Cops protect robbers (1981)

From the September 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism will be a world society without a police force. In fact, it will be a society without a legal system. And because there will be no laws there will be no courts to argue about them in, no prisons in which to lock up offenders, and no people who will be called criminals because they have broken the law.

The idea of socialism as a lawless, crimeless society is likely to evoke the strangest of responses from those who stand for what is euphemistically referred to as ‘law and order’. Judges will tell us that prisons and punishment must always be, for we are all sinners. The person in the street will say that without the law there would be anarchy and under anarchy nothing would be safe. Criminologists will tell us that anti-social behaviour is a necessary feature of modern urban industrial living (which is only a trendy way of saying what the judge has already said). Indeed, even most criminals will insist that a certain degree of law and order is necessary and that the best place for those who have committed worse crimes than them is in a prison cell.

As for the politicians, Leftie Frank Field (Labour, Birkenhead, no convictions) writes that ‘Like most people, I cannot conceive of a society without a police force’. (Guardian, 5/8/81). Tory Home Secretary Whitelaw warned on television recently that ‘without the police, that which we treasure as a nation would be jeopardised’. (Could he have been referring to the Stock Exchange?) Even the very silly Workers’ Revolutionary Party, in their recent GLC election manifesto, called for the replacement of the Metropolitan police force by an armed workers’ militia.

The public’s view of the police is currently undergoing a profound change. The image of the Dixon of Dock Green—type copper with a patronising concern to protect ‘villains’ from themselves and a claim to serve ‘the community’ is fast dying. The role of the police as the brutal defenders of property and privilege is increasingly being recognised. The use of the police as strikebreakers, as contributors to the harassment of racial minorities, as corrupt bullies who will often turn a blind eye to law-breaking if the price is high enough, and, in the cases of Liddle Towers, Blair Peach and unrecorded others, as the unprosecuted murderers of members of the working class.

This writer’s first experience of police methods came during the Grunwick strike in 1977 when he saw uniformed officers kicking pickets when they lay on the ground and beating people up in the back of open police vans. Many trade unionists will testify as to how the police have been used in strikes in order to make life hard for the strikers. Accounts of police persecution of legally innocent workers are increasingly common, especially in areas where there are many black immigrants. Many people convicted of crimes—and many not convicted, but charged-have told how police have illegally beaten them, forced confessions from them and even intimidated their friends and relatives.

The words of police chiefs do not help to comfort those who live in fear of ‘the boys in blue’: Metropolitan Police Chief Commissioner, David McNee, recently stated that ‘if people stay off the streets at night they will have nothing to fear from the police’, while Merseyside’s Chief Constable. Kenneth Oxford, wrote in his report to the Liverpool police committee, six weeks before the Toxteth riot, that

My policy on relationships with the community has been endorsed and strengthened throughout the year, with all members of the force being mindful in this direction. I am confident that these relationships with all sections of the community are in a very healthy position and I do not foresee any serious difficulties developing in the future. (Quoted in the Guardian, 6/8/81. Our emphasis.)

Oxford, whose force has been seen as a major contributory factor in the outburst on Toxteth streets, is clearly not a man of prescience.

Much as some people would like to turn a blind eye to it, it is a fact that the police force often exceeds its legal powers, frequently serves to increase social tensions and ignore criminality when it is committed by the rich. But this is not the root of the problem; socialists are not simply opposed to the police-or to “bad” police—but to a system of social relationships which necessitates coercive forces.

The purpose of the police is to defend property. Yes, it is true that they help old ladies cross the road (whether they want to or not) and they run youth clubs for skinheads who want to be the next Henry Cooper. This, however, is not their main job and the idea of the police as uniformed social workers is a myth. Indeed, police officers can often be disciplined by their superiors for spending too much time helping people when there is real police work to be done elsewhere. One such case is quoted by E. Bittner:

An officer was walking a beat in a quiet residential area when he encountered a middle-aged matron who had been locked out of her home. She had a load of groceries and obviously could not climb into the window she designated as open . . . He set aside hat and truncheon, climbed in through the window, and came downstairs to let her in. As she was grateful and was going to write a letter informing his superior of his meritorious service, he had to carefully explain to her that what he did was against police regulations and quite possibly against the law (since he had no evidence that she actually lived in the house). Any mentions of his actions would probably become a black mark in his personnel file. (“A Theory of the Police” in Potential for Reform of Criminal Justice, ed. H. Jacob, Sage Publications.)

Before the establishment of an official police force in 1829, policing was the direct responsibility of property-owners. Private security gangs were employed to defend the wealth of the rich against the illegal requirements of the poor. Before the rise of industrial capitalism, the administration of the law was primarily in the hands of local land magnates. They would appoint their own magistrates, pay for their own guards and be looked upon as the final arbiters in local disputes. With the increasing role of the state as a means of social control in the mid-Nineteenth century, the unity between the right of ownership and the right of coercion became blurred, but not eradicated.

The role of the early police force, as now, was to ensure the maintenance of the order of property. In an age when slums and mansions, expensive restaurants and hungry children, night clubs and homeless vagrants exist in such close proximity to one another it is vital for the owning class to have a permanent force to protect them and their property from the intrusion of the impoverished. With capitalism, the concept of criminality became synonymous with the disruption of property relationships. In earlier centuries laws tended to be justified in moral terms, but modern jurisprudence has increasingly discarded anachronistic moral and religious formulae and has described its role in explicitly material terms. The police, as a body which is directly governed by laws passed in parliament, now have a clearly political role. What the state says, the police must do.

Dirty work

The state is not an institution which has always existed. In ancient societies, when the means of producing wealth were commonly held, there was no need for an institution to defend private property. The state was a direct consequence of the earliest appropriation of wealth in the form of tools, land and slaves—by private owners. The evolution of the state, as an institution to protect and expand private property, has developed as humankind has increased its domination over the natural environment. With the emergence of nation states with their own particular economic interests, in Western Europe in the late fifteenth century, it became necessary for states to recruit standing armies to fight the battles of the various national ruling classes. At this stage of the evolution of the state machine emerged a division of its functions between military responsibilities to the ruling class—the protection and expansion of markets—and domestic responsibilities- the retention of internal order on the part of the nation’s rulers. That is the role of the police: they are the uniformed guards of the property-owning class. For every worker’s car which they retrieve and for every mugger they catch (and the police are notoriously bad at solving crimes which affect the working class), there are a hundred cases in which the police are quite directly defending property against poverty.

Of course, the capitalists do not do their own dirty work. They are the last people to be found treading the beat or risking their lives in fights against criminals. Why should they bother when they can pay suckers from the working class to act as human guard-dogs on their behalf? Just like other members of the working class, members of the police force have problems. They are dependent upon wages and, like most workers, these are never enough to satisfy their complete needs. They are frequently pushed around by authoritarian superiors who expect them to obey senseless orders. Many of them would like to be liked, but because of the real nature of their job (which is disguised during their training) they are forced to come into frequent conflict with their fellow workers. Of course, many workers join the police force because they are authoritarian, sadistic or politically motivated, but for the vast majority it is just a job, just a wage and just employment. Often the police respond to their problems by demanding more weapons or tougher laws, but in the end these will not eradicate their problems. So long as there is a system which needs repression, intolerance and thuggery in order to defend its norms, and as long as there are wage slaves who are willing to get their hands dirty defending their exploiters’ position, the police’s problem will continue.

