Letter: Wally Preston (2005)

Letter to the Editors from the January 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

I have just come across on your website the (undated) obituary of Wally Preston [it was in the November 2000 issue – Eds]. I had not heard of Wally’s death, and was saddened to learn of it. I met him several times when he was a member of the International Socialists in the 1970s, and he once stayed the night at my home. He was a splendid speaker, a genuine working-class intellectual and a very likeable human being.

However, I must correct your obituarist on one point. He quotes my short history of the IS/SWP and deduces that the comrade who told an IS Conference that a document was so bad it must have been written by a sociologist was Wally. It was not. That speech was made by the late Terry Barrett, a London docker. Barrett was a man of great courage and principle (he publicly opposed the dockers’ march in support of Enoch Powell in 1968), but he was on occasion given to a certain demagogic anti-intellectualism of a sort that I think Wally would not have indulged in.

Ian Birchall, 

London, N9

Blogger's Note:

See the comment below for more background about Terry Barrett.

The Plot Thickens (2005)

TV Review from the January 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Conspiracies – The Illuminati (Sky Mix, Fri, 9.00pm, Dec 10)

“They’re all enslaving you. They call us cattle, but they’re just scum”. So goes one of Alex Jones’ weekly Texas radio rants against that supersecret sect of the centuries, the Illuminati (Enlightened). Established in 1776 in Bavaria as a secular intellectual club but driven underground by the Church, this mysterious society has by now infiltrated into every government organisation including the media. Its aim is nothing less than the dumbing down of a helpless population and then global dictatorship. Apparently. 

We follow the narrator Danny Wallace on a wild-goose chase round industrial estates, hoping to meet a real-life Illuminatus, who evidently bottles out of the encounter (or didn’t exist in the first place), and sundry interviews with paranoid amateur journalists who say things like: “They are monitoring my every move. It’s a wonder I’m still alive” (a wonder you’re not locked up, more like).

Conspiracy theorists often gain plausibility by taking established fact and embellishing it, so that one can’t tell where truth ends and fiction begins. There are undoubtedly shadowy societies of the super-rich which are well-documented. The Skull and Bones in America includes many senators, three past presidents, and both George Bush and John Kerry, while in Britain we have the Masonic Lodge. The Bilderberg Group is also given lavish treatment in the programme. But of course, they can’t be very secret or we wouldn’t know about them. The point is, say the neurotic campaigners, they’re all just fronts for the Illuminati.

What’s really interesting – more than the unlikely tales of mock human sacrifices under a giant stone owl – is why some people need to believe the world is really controlled by a secret society, when it is fairly obviously controlled by the not-very-secret capitalist class. Perhaps that’s just too mundane an explanation, or too public, when what is required by conspiracy theorists is something akin to demonic global possession, something so unearthly and powerful that it is quite beyond our ability to exorcise it. Why do they need to believe in this absolute evil? Perhaps in order to cast themselves as holy crusaders.

There are conspiracies all the time, little ones. Big ones tend to spring leaks however, and few are likely to believe in one that has lasted 250 years without being ‘outed’. The capitalist class is not a conspiracy, not because it is open and, more or less, above board, but because it is not united, as the Illuminati presumably are. The disunity of the capitalist class is their Achilles heel, a weakness workers could use. If you believe your enslavers have no weaknesses, you won’t struggle against them. The crusaders against the Illuminati could do with some illumination on that point.

Paddy Shannon

The need for socialism (2005)

From the January 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is true that material deprivation – at least in this part of the world – is less than it was when the Socialist Party was formed in 1904. But it is also true that since then there has been a tremendous development of the forces of production – the technical means of producing enough for all – so that, despite the increase in world population in the meantime, no man, woman or child in any part of the world need today go without decent food, clothing, shelter or any of the other amenities of life. The fact that most of the world’s population do is a damning indictment of the present social order, capitalism.

Basic contradiction

The case against capitalism and for socialism has always been simple. With the division of labour resulting from the use of more and more sophisticated machines and techniques, humans already cooperate to produce what is needed to sustain life and social activity, but what is produced does not belong to those who produced it – the working class, those who are obliged to sell their mental and physical energies for a living and who make up the overwhelming majority of society – but to a tiny minority of privileged people who, through historical circumstances, happen to own and control the means of wealth production.

