The “Welfare" State (1965)

From the April 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is sometimes claimed that the case for socialism is now no longer relevant as capitalism has managed to reform itself through such means as universal education and factory and welfare legislation. The underlying assumption behind such claims is that socialists hold that under capitalism the owning class can only be a bunch of rapacious and selfish despots holding sway over a wretched mass of labourers who live in utter destitution amid filth and squalor. This was something like the position in the period between the rapid growth of capitalism in Britain at the beginning of the nineteenth century and the time when the governing classes—then landlord and capitalist got round to tackling the situation in the interests of the further development of capitalism.

The socialist analysis of the so-called Welfare State goes back to the pioneer of scientific socialism,. Karl Marx himself. Capital appeared in 1867. By that time the institutions of the Welfare State were not very advanced. In Victorian Origins of the British Welfare State D. Roberts describes their growth in the period 1833-1854. The Parliament elected after the passing of the first Reform Act of 1832 had to deal with the various social problems which the Industrial Revolution had aggravated: growing rural pauperism, the sad state of education, the utter squalor of prisons and the working class areas of towns, the employment of women and children for long hours in the factories and mines. During this period government inspectors were appointed for factories, schools, health, prisons, mines and railways; the Poor Law and church systems were reorganised. The first Factory Act was passed in 1812; state aid to education was also first given in 1833; the first Mines Act was in 1842; the Public Health Act was passed in 1848 and housing was first regulated by an Act of 1851. By the 1850’s the governing classes had overcome their prejudices against State intervention for social reform.

Social reform came to be accepted as a necessity as conditions changed. This then was the extent of the Welfare State during the period of capitalism about which Marx wrote. Besides the employment of women and children and besides the filth and squalor in which the working class then existed Marx also described, as he says in his preface, “the history, the details and the results of English factory legislation.” Drawing an analogy with soil preservation Marx pointed out that the various Factory Acts “curb the passion for a limitless draining of labour power, by forcibly limiting the working day by state regulations, made by a state that is ruled by capitalist and landlord.” His conclusion could not be clearer: factory legislation, he wrote, was “just as much the necessary product of modern industry as cotton-yarn, self-actors and the electric telegraph.”

From about 1870 onwards the various social reforms were consolidated in a number of measures: the Education Act of 1870, the Public Health Act of 1875, the Artisans' Dwelling Act of 1875, the Mining Act of 1877 and the Factory Act of 1878. In this period also the law on trade unions was reformed. A Workmen’s Compensation Act was passed in 1897. Old Age pensions were first paid in 1909 and the National Insurance Act of 1911 introduced unemployment and sickness insurance for the first time. It was during this period that the SPGB was formed and the back-numbers of this journal contain a very useful analysis of these schemes. The issue for May 1914 explained their character very clearly:

Collective capital is expended through Government departments, with the object of placing at the disposal of individual capitalists an improved commodity on the labour market—workers whose labour will bear richer fruit in the shape of surplus value.

By this time reforms of all sorts were passed by every government whatever its political complexion. The government had now assumed the task of seeing that institutional and administrative arrangements kept pace with industrial changes. In 1925 the pensions scheme was made contributory. A number of Acts—Addison, Chamberlain, Wheatley—were passed granting housing subsidies and allowing slum clearances in the period between the wars. Poor Law assistance was however still administered locally. In 1942 appeared the famous Beveridge Report, Beveridge examined the various welfare services and advocated many changes in the interests of efficiency. The proposal which received the most publicity was that for a national minimum income below which no one should fall, i.e., the transfer of poor relief to the central government. In a pamphlet issued at the time, Beveridge Re-Organizes Poverty, the SPGB pointed out that the Beveridge proposals

will level the workers' position as a whole, reducing the more favourably placed to a lower level and putting the worst placed on a less evil level. This is not a “new world” of hope, but a re-distribution of misery.

After the war many of Beveridge’s proposals were implemented: a National Assistance Board was set up to ameliorate destitution and the chaotic hospital system was co-ordinated into the National Health Service. The much-vaunted Welfare State was complete.

