Letter: Initiative & Incentive (1959)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Sir,

The August edition of the Socialist Standard fell into my hands, and, being more than slightly interested in Socialism I read it closely. Naturally the article “To a New Reader” caught my eye. In this article you make certain claims and statements on which I would like to pose some questions.

“It (the owning class) takes no part in social production and is unnecessary to it." From the context it would appear that by owning class, you mean anyone who owns property. If you must pigeonhole everyone into a “class," I am, 1 suppose, of this class, as my father, by saving, has bought the house in which we live. But the income of the household (I am a chartered accountant's articled clerk) is far, far less than that of many what is laughingly termed “working class" households which exist in rent subsidised houses. Why then are we evil to the Socialist? As to being socially unproductive, my friends of this drone class include one chemical engineer (B.Sc.), one electrical engineer (B.Sc.), one agriculturist (B.Sc.) and two capitalists, one of whom arrived in this town four years ago with 30s. and a kitbag of dirty washing. By way of working an eighty-hour week he now has a thriving timber business employing seven men. Very much the same applies to my other capitalist friend except that he has a plastics factory. Yet you also say “Initiative and inventiveness will have a chance to thrive." Has initiative no chance now?

“Production will expand to correspond to the people's needs." Surely production is vastly in excess of the people's needs as it is. I think “wishes" should be substituted for “needs." But then this would be nonsense because production cannot expand to give everyone what he wants.

"Cut-throat competition for jobs will no longer exist." But does it exist now? Surely the best man gets the job? Does Socialism mean that any incompetent can get any job? Besides which the above statement would appear to contradict “Initiative and inventiveness will have chance to thrive, etc."

Finally, on page 121 you are appealing for funds. On page 116, under “Wages by Cheque," you say “Snatching the payroll could, by present ethical standards, be considered more a transfer of property than theft." Your problem solved?

Yours faithfully,

A. L. A.

Horsham, Sussex.

Reply:

The “class who own the means of production" does not include everyone who owns property; buying a house does not change the class of the buyer. The working class consists of men and women who own nothing—or so little—in the means of wealth production that they must sell their abilities to an employer in order to live. This includes people like chartered accountants, engineers and agriculturalists and people who own a house, whose economic interests are the same as other workers. The capitalist class are people who—although many of them do work—own enough of the means of wealth production to live without working for a wage or a salary. Because one of these classes buys labour power from the other, their interests are in conflict. Neither the capitalist nor the working class is evil, for they are both inevitable products of the historically necessary capitalist social system.

Of course, initiative and inventiveness have some sort of a chance under capitalism. So has dishonesty. But not everyone can be an employer—the majority must remain in the working class, where a person's initiative and inventiveness only find expression if he can sell his energies to an employer.

Modern society is capable of satisfying human needs, which include lots of things which our correspondent would call “wishes." But capitalist production is regulated to exploit the market, which need have no relation to people's needs. That is why the National Coal Board is reducing output, whilst pensioners are in need of coal. Socialist society will have no market to take into account,  "production will expand to correspond to the people's needs,”—the only sane productive motive.

Because the size of a person’s wage limits his access to wealth, workers compete among themselves for the better paid jobs. Sometimes they indulge in the "cut throat competition” of toadying to the boss and so on. In 1938. when To a New Reader was first published, this competition was often for employment regardless of the wage. It is naive to think that, in these conditions, the best person always gets the job. Indeed, a lot of people are doing work which is quite unsuited to human abilities. Our correspondent must be familiar with the monotonous employment which healthy young men are doomed to in chartered accountants’ offices. And what about servicemen? Are they actually suited to killing and being killed?

Socialists think that we are capable of better than this. We want a world where only socially useful work is done, producing the very best to enrich the world’s common pool of wealth for the benefit of humanity and not for some ephemeral personal advantage.

Editorial Committee.

SPGB Meetings (1959)

Party News from the October 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

Voice From The Back: The Inequalities Of Capitalism (2006)

The Voice From The Back Column from the October 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Inequalities Of Capitalism

A good example of the class division in modern society can be seen when we look at the wealth of the top 0.1 percent of the population in the USA. “An analysis by David Cay Johnston in the New York Times found that the average annual inflation-adjusted income of this group increased by 2.5 times, to $3 million (£1.6 million), from 1980 to 2002. The average net worth of those on the Forbes 400 list has mushroomed in the past 20 years, rising from $390 million (£206 million) to $2.8 billion (£1.48 billion)” (Times, 17 August).  As for you and your family, “inflation adjusted” how are you doing? A little less than $3 million this year I would imagine.

Pardon Our French

Nothing sums up capitalism better than the article that appeared in the Observer Magazine (27 August) when dealing with the former member of the Workers Revolutionary Party John Bird, who it describes as an entrepreneur. We think this might mean con man but we never went to French classes. This enterprising person may be more familiar to you as the owner of the magazine The Big Issue – yes the one you bought because you felt sorry for the lady outside the bus station.

Here is the owner of that magazine on the homeless and how he feels about it. “Fifty years ago a homeless person wasn’t allowed to sleep rough or beg. They’d get a menial job but they were part of society. Nowadays they pay nothing. They are infantilised. And it costs us £60,000 to keep each one of them in that state.” We must go to French classes. Perhaps entrepreneur really means “arrogant owning class bastard.”

Exploitation

It is a basic premise of socialists that all wealth that is produced inside modern capitalism is the product of the working class and that the capitalist class live off the surplus value that the working class produce. Now we have such pillars of capitalist society as the Observer and Reuters agreeing with us. “The 20 largest quoted companies in the UK make an average of over £96,000 pre-tax profit per employee, according to research carried out by the Observer. … BG, formerly British Gas, made by far the most – approximately £445,000 ..” (Observer, 27 August). Are you understanding these figures? On average your employer cons you out of more than £1,800 a week and in the case of BG over £8,000 a week. Why aren’t you a socialist? Are you a shareholder in BG?

The American Dream

There is a popular misconception about that as the USA is the world’s most developed capitalist country and the most productive the American workers must be well off. A recent report from the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute shows that this is not true.

