Soviet Jews and emigration (1977)

From the July 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Russian annexation of Polish territory in 1654 gave Russia its first large-scale Jewish communities in towns like Minsk, Polatsk, Kiev, Brest and Vilkh. Other towns containing large numbers of Jewish inhabitants also came under the rule of the Tsar. Some years earlier in 1648 the Cossack leader Bogdon Chmielmicki led a revolt against the Polish gentry. After the defeat of the Polish army, his followers turned against the Jews; over 100,000 Jews were killed between 1648 and 1651, and others tortured and ill-treated This was the first large-scale massacre by the Cossacks. However, as early as 1545 Jewish goods from Poland were burnt in public, and Jews forbidden to enter Moscow. In 1563 Tsar Ivan IV ordered that all Jews who refused Christian baptism should be drowned. They were debarred in 1823 from owning land in White Russia by Tsar Alexander, and from following certain trades, and subject to immediate deportation and repeated pogroms. The word pogrom is Russian for a violent attack carried out against a section of the community.

Under the laws of 1793, Jews were mainly confined to the Pale of Settlement—an area which stretched from the Black Sea in the south to the Baltic provinces in the north, to Kalisz and Warsaw in the west and Chennigoy in the east. Even within the Pale of Settlement certain towns would only admit Jews as a special privilege. By 1897 there were more than 5 million Jews in the Pale, and a further 322,000 living outside. Moscow had 9,000; St. Petersburg 21,000; Krarkov 14,000 (official figures 1897).

In the population census of 1970 (before the emigration campaign) the number of Jews living within the USSR, excluding Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, was 2,150,707—less than 1 per cent of the population and twelfth in size of the 104 USSR nationalities listed (Insight No. 7, “Soviet Jews,” Oct. 1975).

In 1917 the Bolshevik revolution nominally removed many of the disadvantages suffered by the Jews, including the abolition of the Pale of Settlement. However, the pogroms re-commenced and continued until the outbreak of World War II. With the death of Stalin these were halted and the persecution of the Jews changed its violent character. It has instead become a political weapon in the present Russian government’s dealings with American capitalism and the US satellite in the east—the Jewish State of Israel, proclaimed as the Jewish national home.

The creation of the state of Israel in 1948 gave fresh impetus to the Zionist movement everywhere, including Russia, but significantly the wealthier Jews, British, American and Russian, are not in too great a hurry to take advantage of it. All Jews are not Zionists; on the contrary. Zionism has the appeal of a happy land far far away, an appeal which becomes stronger as the economic and social conditions of Zionists in other parts of the world become worse. Undoubtedly the Soviet government consistently refuses to advance Soviet Jewish culture. The teaching of Yiddish is not encouraged. In fact, only 25 per cent. of the Jewish population speak Yiddish; 44 per cent., mostly women, being over the age of 60 and 75 per cent. over the age 40. (Insight, No. 8, Oct. 1975). Religious ceremonies such as circumcision require special permits. There are no longer any exclusively Jewish schools and practically no Jewish newspapers. The Russian government openly discourages Jewish culture (although a large number of Jews are following the footsteps of their British and American counterparts, where religious practices are observed only by a small number of orthodox Jews).

Since 1970 when the agitation for Jews to emigrate to Israel commenced, until 1977, approximately 5 per cent of Jews (118,000) left the Soviet Union, and a further 55,000 were waiting for visas in 1976. (The Jews of Russia, Martin Gilbert.) The rate of permits granted was 14,200 a year (National Council for Soviet Jewry circular, Feb. 1977).

Of those who emigrated since 1970, many went elsewhere. Some actually returned to the Soviet Union. The campaign for emigration which is promoted both by the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the National Council for Soviet Jewry, is a demand not for the right of Jews to emigrate to any country of their choice, but that they should emigrate to Israel. The promised land has lost much of its attraction for Soviet Jews. The Yom Kippur war, compulsory military service for men and women, inflation, low wages and rising prices, and all the familiar problems of capitalism, are present in Israel. In addition, constant threat of war with the Arab states has placed the Israeli economy on a regular war footing, and it is anything but a secure and permanent home. According to an article in The Times (12th May 1977), of the Jews who left Russia in 1974, 20 per cent. sought destinations other than Israel. The following year the proportion rose above 50 per cent., and in April 1977 it increased to 70 per cent.

One of the drawbacks which future emigrants will have to face is the prospect of being deprived of financial assistance by the international Jewish organizations if their final destination is not Israel. The view of the Chief Rabbi of Rumania, Dr. Moses Rosen, is that it is Judaism that is threatened, and that emigrants should only go to Israel where they can lead Jewish lives. They should emigrate for “spiritual” not economic reasons, otherwise they should not be helped by Jewish public funds (The Times, 12th May 1977.) This will obviously affect the poorer Jews. Even if a visa is granted the Soviet government charge 900 roubles (£1,000) for every member of the emigrating family. This is a severe financial burden, and goes some way to explaining why only 7½ per cent of Russian Jews attempt to emigrate. A well-qualified professional Soviet citizen receives 160 roubles a month, and this is considered to be a good salary. In fact a number of Russian Jews who have settled in Israel want to move on elsewhere.

A further complicating factor is that despite the freedom of movement of Soviet citizens proclaimed under the Soviet Constitution, Russian workers whether Jewish or not are not permitted to emigrate, and the Soviet government claims to be making a special concession in the case of the Jews. Like all capitalist governments it does not wish to see its skilled labour force seek higher wages and better working conditions abroad. In this they are following the pattern set by the British government in the anti-Combination Laws of 1799-1824, which forbade the emigration of skilled workers in addition to prohibiting the formation of trade unions. For all practical purposes the Russian equivalent of the Combination Laws is still in force. Fear of opening the door to mass emigration lies behind the reticence of the Soviet government to allow unrestricted emigration of Jews. Also it is against the interests of Russian capitalism to help to build up present Israeli capitalism and its USA parent by allowing highly skilled workers to emigrate to these countries. Russian Jewish workers are no exception to the general rule prevailing within wage labour and capital relations. Dominated by the need to get a living in the only way workers can, by selling their labour-power, they will seek the best terms and social conditions for employment. Migration is part of the history of the working class. Workers have come and gone to all corners of the world in their attempts to find work and peace. Some countries refuse them entry, others refuse them exits. The Jewish workers are looking for the philosopher’s stone if they are looking for ideal conditions abroad.

Like any other workers, they cannot continue to live in the past, and must play their part in the removal of religious, nationalist and racial prejudice and the creation of a world in which there are no restrictions on people—freedom in the fullest sense of the word. Freedom from the domination of capital and wage labour; freedom from want, and freedom to extend the latent productive capacity which exists, and of course, freedom of movement. Socialism embraces all of these. Control of the world must be removed from the capitalists and the system abolished. This is the task of a class-conscious working class who are not divided amongst themselves on the basis of nationality, race, religion or sex.

Jim D'Arcy

The great education debate (1977)

From the July 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

To a socialist the name of that true-blue servant of capitalism, Peregrine Worsthorne, does nothing to inspire respect. However, the reactionary outpourings of such as Worsthorne are often quite revealing of what constitutes the true, if publicly unexpressed, thinking of our — and their — capitalist masters.

