On the agenda
As the nights start drawing in, we are reminded that soon it will be time for us to be amused, bewildered or outraged — or perhaps all three — by those annual excursions into fantasy called the party conferences. This year the minds of the party faithful (if that is the right word for the intriguers, back-stabbers and manipulators who infest the chosen seaside towns on these occasions) will be that much more concentrated by the prospect of a general election. It is strongly rumoured that John Major will allow the voters to choose between the Labour and Tory methods of running British capitalism in early November and will use his party's conference as the launch pad for their campaign.
There would be nothing unusual in this. Harold Wilson and Margaret Thatcher are only two recent examples of remorseless exploiters of the publicity given to their party conferences, with an eye to the next election no matter how far away that might have been. So in 1969 Wilson attacked the Tories: "We are promising change: theirs is a prescription for decay". So Thatcher, year after year, fertilised the uglier tumours of nationalism among the sillier of her fans. It was all aimed at a wider audience, beyond the conference hall, watching it happen on their TV sets or reading about it in their newspapers and, it was assumed, deciding thereby how they would vote.
This is all good fun except that conferences are supposed to be events where members of an organisation confer. That means they review past activities, debate current issues and decide about the future. Of course the Tories have never been impressed by that. They never have pretended that theirs was a democratic conference. An all-controlling chair, an overbearing line-up of party heavyweights on the platform and a carefully sifted parade of speakers ensured that controversy reared its unwelcome head only in complaints about party policy being loo indulgent — in calls to bring back hanging, or to bash more foreigners or to turn the screw more tightly on the poorer members of the working class. Stage management was the name of the game, with its climax in Thatcher's exit to the boneheaded chanting of Land of Hope and Glory.
Much as they might sneer at these substitutes for thinking, the Labour Party of the 1990s seems keen to imitate them. Time was when their conferences were freer ranging, but this caused a certain amount of embarrassment when the delegates, under the impression that they were laying down policy for a Labour government, voted for unilateral nuclear disarmament or some other idea which no government in its right mind would entertain. Faced with this, the Labour Party tactic has been to ignore any conference decisions they did not like as glowing examples of a great democratic movement at work.
Either way. and for either party, it amounts to the same thing — a waste of time. When there is work to be done to change society fundamentally, nobody should be deceived by the spewing of words, the reams of promises and the gushing of public relations hype which is what the conferences really are.
USSR Unemployment - Official
In those good old, bad days when Stalin glowered over the cowering people of Russia, apologists for the murderous regime there always had a last line of defence when they were forced up against reality. Unable to refute the hard evidence that "peace loving" Russia was in fact a world-ranking military power, that "freedom loving" Russia in fact ruthlessly controlled every possible aspect of its people lives, that "socialist" Russia imprisoned, tortured and murdered tens of millions of people in order to sustain Stalin in power, there was always one final pathetic justification for all the horrors. There was. squirmed the apologists, no unemployment in Russia; surely that proved the system there was basically different to, and better than, what existed in the West.
So there must have been many a die-hard from the old Communist Party, grown old and weary under the stress of defending the indefensible, in despair at the news that even that puny argument is no longer available. In July a new employment law came into effect in Russia which legalises — in other words admits the existence of — unemployment and lays down a system of unemployment benefit, or dole to you and me.
As Russian industry moves into a long and painful period of reform it is being encouraged to "release" its "surplus" workers, just like British firms when they try to stay profitable by sacking people. Some estimates have it that as many as 20 million Russian workers may be out of work — or thrown on to the industrial scrapheap, to use a favourite Communist phrase — to rely on state benefit for their subsistence.
But being on the dole in "socialist" Russia, where poverty was supposed to have been wiped out over 50 years ago, will not be easy. Seven conditions will have to be satisfied, like signing as available for work and being means tested. To dole claimants in this country it will be gloomily familiar; they will be able to depress their Russian counterparts with an endless fund of stories about waiting for hours to plead for their pittance, about how to grovel to the best effect and finally how to get by on starvation money with no new clothes or outings or entertainment.
Like any country threatened with large scale unemployment, Russia expects a steep increase in the harshness and more destructive poverty among its workers. The Communist die-hards will probably blame it all onto Gorbachev and his betrayal of the true, Stalinist faith. In fact all Gorbachev is doing is to rearrange a social system which was basically never different from avowedly capitalist states like Britain and America. After nearly a century of appalling suffering, with the prospect now of yet more, the people of Russia have nothing to thank their "Communist" rulers for — nor those in other countries whose obsession made them blind and deaf to the suffering.
Citizen's Arrest
There has recently been an addition to the list of words — like "freedom", "peace" and "truth" — without which the life of a speech-making politician would be exceedingly difficult. It is "citizen". The fact that the Tories have recently begun to talk about their concern for the "citizen" and the government to produce something called a Citizen's Charter should rally us to the defence of the word, to prevent it being mauled like so many others.
The word "citizen" has a lot of implied meanings for it suggests people of equal standing, who participate in society on terms of equality and who willingly share in social obligations. It is the kind of word we might use to describe the people of the future society in which work and pleasure are inseparable and human beings regard each other as natural friends. It will be tragic if by "citizen" we mean some unquestioning sycophant of property society, if the word becomes twisted and debased in the battle between the Labour and Conservative parties over who should be the next government of British capitalism.
In any case what "rights" do we "citizens" have under this social system? Capitalism is founded on the monopoly of the means of life by a minority of parasites and its laws and morals — including the "rights" of people — are fashioned by that fact. Governments win power through the votes of "citizens" who have been seduced by promises to protect their interests but when a party are in power those promises are at best compromised, at worst ignored. This happens behind a smokescreen of lies, evasions and euphemisms, some of these the product of devilishly creative minds, which no "citizen" is permitted to penetrate.
In fact any government which really acknowledged the "rights" of its "citizens" is unlikely to survive very long. Capitalism depends on the restriction of freedom and of "rights" and part of its trick is to persuade the very people who are denied these things that it is in their interests for things to be like that. To overturn this set-up we might begin by thinking about how words are distorted in order to sustain it.
Ivan
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