Halo, Halo! (2025)

The Halo Halo Column from the March 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Babies don’t enter the world going ‘Yay, I’m an [insert one of the 4000 religions here]’. Children growing up believing all sorts of that nonsense is down to nurture, not nature. Fortunate are the children whose carers doesn’t indoctrinate them into hokum.

My parents were not religious. My mother grew up in a Methodist household and her sister was devoted all of her life. Time has made me regret not having a conversation with them both to ascertain the difference in their views and why both my parents eschewed religion.

There was a small chapel about a quarter of mile from where we lived. Given its size I surmise that it may have belonged to a small sect. A neighbour’s daughter, I’m guessing aged around 19, somehow persuaded my parents to send me, around eight or nine years old, to the Sunday School there. I don’t blame my parents. Perhaps they wanted a little peace and quiet from a demanding child.

Time has dimmed the recollection as to how long I endured this. I do recall that after a number of weeks children there were given a religious book. A bribe? I was a bibliophile even at that age. It was upon the receipt of my second ‘gift’ that I informed my parents I would no longer be wasting my Sundays by sitting through such nonsense.

The reason? Having been given the same book twice. I still can remember the outrage I felt. A similar outrage remains with me for having unfairly been given a detention in senior school. Speaking of which, not even the compulsory daily school assemblies consisting of hymns and a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer changed my views of religion. Perhaps nature imbues individuals with a natural disinclination toward fairy tales after all.

I once had a partner who, like me, wasn’t religious, but who liked the spectacle of church theatre on occasions such as Christmas. Her best friend, known since childhood days, had a boyfriend who was also, like her, of a Christian bent. My nature towards other people always having been of a non-discriminatory sort this didn’t prevent a social relationship developing.

At Christmas time, after spending a long convivial evening in a pub, we would go to the midnight service at the non-Catholic church which these two individuals attended. My non-religious partner enjoyed the theatre of the occasion. Keep your partner happy, right? Now it would be different.

Around the third year of this ritual, she told me that we wouldn’t be doing the same that year as her friend had informed her that the presence of two atheists, as we were known to be, was ‘upsetting’ to the two Christians at such a ‘sacred’ event. Outrage kicked in again. I was indifferent as to whether we went or not but ‘friends’ don’t behave like that to one another. She was more forgiving and remained friends with them. Love god or else!

DC

Tiny Tips (2025)

The Tiny Tips column from the March 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Kylie Jenner, the 27-year-old billionaire and car enthusiast, was recently spotted with her sister Kendall Jenner driving her $3 million Bugatti Chiron in Beverly Hills. Known for her impressive car collection, Kylie gave fans a rare glimpse of herself behind the wheel rather than posing next to her fleet. 

(Yahoo)

‘Everything outside the Christian framework — including secular music, television, and books — was discouraged. Just as I signed multiple purity pledges throughout my preteen and teen years, promising to avoid not just sex, but even impure thoughts, we were taught to practice absolute abstinence from dangerous ideas’. 

(AlterNet)

While official data is still somewhat sketchy, it’s estimated that 12,000 illegal transplants are performed annually, about 10% of the total number of transplants conducted each year. The organ trade is immensely profitable, generating between $840 million to $1.7 billion in revenue for a relatively small number of traffickers, according to estimates compiled in 2017. Organ trafficking survives, in part, because the demand from affluent consumers in the advanced capitalist West is so high and the legal supply of organs – primarily (about 80%) kidneys, but also lungs, livers and cornea – barely keeps pace. Many people wait at least two years to qualify to receive an organ transplant legally and thousands die every year – about 25 daily, according to the World Health Organization – because no organ becomes available in time to save them. Where do the illegally harvested organs come from? Primarily from North Africa and South Asia. Organ traffickers prey on poor and vulnerable rural dwellers, offering cash in exchange for an organ, usually a kidney. 

(Counterpunch)

This is about the Arctic. You have Russia that is trying to become king of the Arctic with 60-plus icebreakers, some of them nuclear-powered. Do you know how many we have, Jesse? We have two, and one just caught on fire. This is about critical minerals. This is about natural resources. This is about, as the polar ice caps pull back, the Chinese are now cranking out icebreakers and pushing up there as well. So, it’s oil and gas. It’s our national security. It’s critical minerals. 

(Common Dreams)

The response provided by South Africa’s elected officials has so far been both lacking and sinister. It targets migrants with few political allies in the country’s fractured political scene, increasingly characterized by populism, highlighting problems without solutions. 

(Geopolitical Intelligence Services AG)

As long as the capitalist system continues, we will never be able to escape from the shackles of economic crisis, war and massacre, ecological destruction, and workers’ sacrifice. The only solution is the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system and its replacement with communism, a society in which the means of production are no longer in the hands of capitalists or the state, but are socialised, in which production and distribution are in harmony with humanity and nature. 

(Controversies)

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

Preemptive correction (2025)

From the March 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Verso have announced the publication in April of a book by Jasper Bernes entitled The Future of Revolution: Communist prospects from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising. A passage in the advance publicity for the book reads:

When Marx wrote that the Paris Commune of 1871 showed that “the working-class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes,” he identified a principle that will remain true as long as capitalism and its class antagonism persists.

What Marx wrote may or may not remain true as long as capitalism lasts but the subtitle of the book suggests that Bernes is not interpreting the passage in the way Marx meant; that he thinks that Marx wrote ‘simply cannot’ rather than ‘cannot simply’ and was advocating some sort of uprising or insurrection against the capitalist state as the way to communism as a society of common ownership and production directly to meet people’s needs (or socialism, as we call it and as Bernes too seems to define it).

The passage is taken from a manifesto Marx wrote in behalf of the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA) immediately after the fall of the Commune of Paris at the end of May 1871, and later published as part of a pamphlet The Civil France in France. The Commune had been an uprising in Paris against the French government following its defeat in January 1871 in the Franco-Prussian War. It was not an attempt to establish socialism as the common ownership of the means of production but it did introduce a wide political democracy in which, for the first time in history, workers played a part in running things.

Marx’s point was that this — introducing full political democracy — was what the working class should first do on winning control of political power, before using it to introduce pro-worker measures. In other words, the working class should take control of ‘the ready-made state machinery’ but ‘amputate’ (his word) ‘the merely repressive organs of the old governmental power’ before using it.

That this is what Marx meant is clear from a speech he gave the following year, in September 1872, on the margin of the IWMA Congress in The Hague in which he was reported as saying:

You know that the institutions, mores, and traditions of various countries must be taken into consideration, and we do not deny that there are countries — such as America, England, and if I were more familiar with your institutions, I would perhaps also add Holland — where the workers can attain their goal by peaceful means.

How could the working class do this without ‘laying hold’ of ‘the ready-made state machinery’ through organising politically and winning an election? Only once they had done this would they be in a position to lop off its undemocratic features before using it to end capitalism and introduce socialism or to deal with any ‘pro-slavery’ rebellion by some capitalist elements.

Those who disagree with this are entitled to their point of view but they are not entitled to claim that it was Marx’s.

Adam Buick

Sting in the Tail: The restrictive society (1995)

The Sting in the Tail column from the March 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

The restrictive society

Capitalism is a divisive society that not only puts worker against capitalist in a fierce class struggle. It also drives worker against worker in competition for work and wages.

A recent example of this is illustrated in the Independent (24 December) under the headline “Bring back pass laws, says black South Africans”. This report dealt with the influx of illegal immigrants to South Africa from Zaire, Mozambique and other African countries.

"Pass laws may make a comeback in Nelson Mandela's new democratic South Africa. Many black people who were victimised by them under apartheid in the past are now looking with favour on controls for immigrants. "

What a miserable society capitalism is. In the last two months of 1994 the South African government had deported 50,000 workers back to Mozambique. The same sorry story applies to Mexican workers deported from the USA. Capitalism is a world-wide system of exploitation and restriction.

Only inside a socialist system of society will men and women be free to roam the world as they desire.

Shared fantasy

First, the Fantasy Football league and now the Fantasy Share League, a creation of BBC2's Working Lunch programme. Players are invited to compete with the City of London's professionals in forecasting how shares will perform and to back their judgment by pretending to buy and sell them.

But what chance can the amateur forecasters have against the professionals? One clue was provided by Mick Clarke, Stock Market Correspondent of the Times, who confessed on Working Lunch that he had been plugging Asil Nadir’s Polly Peck company prior to its collapse.

And an article in the Guardian (27 December) reviewed how the experts had fared in 1994:

“Most of the City’s leading ‘gurus’ are probably wishing they could have eaten their words — especially those issued with great confidence this time last year. ”

When it comes to predicting how any market will perform, the only real difference between professionals and amateurs is that the former get paid for doing it while the latter do it for nothing.