In the Times Educational Supplement of May 6th under the headline “Why not cut back when so few get anything from school”, we have laid before us the crude reality of education under capitalism. On Tuesday 3rd May Worsthorne addressed a conference at the Roehampton Institute of Higher Education. The following is a part of what he had to say:

It is extremely important that education be geared to ’the needs of society, but we need to be brutally realistic about what the needs of society are. It will always be a minority who take the decisions and the rest will have to accept them. You may jigger about with the means of choosing the élite as much as you like but now, as never before, society has to face the inescapable necessity for the development of a formidable élite.

As if this were not enough, Worsthorne proceeds to really rub our noses in it:

Industrialization meant that most people needed practical intelligence less than ever, and education aimed at encouraging personal development was of the wrong kind for an overcrowded world.

And later:

Most people are going to have to live in a subordinate role, however we dress it up.

And to crown it all:

It is difficult to admit that the great majority will not have satisfaction at work or in other parts of their lives. Politicians and journalists cannot do much about it. Teachers are asking for trouble if they think they can. To encourage children to believe it is all going to be different when they grow up is wrong and will cause a great deal of unhappiness.

Now, the Roehampton Institute of Higher Education represents only a relatively obscure élite in itself, a factor which may have contributed to the onset of Worsthorne’s attack. However, his honesty on this occasion is indeed refreshing.

He is stating what is true under capitalism. Independence of mind breeds thought and thinkers tend to ask awkward questions — too awkward, that is to say, for those who own the means of production and distribution. Their survival as capitalists depends upon the disciplined and acquiescent wage-labour of everybody else, including what that means in the deliberate restriction of working-class education.

Richard Cooper

The Politicians and the crisis: Part 1 (1977)

From the July 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

On Sunday May 8th, in London the seven-nation conference of heads of state ended. Present with their aides were the Prime Ministers of Canada, Italy, Japan, UK, the Presidents of USA and France, and the Chancellor of West Germany; and on the final day Roy Jenkins in his capacity as President of the EEC.

The Conference was the latest of a series of similar conferences to appraise and look for solutions to the very real and increasingly dangerous problems facing the West European industrial countries, North America and Japan, and the rest of the avowedly capitalist world, i.e. Australasia. Latin America and so on, plus and by no means least the primary producing countries of the “Third World”, who are themselves at various stages of industrialization.

The problems discussed were primarily the world trade recession, with its unemployment. particularly amongst the young, inflation, energy, imbalance in international payments, the expected $45,000 million surplus of the oil-producing countries grouped in OPEC, the debts of the developing (non-oil producing) states, the “necessary” increase in nuclear energy (and its attendant dangers, political and military), “aid” to developing countries in which the Eastern (Soviet) bloc trade organization Comecon was urged to follow suit.

Carter, the US President, also raised the question of illegalities which had hitherto been condoned in certain banking, multi-national business and political circles. (The former Japanese Prime Minister, Mr. Tanaka, in relation to bribes from the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation was very involved.) This latter matter was not mentioned in the final declaration of “7 Pledges” to revitalize capitalism’s ailing economies, possibly because although not unimportant, it was regarded as peripheral to the major problems. To raise it officially would have also meant an explicit reference to companies and individuals. But does the conference have any significance for the working class of the world?

It can be safely said that modern society rarely appears to have stability for more than about two consecutive fortnights at a time, and that countless conferences and meetings have come and gone. Like many things it is all relative . . . and yet the newspaper headlines must at least have indicated something of magnitude — e.g. “7 Pledges to stop chaos” (Daily Telegraph, 9th May) and the politicians’ view on what could happen if these problems are not solved, must mean something. Put it this way: Carter, Callaghan and the rest wish to present as good a face as possible on the existing system whether they choose to call it capitalism, the “mixed economy”, a “free market”, a “social market” economy, the “free world” (i.e. capitalism with some sort of parliamentary democracy), partly because they are obliged to continue with it and also perhaps because they like the trappings of political power. As Carter said at the end of the conference: “We have to remember that making decisions, even unanimously, is not a guarantee that our decisions will be consummated. In many ways our own reputations are at stake.” As an article in the Daily Telegraph on Friday 6th May (the day before the beginning of the heads-of-state meeting) under the heading “Outlook for the World Summit — Hidden Threats to the World Economy” stated in its opening paragraph:

Chancellor Schmidt probably expressed the inner thoughts of all the European leaders when he said on Wednesday that he was looking to the London summit this weekend, mainly to bolster confidence. By this he meant the leaders' self-confidence and their electorates’ confidence in them, both of which are indeed at a low ebb.

Why this dual lack of confidence then? Because the politicians always aim to convince themselves and in turn the electorate that the capitalist system has found a way of stabilizing itself, and that despite its many imperfections it could at least avoid a catastrophe of the 1930s’ slump dimensions. They imagined that with their versions of Keynesian economics they had eradicated the deeper troughs of the business cycle.

However, from the mid-sixties onwards their policies have been demonstrated to be futile and unsound. It has been a gradual process, this dawning on the part of capitalism’s politicians.

Perhaps more to the point, among their advisors in the corridors of power, the higher echelons of the Civil Service, this bewilderment was exemplified in an article entitled “Whitehall at its wits’ end” (Sunday Telegraph, 24th April):

‘Everyone is baffled’ confesses one Permanent Secretary. “The old levers just don’t do the trick any more. We’re living in a world we didn’t make and don’t understand’. The Treasury has according to one senior Labour Minister (unnamed) ‘a very marked loss of confidence’, which reveals itself ‘to the discerning eye’ by the presence of competing economic ideologies. Before the Treasury served up only the pure milk of Keynesianism; now Keynes and Friedman are both on offer.

Graham Turner, the author of the article, states that “Whitehall is at its wits’ end . . . like the rest of us — they have not the faintest idea where Britain is going”.

The British politicians, their advisors and their counterparts in other countries may not know where the British and world economies are heading, but they do know, from personal experience and from the reading of history, where the 1930s’ crisis led.

The fact that they spoke at the Summit conference as candidly as they did demonstrates the seriousness of capitalism’s present difficulties.

The Japanese Prime Minister said “the world economic situation was now as serious as that of the early 1930s when leading industrial nations failed to act in time to prevent a slide into the 1939-45 war. History should not be allowed to repeat itself. Western nations had to co-operate more energetically in tackling economic problems” (Sunday Telegraph, 8th May).

He also recalled the fiasco of the 1933 London Economic Conference when no agreement was reached and a communique not even issued. “The difficulties today are greater and are compounded by new problems”.

The French President, Giscard d’Estaing. recalled that the ending of the 1977 conference coincided with the anniversary of the end of the 1939-45 war! “Sombre and pessimistic pictures were sometimes drawn of the present state of the world, but the cooperation at such conferences make it possible to avoid the mistakes [!] that helped to bring on that war.”

Helmut Schmidt of West Germany spoke on similar lines and “thought that they had avoided the results of complete selfishness” — by avoiding the “traps of the 1930’s.” President Carter like the other heads of state was concerned that decisions reached should not be merely pious, but recognized that making decisions and implementing them was not one and the same thing. "Sometimes heads of State tend to over-emphasize their own importance,” he said.

Callaghan considered that continuing unemployment carried political risks, not merely by the replacement of one party by another (naturally he does not want to lose his job) in Parliament — but that political democracy could be threatened. He is obviously concerned regarding the growth of the National Front, with racialism as the main plank of its support, and it is obvious there is a parallel here with the Nazis’ anti-semitism, which was copied in this country by the pre-war British Union of Fascists (although in recent years Sir Oswald Mosley has tried to obscure his organization’s former position on this subject).