Reformists are occasionally heard to demand the reform of the police. Indeed, the new Labour GLC leader, Ken Livingstone, has recently pledged himself in favour of a people’s police force, accountable to a ‘socialist GLC’! We have all experienced what is meant by a people’s police force. In state capitalist Poland, the armed bullies who smashed the skulls of striking workers in Bydgoszcz were called a ‘people’s’ militia. Did that stop them from viciously defending the right of capital against the needs of wage labour? To conceive of a legal system which will operate in terms of friendship and consensus within a system where ownership and control are firmly in the hands of a minority who own the productive and distributive machinery is naive in the extreme.

In a socialist society the means of wealth production and distribution will be commonly owned and democratically controlled by the whole community without distinction of race or sex. In such a society, where no factory, farm, mine, newspaper, aeroplane or house will have an owner, be it an individual or the state, there will be no need for property laws. There will be no function for police or courts or prisons. The vast libraries containing thick statutes on who is entitled to possess what (and, by implication, who isn’t) will be placed in museums. The truncheons and uniforms and judge’s wigs will be regarded as items of perverse historical curiosity. For once the wealth of the world belongs to all humanity and there for our free access, what will there be to steal and what reason would there be to steal it?

Of course, the Human Nature Brigade will not be slow to answer our question. They will correct us for indulging in such utopian dreams. They will remind us that it is not the viciously competitive, warlike system of capitalism which leads people to commit acts of violence, but Human Nature. They will inform us that it is not the system which turns sex into a commodity and makes films glorifying the conquest of women which leads men to rape women, but Human Nature. They, who are the selected élite who have special knowledge of mankind’s inherent characteristics, will be able to tell us that it is not the overcrowded, boring, stressful conditions of most workers’ lives which leads some to act anti-socially, but Human Nature. And our Nature being what it is, we shall always need police to push us around and prison warders to lock us up and judges to judge us. Socialists argue that the social environment makes men and women what they are and that a competitive, jungle society will create anti-social beasts. Change the way in which the society is organised and human behaviour will change also.

But just as capitalism creates wage slaves who want to be pushed around and want to be slaves and fear freedom, at the same time, paradoxically, it creates its own gravediggers. By subjecting the working class more and more to the reality of its exploited and oppressed condition, capitalism creates dissent. If such dissent currently takes the form of engaging in futile street battles with the police and looting the third-rate commodities from the windows of the cheapest shops, experience will eventually transform such dissent into conscious political action. After all, however many policeman’s hats are knocked from their head, the police and the class which they exist to protect will still be there. However many reforms are passed to soften policemen’s truncheons, the arm of the law will always be stronger than the power of a politically atomised working class.

Steve Coleman

Correction (1981)

From the September 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the October 1980 Socialist Standard and some subsequent issues, it was stated that less than one thousandth of the British population own eighty per cent of privately owned shares. This figure was taken from the CIS report The Wealthy, and is incorrect. They say that one per cent of shareholders own eighty per cent of the shares, whereas it is in fact one per cent of the population. (Only seven per cent of the population are shareholders.) The correct figure can be found in Class in a Capitalist Society by J. Westergaard and H. Resler, Penguin, page 158. They use Inland Revenue Statistics to show how one hundredth of the population own over eighty per cent of shares. We apologise for the error, although we have the impression that most of our readers are in the ninety-three per cent without a single share to their name, in any case.

Ours and theirs (1981)

From the September 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

The main points in the Bank of England Bulletin, which was issued last month, were well covered by television, radio and newspapers. Anyone taking what was said in these reports as what was meant would have been delighted with the good news. Here are some of the ways in which the news was reported: “Recession or no WE are getting richer abroad”; “According to figures assembled by the Bank’s statisticians . . . OUR external wealth was actually £4.3 billion more in 1979 than we thought it was a year ago”; “In 1980, for the first time, OUR assets abroad exceeded £200 billion ...” (Our emphasis).

Great, you might think. You can leave that dreary job, or stop looking for one. You can move out of your cramped home and move into spacious accommodation with pleasant amenities. No longer will your lifestyle be tethered by a meagre and insecure income. No longer will your impulses be repeatedly smothered by your poverty. So you get on the blower to the Bank of England, explain that you have heard the news about our great wealth which is invested abroad and ask how you might go about getting some of your share now.

Waiting for your reply from the other end of the line, the dialling tone, or worse, would be your signal that all is not as it seems. In fact what is described as "our overseas wealth’, if it was being reported from the point of view of the great majority, would be described as "their overseas wealth’. In Britain today, the entire pooled wealth of the poorest 80 per cent of the adult population amounts to less than that which is owned by the wealthiest 1 per cent (Report of Royal Commission on Distribution of Income and Wealth, 1980) and 93 per cent of adults do not own any stocks or shares. (CIS report, The Wealthy).

Meanwhile, in Japan the capitalist minority’s quest for profit continues with its inevitable disregard for the common social good. For many years a drug developed by a Professor Chisato Maruyama to treat terminal cancer has been dispensed at his small clinic in Tokyo. The vaccine seems to be regarded as effectual, at least by the hundreds of people who queue from dawn every day outside the clinic to collect a forty days’ supply for their suffering friends or relatives.

Research conducted at Tohoku University suggests that where the vaccine has been used in conjunction with other medical treatment survival rates in terminal cancer have much improved over treatment with other drugs. However, the small clinic cannot keep up with the demand and at the moment it is the only place allowed to dispense the vaccine. In order for the drug to become generally available it must be licenced by the Pharmaceutical Council of the Health Ministry. The Health Ministry usually rules on new drugs within 18 months but the Pharmaceutical firm making the vaccine first applied for licensing five years ago, and still no decision has been reached.

The issue became publicised after patients’ families petitioned the Ministry with 60,000 signatures, and the clamour could no longer be ignored by the government. The reason for the extraordinary delay in official approval being granted to the drug cannot be certain as deliberations of the decision makers—and this applies across the world under capitalism—are conducted in secret, or privately as they would prefer to call it.

But all of the available evidence suggests that there have been “close relations" between the Health Ministry and major drug companies. It seems that these firms are exerting strong pressure (the Yen variety) on health officials to block the commercial licensing of the Maruyama vaccine, which would present damaging competition to their own anti-cancer drugs already on the market. There is a trend for many senior ministry bureaucrats who are ‘co-operative’ with the representatives of large drug companies to be given highly paid appointments with the companies once they have retired from government employment. The rather well-titled ‘vice-president’ of one of the largest Japanese pharmaceutical companies was Deputy Health Minister a few years ago. Until the power of control and decision-making is withdrawn from the minority who now exercise it all over the world, society will continue to be run by us for them.

Gary Jay

Dons on the dole - part 2 (1981)

From the September 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

(In the June Socialist Standard a correspondent who is also a university lecturer reported on the financial cuts being planned for universities by the government’s University Grants Committee (UGC). The measures have now been announced and our correspondent looks at their effects.)