Modern capitalism demands that the State spend capital on maintaining and improving the wealth—and profit—producing capacities of the working class. The NHS, the State education system and even the NAB are State capitalist organisations which work with labour power as their raw material. Although expenditure on such services is an economic necessity under modem capitalism it is not suggested that the relationship between the economy and the Welfare State is direct and mechanical. As a matter of history the present structure of the welfare services is the product of political struggles of varying intensity for over a hundred years. A great deal of idealism and devotion as well as a great deal of calculated self-interest has gone into all the campaign for education, factory and welfare measures under capitalism.

And indeed some aspects of the health and physical environment of the working class have improved considerably: infant mortality has been cut, some killer diseases eradicated, housing and factory conditions bettered. On the other hand, as well as putting more into the worker, capitalism has demanded more out of him more intense work as well as the faster pace of life generally. Aneurin Bevan used to refer to the NHS as “pure socialism” as it gave people free access to medical treatment. However there is nothing to be gained from seeing welfare services as something which they are not. They do not give the worker something for nothing. They are not free handouts.

Reforms—social, economic and political—are necessary all the time to keep the capitalist system running smoothly. They do not represent a challenge to the system or a concession from the system, rather are they demanded by the system. All such reforms, in education and welfare, have left the working class propertyless and non-owners of the means of production. They do not challenge the basis of the capitalist system which is this non-ownership of the means of production by the working class. Poverty is the negation of ownership. Thus the working class still live in poverty.

Today, proposals for the reform of the welfare services are once again being mooted. Douglas Houghton, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in the present government, has been given the responsibility of reforming these services. Like Beveridge he has the task of reorganising poverty, that is, of seeing that expenditure on the welfare services is spent as effectively as possible from the point of view of the productive efficiency of the working class: no one must get too much and no one must get too little. He also has the task of working out more efficient ways of dealing with those whose labour power is either worn out or of such low quality as to be useless : those who used to be called the “aged poor" and others who live in destitution pure and simple.

The working class should not be interested in reorganising poverty. Their aim should be to end the present degrading status of those who work. Under capitalism the producers are treated as mere productive instruments. This is a necessary consequence of the ownership of the means of life by a minority, which means that the producers are propertyless, owning nothing but labour power. Only under socialism where all will have free access to the means of life will people be able to live and treat each other as human beings.

Adam Buick

Capitalism and work (1965)

From the April 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Under Socialism the entire means and techniques that humanity has developed for producing wealth will become the common property of the whole community. The whole of Humanity’s heritage as a tool making innovator handed down from flint stone axe to electronic cybernetics will be unreservedly taken over by the whole community for the satisfaction of its material needs. This condition by itself pre-supposes democratic control and social equality within all aspects of world-wide production. Socialism will reconcile the harvesting of what the community needs with the assertion of individuality through work. Thus people will not perform work by selling their labour on the labour market for a wage or salary. Work will be the means by which people will express within the community. Socialism means co-operation, with the individual determining their contribution to society through all their diverse skills and aptitudes.

No proposition is more likely to inflame the prejudices of defenders of the wage labour system than the demand for “… a community of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common.” These prejudices take the form of a variety of objections frequently voiced at Socialist public meetings. Part of this prejudice is that people by their nature are lazy and have a natural repugnance for work. That production is only ever possible at all when people are forced to engage in work activity by bringing pressures to bear on them. The defenders of commercial interests and the indignities of wage labour claim that people will only work under the inducement of money incentives and when laziness is penalised by the worker being cut off from a livelihood.

It is often argued that people’s “natural laziness” rules out as impracticable any revolutionary demand for a society free from commercialism, the profit motive, class divided society, and the social coercions of wage labour. This objection is a hollow prejudice that seeks to impose a quite false and perverted limitation on humanity’s social possibilities. In order to explain the prejudice itself and why, within Capitalist society, work itself is brought into disrepute, it is necessary to place the whole question of work within modern society into its true social perspective.