It would seem inconceivable that the British working class could en masse support an organization tainted with fascism. Some of NF’s leaders were given to dressing up in Nazi-style uniforms before the organization was formed, and their arguments for economic nationalism — “self-sufficiency” — were advocated by the Nazis. However, it seemed improbable at the time that the Nazis would make much headway.

It can be justifiably argued that Britain in the 1970s, even with inflation and high unemployment is not the same as Germany in the early 1930s at the height of the depression with 6 million unemployed and the dire poverty it meant. However, in spite of the lower percentage of unemployed compared with that period and the lesser relative hardship of today’s unemployed, there is apathy and cynicism to politics and politicians generally, which though understandable is far from healthy — and also a good deal of resentment on the part of some of the young. This is why the established politicians are concerned wondering whether, if the crisis continues irrespective of the party in power, some of the youngsters might transfer their violent support from football teams to organizations like National Front. After all most of the workers of today know little of the 1930s; they make comparisons within this period, and as to whether the politicians’ promises and policies ring true. Over 400,000 of the present unemployed in Britain are in the 16-to-25 age group. In the rest of Western Europe the percentage is a little lower, and in the USA it is higher than in this country.

The major parties of British capitalism are discredited and the growth of the National Front directly arises from this. It is a particular indictment of Labour-style reformism and its inability to deal with capitalism’s problems, heightened as they are in times of crises.

Frank Simkins

(To be continued)

So They Say: Non-starters (1977)

The So They Say Column from the July 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Non-starters

The Labour Party is always assuring us that they stand for a “fairer and more just society” (Mr. Ron Hayward, General Secretary of the Labour Party, 15th March) but we think it reasonable to add that all of the parties who try to run capitalism would claim the same. Circumstances however always seem to intervene before they, or the others, can actually put their words into action. As unemployment and prices rise, as they have done under the Labour Government, and wages and public services fall, there are the men like Mr. Hayward talking about the unfortunate circumstances which newly confront us and so prevent “the fairer and more just” from taking immediate effect.

Were a bookmaker to assure his clients that he stood for “fairer and more just” racing results so that all of them would win, they would know that something was up. When the Labour Party does it, and explains the inevitable losses in terms of circumstances—the going as usual got rougher than we thought and you’ve all lost again—it should signal the time to stop betting on these three-legged creatures.

Winning

To be fair to Mr. Hayward and other members of the Labour Party, they do not give pride of place to this notion of a “fairer and more just society.” This is usually thrown in as an after-thought, and Labour supporters should not put too much weight on it. They would be best advised to put none at all, which would at least make honest men and women of them. Mr. Hayward has identified the fundamental objective of Labour.

Membership of the Party involves joining an organisation whose objective is to win and retain power in order to reform our society in the direction of our democratic socialist beliefs and ideals. Let me emphasise that objective—to win and retain power.

News Release:  Party Information Dept. 15th March 77

And having won and retained it, to let the workers face the circumstances.

The Self-Interest Thing

The director of the US Office of Population is concerned about “over-population”—a term used in capitalist society to justify the starvation, or near starvation, of millions, while alongside them exist the privately owned means to meet their requirements of food, clothing and shelter. Overpopulation to the capitalist and his well-fed entourage refers to those who cannot be used in the process of accumulating wealth. Dr. R. T. Ravenholt, the aforementioned Director, describes as his office’s aim the creation of medical technology to render infertile 100 million women in developing countries. This they call “advanced fertility management” and the programme they have launched will operate over the next nine years.

Although different people will draw different moral conclusions on the correctness of the programme, this should be seen for what it is, a capitalist “solution” to a “problem” which has arisen because the capitalist mode of production denies access to the means of life, unless it makes a profit for someone. That the means of life are in existence, or could be readily brought into existence, is irrelevant in this society.

The US Office of Population does not plan to limit future generations in an attempt to curtail misery from any moral standpoint however, their Director was most explicit on the intentions: Population control was needed to maintain

the normal operation of US commercial interests around the world. Without our trying to help these countries with their economic and social development, the world would rebel against the strong US commercial presence. The self-interest thing is a compelling element. If the population explosion proceeds unchecked, said Dr. Ravenholt, it will cause such terrible economic conditions abroad that revolution will ensue.

London Evening Standard, 11th May 77

Confessions

There is a strange figure who occasionally appears in detective stories and radio plays, best described as "the innocent man who proclaims his guilt.” Inevitably towards the end, this gallant red-herring is discovered, and receives a minor ticking-off because he had acted from the best intentions. How then are we to take India’s Prime Minister, Mr. Maraji Desai, who gave a press-conference on his way to the Commonwealth Conference.

Would India sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty? Certainly, he replied, when those asking me decide to give up nuclear weapons. Those who commit thefts have no business to tell me not to be a thief.

The Times, 8th June 77

Mr. Desai, it will be remembered, is not a character in a radio play.

Of his own colour too

One of the more colourful scientific debates centres around the probability of 100 chimpanzees, who are confined in a roomful of typewriters together with an endless supply of paper, being able to bang out by accident the entire works of Shakespeare within a given period. Although highly improbable, it is generally conceded that the task is not impossible. The odds of success for the chimps are in fact infinitely higher than those of the eight international economists who have been confined for some time deep within the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s centre in an attempt to find “a path out of the economic quagmire which threatened to end more than two decades of growth and high employment.” They have been working on the premise that it is possible to remove capitalism’s problems, without removing capitalism 

The chief primate in the group, Mr. Paul McCracken, has offered their version of “the complete works” after only two years confinement, which, as far as probability goes, is stretching belief. We do not know how many typewriters they had at their disposal, but this is the result.

Fitting budgetary targets into regularly revised medium term projections would provide the required flexibility to adjust the longer-run budget posture to unexpected events and changing public preferences with regard to longer-term economic and social priorities.

The Times, 10th June 77

Roughly translated this means that their solution, in Shakespeare’s words “is shaped sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath breadth; it is just so high as it is and moves with its own organs; it lives by that which nourishes it; and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates.” These economists are learned men indeed.

Alan D'Arcy

Letter: The Root of Roots (1977)

Letter to the Editors from the July 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Root of Roots

Your article under the above title, written by Harmo, caught my attention as I feel it misses the particular significance of the “roots phenomenon” in race relations in Britain today. The quotation your correspondent gave from Kautsky that “the study of the past, far from being mere dilettante antiquarianism, will become a powerful weapon in the struggles of the present . . ." is indeed apt, but he did not, it seems to me, draw an important conclusion from it. I don’t believe that most black people are unduly concerned to prove “racial purity” as is implied by your writer who correctly points to the miscegenation which has existed from time immemorial. The point is that the slave background, common to so many in the USA and the Caribbean, has left black people with a feeling of disorientation, not of belonging—in short, of “rootlessness”.

Historically therefore the story of slavery is important in leading present day peoples to struggle for real equality, but psychologically the study of one man’s own history may be equally important in helping oppressed groups not only to a better awareness of the injustices of the past and the need for social change, but also to a confident awareness of their own great cultural tradition which is only slowly but surely becoming evident particularly in studies in the African continent. Thus the study of history may not only be informative but also may have a profound psychological part to play in the struggle for equality.