The statistics have already had detailed coverage in the media. Roughly they add up to the loss of 3,000 lecturing jobs and 20,0000 student places over the next three to four years. The Association of University Teachers (AUT) said the government had tried to give “academic respectability to a savage cut”. The National Union of Students called the measures “crude educational vandalism”. The pro-Vice Chancellor of one of the worst hit institutions, Salford University, said: “We are shocked, appalled and dismayed”.

In my own university we are still unclear on precisely what is going to happen. Our overall reduction in grant is smaller than most of us expected, but some departments, including my own, have been recommended for “concentration” with corresponding departments in other nearby institutions. Talks among the authorities of these institutions and my own will decide in which university each subject will be concentrated and whether “concentration” will mean losing jobs or just moving house for those of us whose subjects are_transferred.

The local AUT’s view is that the university will take the course that it sees as being in its best overall interest and that we must therefore be prepared to resist if necessary. What has appeared to make Union resistance more possible now than it seemed before is that the UGC had a last-minute change of heart and, instead of telling universities in precise detailed terms how to achieve their economies, simply issued figures of percentage cuts for each institution and told each one in only very general terms as to where its cuts should be operated. The AUT claims that its own representations to the UGC were responsible for this change of emphasis and that Union pressure can also therefore bring unhoped for changes of emphasis (from individual universities). This may be so, but it’s still hard to see how saving one lecturer’s job in one subject will not automatically result in another lecturer’s job being lost in another subject. No matter how much juggling is done, money will only be there for a certain number of salaries. What the UGC have not yielded on is the cuts themselves. They are allowing individual universities more flexibility in distributing their share of the cuts but have made it quite clear that, whatever the attitude of the Union and the universities, the cuts will have to be made.

What surprised most people was not the extent of the grant reductions but the way in which they were spread. A minority of institutions have been particularly hard hit, while the majority are suffering rather less than expected. The Sunday Times (5/7/81) explained this by pointing out that “what really lay behind the UGC’s decision was . . . cost-effectiveness”. In other words the main factor in assessing where the axe should fall was the cheapness with which universities had shown themselves capable of operating their courses. Those whose unit costs were expensive were most heavily penalised. Those whose cost per student was low came off best. As the Vice-Chancellor of the least affected university of all, Bath, was proud to point out: “We’re getting better results for a lower investment” (Sunday Times 5/7/81).

For a number of years now both Labour and Tory governments have talked about the need to make universities more receptive to the “needs of society”. For, although education has grown up in response to the ever increasing needs of the profit system for an increasing number of educated intellectually flexible wage slaves (which is what politicians mean by the “needs of society”), the university sector, because of its traditional “independence”, has been more difficult to mould to capitalism’s requirements and has developed in a more willy-nilly and more expensive fashion than the rest. Governments now want to bring the universities into line, to make them respond more efficiently and more cheaply to the economic needs of capitalism. And what better time than in a period of depression when cuts in so-called “public expenditure” seem especially justified and when so many people in other occupations are losing their jobs.

It’s possible of course that the government is being short-sighted and that, if the depression doesn’t last, employers in Britain will soon find themselves short of the skills of university graduates and will find it difficult to compete in producing and selling their goods on an expanding world market. But capitalism is nothing if not unpredictable and governments committed to running it have to take chances—even if this means wasting human talents and energies on a large scale and having, as a possible end result, increased economic chaos.

The cuts also highlight another kind of wastage of talents and energies that has arisen out of capitalism’s unmanageability. During the 70s universities throughout the country were told that the only way to keep their staff was to increase student numbers. With competition from the polytechnics and a decreasing number of 18-year-olds in the population it was assumed that universities would not be able to do this and that the government would be able to point to this as a reason for making cuts in finance. But a different thing happened. Instead of waiting for students to come to them, (as in the past) universities started to recruit vigorously. Academics put an enormous amount of time, energy and ingenuity into finding ways of attracting new students, and many students were found where before they seemed not to exist. Then came 1979 and a UGC visit to universities told the academics that they’d been finding too many students and they would have to cut down. Now in 1981 they’re being told even more forcefully that all that time, energy and ingenuity has been wasted and that they should have been looking for ways of saving government money not spending more.

The UGC’s letter to universities announcing the cuts said: “Reductions in resources are being imposed at a time when demand for university educations is still rising”. And this was an unwitting admission of the kind of society we live in—a society in which goods and services, including education, are not there to satisfy people’s needs but are only available when the needs of the profit system decree they will be available. The highly educated people at our “centres of academic excellence” should think hard on this and ponder on whether there isn’t a less irrational more harmonious way of organising human affairs.

Howard Moss

Socialist Sonnet No. 161 War Gamers (2024)

From the Socialism or Your Money Back blog 

War Gamers

Night by night sitting like obsessed gamers

Fixated on screens. This evening’s download

Could be Gaza, Ukraine, somewhere abroad.

Graphics are so realistic, the framers

Ensure all players are fully in-shot,

Both perpetrators and victims portrayed

In role, with impressive weapons arrayed:

Rack up more points than last night? Perhaps not.

A helpful voiceover or avatar 

Pops up whenever there’s something to say, 

To grab attention when it’s drifting away, 

Or tempted to upload another war. 

The spectacular needs to be massive, 

For viewers to be retained and passive.

D. A.

Voice From The Back: Behind The Fine Words (2010)

The Voice From The Back Column from the September 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Behind The Fine Words

Recently in a show of strength the USA and South Korea mounted an exercise in and around the Sea of Japan. It consisted of 20 ships, 200 aircraft and 8,000 military personnel and was supposedly a response to the sinking of a South Korean vessel by North Korea. Like all such military displays of power it was accompanied by fine words. They were “protecting the democratic South against the tyranny of the North”. China, an ally of North Korea viewed it as “an intrusion into an area not far from Chinese territorial waters”. It is much more likely that the correspondent Giles Whittell was much nearer the real economic truth behind the fine words when he reported – “The military display that may or may not have struck fear into the hermit dictatorship north of the 38th parallel has angered Beijing as it seeks to assert sovereignty over nearly 1.5 million square miles of the South China Sea, rich in oil and mineral deposits” (Times, 28 July). Behind the fine words, as usual, lurks the profit motive

Progressing Backwards

During the last ninety years or so the working class have been promised by reformist politicians that if only they were in power the working class would enjoy a better standard of living. Foolishly they have swallowed that piece of nonsense and have endured a world war, countless local wars, massive periods of economic slumps, poverty and unemployment. One of the major promises of the reformers was that of improved health care but what is the reality? “The gap between the health of rich and poor is greater now than at any time since modern records began, a study shows. Government initiatives have done little or nothing to close the gap between the life expectancy of poor people and those who are wealthy, researchers from universities in Sheffield and Bristol, writing in the British Medical Journal, said. They looked at deaths between 1921 and 2007” (Times, 23 July). Ninety years of progress according to the reformers – ninety years of futility is more like it!

