War and rumours of war (2024)

From the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Barely two months into a New Year and the ghost of Lord Kitchener has begun to haunt the news agenda. General Nick Carter, former army officer and Chief of the Defence Staff, was quoted (4 February) as saying the British Army would rapidly ‘exhaust their chief capabilities after the first couple of months of engagement.’

This was in response to a report of the Commons Defence Select Committee concluding that ammunition supplies are ‘far below the level required to counter with certainty a threat from the Russian army’.

That there has ever been any certainty, other than a mutual slaughter, in any conflict is risible. Every November what is termed an act of remembrance seems more like a collusion in amnesia. Whatever happened to the war to end all wars?

The very idea perished in the rubble of the blitz, Dresden and Hiroshima, the blood-soaked land around Stalingrad, on the beaches of Normandy. Then, just five years later Korea, closely followed by Vietnam, became the killing ground.

Russia and the USA facing off over and around Cuba in 1962 made the prospect of nuclear war a serious concern. Subsequently, there has been an incessant state of war around the world with, in modern parlance, pop-up conflicts of varying scope and intensity.

It has been argued that the designations of First and Second World Wars are erroneous, that what occurred in 1939 was simply a continuation, after a pause, of what began in 1914. There is a precedent of this in that the Hundred Years War was one of sporadic, not continuous, conflicts.

In which case, it is arguable that the present manifestations of bellicosity are episodes in a Hundred Years+ World War. The original Hundred Years War was the result of competing feudal powers for control of wealth-generating land, mainly in France.

The cause and sustaining factor of the present international nature of armed confrontations is, at base, again economic, only now it is capitalism that’s the dominating system. Land, and its resources, is still worth competing for, as are markets, trade routes and productive capacity.

Then there is war itself as an economic instrument. Armaments have developed dramatically since the longbow proved decisive at Agincourt. Rather than showers of barbarously tipped arrows the air is shredded by military drones and cruise missiles.

Yet, the bloody battlefields of the Somme and Ypres haven’t been completely deserted as the seeming stand-off between Russia and Ukraine demonstrates, with trenches, artillery bombardments and massed assaults over open ground.

Meanwhile, in Gaza, Dresden is being re-enacted as towns and cities are reduced to rubble with civilians being by far the greatest number of casualties killed and maimed. The justification, as if there can be any for mass killing of children, is the wickedness of those lording it over the victims: Hamas in Gaza, Nazis in Dresden, but civilians dying in huge numbers in the cellars.

The response of politicians and their media mouthpieces, such as compliant journalists and retired generals, to perceptions of war to come, is more munitions, more men, and now women. In Britain this is often reinforced with reference to the bogey of appeasement.

All leaders of regimes deemed to be a threat to freedom and democracy in general, and Britain in particular are apparently exemplars of reincarnation, in that each is apparently Hitler reborn. For example, unless Ukraine is successfully defended Putin will direct his forces into wider Europe.

If Putin really is Hitler transmogrified he wouldn’t have learned anything from previous experience should he pursue such a policy. As the rather more limited present military adventure is proving, war is a no-win/no-win situation, with dreadful costs both financial and in lives.

Even a declared victory has undeterminable consequences such as a revitalised Germany and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. Thousand year Reichs tend to be rather shorter in duration, as the British Empire showed.

If the perceived enemy is not personalised by an evil Fuhrer then it is terrorist, an organisation of fanatics, religious or political or both. As such, extra-judicial assassination is justified, with missile or drone strikes across the borders of presently non-belligerent countries, or even nominally allied ones.

When American soldiers are killed in their Middle Eastern base, the Commander in Chief directs his forces to exact vengeance on alleged perpetrators without the inconvenience of having to legally establish guilt. The question is rarely posed as to why American boots are stationed on the ground so far from home territory.

An irony is that the UK military can be deployed in such ‘anti-terrorist’ operations despite the fact that capital punishment has been abolished even for murderers who are proven guilty of crimes analogous to the outcomes of terrorist actions.

Are we really looking to return to the fearful nonsense of ‘Protect and Survive’, that 1970s – and 80s guide at the height of the Cold War, to surviving a nuclear attack by unscrewing a door, leaning it against a wall and huddling beneath it. ‘What wall?’ might well have been the question.

Unspecified experts have opined that the country is woefully unprepared for conflict on British soil. Plans are required for developing cover from air attacks, evacuation, rationing and appropriate technology (whatever that might be).

As to the armed forces, presently apparently underfunded despite an additional £2 billion funding last year, it seems there is a larger number of personnel leaving the army than are being recruited. This has led to, again unspecified, senior military officials speculating about some form of conscription.

There can surely be no doubt that the root cause of war is economic. Israel and Gaza land is the issue, and has been since 1948, with the economic implications of being deprived of it. The fighting over Ukraine has historical roots stretching back to pre-capitalist times.

Developing animosity between the USA and China is very obviously economic competition threatening to become military. Trade routes over the Red Sea are contentious for disrupting western capitalism, while enabling those least favoured by capital to flex their somewhat diminished military muscles.

It is natural for people to wish to protect themselves and survive, but war is the very antithesis of such an outcome. The only way towards any real prospect for peace is removing the fomenter of war, which is capitalism.

While the driving force behind politics remains the pursuit of profit by competing capitalists, often expressed as bellicose nationalism, war will continue to a lesser or greater extent. The achievement of real peace, not just an absence of war, requires socialism.

The ending of wealth creation for private advantage, replaced by a system meeting people’s needs without the rationing effect of money, itself a spark of conflict. By necessity, the system will have to be worldwide, with abolition of nations and their contentious borders.

Then war will no longer be even a rumour, but merely an exemplar for future generations of how people used to allow their own suffering by following leaders and failed ideologies, rather than acting together in their mutual best interests.

Dave Alton

The Party of Business (2024)

"My Red Flag is in the wash."

From the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fifty years ago on 28 February 1974, there was a general election. The Labour Party’s election manifesto included a pledge to:

‘Bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families’.

During the election campaign, Denis Healey made his famous promise to squeeze (some of) the rich until the pips squeaked. It was only to be property speculators not all the rich but he did say that a future Labour government would increase income tax on those with the highest incomes.

Labour won that election and a second one in October the same year.

Alongside nationalisation, the redistribution of wealth from the rich to the working class was the Labour Party’s claimed path to a more equal society. That was how reformism was going to gradually bring about ‘socialism’.

The Labour Party was originally set up as the parliamentary wing of the trade union movement. Hence its name. It was supposed to be the party of labour, the party that was to press for legislation to improve the conditions of workers. In 1918 it did adopt a constitution which proclaimed full-scale nationalisation, which it called socialism (but was actually state capitalism) as its long-term aim, but in practice it sought working- class support on the basis of promising to improve things for workers within the capitalist system.

When in office the Labour Party has always had to govern in the interest of business. That capitalism is an economic system that runs on profits made by businesses is an economic reality which all governments have to recognise on pain of causing an economic slowdown or even downturn. Whatever they might have promised so as to get elected or might have wanted, all Labour governments ended up recognising this and accepting the need for profits to be allowed to be made. Labour MP Harold (later Lord) Lever put it very clearly shortly after Labour won the 1966 General Election in terms as relevant today as they were then:

‘Labour’s economic plans are not in any way geared to nationalisation; they are directed towards increased production on the basis of the continued existence of a large private sector. Within the terms of a profit system it is not possible, in the long run, to achieve sustained increases in output without an adequate flow of profit to promote and finance them. The Labour leadership knows as well as any businessman that an engine which runs on profit cannot be made to move faster without extra fuel. So, though profits may be squeezed temporarily by taxation and Government price policy, they must and will, over a longer period, increase significantly even if not proportionately to increased production’ (Observer, 3 April 1966).

Labour openly embraces capitalism

In 1995 Tony Blair got the party, in opposition since 1979, to drop Clause 4 of its constitution with its socialist-sounding wording. In 1998, Peter Mandelson, a cabinet minister in the Labour government that had come into office the previous year, famously stated the government was ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes’.

This was the ‘New Labour’ that replaced Old Reformist Labour. Starmer is in the same tradition, only he has gone further by declaring Labour to be ‘the Party of Business’. Not only that, he accepts that this involves pursuing, when in office, a policy of ‘fiscal conservatism’ (tinyurl.com/58xynpda):

‘It was “a big mistake” for the left to equate spending money with radicalism as he insisted that fiscal discipline was fundamental to winning power’ (Times, 19 July).

He told last year’s Labour Conference that a Labour government would not be ‘a cheque-book state’ and in a speech last December declared that ‘anyone who expects an incoming Labour government to quickly turn on the spending taps is going to be disappointed’ (tinyurl.com/bddbhuxu ).

Starmer and his would-be Chancellor Rachel Reeves began 2024, the year they both hope to move into Downing Street, by stepping up their appeal to business leaders. Reeves went to Davos to meet the world’s political and business elite at their annual jamboree in Switzerland. She said she was going there to try to convince them that Labour not the Tories ‘are now the pro-business party’ (Times, 18 January).

A couple of weeks later the Labour Party organised its own meeting for business leaders, sponsored by HSBC. The headlines in the business press reporting what went on tell it all:

‘Labour Is The Party Of Business,’ UK’s Starmer Tells Corporate Bigwigs (Barrons, the American business weekly).

Labour is now ‘pro-business’, vows Rachel Reeves (Financial Times).

Reeves unambiguously committed the Labour Party to supporting capitalism:

‘This Labour Party sees profit not as something to be disdained but as a mark of business succeeding’.

‘Be in no doubt, we will campaign as a pro-business party — and we will govern as a pro-business party’ (tinyurl.com/bdubeuak).

So, what has the New Business Party been offering Business?

‘We will cap the headline rate of corporation tax at its current rate of 25 per cent for the next parliament.’

‘The shadow chancellor has told the BBC Labour would not reinstate a bankers’ bonus cap that was scrapped last year by the Conservative government’ (tinyurl.com/dsymw2zn).

‘Labour rules out wealth tax if party wins next election. Ms Reeves confirmed Labour would not target expensive houses, increase capital gains tax or put up the top rate of income tax’ (tinyurl.com/eyftrjdu).

‘Party amends plan to bolster protections for gig economy as it boasts of ‘pro-business’ credentials’ (tinyurl.com/ypxfaz48).

In her speech to the business leaders, Reeves declared that, whatever happens, ‘I will not waiver from iron-clad fiscal rules’. Labour is banking on being able to conjure up growth, but what if this doesn’t happen, as it might well not as governments don’t have the power to bring about growth?

No or slow growth would mean less tax revenue. Under its ‘iron-clad’ rules and given its promise not to increase corporation or other taxes on business, the Labour government would have to cut back on its spending and impose austerity, putting the defence of profits and profit-making first, before social spending and before public sector wages. It would, as Reeves put it, ‘govern as a pro-business party’. All governments always end up having to do this anyway but never has a party announced so clearly in advance that this is what they will do.

Adam Buick

Office sharing in Northern Ireland (2024)

From the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The accession of Michelle O’Neill to First Minister of Northern Ireland is a significant change in Northern Irish affairs.

Sinn Fein have long maintained that the First and Deputy First ministers are co-equal, and the Good Friday Agreement, which cements national identities into the constitution of the statelet, envisages a permanent diarchy between Unionists and Nationalists . But, this is the first time since the foundation of Northern Ireland 102 years ago, that a non-unionist politician is, at the very least, first among equals.

This is not an open-and-shut situation of demographic victory looming for Nationalists: Unionist parties got marginally more votes than a notional Nationalist bloc; and the cross- community Alliance Party – which counts as neither – saw its vote-share increase as it gained 9 seats, giving it 17 in the 90-seat Assembly. Sinn Fein themselves could only claim 29 percent of the vote, but they are very much the largest party in the Six Counties.

The largest Unionist Party, the DUP, had been using the Good Friday Agreement to stall the creation of the new Executive following the 2023 elections, by refusing to nominate a Deputy First Minister. This was rump Unionism flexing its muscles, and demanding to meet the government in Westminster to show who, despite the ballots, is really in charge. Their nominal complaint was the Northern Ireland Protocol, which imposes some customs controls between Ulster and the rest of the United Kingdom.

Indeed, as our pamphlet Ireland Past Present and Future  notes, much of the tension behind the various conflicts was very much over the question of trade barriers and tariffs:

‘Towards the end of the nineteenth century the southern capitalists and the Irish Nationalist Party were becoming increasingly voluble about ‘English and other foreign capitalists squeezing out the home manufacturer and producer’ – an emotive distinction between the ‘foreign’ and home-based exploiters, despite the fact that the latter, due to their fledgling status, were, if anything, even more rapacious than the former.’

But:

‘By the time the southern capitalists found the strength and influence of political assertiveness, the friction between the Ulster capitalist class and its English counterpart had largely passed. Ulster was virtually integrated into the British economy, dependent on its economic link with Britain for much of its raw materials and its market – not only on the British mainland but, under the system of Imperial Preference, throughout the colonies. There was no talk now of independence: Ulster was soundly British! This was the patriotism of the northern capitalists; and their pensioned political hacks would rummage the cesspits of religious bigotry and hatred to ensure that the working class got the message.’

What the DUP got

What the DUP won from the UK government was a Command Paper that affirmed that Ulster remains integrally part of the UK single market, and mitigates some of the effects of the Northern Ireland Protocol (but not all of them, checks remain, and EU law continues to apply, but democratic assent of the Northern Ireland Assembly is required). The agreement also creates: ‘A new legal duty for ministers when introducing primary legislation to consider whether it would affect trade between Northern Ireland and other parts of the UK because it would diverge from EU rules as applicable in Northern Ireland’ (The Northern Ireland Protocol and Windsor Framework House of Commons Research paper) meaning EU law will continue to be implemented across the UK, except on the same terms that a toddler accepts their bedtime because they want to, not because they were told to.

The economy of Northern Ireland is largely agricultural, its manufacturing base has diminished significantly from the days when the shipyards dominated: but substantial engineering and manufacturing remains, so maintaining access to UK markets and seeing off EU competitors will be important for many.

Also, we need to be clear, that the infrastructure of Unionism, those ‘pensioned political hacks’ means that the largely symbolic warm words about Ulster remaining British remain important; many people owe their position of influence to that story (just as much as many pensioned political hacks in the Nationalist movement do to the counter-story). The economic needs of Northern Irish capitalists do not immediately translate into political policy, but have to move through the political weeds of a century of conflict and sectarian domination.

Referendum?

O’Neill predicts a border poll by 2030. And, indeed, the Good Friday Agreement does commit the Westminster Government to hold one when there is good evidence that there would be a yes vote for reunification. We can confidently predict a degree of Nelsonian blindness on this matter, and although the courts could be called upon to intervene, they are unlikely to do so on what is quintessentially a political question.

There are signs that an incoming Labour government would be no more willing to call a referendum than the current Tory administration, with Labour spokespeople waffling round what their position would be on any such poll – fully aware that their position in Scotland is for the Union, and any change for Northern Ireland would likely ripple over the sea for new calls for Scottish independence.

Significantly, the UK government has argued that, although the Scottish Parliament does not have the power to call a referendum on independence (that power is firmly reserved to Westminster), this is not undemocratic, since Scottish people can vote in Westminster elections. The same arguments will be wheeled out for the Six Counties (which the Westminster government fervently avers is no different from any other part of the United Kingdom).

The ongoing tussle between ideologues, professional politicians and the interests of the wealthy will continue, using border and people’s identities as pieces in the great game. Today’s fervent Unionist may be tomorrow’s avowed separatist, should the winds of profit blow that way. For now, Sinn Fein ministers will ‘share power’ by picking up salaries that would have once gone to Unionists, and will get on with delivering goods and services to their constituents on terms that the propertied classes will allow so long as their interests continue to be served.

Pik Smeet

How we perceive work (2024)

From the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The ancient Chinese philosopher, Confucius is reputed to have once said ‘Choose a job you love, and you will never work a day in your life.’ Though there is considerable doubt that he ever said such a thing, it is quite an apt expression. It neatly encapsulates a fairly widely held view of work as a something that, for the most part, we do not love and an activity that we would not choose to engage in unless compelled to do so.

In similar vein, the anarchist Bob Black begins his 1985 essay, The Abolition of Work, with the rousing statement ‘No one should ever work. Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world.’ Black, like Confucius, is obviously equating work here with coerced labour – waged employment – and counter-poses to this the idea of ‘play’ by which he means free creative activity.

It’s a question of semantics really but, clearly, you don’t need to define ‘work’ as coercive per se; you can distinguish between cases where this is true and cases where it is not – where the latter might very well also entail ‘free creative activity’. Dictionaries to some extent reflect this ambiguity. Thus, we find in the online Merriam-Webster dictionary, ‘working’ being defined as ‘to perform work or fulfil duties regularly for wages or salary’ but ‘work’ as applying to ‘any purposeful activity whether remunerative or not’ or even ‘something produced by the exercise of creative talent or expenditure of creative effort : artistic production.’

Disutility

Adam Smith started out from the basic premise that human beings were inherently lazy. Work was really a form of self-sacrifice rather than of self-expression. As he put it, ‘What everything really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.’ That also articulates, in a nutshell, his labour theory of value. The worker´s reward for sacrificing ‘his tranquillity, his freedom, and his happiness’ was his wage.

Smith´s negative attitude towards work was mirrored in the writings of others such as the Utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham. Bentham opined that our love of ease stemmed from our aversion to labour. Labour was painful and human beings had a natural disposition to avoid pain and seek pleasure – or, in this instance, leisure.

Neoclassical economists, like Jevons and Alfred Marshall in the late 19th century, built on Bentham’s utilitarian arguments but substituted the more technical sounding term, ‘disutility’, for ‘pain’. To ensure that work gets done, without which society would collapse, requires ‘compensating’ workers with a wage for the disutility their work entails.

This idea of ‘compensation’ was not new – in fact, it goes back to antiquity but was then more commonly associated with some form of redress for harm or negligence caused. The specific sense used here – the payment of wages or salaries for doing work – became more common only when the experience of wage labour itself became more commonplace with the rise of capitalism.

Of course, the notion that work is, by its very nature, a disutility is little more than a transparently self-serving sleight of hand that seeks to justify the existence of a system of wage labour – and by extension, capitalism – as being indispensable to the performance of work upon which our collective survival depends. Wage labour may be a disutility, but it does not follow at all that work, as such, needs to be.

Though Marx adapted Smith´s labour theory of value to fit his own narrative, he was quite scathing about Smith´s equating of work with toil:

‘In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou labour! was Jehovah’s curse on Adam. And this is labour for Smith, a curse. “Tranquillity” appears as the adequate state, as identical with “freedom” and “happiness”. It seems quite far from Smith’s mind that the individual, “in his normal state of health, strength, activity, skill, facility”, also needs a normal portion of work, and of the suspension of tranquillity. Certainly, labour obtains its measure from the outside, through the aim to be attained and the obstacles to be overcome in attaining it. But Smith has no inkling whatever that the overcoming of obstacles is in itself a liberating activity – and that, further, the external aims become stripped of the semblance of merely external natural urgencies and become posited as aims which the individual himself posits – hence as self-realization, objectification of the subject, hence real freedom, whose action is, precisely, labour. He is right, of course, that, in its historic forms as slave-labour, serf-labour, and wage-labour, labour always appears as repulsive, always as external forced labour; and not-labour , by contrast, as “freedom and happiness”’(Grundrisse, Chapter 12).

Free creative activity

If there is a disinclination to work on the part of the great majority there is nothing ‘natural’ about it. It is simply a gut reaction to the particular form that work takes in a society that is fundamentally orientated to serve the interests of the few who don’t need to work and not the many who do.

Of course, in these circumstances people will be disposed to view work negatively. That´s perfectly understandable. It is always going to be difficult to overcome this ingrained prejudice when the basic relationship between employers and employees is essentially a coercive one and when that key institution of a capitalist economy – the business firm – is itself a fundamentally authoritarian arrangement.

Who particularly enjoys being bossed around and economically forced into engaging in an activity that is not primarily done for their benefit, anyway?

But what of work after the abolition of the wages system in a post-capitalist society? Could it become the free creative activity that Black envisaged? A transformation of work into free creative activity would, in a sense, abolish the very concept of a ‘working day’ by effectively eliminating the distinction between what we call ‘leisure’ and what we call ‘work’.

Work would still be work, not quite leisure, in that case, even if the difference between them – for example in terms of the sense of fulfilment and pleasure each activity afforded the individual – would narrow considerably. The difference perhaps might be that work is something more purposeful or linked to the satisfaction of other needs, than is true of leisure.

Robin Cox

Party News: The Socialist Party's Summer School (2024)

Party News from the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our understanding of the kind of society we’re living in is shaped by our circumstances: our home, our work, our finances, our communities. Recognising our own place in the economy, politics and history is part of developing a wider awareness of how capitalist society functions. Alongside an understanding of the mechanics of capitalism, political consciousness also involves our attitude towards it. Seeing through the ideologies which promote accepting our current social system requires us to question 

and judge what we experience. Realising that capitalism doesn’t benefit the vast majority of people naturally leads on to considering what alternative society could run for the benefit of everyone.

The Socialist Party’s weekend of talks and discussion explores what political consciousness is, how it arises and what we, as a class and as individuals, can do with it.

Our venue is the University of Worcester, St John's Campus, Henwick Grove, St John's, Worcester, WR2 6AJ.

Full residential cost (including accommodation and meals Friday evening to Sunday afternoon) is £150; the concessionary rate is £80.

Book online at worldsocialism.org/spgb/summer-school-2024/ or send a cheque (payable to the Socialist Party of Great Britain) with your contact details to Summer School, The Socialist Party, 52 Clapham High Street, London, SW4 7UN. Day visitors are welcome, but please e-mail for details in advance. 

Email enquiries to spgbschool@yahoo.co.uk.

Contradiction (2024)

Book Review from the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Contradiction Within the Soul of Humanity. By Ernest Dyer. New Generation Publishing. 2023. 83pp.

This book is, by the author’s own admission, his personal journey of escape from the conditioning which society, via conventional upbringing and education system, marks us all with. This journey, he tells us, was triggered by his questioning of why humanity has been plagued by the horrors of war and conflict throughout much of its known history. The book’s title, with its use of the word ‘soul’, may suggest some kind of religious inspiration, but, as he makes clear, even as a teenager he realised that religious explanations made no sense and that, as he puts it ‘God was a fictional construct’. So the underlying reasons for the competition and conflict which seemed fundamental to human society had to lie elsewhere. He proceeds here to identify ‘the evil in humankind’s history’ (his words) as developing from the beginnings of ‘civil life’, referring to the start of settled agriculture and the development of fixed communities around 10,000 years ago with their hierarchies and wealth inequalities.

This is very much in line with much modern thinking about the origins of inequality, inter-group conflict and the challenge to the pro-social behaviour among homo sapiens which had largely characterised its previous 2-300,000 years of existence. That challenge, he argues, has reached its peak in modern society, where the sources of ‘evil’ are not just war and economic inequality but also environmental degradation and the threats posed by artificial intelligence. He does not stint on detailing the horrors which war has brought, and still brings, to humanity and the overwhelming waste of resources occasioned by war and preparation for it. As he rightly points out, war in the modern world is overwhelmingly caused by ‘competition over valued resources such as: water, land, fossil fuels, rare and valued metals and materials’. This, he tells us, results in ‘a mismatch between what we can now do (technologically) and our seeming inability to manage the consequences’. He sees as the driver of all this the interests of what he variously calls the ‘elite class’, ‘elite groups’ and ‘national leaders’, with the vast majority of people being ‘impotent witnesses’. He recognises that these elites are the owners or controllers of the vast majority of society’s wealth, even if he does not explicitly identify them, as we would, as the capitalist class and their representatives.

What is the author’s remedy for this contradiction between human potential and the actual reality of human society? Since, together with war, competition and inequality, the other great ‘evil’ he sees in the world is the modern nation state (described as ‘the most powerful, and currently for the World the most dangerous, entity fostering the identification of differences between peoples’), he calls for ‘world consciousness’, considering that ‘no human is irredeemably beyond the potential for some precocious sense of world-consciousness’. An admirable sentiment definitely, but how is that world consciousness to be achieved? Via some kind of ‘global governance’ body, he suggests, perhaps based on the United Nations, where representatives from different nations will get together and agree on a way of organising the world and its resources so as to eliminate armed conflict and the threat of it. The problem of course is that the United Nations is already meant to do that in theory, but it doesn’t – and can’t –, because the foremost obstacle to it is the very existence of the ‘elites’ the author talks about in each individual country and their monopoly of the wealth that they possess and seek to retain or increase via the working of their national executive committees, ie, governments.

The author does, however, glimpse a solution that could work on a world-scale when he talks about ‘the actual engagement of mass populations as a necessary precondition’ to get rid of ‘hegemonic economic competition’ and achieve ‘co-operation and peaceful co-existence’. But that will involve something this book doesn’t mention, that is an understanding by those ‘mass populations’ of the way current society, capitalism, operates and the need to change that by mass political action, democratically and ideally via the ballot box, to create a moneyless, wageless, stateless society, a society of the ‘inter-group co-operation’ the book advocates. That will truly be ‘world consciousness’ and, no matter what the author of this book, which is well-meaning and for the most part entirely admirable, would like to happen, it cannot come through some kind of moral agreement by some global body within the current system.

Howard Moss

A Search for Truth (2024)

Book Review from the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Alfred Reynolds / Reinhold Alfred. By Richard Headicar. 2023. ISBN 978-1-3999-6772-3

Alfred Reynolds was a philosopher and poet from Hungary who fled to Britain in 1937 after being arrested for allegedly subversive political activities. A Social Democrat and former ‘Communist’ who was at one point accused of Trotskyism there, he was a radical who was a long-term critic of totalitarian political formations, both Fascist and Leninist.

Because of his linguistic abilities he worked as an interpreter for a time in Britain including for German prisoners of war at the Kempton Park prison camp, before creating a de-Nazification programme that he pioneered at Slemdal Prison Camp in Norway. He received recognition and support from the Labour MP Philip Noel-Baker and after a time with the International Refugee Council eventually became a middle-ranking UK civil servant in London, but it is not that for which he is perhaps most well-known.

After the war, Reynolds created a weekly discussion group that mirrored to some extent one that he had developed in Hungary and another, later, circle of Germans who had been influenced by his tutelage. It was called the ‘Bridge Circle’ and out of this emanated a monthly journal called the London Letter. This had a low circulation but an influence that was disproportionate to its size: over time Martin Buber, J.B. Priestley, TUC leader George Woodcock, Albert Schweitzer and Sir Herbert Read were all contributors. Jomo Kenyatta was another who orbited in this milieu, as was Colin Wilson who described Reynolds as ‘one of the most original minds of the modern world’.

Reynolds went on to found an English Language School in central London, but it is for the Bridge Circle and London Letter that he is probably best known. His philosophy counselled strongly against ‘group think’ and in favour of the search for ‘personal truth’ and arguably veered between liberalism and anarchism (with added influences from the saner writings of Nietzsche among others). In 1982 a number of Reynolds’s articles were published in a volume called Pilate’s Question. This title referred to the eternal conundrum of ‘what is truth?’, though Reynolds was a little frustrated that this was interpreted by some onlookers as being a possible religious tract when it was anything but.

Reynolds was for decades one of London’s characters and it was at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park that he met Richard Headicar in the 1950s, the author of this biography. Headicar was at the time an anti-nuclear speaker with anarchist leanings and who broadly supported CND. He became heavily influenced by Reynolds who converted from being his critic to mentor, and was a regular attender at the Bridge Circle (later carrying on a similar informal philosophy group in London, including after Reynolds’s death in 1993). Headicar writes:

‘Fittingly the last time I saw Alfred was at Speakers’ Corner. Coincidentally I was speaking for the SPGB of which he claimed he was once a member. I think he may have joined using another of his noms de plume. Spotting him in my crowd I was once more fleetingly visited by trepidation, wondering if he would be disappointed by my new affiliation. When I alighted from the platform he at once approached me, smiled, put his arm around my shoulder and said “Richard, that was pure Bridge”.’

The book is beautifully produced and includes many copies of letters, photos and other artefacts. It also details the more recent resurgence of interest in him in his home country of Hungary, including for his early work Alfred Reinhold’s First and Last Volume of Lyric Poetry. There is a useful chapter on Bridge philosophy too and its relationship with Marx, Nietzsche, the power of human consciousness, technology and creativity among other things. And while Reynolds was sceptical of the ‘group think’ of Marxism, he clearly recognised in the SPGB a more independent and critical spirit than is typical on the self-styled Left – as of course, did Richard Headicar himself, a Party member to this day.

Dave Perrin