Muddle-headed Ken

Ken Coates, Labour MEP, is upset over Tony Blair’s plans to change Clause Four of the Labour Party’s constitution. You can tell this from his comments on Blair and the Party “modernisers’’ whom he described as:

“bastards and shits who are going to walk past the unemployed” (Guardian, 14 January)

Does Coates really think that Clause Four, which he says “I cannot live without”, ever made a scrap of difference to unemployment under Labour governments? The fact is that every time Labour left office unemployment was higher than when it came in.

But Coates also asked an interesting question:

“How can you talk about equality and assume the permanent continuation of employers and employees?"

If he is being serious here then what is he doing in a party which, despite the presence of Clause Four, has always endorsed the production from profit system of which the employer/employee relationship is such an integral part?

Trial by torture

Kilroy on BBC1 isn’t one of Scorpion’s favourite TV programmes but the edition on 20 January was riveting stuff.

Two Tories were stuck with the task of defending the government against an angry bunch of OAP’s who complained over and over about their poverty. The luckless pair were Barbara, a County Councillor, and Daniel, a would-be Tory' MP.

And how they floundered as they tried to deal with the pensioners' flood of accusations: Barbara couldn’t even bring herself to say the word “poverty”, preferring instead “lower living standards”, while Daniel could only answer the demand for higher pensions by bleating “Where's the money to come from?” and insisting that “People should save more for their old age.”

It was a joy to see how those Tory' apologists were made to squirm by the pensioners, but the dogged way in which they defended the indefensible must have earned them the admiration of every watching politician.

Alive and kicking

Are trade unions finished? Vicious antiunion laws, large-scale unemployment plus the growth of part-time work have planted the idea among many workers that TUs can no longer produce results. These changed circumstances do mean that unions are not so effective as they once were in some activities, but they are increasingly effective in others.

For example, figures published by the TUC show that the unions won £335 million in 1993/4 in compensation for members who suffered injury or ill-health at work or were unfairly dismissed. This figure represents an eight percent increase over the previous year and is in spite of falling membership.

Socialists are the first to point to the limitation of trade unions, but their value to workers in the industrial struggle remains and should not be underestimated.

Pseudo-revolutionaries corner

In the olden days when the Communist Party used to exist they used to justify every change of “tactics" by reference to “dialectics, comrade, dialectics”. Now their mantle has fallen on the SWP whose leader Tony Cliff spouts the same gobbledegook Here he is writing about the “third stage”of the industrial struggle:

"Now we come to a problem. The level of generalisation is on the one hand quite low, but at the same time it is quite high. This sounds like a contradiction, but the contradiction is reality. ”

Eh?

Scorpion

Capitalist Values in the Modern World (1995)

From the March 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

The long stated aim of the Labour Party is to run the market economy better than the Tories. What they really mean is that they want to try and run capitalism better — though, as yet, they haven't mustered the courage to use that word. To most people now, the Labour Party is an alternative to the Conservative Party only in the same way that Pepsi is an alternative to Coca Cola

There is a profound dishonesty about the Labour Party’s discussion document, Labour's Objects: Socialist values in the modern world, which is the basis for discussion throughout that party and for its special conference abandonment of Clause Four next month. We use the term dishonesty advisedly, for, the document is a work of confidence trickery, designed to convince Labour’s rank-and-file that it is about “strengthening socialist values”, when in fact it is a total capitulation to the ideology of capitalism.

Of course, Labour has always been a capitalist party in the sense that it has never sought to abolish production for profit and establish production for use. Even veteran left-winger, Tony Benn, whose knowledge of the Labour Party is rather longer and broader than that of Tony Blair, has repeated persistently that "the Labour Party is not — and probably never was — a socialist party” (Independent, 17 May 1989) and that "Socialism has been explicitly repudiated. Capitalism is hardly ever mentioned. The only political choice seems to be between two management teams, both committed to . . . the status quo. " (Tribune, 8 April 1994). Most Labour activists know that Benn is right, so the current talk of “socialist values” is nothing more than fraudulence.