Bargain Basement Exploitation

“One of Britain’s fiercest and most ostentatiously successful business men has been enlisted to spearhead the Government’s attack on public spending. Sir Philip Green, a man with a reputation for making brutally effective commercial reforms, has been asked by David Cameron to lead a no-holds barred examination of departmental budgets” (Times, 13 August). In his personal life Sir Philip is anything but frugal or economic. He spent £5 million on his 50th birthday party, £4 million on his son’s bar mitzvah and £30 million on his yacht. We imagine what impressed Cameron about Green was his ruthless exploitation of his workers. Here is an example of how fortunes are made in the retail business. “Indian workers are paid just 25p an hour and forced to work overtime in factories used by some of Britain’s best-known high street stores … Some of the biggest names on the British high street are at the centre of a major sweatshop scandal. An Observer investigation has found staff at their Indian suppliers working up to 16 hours a day. Marks & Spencer, Gap and Next have launched their own inquiries into abuses and pledged to end the practice of excessive overtime, which is a flagrant breach of the industry’s ethical trading (ETI) and Indian labour laws” (Observer, 8 August). It is estimated that Green has a fortune of over £4 billion made in such firms as BHS, Topshop, Evans, Miss Selfridge and Dorothy Perkins – that exploitation rather than his personal lifestyle is what has impressed the cost-cutting Cameron.

Half A Million Homeless

Politicians love nothing better than coming up with catchy phrases that they reckon will be taken up by the media. Over the years we have had “The war to end all wars”, “A land fit for heroes”, “You never had it so good”, and more recently Mrs Thatcher’s “A property owning democracy”. The war to end all wars led to an even bloodier conflict, a land fit for heroes turned out be a land where only a bloody hero could survive and Macmillan’s never had it so good only applied to the owning class. Thatcher’s property owning democracy seems particularly ironic when we learn of this prediction. “More than 500,000 people will be added to social housing waiting lists and nearly 300,000 jobs will go under proposals to cut the housing budget by up to 40 per cent, say campaigners. The National Housing Federation says ministers risk “shutting the door on an entire generation of low-income families” by cutting cash for affordable homes” (Times, 26 July). Empty political slogans don’t solve the problems of poverty, unemployment or homelessness – only workers understanding about socialism can do that.

“Humanitarian” Slaughter

Capitalism is a blood-thirsty rapacious society, so it is no accident that its supporters have had to invent euphemisms to cover up its carnage. In recent years we have heard of “collateral damage”. This is used when a school or a hospital is blown up. To cover up the madness that leads to troops killing their own numbers we have “friendly fire”. The Israeli government have sunk to a new level even for them with the following news item. “The Israeli military has imposed restrictions on the use of white phosphorous munitions, which led to civilian deaths and casualties in Gaza last year. Israel told the UN that it would deploy them only when approved by a “humanitarian affairs officer” (Times, 22 July). What would be the job description of a “humanitarian affairs officer”? Someone adept at describing burning to death from white phosphorous as a “pleasant, almost painless termination” perhaps?

The Growth Of Inequality

One of the great illusions of the 21st century is that only in the past had we this awful set-up where “robber barons” intent on grabbing more and more wealth out of the poor exploited masses had their existence. How 19th-century we are led to believe, because we do not live in such a society today. But do we ? “Many of the great fortunes of American history – those of the Rockefellers, Andrew Carnegie and the Fords – are now mighty foundations that have long outlasted their founders. Recent years have seen the greatest disparity of wealth in America since the Golden Age of the 1920s. A recent study found that the top one per cent of Americans now receive 15 per cent of the country’s total income – about double the rate of the 1960s and 1970s” (Times, 5 August). Capitalism was based on the exploitation of the working class by the capitalist class in the days of Rockefeller and Carnegie – it still is.

Blogger's Note:

The 'Behind The Fine Words' piece was not in the print edition of the Standard but is included in the website edition of the Standard.

What future for the Beautiful Island? (2010)

From the September 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

A look at the 'other China'

Start with Hong Kong. A bouquet of modern capitalism. Concrete, glass, steel. Banks, hotels, skyscrapers. Streets bedecked with anti-pollution face masks. And residents who advise visitors come to marvel not to drink the water. Then escape to a leaf-shaped island of some 24 million population which became known to untroubled, disinterested people outside only because it was the country of origin of much of the cheap electrical equipment they bought from their local branch of Currys or Comet. Once reliant on the export of cheap textiles or consumer goods the island rose to be among the world’s leading manufacturers of computer software and hardware. Not to overlook bicycle parts, some of which are used at a London East End branch of the not-for-profit Social Enterprise to help train locals who are homeless, isolated or unemployed (or perhaps all three) to make a kind of living as bicycle mechanics.

Within the island’s demographic stew there are some half a million descendants of about a dozen aboriginal tribes, settled with others who came over from mainland China. Together they can claim to be now one of the most peaceful societies in Asia. So – welcome to the island of Taiwan, to Ilha Formosa (beautiful island), to the Republic of China – a misleadingly splendid name for a state which is no longer a member of the United Nations and is recognised by only the likes of Belize, Malawi, the Vatican… Welcome to the beautiful scenery, the mountains, the golden beaches. To the flyovers whisking you above the factories and past the driven schools. To the nation state which exists by, through and in with, one tough work-ethic.

Martial Law

Of the competing mercantile powers it was the Portugese who, about 1590, “discovered” Taiwan – and gave it the name Ilha Formosa. A long period of war, rebellion and murderous poverty while Taiwan was a “province” of China ended in 1895 when the Japanese occupied the island. This was supposedly “in perpetuity” but it came to an end in 1945, after a half century of martial law. Japanese rule was harsh – an estimated ten thousand people were killed – but not corrupt and it developed an educational system as well as roads, railways and industry. In 1943, as the Allied leaders were carving up the Far East in expectation of Japan’s defeat in World War Two, a “peace” conference in Cairo decided that, as a spoil of war, Taiwan would be “returned” to China under Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT). United States Vice President Truman’s response described the island as “America’s unsinkable battleship”.

Towards the end of the war there was a subtle change in the vocabulary of the Allied powers’ intentions; Taiwan was to be “temporarily occupied” on their behalf by the KMT. But this was soon undermined when civil war broke out on mainland China between the KMT and Mao Tse Tung’s “communist” forces. Preoccupied by those more pressing events, Chiang left the running of Taiwan to his deputy Chen Yi, whose regime was barbaric enough to provoke many “liberated” Taiwanese to regret the end of Japanese rule. In 1947 a minor incident connected to the state monopoly of the tobacco trade inflamed a series of widespread protests which were crushed with mass arrests, torture and execution of up to 30,000 people. (The day when it started – 28 February – is now a national holiday in Taiwan and New Park in the capital city Taipei was re-named 2-28 Peace park). That horror was a foretaste of things to come

White Terror 

By 1949, as the KMT on the mainland were facing defeat Chiang Kai-shek took refuge in Taiwan, where he continued to insist that one day he would prevail. Meanwhile martial law returned under The White Terror, with mass arrests of those alleged to be “attempting to overthrow the government”. Over 90,000 were taken in this way and at least half of them were executed. The scene of much of this was Green Island Lodge – a prison on a volcanic island separated from Taiwan by a few miles of nausea-inducing Pacific Ocean. Here there is lush scenery, one of the world’s three seawater hot springs, golden beaches, pristine coral reefs and dazzling tropical fish. This is where many Taiwanese come to enjoy a short break – if they can ignore that close by are a museum and a human rights memorial in place of the notorious prison where so many victims of The White Terror suffered and perished.