The framework within which work is performed in Capitalist society is comprised of the fact that wealth is produced and distributed through the buying and selling of commodities. A small section of the population monopolise and control the means of production, the factories, mines, transport etc., and this monopoly of the means of life is used by them to extract a commercial profit from social production. From this economic basis two inescapable facts of every day life emerge. Firstly, the work performed by any category of worker, whether they be labourer, technician or professional, enhances the privileged position of a social minority; the profit that accrues to this minority class takes precedence over general community needs. Secondly, the only access to a living open to any category of worker who contributes through his or her work to production and distribution is by selling his or her mental capacities for wages or salary to an employer.

Capitalist production rests upon involving those who contribute to production in subservience and economic exploitation. Exploitation is an inevitable corollary of work in a commercial society. Work in these circumstances cannot be the fulfilment of the workers’ interests through their creative efforts, but its direct opposite, the activity by which their exploited status is maintained. The ends to which their work efforts are directed are alien to their interests as individuals and alien to the interests of the working class as a class. Work under Capitalism means selling labour power in a labour market, but in the conditions of day to day reality it is impossible to abstract the power to work from the personality of the person working. Commercialised labour involves the commercialisation of humanity itself.

Under Socialism the fact that work will be the means whereby individuals will assert themselves within society through creative activity will in itself characterise the nature of social production. The expression of individual talent will not be stultified by the crushing economic factors which operate in present day society, where the object of production is for sale at a profit. The organisation of the labour force under Capitalism is determined by stringent economic factors which are both commercial and military; it is geared to the profit motive and the military defence of the profit motive. From the viewpoint of catering for actual material needs a vast wastage of labour takes place under Capitalism. The functions of Advertising, Insurance, Banking, the Armed Forces, the Armaments Industry are all examples. This is not an organisation of Society’s resources adjusted to human needs but is one adjusted to social ends that are alien to human needs and which would under Socialism become redundant.

Under Capitalism then, work becomes an activity imposed on workers by forces external to themselves. It is the division of labour in the cause of profit that imposes itself on workers and forces them to comply with its requirements. People become the adjuncts of machines, servants of the “belt system”; workers engage in work that is physically and mentally destructive and which involves a life time of personal frustration. Workers under Capitalism must compromise their individuality, must tell lies and perfect a multitude of deceitful techniques. Like someone who sells. eternally cheerful under all circumstances, they must lead double lives, only becoming their true selves during their leisure time. Work in these circumstances cannot be a creative activity that enhances the workers’ personal sense of fulfilment; it is the hall mark of their social inferiority and merely the means of reproducing their subsistence from week to week or month to month. Work is not an end in itself but a distasteful and repugnant means to another economic end.

The division of labour in Capitalist society not only places in the name of work, a burden of economic duty on the working class, but debases work even further through the economic factors that condition it. A system geared to the marketing of commodities is pre-occupied with cheapness and saleability. The skills of carpenters for instance are bent not to the flowering of their talents, but to speed, the saving of time, skimping of material and the inferiority of the product in design and finish. The person who, in their leisure time, does carpentry for a hobby, in an atmosphere that is free from the requirements of speed and cheapness, would not dream of making an inferior joint, whilst knowing that the more elaborate joint, consuming more time, was really necessary. That person would regard such an economy as not only an abuse of the job in hand but an abuse of themselves, a self-inflicted insult to their own skill. The double standard is common in many workers. As units of labour within commodity production they must act as economic categories and accept all the priorities of Capitalist economics, including speed and cheapness. It is only when they are outside money inducements and the economic necessity of reproducing their subsistence that they are able to take pride in performing uncorrupted work. Capitalism degrades work and makes impossible what William Morris called “The expression of man’s joy through his labour”. Marx himself saw work in a Capitalist context in the same light. “… The work is external to the worker, that is not part of his nature, that consequently he does not fulfil himself in his work but denies himself… His work is not voluntary but imposed, forced labour. It is not the satisfaction of a need but only a means for satisfying other needs… Finally, the alienated character of work appears in the fact that it is not his work but work for someone else, that in work he does not belong to himself but to another person.” (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts.)

To ignore the social context in which work is performed and to raise people’s “natural laziness” as an objection to Socialism is to crown ignorance and prejudice with distorted pessimism. Like any other social phenomenon, the question of work can only be understood in relation to the whole social environment.

Under Socialism work will spring spontaneously from individuals themselves and the contribution that they make through Society, in whatever field they choose, will at once form the basis of social cohesion and at the same time endow their individual personality. The interests of the individual will be in harmony with the interests of the whole community.

Pieter Lawrence

The Passing Show: TV trash (1965)

The Passing Show Column from the April 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

TV trash

How often do you wash your hair? How often do you have a bath? If someone (other than perhaps your doctor) asked you those questions, you'd probably tell him to mind his own business. Such matters are considered personal enough not to discuss them generally in public.

However, that’s in the everyday run of affairs. But if there was money in it, you might well swallow your pride and tell the questioner what he wanted to know. And if the exercise were repeated often enough and lucratively enough, it’s possible you would forget you were ever annoyed and would even offer other personal but just as worthless titbits, such as the number of times you blow your nose in a day. I could go further, but I won’t.

Why am I mentioning this? It's just that one Friday evening a few weeks ago, I had the misfortune to sit through one hour of concentrated rubbish put out by I.T.V. under the title Ready, Steady, Go! As far as I could tell, it was a collection of pop groups and “ singers ” bleating, moaning, groaning and grimacing to the accompaniment of twanging guitars and the shouts of hysterical teenagers; Usually they merely mime to a background recording, but this time it was a “live” show, and having seen samples of both now, I’d say the more objectionable by a short head.

With Keith Fordyce as the compere trying hard to sound wildly enthusiastic over the nerve racking extremes of sixty minutes sheer row, and his assistant Cathy McGowan, calling everything “ fab ” and “gear”, the high spot—or punch line if you prefer—came when the Rolling Stones appeared and their Mike Jagger answered puerile questions about his bathing and washing habits. At the end of the programme, such was the frenzy of his audience, that he was saved from being devoured only by the intervention of some strong arm men, no doubt retained for the occasion.

It would be stupid of course to blame television as such for trash like this—just as logical as blaming weapons for the outbreak of war. It would be putting the cart before the horse. Like so many things in this world, T.V. has a vast potential for benefiting mankind, but is twisted and debased to suit the needs of a profit making system of society. And this applies just as much to the staid old B.B.C. as it does to the cruder and brassier I.T.V. So if there is a vast teenage demand for Beatles, Animals, Jerks, Kinks, Pretty Boys and Rolling Stones, then T.V. has to sink to the occasion. No matter if some of the characters look like Rowton House rejects; their records sell, don’t they? In their millions?

Indeed they do, and while that sort of condition obtains, all sorts of people will swallow whatever pride they may once have had, in the frantic race for the fast buck. A survey a few years back pointed out the size of the teenage market, running into hundreds of millions of pounds a year, something which certainly didn’t exist before the war. So no wonder we have manufacturers sitting up and taking notice, making things specially for the “teenage character” and changing the styles at a bewildering speed to maintain the myth of teenage exclusiveness, trying to keep the youngsters sufficiently obsessed with themselves to bolster sales.

Gramophone records are no exception to this rule. Generally the pop recordings are of poor quality, and not intended to last. Teenage restlessness in the demand for “new” numbers and boredom with the old. will be encouraged by the disc companies. It’s good for turnover and sales, but reduces the level of performance to an all time low with each new group or record to appear. Hence the spectacle of Ready, Steady, Go, Jukebox Jury and others.

The tragedy of it all is that teenagers are so unaware of all this. They really do believe that they are “different" from the rest of us and that the current hullabaloo is merely a recognition of this at last. In fact their wage status in society guarantees their “sameness” with everyone else and places similar restrictions upon them. They are being taken for a long and bumpy ride with a rubbish tip at the end of it.

