking. Class society is now on the defensive, and there is no way to defend the indefensible.

Stefan.

What free access means (2007)

From the June 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists often describe socialism as a society where there will be free access, but what could this mean in concrete terms?

Socialism will be a society of free access to what has been produced. This does not mean alcohol being made available to children or anyone being able to get hold of guns. But there’ll be no money, credit cards or cheque books, no artificial barriers to people having what they’ve decided they want. But how would free access work, and would it lead to a free-for-all and chaos as people just took more and more? 

It doesn’t matter whether they’ll be called shops, stores or warehouses, but there will be places where people will go to collect goods. Whether it’s food, clothes, electrical gadgets or whatever, these places will in some ways be like the shops that exist nowadays but in other ways will be rather different. There will be no price tickets, check-outs or security guards. There’ll be no ‘buy one get one free’ offers, no brightly-coloured promotions trying to pressurise you into buying certain goods. There may well still be shop assistants, whose task it really will be to assist people rather than talk them into purchases. There will still be plenty of choice, and probably more real choice than exists today, when you can ‘choose’ among masses of near-identical products. If you want food, no doubt you will go with a shopping list and make sure that you load what you want into the shopping trolley. And then you’ll just leave, since you won’t have to pay for anything.

Another big difference between the shops of today and the warehouses of the socialist future will concern the quality of what is in them. Everything will be the best quality, as production for use means there would be no point in producing cheap food or shoddy goods. Nowadays, the cheap and tacky are for those who cannot afford to buy the best, an idea which will be completely alien in socialism. A ‘prestigious’ brand name or logo will not be used to inflate the price of something or to make the consumer fit in or feel a cut above the rest.

Having only the best doesn’t mean that we’ll be eating caviar all the time, just that — even if you’re having bangers and mash for tea — you’ll be having the best of its kind. Furniture or TVs won’t be designed to wear out: a sensible use of resources would involve making things to last and recycling as much as possible.

The standard objection to the socialist account of free access is rooted in a view of human nature. People would take and take, it may be claimed, irrespective of what they actually wanted. But a bit of thought should show that this objection does not hold water. For one thing, the people who live in socialism will be convinced of the superiority of this way of organising society and will not act against its interests. And further, think about the things you consume and whether you would really benefit from hoarding them. Most people can only consume fairly limited amounts of milk or bread or toilet paper and won’t need to keep cupboards full of any of them. Even in these days of home freezers, where people do stock up on some foods, they don’t keep massive amounts of anything. In a society of free access, you’ll always be able to get more butter or dog food from the local warehouse, so you won’t need your own mountain of either.

But aren’t there other goods for which these considerations won’t apply? Well, again, people won’t need several cars or ten dining-room tables. There probably are some items which people may well want a lot of: no doubt it will vary from individual to individual, but clothes, books, CDs and DVDs might be good examples. In some cases, producing extra copies (say of a CD) requires very little extra resources. There might well be first-class public libraries or comprehensive book-recycling schemes, which would obviate the desire to own individual copies of some books. And clothing won’t be subject to the whims of fashion as it is now, so people won’t want new outfits each year. In general, the whole idea of consumerism, of possessions making you happy, won’t apply.

The point is not that we can explain in detail now just how the demand for every item will be realised in socialism. Rather, we can just set out some general principles about how free access would function and suggest that the human nature objections to it are based on a very narrow view of how human beings behave under capitalism. The combination of socialist consciousness and good old common sense will ensure that people will take what they need rather than all that is available or all they can carry.

A society of free access, then, will mean what it says. People will select their weekly food needs and take home what they’ve chosen, without anyone asking them to pay for it. They will choose clothes, furniture, sports gear, lawnmowers in the same way. And they will know that none of what they’re eating or using is dangerous or nasty, that none of it has been produced in an environmentally-unfriendly way or to make a profit for a few rather than to satisfy the needs of the many.

Paul Bennett