Apart from his willingness to commit atrocities, the defeated Chiang Kai-shek became something of an embarrassment to the Americans. In 1971 President Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger offered an “opening” – a carefully chosen word of flexible interpretation – to China and, as if that was not enough, Taiwan lost its membership of the United Nations to China. During the following year the US and China met and agreed on a “communiqué” which, while not actually saying that Mao had won the civil war, “acknowledged” (more of those careful words) that the new China was a unified country of which Taiwan was a part. This betrayal of what was supposed to have been an unshakeable commitment was settled after the negotiators had been pleasured by an especially sumptuous meal, encouraging Nixon’s odious chief arm-twister, replete, to assure his hosts “After a dinner of moatal and Peking Duck I’ll sign anything”. Well, he was Henry Kissinger wasn’t he…

Elections

Chiang Kai-shek died in 1978 and his son Chiang Ching-kuo took over with an easier, less repressive hand. While martial law was still in operation it was possible in 1986 for the first official opposition – the Democratic Progressive Party – to be formed and to win a significant number of seats in the next election. In process with these changes in 1987 martial law was brought to an end; free elections are now an established part of political life on the island and the election of 2000 brought an end to KMT rule. It should be said that it is not unknown for elected members to try to sort out their differences through a punch-up in the Chamber and for political business to be obstructed through allegations of corruption. In 1991 the KMT claim to link Taiwan and the Chinese mainland was formally abandoned. Symbolic of the clearing away of a lot of the obstructive anachronisms imposed on the Taiwan of the 1940s, many of the statues of Chiang Kai-shek were vengefully torn down. It was symbolic too of Taiwan feeling its way into place as an independent competitor in global capitalism.

Part of this process is Taiwan’s promotion of itself as a tourist attraction to rival the best offered by the likes of Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia. “Where else” bellows a full page ad in a Sunday newspaper colour supplement “would you find time-honoured traditions that thrive in perfect harmony with the chic and the avant-garde”’. Apart from its “breathtaking scenery” the island’s vibrant ambition is testified to by “the city’s skyscrapers” – among them Taipei 101, the world’s second highest building, with the fastest elevator to whisk you from ground level to the top viewing spot in a matter of seconds so smoothly that you are unaware of moving. All of which demands that the Taiwanese people live by a patriotism manufactured as surely as those computer parts. And it all soaks down to the children, who devotedly learn the officially sanctioned Mandarin language – often along with English and Japanese – during an average 12 hour day in the classroom with extra tuition in Maths and Science at private cram schools on a Saturday.

Unemployment 

But hard work, to whatever degree, has not been able to insulate Taiwan from capitalism’s chaos. The present world recession has cruelly broken the dream of ever-flowing Taiwanese prosperity. Unemployment is an encroaching problem no longer confined to the poorer, under-educated families but now also affecting graduates. A government subsidy intended to persuade companies to take on graduates has had the effect of worsening poverty at large by forcing applicants to accept lower starting wages – at about half the national average. Many employers – as in England – have pressed their workers to take temporary unpaid leave, or have stopped taking on new staff altogether. And there remains a serious problem of youth unemployment, with the rate for 15-24 year olds about twice that for the workforce as a whole and looming over it all is the real prospect of them being sucked into the ranks of the long-term unemployed.

After a history of savage repression, Taiwan is struggling now for a place among the trend-setters of Twenty-First Century global capitalism. For example they are trying for admission to bodies such as the United Nations and there are missions working for unity with China. As one guide (Robert Kelly and Joshua Brown, Lonely Planet ) put it: “So is Taiwan at a crossroads, or a precipice?” And it may also be asked – what will this do to a beautiful island which has already suffered so grievously? Will it turn out to be a modern capitalist power as frantic, as restless and as abrasive as Hong Kong?

Ivan

For or Against Parliament? (2010)

From the September 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

People who come into contact with the Socialist Party and learn that we advocate revolution are often surprised that the revolution we urge is one that can be brought about by parliamentary means. They are used to associating revolution with the violent overthrow of governments, not with peaceful democratic elections. This is understandable given that, historically, revolutions of whatever kind have tended to be accompanied by bloodshed and violence and most organisations or political parties calling for revolution still envisage, whether explicitly or otherwise, violent means.

But the latest Socialist Party pamphlet, What’s Wrong With Using Parliament? The Cases For and Against the Revolutionary Use of Parliament, makes it clear that, for the establishment of the wageless, moneyless free access society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of life that defines socialism, it is essential for the revolution to be brought about by a majority using democratic means. And since such means are available in most countries in the form of elections by universal suffrage, there is no reason why these should not be used in order for that majority to take control of governments and establish a worldwide socialist society.

While this is the basic premise of the pamphlet, most of it is actually taken up explaining why the common objections to the use of parliament to carry out revolutionary action do not hold water. These are objections often put by those such as anarchists who may broadly agree with the kind of society we want to establish but believe that any attempt to do so by parliamentary means is doomed to failure. There are two main arguments along these lines.

The first argument is that socialists elected to a capitalist parliament will not be able to withstand the ‘system’ and either will find that it forces them into complying with the status quo or will be seduced by being part of the ‘power structure’ and will voluntarily fall in with it ignoring their roots and the mandate on which they were elected.

The pamphlet answers this argument firstly by showing that the capitalist form of democracy, though seriously flawed, has in fact no formal means of preventing sufficiently determined individuals representing a politically conscious majority from using the political system it has developed in order to overthrow it. It deals with the ‘power corrupts’ idea by arguing that the delegates in question would be operating in a different social framework from the one that currently exists, one that would be shot through with the notion of participation and democratic accountability at all levels. It expresses the idea in the following way:

“With the spread of socialist ideas all organisations will change and take on a participatory democratic and socialist character, so that the majority’s organisation for socialism will not be just political and economic, but will also embrace schools and universities, television, film-making, plays and the like as well as inter-personal relationships. We’re talking about a radical social revolution involving all aspects of social life.”

A far more advanced form of democracy therefore than offered to us by capitalism today, where once every few years we are asked to put an X on a ballot paper to choose the best capitalist-management team from amongst competing groups of politicians, who then go away and take all the decisions that influence our lives without consulting us. Yet weak democracy is better then none and, as the pamphlet makes clear, it still provides a means for the majority to take political power once a socialist majority has emerged.

The second argument against the use of parliament is that the powers-that-be would never tolerate a democratic takeover by a socialist majority because of the loss of authority and privilege this would mean for them. They would therefore, if necessary, prevent it by force. There are many suppositions underlying such an argument but the main one is that there is somehow a power behind or beyond elected governments that in reality controls them (some kind of shadowy group or committee or boardroom that is really in control) and that, therefore, if its position is seriously threatened it has the means at its disposal to clamp down on those threatening it and will not hesitate to use violence to do so, perhaps in the form of a coup or a military takeover.

The pamphlet confronts this position by challenging the ‘conspiracy theorists’ to provide evidence that there is a conspiracy behind government and the way the system is organised and argues that, while capitalism with its inbuilt rivalries and vested interests may provide a fertile breeding ground for many individual conspiracies, no evidence exists or has ever been presented that there is an overall conspiracy running capitalism and its governments. That being the case, any attempt to use violence to prevent socialism being brought about by a majority in parliament with undisputed democratic legitimacy would have to be made not by people in the ‘background’ but by non-socialist politicians, yet how would they go about using violence against a majority that included workers from all walks of life and occupations, including the police and armed forces? Is it conceivable that they would obey orders from politicians to suppress the majority of their fellow-socialists and, even if there were enough elements from those quarters who would be prepared to take such action, would they not be overwhelmed by the majority who would oppose them in self-defence?

The essence of the socialist position on the use of parliament is summed up in the following way towards the end of the pamphlet: 

“Once there is an organised, determined majority, the success of the socialist revolution is assured, one way or the other. It is then a question of the best tactic to pursue to try to ensure that this takes place as rapidly and as smoothly as possible. In our view, the best way to proceed is to start by obtaining a democratic mandate via the ballot box for the changeover to socialism. The tactical advantage is that, when obtained, it deprives the supporters of capitalism of any legitimacy for the continuation of their rule.”

The other, related point made is that the organisation of the socialist majority that develops within capitalist society will reflect – will have to reflect – the essentially democratic nature of the future society it will establish. It will in fact have to prefigure that society and so be entirely democratic, and without a leadership which can impose decisions on the rest. All important decisions, in fact, will come from the majority via referendums or meetings of mandated, wholly accountable and recallable delegates. In this light, it is not surprising, as the pamphlet points out, that those groups who support left-wing, Leninist-style ‘revolution’, with its ideas of leadership and decision-taking by a vanguard, dismiss socialism by the ballot box as ‘utopian’. Not that the ‘socialism’ those groups say they stand for amounts to anything more than some form of tightly organised state control of capitalism. Not either that the ‘socialism’ they endorse is any closer to a society of free access and democratic control than the aims of supporters of established parties such as the Labour Party who wish to press their parties into somehow overcoming the economic realities of the profit system and bringing in reforms that will allow it to be governed more humanely.

So this pamphlet puts the case for a revolutionary use of the ballot box to establish socialism and in so doing provides powerful arguments against those who advocate a more benign form of capitalism via parliamentary reforms, against those who want to bring in forms of rigid state control over the capitalist system, if necessary by minority action, and, more specifically, against those who seem to share the socialist aims of a stateless, free access society but still think that parliament cannot be the route to achieve it because the ruling class will never give up power without the use of armed force.

Howard Moss

For a copy of What’s Wrong With Using Parliament? The Cases For and Against the Revolutionary Use of Parliament, send a cheque / money order for £1.50 payable to 

“The Socialist Party of Great Britain” to 52 Clapham High St, London SW4 7UN.

Tiny Tips (2010)

The Tiny Tips column from the September 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

According to one organizer, a scrappy former bank teller named Wu Lijuan, there are at least 70,000 people seeking to regain their old jobs or receive monetary compensation, a sizeable wedge of the 400,000 who were laid off during a decade-long purge. Like many other state-owned companies, the banks slashed payrolls and restructured to raise profitability and make themselves more attractive to outside investors. “They tossed us out like garbage,” Ms. Wu, 44, said before a recent protest, scanning fellow restaurant patrons for potential eavesdroppers. “All we’re asking for is justice and maybe to serve as a model for others who have been wronged.” For a government determined to maintain social harmony, the protests and petitioning are vexing. Compared with farmers angry over seized land or retired soldiers seeking fatter pensions, the bank workers — educated, organized and knowledgeable about the Internet — are better equipped to outsmart the public security agents constantly on their trail.

[Link.]

“Women demand men have houses and cars, why can’t men demand women be virgins?” asked one man on the Tianya site. “So, greedy women, remember, you have to protect your hymens, because those are big dowries for you to exchange for money.” Some men who were interviewed agreed about the importance of finding a virgin. “I really care about virginity,” said Xia Yang, product manager for a technology company. “If you go to buy a cellphone, of course you’d want to buy a new cellphone. Who would spend the same amount of money to buy an old cellphone that’s been used for two years?” The virginity debate also underscores a contradiction in modern China: As the nation becomes more freewheeling, there remains a deeply conservative core.

[Link.]

The report listed numerous areas in which China’s military is on the march. China is deploying a new class of nuclear-powered submarines equipped with intercontinental ballistic missiles. It is pouring money into space warfare systems and cyber-warfare capabilities. It is developing a “carrier killer” anti-ship ballistic missile. China has “the most active land-based ballistic and cruise missile program in the world,” the report said. Beijing “now possesses one of the largest” forces of surface-to-air missiles in the world, it added. And it has the “largest force of principal combatants, submarines, and amphibious warfare ships in Asia.”

[Link.]

Letter: Living wage or . . . (2010)

Letter to the Editors from the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Living wage or . . .

Dear Editors

I must declare from the outset that I am a fellow traveller with the SPGB in as much as seeking the abolition of the wage system, but in the Socialist Standard’s recent Cooking the Books column ‘What’s a “Living Wage”?’ (June), I was left disappointed by the way in which the living wage was represented.

The first problem with the article is where (discussing the Green Party’s flagship policy of raising the National Minimum Wage to £8.10/hour) it states that £16,848 pa. ‘hardly qualifies as an adequate “living wage”.’ This feels a little disingenuous.

Let’s be honest about this: of course £16.8k a year is not comfortable, and it is certainly not fair. It is still several thousand shy of the current national average, but it is also several thousand closer. However, the difference it would make (before we get onto potential wider economic repercussions of the wage rate) to those currently on NMW would be phenomenal.

This is a difference not only of nearly £5k a year but has a multitude of knock-on benefits the article neglects to mention, the most important and obvious being the positive impact on health (one of the key grounds for the living wage) due to reduced stress levels.

This leads me comfortably into my next point. As a seasoned London-based organiser around the London Living Wage, one of the most uncomfortable facts I’ve had to deal with in campaigning for the living wage is that paying the London Living Wage has been good for employers; it is good management of capitalism.

A better wage rate (albeit still suitably low) means fewer employee sick days taken and a much lower turnover in employee numbers. The former relates specifically to the aforementioned health benefits, the latter relates often to simple time-management.

So many NMW workers have to work multiple jobs to make up enough hours in order to gain enough money to cover rent and provide the cheapest meal for their families. Staff turnover can be high for NMW employers due to employees taking up work at sites marginally closer to home, etc. In many respects the living wage can be more about time rather than money.

The article states that the first effect of legal living wage rate would be that “some employers would go bankrupt.” Of course this is a definite possibility in the current economic crisis with many employers already teetering on the edge.

On the other hand, however, the kind of employers most likely to be adversely affected would (obviously) be those dependent on super-exploitation: I’m thinking especially of cleaning, security and catering agencies.

But the roles employers for these firms provide are those which are, broadly speaking, already exploited to saturation point, i.e. there is scarcely a surplus of workers (or at least not a surplus of work-hours – admittedly something different). These are by no means the only NMW job types, but they constitute a significant proportion and are (at our current level of technology) extremely difficult to substitute for any kind of improved machinery. We aren’t yet at the stage where robotic androids could perform all the tasks a security guard or cleaner does.

If these agencies – subcontractors, beneficiaries of privatisation – were to collapse under wage bills, this does not therefore necessarily mean mass unemployment (except possibly on a very temporary basis) as the roles require being re-hired for as immediately as they are lost.

In a lot of cases this would presumably take the form of these out-sourced services being brought back in-house to the sites on which they are employed. This can be and often is in fact cheaper for site-owners as it cuts out duplicate management posts between the site-company and the outsourced company (both of which are paid for by the site-owner).

In short, it can work out cheaper in more ways than one to pay workers more. It is not necessarily as straight-forward as the article suggests. A living wage can be as much ‘living’ for the employee as it is for the employer.

Finally, and in my eyes most importantly, the article ends that ‘workers should replace the green demand for a “Living Wage” by the revolutionary demand for the “Abolition of the Wages System”.’ As I mentioned, in principle I agree. However, this simple sentence does injustice to the value living wage struggles have.

For myself the main and most important benefit of the London Living Wage is that it lifts workers and their dependents not only out of the deeper throes of poverty (though not completely altogether) but that it also lifts them out of the harshest insecurity and psychological vulnerability imaginable.

It is not a coincidence that those on the NMW are among the least likely to be unionised. I’m certain the SPGB understands the mechanism used by bosses in holding workers down through the wage system. In London, living wage struggles have galvanised workers’ organisations (especially grassroots unionisation), and have recently begun to really politicise workers. It instils consciousness.

If the wage system can be represented by the image of a boss stamping on a worker’s face, then the living wage might be removing the boss’s foot from the worker’s neck. She’s still going to get stamped in the face, but she’s a little freer to start fighting back.

The demand to abolish wage-slavery is certainly the most important one. However, in our current situation it is only through living wage struggles that any kind of meaningful revolutionary discourse can exist. The living wage question is the first line in this discussion which, if followed to its natural conclusion, ends by agreeing to overthrow exploitation altogether.

An interesting question Cooking the Books should ask is where, if at all, in this discussion the ‘transitional demand’ for a National Maximum Salary might be.

Joseph Robertson, 

London

Reply: … abolition of the wages system?

Let’s get one thing clear from the start. We have nothing against workers struggling for and getting higher wages if they can. We favour this, even if we think that ideally this should be tied to struggling to abolish the wages system altogether. Our members, as workers, join trade unions. So, we hope your campaign to get London employers to pay some of their workers more succeeds, even if we don’t like the term “living wage” any more than “fair wage”. There’s nothing fair about the wages system and we’re against people having to work for a wage to live.

Wages (and their other name, salaries) are a price – the price of the labour power, or working skills, that workers sell to an employer. Most people are forced by economic necessity to do this to get a living, to obtain the money to buy the things they need to live.

The wages system implies the division of society into those who own and control the means for producing wealth and who need to employ people to operate them and those who, owning no means of production, have to sell their working skills to them. It implies a class divided society. But more. Employers are not philanthropists. They only employ workers if they think there’s a profit in it for them. The source of their profits is the difference between what they pay their workers as wages and what they receive from the sale of what their employees produce. So, the wages system also implies exploitation, the extraction of unpaid labour from the workforce. That’s why there is not, and cannot be, any such thing as a fair wage.

The abolition of the wages system involves abolishing the class division of society by making the means of production the common property of everybody under democratic control. Then nobody will be obliged to work for someone else for a wage. Instead, the principle “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs” will apply. People will co-operate to produce what is needed and then everybody will have free access to it to satisfy their needs, without having to pay. In fact money will have become redundant.

What we were criticising in the article was the proposal of a political party to increase the present legal minimum wage by over 40 percent and call the result a “living wage”. We pointed out that this was just another empty vote-catching promise which, even if implemented, wouldn’t have had the expected effects. We would have thought that it was generally accepted that higher wages do lead employers to introduce labour-saving machinery. An example of this in reverse would be how many garages have abandoned car washing machines as hand washing done by asylum seekers (probably getting less than the minimum wage) has become cheaper. You yourself concede that an imposed increase of the order proposed by the Green Party – by nearly £5k a year – could lead to an increase in unemployment for the lowest-paid, even if you think this would only be temporary.

We do not agree that “in our current situation it is only through living wage struggles that any kind of meaningful revolutionary discourse can exist.” These probably are producing an increased trade union consciousness among a section of the working class, but the struggle for higher wages and better working conditions (better conditions for the sale of labour-power) is not the same as socialist understanding of the need to get rid of the wages system altogether by bringing the means of production into the common ownership and democratic control of the whole population. That does not rise spontaneously out of the mere struggle for higher wages but requires the presence and activity of socialists to point this out directly.

Incidentally, for what it’s worth, Marx didn’t think much of such demands as “fixing the minimum wage by law”, which was one of the reform demands of the French Workers Party he had a hand in helping to set up in 1880. He wrote, referring to the proposer of this: “I told him: ‘If the French proletariat is still so childish as to require such bait, it is not worth while drawing up any program whatever.’” (Letter to Sorge, 5 November 1880, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/letters/80_11_05.htm)

As to the demand for a “National Maximum Salary”, we don’t think that this is something that those who want to abolish the wages system should get involved in. The bloated “salaries” received by many top business people and government officials are not really the price of their labour power but a disguised way of getting a share of the surplus value extracted from the unpaid labour of the workers.

Editors.

Letter: Imperialism (2010)

Letter to the Editors from the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Imperialism

Dear Editors

It was reported on Sunday 11 July 2010 that a boy of seven works a 98-hour week in Delhi to supply products to the British high street chain Poundland.

What is the SPGB position on the conception of imperialism through Lenin, Bukharin and Luxemburg and the idea of an aristocracy of labour?

Wirral Socialists 

(http://www.wirralsocialists.com)

Reply:

We have never accepted the view that a section of the working class in the developed capitalist countries – the so-called “aristocracy of labour” of skilled workers – shares in the proceeds of the exploitation of colonial and now ‘Third World’ countries, The wages paid to skilled workers here reflect the higher quality – due to more education, training and skill – of the labour power they have to sell.

It was only in 1920, in a preface to the French and German editions, of his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism that Lenin introduced the idea that a section of the working class in the imperialist countries shared in the booty extracted from capitalists, workers and peasants in the rest of the world. This was to try to secure the support of anti-colonial movements for his beleaguered regime in Russia. It was a political manoeuvre – “workers and colonial peoples unite” – that went against the basic principle of Marxian economics that wages represent the value of the labour-power a worker sells and contain no element of surplus value.

The original 1916 edition of the pamphlet did not contain this. It was a fairly run-of-the-mill analysis of imperialism and colonialism as put forward by Social Democrats of the time: that it was due to the higher profits to be made in the colonies and less developed countries than at home. The only real objection was to its subtitle of “the highest stage of capitalism” since capitalism had been “imperialist” in the 18th century too.

Rosa Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital (1912), however, was based on a faulty analysis of capitalism: that it suffered from a chronic shortage of home purchasing power that drove capitalist countries to seek markets outside capitalism, in the less developed parts of the world. Apart from its descriptive parts it is of little value.

The Bolshevik Bukharin’s Imperialism and the World Economy (1916) developed the idea of a single capitalist world economy and anticipated the role that the state was to play in supporting the overseas economic interests (markets, raw material resources, investment outlets, trade routes) of the capitalist firms established within its borders.

All three (and others) were trying to analyse the phenomenon of capitalism coming to dominate the whole world, as it did towards the end of the 19th century, to which the term “imperialism” was given. This was not the best term since imperialism is not something separate from capitalism and all capitalist countries, not just those normally labelled “imperialist”, are prepared to use force to further the vital economic interests of their capitalist class. – Editors.