D. C. Mayer

Romford

Reply:

Our article did not imply that most black people are unduly concerned to prove “racial purity”—the reference was made to Haley (the author of Roots) and militant “Afro-Americans” who do pursue this line, and who invariably do so for commercial or political reasons. You say black people have a “feeling of disorientation” and "rootlessness” and if we are, for the sake of brevity, to assume some positive meaning from such phrases, is not this “feeling” common to the Irish, Polish, Italian and other elements —including the native Indian—which go to make up the American population?

The mistake is made by some in assuming that "a feeling of disorientation” reflects a form of almost instinctive desire to get back to “roots”. As our article pointed out, this is likely to prove a most difficult exercise in itself. It also fails to take into account the effects of capitalist society which, with its lack of social plan, its requirement for the free movement of labour coupled with reversals in this policy, so-called national rivalries and shifting alliances, in itself creates insecurity among members of society as a whole.

We have always stressed the need for men and women to both study, and learn from, history. Any real study will reveal that the vast majority have a common solution to problems, including racial problems, which in capitalism are falsely made to appear as group problems to be dealt with in isolation. If you feel that there is a psychological barrier to be overcome before members of the working class can understand and work for the establishment of a society based on common ownership, it is not one erected by Socialists.

Editors.

Letter: Class & Understanding (1977)

Letter to the Editors from the July 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Class & Understanding

I must concentrate on defending the reputation of the late Harold Walsby against your mud-slinging. Your article “Question of Intelligence” mentioned the view “that a large proportion of the population were constitutionally incapable of learning much or running their own lives”. Challenged to give even one of these examples which, you said, “appeared in the work of Harold Walsby” you quote F. A. Ridley and the Sunday Chronicle. You do not give one example from Walsby.

You say. “If . . . the statements in SPGB—Utopian or Scientific? do not say the working class is mentally inferior, what the devil are they supposed to mean?” If the statements you mean are those quoted in “Question of Intelligence”, then the only reference they make to the working class is to say the SPGB “mushily vacillates . . .  about whether the workers have or have not the intelligence to establish Socialism”. This gives no ground for the charge that Walsby held the workers to be mentally inferior. If you want to understand SPGB—Utopian or Scientific? (and Walsby’s other ideological work) read it again with the idea that although there is a minority accepting Socialism and a majority rejecting it, the division between them does not correspond with the division between workers and capitalists. A small minority of workers accept Socialism, the great majority of workers reject it. A small minority of capitalists accept Socialism, the great majority of capitalists reject it. In acceptance or rejection of Socialism there is no significant difference between workers and capitalists.

My letter said the overwhelming majority of those who have heard the Socialist case have rejected it. You seem to think you have dealt with this by saying “the overwhelming majority of the working class have not heard it”. This is not an answer. And by attempting but failing to answer the point you acknowledge its validity. The overwhelming majority of those who have heard the Socialist case have rejected it. What grounds have you for believing the response will be different in future?

G. W. Walford

London N1

Reply:

The substance of your defence of Walsby appears to be that his remarks quoted in “Question of Intelligence” referred not to the working class but to workers and capitalists alike.

The quotation was taken from Chapter 2 of Walsby’s pamphlet SPGB—Utopian or Scientific? which is headed, specifically, “Why don’t the workers accept the socialist case?” The opening of the chapter is a sufficient rebuttal of the assertion that we “vacillate” about the workers’ intelligence. Walsby says: “If we ask the SPGBer ‘Can the workers understand Socialism?’ his almost invariable answer is a very confident and emphatic ‘Yes!’”

Throughout the chapter Walsby makes clear that he is talking about the working class and no-one else.

What is the real answer, then, to the question, ‘Why don’t the workers accept the Socialist case?’ Could it possibly be that ‘working class intelligence’ is not equal to the task, and cannot ‘rise to the height’ required for understanding Socialism?

Among other examples, he says: "So far, then, working-class intelligence has not risen to that elevated level”. The quotation used in our article—"the actual statistical-psychological investigations by Prof. Burt, Thompson, Cattel and many others”—goes on to state that “the average human intelligence is on the decline”. Since the working class is nine-tenths of the population, it must dominate any “average”.

There is no mention whatever of the capitalist class in Walsby’s pamphlet, or of the argument you attribute to it in this connection. Indeed, your remarks generally are difficult to take seriously. You call SPGB—Utopian or Scientific? an "ideological work”, implying a high level of theoretical debate. In fact it consists to a considerable extent of personal abuse of SPGB members.

The principal task of the SPGB lies in the fact that the great majority of the working class have never heard of it. You do not dispute this, but say it "is not an answer”. On the contrary, while that is so, your assertion that "in acceptance or rejection of Socialism there is no significant difference between workers and capitalists” is absurd; and your insistence that the majority who have never heard the Socialist case will reject it when they do is, presumably, blind hope.

Our previous reply pointed out that when workers do hear the Socialist case it is usually under disadvantageous conditions. If, for example, we are allowed to give one broadcast in several years, it is preposterous to say its outcome is that thousands have heard the Socialist case and rejected it. In everyday experience, persuasion and the resolving of differences may and do require several excursions into the subject. We note you share this view yourself. Following our previous reply, you did not settle for having had your arguments rejected, but had another go. To quote your own ending, what grounds have you for believing the response will be different in future?

Editors.

Letter: Marx and Inflation (1977)

Letter to the Editors from the July 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx and Inflation

Would you please quote me chapter and verse from Marx and Engels’s writings where permanent inflation which seems universally prevalent in all 1st world countries today, is predicted? To answer successfully this paramount question, you should appreciate in itself will constitute a monument to the prestige of Marx and Engels’s writings!

May I take the liberty of asking why your committee or other of your scribes object to, or else fail to compose, aphorisms accentuating hundreds of aspects of Marxian doctrine? I have repeatedly offered my work (to your brother body the WSP also) in this connection, but have been inevitably revolted by your wilful omission to put the cause of Socialism first and foremost, under the characterless excuse bound up with your passion for the pseudo-democratic that you don’t take writing from non-members.

T. K.

Northants 

(name & address supplied)

Reply:

There is no “chapter and verse” predicting permanent' inflation. What Marx provided was a detailed analysis of capitalism, including explanations of why unemployment, crises and inflation take place. Inflation is not a permanent condition; it results from government policies adopted to try to overcome other problems, and is ended by further government action. It would have been impossible for Marx to predict this. His analysis of the cause of inflation—the result of the excess issue of an inconvertible paper currency—is the only correct one; but present-day economists do not want to know about it because it points to the insolubility of the problems of capitalism.

Contributions to the Socialist Standard are accepted only from members of the SPGB and its companion parties because the Socialist Standard exists to propagate their views and no others. If you are so determined to "put the cause of Socialism first and foremost”, what about your "wilful omission” to become a member of the Socialist Party?

Editors.

Letter: Big is Beautiful (1977)

Letter to the Editors from the July 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Big is Beautiful

In reply to my letter ("More Impact, Please”, May SS) you say it would be a wonderful thing if the material and economic conditions of capitalism did turn the workers into Socialists, and I am sure it would be an equally wonderful thing for your party and Socialism if the conditions produced the stimulus for the British working class to develop Socialist ideas. How then does the SPGB explain the fact that after nearly two hundred years of capitalist development the working class have no desire for Socialism at all?

You say that history shows us that before there can be a fundamental change in society there is a long period during which the ideas and attitudes necessary for the change are fully developed. But the stimulus you write about has not enabled the British workers to turn into Socialists, even after two hundred years. And even today when you expect the development of Socialist ideas to be much shorter you can produce no real evidence for saying this of the British workers or the workers of any other country.