Neither democratic nor socialist

Never in recent times has the term “socialist” and“socialism”appeared so often in a Labour Party document as in this latest one. It is there as a sop to the party's members. It is an insult to their political intelligence, treating them as mugs who will be won over by empty words. Sadly, in many cases it will succeed. But the mugs will pay their price, for once the leaders have their new constitution you can be sure that the term “socialism” will be as absent from future speeches and literature as it has been from every recent Labour Party manifesto. The truth is that these power-seeking politicians are embarrassed by those of their “comrades” who joined the party thinking (mistakenly) that it was socialist.

Not only is it dishonest, but also undemocratic. Blair announced that he wanted to change the objective of his party. Having stated this and called for debate, when the first response to his view came in a Guardian ad placed by a number of Labour MEPs who totally repudiated his position he admonished them for daring to criticise him in public, declaring such action to be “immature”. Is that Blair’s idea of a democratic discussion? According to polls, the overwhelming majority of constituency Labour parties are opposed to scrapping Clause Four. Blair’s response is to move the goalposts and insist that all book-members of his party have a vote, ensuring that the constituency activists will be outvoted. When the current document was circulated there was no invitation to opponents of the leader to circulate their points of view' in the same mail-out. Such democracy would not even occur to a fundamentally undemocratic party like Labour. Indeed, worse than that, on the green “Response Sheet” within the bogus consultation document, incredibly, there exists no place to state any support for Clause Four.

Contrast this with the Socialist Party where all policy is made by conference, which is mandated by all members, or by a party poll of each and every. member. Any move to change our Object or Declaration of Principles would be thoroughly debated, undoubtedly the subject of a party poll in which all sides would have their views published and circulated at the party’s expense, and then decided by a vote of members after full discussion without any priority being given to leaders (we have none) or officials That is the only way to conduct socialist debate and those who stray from the ways of democracy have absolutely no right to call themselves socialists.

Capitulation to capitalism

On page two we are told that “The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party” which is a lie: it is neither democratic nor socialist. But you have only to read on to page eight to see just what that means to them: "We believe in an economy that works in the public interest. A competitive market economy, with a strong industrial and wealth generating base is in the public interest. ”

Now, you are either in favour of production "in the public interest” (i.e. for need) or within “a competitive market” (i.e. for sale and profit). The two aims are mutually exclusive. The market cannot be run in the public interest because it is a market in which most of the public are themselves on sale, as items of labour power to be bought for less than the cost of what they produce. Profit arises out of the difference between what workers produce and what we are paid. So, in supporting the market Labour is necessarily opposing the workers’ interests. We are prepared to accept that Blair and his co-leaders are quite ignorant of this point and really believe that you can run a socialist society on the basis of market competition. They are theoretically shallow people whose sole political experience has been gained in vote-trading and devising policies for capitalism. But surely many of their followers, some at least of whom will have joined Labour in revulsion against the market and profits, will see the absurdity of the position they are being asked to vote for.

Again dishonestly, the document explains that talk of “common ownership” only came about because "there was a genuine revulsion at the sheer anarchy and exploitation associated with the free market of Victorian capitalism”. The reference to “Victorian capitalism” is a clever piece of trickery, leading readers to assume that of course 1990s’ capitalism is free from economic anarchy, the exploitation of wage labour and the vandalism of “the free market”. Many Labour members and supporters will know just how much this applies to capitalism in 1995, especially when looked at as a global system.

We offer no advice to Labour's membership as to whether they vote for or against Clause Four. If it is retained the party’s leaders, including Blair, have already declared it to be meaningless and to have meant nothing to them for years. (So much for what is written on every' Labour Party membership card!) If it is scrapped the process of turning Labour into a more successful version of Owen’s SDP will be completed No self-respecting worker seeking the end of the market-capitalist economy will remain in the Labour Party.

Power at any cost

But there is one reason for supporting anything that Blair proposes, however dishonest, undemocratic, confused and at odds with what you actually believe it might be, and that is spelt out in the second paragraph of the document:

"There are those who will ask why it is necessary to have this debate. The answer is simple. We will not win an election unless we win the trust of the people. ”

But what precisely is winning “the trust of the people”? Is it really the case that millions of workers (who, oddly enough, have put Labour in a massive poll lead because they are so desperate to get rid of the Tories) are saying “Well, we would vote Labour, but not until they can convince us that they support a competitive market economy”? We think not. But you can be quite sure that the Murdoch Empire and the Stock Exchange are after a firm assurance. Remember, in the last election the crook’s own daily, the Financial Times, urged its readers to vote Labour. Blair’s job is to convince as many of these people as possible that his government can provide a low-taxed, low-waged, highly-policed competitive market economy in Britain. The increasingly obnoxious Daily Mirror on 30 January carried an editorial entitled “There's No Clause for Concern” in which readers are urged to "be cheered by (Blair’s) determination to create a just and equal society”. This is fraud, not that different from the tradition of the Mirror's unlamented old crook of a proprietor (himself an ex-Labour MP).