“Adjusted for inflation, average wages in the US are now lower than they were in 2000 – so the benefits of the rapid increases in productivity . . .  are not being passed to the workers. In fact, as the New York Times reported last week, official figures show that wages and salaries now make up the smallest part of GDP since records began in 1947 . . .  In 1965, CEOs earned 24 times more than the average worker; by 2005 it was 262 times. . . . The top 20 per cent of asset-holders now control 85 per cent of all America’s wealth.” (Observer, 3 September)

Bones of Contention

The National Museum of Kenya is to reopen next year after extensive renovations. It will feature a special exhibit The Origins Of Man which will display the key fossil finds of Africa’s Great Rift Valley – considered by many to be the cradle of humanity. All round celebrations locally, you may imagine. Not a bit of it. “It’s creating a big weapon against Christians that’s killing our faith,” said Bishop Boniface Adoyo, who is leading the hide-the-bones-campaign.” (Observer, 10 September). This individual is chairman of the Evangelical Alliance of Kenya, which claims to represent churches of 35 denominations with 9 million members. No surprise there, he is carrying on the long tradition of Christian suppression of scientific enquiry.

 

Big Brother Is Watching You

George Orwell’s 1984 was a dystopia where every move of the worker was monitored, but Orwell’s nightmare has arrived. “Learn that truth, and learn it well; what you do at work is the boss’s business. Xora and SurfControl are just some of the new technologies that have sprung up in the past two years peddling products and services – software, GPS video and phone surveillance, even investigators – that let managers get to know you really well. The worst mole sits right on your desk. Your computer can be rigged to lock down work files, restrict Web searches and flag e-mailed jokes about the CEO’s wife. ‘Virtually nothing you do at work on your computer can’t be monitored’, says Jeremy Gruber, legal director of the US National Workrights Institute, which advocates work place privacy” (Time, 11 September). The article goes on to quantify how widespread this snooping is. 76 percent of employers watch your use of the Web, 36 percent track the content and time spent on the keyboard. 38 percent hire staff to sift through your e-mail and 38 percent have fired workers over the last 12 months for misuse of the email.

Editorial: Leaders, get lost! (2006)

Editorial from the October 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Countless column inches and seemingly endless hours of news reports have been given over to the leadership crisis the Labour Party is currently engulfed in. Speaking up for Prime Minister Tony Blair, former Home Secretary Charles Clarke said Blair would stand down when he was good and ready to do so and he accused Chancellor Gordon Brown of “absolutely stupid” behaviour in challenging Blair, commenting that Brown needed first to prove his fitness to lead.

Fitness to lead? Now there’s a thing. It assumes leaders have some special qualification acquired over years of study and self-sacrifice when the only real qualification is the ability to hoodwink others into thinking you possess knowledge and qualities they do not. Unlike other professions – doctors, surgeons, architects, physicists – whose skills come via many years of hard slog – politicians require none whatsoever. The only requisite credentials needed when standing for election are that you are over 21 years of age, not insane and with no recent prison record.

Despite this, many workers think we cannot function without leaders. This is a fallacy and one perpetuated by the ruling class to help them maintain their control over our lives. Indeed, so prevalent is this philosophy, that from the cradle to the grave we are taught to mistrust our own intelligence and to feel somewhat inadequate, to look up to our ‘betters and superiors’ (schools, church, politicians, parents etc) for their expert guidance and to accept without question the plans they draw up for our future.

It is assumed by many that leaders run the world. Well, we think it is we, the workers, who run the world. Politicians might make government policy, which becomes law, but it is we who build and work the hospitals and schools. It is we who build the bridges, roads and railways, ports and airports; all the products that humans need to survive. It is we who produce everything from a pin to an oil-rig and provide humanity with all the services it requires – we the working class! We don’t depend on leaders for these skills or for their guidance. They have no monopoly on our knowledge and intelligence or on the inventions we dream up to enhance the quality of life. If all the worlds’ leaders died tomorrow, few would really miss them and society would function just as before.

The concept of leadership has emerged with class society and will end when we abolish class society, when we abolish the profit system and all that goes with it. The master class have been allowed to lead because of their control over the means of living and by virtue of their control of the education system and their monopoly of the media and other information processes.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The greatest weapons we posses are our class unity, our intelligence, and our ability to question the status quo and to imagine a world fashioned in our own interests. Leaders perceive all of this to be a threat and so will do anything to keep us in a state of oblivion, dejection and dependency. Our apathy is the victory they celebrate each day. Our unwillingness to unite as a globally exploited majority and to confront them on the battlefield of ideas is the subject of their champagne toasts.

Remember this as the battle for leadership of the Labour Party hots up.

Letters: Ted Grant (2006)

Letters to the Editors from the October 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ted Grant

Dear Editors

Following on from your obituary of Ted Grant, the Trotskyist founder of the “entryist” Militant Tendency (September Socialist Standard), I agree that he was never a revolutionary; but just another reformer masquerading as a revolutionary.

I first heard Ted Grant speak at a meeting in High Holborn, of the so-called Revolutionary Communist Party, just before its demise probably in 1947. At this meeting, I heard for the first time the claim that the Soviet Union was not socialist, or even a “degenerated workers’ state”, but in fact a dictatorial form of state capitalism. A member of the audience (of about 100) got up and forcefully, as well as persistently, much to the annoyance of Grant and the other Trotskyist speakers, and argued that the economy of the USSR was state capitalist, and that the workers and peasants there were exploited in much the same way as elsewhere. Shortly after, two of the leaders who were at the meeting, Jock Haston and Tony Cliff, both accepted the claim that Soviet Russia was state capitalist.

And who was the speaker from the audience? I learned later, when I knew the SPGB (from meetings on Clapham Common), that it was a man named Sammy Cash, a well-known and active member of the Socialist Party.

As you noted, Ted Grant was ousted from the Militant Tendency by a man called Peter Taaffe, a thoroughly dishonest individual who claims that his existing group is the “socialist party”, known by the most appropriate acronym of SPEW.

Peter E. Newell, 

Colchester, Essex

A frustrated priest

Dear Editors,

The obituary on Ted Grant by DAP rather impressed me with its honesty and, even, generosity. I met Grant and Haston in 1948 at the RCP HQ on the Harrow Road. Haston was a fun fellow; Grant seemed a bit like a frustrated priest.

Richard Montague, 

Ballymena, Co. Antrim.

Royalty – an irrelevance?

Dear Editors,

On the road to Socialism there are powerful institutions in the way. Monarchy, with all its associated inequalities and public loyalty, is a powerful support for capitalism. It embodies wealth and privilege alongside emotional adoration by the poor. Cromwell managed to remove a king, but soon after his death the monarchy was re-established.

Why has it been as successful as an institution? It no doubt has its own methods for self-survival (modern PR experts, and years of experience of being a monarch, plus perhaps a genuine love for the British people). Yet the institution can only survive with public consent. None of the political parties that have attained power has bothered to question in any serious way the existence of the monarchy; partly I assume because they dread the loyalty of the British people.

We are been socialised into a culture that respects the royal family, at least in principle (people may frown at certain incidents with the royals, but basically accept their existence). Submission to the monarchy is encouraged from the cradle to the grave, and even if cynical, a person may find it difficult to resist a feeling of pride when a member of the royal family visits their factory or local area. Celebrities have occasionally returned MBEs, but they are few and far between.

Vast arguments are put forward to justify the royal family (e.g. encourages tourism and hence the pockets of the people) We all ‘immersed’ in royalist propaganda and culture. Yet how can it be right for one family to be so well provided for (houses, land, wealth, public adoration etc) when other families struggle from day to day?

They also assist and legitimise other people who have unfair amounts of wealth (in the past kings and queens have helped each other in difficult circumstances – when the peasants are getting above themselves for instance).

The institution also puts unfair pressure on the members of the royal family. The horses the Queen must have sat on horses on rainy days to fulfil her royal duties; and the boredom of watching parade after parade! The lack of privacy – even minor scandals blown out of all proportion, and the difficulty of moving in privacy from A to B.

We are so ‘brainwashed’ into the advantages of monarchy, that we grossly underestimate the disadvantages. Yet it take courage for a politician to suggest to suggest we abolish it – the inaction of millions of indoctrinated people can be a formidable thing to experience. Other politicians would condemn his very words (in the hope of gaining votes for their own parties!).

Are we all involved in a ‘mother-figure’ complex (or for ex-public school types –‘matron’)? Do we feel more comfortable knowing she is then looking after us? Or are we being childish? Shouldn’t we liberate her and her family, as well as the public, from an institution that goes hand-in-hand with unequal society? Draw a line under history and move on?

Paul Wilson, 

Brighouse, West Yorks

Reply:

Obviously if the monarchy is still around at the time socialism is established it would be abolished immediately. Such institutionalised privilege can have no place in a society of equals. This said, we don’t see any point in wasting time campaigning to get it abolished under capitalism. Whether or not a capitalist state is a monarchy or a republic makes no difference to the economic structure of society, which is the root cause of the problems wage and salary workers face today. Just look at the USA, which has been a republic since the 18th century – Editors.

Zionism: myth and reality (2006)

Book Review from the October 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Zionism misled many Jewish workers with its promise of a “homeland for Jews”. A recent book examines the fate of the million or so non-Jews in the state Zionism established.

In 1999 when Susan Nathan went to live in Israel under the Law of Return her head was “full of romantic notions of Zionism and the Jewish state.” Some three years later she moved from Tel Aviv to live, as the only Jew, in the Arab town of Tamra in the Galilee. Her book, The Other Side of Israel (published by Harper Collins last year), tells the story of her “journey across the Jewish-Arab divide”, and gives a rare insight into the Jewish state from the perspective of the Palestinians who are Israeli citizens.

The journey began when she was a patient in the Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem, where she was surprised to find Israelis and Palestinians sharing the same ward, and Palestinians who were Israeli citizens: Israeli Arabs. The real shock came when an Orthodox woman was visited by her husband who had “a pistol on one hip and a rifle slung casually over his shoulder” – no one else seemed surprised by the presence of an armed civilian. He told Susan Nathan in a strong American accent that he had requisitioned an Arab home in East Jerusalem and never left home without a weapon. The reply to her suggestion that he would be better off in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City was “All of East Jerusalem belongs to the Jews.”

More questioning came a few months later when she was invited to help with a student organisation – Mahapach, in connection with their work for disadvantaged communities in Israel, “particularly the indigenous Arab population and the community of Jews of Middle Eastern descent . . . the Mizrahim.” She knew of the latter but where did the Arabs live? Why had they been invisible to her during her first two years in Israel?

She was to learn that one million Arabs share the state, and that about a quarter of them are internal refugees. She was “profoundly shaken” by her first visit to an Arab area – the town of Tamra, made as part of the research for Mahapach. It was strikingly different from any Jewish area she had seen, with obvious, chronic overcrowding.

At the home of Dr Asad Ghanem (head of politics at Haifa University) she heard about the discrimination exercised against the Arab population “in all spheres of Israeli life.” In Arab communities there are thousands of homes judged illegal by the state and under the threat of demolition: in Tamra there are 150 such homes. The authorities’ version is that the widespread illegal building is the act of law breakers, people squatting on land or not wanting to pay for a licence. So the police bring bulldozers “at crack of dawn” to destroy illegal homes. 500 hundred Arab homes were destroyed in 2003.

Arab families are forced to build illegally because the state refuses to issue them with a building permit. Even when, as in Dr Ghanem’s case, the home is built on land owned by his family for generations the permit is still refused: he pays regular heavy fines to ward off demolition. He asked Susan Nathan if she had made Aliyah, and it was difficult to answer. Her privileges as a Jewish immigrant were at the expense of his people, “sitting in his home the reality finally hit me. The intoxicating power trip had come to an abrupt halt.” And the task of becoming informed had begun: the unlearning of her “lifelong Zionist training.”

The Zionist myth is that the “Jews had reclaimed an empty, barren land – ‘a land without people for a people without land’- we had made the desert bloom, we had filled an uninhabited piece of the Middle East with Kibbutzim, the collective farms that were the pioneering backbone of the state in its early years.” Prior to 1948 there had been aggressive colonising of the land by Jewish immigrants, and a campaign of land purchases funded by the Jewish National Fund, but only 7 percent of Palestine had been purchased.

The other side of Israeli Independence in 1948 is for the Palestinians the Nakba (the catastrophe) the loss of their homeland to the Jewish state. 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes and country. A map in the book marks the position of the 400 villages which were emptied and then destroyed by the army. The Kibbutzim were built on the land of destroyed villages. Around a hundred villages survived, as did Tamra because it was not on the main route of the Israeli army and was a small community providing “a useful pool of cheap labour in the area.” The original village had a population of 2,000 the number was swelled by refugees cleared from other villages. Photographs exist from 1948 which show “a sea of Red Cross tents” in which the refugees were housed for some years. One third of the present inhabitants of Tamra are internal refugees. A sizeable number of the 150,000 Palestinians who remained in the country and became Israeli citizens (“by accident rather than design”), were classified as “present absentees”, and had their homes, land and bank accounts appropriated by the Custodian of  Absentee Property. There is no instance of any property being restored to former Arab owners or compensation paid.

Apartheid

Dispossession still continues in various ways. Planning laws restrict Arab communities both in number – to the 123 listed in 1965 – and in area, even though the population has increased. Israel is an apartheid state which enforces policies of ethnic segregation. Dr Uri Davies a Jew who, like Susan Nathan, lives in an Arab town is quoted as applying the term apartheid in a specific sense to mean “the regulation and enforcement of racism and xenophobia in law.” He defines the core element of an apartheid state as “the structure of laws that allows the colonising population to exploit the resources of the state – mainly land – to the disadvantage of the native population.”

Though it is not publicly admitted “racist employment practices and the exclusion of Arabs from wealth generating sectors of the economy are the bedrock of state planning policies.” Most computer systems do not list Arab communities. Arabic is the second official language, yet people are not allowed to use it at work – a woman was sacked from McDonalds for doing so.

There are two separate school systems, with much less money spent on Arab children. There is intensive surveillance of the Arab education system, teachers are effectively “banned from teaching about the Nakba  . . . or about their people’s connection to Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza” and the refugee camps in other countries. In Haifa the Arab Parents’ Forum failed in an attempt to register their children at Jewish schools for 2004: Arab pupils are in a separate registration area.

Susan Nathan believes that what happened in the 1948 war is at the root of conflict in the Middle East. The price of creating a homeland was to inflict the “Jewish story of dispossession and wandering on another people – the Palestinians.” She makes a distinction between making a comparison, quantitative judgements about the degree of suffering, and drawing a parallel which suggests “one set of events can echo another.” Zionist organisations, she says, like the Jewish National Fund and the Jewish Agency should be disbanded and the apartheid system ended; there should be equality between all citizens.

An old man told her of the time when it was possible to travel by train from the Galilee to all of the region’s biggest cities “when the borders existed as no more than the lines on maps produced by the area’s British and French rulers.” Socialists never supported Zionism but opposed it as yet another nationalist delusion as what we aspire to is a world without national frontiers in which free movement is possible and where all people live together as equals.

Pat Deutz

Carbon trading or social change? (2006)

From the October 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

July brought two publications coincidentally including articles on the same subject. Couched in terms so, so soothing to the save-the-planet-sympathisers, Roughnews advises us that “we all need to limit our personal impact on global warming” and whilst supporting responsible tourism we should give thought to “how we can redress the environmental damage caused by travel – in particular flights, the fastest growing contributor to global warming”. Great! Excellent idea! This has to be good news. We can continue to fly, as often, as far as we choose and can also redress the environmental damage. And the solution? Offset your use of carbon taken from the ground by enabling a tree to be planted somewhere in the world – and on a short haul flight this “costs no more than the price of a drink”.

Rough Guides is also publishing a book in October, called Climate Change which, miracle of miracles, is actually a ‘climate neutral’ book meaning that “the amount of CO2 emitted in the book’s production and distribution, including everything from paper manufacture to the computers used by the author and editor and the estimated carbon footprint of the book’s physical distribution has been calculated” by the carbon offset company Climate Care. To what end? So that Rough Guides (through increased retail price of the book, presumably) will pay Climate Care to ‘offset’ the carbon emissions by planting some trees somewhere, or by installing energy-saving light bulbs somewhere else, or a similar scheme supposed to mop up the carbon released. Apparently Rough Guides offsets all its authors’ travel by paying Climate Care to take care of it. No mention of how Climate Care benefits from the arrangement. It seems one can ‘offset’ all manner of nasties now, from flying, car rental, to producing CDs, all the while feeling good about ‘putting something back’ and being lulled into believing you have repaired the damage done. (The World Bank estimated the global carbon market to be worth $11 billion at the end of 2005, 10 times the previous year’s value.)

However, the second July publication, New Internationalist, has a different story to tell. It reminds us that by unlocking the carbon in fossil fuels by mining it, burning it and releasing it as active carbon it disrupts the balance of carbon in air, soil and seas. What is needed to address the problem of too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is to reduce the amount of carbon released. Oliver Rackham, a Cambridge University botanist and landscape historian is quoted thus, “Telling people to plant trees (to solve climate change) is like telling them to drink more water to keep down rising sea levels.” Adam Ma’anit, the author of the article, gets to grips with reality and shows offsetting for what it is – companies being formed to take advantage of the gullible consumer, established companies jumping on the bandwagon to increase their share of the market and the misinformed punter alleviating their guilt whilst doing nothing to actually cut carbon emissions. Adam Ma’anit: “Climate change is an issue we shouldn’t be ‘neutral’ on. Carbon offsets are at best a distraction and at worst a grandiose carbon laundering scheme.” And, “The solution to climate change is social change.” Any seconders?

Janet Surman

Bored with politics? (2006)

From the October 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Politics is not just about the antics of career politicians – or at least doesn’t have to be

If you ask people “what is a party?” they are likely to reply something along the lines of “a group of people who want to get elected”. If you then ask them why they think these people want to get elected, the reply, if they’re feeling charitable, will be “to do things for the country” or “to help other people”. If they’re not feeling charitable, they’ll say “to help themselves” or that “they’re just in for what they can get”.

The truth – both as to what people think and what politicians want – will be something in between. Since up to 70 percent of people turn out to vote at elections and vote for politicians and their parties, they can’t really think that all that politicians want to do is to line their own pockets or further their own careers. They must be giving them some credit for wanting to do more, otherwise they’d be exposing themselves as fools for voting for them. And some politicians can show that they genuinely want to help other people, while at the same time of course making a career and some money for themselves.

Being a politician is a sort of profession, like a lawyer or a doctor. A politician’s trade is to get into parliament or the local council to run the administrative side of capitalism. To do this, they must get elected and, to get elected, they must promise to do things for people; they must find out what’s worrying people and then promise to do something about it.

This is why parties don’t need principles. Or, put another way, they only need one principle (if it can be called that) and that’s “get elected”. In the past some parties, the Labour Party for instance, used to campaign to try to win people over to their point of view. Not any more. Today politicians just promise people what they want to hear.

Although Blair, Mandelson and New Labour earned themselves a reputation for cynicism by the way they raised this to a fine art, actually the best practitioners of this have been the Lib-Dems, who’ve long had “focus groups” to tell them what to promise people in some area they’ve targeted. Now the Tories under Cameron are practising this in a more serious way too.

This kind of politics – which is dominant today – rests on a number of assumptions and has a number of consequences.

1. It accepts the status quo. It accepts capitalism and seeks merely to work within it. Politics becomes a question of choosing the best capitalism-management team from amongst competing groups of politicians.
2. Politics becomes a profession. You vote for a politician to do something for you and you reward them for the service by voting for them.
3. Politics becomes an activity in which only a minority – the professional politicians – participate. Most people’s only involvement in politics is, literally, once every few years when they go and put an X on a ballot paper. Then they go home and let the person elected get on with the job.
4. Elections become more and more a sort of referendum, a plebiscite on the record of the outgoing government or council. People’s participation in politics becomes simply giving a thumbs up or a thumbs down to the outgoing administration. If they don’t mind what they’ve done, they vote them in again. If they’re not happy then they vote in some other lot.

Politics becomes a spectacle in which people are just passive spectators watching the goings-on of politicians. The media – especially TV – play to this, presenting politics in between elections as a soap. But it is not even a good spectacle. It’s boring and the actors are all second and third rate. It doesn’t work either. Nothing seems to change and nothing does change. The same old problems continue, with the professional politicians only being able to tinker about and patch things up a little.

The end result is that politics in seen as completely boring and that people don’t want to know about it, except in the few weeks before a general election. People know that voting doesn’t change anything and that the only power they have is to vote the Ins Out (or In again) or vote the Outs In; to change the management team, while their day-to-day lives are unaffected and unchanged.

No wonder people become apathetic, resigned and cynical.

A different politics

Can things change? Yes, they could but it’s not going to be through conventional politics, only through a quite different kind of politics. A politics which rejects and aims to change the status quo. A politics which involves people participating and not leaving things up to others to do something for them.

Besides involving people surrendering their power to act to others, conventional politics is based on the illusion that what happens depends on what the politicians in power do; that politicians really do control things; that politics is in the driving seat. But this isn’t the case. It is the way society is organised to produce things that is the main factor determining the way we live and what happens – and what doesn’t happen. In other words, what is important is the sort of social and economic system we live under, not which party of professional politicians controls the government. That’s why changing governments changes nothing.

The present system – capitalism, with its class privilege, production for profit and coercive state machine – is by nature incapable of being made to serve the common good; as a profit-making system it has to put making profits before meeting people’s needs. Before we can think about achieving a better world, it must go. What is needed, as a framework within which to solve the economic and social problems we now face, is a classless society where productive resources are held in common, where there’s production to satisfy people’s needs and not for profit and democratic administration not government over people. In a word, socialism (in its original sense).

When more and more people realise this they will begin organising for it, in the places where they work, in the neighbourhoods where they live, in the various clubs and associations they are members of, but, above all, they will need to organise politically. Who says “politically” also says “political party”. So we are talking about a “socialist party”.

Unfortunately so associated has the word “party” come to be with conventional politics that many people (including our anarchist critics) imagine that we, too, are proposing just another organisation of political leaders for people to follow; that we’re saying “vote for us and we’ll bring in socialism for you”. But we’re not. By “socialist party” we mean a party of people who want socialism, people organised democratically to win control of political power for socialism.

Obviously, a mass socialist party like this does not yet exist, but it is our view that, for socialism to be established, it should. Without having any delusions of grandeur, we try to organise ourselves today in our small party in the same way we think that a mass socialist party should organise itself: without leaders and with major decisions being made democratically either by a referendum of the whole membership or by a conference of mandated delegates and other decisions by elected committees. The “socialist party” would be a mass movement of people who wanted socialism, not a party of professional politicians or a party of professional revolutionaries or even of people who wanted to serve the people.

The same goes for participation in elections (since a mass socialist party would contest elections). Here too, we try to anticipate how we think a mass socialist party, when it emerges, should behave. Its candidates should not seek to be leaders, separate from those who vote for them, but should be standing as delegates to be mandated by those who want socialism. This is why when we stand in elections all we advocate is socialism. Not reforms of capitalism, not promises to do things for people, as the conventional parties do.

If you want a better world, you are going to have to bring it about yourselves. That’s our basic message. It’s no good following leaders, whether professional politicians or professional revolutionaries. In fact, following anybody (not even us) won’t get you anywhere. The only way is to carry out a do-it-yourself revolution on a completely democratic basis. Democratic in the sense that that’s what the majority want. And democratic in the sense that that majority, rather than following leaders, organises itself on the basis of mandated and recallable delegates carrying out decisions reached after a full and free discussion and vote.

That’s what politics can be, and should be. And has to be if things are ever to change.

Adam Buick

Left, Right and Centre (2006)

From the October 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

As the Party Conference season begins we look at politicians’ politics

Today politics is about achieving political power, with the main political parties contesting to maximise their share of votes in a political market in the same way as competing companies do in their areas of commercial interest. Power and influence has become an end in itself for political parties because those interests that traditionally separated them have been absorbed into the tapestry of modern capitalism. In Britain, for example, the Conservative and Unionist Party evolved out of the Tory interest which was committed to the landed aristocracy, the upper class, and those institutions like the church that promoted the concept of the ‘divine right of kings’ and the social stratification of society.

As the middle class – the bourgeoisie or capitalist class – evolved and gained strength economically, it challenged the aristocracy for political control in order to throw off the impeding legal structures of feudalism which confined and restricted its continued economic expansion. The political interest representing the burgeoning class interests of the bourgeoisie was known as the Whigs and subsequently evolved into the Liberal Party.

In a property-orientated society such as feudalism or capitalism all real wealth is produced and can only be produced by the labour power of a subject class. The patents granting ownership of land to the feudal lords and barons may have derived from a parasitic monarchy but the wealth and privilege enjoyed by the lords and ladies of the manor was founded on the labour of their feudal serfs.

Similarly, the new revolutionary class of capitalists needed the labourer to work their engines of production; the serf would be converted from a feudal slave into a wage slave under the illusion that they were being given their freedom. Obviously, since the labourer was the key element in the wealth-producing function of both the feudal establishment and the new capitalist system of social organisation, the terms governing the future control of labour were a primary element of contention between the old order and that of the nascent capitalist class. This conflict of interest between the landed interest and the interests of the bourgeoisie was reflected in the post-revolutionary world of capitalist politics.

Left and right

The terms ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ as political designations emerged innocuously out of the seating arrangements in the Legislative Assembly of Revolutionary France in 1791, when the royalist Feuillants sat on the right side of the chamber and the radical Montagnards occupied the seats on the left. This almost incidental occurrence was to bring the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ into the lexicon of politics, where inevitably their wide generality would make them universally both an instrument of confusion and often a means of deliberate obfuscation.

By the middle of the 19th century the expression of political conservatism was regarded as ‘right wing’ while their liberal opponents were designated ‘left wing’. It was not solely, however as labels for political parties that the terms were to bedevil political consciousness but increasingly the most irrelevant matters that could be construed as having political moment found description within the spectrum of Left and Right.

So when the German and French socialist movements tactically retained programmes of ‘immediate demands’ – reformist strategies intended to bring about what they hoped would be the piecemeal evolution of capitalism into socialism – they inevitably became the political Left. The British Labour Party when it was formed in 1906, unlike its continental cousins, did not choose reformism as a tactic but was founded on a strategy that held that inevitably and gradually capitalism could be reformed into socialism. It became the principal focus of the Left in Britain, lingering long after the Labour Party’s pathetic failure to exercise any real influence in government when it first got the opportunity to do so in 1923.

Inter-Left enmity

For decades Labour and Social Democratic parties throughout the world have contended for political office and the power of government on the claim that they were acting as bona-fide socialists. The multiplicity of left-wing groups, ‘tendencies’ and parties, like the various Trotskyist organisations and the fragmented periphery of ‘the left’, have traditionally supported the main Labour or social-democratic parties in general elections only to become implacably opposed to their policies when they formed governments.

The basis of this inter-left enmity is always related not to socialism but to aspects of capitalism and is based on the chastening reality of political power. In fact politics within the left is similar to politics outside the left: it is all about capitalism and its endemic problems. Not only that but right across the entire spectrum of politics from so-called Left to Right and through Centre the basic ideas that are perceived as representing Left and Right have been adopted and abandoned by parties of differing political complexions.

British politics currently illustrates this point: the Blair government is pursuing viciously authoritarian policies and backing the aggressive expansionism of a particularly vicious United States establishment. Judged by the absurd yardstick for determining positions on the swingometer of Left and Right such policies would be seen as extremely right-wing. Conversely, the new Tory leader, David Cameron, is trying to lead his party back to favour with the electorate with gestures of sympathy for the poor, the oppressed and the intellectually deprived which he believes might fool people into the belief that the Tories really do care. In fact policies wrongly seen by the pundits to be essential parts of Labour’s political stock-in-trade.

Historically, all three of the big political parties in Britain have advocated or used nationalisation — once the sacred cow of the British Left – when economic circumstances have shown a need for such a policy. Again, all three parties accepted the economic thinking underwriting the welfare state and all three have accepted the Keynesian economic philosophy when it was wrongly believed to be the panacea for the intractable ills of the system and especially the problem of managing economic demand.

Winning elections

The reality of politics today is that political parties represent the corporate face of organised groups  of career-orientated politicians whose cushy, well-paid jobs are dependent on selling old and failed political formulae dressed in worthless verbiage to a gullible electorate. It is not a question of honesty, sincerity or sagacity; wise and sincere people elected to government may indeed be able to soften some of the nasty features that capitalism throws up, but a government endowed with a surfeit of wisdom and sincerity could not make a system of economic anarchy and competition — a system predicated on the exploitation of the many by the few — run in the common interest.

Mere poverty and absolute destitution, the gigantic organisation of mass murder, which is war, homelessness, crime, social alienation and all the other features of the capitalist way of life are not caused by stupid, brutal or insincere politicians; they are endemic to capitalism. That is the demonstrable assumption on which the case for socialism – our case – is based; that is why we say it is social and economic system that has got to be changed and not its political functionaries.

Richard Montague

Cooking the Books: Salt sellers (2006)

The Cooking the Books column from the October 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Doctors and nutritionists have long known that too much salt is bad for you as, by raising blood pressure, it increases the risk of strokes and heart attacks. So, it would seem only normal that a body bearing the name “Food Standards Agency” should concern itself with the amount of salt that food companies put into the foodstuffs they offer for sale.

But the Food Standards Agency has to operate within the context of a capitalist economy where all businesses, including food companies, aim to make the biggest profits possible on behalf of their shareholders. As a result it has to be careful not to try to set “unrealistic” standards, i.e. standards that would reduce profitability.

In 2005 the FSA put out a consultative document with proposals to achieve a 40 percent reduction in people’s average salt intake by 2010. The food industry was appalled and immediately began lobbying to have the proposals watered down.

Salt has been used to preserve food since the dawn of civilisation and before. It also adds a distinctive flavour to food. The food industry was quick to seize on this in their counter-arguments. Reducing the salt content of their products, they said, would increase the risk of food poisoning (as if, these days, there weren’t alternatives to salt as a food preservative). It would, they went on, make their products less tasty to consumers, whose interests of course they put above all else, etc, etc.

Times journalist Dominic Kennedy used the Freedom of Information Act to gain access to the documents submitted to the FSA by the food industry. What even he called “the most nakedly honest” argument came from Nestlé who submitted that:

“Salt is a major constituent in many products – and it is a cheap ingredient. Reduction in salt levels, even by a very small amount, significantly increases the overall cost of manufacturing the product, mainly because the ingredients used for the replacement of salt are much more expensive, e.g., herbs or meat extracts” (Times, 3 August. See also timesonline.co.uk/britain, search for “pro-salt campaign”).

In the end the FSA agreed to lower its proposed standards. Hence the title of Kennedy’s article “How the salt campaign was scuppered”. In a society geared to human welfare, if doctors and nutritionists concluded that too much of some ingredient (whether salt, or sugar or fat since it’s the same story there) was detrimental to people’s health then, production not being in the hands of profit-seeking enterprises, the amount of the ingredient going in manufactured foods would be fixed taking this, and only this, into account.

But capitalism is not a society geared to serving human welfare.

Marx’s party (2006)

Book Review from the October 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Rebel’s Guide to Marx. By Mike Gonzalez. Bookmarks. 2006. 60pp. £2

While factually correct on the details of Marx’s life, this SWP booklet suffers (as you would expect) from a significant distortion of Marx’s views.

Marx is made out to be a proto-SWPer, obsessed with “building the party”. In actual fact, while Marx did use the word “party”, before the 1870s it was not in the sense of an organised vanguard, but rather as those, whether organised or not, who wanted communism (or socialism, the same thing), more what we would today call a current of opinion than its subsequent sense of party as an organisation.

Marx did, during the period of Germany’s aborted bourgeois revolution of 1848-9, favour communists organising themselves as a distinct group to try to push the bourgeois revolution to its limits and beyond. But, once this period was over, he argued for this communist organisation to be disbanded.

Later, when he was active in the International Working Men’s Association from 1864-1872, he advocated the working class organising into a distinct political party. By then “party” had begun to take on its modern meaning and Marx was associated with an organisation in Germany called the “Social Democratic Workers Party” (SDAP) which, after merging with another group, became in 1875 the “German Socialist Workers Party” (SADP). (It later changed its name to Social Democratic Party of Germany – SPD – which still exists today, as a reformist party.) Marx referred to it simply as the workers’ party.

So, Marx’s conception of party was that of an open, democratically-organised mass party, not a vanguard of self-appointed professional revolutionaries.

Adam Buick

Note of corrections (2006)

From the October 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

The article "September 11, 2001: Reflections on a Somewhat Unusual Act of War" (September Socialist Standard) refers to arguments that it states were made by anti-war analyst Rahul Mahajan in his book The New Crusade: America's War on Terrorism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002). In fact, these arguments were drawn from another book by the same author: Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003.)

In the August issue we stated that "China is using 47 per cent of the world's cement to complete the damming of the Yangzi" (p. 8). In the September issue we wrote that China was using "almost 70 percent of the world's cement supplies on a single dam project" (p. 9). Both figures can't be right. In fact, both are wrong. China is generally calculated as using 47 per cent of the world's cement (see, for example, http://southasia.oneworld.net/article/view/12 5468/1/1893) but not all of this is for the Yangzi dam project.

Obituary: Joe Richmond (2006)

Obituary from the October 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Joe Richmond died a few months ago. He was a marvellous member. He taught me what little I know about the Materialist Conception of History and he was the best member I ever heard on Engels’s Transformation From Ape To Man. He was a great guy. He was a shipwright on the Clydeside and came across the socialist case from a trade union background (as an apprentice he has been involved in the unofficial – and illegal – 1944 apprentices’ strike). He later became a school teacher. I remember him best as a lecturer at the Glasgow branch rooms in Berkeley Street using fretwork pieces of wood to show how the continents were formed. Years later on television I saw the same thing. He was also an attender at various classes on philosophy at extra-mural Glasgow University courses where he embarrassed the lecturers with his corrections about the works of Hegel, Engels and Marx. After retiring Joe emigrated to Australia to be near his two sons. He rejoined the Socialist Party and kept up his interest in political matters. We have had many great members, he was one of the best. To his wife Anna and his children we extend our sympathies.

Thanks a lot Joe,

Richard Donnelly

50 Years ago: Mass suicide (2006)

The 50 Years Ago column from the October 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Under the title “Do not willingly contribute to the mass suicide of the human race” the Empire News (24 June, 1956) had the following:

“The highest radioactive deposit in a single day from a thermo-nuclear weapon test was 100 microcuries a square mile at Milford and 25 at Harwell. Daily deposits at Harwell and Milford, however, are generally similar. Danger from these radioactive particles is very slight, say scientists. But one of the radioactive substances, known as strontium 90 may be deposited in grass which is cropped by animals. This gets into their bones and may cause cancer. So the experts warn: limit the number of atom tests. Fears that rainwater may be contaminated from the Monte Bello atom test have arisen in Queensland, Australia, and people have been warned not to drink it for a few days.”—The above was taken from a news item, “Atom-Rain Tests.”—(Empire News, 24.6.56.)

But such is the nature of capitalism; that even though the rival Governments know they may be instrumental in causing the “virtual suicide of the human race.” They dare not let up; for fear of conceding an advantage to their rivals; yet they have the effrontery to call capitalism a civilised society! Why, by comparison with this, even the most senseless butchery in history seems like sanity. The human race may be virtually dying on its feet; and still the people do nothing about it; when will they get wise; and act on their own behalf instead of waiting and hoping for someone else to put the world right for them?

Workers of the world, put not your trust in leaders. Instead fashion the world the way you want it yourselves by organising for socialism; then you can rest secure in the knowledge that the only developments which will be undertaken will be those which will be of benefit to all.

(From article by Phil Mellor, Socialist Standard, October 1956)

Greasy Pole: Is There Life After Tony Blair? (2006)

The Greasy Pole column from the October 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Even by the standards we have come to expect from them, it was an outrageous piece of New Labour spin to tell us that the leadership handover between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown would be “smooth and orderly”. For one thing Blair and his cronies must have known that announcing his intention to resign on some unnamed, unpredictable date in the future ensured that the handover would take place after a long period of chaos as a succession of hopefuls – and no-hopers – pushed themselves as potential leaders. We had already had the sly briefing about Gordon Brown’s alleged “psychological flaws” (which must apply to many politicians). The infighting could have been prevented by settling on a firm date but whenever this was raised with Blair he brushed it aside by saying that he would go when he had done his job of clearing up a few trivial matters like crime, the wars in the Middle East and Iraq, the NHS, education, poverty… The very idea is laughable, that there will ever, can ever, be a day when a political leader can pass into well earned retirement because they have succeeded in making all the necessary adjustments and improvements to society, so that from now on all will be smooth and orderly. While there is no evidence that Blair is an avid student of history it is clear that he has absorbed many of its essential lessons in the sleazier arts of politics.

Morrison

What can be said, on that score, about Gordon Brown? When he made that deal, across the Granita table, with Blair, did he not have an inkling of what he was committing himself to? Was he entirely innocent of any doubts about politicians’ readiness to keep their word? Did he not reflect on the examples of other nominated heirs to a party leadership who had failed miserably to achieve it? When the Attlee government was elected in 1945 the Deputy Leader of the party was Herbert Morrison, a canny, cocky political operator with the common touch. In contrast, Attlee was understated, not to say drab; when he was made Leader in 1935 Hugh Dalton, who was later Chancellor of the Exchequer, bemoaned “. . .  a wretched and disheartening result . . . And a little mouse shall lead them”. After Labour’s emphatic win Morrison made it clear that he had no intention of agreeing to Attlee as Prime Minister and that, before he accepted he job, Attlee should submit himself to a vote of confidence by the Parliamentary Labour Party.

This was the kind of situation which, in recent times, must have provoked an incandescent row between Brown and Blair. Attlee, however, was in a different mode. After his election triumph he went quietly with his wife for tea at the Great Western Hotel in London and it was there, among the delicate china and the scones, he was told that King George VI was anxious to fill the vacancy for a new government for British capitalism and would he please go to Buckingham Palace to set the royal mind at rest. Attlee took the view that the monarch should not be kept waiting while the Parliamentary Labour Party made up its mind so he went at once to the Palace where “without quibbles” as he put it, he accepted the top job. (He got his vote of confidence the next day – as if an hysterically triumphant, desperately ambitious, party would ever have dreamed of denying it to him).

Churchill

Attlee later described the notion of Morrison being party leader as “fantastic” – seriously out of touch with reality. He continued as leader after his government were defeated in the 1951 election, leaving Morrison to sulk and snipe, fretful in the knowledge that the longer Attlee stayed on the weaker his chances of succeeding. It was clear at that time that if the Labour Party was to have any hope of clawing their way back into government they would need to undertake a comprehensive overhaul of their policies and presentation but Attlee was too weary after his years in government to do anything about it. That was probably the time for him to retire but instead he kept going, which had the effect of stifling Morrison’s leadership chances (Morrison was, of course, convinced that this was the motivation). After Labour was defeated again, in 1955, Attlee carried on for a few months and then suddenly resigned, going to the House of Lords. The delay in his going had had its effect; Hugh Gaitskell had emerged as the likeliest leadership candidate and he won the ballot over both Morrison and Aneurin Bevan, leaving Morrison to nurse his bitter disappointment.

The Tory government which followed had its own inheritance problems for Winston Churchill had always made it clear that he would be succeeded as leader by his Deputy Anthony Eden; for example in 1942 Churchill told the King that if he failed to return from one of his trips abroad Eden should be asked to take his place. In spite of the Tories’ calamitous defeat in the 1945 election Churchill hung on as leader (in any case he never made any secret of his reluctance to take account of his party’s wishes). But he was bored in opposition and he might have resigned then except that his “Iron Curtain” speech seemed to revive his confidence in himself as an historic figure so he stayed, while playing on Eden’s loyalty by throwing out occasional hints that he would hand over in the near future – rather like Tony Blair today. At the same time Churchill made it clear that he would regard any suggestion that he should resign as base treachery. Even when he had a succession of strokes, notably in 1949 and 1953, which progressively disabled him, he kept himself in the job. It seemed as if he would never go.

Eden

The grinding pressure of disappointment aggravated Eden’s emotional and medical difficulties; at the time of Churchill’s 1953 stroke Eden was convalescing abroad after an operation, which prevented him taking over. In any case Churchill, in the words of his son Randolph, “fought his way back to health with a Roman mastery of mind over flesh” so that he was still Prime Minister when he turned 80 in November 1954. He resigned in April 1955 and Eden came at last into his inheritance, except that it was a procession of disasters. Under scathing criticism from a normally loyal Tory press – the Daily Telegraph ranted about “changes of mind by the Government; half measures; and the postponement of decisions” – the breaking point for him was his obsessive but doomed attempt to revive the standing of British capitalism in the Middle East by the Suez invasion (his wife later told how at times she had felt as if the Suez Canal was running through their living room). By now a very sick man, virtually living on prescribed drugs, Eden gave up and went to the West Indies to recuperate. After all that waiting, he had been Prime Minister for less than two years.

Spite

A common factor in these episodes, as with the present clash between Blair and Brown, is the absence of any differences in policy. The disputes were not about whether to run capitalism but who should be allowed to indulge their ambitions by doing so. From those roots a tangled growth of spite and venom has flourished, in which Brown abruptly ceased to be the assumed, widely welcomed, successor to Blair and instead became the target of vicious personal attacks, some of which originated from people who were themselves far from blameless. “Compulsive obsessive”, “autistic” and “childish vanity” were among the kinder assessments of Brown.

Perhaps most audacious of all was Charles Clarke’s charge that Brown is a “control freak”, which overlooked the fact that when he was Home Secretary Clarke was a relentless, determined advocate of Identity Cards. The winner of this “smooth and orderly process” among contestants who lay down laws which are designed to instruct us how to behave will be whoever emerges with the least shredded clothing and the fewest wounds.

Ivan