Your reply to my letter only produces some evidence of the perversion of the word Socialism by Labour Social-Democratic parties, but absolutely no evidence at all why the long period of capitalist development in Britain has produced not even the slightest movement towards Socialism by British workers. So neither the economic conditions of capitalism, or the Socialist propaganda from your Socialist Standard has had any real effect on the British working class. How then does the SPGB account for that?

Ian Campbell

Dundee

Reply:

It is quite untrue that the working class "have no desire for Socialism at all” and that there is “not even the slightest movement towards Socialism by British workers”.

The purpose of the references to Labour and social-democratic parties in our previous reply was not to reiterate their perversion of the word Socialism but to point out the reason why they use it: that many workers associate it with changing the present unsatisfactory order of society. The Labour Party started its manifesto in the election campaign of 1945 by announcing itself “a socialist party, and proud of it”, in the belief that this would appeal strongly to workers. Obviously the supporters then and at other times have been disillusioned, but Labour and the other parties think it important to go on trading on "socialism”.

The Socialist movement is alive and well: here you are, writing to its journal which has been going strong since 1904. You are, in effect, demanding to know why we are not bigger. We note that you avoid saying whether the Socialist Party is correct in your opinion—your previous letter said “the working class of Britain have never taken the SPGB’s case against capitalism as being the best way”, without indicating your view. Is it that you identify correctness with a large body of support?

Our reference to history aimed (it seems unsuccessfully) to draw your attention to the fact that a developed Socialist movement arose not automatically at the outset of the Industrial Revolution two hundred years ago. but after a hundred years in which capitalism was itself developing. Present-day methods of communication mean that information and ideas can be disseminated swiftly all over the world, once fuller access to their use is obtained. We have never under-estimated the obstacles to be overcome, whereas you speak as if they did not exist in judging our ‘'impact” on the working class. The fact remains that workers continually react against the conditions of capitalism and look for an alternative; to the extent that the Socialist case can then be presented to them, the Socialist movement progresses all the time. “No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable”—a quotation from a Smith of two hundred years ago.

Editors.

Letter: What's the name (1977)

Letter to the Editors from the July 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard 

What's the name

I noticed in the article “Queen Capital’s Jubilee” (April SS) that you refer to the future King George V as George Wettin. I am curious as to where this name originates. I was told it should really be Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Did the writer of the 1911 article make a mistake which you have followed, or was he really George Wettin? I am writing on behalf of other people besides myself who are curious about this.

F. S., Newcastle 

(name & address supplied)

Reply:

Your letter raises a very interesting point.

The name Wettin goes back in European kingship to the year 997. Frederick, one of the two sons of Dietrich, received lands taken from the Wends, including the county of Gau of Wettin on the bank of the Saale. A succession of kings added to these lands. Thimo (1104), cousin of Henry I, built a castle at Wettin and he was called by this name. In 1288 the county, town and castle of Wettin were sold to the archbishop of Magdeburg and later incorporated in the kingdom of Prussia.

By the time of Frederick the Warlike (1381-1428) the lands of the Wettins stretched from the Oder to the Werra and from the Erzgebirge to the Harz mountains. It is from the son of Frederick that two branches of the family descend, the Ernestine and Albertine. To the former belong the dukes of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. The kings of other European countries came from this line, including Belgium from 1831 and Great Britain from 1901.

Source of information: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 23 o. 551.

Editors.

The Economics of Capitalism (1977)

From the July 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

The commodity is the cell form of capitalist society. It contains the social substance which is described as human labour. This gives it Value. The amount of human labour is not measured over single commodities or groups of them, and this is not possible. The commodity is a social product, and the substance of Value is social: one uniform, or homogeneous, labour-power embodied in the sum total of the values of all commodities produced by that society under normal conditions of production.

Individuals or groups produce commodities, but not the Value of commodities. Society determines the Value of a commodity, and the Exchange-Value of a commodity, through the process of determining the amount of socially-necessary labour involved in their production, i.e. the labour-time socially necessary for their production.

The Value of commodities will fluctuate according to the productiveness of social labour at any given time. It is not fixed or intrinsic. The law of Value lies behind every exchange of products, but the exchange relation is a relation between products. Human labour-power creates Value but is not in itself Value unless it is congealed or embodied in objects of Value, which can be used to express the Value of other objects of Value.

The social relation of Value comes into being at that point in social production when Use-Values are produced for the purpose of exchange, and this form has become dominant. Value is inseparable from its magnitude, and the social relation is basically an exchange relation. Exchange-Value has no existence separate from Use-Value (but Use-Value can exist without Exchange Value). The productive relations of men in a Socialist society will result in the production of Use-Values, articles of utility specifically produced for consumption and not exchange. The social relation of production will be a direct relation between individuals consciously producing for each other and not producing for an anonymous market. The social powers of production will also be under the direct control of society. The point is that there will be relations between people manifesting themselves as relations between things.

Obviously this description of Value cannot stand on its own, and requires explanation. The Marxist position is that labour-power has a two-fold character: on one hand it produces articles of utility, and at the same time it produces Value; that is, concrete labour becomes the form under which its opposite abstract labour manifests itself.

1. The substance of Value.
2. The magnitude of Value.

The twofold character of labour power cannot exist in a Socialist society — the subjects of labour will not come into the Exchange relation because wealth will not assume the commodity form.

We have always stressed the need to abolish production for exchange, together with the monetary system which is the highest manifestation of the Value relation. In doing this we have always pointed out that men stand behind all forms of social production and distribution, and that wealth need not take the commodity form. We claim, with Marx, that when the products of labour are brought into the exchange relation of Value we are equating the different kinds of labour embodied in them. We are, in effect, exchanging one man’s labour for another man’s labour, and that all commodities, as social products, are the material expressions of the human labour spent in their production. To endow inanimate objects such as commodities with powers outside of the human agency is absolute nonsense.

The historical development of Value as a social relation is completed when the amount of labour spent in the production of useful articles is socially expressed as a quality belonging to the article. In section III of Capital on commodities, Marx makes the following statement: 

“If however we bear in mind that the Value of commodities has a purely social reality, and that they assume this reality only insofar as they are expressions or embodiments of one identical substance, viz. human labour, it follows as a matter of course that Value can only manifest itself in the social relation of commodity to commodity.” 

Capitalism has separated persons from their products, and the social relation of Value is a monetary relation between things of Value.

Marx was always concerned to separate the discussion of political economy from philosophical propositions, although inevitably there is some overlap. To this extent he was concerned with the social relations between things. “The relations of the producer to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation existing not between themselves but between the products of their labour” (Capital, Vol. I, p.85, Kerr edn.) Exchange establishes the direct link between the products, and indirectly through them, the producers. “The relation connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appears not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but what they really are, material relations between persons, and social relations between things”, (p. 78, Lawrence & Wishart edn.)

One thing emerges, and that is that Marx considered that social relations existed between things. Any investigation of capitalist society would have been impossible had he taken any other view. Marx obviously knew that human labour stood behind all production in all stages of society. It was only through the analysis of prices that the Value relation was discovered.

Jim D'Arcy

Price Increase (1977)

Party News from the July 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

From September the price of the Socialist Standard will be 15p. We regret the increase and have held the price at its present level for as long as possible. However, as many readers know, the journal is run at a loss, and with continually increasing costs the deficit is now more than we can support. Subscribers will be advised of the new rates.

Appeal For Funds (1977)

Party News from the July 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the beginning of this year we made an appeal for money. The response to it was very generous, but we now have to appeal again. We hardly need to tell readers how quickly money is consumed in a period of rising prices. The Socialist Standard runs at a loss which has increased sharply because of higher printing costs in the last three years. In April and May we conducted highly active campaigns in the Greater London Council elections, which put the Socialist Party’s name before large numbers of people who had not heard it before. We never stop work for Socialism — and it all costs money.

Our outstanding need at present is for funds for the General Election which will almost certainly take place soon. Readers of the Socialist Standard and people who have attended our meetings often write in to say how impressed they are: why do we not put up lots of candidates? The answer is that we do everything we can from limited resources. We aim to have candidates in London in the General Election. The deposit and the election literature by themselves are big expenses. We must not miss any opportunity of presenting the Socialist case because we cannot afford it.

We ask all of you to give as much as you can — for Socialism. The address is A. Waite (Treasurer), SPGB, 52 Clapham High Street, London SW4 7UN; mark the envelope “Parliamentary Fund”.

SPGB Lectures and Meetings (1977)

Party News from the July 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

The guest speaker at the Westminster Branch of the SPGB, Tony Bunyan, speaking on the subject of 'The Political Police in Britain', was the author of the book of the same name. It was reviewed in the August 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Where to buy the Socialist Standard outside London (1977)

From the July 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

A "Done & Dusted" catch up special

A backlog of "done & dusted" Socialist Standards from the blog. I'll try to be better next month . . . promise.

May 2024's "Done & Dusted"

December 1906

May 1946

May 1949

May 2024

June 2024's "Done & Dusted"

June 1912

June 1914

June 1917

June 1931

June 1939

June 1950

June 1955

June 1963

June 1976

June 1987

June 1989

June 1996

June 2024

Life & Times: Asylum hell (2024)

The Life and Times column from the July 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

I was recently invited to a wedding. The couple getting married were a young man from Africa and a local girl from my own area – Francis and Sarah I’ll call them. It was a modest affair – Registry Office with 20-30 people and then a buffet reception in a local community centre with a slightly larger attendance. The couple already had two children and were obviously devoted to each other. They’d met when Francis, who’d fled his country, was waiting for his umpteenth asylum application to be heard and processed. His parents had been killed in internecine fighting between religious groups in his country and, fearing for his life, he’d managed to find someone to help him escape, get to France and from there cross to the UK. All this when he was only 15 years of age. Now, on the day of his wedding, he was 31 and had only recently been granted leave to remain in this country – and that on a temporary basis. Before this he’d lived for a dozen years in limbo.

Threat of deportation

How did I come to know him? One day, out of the blue, a friend who regularly supports asylum seekers asked me if I’d attend court with one of them the following week since she’d arranged to go on holiday. I agreed and from there I sort of got drawn in. Francis had been ‘picked up’ by Home Office officials when he’d gone for one of his monthly sign-ons at the local police station. From there he’d been taken to a ‘safe place’ with a view to deportation. In the event the judge at the court hearing found that the necessary formalities for deportation hadn’t been satisfied and he was released pending further scrutiny. But he would still have to report to the local immigration office once a month. I said I would go with him.

So once a month I would accompany him to the processing place. Every time he went he was petrified he wouldn’t get out but would be bundled into one of the Home Office vans waiting menacingly outside. So I made a point of dressing up (ie suit, collar and tie) reasoning that, whatever their intentions, they might have more compunction about snatching him if an older well-dressed man (who might even be his solicitor) was with him. In the event they never tried it again, but he did continue to be put through hell, with all the long drawn out, complex applications and appeals he made being rejected. This was largely on the grounds that they didn’t believe his story. And it’s true that he didn’t have evidence to prove it, and of course I couldn’t be absolutely sure myself. But it didn’t matter to me. As a socialist who wants a world without frontiers or discrimination of any sort, whatever anyone’s story, I was an open borders person.

Mind games

Every time Francis applied or appealed against a decision, he was made to travel half the length of the country – usually to the immigration office in Liverpool – to deliver his application by hand, even though that process itself took around 10 minutes. How did he survive during this time? Well, the friend of mine who had been kind enough to give him a room in her house to live in and some financial support, also got one of the local universities to accept him to follow a degree course in Business Studies free of charge. And this despite the fact that, in the beginning at least, he knew very little English. But he turned out to be a bit of a prodigy, mastering English very quickly and becoming a fluent speaker and writer. So much so that, on completing his course, he was awarded a first-class degree. And this was a key part of his next Home Office application. He hoped that they would recognise him as someone who could usefully contribute to the society he was desperate to live in. Instead he got knocked back again. Their response to his academic achievement was that he’d be able to contribute usefully to his home country when he went back there.

The rejection was nothing new. ‘Mind games’ was the way he described it. Yet even if he couldn’t work, had no entitlement to any means of living and still faced deportation, he somehow managed to stay positive. This was rewarded when he met Sarah. She took him to live with her, they had a child and, when he applied again, he went down ‘the family route’. To the surprise of us all, this time they relented and gave him short-term permission to stay. These decisions are often thought to be hit and miss, depending even on the mood of the Home Office caseworker at the time, so maybe this time that person got up on the right side of bed? But, anyway, this was a start and meant that at least Francis had the legal right to work. And he quickly found a job – in a delivery depot on the night shift. And then he moved to working in a care home, something he liked better and found a good deal of satisfaction in. He still works there, his leave to remain having been extended – hopefully indefinitely. So given the treatment asylum seekers get and the social and political demonisation they’re subject to, I think we can say he’s one of the lucky ones. When I attended court with him at the beginning, I witnessed one poor individual being dragged away to be put on a plane – the anonymous fate of so many, and of some of Francis’s own friends.

Abolish borders?

So the wedding was a happy event for him – and for me – especially considering that so many desperate people leave their homes through poverty or oppression only to find that the better life they were hoping for elsewhere doesn’t materialise and they may even be pushed back forcibly to the place they were escaping from. So Francis, though it may be thought that, as a care worker, he’s not fulfilling his potential, has been luckier than many in a system that divides groups of people up by borders and denies them the right to movement across the planet for all that a sane socialist society would offer. But this can only come with the abolition not just of borders and states but of money, wages and the whole of the profit system.

Howard Moss

Pathfinders: Up for grabs (2024)

The Pathfinders Column from the July 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Party politics may have been grabbing the UK headlines in the past few weeks, and continue to do so worldwide as 2024 sees a record 2 billion voters going to the polls in 50 countries, but behind the scenes, capitalist states and corporations are continuing their efforts to grab everything they can get their hands on in a relentless pursuit of future profits.

Billed somewhat improbably is ‘the biggest story of the 21st century’, a new documentary called The Grab goes into detail about how, overnight, a Chinese firm became the owner of almost one in four American pigs, while Saudi Arabian investors were behind land acquisitions in Arizona and Zambia, and various other state and corporate actors have been busily acquiring overseas food and water resources in a bid to fence in future supplies that are set to be as contested as oil was in the last century (tinyurl.com/2p8setzp).

It’s hard though to see this as genuinely ‘shocking’ unless one genuinely has no idea how capitalism works. Capitalism is all about grabbing, plundering and poaching, much of it routinely under-reported. Take species extinction, driven by climate change but further exacerbated by retail markets. Wild endangered species are being poached for bushmeat, with the accelerator effect that the rarer the animal becomes, the more valuable it is as a commodity.

The black rhino is now critically endangered due to poaching, with a population collapse of 96 percent. Endangered pangolins are the world’s most poached animal, for use in Chinese so-called traditional medicine or to make American handbags and cowboy boots, while African elephants are predicted to go extinct within 50 years. In Uganda and Rwanda, a perpetual war over gorilla poaching claims lives every year as national park rangers face being murdered by poachers who themselves have no realistic alternative sources of income. In the Congo five million tonnes of bushmeat are exported every year, mostly for the wealthy Asia market. Bonobos – that iconic species much admired for their non-violent and non-hierarchical behaviour – are now endangered by devastating poaching. To this toll can be added antelopes, buffalo, African grey parrots (99 percent population crash in Ghana), orang-utans, chimps and gibbons, lions, tigers, turtles and a variety of less well-known species (tinyurl.com/y8y9bkxt).

Animals don’t even have to be alive to be poached. A recent story detailed how the private and often illegal trade in fossils is getting in the way of genuine science, because the dollar value of big-ticket items, like a recently discovered complete Stegosaurus fossil, mean that museums often can’t afford to outbid private collectors and so lose much valuable research material. Even worse is the ruthless plundering that accompanies illegal digs, with bones being smashed and fossils removed with no documentation to show where they came from, rendering them useless for future research purposes (tinyurl.com/mvtkehmd).

It would be pointless to blame the individuals behind all this, who are simply being pragmatic about what they need to do to survive and thrive in capitalism, just as corporations do. If we collectively abolish the right of private individuals to own socially necessary resources, and thus remove at a stroke the basis of the buying and selling money system, all of the above would cease in an instant.

But while the dollar signs are flashing, there will be no signs of improvement, in any field of endeavour. Readers of this magazine may recall previous articles (eg, December 2015) on the mysterious archaeological site of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, whose discovery threw the materialist ‘standard model’ of human social development into utter disarray. At the time, only 5 percent of the extensive site had been excavated, with the 95 percent remainder concealing who-knew-what assumption-busting discoveries. So, nearly ten years on, how much more of the site has been excavated and what new exciting things do we know? The answers are none and nothing, thanks to private sector management. A deal with the World Economic Forum has resulted in the site being left ‘for future generations’, which is a thinly veiled excuse to stop funding research and instead start monetising what little has been exposed with the erection of enclosures and walkways, which involve driving huge steel spikes into unexamined archaeology for the purpose of generating tourist dollars (tinyurl.com/sz538uzm).

But perhaps the biggest indictment of capitalism’s disregard of decency in favour of dosh is right above our heads, on most nights of the year. Last month China unfurled its flag on the dark side of the moon, which in the last year has seen landings by India and Japan, along with private US firm Intuitive Machines. Nasa is aiming for a 2026 crewed landing, while China plans to send humans there by 2030, with all parties keen to build permanent bases using frozen water assumed to be in deep craters at the moon’s South Pole. And what of the venerable 1967 Outer Space Treaty, signed by 100 countries to the effect that no nation could own the Moon? Well, that was when nobody had even got there, and the likelihood of finding anything useful there was the faintest of moon glimmers. But now that large quantities of rare earth minerals, iron, titanium and helium-3 are known to be there, states are taking a much less high-minded view. The US in 2015 passed a law allowing itself to mine and sell any space material, and other countries are scrambling to give themselves similar ‘legal’ permissions (tinyurl.com/5n8avhxc). Really, capitalism ought to be called ‘The Grab’. But for all workers who live under the moon, what’s really up for grabs is a vastly better collective future without it.

Paddy Shannon

Cooking the Books: The blame game (2024)

The Cooking the Books column from the July 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

According to the media, the main issue in the election has been the state of the economy. The Labour Party has made it the central point in their campaign, seeking to blame the outgoing Conservative government for slow growth and stagnating living standards. In a typical example of their (rather overblown) propaganda Rachel Reeves, the would-be Chancellor of the Exchequer, stated:

‘The Tories have had 14 years to fix the nation’s roof. Instead, they smashed the windows, kicked the door in and burnt the house down. Here’s the honest truth about Rishi Sunak’s record in power in ten words: our country is poorer and working people are worse off’ (fundraising email to Labour supporters, 25 May).

This is to put the blame for the current state of the economy entirely on the government. It is to assume that a government can control the way the economy works. This is an assumption made not just by the Labour Party but shared by the Tories themselves and by other groups of politicians who aspire to be the government such as the Lib-Dems and the Greens. But it is mistaken.

The economy is driven by the quest for profits by private and state enterprises competing to sell the goods and services that they employ workers to produce or provide. This gives rise to impersonal economic forces which determine the level of production and employment.

Governments can only react to the economy as it goes through its never-ending cycles of expansion and contraction. They can’t control this. As far as the operation of the economy is concerned, governments just preside over what is happening; they are in office but not in power. The power that they do have to intervene in the economy, through taxation, subsidies and spending, is limited by the state the economy is in at any particular time and the permanent need to give priority to profit-making and conditions for this. It is this that leads them, when the economy is not growing, to cut spending on public services and social benefits.

In the political game played by parties competing to stay in or come into office, the ploy of the Outs, when a government is forced to cut back its spending, is to blame the Ins for what the operation of capitalism has forced them to do, which in this election the Labour Party has been playing for all its worth. On the other hand, when capitalism is in a period of expansion which a government happens to be presiding over, the ploy of the Ins is to claim credit for this even though this has nothing to do with what they have done.

While the economic policy a government pursues can’t make things better it can make them worse. The short-lived Truss government is a case in point. A government which tried to spend its way out of a period of contraction or stagnation would be another.

The Labour Party has learned this since the end of the 1970s and its current policy is based entirely on trying to encourage economic growth. It’s a gamble. They could be lucky, as the Blair government was for a time, and be in office when the capitalist economy spontaneously expands, but it doesn’t look like it. A government can no more bring about growth than it can spend its way out of a period of slow or no growth.

A Starmer government won’t be able fix the roof either. On the other hand, when the windows get smashed and the door kicked in, they won’t be to blame; capitalism will be.

Material World: Who voted for Elon Musk? (2024)

'Am I even in this article?'

The Material World column from the July 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

According to mainstream economic theory as taught in schools and universities, the capitalist is fully entitled, by definition, to whatever they receive, be this modest or spectacularly large; they bore the risk by investing ‘their’ capital and so fully deserve the return it yields – a risk, nonetheless, that they can mitigate by expanding their already diverse investment portfolio and by taking considerable comfort in the legislative convenience afforded by the Law of Limited Liability.

The risk to the worker, on the other hand – whether we are talking about death or injury as a result of industrial accidents or the prospects of being made unemployed should the business close down as a consequence of entrepreneurial miscalculation – may not even be acknowledged, let alone ‘rewarded’. Our worker, unable to pay that medical bill or make the next mortgage repayment, might well find themselves, unlike our capitalist, homeless and on the street.

Risk per se may well be part of life but the kind of risks we are talking about here should, you would have thought, be dispensed with or pared down to a bare minimum – not glorified as that mindless machismo or short-sighted and selfish folly we associated with a so-called ‘rugged individualism’. The problem is that this is not possible today. ‘Risk’ in this latter sense is a built-in attribute of a ferociously competitive market economy that is itself simply taken for granted as the necessary context of all entrepreneurial decision-making.

