50 Years Ago: The fat of the land (2025)

The 50 Years Ago column from the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Even a newspaper like The Sun should be asked to explain itself at times. On 22nd November its editorial said: ‘Britain’s future is bleak, sombre and perilous . . . the British are fat, lazy, complacent — and deeply in debt’.

Who are ‘Britain’ and ‘the British’ in this statement? Clearly, The Sun does not mean everyone. Harold Wilson and Edward Heath are both fat, but they are not deeply in debt with bleak futures. Denis Healey is fat. So is Reginald Maudling. The Houses of Parliament are full of fat people, and they are only outweighed by the Institute of Directors. Nobody supposes, however, that these are the target of The Sun’s unkind words and its sombre warning.

What it means is the working class, and it’s a funny thing how the idea of a working man being fat is equated with national disaster. (…) The Sun was in fact commenting on, and supporting, a report on ‘Britain’s plight’ by the Hudson Institute of America: experts say poverty is on the way. (…)

On 5th December similar forecasts and warnings were given in a review by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. According to this, in 1975 prices will rise still higher and unemployment will grow. Both teams of ‘experts’ had plans to urge. The National Institute thought import controls would prove necessary; the Hudson Institute would remedy things by ‘a new national six-year economic policy’ run by ‘Britain’s best economists and administrators’.

The latter scheme is presumably to ensure that, whatever happens, the fat and the thin remain distinguishable. How little use it would be otherwise is shown by one of The Sun’s remarks:

‘Leadership—or lack of it—is one element, of course. We are all of us unfortunate to live in an age of political pygmies. But perhaps we are already beyond the stage where we could be rescued by inspired leadership.’

Which is saying that things have come to a crisis under unimpressive dolts, but would be no better under geniuses.

The fallacy of all this is treating the impending crisis as an abnormality. Words like ‘doomsday’, ‘peril’, ‘saving Britain’ and ‘the Dunkirk spirit’ imply it to be a millennial catastrophe; but that is only a way of calling for more sacrifices from the workers. The reality is that the crisis is a normal phenomenon of capitalism.

[From the article, 'The fat of the land', by Robert Barltrop, Socialist Standard, January 1975.]

Editorial: The change of rulers in Syria (2025)

Editorial from the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the brutal 50-year tyranny of the Assad dynasty collapsed last month, people danced in the streets in many parts of Syria as they contemplated an unprecedented new beginning. Joyous crowds looted the Presidential palace, while the titular head of the Ba’ath party dictatorship skulked off to Moscow.

The fall of the secular Arab nationalist dictatorship alters the balance of power between the various states in the region, with Turkey and the United States the winners and Iran and Russia the losers. The winners took quick advantage of the initial power vacuum. Turkey sent its proxies to attack the Kurdish nationalists who control a large part of Syria including the oilfields. Indeed, Turkey must have given the victorious Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) Islamists the green light to march on Aleppo and then down to Damascus.

The United States benefits from a weakened Iran, the main threat to its current domination of the wider region and the oilfields and the trade routes out of it.

Israel, too, wasted no time in exploiting this tense, multiplayer Game of Thrones scenario, by bombing Syria’s navy to the bottom of the sea, as well as a host of other targets, and pressing forward in the Golan Heights. Their reasoning is obvious. One or other group is eventually going to take power in Syria. If it’s a group that hates Israel, they can hate Israel without missiles and a navy. In a world where relations between states is based on ‘might is right’, Israel wants another weak neighbour like Lebanon.

What was surprising was the rapidity with which the dictatorship collapsed. Its conscript army was reluctant to fight and the general population, suffering from increased economic hardship due to Western sanctions (the cruel way the West employs to undermine a dictatorship it doesn’t support) was ready to welcome a change of regime

HTS seems keen to solicit international recognition, which means making some concessions to capitalist liberal democracy, but it has been designated a terrorist organisation by the West, and there’s a $10m price on the head of its leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, aka Abu Mohammed al-Jolani. Indeed this former al-Qaeda and ISIS fighter has publicly praised the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, and faced home-turf protests that his Sharia-law regime in the province of Idlib was as bad as Assad’s. But he has also faced protests by Islamic hardliners who think he’s not fundamentalist enough.

The political direction of travel is not obvious at the time of writing, and any spark could set off civil war. For the sake of the people of Syria, newly released from a tyranny that looked eternal, we can only hope not. As for the long-term future, it would seem almost churlish to point out that, if the country doesn’t go into meltdown, they’ll get the wage-slavery and the limited political ‘rights’ that workers have in many other capitalist countries, while a new privileged Syrian ruling class exploiting them emerges. That, unfortunately, is the best-case scenario, in the absence of an imminent global socialist revolution. The worst-case scenario doesn’t bear thinking about.

Socialist Sonnet No. 175: New Old Year? (2024)

From the Socialism or Your Money Back blog

 

New Old Year?

Backward facing Janus covers those eyes

That cannot look away from the grim sights

Blighting far, far too many days and nights,

The common realisation of lies,

Told about the military murder

Of expendable civilians

For what will prove to be mere pyrrhic gains.

Then those wild firestorms and floods that occur

As climate changes but policies don’t.

And, so it was, yet another year went,

With capitalism seeming content

And secure in its pursuit of profit.

From the threshold of the old and the new,

Does Janus hold a more positive view?

 

D. A.

"In the year 2025, if man is still alive, and if the hard copy of the Standard can survive, they may find* . . ."

First post of the year should be a (brief) look back at the blog in 2024.

Unfortunately, I spread myself a little too thin in 2024. I only put up 1359 posts in 2024 which is not terrible but I was aiming for 1500 posts as a bare minimum. Too much time spent elsewhere on social media, too much time starting mini-projects which have yet to see fruition on the blog. Hopefully some of them will see the light in 2025. There are no excuses if I make the same *cough* excuse come January 1st, 2026.

A milestone of sorts was reached in late December when the blog passed 4 million hits. Two points: 1) The obvious one first: I'm under no illusion that the majority of the hits are bots, etc. However, I do know from the blog's site tracker that the blog continues to receive a healthy audience from around the world. It's pleasing to note that many of those visitors are returning viewers. The blog continues to serve its purpose of providing another online presence for socialist propaganda. (The more the merrier.) And if it's also used as nothing more than a resource for students of working class history, all the better for that. 2) The 'hits' on the blog actually exceed 4 million. When google overhauled Blogger a few years back the stats actually went back to Year Zero.

New pages were added to the top of the page in January of last year for the current regular columns in the Socialist Standard, and there are plans to add more pages in the coming calendar year. I won't say too much right now. Just watch this space.

Now to the meat of the post: the twenty most viewed posts on the blog in 2024. This is only the fourth time that I've done a 'End of the Year Stats' post, which is actually bastard annoying when you consider that 2024 was the 18th year of the blog. Think of all those missing years. 

Nice to see a couple of Ralph Critchfield ('Ivan') pieces in amongst the twenty. He really was a wonderful writer for the Standard over many decades. Interesting to note that a couple of old pieces on Lenin - including Fitzgerald's classic 1924 obituary of Lenin - continue to receive hits year on year.  The video review of the German Industrial Metal band, Rammstein, polled so high 'cos I made a point of seeking out fan pages for the band on social media, and posted the article front and centre on said pages. Steve Coleman's humbug piece probably polled so high 'cos it had Christmas in its title, and I fear it could become the blog's perennial end of the year number one because of that. Lumbered with the impossibilist equivalent of Mariah Carey singing the Declaration of Principles to the tune of 'Little Drummer Boy'.

Anyway, in the spirit of the late and great Johnny Walker, here's the countdown of the twenty most viewed posts on the blog for the year 2024.

20. Taboo (1982)

19. Elections worldwide (2024)

18. “I hoped he liked me as well as I liked him.”

17. Snap, crackle, pop . . . (1987)

16. Confusion on the left (1965)

15. Dropped the ball . . .

14. Zionism – A case study in nationalism (2024)

13. Bird’s Eye View: Howlers (2023)

12. Warnings and alerts (2024)

11. Halo Halo! (2024)

10. Labour landslides: then and now (2024)

9. Tiny Tips (2024)

8. Uncensored News and Views on Russia (1946)

7. The Passing of Lenin. (1924)

6. A plague on both their houses (2024)

5. Lenin's Distortion of Marxism (1983)

4. Historical fascism (2024)

3. New translation of Das Kapital (2024)

2. Video Review: German cultural history and socialism (2024)

1. The ghost of Christmas yet to come (1995)

*Apologies to Zager & Evans.