Letter: Pete Seeger again (2010)

Letter to the Editors from the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pete Seeger again

Dear Editors

For a nonagenarian, Pete Seeger sure possesses some staying power. First Roy Beat and now Stephen Shenfield (June and August issues) have gone into print, both missing the main thrust of the March article. Instead, they laser-in on my flippant swipe at the Left’s perennial practice of hijacking every convenient bandwaggon –”good cause” – to promote itself.

In no way was I “dismissing” or “belittling” the Civil Rights Movement as they suggest; merely noting its inbuilt shortcomings. A southern negro could, of course, be summarily lynched for much less than displaying revolutionary tendencies; a reluctance to step into the gutter or an admiring glance (“rape”) sufficing.

All of us abhor Capitalism’s myriad injustices and obscenities but recognise that the solution begins with a rational understanding of the root causes rather than an emotional piecemeal assault on their effects. Is this “Sectarian”? Having pored long and hard over my dictionary, I can only conclude that in commonsense everyday terms it’s nothing of the sort. Personally I’m happier with “Socialist”.

Andrew Armitage

Engels on Human Evolution (2010)

From the September 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Links to Part 1 and Part 2.

Engels followed the impact of Darwin’s ideas more closely than Marx. He may even have read Darwin's “The Descent of Man”.

Unlike Marx, Engels continued his interest in Darwin and things Darwinian beyond the initial general public furore created by the publication of Origin. Apart from references to Darwin in his correspondence with Marx and others, the first major piece of work Engels produced was the notes for the unfinished The Rôle of Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, written between May and June 1876, over five years after the publication of the Descent.

This speculative, but interesting, work which includes a strong element of Lamarckism (but even Darwin had to resort to a version of Lamarck), can be seen as a Marxian response to the “Man’s place in nature” debate in at least two important ways. First of all, it attempts to show in what way humans are different from other animals. Unlike Darwin, who was eager to point to the similarities across species, to indicate the origins of typical human behaviour in a simpler form in other species, and that humans were only quantitatively different from animals, Engels was adamant in showing both the difference and similarities between humans and other animals. Whilst speculating in how human labour activity had evolved from earlier forms along with the evolution of physical organisation, and therefore within the Darwinian explanatory framework, he was also wanted to show how human labour differed from that of lower animals. Following the same line of argument he and Marx had arrived at thirty years previously in The German Ideology, he wrote:

“Animals…change the environment by their activities in the same way, even if not to the same extent, as man does, and these changes, as we have seen, in turn react upon and change those who made them…But animals exert a lasting effect on their environment unintentionally and, as far as the animals themselves are concerned, accidentally. The further removed men are from animals, however, the more their effect on nature assumes the character of premeditated, planned action directed towards preconceived ends” (Marx and Engels Collected Works, volume 25, p.459).

“In short, the animal merely uses its environment, and brings about changes in it simply by its presence; man by his changes makes it serve his ends, masters it. This is the final, essential distinction between man and other animals, and once again it is labour that brings about this distinction” (ibid., p.460).

In addition to this evolutionary explanation of the difference between human and animal labour, Engels’s argument can also be seen as a materialist response to Wallace’s “unseen spirit” explanation of the difference between humans and animal. Furthermore, Engels also opposed the mental materialism of Darwin, who based the difference between humans and other animals in the more developed and complex mentality of humans; a form of idealism that had dominated Western philosophy since the rise of Christianity:

“All merit for the swift advance of civilisation was ascribed to the mind, to the brain. Man became accustomed to explain their actions as arising out of thought instead of their needs (which in any case are reflected and perceived in the mind); and so in the course of time there emerged that idealistic world outlook which, especially since the fall of the world of antiquity, has dominated men’s minds. It still rules them to such a degree that even the most materialistic natural scientists of the Darwinian school are still unable to form any clear idea of the origin of man, because under this ideological influence they do not recognize the part that has been played therein by labour.”

Did Engels Read The Descent?

Engels seems to have kept up with the Darwinian literature on human evolution, making reference to T.H. Huxley, Ernst Haeckel, John Lubbock Charles Lyell and Alfred Russel Wallace, although it is not always clear which of their works he is referring to. So it is somewhat surprising that there is no explicit reference to The Descent or to what Darwin wrote on the matter. But seeing that he had read all these other authors, who had made their contribution before 1871, and that Darwin was the most important figure in this group, it would seem unusual that Engels would not read The Descent. Also, he had five years to read him before he started work on The Rôle of Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man in May 1876.

There is, however, some textual evidence that Engels did read The Descent. In the second paragraph of his pamphlet, Engels writes:

“Darwin has given us an approximate description of these ancestors of ours. They were completely covered with hair, they had beards and pointed ears, and they lived in bands in trees.”

This description attributed to Darwin comes in part from The Descent. In Chapter 6, “On the Affinities and Genealogy of Man,” Darwin writes:

“The early progenitors of man must have been once covered with hair, both sexes having beards; their ears were probably pointed, and capable of movement; and their bodies were provided with a tail, having proper muscles”

(Darwin The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1871; Penguin edition 2004, p.188).

The reference to “they lived in bands in trees“ too seems to have come from The Descent, as Darwin writes:    

“We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World.” (p. 678)

Therefore, unless Engels got these from another author, these two separate references provide adequate justification for thinking that Engels did read The Descent.

From Darwin to Marx: From Biology to History

Human beings possess a dual character, as both biological and historical beings, in a radically different way from any other animal.

For non-human animals, the biological, structural determination of their activity is dominant. As they get more biologically complex, they acquire the capacity for their activity to be modified by previous interactions with the world, but they live in the “now”; their activity is concerned with adjusting to the immediate circumstances they are interacting with. They have a blind past, as a species and as individual organism, but not a history.

Only humans have history. Through their linguistic ability and social co-operation, human beings have over centuries achieved (it is not nature-given) a greater degree of purpose and agency than any other species. As a result, they not only have a history, but can make history. But making history requires that the impersonal, law-like relations of the capital relationship, of production for profit, be destroyed and replaced by a free association of producers who create a world in their own interests and their own purpose. Only then will humanity shift from a determined pre-history to a determining history.

Ed Blewitt

(concluded)

50 Years ago: Harry Pollitt (2010)

The 50 Years Ago column from the September 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

What a tragedy was the life of Harry Pollitt! Here was a man who, horrified by the conditions of the working class as he had known them in his youth, set out in a genuine attempt to improve those conditions. He conceived a personal dislike of “the bosses,” and was determined to “make them pay” for what the workers had had to suffer. Yet Harry Pollitt never gained a thorough understanding of the forces that mould modern society, in Russia as well as in Britain. As a result, his deeply-felt hostility to the ruling class in Britain simply resulted in his becoming, indirectly, an overseas ally of the Russian ruling class. It is not enough merely to oppose capitalism, as one has known it: one must be for its alternative, Socialism. Had Harry Pollitt succeeded in his efforts, he would merely have been instrumental in establishing state capitalism in Britain, in place of the variety we have at present. And that would have left the workers exactly where they  are  now.

[From “The Passing Show” by A.W.E., Socialist Standard, September 1960]

SPGB Meetings (2010)

Party News from the September 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard