Friday, June 3, 2022

Pamphlets for sale. (1927)

From the October 1927 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have been fortunate in securing quantities of seven pamphlets published by the Socialist Party of Canada, and are offering them for sale at the rates set out below. There is, of course, no need to make special mention of the standard works of Marx and Engels. The pamphlet on the causes of modern war contains much useful information with copious references, and consists of articles which appeared serially in the Western Clarion (now defunct). “Slave of the Farm” describes and explains the hard and losing fight waged by the Canadian farmer against the organised financial and industrial Capitalists. It is a corrective to the fanciful tales of the Empire boosters and emigration touts.

Causes of Belief in God,” by Lafargue, has not been published in this country in pamphlet form, and will be new to most English readers. It is written with Lafargue’s accustomed brilliance.

The Socialist Party of Canada has now ceased to exist, and the pamphlets will not be reprinted in the present editions.

Those we have obtained represent the bulk of the remaining supply. They are excellently produced, of convenient size, and well worth the price asked. All but two (“Slave of the Farm” and “Economic Causes of War”) are in the uniform and attractive series known as the “Whitehead Library.” As the stock will soon be exhausted, you are urged to make early application.

“Wage-Labour and Capital” (Marx), – pages, 4d.
“Communist Manifesto” (Marx and Engels), 59 pages, 4d.
“Slave of the Farm” (A. Budden), 63 pages, 6d.
“Economic Causes of War” (P. T. Leckie), 132 pages, 6d.
“Causes of Belief in God” (Lafargue), 48 pages, 6d.
“Socialism—Utopian and Scientific” (Engels), 95 pages, 6d.
“Value, Price and Profit” (Marx), 78 pages, 6d.

Note.—Postage extra : ½d. per copy.

Blogger's Note:
The Socialist Party of Canada referred to in the notice was the Party which dissolved in 1925. The Socialist Party of Canada, which is affiliated to the World Socialist Movement, was founded in 1931. There is an overlap between the two organisations because the original Socialist Party of Canada had a significant impossibilist membership within it, and there was an overlap of members between both organisations.

The view of a great painter. (1927)

From the October 1927 issue of the Socialist Standard
“Poverty may induce industry, but it does not produce the fine flower of painting. The test is not poverty, it’s money. Give a painter money, and see what he will do : if he does not paint, his work is well lost to the world.”Whistler.

Socialism and Science. (1927)

From the October 1927 issue of the Socialist Standard

Concerning the beginnings of the cosmic system, we are without knowledge. Science is concerned with the universe as we find it, and speculations as to beginning or finality would both be futile. The indestructibility of matter seems fairly established, and we therefore, only look for efficient causes to effect the changes that would bring about the forms we know to-day. There is evidence of a continuity of processes, the totality of which we term evolution. From astrology to astronomy, from alchemy to chemistry, supernatural creation to naturally selected species, such has been the unfolding in the branches of knowledge that has given us the concept of the universe as a totality of its relations : Before we can formulate a science upon any particular subject, we proceed by a certain method. That method is similar whether the subject matter be the Solar System or the Social System. First induction or the gathering of the facts by experiment and observation; second, the classification and generalisation of such facts into sequences or series, and finally the deduction from such sequences of a theory or scientific law which allows of no other interpretation of the facts than the one consistently derived. By such methods came the Atomic Theory in chemistry, the Law of Gravitation in Physics, the Germ Theory in Pathology, and the Labour Theory of Value in Economics. By such methods we are enabled to understand and explain the facts of experience, and also to supply the antidote to the numbing effects of Capitalist mal-education. Laplace, seeking material for his Nebulae Hypothesis found that he had no need for the God Idea. All science dispenses with such products of man’s ignorant fear. It assigns him his place in nature, and lays to rest for ever the belief in the supernatural. True, there are gaps that require filling in, but they are gaps in our knowledge, not in nature. Aided by abstract thought and the service rendered to one science by another, the gaps are filling. Worlds are not born except of pre-existing matter, and the astronomer has but to turn his powerful telescope toward the heavens, and, with the aid of the spectroscope, analyse, review and reconstruct the birth, growth and decay of solar systems like our own. Piecing together what was previously “explained” by childish theology (He made the stars) we learn that this earth was once a whirling gaseous mass thrown off the sun. Allowing for immense periods of time, cooling would take place, and condensation would bring with it a covering of water and ultimately the formation of oceans. From various sources, we know that primitive life must have begun in these oceans, and through the over-laid strata of the earth disturbed and altered though it has been, we piece together the history of plant and animal life from the geological order in which their fossils are embedded. We find the many extinct forms that were modified and evolved toward those that began life in a world like the one we know to-day.

It was upon this background that Darwin projected the results of his observations. It provided him with the eras of time in which to account for the differentiation of animals and plants from earlier times. It also enabled him to show that continual changing of the earth’s surface would beget conditions which, with the prolific nature in all species, would involve intense struggle for the limited available subsistence. Those species that acquired any advantage from one generation to another in the quest for food, and in the struggle against natural obstacles, would be the species that nature’s sifting process considered fittest to survive.

Those unable to adapt themselves as species would become extinct. Instead of plan and design, as talked of by the Christian, nature has been found to be one huge slaughterhouse of those for whom no place has been found. Darwin knew, of course, from his researches, that man must be included in his evolutionary process. He did not say, as so many falsely assert, that “man came from monkeys” : Man comes from his parents, they from ancestors, and they in turn from more primitive ancestors.

The evidence upon which Darwin relied to establish man’s development from lower forms was the close resemblance of primitive man in structure to the apes known as anthropoid. The resemblance is a much closer one than that between some living races of men. This structural likeness with many other similarities, is too close to be explained in any other way than by common ancestry at some earlier period. Man’s body, too, contains rudimentary parts which point with certainty to his lowly origin. Life begets life, and all biological forms evolve in a similar manner. From the simple cell stage to the most complex organism, plant, animal and man all develop alike, the cell is the unit. The human embryo commences with the union of the male and female cell, and the main history of the species is retold during its development, the last form it passes through before birth being that of the anthropoid ape. Man’s journey commences where he develops language and the ability to construct tools. With a mean power over nature’s materials, he was for thousands of years cradled in the crude communism of the tribe. With a subsistence so mean that it permitted of no idlers, it seems paradoxical that it was the very increase in productivity that made slavery possible. Slavery and class society arrive together. Says Karl Marx, the founder of the science of Socialism : “All history is the history of class struggles.” True to the scientific method, Marx assembled his facts, and answered his critics, with a patience and a thoroughness equalled only by his contemporary Darwin. He bequeathed to the workers an analysis of Capitalist society that has withstood the onslaughts of the paid Professors of the Universities for over half-a-century. In the monumental work Capital, the cause of working-class poverty, is made obvious and clear, and there is shown, that to understand the cause, is to understand the remedy. To remove poverty the workers must by class conscious activity take from the Master Class their means of life. They must commonly own these means which to-day are the Private Property of the Capitalist few. To enjoy the leisurely life, the modern powers of wealth-production make possible, Social revolution is necessary. In order to change the basis of society from a production for profit to a production for use one, the workers themselves must first have the revolutionary outlook. No amount of Capitalist evolution can bring the change to Socialism that is necessary to free the workers. Capitalism has the seeds of its own destruction, but the workers must be the seeds. Lewis H. Morgan, in his “Ancient Society,” after a life study of the development of human society, came to conclusions similar to Marx in quite an independent manner. He says (p. 562) :
“The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim; because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction. Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence and knowledge are steadily tending. It will be a revival in a higher form of the liberty, equality and fraternity, of the ancient gentes.”
Such conclusions the Socialist can endorse. From our own platform, and through our literature, can be obtained all the knowledge required by the workers for the establishment of that higher form of society. Time and truth will tell without empty slogans, or vote-catching reforms, but with the beacon-light of science we illuminate the road to Socialism.
W. E. MacHaffie

A word in season. (1927)

From the October 1927 issue of the Socialist Standard

The London society season is in full swing. It is an event of importance to the ladies and gentlemen of the class we work for—when permitted. It is an event by which we can measure their prosperity and our poverty. In that respect it is of importance to you : as working men and women you have been taught to believe from childhood that they are so very clever, and brainy, working with their brains sort of thing (sic). There is, therefore, reason to believe that in your simplicity the following will appear to you evidence of their ability. The event, it says :—
“Is one which promises to be the most brilliant, and crowded, and interesting of any since prewar days. . . 300,000 people are coming to London. . . . They will be doing Henley, which is so very gay, and Ascot, which is so very smart, The Derby, the Horse Show, the Royal Tournament, all the fetes and functions, until they run off to Goodwood in tailor-mades and leave those green woods and scented Downs for Cowes and the “white wings” on the Solent” (“Sunday News,” May 8, 1927).
And very nice, too ! And what of you fellow workers? You will be doing the same old round of toil which makes such luxury possible. When, with the passing of the summer months, your masters and their ladies depart for the moors, the country house, or the Riviera, you will remain the occupants of the murky, mud-plastered cities of industry. Still, you will argue, who are we, anyway? They’ve got the brains. What is the real contrast? Indolence and parasitism—revelling in splendour. Usefulness and skill exercised in every department of wealth production rewarded with penury, insecurity, and often premature death. Chasing the seasons around the earth in a mad whirl of never-satisfying pleasure may exercise these people in many directions ; it is obvious that, miles from the seat of operations, they can play no part in wealth-producing processes. That part is the workers’ part, including the real directing, the organising, and even the collecting of the profits which flow on during their absence. Still, some sort of excuses have to be made as these contrasts become more pronounced. The contempt that the master class have for your political intelligence is shown from the following clap trap which appeared in a leading article (Westminster Gazette, June 13th, 1927) in the very midst of this welter of wealth. They say :—
“The fact is that no policy other than strict economy is possible for a country such as ours.”
One wouldn’t have thought it, would they ? Some may think that we overdraw the picture: that though there may be a greater flaunting of wealth, the worst forms of squalor have been removed from the workers’ life. Have they? Not a stone’s throw from London’s fashionable and wealthy centre are conditions that would disgrace savages. Seven Westminster citizens, headed by a gentleman who preaches the blessedness of poverty, visited 490 houses in the Victoria Ward (Rev. Francis Boyd, report Evening News, June 6th, 1927). Here are a few of the things that they saw in this rich residential area :—
“In Aylesford Street a woman, her son, his wife, and their boy of 14 were found all living in one room. In another house where four families shared eight rooms there were 14 adults and 10 children. In a court in Wilton Road a husband, wife, five daughters aged 20, 16, 15, 13 and 5 and a son aged 18, had only two rooms in which to live and sleep. Yet another instance in Gray’s Inn Court is given where, in two rooms were a grandmother, man and wife, girls aged 14, 13 and 7 and boys aged 10, 3 and 1.”
“The list could be extended indefinitely,” says the report. “Particularly numerous are the families of six, seven, and more members living in two rooms in tenement houses.”

Of an address in Alderney Street it says :—
“There are sewer rats so numerous that within 24 hours of the laying of a new board it was eaten through. The children are terrified of the rats and refuse to go to bed. One boy was sent to Westminster Hospital suffering from nervous exhaustion.”
And this after one hundred years of reform, within the precincts of the Houses of Parliament. Every London district and every large town could show similar plague spots. The workers being content with the scraps and the offal, the gloomy hovels, and excluded from life’s real pleasures, have allowed their masters to take full advantage of their contentment. Blame or sympathy in either case is waste of time : nothing but the recognition that the removal of all social evils is their mission, and theirs alone, can rid society of such glaring contrasts in wealth and squalor. Experience is a hard and often a slow teacher, but there are signs that it has slowly but surely been doing its work. Awaken, workers, to the possibilities of Socialism, so that you may join with us for the Social Revolution.
W. E. MacHaffie

Corrections. (1999)

From the January 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the part of the article “The Struggle for Democracy” dealing with the finances of the Labour Party, on page 9 of last month’s Socialist Standard, a passage read ” . . . businesses and 21 millionaires who each gave a minimum of £50,000 and not much more“. This should have read “and a lot much more”.

Party News (1999)

Party News from the January 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Election Result

The result of the by-election on 17 December in the Quay ward of South Tyneside Metropolitan Borough Council: Abbot (Lib-Dem) 669; Nellist (Lab) 452; Cole (Con) 42; Bissett (Socialist) 39.

Voice From The Back: The farce must go on (1998)

The Voice From The Back Column from the December 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

The farce must go on

Executions continue while work is in progress at Huntsville Prison, Texas, in renovating the spectators’ salon in front of the execution chamber. For reasons of economy, the prison authorities are having the work done by the inmates, who are engaged in making seating more comfortable and spacious for the spectators, and enhancing visibility. Le Monde, 19 September (translated).


Melt-down

Azerbaijan is a former Soviet republic located in a disagreeable spot just south of Russia and just north of Iran. It is know for nothing except oil . . . Scholars who believe that history ended with the collapse of Communism should visit Baku, because in Baku, nothing is settled. Who could predict the future of a country that many in Moscow—volatile, feverish Moscow—believe shouldn’t be a country at all, but instead a province of a reanimated Russian empire. In Teheran, Azerbaijan is seen as an unforgivable contradiction: a secular Shiite sate, a country ripe for Islamization. In ten years’ time Azerbaijan could be an Islamic state, or a new-Communist state, or a capitalist democracy, or a capitalist autocracy, or even part of Russia. New York Times, 4 October.


Relentless pressure (1)

Stress at work is on the increase, with three quarters of health and safety officers saying it is the biggest workplace hazard, according to a TUC survey published today. Guardian, 23 September.


Relentless pressure (2)

On Tuesday the Environment Agency will consider an application from BNFL to increase its emissions of radioactive gases. Mail on Sunday, 18 October.


Be happy!

Revolutionary anti-suicide glass screens are to be introduced for the first time in Britain on London Underground’s £2.7 billion Jubilee Line extension from central to east London. Suicide attempts on the Underground currently average almost three a week. Guardian, 15 October.


Breakdown

“The challenge to the international community is immediate. We can’t wait around. This isn’t going to go away. It’s here, it’s now and it’s urgent.” It was the Prime Minister’s strongest admission so far that the capitalist system may be on the verge of collapse. Sun, 8 October.


Blasphemy!

A top Manchester lawyer is to complain to the advertising watchdog over posters that “encourage people to skive off work,” Paul Nicolls, head of employment law at Dibb Lupton Alsop, is increased by the campaign by the outdoor clothing firm Karrimor. It’s bright blue posters, plastered on the back of some buses in Greater Manchester say: “Phone in sick—Karrimor, the great British mountains company.” Mr Nicolls said: “This is irresponsible marketing, encouraging people to take time off work on the pretext of illness at a time when British businesses are losing the equivalent of £13 billion a year through sickness absenteeism.” Manchester Evening News, 31 August.


Religion + nationalism = murder

Marija Bistrica, Croatia—Pope John Paul II over the weekend beatified the 1940s archbishop of Zagreb as a martyr to “the atrocities of the Communist system”. Beatification is the final step before canonization as a saint. By paying such homage to Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac, who was imprisoned by the Tito government as a Nazi collaborator, the Pope stepped into one of the bitterest disputes that linger between Croats and Serbs . . . They [Serbs] have long viewed Cardinal Stepinac as a wartime sympathiser with the pro-Nazi government of Croatia, which killed tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies—a regime that many here see as the precursor of today’s independent state. New York Herald Tribune, 5 October.


And persecution

[With independence] “Everyone from the former USSR was considered hostile,” recalls Janis Kahanovics, vice director of the Naturalisation Council. The Riga authorities only accorded citizenship to those already in the country between the wars, and to their descendants. From one day to the next, more than 700,000 immigrants who had arrived during the Soviet occupation found themselves stateless. Referring to a “violation of human rights” in Latvia, Russia refuses to normalise relations and has enforced economic sanctions. The dispersal by force of a demonstration by the elderly, for the most part Russian speakers, and a parade of Latvian Waffen-SS veterans through Riga in March, have contributed to the straining of bilateral relations. Le Monde, 3 October (translated).


Nice little earner

The government is to press on with controversial plans to privatise the state agency that owns Porton Down biological warfare unit. Despite opposition from UK arms manufacturers, the Ministry of Defence is about to appoint financial advisers to review how best to handle a sell-off. Financial Mail on Sunday, 18 October.

Editorial: What really happened on Clapham Common? (1998)

Editorial from the December 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Christmas Fantasy

Strolling upon Clapham Common one dark autumn night, the Cabinet Minister spied sights more sordid than any apparition from his most fevered nightmares. Around him gathered groups of men with copies of . . . oh, the vulgarity of it all . . . copies of the Sun. The sad misfits dribbled and drawled over black-and-white pictures of naked flesh and uttered wild declarations of impotent intent, such as “‘I’d give her one any day of the week”. The Cabinet Minister could only swallow hard. On another part of this place of iniquity—oh, how far from the gay valleys of his boyhood—stood uniformed ranks of clone-like beings chanting passages from the New Labour manifesto. Were these Euro-candidates preparing for informal press interviews—or perhaps a more sinister cult, half-Mandelson, half-Mormon?

The quivering Cabinet Minister ran as fast as he could away from this scene of debauchery. That nature had produced such distortions of humanity was more than he could stomach. Into the direction of Clapham High Street he ran, in search of refuge.

At last, a safe haven. Number 52. The door ajar. A pile of old socialist literature in a box at the entrance. These induced in the Cabinet Minister vague memories of encounters long ago. The man in his home town who had stood upon the platform proclaiming to all the world that it was revolution and not reform that would remove the evils of capitalism. In those days the then young politician had believed that capitalism was indeed the cause of many evils. (This was before the Blairite re-education programme had taught him the wisdom of ‘social justice through the market’, of course.) He was fully resolved to go to Parliament and put right these effects of the system, the cause of which he was committed to retaining intact. ‘As long as the cause of social ills remain and production is for profit and not solely for use there will always be poverty and misery for the exploited majority’ had declared the uncompromising socialist.

And now the Cabinet Minister stood at the door of the Socialist Party’s headquarters, unable to convince even himself that his years of reformist tinkering with the system had been anything but futile. The discussion into which he then entered with the group of socialists in Clapham was, in truth, the affirming moment in his realisation that there still remained only one alternative.

The next day the Cabinet Minister went to see the Prime Minister. “‘It’s all a lie. I can’t go on. I don’t want to run capitalism. How can a party dependent on the support of a rag like the Sun claim to be changing anything?” Tony broke away for a few moments from his policy briefing with Rupert Murdoch. (The latter was briefing the former, needless to say.) The famous Blairite smile dropped, as happens whenever the Great One is contradicted by the merest hint of dissent. The Cabinet Minister was fired on the spot, for his momentary lapse in political judgement. The Prime Minister’s Press Secretary was urged to concoct a story for the media that would save the Government from association with such perverted thoughts. The Sun gloated over the denunciation of the ex-Cabinet Minister. And the true story has not been told until this day.

The struggle for democracy (1998)

From the December 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard
The capitalist system may have nominally democratic institutions, but it relies upon working class compliance, passivity and lack of involvement in the process to carry out its worst and most illiberal functionings. Real democracy can only be achieved on the basis of the common ownership of society’s means of living.
Anyone who has engaged in politics must eventually come across such statements as “democracy is inefficient”; “the best form of government is a benevolent dictatorship”; or (a personal all time classic) “the country should be run by experts, well trained managers, not just any Tom Dick or Harry”. Such comments (which are surprisingly common) reflect a general lack of democratic culture among the working class. These points are easily countered: democracy is only inefficient if your only criterion is speed, but if you include wide consultation and a plurality of opinions and ideas within the decision-making process, then democracy is actually far more efficient in the long run. The benevolent dictator idea neglects the fact that dictators must have a class to back them up so as to ensure the primary aim of all dictators—of staying in power. Likewise, with the group of managers, the question becomes, how do we select such managers? And how are they supposed to manage the country? In whose interest?

These attitudes reveal, however, not that the working class is not interested in how the world is run, but that they have a strong desire for it to be done better. The whole ideology behind a benevolent dictator (the sort of ideology that led to the worship of Lenin, and then Hitler and Mussolini in the thirties) is that they have the power to do what is right, without being constrained by laws or petty interests. The dictator becomes the symbol of the law, all-capable, all-powerful, ready to manage affairs in a rational manner, not in the manner dictated by bourgeois law or by propertied interests. That’s the idea at least. The dictator or the managers become a symbol for orderliness and rationality in an insane and disorganised world. They represent stability.

The problem is that most folk do not look to democracy to bring about this stability. The bourgeois propagandists have done their work, and have effectively destroyed any belief in democracy as the idea that folks can run their own lives and own communities. Years of battering and enforced passivity has come to mean that for most of the working class the idea of them being in charge of affairs is inconceivable.

The most damaging thing to the cause of true democracy is the repeated assurances that what we have nowadays is democracy, and so all the sleaze, all the dumbing down, all the secret negotiations and dirty deals get lumped together to suggest in people’s minds that democracy is not all that great. Our masters wouldn’t want it any other way.

Labour rallies
A recent example of the state of democracy in Britain is the Labour Party conference. Traditionally the Labour conference had at least some nominal control over party and policy. However this year, after Blair has wrought his changes, it became a parade ground, and more of a rally than a decision-making body. Hack after hack talked about the old days of Labour scraps and ferocious debates at the conference. None of them mentioned that debate is part of the democratic process, but instead concentrated on the way it used to damage the image of the Labour Party by making it look divided. Likewise, whenever a party official or government member warned conference that they mustn’t go back to the in-fighting of the 70s, they neglected the fact that the infighting was caused by the party’s leaders refusing to do as they were told by the democratic bodies of the party.

Such exercises in amnesia are not accidental. The British Establishment does not like the idea of its government being under any form of democratic control beyond the nominal scrutiny of Parliament. The media plays a powerful role in this. Its whole agenda of trying to detect splits in the governing party, or questioning the “strength” of a Prime Minister’s position, is entirely geared towards promoting anti-democratic, anti-discussion attitudes within the political elite. If a party can lose power because it is seen to have differences of opinion then the only alternative is to keep quiet, and try to get into a good ministerial job to try and “make a difference” there.

It was such a desire to stay in power and limit the appearance of dissent that led to the changes within the Labour Party being agreed to and passed by the very democratic procedures that they have just abolished. The membership of the Labour Party, desperate for a chance to get into power to enact their ever more limited reforms, surrendered their capacity to effect democratic control.

There are further anti-democratic forces at work in the general political discourse, some of which have been with us a long time. One of the most potent is the argument that there is a need to elect to Parliament the people best able to run the country (back to those managers again). Thus there is a selection process for candidates that has a set of criteria to be fulfilled to show ability, usually involving being white, and university-educated, and either a teacher, lecturer, lawyer or banker. Thus Parliament is stuffed with clones of the type most likely to help the ruling class rule. Any notion that Parliament is there to represent the people, and that a constituency should elect someone that they think is most like them, and represent their interests, goes completely out of the window. Even the most limited scope for democracy is subtly elided by propaganda, ideology, and the practice of the main institutionalised parties.

At the last Labour conference, when Tony Blair complete with mechanical body language and a look of good intent, strongly emphasised his strong belief and strong determination, he was met with slavish rapture by the ranks of Labour hacks. They loved his insistence that a strong Britain would be good for everyone, and loved his ideas about working in partnership with our exploiters for mutual gain.

This is the old nationalist lie that we are one country, one people, working together for a common interest. Or, to take a leftist version, as Orwell put it “one family, with the wrong members in charge”(The Lion and The Unicorn). This ideology allows politicians to present us as if we have one common interest. “I’d rather be unpopular than wrong” Blair declaimed, in the full expectation that his unpopularity was about to come from a Labour government acting against the interests of the working class (yet again) in defence of the “National Interest” (the interests of the exploiters of the ruling class).

Nationalism allows the politicians to limit democratic choice on the grounds that there is only one national interest and therefore only one general programme, one set of policies to be followed. However, one of the basic points about liberal democracy is that, as we put it in our declaration of principles, “all parties are but the expression of class interests”. This has long been a guiding principle in British politics, with the different interests of different sections of the ruling class being represented by the different parties. Whilst the Labour Party has always firmly supported the interest of the industrial sections of the ruling class, it has also, at its most reformist, sought to be a conduit for working class interests within capitalism.

Money talks
That Labour has renounced even the most basic reformist platform reflects the interests of a ruling class that is itself in something of a crisis. The poor growth of the last twenty years, the need to keep wages and welfare down, and the need to find new markets have meant that our rulers have had to clamp down on possible channels for dissidence. They cannot, in their current condition, accept any challenge to their profits. When the Major government looked like it was too hostile to the Euro, and thus to the interests of big business and one of their few possible escape routes, they deserted it, and took their money to the Labour Party, newly reformed to appeal to their interest.

In its switch from Tory to Labour the age-old influence of Money has been much more visible than it usually is. The Labour conference attracted heavy criticism for the sponsorship it received from many companies up to and including the delegates’ name tags sponsored by Somerfield. Powerful vested interests have been shamelessly brought in to help Labour “co-operate” better with their kleptocratic masters. They conspicuously drew from the corporate world by bringing Lord Simon (a former Director of BP) into the cabinet by way of the unelected House of Lords. There was nary a whisper of protest at this, not from the media at any rate, and not from the Tory opposition, who doubtless approve of such things.

The influence of Money was plainer to see in the last general election too. Of some £26 million spent by the Labour Party, only £9 million came from unions and members. Nearly all the rest came, according to the recent Neill Report on Party Funding, from private donors including businesses and 21 millionaires who each gave a minimum of £50,000 and not much more. This effectively meant that Labour policies were being sold to these people, and had to be acceptable before they would buy them. This is of course nothing new, but it is more blatant than before.

Although the government is due to introduce reforms to the party funding system, this is unlikely to do much to change the basic fact that money dominates elections. For that matter, most of their “democratic reforms” are unlikely to make any real change either. Abolishing hereditary peers will simply allow for a House of Appointees—it is unlikely, given that Blair exercised his power of appointment to get Lord Simon into the cabinet, that he would wish to renounce such an option for the future. He defends himself against charges of being a control freak by pointing out all the extra voting that he is allowing for Scottish and Welsh devolution. However, this merely means voting parties in to oversee the bureaucratic work already going on, and to enable regional government to make itself more business-friendly.

Neither do other options being considered add to the democratic culture in Britain. Given the low turnouts in many elections (which the goons at Class War celebrated after the last general election), there has been talk of introducing compulsory voting. This would amount to a state forcing its citizens to legitimize it and runs totally counter to any real notion of democracy. PR, if instituted, would just be a way of further institutionalising parties, and changing the question from representation to one of balancing the parties’ share in the executive. It would merely mean that it would become more difficult for one party to dominate the government and thus go against the ruling class interest in the way the Tories did at the end.

All of these changes, however, are merely cosmetic. They represent changes to formal democracy, which has no real power to affect the course of events. At the moment a small group of people control all the wealth and property, and it is upon their interests that everything hinges. It is only by removing such people, and not by tinkering with the form, that true democracy can be reached.

Democracy is not a set of rules or a parliament; it is a process, a process that must be fought for. The struggle for democracy is the struggle for socialism. It is not a struggle for reforms, for this or that political system, for this or that leader, for some rule change or other—it is the struggle for an idea, for a belief, a belief that we can run our own lives, that we have a right to a say in how society is run, for a belief that the responsibility for democracy lies not upon the politicians or their bureaucrats, but upon ourselves.
Pik Smeet

Greasy Pole: Gays and capitalism (1998)

The Greasy Pole column from the December 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Among the demands of campaigners for homosexual equality is that there should be an end to the discrimination towards gays and lesbians in the armed forces. Everyone, whatever their sexuality, should be treated equally in their military training, the opportunity to join “elite” units and their chances of promotion. And they should be encouraged to kill other people just as efficiently and ruthlessly as any other soldier, sailor or air person. Welcome to the world of “equality”.

We can spend a lot of time considering the nature of prejudice against homosexuals and how deeply this might be rooted in the bigots’ anxieties about their own sexuality. In the case of the armed forces, with their emphasis on disciplined, uniform devotion to the task of wiping out other human beings, it is no surprise that the prejudice should be particularly strong and cruel. But, typically of a prejudice, it is not a theory supported by any evidence; the assumption that military gays have to be confined to work in the cookhouse because they couldn’t be trusted in the frontline has no basis in reality. In the First World War, for example, soldiers like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon were homosexuals who were as reckless of their own safety in carrying out their grisly “duties” as the most bloodthirsty commander could have wished.

Decorated
Owen went back to the trenches from the hospital where he had been treated for—but not apparently cured of—shell shock and concussion. At the front he wrote of how exhilarating it was “baffling the machine guns with quick bounds from cover to cover”. In the final weeks of the war he was out in the leading units breaking through the German lines and he was decorated for it—until he was killed a little before Armistice Day. Sassoon’s exploits in battle were so impressive that he earned himself the sobriquet of Mad Jack. After one particularly reckless episode he too was decorated. He then developed some doubts about the war but then became reconciled enough to go back to the Front.

So there is absolutely no reason for the armed forces to have any qualms about filling their ranks with a mixture of heterosexuals and homosexuals in the confidence that they will all work together in a disciplined employment of the latest weapon technology to destroy as much of the “enemy” as possible. This is all in the best interests of the British ruling class; capitalism depends on the support of its people, in peace and war, boom and slump, whatever other differences they may have. We have recently seen how this principle applies to the governments of capitalism and to what is significant about their operation.

There is no reason to believe that Members of Parliament—no matter what image of themselves they project—are any different in terms of their sexual preferences from the people they are supposed to represent. So we can assume that there are proportionately as many homosexuals in the Commons as in the world outside (although there are persistent rumours that there are rather more). But for various reasons it was considered politically advisable to disguise this fact and there was a powerful, united effort to do this.

Rumours
Tom Driberg, for example, was a Labour MP elected in 1945 whose sexual exploits—at a time when homosexual activity was illegal—were renowned for what might be called their reckless audacity. But Driberg was never exposed, even when he had landed himself in a police station, facing a criminal charge. On the other side of the House the Tory MP Harvey Proctor mixed his homosexuality with a nastier type of racism but he was protected until one of his associates blew his cover. When he had to leave Parliament his friends continued to stand by him, helping him out with loans to open a clothing shop. There were persistent, lurid rumours about more than one prominent member of Thatcher’s cabinets—in one case it was said that his withdrawal from the brightest of the limelight was enforced by a frantic police interest in his activities.

By the time we got round to Ron Davies, Peter Mandelson and Nick Brown the situation had changed. Perhaps it was because the fact had finally sunk in, that the law had been reformed some years ago. Perhaps it was because one or two MPs—most prominently Chris Smith—openly announced that they are gay and that this would not prevent them doing their job as administrators of capitalism. Whatever it was, the steam had clearly gone out of the whole thing so that even the Sun could point out that Mandelson’s sexuality is irrelevant to his performance as a minister—especially one who has to have an opinion on Rupert Murdoch’s bid to buy Manchester United. In the Sunday Times of 15 November the Tory shadow chancellor, Francis Maude—whose gay brother died in 1993 of Aids—gave the view of ” . . . a classic, buttoned-up, middle class Brit”. Did he disapprove of his brother’s activities?

“It always seemed to me a bit pointless to disapprove of homosexuality. It’s like disapproving of rain.”

Outed
What are we to think, when the Let-It-All-Hang-Out Sun agrees with a buttoned-up Tory like Francis Maude? Perhaps times have changed enough to put the issue of sexuality into its proper place, so that the millions of people who buy the Sun and the millions who support the parties of Francis Maude and Peter Mandelson no longer think it is relevant to how they vote. One thing which is absolutely clear in the history of capitalism is that the personal characteristics, preferences and sexuality of its leaders have no bearing on how they run the system. The notion that personalities affect politics is part of the deception which persuades people that capitalism is not a society which must operate against their interests.

It is time that all politicians were outed. It is time to winkle them out of the closet in which they conceal the fact that they stand for a social system which can’t help but produce a mountain of human misery—of fear, destruction, neglect, disease . . . It is time for the workers to think in terms, not just of the “liberation” of a group of us but of our whole class.
Ivan

Party News (1998)

Party News from the December 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Denmark

On 21 October our comrade Graham Taylor represented the World Socialist f Movement in a debate in Aarhus against the “Internationale Socialister”, the Danish equivalent of the British SWP. The debate, in Danish, was mainly about why we did not regard the Russian revolution as a socialist revolution. On 4 November a lecture on Marxism in the same city attended by 90 people provided an opportunity for the case for socialism to be presented from the floor. A number of new contacts have been made and the local press has expressed an interest.


North East

Despite the shadow boxing between Labour and the Tory Lords over the election system for next June's Euro-elections, the North East branch is going ahead with plans to present a 4 person list for the North East regional constituency.

To date, on two separate occasions, a branch member has been a panellist on BBC Radio Tyneside's discussion and phone in programme "The Zoo" (their title) where they were able to put and answer questions on the socialist case.

Meanwhile, another vacancy has arisen on South Tyneside Metropolitan Borough Council, in Quay ward, Hebburn. The by-election is taking place on 17 December. The Socialist Party candidate is John Bissett. A meeting challenging the other candidates—Labour, Lib-Dem and Tory—has been organised at the Community Centre, Hebburn, at 8pm on Tuesday 15 December.

Capitalism: An unnatural disaster (1998)

From the December 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Global capitalism’s reaction to the hurricane disaster in Central America shows the system in its true colours—greedy gold and bloody red. Hurricane Mitch left a trail of death and destruction in Honduras, Nicaragua and neighbouring countries. Over 24,000 people were killed or are missing. Millions of some of the poorest people in the world lost their homes and their means of livelihood. International aid agencies gave some help, but it was too little and too late to deal adequately with the problem. Above all, the global profit system proved woefully inadequate to deal humanely and effectively with the situation.

The surviving victims of the disaster need food, fresh water, clothing, medication and many other items. Some of those needs are being met, but not nearly enough. Governments of the richer countries have offered niggardly help. Ordinary citizens, appalled by the extent of the tragedy as revealed by the media, have responded more generously to appeals by the multi-charity Disasters Emergency Committee.

Hurricane Mitch and similar misfortunes are presented as unavoidable natural disasters. To some extent, this is true. But it ignores the difficult-to-quantify consequences of the deliberate pursuit of profit at the expense of environmental protection and conservation—the emission of poisonous gases, the destruction of forests, acid rain, and so on. The severity of the disasters is compounded by the fact that capitalism’s priority is to preserve and enhance the profit system, not to preserve and enhance human life.

The outstanding obscenity is that, even before the latest disaster, the countries affected were massively in debt to the richest “economies” in the world. Both Nicaragua and Honduras were paying about £1m a day in interest on those debts. The payments were more than twice what was spent on health and education combined. The best that some of the European governments could come up with was a scheme to offer debt “relief” in the form of a moratorium on interest payments and a fund to help reduce the cost of future repayments (Guardian, 11 November).

The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are being asked to disgorge a fraction of their capital built up over many years by exploitation of the multinational working class. The bankers ponder whether they can afford such generosity, while the insurance industry is worried about its profitability. Experts “believe insurance cover, vital for attracting inward investment to develop tourist resorts and protect homes and businesses, will become prohibitively high. In some areas it may disappear entirely” (Times, 9 November).

How would the consequences of natural disasters be dealt with in a socialist world? The frequency and severity of such events would be minimised by not damaging the environment in the pursuit of profit and not forcing people to live in areas that are prone to really unavoidable natural disasters. When a hurricane, earthquake or whatever did occur, help would be organised directly and immediately to meet the needs of the victims. No waiting around for funds to be set up, relief costs to be authorised, etc. No question of debt moratoria or cancellation to be considered—not debts would be created. Just the simple meeting of human need. Is that too complex and unthinkable an idea to understand and act on?
Stan Parker

Inadequate scientific perspectives (1998)

Theatre Review from the December 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

An Experiment with an Air Pump by Shelagh Stephenson. Hampstead Theatre.

Three plays about science in as many months. Is there something in the wind or is this mere serendipity? All three plays have a historical focus: Copenhagen (Socialist Standard, September) is about the making of the first atom bomb; After Darwin (October) looks at the immediate and later consequences of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution; and now in An Experiment with an Air Pump, Shelagh Stephenson offers two stories, inviting us to compare the motivations of scientists at the end of the eighteenth century with those of other scientists 200 years later.

Like Tom Stoppard in Arcadia, Stephenson keeps both her stories in play throughout the evening. She is good in persuading us that even as late as the end of the 18th century science was still largely a gentleman’s activity, that the primary motives of those involved were still concerned with discovery for its own sake, and that the enterprise was managed in a neutral manner. But she also chillingly points to the dangers of scientific experiments which, whilst neutral in their apparent search for truth, were morally indifferent to the rights of those who became the subjects of experiment. The same attitudes which allowed scientists in Nazi Germany to experiment with victims imprisoned in concentration camps, were clearly evident in Great Britain two hundred years ago.

Unfortunately, however, whilst the 18th century tale is persuasive and revealing—and managed with a sure dramatic touch—its 20th century counterpart is a slight little thing which avoid any substantial discussion of contemporary science. The story, such as it is, concerns the fate of a research scientist. Should she continue to work as a university don or accept funding from a private company? Whilst the earlier tale offers some interesting insights into the relationships between science and society, the later story seems intent on avoiding such issues in favour of what might be called “human interest”. The choice facing the scientist is thus a particular choice. It is not referenced to similar choices which other scientists might face, nor yet is it placed in any meaningful context. Indeed, the very particularity of the scientist’s dilemma means that it cannot stand as a token for wider concerns.

Why, I found myself wondering at the end of the performance, had Shelagh Stephenson offered us such a sad little tale? Why, having established such a broad set of critical perspectives for her first tale, should she choose such an inadequate contemporary counterpoise? And then it occurred to me that it is possible to get some purchase on events in the 18th century, without necessarily having access to those further additional insights which would allow similar, present-day events to be scrutinised. Thus she is sufficiently far from the end of the 18th century to be able to see what was afoot with some clarity. But she is also too close to the present, and seemingly without all the analytical tools necessary to understand what is going on.

I recall being critical of Timberlake Wertenbaker’s After Darwin for much the same reason: a failure to comprehend what is at stake in modern science. As a one-time graduate in chemistry I can confirm that the education (sic) of scientists usually conspicuously avoids any reference to the nature of scientific activity, its history and philosophy. Such knowledge as I have about science and technology (rather than the restricted field of vision that is chemistry), has been gained from the study of sociology, philosophy and history, rather than as part of undergraduate studies in science. Just about the last thing that contemporary society wants is that scientists are able to reflect on the nature and consequences of their activity. If they were able to do this they might become concerned about the consequences of their day-to-day behaviour. But commerce and industry want compliant workers and now knowing, reflective practitioners. And dramatists—certainly dramatists who might want to write about contemporary science—tend to have an arts rather than a science background, and as such are unlikely to be familiar with both science and its sociology.

So we will probably have to wait a very long time before some writer is able to incorporate a critique of contemporary science in a drama about the practice of science. It’s not only audiences who are the victims of over-specialisation and dumbing down. Writers, directors and performers also suffer in the cause of capitalism.
Michael Gill

Traitor to Socialism (1998)

Book Review from the December 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Lost Writings. By James Connolly. Pluto Press. £13.99.

James Connolly is an Irish National Hero, a Martyr no less, executed by the Brits for his leading role in the fool-hardy and intentionally suicidal 1916 “Easter Rising”. He also had the reputation for being a socialist, and in fact was for a while a participant in the impossiblist, or anti-reformist, revolt in Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation (SDF) which led to the formation of a British equivalent of the American Socialist Labour Party (SLP) in 1903 and of the SPGB in 1904.

Connolly had been born in Edinburgh in 1868 and first became active in the SDF’s equivalent there. In 1896 he moved to Dublin where he was one of the founders of the Irish Socialist Republican Party (ISRP) which had a similar policy—socialism as an aim, but combined with a programme of reforms to be achieved under capitalism—except that it also stood for an independent Ireland.

Connolly soon saw through Hyndman (this collection contains an article of his denouncing Hyndman’s anti-semitism) and was attracted by the ideas of Daniel De Leon and the American SLP. Thus, in the impossiblist revolt within the SDF, Connolly was associated with the SLP not us (though he was in correspondence with some of those who set up the SPGB). In 1903 he moved to America where he got a paid job with the SLP but soon fell out with De Leon and went to work for the rival SPA. He was also involved with the IWW. In 1910 he returned to Ireland where he became an organiser, first in Belfast then in Dublin, for the Irish Transport and General Workers Union.

In this collection of articles by Connolly not previously republished it is those up to 1910 that are interesting from a socialist point of view in that they give an idea of the intellectual milieu out of which our own party emerged, in particular the view that there was an irreconcilable conflict of interest between the working class and “the master class” and that the working class, once enlightened, could use the ballot box as an instrument of emancipation. Connolly, however, was always wrong on the issue of a reform programme. It was him who drafted the Platform of the SLP (included here) after it broke away from the SDF which, surprisingly since this was not the policy of the American SLP, contained a list of immediate demands short of socialism. The SLP later dropped this, but not Connolly.

In fact by the time he returned to Ireland he was a Labourite reformist and fervent Irish Nationalist. Whereas in his ISRP days he had laughed at those who invoked “the spiritual inheritance of the Gael”, his articles (in this period best described by the title of one of them, “Some Rambling Remarks”) now spoke of the “soul” of the “Irish Race” and he denounced Protestant workers in the North as “a local majority of bigoted traitors of Ireland“. And, whereas in 1899 he had argued that “the cry for a ‘Union of Classes’ is in reality an insidious move on the part of our Irish master class to have the powers of government transferred from the hands of the English capitalist government into the hands of an Irish capitalist government” (Workers Republic, 2 September 1899), he was proudly declaring at a public meeting in 1914 to discuss “The Position of the Nation” with regard to the First World War that “he had with him on the platform men drawn from all classes” (Irish Worker, 17 October 1914).

Connolly to his credit opposed the war, but more on Irish Nationalist rather than international socialist grounds. Indeed, a pro-German stance can be detected in some of his articles. For instance, in the speech above in October 1914 he was reported as saying that “Germany was fighting for the commerce of the seas and for the means of building up a sane civilisation in Europe” and, a month later, wrote that “in this attack upon Germany it [the Irish working class] sees an attack upon the nation whose working class had advanced nearest to the capture of the citadels of capitalism” (Irish Worker, 21 November 1914).

As the war dragged on, he turned more and more to the physical-force Irish Republicans and began to talk like the nutcase Patrick Pearse about the need for a blood sacrifice to save the soul of the Irish race, declaring that “no agency less potent than the red tide of war on Irish soil will ever be able to enable the Irish race to recover its self-respect” and that “without the Shedding of Blood there is no Redemption” (Workers Republic, 5 February 1916).

At least he practised what he preached and sacrificed his own blood. After his death he got his “red tide of war on Irish soil” in which thousands of Irish workers were killed to establish an Irish Capitalist state which did absolutely nothing for those who survived. Connolly had died a “bigoted traitor” to the international working class.
Adam Buick

Sixties Man (1998)

Book Review from the December 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

1968 Marching in the streets by Tariq Ali and Susan Watkins. Bloomsbury, London 1998. £20.

Hey man, ’68 was so great! Like everything was happening all at once and everyone was groovy. Tarry tells it like it was. There was like Vietnam, man. The Cong versus the US. Sampson versus Goliath like. Ho was the man there man. Like he was never just another nationalist dictator. Yeah right. “Hell no we won’t go.” Unless it’s someone we really dislike like the Nazis. Then there was Che, man. He was like Jesus, man. And like Che had nothing to do with the repressive Cuban regime at all. And there was Czechoslovakia too. Dubcek and “state managed capitalism with a human face”. Or whatever it was. Then there was the students in Paris, man, who were like really radical and didn’t just want bigger beds and bigger grants at all. There was a real revolutionary situation there, man. Although de Gaulle did get a totally massive election victory. We all loved Meow, the Chinese cat, too. After all millions of dead red Chinese can’t be wrong. And then there was Free Love, man. Which didn’t just mean I could get laid more often. And we weren’t like just into getting stoned like today’s kids who smoke dope and do LSD all the time. Everyone was just so radical and everyone was out marching just like Enoch Powell, man. And rioting: “to loot is to liberate”. Unless it’s my shop of course. Then there was like the Blacks thing, man, and Women’s Liberation. Those things changed the world forever, man. Like Blacks aren’t discriminated against at all now and women still don’t get the shitty end of the stick. Now like everyone’s totally sold out, man, they used to be so radical and now they’re like bourgeois. Not Tarry though. Even though he’s got a job on the TV and he’s a rich man, man.

Repeat this mournful, self-indulgent, semi-Trot dirge until bored to death or organise for a real socialist revolution.
Kaz.

The Gospel According to St Tony (1998)

Harry Enfield as the Reverend Blair.
TV Review from the December 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

There must be an age-old adage in the comedy profession—satire will never die so long as we’ve got politicians. If the last Tory administration provided more grist to the satirical mill than anyone thought possible, New Labour is fast emerging as a more than worthy substitute for it. It was surprising then that last month one of Britain’s most gifted satirists, Harry Enfield, should have chosen the Conservative Party for his most recent attack on Britain’s most disreputable profession.

Norman Ormal was a composite money-grubbing, greasy-pole climbing Tory MP surrounded by a menagerie of fellow low-lifes, also played by Enfield. The character based on Alan Clark was toe-curlingly gruesome, and thereby eminently lifelike. But there seemed little point in such a programme beyond showcasing Enfield’s mimicry skills. There is, to gloriously mix metaphors, no point in flogging a dead parrot.

Rather more promising is Enfield’s part in the televising of Private Eye’s St Albion’s Parish News, its excoriation of the evangelical wing of New Labour, replete with Tony Blair as vicar. There is something slightly disturbing about Blair, and Private Eye have probably got nearer to identifying it than anyone else. He is just too nice. Not in an abstract sense (nobody can really be too nice), but too nice given his dubious “values” and incredible manipulation skills. The “nice” public image clearly doesn’t marry with the other elements of his persona. Someone who genuinely smiles and gleams and brings light into the eyes of pensioners when he goes on a town centre walkabout doesn’t then turn round and cut single mothers’ benefit. Someone who can speak so movingly about peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland doesn’t then agree to send British planes over to the Gulf to bomb the living daylights out of tens of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children—at least not usually if they are genuine. But then again, religion can play funny tricks on the mind.

Roaring with Rory
The hardest-hitting satirical show on TV is still fronted by Rory Bremner (C4, Sundays), and thankfully he has not been tempted to spare New Labour’s blushes. Rory Bremner has a talent most of us can only wish for, and he hasn’t misused it. Exposing the last bunch of Tory slimeballs and greasers must have been a pleasure for him.

The previous occasion this column mentioned Rory Bremner it was to express the wish that his programme wouldn’t soft-pedal on New Labour. It hasn’t. Bremner too has captured the phoney-Tony evangelical spirit of the Prime Minister. And the double-standards that go along with it. And while his impressions and caricatures provide a wonderful lampoon of the virtual reality world which is New Labour, John Bird and John Fortune have stuck to their task of ripping apart the hypocrisy that lies at the very heart of this project, of exposing the people with a Mission and with Vision whose only mission is to keep themselves in the luxury to which they are now accustomed and whose vision is distorted by a crazy virtual-reality headset called “the market”. Bird and Fortune make stark for all to see what was once the preserve of socialists—there is no fundamental difference between the Conservative and Labour parties. Indeed, there is little if anything between them taking into account the factors they themselves think are important and distinguishing. Nothing could have illustrated this more than the sight of a Labour minister explaining why the government is thinking of putting the Royal Flight—which carries ministers, the royals and other dignitaries across the globe—out to private tender. And then for Francis Maude, Tory Shadow Chancellor, to appear on the TV news denouncing it as a disgraceful waste of a national asset. Virtual reality headsets—you got ’em!

Speaking of which the most marvellous moment of all on Rory Bremner each week is the appearance of the virtual reality Peter Mandelson, replete with 1940s’ BBC radio announcer voice. Catch it if you can. The scariest thing, though, is that somehow it seems more genuine, and somehow human, than the real thing.
Dave Perrin

Blogger's Note:
It's probably been mentioned before on the blog but John Bird was briefly a member of the Nottingham Branch of the SPGB before *cough* going up to Cambridge University in the 1950s. One of those 'Is it really true?' stories is that Harry Enfield, when he was an undergraduate student at York University, wrote his thesis on the SPGB under the tutelage of ex-SPGB member, the late John Crump. 

How well is the "Welfare State" (1957)

From the June 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from March Socialist Standard).

Housing in Vienna

In the face of the general poverty of the mass of the people, any assertion that the workers are supposed to be the owners of nationalized industries is not only a mockery; it is a downright fraud and an insult to their intelligence. Even the assertion of house-owning by the workers is for the overwhelming majority nothing but an illusion. Of the 100,000 flats built by the Municipality of Vienna since 1922, not one can be claimed by the occupier to be his property. They all are owned and controlled by the share and bondholders of the Municipality and the Banks. The occupiers are there on sufferance; i.e., on condition that, and as long as they can pay the rent, the same as in all the houses belonging to private landlords or the State. Failure to meet this obligation involves the loss of the accommodation. No, "welfare" does not go so far as to make you the owner of "your" flat. While this municipal building activity may be said to be a bright spot in the jungle of the housing market, the problem remains really and truly a terrifying one.

Dr. Nuna Sailer, speaking on the social background of the problem of youth, said the whole question is marked by the indescribable housing conditions in Austria. In Vienna more than two-thirds of all flats still consist of only one room and kitchen. The larger part of the flats have not even their own water supply. There are no statistics on the number of beds in the individual households. Inspectors see appalling conditions when visiting homes. Children of four still sleep in cradles, prams or boxes, chests of drawers, trunks; two or three little stools and similar makeshifts serve as “beds.” As a result of a comprehensive investigation, it was found that 12 per cent of all children shared their parents' bed. About a tenth of them are from 14 to 18 years old.

It is obvious that apart from a lot of other evils due to such lack of dwelling space, the child cannot learn or do its homework. Bad housing conditions also lead not only to quarrels, but to a complication of the problem of youth in the family. Out of 72,000 marriages in 1949 there were 18,000 divorces. Today almost 40 per cent of all children have no father, 20 per cent. are illegitimate, a large number come from unmarried couples, the remainder are orphans.

167,044 flats are needed in the whole of Austria, according to the latest statistical records. Behind this dreary figure there are hundreds of thousands of human tragedies. Not included in this figure are the many thousands of families which must dwell in old, derelict, insanitary places; those 167,044 families are looking for accommodation and have no home of their own at all. They live herded together with relatives or as sub-tenants. The sorry record is held by Vienna, where in spite of all municipal building, there is a lack of 62,741 flats. "On the question of how the shocking balance sheet of Austria's housing misery could be remedied," said a reporter, “the statistical office can, of course, give no information."

Even the various homes for the homeless (cases of ejection, etc.) in Vienna have 200 family applicants on their waiting lists, although they offer only temporary abodes of some sort.

One must read the columns in the newspapers describing the housing conditions and the awful ordeals of all those thousands of families in quest of a home, to realize the amount of human suffering and degradation.

Just the same in Paris and London and Brussels
And those interested in conditions in other countries will learn that housing conditions there are even worse. According to official statistics, there are 1,180,000 dwellings in Paris, 260,000 of which have no water, 250,000 no gas, and 60,000 no electric current The action of a priest, the Abbé Pierre, who undertook to arouse the public conscience after more and more people had been found frozen to death in the streets of Paris, would indeed seem to fully bear out what has been said about Paris on that score.

After reading a report of conditions in a working class district in Brussels ("one of the most chromium- plated capitals in Europe"), the young king of Belgium made a secret six-hour tour of the district and “got a shock.” The priest who accompanied him said afterwards: "The king was distressed at what he saw," and said that "it is a tragedy that humans should have to live in such conditions." He visited 30 tenements. One housewife mistook the bespectacled, studious-looking king for a sanitary inspector. She showed him a broken-down lavatory shared by 17 families. “Look at that," she told the king, "and to think the landlord has one in marble."

What a correspondent (an estate agent) in the London Times (12.6.1956) said on the housing problem in another Welfare State, England, literally fits the situation in this country when he writes: “. . . several of the 50 families we have had to deal with in the last three months have been on a council list for anything between five and 12 years." After describing the impossibility of wage-earners being able to buy a house, the correspondent says: "We have tried lately not to make our small society known, from despair at coping with any more cases of most cruel hardship; young couples turned out of their lodgings on arrival of a baby; husbands separated from their wives and children; families living crowded in one room, others in L.C.C. hostels for as much as three years. Every council in and around London sees the problem as of overwhelming urgency."

There is probably not one of the “fair cities of the world" where the mass of the inhabitants are not herded together often in what can only be described as slums and suffer the physical and mental torment which such atrocious housing conditions bring in their train.

“Get children and lose your job"
It is not only the housing question that terrifies many women at the prospect of having children; it is the fear of losing their jobs or the difficulty of getting one, apart from numerous other considerations—all due to the fact of poverty. In their despair they resort to illegal operations, imploring doctors to perform them, with the result that when eventually found out, physicians and patients go to prison. In February this year a trial took place at the Vienna Court when no fewer than 300 women and a number of doctors had to stand trial for such illegal action. Under the heading: “Weeping women, grinning listeners,” the Arbeiter Zeitung reported how people outside the court fought with fists for seats. One can only imagine the ordeal of women having before the judge to answer embarrassing questions about the most intimate particulars of their married life. One has to bear in mind that there are women who have no parents, no home and no jobs and who threaten to commit suicide unless the doctor helps them. Again and again women bring children into the world in the open, because they have no homes, no money, no work. After reporting on one of these cases, the paper says: “Now the woman is in hospital. She gets food and has a bed. Then she will move with her child to a Central Children's Home. But What then? She has no home.”

Child mortality
Dr. H. Czermak, of the Vienna University Clinic for Children, declared before the Society for Children's Welfare that Austria showed the highest infantile mortality in West and Northern Europe. In this country, Dr. Czermak revealed, eight healthily born children die every day. One might ask what sense there is in preaching the increase of births and to punish women and doctors for interfering with the growth and development of new life when the economic conditions of the family make it impossible for the woman to do without the earnings from a job? Even the inveterate apologists for wage-slavery, such as the Arbeiter Zeitung, have to confess that the low wage earned by the husbands absolutely forces women to go to work. What to do with the children while the mother is at work, that is the problem. And what does the “Socialist” Party of Austria propose as a remedy for this and the other social problems? Socialism? Not on your life! Create more children's hostels, where the poor things can be deposited while the mother is at work! And setting up a marriage and family advisory committee and service to repair broken and ill marriages!

“Our welfare workers can sing a very nasty song indeed of the conditions which they find in such marriages in which there are children. Most of the 5,000 children in the municipal institutions come from such marriages” “The shocking fact,” said the deputy mayor, “induced us to set up a committee.”

That these conditions are not confined to Austria, but prevail all over the capitalist world, was confirmed by the International Youth Aid Society, which stated that of 900 million children, 600 million are undernourished, badly clothed, insufficiently housed and not properly protected against illness.

Suicides in Austria
In a leading article under the heading “Died on the Welfare State,” Die Presse (19.4.1956) wrote:
  "In the city of Vienna suicides are on the order of the day. In the last decades they have increased to such a frightful extent that the public scarcely takes notice of them. Two or three lines in the papers, often not even so much, coolly report that X, Y, Z could no longer cope with their conditions of existence mid saw no other way out than death.  . . . Also, yesterday, one could read that a 65-year-old war invalid hanged himself in a room of the Health Insurance Premises. He had been sent from one department to another until he could no longer stand it and decided to end it all.  . . . This case is sad proof that even the finest National Insurance Law, however cleverly it may be conceived and well meant, can never provide a solution of the social problems of our days, but brings the danger, like the innumerable other welfare, health-insurance and old age protection laws, to become a soulless mechanism, which in the end crushes those Whom they were intended to help."
And under the heading: “Many suicides in Austria,” the Arbeiter Zeitung reported that in 25 countries, with a total of 400 million people, about 72,000 persons commit suicide every year. Austria is always found among the group topping the list, with Japan, Denmark and Switzerland. Whatever the reports say
about causes, there is no doubt whatever that the overwhelming majority drift to suicide, just as they do to crime through poverty. And who does not know by now that the cause of poverty is Capitalism.

At the time of writing, a local theatre produces the drama “Poverty,” by Anton Wildgans, in which, among other working class catastrophies, a small postal clerk (another nationalized industry said to belong to the people) dies after an illness which was for his family an almost greater catastrophe than his death. Said a theatre critic: “The play verily has lost nothing of its poignant actuality.”
Rudolf Frank

(To be continued).

Letter: Need answering (1957)

Letter to the Editors from the May 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Sir,

Although I am not a member of your party, I read Questions of the Day and Socialist Comment with great enjoyment. These pamphlets were well written, and it is a refreshing change to read some political propaganda which has some literary merit. However, two points—one minor, the other major—need answering.

Firstly, when talking of the Class and Colour problems in South Africa your writer says: “Many British clergymen have gained a cheap reputation of liberality by pointing out these evils, although they close their eyes to the exploitation of workers on their own doorsteps; i.e., in Britain. This seems to me to be a rather cheap and ill-founded attack on Father Huddleston, who really is concerned about the plight of the native in South Africa. I should like your correspondent to justify his remark.

Secondly, your definition of the Marxist interpretation of history, although I realise that it has to be compressed for reasons of space, is utterly misleading. The economic interpretation of history does not mean that men are wholly or primarily actuated by economic motives. To use the words of Professor Schumpeter: “The explanation of the role and mechanism of non-economic motives and the analysis of the way in which social reality mirrors itself in the individual psyches is an essential element of the theory, and one of its most significant contributions. Marx did not hold that religions, metaphysics, and political volitions were either reducable to economic motives or of no importance. He only tried to unveil the economic conditions which shape them and which account for their rise and fall."

Finally, the economic interpretation of history has often been called the materialistic interpretation of history. Your writer in Socialist Comment makes this mistake. Marx’s philosophy is no more materialistic than is Hegel’s, and his theory of history is not more materialistic than is any other attempt to account for the historical process by the means of empirical science. It should be clear that this is logically compatible with any metaphysical or religious belief—exactly as any physical picture of the world is. Medieval theology itself supplies methods by which it is possible to establish this compatibility. Several Catholic radicals declare themselves Marxists in everything except in matters relating to their faith.

Thank you again for some interesting reading.
 Yours faithfully,
“ History Sixth.”