Doctors' dilemma

Not so long ago there was no National Health Service in Britain. You just had to scrape the money together to pay the doctor if you were unfortunate enough to need his services. And of course, a stay in hospital meant hospital bills, although how many workers managed to pay them is another matter.

The family doctor was often held in awe and reverence—a pillar of respectability, financially very comfortable and independent. That was obviously the impression that East End slum dwellers gained, perhaps because the doctor always wore a clean shirt and looked smartly turned out. They did not realise just how great a struggle some medicos had to get by. but the going must have been tough at times, particularly in the depressed areas. A. J. Cronin gives us a glimpse of this in some of his novels.

Well, whatever delusions we may have had about the G.P.’s status before the war, there is certainly no room for them now. Most of his “ independence ” was swept away when the postwar health service was set up, and doctors in general can be seen now for what they are—and always were—working men and women. True, their income on average is still much higher than many other workers, but what of that? There have always been differing grades of training and pay under capitalism and here is an example. Their training is years long and their working hours atrocious. A Guardian article of March 9th for example told of resident hospital doctors often working a hundred hours and more a week.

And just like other workers, the doctors have to battle with their employers (the government) over wages and conditions, which is really what all the rumpus was about a few weeks back. The British Medical Association—the doctors' “trade union"—threatened to withdraw its members from the health service if the government's pay offer was not improved. This was not a strike, it was claimed, although just what other name it could be given was not stated. However, the government seems to have climbed down and granted some at least of the doctors’ demands. For them, however, the lesson of organisation has been a long time in the learning. The assiduously cultivated image of medicine being a calling rather than a job, with its practitioners’ sole aim to serve their patients, will be equally long a-dying; and this presents them with a dilemma.

To retain the all-important public support for their cause, the old picture is of help, but it can act as a double-edged weapon. The government has been quick to realise this and use it to the full in its negotiations with the B.M.A. As so many other workers have found, it is the strike or the very real threat of it, which gets things moving if they can be moved at all. And then bang goes public sympathy.

In the event, the medicos took the only course open to them and risked public hostility. Strikes are a constant feature of capitalist society—they are part of the fight which goes on all the time. And people usually get hurt in a fight, not just the direct participants but onlookers as well. It is one of the regrettable facts of capitalist life. End capitalism and you end the fight—for doctors as well as for the rest of us.

Eddie Critichfield

News in Review: Summerskill speaks (1965)

The News in Review column from the April 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Summerskill speaks

The indignation of Lady Summerskill was on public view recently when on television she accused the Tate Gallery of pandering to a "pseudo intellectual snobbery” when it paid £60,000 for a painting by Picasso which she claimed was “ quite meaningless.” The money, she claimed, would have been much better spent on a hospital or a new operating theatre.

We don’t doubt that Lady Summerskill sincerely feels that she has lined up her social priorities in the right order, but then choices of this kind don’t really have to be made. There is no reason why either art or hospitals should carry a price tag at all. Her indignation is diminished by the fact that she herself accepts the phoney economic limitations that Capitalism places on the provision of both these necessary facilities.

30 years after

The recent Royal visit to Ethiopia, which was front page news in the British Press for a few days, carried the mind back vividly, exactly 30 years, to the days when Abyssinia filled not only British but world newspapers. This was in 1935, when Italy launched its brutal war of conquest against this strange survival from the ancient world. The news of bombing raids and poison-gas coming over the radio, provided a sickening curtain-raiser for the world-wide tragedy that was to follow.

For a year or more Abyssinia was the centre of passionate political debate, and the subject that dominated all street-corner meetings. It was the rallying point for the “Popular Fronters’’ until the Spanish Civil War pushed it back into the shadows. One can also recall the mass of misinformation, about Abyssinia, that poured from Communist and Fascist platforms alike—from speakers who one suspected, had only just heard of the place. Perhaps the crowning irony was the spectacle of the Emperor Haile Selassie, autocrat, with a system of government that made the late Tzar look like a revolutionary, becoming the idol of the Left and a champion of Liberty.

Can it be only 30 years since these events took place? The face of Africa has changed so rapidly in the last generation, that it is difficult to realise that Abyssinia was once the only independent state left in Africa, after the great European powers had carved up the continent. Mountainous and land locked, nobody particularly wanted it but Italy, desperate for glory to impress its proletariat, and for land to dump its surplus production.

Today Africa is covered with newly independent States, and it is those which are still under European control that make news. Capitalism is advancing, behind the rash of new flags, smashing tribal economics in its path, and producing the pattern of life so familiar to us. Ethiopia, with Italy’s old colony of Eritrea thrown in to give it a sea coast, has emerged as a kind of centre for the Pan-African movement, with Addis Ababa as an African Geneva.

Perhaps the greatest irony of all is the fact that the new African leaders, loud in their condemnation of Imperialism, are prepared to accept “ His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie, King of Kings, Elect of God, and Conquering Lion of Judah,” as one of themselves.

Wilson's chat

It was on the evening of 24th. February last that Mr. Harold Wilson, his silver hair carefully flattened into place, spoke to us all on television.

First, there was the little joke about Madame Tussauds, to prove that the Prime Minister is human. Then the smile, faint though it had been, vanished and Wilson piled into us.

We need, he said, a revolution (how many other politicians have said that, without actually meaning a revolution, nor perhaps even realising the import of the word?) in industrial techniques and national attitudes.

No more of the attitude that “what was good enough for grandfather is good enough for me.” No more “strikes arising from some real or imagined grievance."

No more “arguments about which of two men shall bore a hole in a sheet of metal... when "—and here Mr. Wilson's eye was level, his voice threatening— “waiting in the wings there are automative hole borers whose designers have not programmed them to argue about demarcation disputes."

The Tories watched and studied this broadcast very carefully. If the Prime Minister had said a word out of place, if he had been in the slightest bit “controversial," the Opposition would have claimed the right to reply.

But Mr. Wilson cut the ground from under their feet. The Conservatives could find nothing in his broadcast to argue with. The reason for this is plain.

No employer, no Tory, would disagree with the Wilson strictures on strikes, industrial disputes, —clock watching—even the sideswipe at expense account lunches. Indeed, some of them probably realised that Wilson attacked strikers much more effectively than the tweedy, remote fourteenth Earl could ever hope to.

In fact, Wilson ignored the minor differences between his party and the Conservatives and concentrated upon their grounds of fundamental agreement—upon their united support of the interests of the British capitalist class.

It is true that the broadcast gave the Tories one cause for concern. Wilson assiduously engaged himself that evening in building up the image of himself as what they call a national leader and therefore was, perhaps, winning votes from those workers who like to have a Big Brother at the head of their master class.

This is an apt comment on the standing of the Labour Party today. They have come a long way since the times when they professed to stand for the interests of the working class and in Harold Wilson they have found the man to bring them to the inevitable end of their journey. For now they are openly a national party of British capitalism, trying to boost British technology, British exports, British influence with no more nonsense about the class struggle.

Wilson himself made the point when he went for “ ... men pinching a few minutes here, an hour there ..." The significance of this is that men can only “pinch” time from their employer because they have already sold it to him—because they have sold to him their working ability, measured in minutes and hours.

Into Europe?

Anyone who has his nose to the ground cannot have failed recently to detect a familiar scent.

The British capitalist class is once more showing interest in joining the European Common Market.

Sir Alec Douglas-Home, addressing the Young Conservatives last February, spoke of cementing “an agreement with Europe . . . economic and political and in due course it will cover security..."

Mr. Wilson, while outwardly he cannot so quickly discard his anti-European hat, is showing signs that he is attracted by its opposite. If he decides to wear this particular hat there will be, of course, no heartburning as a result of yet another abandonment of what were once presented as inviolable principles.

Foreign Secretary Mr. Michael Stewart has recently said that Europe should be "... an equal and influential member of the Atlantic partnership."

These friendly noises could mean that the British capitalist class are once more seeking other ways out of their immediate difficulties than national and Commonwealth ones. In this, of course, their hopes are illusory; the Common Market has not solved the economic problems of its members.

If Britain does try again to join Europe, there will follow the old battle between those interests (agriculture, for example) which see their economic fortunes safest in a massive tariff wall against foreign competition and those (motor cars, for example) whose mouths water at the prospect of penetrating the European market on tariff terms equal to the German and French industries.

Then there is the brooding figure of de Gaulle, who has fashioned French policy on the resolve to build a Europe independent, as far as it can be, of American influence, with France as the dominant power. 

This policy has no place, at present, for powerful competition from Britain. Here, once more, will probably be the biggest stumbling block to any British attempt to sign the Rome Treaty.

If Britain should sign, nobody should be deluded about the motives for it. An attempt to join the Common Market will doubtless be heralded by numerous politicians as a step towards human unity and the brotherhood of man.

When we have discarded this frill of lies, we shall see that a revival of interest in Europe is due, as The Economist put it, to ". . . realities, not sentiments . . . powerful pressures . . ."

They might also have added that the realities and the pressures are those of the balance sheet. The British capitalist class will try to get into Europe only if they are convinced that their general interests, in terms of profit making and maintaining, are safer that way.

Whether they are right or wrong in such assessments is beside the point. What is very much to the point, however, is that the people who make the profits, and who are exploited and degraded in the process—the working class—should for once not be misled by the frills and should face the realities.

Malcolm X

According to his autobiography, Malcolm X expected to die violently, but probably most people expected that, if this happened, it would be by the hand of a white man.

The assassination provoked an outburst of hysteria and apprehension—even regret from people who were only recently denouncing the doctrines which Malcolm X had expounded.

The murdered man moved in a world of violence. His mother, he said, was conceived after a white man had raped his grandmother. His father was also murdered, his skull smashed in and his body flung under the wheels of a street car.

It was only after the seemingly inevitable career of crime and drug addiction that Malcolm X became interested in the Black Muslims—an event which, he wrote, gave him “a little feeling of self-respect."

He soon became prominent in the movement, attracting a lot of publicity with his teachings that the Negro should be strong, disciplined and ready to answer violence with violence. A few months ago he came to the Oxford Union to defend his own interpretation of Barry Goldwater's famous remarks on extremism.

It is perhaps surprising that there was not a Malcolm X before. The oppressions and indignities to which the American Negro are subjected are so extreme that it was predictable they should develop their own, counter-extremist, organisation.

If history is any guide, it was also predictable that this organisation should split, and that the struggle between the two factions (the Black Muslims and Malcolm X’s Organisation of Afro-American Unity) should be as bitter and as ruthless as that against their common adversary.

We have seen this before. We have seen it in Cyprus and in Algeria and many, many times before that we saw it in Ireland, in the days when Michael Collins was shot down on the far South road from Skibbereen to Cork.

In many ways, the United Slates today is a cauldron of savagery and hatred. In an ugly situation, the Negroes themselves offer scant hope. The summit of their ambition is in fact to be exploited on equal terms with the white wage slaves who now stand just a little above them on the social scale.

There is no reason to believe that, if the Negroes got the vote, and won full civil fights in the United States, they would use their new opportunities to end the social system which degrades workers of all colours all over the world.

The Negroes are desperate, and in their desperation they have turned to organisations which sometimes are little better than a black Ku-Klux-Klan. They show little interest in the fact that race prejudice is only one part of the monstrous wall of ignorance which shields and supports the oppressive capitalist system.

As long as this continues, there will be small comfort in the American future. The shots which killed Malcolm X signalled that the Negro movement in the United States has served some sort of apprenticeship, and is now ready to go out into the world and shed blood in earnest

SPGB Meetings (1965)

Party News from the April 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard