Chile: Myth and Reality (1973)

From the October 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

The events in Chile are already a myth. There, according to left and right-wing commentators alike, a democratically-elected Marxist government was overthrown by the armed forces, so proving the impossibility of establishing Socialism peacefully by using the existing machinery of limited political democracy.

Let us try to scotch this myth now by showing that the failure of the so-called Chilean experiment has absolutely no relevance to the question of whether or not Socialism can be established peacefully and democratically.

Allende and his Popular Unity were not Marxists and were not trying to establish Socialism. The programme of the Popular Unity, an alliance whose main elements were the so-called Socialist Party and the so-called Communist Party, was essentially one of state capitalism for Chile. It called for the break-up the big landed estates, for the nationalisation of foreign-owned and some Chilean-owned industry, and for various social reforms. Even if implemented in full this programme would have left the basic position of the working class in Chile unchanged: they would have remained propertyless wage-workers forced to sell their mental and physical energies to an employer (even if the State) in order to live; production would have remained geared to the market; and the government would still, under pressure from the world market, have had to restrict the consumption of the working class in order to allow the maximum amount of surplus value to be extracted for re-investment.

Secondly, not only was the Allende government not trying to establish Socialism, but it did not even have majority support for its programme of state capitalism. Allende was elected President in September 1970 in a three-way contest, but with only 36 per cent of the vote. Subsequent elections showed that his government never did manage to acquire majority support. The last elections in March this year still gave its opponents 55 per cent of the vote.

Thirdly, because of this limited electoral support, the Popular Unity did not completely control the State machine. Parliament remained in the hands of its opponents who, although they did not have the two-thirds majority needed to impeach Allende himself, harassed his Ministers and delayed and altered ills proposed laws.

For three years those whose vested interests were threatened by the coming of state capitalism to Chile—the American corporations, the Chilean landowners and big capitalists—sabotaged and plotted against the Allende government, but the fact remains that the conflict in Chile was between private capitalism and state capitalism, not between capitalism and Socialism.

That the limited democracy that existed in Chile has been a victim of this conflict can only be a matter of regret for Socialists. For, whatever its limitations, capitalist political democracy at least allows the working class to organise to defend its everyday interests and to discuss differing political views, including those of Socialists. Its suppression in Chile by a military junta represents, in this sense, a step backward for the working class of Chile—not that much of it would have survived had the Popular Unity’s full state capitalist programme been implemented, if the experience of Cuba is anything to go by.

But it still remains true that, in the quite different political conditions (which have never yet existed) of .in immense majority of workers in all the industrialized countries of the world being Socialists and organised to win and control political power, Socialism could be established peacefully. The overthrow of a minority state capitalist government in Chile by forces acting on behalf of private capitalist groups will not deflect us from this position into urging the working class to adopt the futile and dangerous policy of armed insurrection.

Are the workers cheated? (1973)

From the October 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

The short answer to this question is “No”. We are not discussing the “clip-joints” of Soho who cater for visiting football fans on a Saturday evening. Nor the usurious second mortgage and hire-purchase rates charged to some workers. There are instances where individual workers are overcharged, particularly when they are on holiday or in a holiday mood. These, and similar instances, are not typical of the experience of the majority of workers and the working class as a whole.

During the last century, cheating of workers was common—they received most of their wages in the form of tokens which could only be exchanged at certain shops owned by their masters—the Tommy-shops as they were nicknamed. They had no choice but to purchase the low-quality food, usually at exorbitant prices. As a result, many workers starved; it became a national scandal, so much so that the government acting in the interests of all capitalists, introduced the Truck Acts, 1831, which forbade the payment of wages in token or kind.

From time to time, and certainly during a general election, the subject of high prices becomes a major issue. This is good election stuff, and both Tory and Labour Parties fought the last election on it. Some MPs parade themselves as public watchdogs, making sure that the housewife is not overcharged in the High Street while her husband is exploited in the factory.

It is not because the capitalists have a moral objection to cheating the worker, or for that matter, to cheating each other. It is simply that they cannot get away with it. When Sir Denys Lowson, former Lord Mayor of London, performed a series of share transactions involving the National Group of Unit Trusts Ltd, which effectively made him £5 million better off, there was an uproar in the City because he hadn’t played the game according to the rules. He later offered to repay the £5 m., saying that he had made an error of judgement. (Daily Telegraph, 12/7/73). No doubt the City and Stock Exchange will derive much amusement discussing this “error of judgement”.

Prices and Exploitation

Support for campaigns to lower or stabilize prices is a waste of time. One, because they are reformist and distract the workers’ attention from the issue of Socialism, and two, because lower prices make no difference to the position of the working class. Such campaigns to lower prices invariably have had the effect of lowering wages also. High prices or low prices cannot materially alter the position of the worker under capitalism. Since 1939 the price level in this country has increased by about 400 per cent.; wages have increased slightly beyond this. The reason why the capitalist cannot exploit the worker twice is due to the economic nature of capitalism over which he has a very limited control.

All workers are exploited under capitalism by their immediate employers: some directly at the point of production and distribution — factories, agriculture, mines, transport, etc. — others indirectly during the process of circulation and administration — banking, insurance, civil servants, advertizing and commerce generally, the “white-collar” workers. The productive workers are engaged directly in the production of wealth, and broadly speaking, the white-collar workers are concerned in appropriating a certain part of that wealth for those capitalists, or capitalist institutions, which employ them. Exploitation means that the workers produce, or realize, more value than they receive back in the form of wages. Surplus-value (the source of profit), is socially produced by all workers for the benefit of all capitalists. Wages or salaries are not determined by the amount a worker produces, but by what he sells —his commodity labour-power, his capacity to work. The value of that labour-power, whether the worker works with his hands or his brain, is determined by the amount the worker requires from time to time, to sustain himself and his family. The rent or mortgage interest he pays, the food he buys, clothes, holidays, bringing up and educating his children. These are the major elements of the worker’s existence, and not unnaturally they dominate his entire thinking.

Capitalists Divided

There is no automatic right of any group of workers to receive the value of their labour-power. In times of boom, where there is a demand for labour-power, the workers will be able to take advantage of this by pressing wage demands, mainly through trade-union action. During a slump, when there is unemployment, and the supply of labour-power is greater than the demand, employers can force wage levels below the value of labour-power (though this cannot go beyond a certain limit).

Increases in the cost of living will compel workers to seek higher wages: in most cases to compensate themselves for the loss in purchasing power, but in other cases, to go further and gain an increase in the standard of living. One thing is clear, high wages mean lower profits.

For this reason the capitalist employer looks very carefully at any increases in the cost of the goods or services supplied to the worker by other sections of the capitalist class, e.g. landlords, clothing manufacturers. The capitalists are not one happy band of brothers, in a class society they themselves are divided. Much of their time and energy, outside of exploiting their own workers, is taken up with trying to take the money from each others’ pockets. They do not respect the right of each to his profit; the State has to arbitrate on endless disputes between them. The Law Courts exist principally to deal with property questions. Any section of the capitalist class will always try and gain an advantage at the others’ expense, and of course, at the expense of the worker, provided they can get away with it.

For example, were landlords, during the present housing shortage, able to raise rents or evict tenants they would do so without regard to any national capitalist interest. The dominant section of the capitalist class are alive to this, and introduced the Rent Acts to protect their own interests first and the workers’ second. No government can afford to relinquish control over certain prices. They seek it either by a direct price freeze, as at present, by a system of subsidies, as in Agriculture and Fisheries, or by legislation and selective taxation.

Two Kinds of Struggle

There is no doubt that were the food manufacturers and clothing manufacturers, together with other suppliers, able to form monopolies in order to increase prices then their profits would increase, but the worker, who would have to pay higher prices for their goods, would immediately press for higher wages. Those higher wages would have to be paid by the industrial and other sections of the capitalist class—in effect they would suffer lower profits. In essence therefore the gains of the food and clothing monopolies, landlord and retailer, would be the losses of the industrial capitalist. He would have to bear the real cost of higher food prices, rents, etc. The industrial capitalist obviously would not met the workers’ demands, however justified, without a struggle, but this is a class struggle in which he has nothing to gain and stands to lose either profit or production, or both. We can well understand the industrial capitalist’s lack of enthusiasm for such a struggle when the prize goes to the food monopolist or the landlord, and not to him.

In any case, if the workers have successfully managed once to demand a certain standard of living, they will continue to do this in similar circumstances. The dominant section of the capitalist class, who have political power, will then have to concentrate their energy against food profiteers, and others who try to overcharge the workers. Legislation is introduced forbidding price increases and wage increases above a certain level: anti-monopoly laws and laws restricting the activities of hire-purchase companies are introduced, with subsidies for keeping down mortgage rates, etc. These, incidentally, instead of being a hand-out to the workers, are really a money-saver to the capitalists. They have found from experience that it is sometimes better to give a subsidy to a minority of workers rather than allow a general increase in wages which would benefit all workers.

The theory that the workers are exploited twice — once at the point of production, and a second time in the market — is fallacious. It is also fallacious to imagine that the workers can have high wages and low prices. Wages are prices — if one is high the other is high, and vice versa. The worker must earn enough on average to live and re-produce his labour-power; below this his labouring capacity would be impaired. Cheating the worker would have this effect, and this would be detrimental to the interests of the capitalist class as a whole. The struggle against higher prices is not an aspect of the class struggle. This is a reformist struggle, which can only be resolved, if it can be resolved at all, on the political field by governmental action. The struggle for higher wages against the capitalist class, involving the proper use of the strike weapon, is a class struggle. Higher wages are the only answer to higher prices within capitalism. Workers should not dissipate their time and energy by supporting or initiating campaigns to establish lower prices. The much more simple proposition which would finally resolve this perpetual controversy over wages and prices is the abolition of the wages system. That is what Socialism is all about.

Jim D'Arcy

A Third-Class Report (1973)

From the October 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Have you noticed how often reformers are behind the times ? They want to make public transport free when the majority of people no longer use it; or to protect ancient buildings after most of them have been pulled down; or ban some deleterious sport such as hunting or prizefighting at the stage when it is nearly extinct anyway, the realistic time for the campaigns ought to be in the heyday of whatever-it-is. And that is precisely the time in most cases when the reformers are saying nothing about it.

The Observer and other papers have made headlines recently of the discovery that some public swimming baths are dirty, and the demand for a clean-up. The reporters must have been diligent — and young. If they were not young, and could recall Third-Class Night at the municipal baths before 1939, they would not have been so horrified. They would know also that a few coppers in the income structure saved from or condemned to it. Gentle reader, if you are squeamish don’t read on. I was there.

The Baths were in the High Street. They were also the municipal wash-house, and the back windows billowed steam over a railed-in and litter-strewn dirt patch which was called (what joys!) the Recreation Ground. The swimming bath could be floored-over with rough wood blocks and was used in winter for free concerts, cheap dances, and political meetings.

The principle of Third-Class Night was that the water was changed once a week. On Mondays and Tuesdays the swimming was First Class: that is, the water was clean. Ladies’ session and gentlemen’s session at sevenpence a time, and the local Grammar School had time reserved. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday were Second Class, for fourpence — ladies’, gents’, and mixed, and the broth thickening inexorably.

And Saturday . . . Saturday was Third-Class Night, mixed: twopence. They used to say “Tread water”. No problem; you could have done handstands on it. The story of Christ walking on the water probably originated on Third-Class Night in the baths at Jerusalem. You could stay in as long as you liked, so everyone peed while swimming about as the need arose. There was a joke about a conscientious girl who always gave the attendant a penny before she left. Every male over thirty spat frequently as well, because every male over thirty did that everywhere.

Shampooing and shirt-changing did not happen frequently, either, if you were in the Saturday class. Most men slept in their shirts, and a good many in their socks too. For a lot of the Third-Class-Nighters the twopenny swim was a combination of business and pleasure; you got a wash, of sorts, all over. Of course a lot of the basic muck came from the Second and First Class, but it was probably thought an honour for us to swim in their secretions. Like Madame Tussaud’s: Mingle With the Mighty.

There we floundered in our scores, doing breast strokes and side strokes and colliding with one another in yellow-grey water you couldn’t see the bottom through and with cigarette ends and spit and bits of paper floating all round. We wiped and dried ourselves with the scraggy municipal towels. And when we had gone they emptied the soup away and filled the bath with nice clean water for the First Class again on Monday.

So the Observer won’t scare me with its pale account of a grubby swimming bath somewhere: what it describes is mere Second-Class stuff. But I cannot remember any reporter coming to our Baths on Saturday night and going away to Shock the Nation with his findings. Surely that would have been a much better time? However, it would have been a complicated investigation. It would have led to discovering that our problem was not dirt but poverty and inequality; and to get to the bottom of it they would have to go into the economics of capitalism. You can’t expect newspapers and reformers to start that kind of thing.

Robert Barltrop

So They Say: Nearest and Dearest (1973)

The So They Say Column from the October 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nearest and Dearest

The case last month in which an Englishman married a Malawi-born woman to prevent her deportation, the couple intending to divorce immediately, was treated by the press as unique. It is not. Five years ago the celebrated small-ads pages of International Times were regularly carrying advertisements from seekers and offerers of nationality-by-marriage. They are currently to be found in the Personal column of Private Eye:

Englishman (26) offers citizenship by marriage. Best offer.

Englishman offers British citizenship £800.

Englishman offers British citizenship. Best offer over £1,000.

Socialist Standard readers are invited to think of a new answer to the question: Would you let your daughter marry a black man? As Byron wrote, “ready money is Aladdin's lamp”. In its light can be seen the fatuousness of legal marriage vows as well as the stupidity of national boundaries and immigration laws.

Growing Stunts Your Growth

The classic definition of inflation is “too much money chasing too few goods”. The aim of western governments wrestling with it has been to try to hold back wages and prices on one hand, and promote productive growth on the other. More goods, less currency: it seems logical. “Growth” is not only the answer to the inflation problem, but the source of the ecological one. With growth, pollution comes; without it, we are in the economic mire.