The dogma that the capitalist provided the capital that got the production process going not only fails to address the question of where that capital came from in the first place; it also seeks to justify the return they receive on the grounds that they have to cover the operating costs of their business – unlike their employees who, happily, do not have to bear the heavy burden this entails.

But this overlooks that matter of where our capitalist derives the wherewithal to cover these costs – not to mention the fact that any inventory or equipment they may purchase out of this money remains, legally, entirely theirs. Such inventory or equipment was, needless to say, not produced by them – although at times you might be forgiven for thinking from the pronouncements of apologists for capitalism that that is precisely what happened. The issue, however, is not what contribution our capitalist made to production but, rather, where they got the money to make that contribution in the first instance.

An entrepreneur who owns a business that produces a product for which there is brisk demand, might be said to be ‘rewarded’ by society, according to this argument, in the sense that they are thereby enabled to become extremely rich by attentively responding to, and serving, this demand. Society – consumers in general – as it were, passes judgement on this product in the act of buying it. Their approval in the form of a market purchase is purportedly tantamount to a desire to reward our entrepreneur for making this product available on the market.

However, it is not difficult to see why such an argument (which is raised with surprising frequency) is little more than a specious and self-serving rationalisation. To begin with, the product itself, from its conception and design through to its manufacture, marketing and sale, is likely to involve the labour of a great many workers employed or subcontracted by our entrepreneur. Even so, these, unlike our entrepreneur, are not likely to find themselves suddenly enriched on account of their contribution to making this highly desirable product available to the public.

On the contrary, the entire revenue from the sale of this product will go to our capitalist entrepreneur, in the first instance, simply by virtue of their ownership of the business itself. What they then personally end up with in money terms, after deducting from that revenue all those production costs, including the wages bill, is a residual magnitude which can vary depending on other factors – including, of course, how much, or how little, they pay their workforce.

How the social product comes to be divided up has little or nothing to do with the public’s opinion of our entrepreneur or the putative role they perform. More than likely their existence will be completely unknown to consumers. These consumers are not concerned with ‘rewarding the producers’ for producing this product, let alone the entrepreneur who has employed these producers to produce it. That is a completely unwarranted imputation. All that the public is concerned with is the desirability and price of the product in question.

There is simply no way of effectively testing this proposition anyway, since the very valuations the public are supposedly making with respect to these different occupations in society (and the differential incomes they command) are themselves expressed through, and subject to, the limitations of, ‘effective demand’ – that is, demand backed up by purchasing power.

What this means is that even if we grant the argument that the public are, as it were, ‘voting’ for our entrepreneur, or their business, with each pound, dollar or whatever spent counting as a vote cast, it is still the case (to continue with this metaphor) that some have vastly more votes at their disposal compared to others and, indeed, that many of these others may as well be considered completely disenfranchised as far as a great many products in the market are concerned. That is to say, their ‘economic votes’ are prevented from being expressed in the determination of these products’ prices by their inability to afford these products in the first instance.

In any case, what is being asserted is a completely untestable proposition. Who decided – or voted for – Elon Musk to become the richest individual in the world? The answer is, of course – no one.

Robin Cox

What is socialism? (2024)

From the July 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the beginning of the election campaign Starmer was reported as saying that he considered himself a socialist. According to Chris Mason, the BBC’s Political Editor, ‘Starmer told me today he sees himself as a socialist. For those scared of that label, he said he saw it as putting “the country at the service of working people”’ (27 May 18.04).

Few can have believed that Starmer is in any sense a socialist, but it at least provoked the media into talking about ‘socialism’. In an ‘explainer’ article, the Guardian (28 May) even asked ‘What is Socialism?’ Their answer reflected dictionary definitions, which describe how a word is used rather than how it should be:

‘Like many political philosophies it means different things to different people. But broadly socialists believe all human beings are of equal worth and that society should be organised to reflect that. Fairness, equality, justice and the common good are the foundations of socialism. The wealth created by humans should be used to benefit everyone. Some socialists believe that key industries and sectors, such as utilities, transport and housing, should be owned by the state and run in the public interest rather than for private profit. Other socialists believe that all industries and sectors should be run this way’.

We have inherited a definition of socialism which we consider to be both logically and historically correct — a system of society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of living by and in the interest of the whole community. But we can go along with some of the things the Guardian says. For instance, that ‘all human beings are of equal worth and that society should be organised to reflect that’ and ‘that wealth created by humans should be used to benefit everyone’.

On the other hand, describing the foundation of socialism as fairness, equality, justice and the common good doesn’t tell us anything as different people have different opinions as to what is fair, just or in the common interest. Supporters of capitalism could — and in fact do — claim this for capitalism.

The question is: on what basis would society have to be organised to ensure everybody is of equal worth and wealth used to benefit everyone? In our view it could only be on the basis of the means of living (land, industry, transport, communications, etc) being the common property of the whole community. In other words, belonging to everybody but this is the same as belonging to nobody. A socialist society is one where no individual or group of individuals has ownership or controlling rights, in law or in fact, over the resources to produce what society needs to survive as this puts them in a privileged position vis-à-vis the rest of society.

A classless society means that everybody stands in the same relationship to the means of living as everybody else, each having the same opportunity to have a say in how society is run, through democratic procedures of one kind or another. Without the means of living being commonly owned and democratically controlled, the wealth that humans create cannot be used to benefit everyone. Only once freed from the constraints of sectional ownership and the economic forces set in motion when there is production for the market, can society be in a position to do this.

The Guardian (and dictionaries) attempt to grasp the idea of common ownership, which is indeed the basis of socialism, by equating this with ‘public/government ownership’ defined as ownership by the state. But the state is not the same as the community. The state is an institution standing above society controlled by and for a section only of the members of society. Under capitalism it is controlled by that section that owns and controls the means of living. The ‘public interest’ is their interest and ‘public ownership’ is ownership by them as a class. What government ownership amounts to is state capitalism.

Ever since our foundation in 1904 we have consistently argued that government ownership is not socialism. See, for instance, ‘Nationalisation not Socialism’, March 1908 and ‘Evolution and State Capitalism’, April 1910.

That state capitalism is the same as socialism is the most common misunderstanding as to what socialism means. It can even be described as the illusion of the epoch. It is only on the basis of this mistake that the Labour Party (at one time, a long time ago) and Russia when it was the USSR could be described as socialist.

What Starmer thought socialism is was not clear, but he did mention to Chris Mason that it meant ‘the country in the service of working people’. That’s not socialism either. In fact it’s how the Conservatives might describe conservatism and the Lib Dems liberalism. But at least it is something that a Starmer Labour government can be judged by.

The trouble for him is that a country with a capitalist economy simply cannot be made to serve the interest of ‘working people’, or the social class made up of people who, through being excluded from ownership and control of the means of living, are forced by economic necessity to sell their working skills to some employer. A society based on minority ownership and production for profit can never be made to work in their interest as making profits for capitalist enterprises ahead of satisfying people’s needs is built into it. Hence the problems that the working class face. As these arise from capitalism, they cannot be solved without getting rid of capitalism.

We confidently predict, therefore, that Starmer will fail in his endeavour to make capitalism serve the working class. Socialism, properly understood as the common ownership and democratic control of the means of living, is the only framework in which people can be social equals and production re-oriented to serve people’s needs.

Adam Buick