As a result what is produced belongs to this minority and so is not available to the members of society to take and use to satisfy their needs. It is only made available to them against payment but what we of the working class can afford is limited by the size of our wage packet or salary cheque, which is always less than the new value incorporated in what we produce. The difference is profit – the source of the privileged income of the owning minority and the over-riding aim of production. So, not only is free access to what is produced denied to those who, collectively, produced it, but what gets to be produced is dictated not by what people want and need but by what is most profitable.

This contradiction between cooperative, collective production and the private appropriation of the product, arising from the means of production being monopolised by a minority, is the root-cause of the problems faced by the working class majority in all fields of life.

Promises to solve these problems, as over housing, transport, the environment, food safety, are the stuff of politics but the parties and politicians people vote for never solve them. Not because they are dishonest or not determined enough or mere self-seekers but because they cannot. The problems they promise to solve are caused by capitalism and so can never be solved as long as capitalism is allowed to continue.

Capitalism cannot work for all

Capitalism, as a profit system based on the class ownership of the means of production, can never be made to work in the interests of all. It always puts profits first. That’s its nature, which cannot be changed by any government or any other form of activity within the context of class ownership and production for profit.

This is why reformism, as the attempt to make capitalism work in the interest of all, is ultimately futile. At most it can only smooth off some of the rougher edges a little, at least for some people and for a while, but it can never solve the problems facing wage and salary workers.

This being the case, what the working class, as the class that suffers most from the problems caused by capitalism, should be aiming at is bringing an end to the contradiction between cooperation in production and private appropriation of the products. This can only be done by bringing ownership into line with productive reality, by bringing about a situation where what is produced collectively is also owned collectively; which is only possible when the means for producing wealth have become the common property of all the members of society.

The socialist solution

This – the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production by and in the interest of society as a whole – is socialism and it is the only political goal worth striving for. Only it can provide the framework within which production can be re-oriented away from making profits for an owning class to providing what people want and need. On the basis of common ownership and democratic control, enough food, clothing, housing, transport, energy and the other necessaries and amenities of life could, should and would be produced to ensure that nobody, in any part of the world, went without what they needed. Material deprivation, and worries about satisfying material needs – around which most people’s lives revolve today – will no longer exist.

But socialism is not just about satisfying people’s material needs. That will just be routine in socialism, something taken for granted. It is also about allowing human beings to behave as the social animals that, biologically, we are. We are not just dependent on each other materially – on cooperating to produce what we need – but psychologically and culturally too. We evolved through cooperation and we need to cooperate and to feel part of a community with other human beings, but capitalism denies us this. Built-in to it is competition not cooperation. Competition not only between the owning class and the excluded majority – the class struggle – but also between members of the owning class to make profits – which, on a world scale, leads to wars and preparation for war, as over sources of raw materials, trade routes, markets and investment outlets – and between members of the excluded majority for jobs and housing, fuelling nationalism, racism and xenophobia.

Socialism, by ending the division of society into antagonistic classes, and by ensuring that every human being has their material needs met as a matter of course, will stop the rat-race we are forced to participate in under capitalism and create a real community and a real sense of community. People will no longer be alienated from their social nature and from other human beings.

Which way to socialism?

Those who set up the Socialist Party had a clear idea of how they thought socialism should come about: through the majority working class coming to understand that they were an exploited class to whom capitalism had nothing to offer and organising on the political field, to pursue uncompromisingly the single aim of  wresting control of political power from the capitalist class and using it to end the monopoly exercised by the capitalist minority over the means of wealth production. This political and then economic expropriation was seen as being a conscious, democratic, political act.

It was also seen as being a revolutionary act, not in the sense of street-fighting and bloodshed – even if some violent incidents might not to be able to be entirely avoided – but in the sense of a decisive break, a rupture, involving the rapid conversion of the means of production from the class monopoly of a minority into the common property of all the people. In other words, a social revolution as a rapid and abrupt change in the basis of society carried out by political means.

At the time there were others who called themselves socialists who put forward a different approach: the gradual transformation of capitalism into socialism through a series of social reforms which would improve conditions for the working class by supplementing their wages with state benefits and which would convert individual industries, one after the other, into public services producing what people needed not for profit. This went under various names: gradualism, Fabianism, revisionism (when put forward by former Marxian revolutionaries), reformism. In Britain, at the time the Socialist Party was formed, it was represented by the now defunct Independent Labour Party, which was one of the constituent parts of the Labour Party and then, after the adoption of a new constitution in 1918, by the Labour Party itself, at least by those of its members and leaders who had any long-term perspective.

Gradualism fails

This strategy denied the need for a consciously socialist majority as a preliminary condition for establishing socialism. According to its proponents, all that was required was a parliamentary majority acquired on the basis of votes for a programme of reforms to be achieved within capitalism. It was a strategy that was put to the test, in Britain, in 1945 when the Labour Party won a landslide election victory giving them a huge parliamentary majority.

But it didn’t work. Labour, having taken on responsibility for governing capitalism found, as it had as a minority government in 1924 and 1929-1931, that capitalism had to be governed on its terms: priority had to be given to profit-making not social improvements for workers; in fact, even wages had to be restrained. The Wilson and Callaghan Labour governments in the 1960s and 1970s fared no better at reforming capitalism in the interest of wage and salary workers. They, too, ended up administering capitalism on its terms, i.e., in the interest of profit-making and against the interests of the wage and salary earning majority. As did all similar government in other parts of the world.

The experience of the 20th century proved the gradualists wrong. Instead of such parties gradually changing capitalism, it was capitalism that gradually changed them. Nowadays, they don’t even claim to be aiming at socialism, only to be able to manage capitalism in a more efficient way.

The Socialist Party in Britain were not the only critics of gradualist reformism. Indeed, the early members initially saw themselves as part of the wing of the international Social Democratic movement that was opposed to the revisionism and opportunism that was spreading within the movement. However, most of the other pre-WWI opponents of gradualism, including Rosa Luxemburg, author of a pamphlet with the title of Reform or Revolution?, did not see the danger, in terms of attracting non-socialist support and becoming its prisoner, of a socialist party advocating reforms. After the ignominious collapse of the international Social Democratic movement when the war broke out, many of the other anti-gradualists turned to Lenin’s Bolshevism for an alternative strategy.

Minority action fails too

Whereas the gradualists had still been committed to democratic methods and majority action even though only by non-socialists, Lenin argued that under capitalism only a minority would ever be able to reach socialist understanding and that it was therefore up to this minority to organise itself as a vanguard party to seize power on behalf of the majority.

In other words, the Leninists’ alternative strategy to gradualist reformism was not the consciously socialist, majority political action advocated by the Socialist Party in Britain, but minority socialist action: socialism was to be introduced by a dictatorship exercised by a minority of socialists. This was how the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in the course of the 1917 Russian revolution was presented. This was never going to work as a way to socialism since socialism can only exist on a democratic basis with majority participation in decision-making. And it didn’t. Instead of the Bolshevik dictatorship in Russia leading to socialism, it led to state capitalism with the members of the “socialist” vanguard evolving into a new ruling class exercising a brutal dictatorship over the workers of Russia.

The 20th century confirmed that minority dictatorship was no more a route to socialism than parliamentary reformism. The worst thing about it was that the Russian dictatorship claimed to be socialist, with the result that millions of workers all over the world were put off the whole idea of socialism. To tell the truth, socialism is still suffering from this unwelcome legacy, with the view that “socialism has been tried (in Russia) and failed” being widely held.

In fact, of course, socialism has not been tried. What has been tried are two strategies – gradualist reformism and Leninist minority dictatorship – for supposedly progressing towards socialism. Both failed. But what has not been tried is the strategy proposed by the founding members of the Socialist Party in 1904: conscious, majority, revolutionary political action.

Just as socialism remains as relevant today as it was in 1904, so too does this strategy. “No socialism without socialists” remains as true today as it was then. And “making socialists”, as a step towards the emergence of a majority desire for socialism, remains the task of those who want to see established a socialist world of common ownership, democratic control, production to meet people’s needs and free distribution on the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”.

Adam Buick

Poverty, nationalism and the Wales Millenium centre. (2005)

From the January 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Friday 26 November was a ‘good news’ day. It marked the beginning of a three-day gala opening of the Wales Millennium Centre (WMC) in Cardiff, an event that was greeted by a media fanfare that relegated all other news in Wales to the back pages. Built in the Cardiff Bay area that was once home to the city’s red-light district, the WMC is a replacement for the Cardiff Opera House project abandoned for being too elitist almost ten years ago. The construction, plagued with funding problems and originally due to open on St David’s Day (1 March) 2001 was finally completed (after a £37 million Welsh Assembly grant in January 2002) at a total cost of £106 million.

Amongst the host of celebrities in raptures over the building, lovingly described by many as having looking like a cross between a giant computer mouse and an armadillo, was the patriotic Welsh baritone Bryn Terfel.  Gushing with adulation he exclaimed, “The eyes of the world will be on the opening this weekend, but it’s important that the good work continues over the next year and that we, as a nation, embrace it.” (Western Mail, 26 November)

Many, including Terfel, share a patriotic delusion that people born in the same country have a common interest, unique to their particular geographical location and a source of misguided pride. This nationalistic nonsense and talk about ‘nations’ disguises the actual division of the world’s population into two classes, the minority who own the means of producing and distributing wealth and the majority of working people who are compelled to work for a wage or salary in order to live. These two classes have opposing interests, since the wealth enjoyed by the owning class depends on depriving working people of the things they need and reduces them to a life of servitude, insecurity and poverty. Working people have no country or nation, only a place where they were born and where they are exploited for the benefit of the owners. The interests of working people in Wales are common to working people throughout the world and antagonistic to the world’s capitalist class, including those in Wales. It is class not nationality that determines your role in society.

So instead urging people to ‘embrace’ the ‘Theatre of Dreams’ Terfel and his nationalist friends might stop to embrace a few facts about people in Wales, with many of its three million population in dire poverty. Does he embrace the fact that NHS waiting list cause BMA staff in Wales to “weep in despair”? On the day of the gala opening, “Dr Calland spoke as new monthly figures showed 311,000 people were waiting for treatment – up 2,400 on last month.” (BBC Wales Ceefax, 26 November)  Or perhaps he might embrace the news that on the day of the gala opening reassurances that ‘Support Line Cymru,’ the teacher’s telephone support line, would continue to get Assembly government funding. The support line, set up in 2002, received no fewer than 650 calls from teachers suffering from stress last year (ITV Wales, Teletext, 26 November).

 

Or even the unpleasant facts about those victims of work related injuries, the subject of a TUC report also reported on BBC Wales news (Ceefax page 165) on the morning of the 26 November. The report concluded, “Wales is the worst place in the UK for injury sustained by people slipping and tripping in work.” Stress, repetitive strain injury and back strains are itemised as the top three health risks facing workers.

Perhaps it’s a little too embarrassing to consider the facts about Cardiff’s environment. On the morning of the gala opening, the WMC’s new neighbours, the residents of Leckwith were told to embrace the fact they must “take special precautions” after traces of arsenic, lead, nickel and mercury had been found in the soil in their gardens, stadium and local allotment. Council investigations revealed “unacceptable levels of contamination” prompting the issuing of a warning to children and pregnant women, “to limit the amount of Leckwith-grown produce they ate.” The area had once been a railway yard and later a landfill site but is now a place where working people live. (www.bbc.co.uk, 26 November).

Reviewing the facts about unemployment in Wales will probably be even less palatable. John Osmond, Director of the Institute of Welsh Affairs observed, “On the surface in Wales, unemployment appears to have reached tolerably low levels, but when combined with sickness and disability claimants, the proportions not working are higher than almost anywhere else in the UK. There are pockets of extreme poverty throughout. The Valleys pose particular problems, with their legacy of ill health, low skill levels and low employment activity rates. But there are also concentrations of poverty along the North Wales coastline, in south Pembrokeshire and in parts of Cardiff, Newport and Swansea” (www. jrf. org. uk /pressroom, 27 February). Nor the facts about the 55,000 inhabitants of Merthyr Tydfil, unless, of course, their quality of life has improved significantly since 2001. Then, 66 percent of homes had less than £10,000 income a year, 48.6 percent of people were in employment, 28 percent of homes receive housing benefit, 12.5 percent of homes are not fit for habitation, 44 percent of 16-60 year-olds had no qualifications and 30 percent of people suffered from long-term illness (Welsh Assembly Government, Mapping social exclusion in Wales, 1999; 2001 census)

Perhaps the plight of youngsters highlighted two years ago in a BBC examination of poverty in Wales that reported, “Youth unemployment in Wales is now the second highest in the whole of the UK” is worthy of being embraced by the nationalists. The BBC report showed that 14 percent of youth were jobless, 19 percent of the population received benefit and 700,000 people were below the low-income threshold, which meant that in the EU only Greece had more in so-called ‘official poverty.’ (news.bbc.co.uk, 30 July, 2002) In the period 2002-3, 27 percent of Welsh 15-year olds (10,000 children) failed to obtain any GCSEs above grade D and 8 percent obtained no GCSEs at all (3,000 children) compared to 4 percent in England (www.poverty.org.uk/intro/index.htm).

But, we shouldn’t let awkward facts spoil something as grand as the gala opening and many facts are best left unsaid. These might include the despair of thousands of people in Wales seeking help with debt problems, which three years ago had reached a total of £120 million. In September 2001, “The Welsh Consumer Council report+ reveals consumer troubles with loans, overdrafts, credit and store cards have risen by more than a third in the last four years. And trading standards officials are increasingly concerned about the activities of unlicensed loan sharks who use illegal or threatening tactics to collect cash. Today’s report reveals Citizen Advice Bureaux in Wales dealt with more than 56,000 debt inquiries” (Tom Badden, Liverpool Daily Post, 13 September 2001). Meanwhile, “the figures show there were 11,967 individual insolvencies in England and Wales in the third quarter of 2004. It was an increase of 6.2 percent on the previous quarter and 31.1 percent on the same period a year ago” (www.clearlybusiness.com).

Equally unattractive is embracing the knowledge that Shelter Cymru are “helping over 13,000 in housing need every year” and “estimate that 50,000 children are living in unfit housing in Wales according to the last house condition survey.” Or perhaps the estimated 33 percent of children in Wales who suffer asthma symptoms, more than three times the levels in Spain, Poland and Denmark. “The link between poor housing, homelessness and poor health are so obvious but they often seem overlooked when it comes to resources.” (www. sheltercymru, 7 July)

John Puzey, Director of Shelter Cymru had earlier warned that the housing ‘boom’ meant, “Fewer people are able to access the housing market with the average price of a home in Wales at £120,000. There is more pressure for social housing because people can’t afford to buy properties but social housing is less available due to lower levels of building and a continuing loss through the right to buy” (www.sheltercymru, 17 June).  During 2003-4 the number of homeless households in Wales rose to 9,147, while those in temporary accommodation rose to 2,890 by March 2004, an increase of 94 percent in a year. “Even more damaging are the increasing numbers of families with children with no alternatives but to stay in overcrowded bed and breakfast accommodation – the latest figures show almost 700 households in B&B with about a quarter having dependent children.” Puzey continued that housing children in temporary accommodation “can cause serious life long problems, disrupting education and arresting development.” (Shelter Cymru, 29th September 2004). The BBC noted, “It is estimated that £3 bn is needed to bring every home in Wales up to a decent standard”(www.news.bbc.co.uk, 26 October).

We can be sure that life in “The South Wales Valleys [who are] facing a drugs ‘epidemic’ with heroin dealers operating “every quarter of a mile,” is a fact that won’t be embraced. Assistant Chief Constable of South Wales Police, David Francis, said “The drugs problem is the biggest crisis that is facing our communities – people in these communities are being torn apart by what drugs are doing to their families and the crime that is related to it.” (www.bbc.news.co.uk, 25 October, 2002)

Wake up, Bryn and all those peddling delusions of  ‘nations.’ The only things that working people need ‘embrace’ are the undeniable truths that capitalism cannot work in our interest and the nationalist message is everywhere poisonous and divisive, embracing the notion that capitalism is somehow better when administrated locally. The socialist message is that working people everywhere must end the servitude, insecurity and poverty that capitalism is incapable of curing by embracing socialism, a world community without nations, class discrimination, production for profit or money. In socialist society each, according to their individual taste, will be freely entertained in venues like the WMC throughout the world, while the fear that we must sink back to a life of deprivation and misery after the final curtain falls will have become nothing more than a distant memory.

Steve Trott