That is what they say, at any rate. But a report from Japan (Guardian, 1st September) turns the economic picture another way up. There, to try to stop inflation the Cabinet has framed measures “aimed at moderating the growth rate of Japan’s economy”. The programme has familiar features like cuts in bank lending, hire-purchase restrictions, etc., but goes on to a series of limitations on development. They include the postponement of public works and the reduction of outlays on new plant and equipment in the motor industry. The Ministry of International Trade and Industry will also

ask six industries to reduce capital spending plans in fiscal 1973 by 102 billion yen, centring on long-lead-time projects. These include the steel, petrochemical, electronic and electrical machinery, aluminium smelting and rolling, electric power and retail sectors.

Pay Attention, There !

In fact, capitalists in Japan, like their counterparts everywhere else, recognize that they must follow not the theories of government but the market. On 10th September the “City Comment” columnist of the Guardian asked an industrialist if his company was affected “by the thought that the Government was committed to the expansion of the economy and running immense economic and social risks apparently on industry’s behalf”.

The blunt answer was no. The company was paying no attention whatsoever to Mr. Heath’s obstinate growth policy in forming its new investment plans. It was working on the assumption that by 1975 demand for its products would be slowing down markedly, for other industries the deceleration would come earlier. As for Mr. Heath’s expansionist propaganda, it was dismissed as ‘politicians’ talk’, for public consumption.

Making A Crow Grow

One company whose “profit growth record” has been checked is Acrow Engineering group. Due to the losses of a newly-acquired subsidiary, Steel Group of Sunderland, Acrow's pre-tax profits for 1972-73 rose by only 3 per cent., from £2,617,000 to £2,697,000, instead of the 10-13 per cent, shown in the last five years. According to the annual report (1st September) the difficulties at Sunderland are now being resolved; and “the original Acrow companies had performed well”.

“Performed” is an appropriate word. Students approaching an Acrow works in south-east England for vacation work this summer were offered employment as labourers for 20p. an hour. A 44-hour week in factory conditions at that rate brings a wage of £8.80p. before deductions. Perhaps it is a scheme for teaching economics students the meaning of “surplus-value”, first hand.

Rising Tally

Another interesting report is that of the Provident Clothing company. Its profits have been rising for some time, and in the six months to 30th June this year they jumped 35 per cent. Provident Clothing’s figures have to be given in an unusual way. The leap in the current year is from £71.2 millions to £127.6 millions in amounts due from customers and from £12.5 millions to £25.6 millions in deferred revenue.

Financial-page comment has put this surge down to “buoyant consumer sales”. However, Provident is the best-known name in the check and voucher business — hence the statement of incomes “due” and “deferred”: like the weekly payments for clothes and household goods. Nothing “buoyant” about that. Provident Clothing prospers through poverty and working people trying to make ends meet. No doubt employees of Acrow Enginering are among its regular customers.

Liberal Sentiments

The recent Liberal Party gains have produced euphoric visions of capitalism humanized by Liberals’ “concern for the individual”. It is more to the point to know what economic policy the Liberal Party would try if in power. On 11th September it published a document which proposes “a prices and incomes policy enforced by fiscal penalties”.

The penalties envisaged are for exceeding laid-down rates of increase in prices and wages. For companies they would be additions to Corporation Tax; for workers, surcharges on graduated National Insurance contributions. John Pardoe, MP, defending this policy in a letter to the Guardian, called it “foolproof” and asserted:

It needs no policemen and no prisons, and it removes the Government from day to day interference in wage and price settlements.

Oh, marvellous: away with all this cumbersome machinery, and let us return to straightforward pay cuts.

It would be interesting to learn how the obviously large addition to Inland Revenue work is to be accomplished. Tax officials have complained continually of understaffing and overwork. Is the solution to raise wages to recruit more clerks, and then cut the wages to defeat inflation ?

A Freudian Misprint

“No doubt it is possible for a well led, well educated, well housed individual ... to come to the conclusions reached by your correspondent.” (Letter from a clergyman to The Guardian, 7th September; our emphasis. If he did not mean it, he should have.)

Robert Barltrop

Capitalism — the gambling society ! (1973)

From the October 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Under Roman Law, a loser at the ancient and popular gambling game of “knucklebones”, could sue and was entitled to have his losses returned. Certainly a case of “the good old days” so far as modern punters are concerned; but even the thought of such a law today is enough to make the bet-shop tycoons turn deathly pale.

However, the costermongers of London’s 1850’s could put to shame our modern bookmakers when it came to showing some humanity in the betting jungle. The Victorian journalist Mayhew told of an established custom among them of making a “present of four or five shillings to those whose losses were heavy”. He also reported that the street Piemen of that period, finding competition severe from the increasing number of pie shops, used to cry . . . “Toss or buy! Up and win ’em”, handing over a pie if their customer won, and receiving one penny without parting with a pie, if their customer lost the toss.

But the business of gambling today, far from being alien to the gambling of business, actually complements it and proof of this is to be found in the Stock Exchange quotes of various bookmaking firms “on ’change” who blossomed forth from the squalor and the illegality of the old back-street betting dens of Britain. So that, since the “hungry thirties”, gambling has developed into a large-scale social habit with crowded bet-shops, bingo halls, dog tracks, casinos and last but not least, horse racing, boosted by T.V., with half the female population joining in. All this human activity, animated by the sordid incentive of money-grubbing, merely mirrors that of the stock exchanges and marketplaces of capitalism and is quite natural to the prevailing mode of production, despite hypocritical and illogical protests from the hired Men of God who bolster King Capital’s Establishment.

Those who, like the pre-Victorian writer and reformer, Sydney Smith, wish to suppress what they term “vice” in the form of gambling, should take a long hard look at the real vice — capitalism itself, instead of wasting their time tinkering with society. But even Smith, in his long essay on “The Society for the Suppression of Vice” in the Edinburgh Review jibbed at the prevailing social hypocrisy:

The gambling houses of St. James remain untouched. The peer ruins himself and his family with impunity . . . It is not true, as urged by the Society, that the vices of the poor are carried on in houses of public resort, and those of the rich in their own houses. The Society cannot be ignorant of the innumerable gambling houses resorted to by men of fashion. Is there one they have suppressed, or even attempted to suppress ? Can anything be more despicable than distinctions such as these? 

Nor, may we add, was it logical of Smith to make a distinction between gambling and business as though one was alien to the other! And whether the rich gambled in St. James, their own private apartments, Monte Carlo, or anywhere else makes no iota of difference to the working class. While the “opium of the people” — which Sydney Smith helped to perpetuate, did them far more damage than any game of Pitch & Toss! Failing to “see the wood for the trees” he believed that the ugly face of capitalism could be improved, that “God was in his heaven and the world was all right”.

An early attempt to introduce government sponsored gambling in the form of Premium Bonds was made in 1917. In that year Sir Ellis Hume-Williams formed a Premium Bond Committee in the House of Commons, which was debated and defeated a few years later. As he remarked in his autobiography.

Of course my chief opponent was Sir Robert Kindersley who quite honestly — and I think rightly — feared that Premium Bonds would injure the flow of money to his War Savings Certificates. It so happened that we had never met, but in the winter after it was all over we found ourselves seated opposite each other at the very mild Chemin-de-fer tables at the Cannes Casino and a battle royal between us ensued.

(The World, the House and the Bar) 

Note that there is no mention here of any police harassment of these two members of the élite for their gambling activities, such as the Black Maria raids on the back-street gambling dens of Britain where members of the working class dared to indulge in the Sport of Kings, until the siege was finally lifted and betting for the wage-enslaved majority became “respectable”.

With football pools’ dividends reaching ever-new highs, gambling continues to boom like the quack remedies described by Marx and Engels:

Just as medical miracle workers and miraculous cures are made possible by ignorance of the laws of the natural world, social miracle workers and miraculous social cures thrive upon ignorance of the laws of the social world. 

Speculation in stocks and shares is a characteristic of a gambling society like capitalism, and bankruptcies are another ! Even men like Pascal, who formulated a theory of probability (and who was known as . . . “the gamblers friend”), or Carl Frederick Gauss, nineteenth century German mathematician who “loved to calculate as a Soprano loves to hold high C” would be helpless to remove the gambling element from the anarchy of production for profit.

So, let us take a tip from Marx, and ignoring those miraculous social cures get wise to the laws of the social world within the ranks of the World Socialist Movement.

G. R. Russell

Open and shut (1973)

SLL paper

From the October 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party is an open, democratic organisation. All our meetings are open to non-members and at our lectures and propaganda meetings they are invited to put their points of view in opposition to us, provided only that they respect the rules of democratic debate.

In contrast to this many so-called “socialist” groups, often professing to be democratic, deliberately exclude Socialists from their meetings — possibly because they fear that we will expose their false claims for what they are. We have received a letter from a comrade in Dundee which will illustrate this point well:

On July 3rd I was invited by a Socialist Labour League member to attend their meeting in a hall here in Dundee which was to take place on July 5th.

I accordingly arrived with another comrade and a friend, to listen to the lecture and ask questions in the ensuing discussions.

We were the first three in the room but soon afterwards another twelve or so members of the public entered and we all sat patiently awaiting the arrival of the lecturer. He entered, but instead of continuing with the meeting he asked me if I would “mind stepping outside for a minute”. Why? He told me it was a meeting to discuss SLL policy and that we weren’t welcome to sit in on it. “This is a private meeting for SLL members only”, he said.

I returned to the meeting and informed those present of the SLL decision, asking them for their opinions on it. Alas everyone seemed suddenly struck dumb and the lecturer’s democratic (?) decision was final.

He then became rather nasty and argumentative, and said if we didn’t leave of our own accord they would “have to remove” us. We pointed out that our companion had no party allegiance so how did he stand? “He can stay if he likes, but we don’t want you at our meetings” said the lecturer, who was by now becoming rather aggressive.

Not wishing to cause any trouble we left, but not before informing those present that the SLL censorship was no different from that of Mary Whitehouse or the Capitalist mass media.

The SLL ironically enough demand “The right of freedom of speech”, but it seems this is only if one agrees with what they say. They demand “The right to defend rights”, but if one should try to exercise any of those “rights” at their meetings, then they’ll throw you out. If someday the SLL should gain control of the capitalist system, will we Socialists have “The right of freedom of speech”? Or will this privilege be reserved only for those who toe the party line and support the state-capitalist dictatorship they seek to impose?

Incidentally as the meeting was for SLL members only why was a CP member member allowed to stay? Why were those people with no party allegiance allowed to stay?

Yours fraternally.

J McFarlane, 

Dundee.

50 Years Ago: Children and Empire (1973)

The 50 Years Ago column from the October 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

The special correspondent of the Daily News, reporting the speech of Dr. Vaughan Cornish, President of the Geographical Section of the British Association, writes:—

‘In his opinion, if you are to do your duty to the Empire you must have at least four children. He made it clear that you should not invite children into the world for their own pleasure and amusement, but should enlist them as it were, in an army for home defence.

‘In his view, it appeared, children were merely potential soldiers.

'In order to have strategic security in this island’, he insisted, ‘we must be able to meet the air force of a European combination as well as to carry out our traditional plan of dispatching a powerful expeditionary force for the support of a friendly power. This active defence requires a large population.’

(Daily News 14.9.1923).

Imagine urging us to increase our families so that our children may provide food for guns! And the monuments to the ‘glorious dead’ are still being covered with wreaths though their dependants cannot find the necessary covering to shelter them from the inclement weather.

(From an unsigned editorial Produce More — Children in the Socialist Standard, October 1923).

SPGB Meetings (1973)

Party News from the October 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

September's "Done & Dusted"

A busy month on the blog which was only briefly interrupted by a kick in the knackers by Manchester Branch. (Yes, I like to hold grudges.)

Cue cut and paste . . . 

What is now a regular feature on the blog . . . and like all regular features on the blog, one that I should have put in place about 10 years ago. (It's the same with the Pages that I'm slowly introducing to the top of the blog's homepage).

It's perfectly simple. Here's a list of the Socialist Standards that were completed on the blog in the month of September 2023. Slowly but surely the digitization of the Standard is *cough* nearing completion. If I'd hazard a guess, I'd say it will be finished by the end of 2024  2029. Famous last words, and all that. 

They are broken up into separate decades for the hard of hearing.

September's "Done & Dusted"

August 1905

September 1905

October 1905

November 1905

September 1938

June 1944

September 1944

September 1952

September 1954

September 1956

September 1958

September 1960

September 1963

September 1966

September 1972

September 1973

September 1974

September 1978

September 1983

September 1987

September 1989

September 1990

September 1991

September 1995

September 2001

September 2002

September 2003

September 2004

September 2006

September 2007

September 2008

September 2009

September 2023

Last month I wrote, "September can sometimes be a quiet time on the blog. Who knows if this year will be another one of those quiet Septembers?"

I'm glad I was proven wrong on that score. Octobers can also be a weird month on the blog (What the hell happened in 2021? I hope I was having too good a time to blog.) I need to crack on. If the blog doesn't punch through the 2000 post barrier in 2023, I'll be gutted . . .  crestfallen . . . forlorn . . . sick as a parrot . . . sorry, I'm all cliched out, Geoff.)

Resistance to Empire (2023)

Book Review from the October 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Great Defiance: How the World took on the British Empire. By David Veevers. Penguin, 2023.

This is an account of the rise of the early British Empire that counters the ‘War of the Worlds’ style idea that Britain spread out to conquer the world based on some sort of natural or technical (or even providential) superiority. It puts centre stage the resistance to the rise of the empire, and shows how the British were often thwarted, or their victories curtailed.

For instance, the book begins with Ireland, making the point that the conquest took over a hundred years, and nearly ended up bankrupting the English state. Mostly, the English had to rely on a network of local lords who would ally with the Irish cause as much as support the crown, as their interests depended. The Tudor state thus adopted "an innovative strategy of colonial expansion. Withdrawing the crown’s claims to territories beyond the Pale, Elizabeth stepped aside and opened up the colonisation of Ireland to private enterprise." Backed up by the violence of the British state, using such weapons as induced famine and atrocious slaughter, rebellious Ireland was brought to heel.

This became the operating method of the expanding English colonialism, and indeed, the colonisation of the new world was linked by some of the people who colonised Ireland: the name Walter Raleigh keeps recurring through this book. Veevers deploys the indigenous people’s names for themselves, thus what is now Carolina in the United States was Ossomocomuck and the people were the Algonquian. Likewise, in the Antilles, the people were the Kalinago, and what is now called St Vincent was Hairoun.

In part, the expansion into the Americas was made possible by the conquest of Ireland, providing a substantial market for imported sugar and other goods, and also providing people to export to work in the colonies, in the form of indentured labour (which, as the author emphasises, and contrary to some claims today, is not comparable with the slavery that followed. Indeed, the book deals with the slave trade extensively, and notes how the Dahomey kings tried to take control of the trade in enslaved people from the Bight of Benin. Many Africans were not passive victims but agents, warts and all. And, again, it shows how the pieces of the jigsaw came together, and the tobacco and sugar trades drove the demand and thus the qualitative change in the slave trade to the new world.

The book also covers what happened when the English arrived as supplicants, such as in India or Japan, and found themselves confronted by powerful empires in their own right. The English were able to offer revenue to the emperors in the form of trade as well as military support (especially seaborne). Much of the history of the English presence was shaped by trying to escape taxes.

It’s not easy to come across accounts of how the English (later the British) came to dominate in India. My memory of schoolbooks is there was a blackhole in Calcutta and then Clive won the battle of Plassey (actually, he didn’t, but that’s a longer story). Veevers explains the interactions between the English merchants, the settled Portuguese community and the Mogul nawabs and princes. This book is worth reading for this account alone.

The book ends with the point that the history of the British Empire is as much an act of forgetting and airbrushing the subjectivity and substance of the wide variety of the world’s people. As he points out, in a very real sense, the British unmade the world.

Pik Smeet

Mad Monx (2023)

From the October 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard 

In 1327 a Benedictine monastery in northern Italy suffered a calamitous fire which destroyed a magnificent collection of irreplaceable books and manuscripts. It was determined that the cause was arson. The perpetrator was an aged fanatical monk who sought to keep certain knowledge hidden away. Oh, that was fiction, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.

Marx was one of those whose books were destroyed by the Nazis, also keen to keep knowledge hidden. Burnt too were the works of Heinrich Heine. Heine’s 1821 play, Almansor, contains the line: ‘Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too’.

Science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury was also queasy at the repression being practised by the Soviet Union. Russians resorted to manual copying of literature (samizdat) and passing it from hand to hand.

In 1953, Bradbury’s dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451, appeared. Fahrenheit 451 refers to the temperature at which books burn. Set in a future America, it was the job of firemen not to extinguish conflagrations but to initiate them for the purpose of book burning.

‘Sticks and stones might break my bones but words cannot hurt me’ goes the old anti-bullying children’s rhyme, but publishing words can certainly lead to the violence it rails against.

Recent burnings of the Koran in Denmark and Sweden, which have freedom of speech enshrined in their constitutions, have led both countries to contemplate introducing laws to stop such actions. This is not the first time that such events have occurred and the consequences have, in some cases, resulted in extremely violent protests. Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson warned that a spate of Koran burnings in the country has triggered ‘the most serious security situation since the Second World War’. One cannot believe he is referencing the Religion of Peace (sic).

Violent protests followed the publication in 1988 of Salman Rushdie’s novel Satanic Verses. Ayatollah Khomeini, then leader of Iran, called for the death of Rushdie. In August 2022 a stabbing attempt was made resulting in Rushdie losing the sight of one eye and the use of a hand.

A Pew Research Center analysis found that 79 countries and territories out of the 198 studied around the world (40 percent) had laws or policies in 2019 banning blasphemy, defined as speech or actions considered to be contemptuous of a god or of people or objects considered sacred. Twenty-two countries (11 percent) had laws against apostasy (abandoning one’s religion).

In March 2023 the Spectator wrote:

‘No religion ought to be given the power to constrain political discourse or behaviour in order to protect its adherents from being scandalised, and no government should help it by silencing its critics. If a Wakefield resident was to burn the Quran publicly in protest at the pretensions of the fundamentalists (something, incidentally, that can now cause you to be arrested on serious public order charges by police increasingly desperate not to appear anti-Islamic, as happened some years ago), we should fight to protect his right to free speech in the same way as we would if he had been a secularist or left-winger who had burnt a Bible or an American flag’ (tinyurl.com/bdebukkd).

Theory at odds with reality?

Earlier in 2023 an American Tennessee pastor live-streamed a book-burning event urging his flock to throw their Harry Potter and Twilight copies into a bonfire. Because why? Because, he said, ‘IT’S WITCHCRAFT 100 PERCENT! All your Twilight books and movies. That mess is full of spells, demonism, shape-shifting and occultism. Stop allowing demonic influences into your home’. Does he know it’s 2023 not 1933? Or perhaps he thinks it’s 1633.

Whatever the literary merits, or otherwise, of J K Rowling’s works – Harry Potter has sold over 500 million copies since 1997– in an example that modern heresy will still get you burned at the stake, metaphorically, Rowling’s defence of biological women has seen her banned from events celebrating her own books and films. The three main actors whose careers were kickstarted in the Potter film series have been vocal in condemning her.

Not much support for Voltaire’s ‘I don’t agree with what you say but I will defend with my life your right to say it’ there. Nothing is free under capitalism but free speech increasingly comes at a price.

‘Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past’. In George Orwell’s 1984 the protagonist Winston Smith is employed in the Ministry of Truth’s Records Department. Here he altered historical newspapers and photographs to concur with whatever the Party line was at the time. The removal of ‘unpersons’ was often carried out in this manner in the Soviet Union.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union statues of Lenin were systematically removed from the state the Soviets had previously controlled. Understandable if you’ve been subject to repression for many years but the removal of literary figures seems churlish.

As part of its de-Russification, Ukraine has been removing monuments to Alexander Pushkin the Russian poet, playwright, and novelist, thought to be the greatest Russian poet and founder of modern Russian literature.

A few years back Iran was, allegedly, (the report comes from the American-supported Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty) considering removing Persian astronomer, mathematician and poet Omar Khayyam from its education curriculum. Changes were because ‘Officials believe that in order to attract the younger generation they must increase the intensity of their religious and ideological propaganda in schools. They think that a large proportion of young people are turning away from religion and government ideology because of the weakness of propaganda in the education system and the mass media’. Shades of Goebbels?

When William Caxton introduced the printing press into England in 1476 he would have been unaware of the law of unintended consequences. Pity that so many are now experiencing them.

Dave Coggan

Best regards, but miles apart (2023)

From the October 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Sometimes people in other groups and countries contact us with a view to some kind of joint venture or activity. As a recent correspondence illustrates, such well-intended invitations can often expose deep and unsuspected difficulties. It would be unfair to quote our correspondent directly without their permission, but you may surmise their arguments from our own responses below.

Hi there,

I’ve just been forwarded your invite, and sure, happy to have a chat online. If you know anything about us though, you’ll know we’re all about global common ownership now, with no money or markets, and we don’t go in for piecemeal progressive reforms, eg, housing, so I don’t know how much you’d get out of our involvement.

Best regards

Hi there,

To be honest I’m reluctant to take part if the purpose is mainly to ‘raise awareness’ about housing issues. The way I interpret this is ‘promoting positive things we can do about housing’, and I’m not convinced there are any. I would be obliged to object that over a hundred years of housing reforms have done nothing to cure the homelessness problem, and in my opinion never will do anything, because housing is like any other commodity that’s produced for profit, not for need, and entirely subject to the laws of the capitalist market. Poor people simply don’t matter in this system, but it’s arguably even worse than that. The more workers are ground down by exorbitant rents and mortgages, the more desperate they get, and the more employers can screw them with low wages, zero-hour contracts and anti-union rules. In this view, homelessness is actually great for capitalism, just like unemployment, and unaffordable health systems. They are not problems it has any intention of solving.

I’m guessing you want to stress the positives, as in these two paragraphs from Jacobin magazine:

‘Certain reform-oriented struggles, especially those around rent control and expanded provision of social housing, offer important opportunities for on-the-ground socialist organizing. But we also shouldn’t be shy about our big-picture diagnosis.

Socialists have to make the case, loudly, publicly, and globally: capitalism can never meet our needs for high-quality, affordable housing. The reason is straightforward: the profit motive’ (jacobin.com/2018/11/capitalism-affordable-housing-rent-commodities-profit).

This is the age-old dilemma of action now or revolution later. It’s always claimed that you can do both, but in practice one is always pursued at the expense of the other. To me it’s like trying to redecorate while your house is on fire. I also can’t go along with the idea that housing reforms could be some kind of step on the way to socialism. You could make the same argument for virtually every charity under the sun, with the result that the steps on the way to socialism rapidly multiply to infinity. And reforms can be undone, and frequently have been, by successive political regimes, so that sadly, reformism is rarely a forward path, more often a circular loop. How many times has Oxfam proposed to eradicate poverty since they were founded in 1942?

I’m replying at some length just so you can see what position I would be obliged to take, which I fear would have the effect of undermining whatever you want to put across. I heartily sympathise with you over the undeniable fact that the working class does not seem interested in socialism right now. But I don’t think the solution is to offer them something else. Part of the reason the working class is not interested in the single socialist step is that they’re too beguiled by the plethora of reformist routes being offered to them.

If you’re happy to proceed on this basis then fine, but I perfectly understand if you don’t think it would be helpful.

Best regards

Hi there,

Based on what you’ve just replied, I’m afraid I have not made myself clear at all. You say you ‘100 percent support radical socialist reforms’. We don’t, because we don’t believe they exist or that they would work. You ask for socialist ideas (I suppose meaning ‘reform measures’) that I support. There are none. You ask what policies I think are best. There are none. Key issues? Just one, getting the world to abolish capitalism. That’s all. No interims, no small steps, no ‘in the meantime’.

Your approach is: the working class won’t listen, so propose progressive things they will listen to instead. In this view, socialism is more of an ongoing process than an end goal.

Our approach is: the working class won’t listen, so make them listen. Socialism is the only goal. There is no process.

You may regard this as an absolutist, rather than a relativist position, and you’d be right. This is not a new debate, it’s as old as the history of socialist thinking, and caused the breakup of the First International. On the one (majority) side, the gradualists, reformists, Fabians and ‘minimalist’ socialists who thought you could introduce socialism by degrees, through progressive government measures. On the other side, the ‘maximalist’ socialists, also called Impossibilists, who demanded the immediate abolition of capitalism, and nothing less.

We are in that maximalist tradition, which is nothing if not uncompromising. We would be the first to admit that we haven’t got what we wanted. But capitalism still exists, and workers are still suffering, with the world possibly on the brink of self-extermination, so we would argue that the minimalists didn’t get what they wanted either. We’re no closer to socialism now than we were a hundred years ago, for all their progressive ideas. In fact, because of all the ‘faux socialism’ being put about, we are arguably even further away.

I admire your energy and initiative in setting up your own political group, obviously in the hope that you can make a difference. The world needs people like you, more than ever. But I would suggest that you take a closer look at these ‘socialist reforms’ you advocate. There are very few genuinely new concepts floating around. Have these reforms been tried before, and if so, what happened? Do they make sense in terms of economics? If you’re not sure, feel free to ask me. If I don’t know, I can find out. A little bit of homework now could save you spending a lot of energy later.

Why not tell me what measures you want to promote, and I’ll tell you what I think?

Best regards

Hi again,

I’m sorry you think I’m being ‘pointlessly hostile’ and wasting your time with ‘idiotic squabbling’. I only wanted you to understand my position and now I guess you do. I suppose you will consider it a waste of time communicating with me, but I will take the trouble to reply anyway. To me, this sort of exchange is not some alternative to the revolutionary process, it’s part of it.

Believe me, I would love nothing better than to get round the table with a united revolutionary socialist movement and form a united plan. If I had the magic power to make that happen I would. I don’t want a divided opposition to capitalism any more than you do.

But if you think that movement is divided by nothing more than petty superficial squabbles, you don’t understand revolutionary politics as well as you think. The divisions go all the way down.

There are two main fault lines:

(1) Minimal versus maximal – the two poles, as already explained. Minimalists are driven by a desperate sense of expediency, but what happens in practice is that they always get drawn into managing capitalism on behalf of the rich. This has happened with every supposedly labour or socialist party that’s ever been in government. In the UK, many of their grandees end up in the House of Lords. What usually happens to the supporters is that, over time, they forget all about socialism and become garden-variety liberals.

(2) Vanguardists versus libertarians – on one side, the Leninists, Stalinists, Trotskyists, etc, who believe the working class is basically stupid and needs an elite revolutionary leadership, who alone are capable of understanding socialist theory. If successful these groups, in the process of imposing their new order, have become a new totalitarian ruling class, very often murderously so. Against them stands an assortment of libertarian socialists, anarchists, syndicalists and some left or council communists, who reject leadership as an inherently weak and undemocratic form of organisation, and insist like Marx that only the whole working class can emancipate itself.

The above presupposes that, at heart, they all want 100 percent socialism, at least at some distant point in the future. Actually, many of the minimalists and vanguardists don’t even want that, or understand what it is. They think socialism is just capitalism managed by the state, or by a revolutionary dictatorship.

I need hardly add that there are other, more minor differences. The vanguardists all hate each other, like the fighting dogs they are. The minimalists (who are often also vanguardists) all promote competing and often infeasible reforms (like UBI) simply to get votes and/or members. Even the libertarians are divided, with most apart from the SPGB being anti-parliament.

I’m not making any of this up. These divisions existed well before you or I were ever born. If you’re going into revolutionary territory, you need to know where the cliff edges are. It doesn’t mean we have to be uncivil with each other, but unity between groups who don’t want the same thing is out of the question. Our solution, whether you agree with it or not, is to specify exactly what we mean by socialism, and then seek out only those people who fully support that aim, so that the revolution can proceed on solid rather than nebulous foundations.

Best regards

PJS

Blogger's Notes:

" . . . and caused the breakup of the First International . . . " I think PJS meant the Second International.

Tiny Tips (2023)

The Tiny Tips column from the October 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard 

The owner of OnlyFans took home a hefty paycheck last year. Leonid Radvinsky, a Ukrainian-American businessman, received more than $338 million in dividends in 2022, according to financial statements filed by the adult-content platform’s parent company, UK-based Fenix International Ltd, and obtained by PEOPLE. Radvinsky’s nine-figure bonus equates to roughly $1.3 million for each of the 260 working days in 2022 (tinyurl.com/7kax535y).

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It is no good targeting isolated faults within this society and attempting to fix them one by one. Many of its core structures, procedures, assumptions and values are mistaken and the focus must be on replacing the system with one that does not generate the present range of problems leading us to destruction. A satisfactory alternative must be some form of simpler way. We will get nowhere unless and until this is widely understood and willingly accepted (tinyurl.com/2tkr49fx).

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A harsh custom courses through rural China. If a woman marries a man from outside her village, she becomes a waijianü, or “married-out daughter”. Tradition deems married-out women can be stripped of their rights to land that legally belongs to them. The Communist Party came to power promising to emancipate women from feudalism. Today, the collective financial losses suffered by married-out women are growing (tinyurl.com/bdfkrjre).

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Almost thirty years after the end of formal apartheid ANC rule has come to a point of economic devastation with unemployment at over 40% and youth unemployment at over 70%. There has been no significant land reform. Hunger is endemic, there is pervasive violence, crises in schools and health care, collapsing electricity, water, rail and port systems, corruption on a staggering scale and ruthless political repression of struggles for urban land (tinyurl.com/4sz7kah7).

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Danish film-maker and provocateur Lars von Trier has defended himself from backlash after writing a social media post that criticised Denmark’s donation of F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine. “Russian lives matter also!” he wrote on Instagram on Tuesday after Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s visit to Denmark, where he and Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, inspected the F-16s to be delivered to his country. Von Trier addressed his post to “Mr Zelensky and Mr Putin, and not least Mrs Frederiksen (who yesterday, like someone head over heels in love, posed in the cockpit of one of the scariest killing machines of our time, grinning from ear to ear)” (tinyurl.com/3fj7k4x5).

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More than 1,300 people died while homeless across the United Kingdom in 2022, marking an 85 percent increase since 2019 (tinyurl.com/3ftb3y66).

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Ryan Knight @ProudSocialist •The cruelty of disaster capitalism on full display in Maui: “We can’t get aid yet they are serving evictions” (tinyurl.com/nj5favbp).

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As Staughton Lynd’s speeches, writings, statements and interviews demonstrate, there were coherent and persuasive arguments against the war in Vietnam based on U.S. and international law, precedents from American history, and moral and ethical considerations based on conscientious objection to war and an internationalism embraced by American radicals which said: “My country is the world, my countrymen are all mankind” (tinyurl.com/bdtdr2t2).

Cooking the Books: An anarcho-capitalist president? (2023)

The Cooking the Books column from the October 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

In August the media reported the success in Argentina’s presidential primary elections of Javier Milei, ‘a self-described ‘anarcho-capitalist’’ (Financial Times, 31 August), ‘the ultra-right libertarian and ‘anarcho-capitalist’ who represents angry Argentina’ (El País, 14 August).

If they now have a chance of one of theirs being elected as president, the anarcho-capitalists have come a long way since we debated them in the 1980s and 1990s, challenging their argument that socialism (as a society based on common ownership without production for sale) was impossible and refuting their spurious ‘economic calculation argument’.

The theory, the Financial Times noted, was the brain-child of Murray Rothbard (1926-1995) who ‘developed a radical version of libertarianism that he called ‘anarcho-capitalism’. In this worldview, states are ‘organised banditry’ and taxation is nothing but ‘theft on a gigantic, and unchecked, scale’. As Quinn Slobodian points out in his recent book Crack-up Capitalism, in Rothbard’s ideal polity, ‘contracts would replace constitutions’ and people would not be citizens but ‘clients of a range of service providers’’ (tinyurl.com/484hr8b8).

We can confirm this from the many debates we had with them. They did argue that capitalism can, and should, exist without the state; in fact that as long as the state existed there was not real capitalism but ‘statism’ or ‘corporatism’. Capitalism, they said, had never been tried. In their view, the functions of the state, including the courts, the police and the armed forces, should be exercised by competing private enterprises whose services individuals could buy according to choice. In fact, everything should be dealt with by buying and selling contracts between individuals and groups of individuals.

This includes the sale of body parts. They are divided over whether parents can sell their children. Milei, who is evidently a loud-mouth who speaks before he thinks, confirms both. According to El País,

‘In June of last year, he referred to the sale of organs as ‘just another market’ during a radio debate. ‘Who are you to determine what [a person] does with his life?’ Milei questioned. (…) Days later, a journalist asked him if he subscribed to another theory that suggested ‘the sale of children.’ Milei replied, ‘It depends,’ and further got himself tangled up. ‘Shouldn’t the answer be no?’ the journalist pressed. ‘If I had a child, I would not sell it,’ Milei said. ‘The answer depends on the terms in which you are thinking; maybe 200 years from now it could be debated’ (tinyurl.com/ykvn5baj).

Capitalism in Argentina must have reduced workers there to the depths of desperation if so many are prepared to vote, even as a protest, for a person with such crazy ideas.

Anarcho-capitalism is a dystopian nightmare that, if it could be implemented, would make capitalism even worse than it is now by subjecting everything, literally everything, to being bought and sold. It would reduce us all to isolated atoms only interacting in the market place.

Capitalism has never existed without the state and never could have. It was helped into being by the exercise of coercive state power both to accumulate the first money invested as industrial capital (colonial plunder, slave trade) and to create a propertyless proletariat by driving peasants off the land (enclosures, clearances). As Marx put it, capitalism came into the world ‘dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt’ (Capital, vol 1, ch. 31). Once established, capitalism still needed a social organ of coercion to maintain the monopoly over the means of production by a few and to exclude the working class from them except to work for wages and produce profits.

In any event, if Milei is elected president, there is no chance that he will abolish the state in Argentina. ‘Anarcho-capitalism’— capitalism without a coercive state — is a contradiction in terms.

Proper Gander: SSRIs and side effects (2023)

The Proper Gander column from the October 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

As many as one in seven people in the UK are prescribed antidepressants. While undoubtedly, medication helps lift many out of a debilitatingly low mood, for others, unexpected and unpleasant side effects have outweighed any benefits. Are My Antidepressants Worth It?, an episode of the documentary series Disclosure (BBC iPlayer) looked at the downsides of the medication, especially among young people in Scotland. Presenter Anton Ferrie and his team spoke with over a hundred people prescribed antidepressants about their experiences, along with doctors and researchers. The programme gave exposure to an important issue but predictably only gave hints of the wider context which explains why the problem has arisen.

The most commonly prescribed antidepressants in the UK – sertraline, fluoxetine and citalopram – all fall under the category of SSRIs (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors). As the name suggests, SSRIs impact on serotonin, a neurotransmitter involved with regulating mood, with each type working on the brain in a slightly different way. Doctors therefore need to make sure they prescribe the most appropriate type for each patient’s situation, particularly when the patient is a young person who is still developing. The programme includes a sad example of when the wrong decision has been made: Dylan Stallan was switched from fluoxetine to sertraline after he turned 18, and he ended his life two months later. An increased risk of suicide among young people associated with SSRI use is one of the concerns voiced by, among others, Dr David Healy and Prof Bernadka Dubicka in the documentary. As well as the risk of suicidal thoughts, other side effects of antidepressants can include insomnia, sleepiness, dizziness, headaches, fatigue and sexual problems. Thousands of people have reported the latter persisting even after they have stopped taking SSRIs, enough for the complaint to have its own name: Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction. PSSD isn’t recognised as a separate condition by the NHS, though, partly because it’s not understood how much its symptoms (which can be as extreme as a numbing of all sexual feeling) are an after effect of the medication or are due to depression returning.

For some people taking antidepressants, it’s difficult for them to tell whether what they experience is a side effect or not. Rachel Coburn, the producer of the documentary, talked about being prescribed antidepressants for as long as 12 years, since she was 18. She said that she can sometimes be forgetful and is troubled by not knowing whether this is because of the medication or is just how she is. After taking the pills her whole adult life, she wondered ‘what lies beneath the citalopram’. Radio presenter Katie Thistleton asked herself the same question, and struggled through withdrawal symptoms when trying to come off her medication.

As the focus of the programme was on the general lack of awareness of the side effects of antidepressants, it only touched on other aspects of their use. Dr Ben Davis, a GP, made the point that a brief chat with a rushed doctor isn’t the best basis for a decision about long-term medication, especially for an issue as individual and complicated as mental health. An obvious conclusion from this is that the NHS doesn’t have enough funding to employ more GPs, counsellors and other specialists to meet need. A more fundamental issue is why that need is there, and growing. The numbers of people feeling depressed have been increasing over the decades, particularly among children. A study by the Nuffield Foundation published in 2012 (tinyurl.com/kf2xtxk2) found that the proportion of 15 and 16 year olds reporting that they frequently felt anxious or depressed had doubled since the early 1980s, from one in 30 to two in 30 among boys and one in 10 to two in 10 among girls. By 2021, as many as one in six children in England aged six to 16 years had a probable mental health disorder, according to the NHS (tinyurl.com/mr29j8k9). Partly, this rise is because of more awareness and less stigma around mental health issues than in previous decades, so more people now feel able to access help. In this way, the normalisation of mental health issues has had a positive effect, but looked at from another angle, this increased awareness has come about because societal factors are pushing more people into this state of mind. It’s not surprising that depression is a likely reaction to the privations and alienation which come with life in our society, amplified in recent years by the Covid pandemic and the cost of living crisis.

And so the big pharmaceutical companies have come to our rescue by manufacturing the SSRIs to meet the expanding need. The way our healthcare system functions buys into the clout enjoyed by profit-hungry organisations like GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca. Dr Healy has revealed how drug companies fund research into medicines, creating a bias towards their products which gets disguised by the studies’ academic credentials. The end result is that brands of antidepressants are promoted as the go-to option for busy GPs who realise that a prescription is a more prosaic option than to make a referral to join a lengthy waiting list for counselling. As Katie Thistleton says, antidepressants can be a sticking plaster but they can’t really solve the underlying problem.

Mike Foster

Capitalist Republic (2023)

Book Review from the October 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Abolish the Monarchy. By Graham Smith. Penguin, 2023. £16.99

This book by the campaign group Republic’s CEO makes clear that its formal aspirations are for a liberal republic. They see the monarchy as something of left-over business (indeed, at one point in the book he actually argues that the rump of royal powers cannot be exercised because of the lack of legitimacy of the Crown, but that a president could deploy those powers: a cry for more executive power seems an odd stance for democrats).

In fact, the liberal fantasy gripping his work is on full display while he segues into discussing an elected House of Lords. Despite bemoaning the lack of imagination of those who can’t think past having a monarchy, he likewise cannot imagine a state without a bicameral legislature (albeit wanting all parts to be elected). Smith’s republicanism is simply wanting to continue the liberal project and sweep away the last vestiges of feudal power.

His book is worth reading for two features, though. The first is for his accounts of being a campaigning activist outside the political machines, and secondly for his attempts to describe a process of big reform to society, such as a wave of activism that sweeps away the monarchy. Unfortunately he doesn’t have a motor, beyond hope, for how this could come about, but nonetheless there is a certain, well, nobility in his continuing to plug away.

Smith, noting the predilection for the BBC to propagandise on behalf of the monarchy, says he is not suggesting a conspiracy, yet for the first half of the book he describes the very real secretive way the monarchy act and the determined way it protects itself. It is an organised conspiracy against the public, and by misunderstanding the nature of power beyond the formal and public roles, he is missing the real class nature of monarchy. Despite this, he is interesting on the actual real wealth the monarchy wields, and the way in which that buys considerable sway alone (especially as it has special access to the laws around which it can operate its businesses).

Pik Smeet

50 Years Ago: Chile: myth and reality (2023)

The 50 Years Ago column from the October 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard 

The events in Chile are already a myth. There, according to left and right-wing commentators alike, a democratically-elected Marxist government was overthrown by the armed forces, so proving the impossibility of establishing Socialism peacefully by using the existing machinery of limited political democracy.

Let us try to scotch this myth now by showing that the failure of the so-called Chilean experiment has absolutely no relevance to the question of whether or not Socialism can be established peacefully and democratically.

Allende and his Popular Unity were not Marxists and were not trying to establish Socialism. The programme of the Popular Unity, an alliance whose main elements were the so-called Socialist Party and the so-called Communist Party, was essentially one of state capitalism for Chile. It called for the break-up of the big landed estates, for the nationalisation of foreign-owned and some Chilean-owned industry, and for various social reforms. Even if implemented in full this programme would have left the basic position of the working class in Chile unchanged: they would have remained propertyless wage-workers forced to sell their mental and physical energies to an employer (even if the State) in order to live; production would have remained geared to the market; and the government would still, under pressure from the world market, have had to restrict the consumption of the working class in order to allow the maximum amount of surplus value to be extracted for re-investment.

Secondly, not only was the Allende government not trying to establish Socialism, but it did not even have majority support for its programme of state capitalism. Allende was elected President in September 1970 in a three-way contest, but with only 36 per cent of the vote. Subsequent elections showed that his government never did manage to acquire majority support. The last elections in March this year still gave its opponents 55 per cent of the vote.

Thirdly, because of this limited electoral support, the Popular Unity did not completely control the State machine. Parliament remained in the hands of its opponents who, although they did not have the two-thirds majority needed to impeach Allende himself, harassed his Ministers and delayed and altered his proposed laws.

For three years those whose vested interests were threatened by the coming of state capitalism to Chile—the American corporations, the Chilean landowners and big capitalists—sabotaged and plotted against the Allende government, but the fact remains that the conflict in Chile was between private capitalism and state capitalism, not between capitalism and Socialism.

That the limited democracy that existed in Chile has been a victim of this conflict can only be a matter of regret for Socialists. For, whatever its limitations, capitalist political democracy at least allows the working class to organise to defend its everyday interests and to discuss differing political views, including those of Socialists. Its suppression in Chile by a military junta represents, in this sense, a step backward for the working class of Chile—not that much of it would have survived had the Popular Unity’s full state capitalist programme been implemented, if the experience of Cuba is anything to go by.

But it still remains true that, in the quite different political conditions (which have never yet existed) of an immense majority of workers in all the industrialized countries of the world being Socialists and organised to win and control political power, Socialism could be established peacefully. The overthrow of a minority state capitalist government in Chile by forces acting on behalf of private capitalist groups will not deflect us from this position into urging the working class to adopt the futile and dangerous policy of armed insurrection.

(Socialist Standard, October 1973)