There will be those workers within the Labour Party who will reluctantly bow to their leaders and do simply anything to get a Labour government elected. Anything, they will tell themselves, must be better than the Tories. Must it? What about a party of Blair-led Labour-Tories, funded by union money and acting like recent Labour governments in Australia and New Zealand which, according to workers there, are worse, if anything, than their conservative rivals? Power at any cost is a very foolish course to adopt.

It is not as if there is no choice. There is a Socialist Party. Our Object is what any self-respecting and principled socialist would support. Tony Benn says that he will stick with the Labour Party until he dies: an act of dogmatic commitment worthy of religious zealotry. But what about workers who are young enough to want something more than loyalty to a dishonest capitalist party for their future? You owe it to yourselves to find out more about what genuine socialists are saying and doing.

Steve Coleman

Letter: A Campaign with Revolutionary Implications? (1995)

From the March 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

ALB’s review of Selma James's Marx and Feminism (Socialist Standard, December 1994) not only gives a misleading portrayal of a tradition which has made a valuable contribution to libertarian communist thought, but also displays the usual blind-spots present in much orthodox Marxist theorising (or lack of it) on the position of women under capitalism.

The Socialist Party may dismiss Wages for Housework as "conservative" and reformist.but I believe that they, together with the Autonomist Marxist tradition with which they are connected. have made the following critical interventions which have revolutionary implications:

(a) Selma James, together with Mariarosa Dalla Costa, was among the first to show how capitalism is founded not only on the capital/wage labour relationship but also on a hierarchy between waged and unwaged within the working-class. Thus capital “hides behind" the unpaid labour of those, usually women and people of colour, who carry out activities such as care-giving, cooking, cleaning, and basic food production, upon which "free" wage labour depends. Where these activities are provided in return for a wage, this usually involves the "super-exploitation" of labour-power as in the case of the so-called Third World where many women and men are paid far less than the average cost of meeting their subsistence needs. The production and reproduction of the commodity "labour power" is central, therefore, to the ongoing process of capital accumulation.

(b) Present day capitalism can usefully be seen as a "social factory" in which class struggle has spread to virtually all areas of everyday life, even as. numerically speaking, "wage labourers" have come to constitute a small minority of the world’s working-class. (The German sociologist Claudia von Werlhof has estimated that only 10-20 percent of the world’s working class are wage labourers "free" to sell their labour-power in return for a wage or salary. The rest, made up of women, subsistence producers. peasants and other "marginalised" labourers appear to be the "norm" despite what Eurocentric forms of Marxism would have us believe.) Resistance to capitalist domination, therefore, occurs in sites far removed from factory-based industrial production and trade unions: from women fighting against the introduction of reproductive technologies to the resistance of indigenous peoples to the forced enclosure of common land. In this respect. James and Dalla Costa have stressed the importance of recognising the diversity of working-class experience as well as the commonalities. They and other feminists have exploded the myth of the white, male, unionised wage labourer as the subject of Marxist analysis and agent of revolutionary change.

(c) Wages for Housework and the Autonomist Marxist tradition has consistently stressed the futility of reformism, particularly as it is embodied in unionism, labour parties. Leninism, and the “left” in general. They have been critical of those leftists who see the way forward as more jobs/full employment, more rational control of capitalist production disguised as "workers control", a social democratic government, or a vanguard party leading the masses to revolution. Selma James castigates feminists who "don't aim to destroy the capitalist social relation but only to organize it more rationally" while Mariarosa Dalla Costa has argued that those "who advocate that the liberation of the working-class woman lies in her getting a job outside the home are part of the problem, not the solution. Slavery to an assembly line is not a liberation from slavery to a kitchen sink" (Dalla Costa & James The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community. Bristol: Falling Wall Press. 1972. pp 2 and 33 respectively). The alternative this tradition poses is concurrent with other non-market communist traditions; the abolition of capitalist work (both waged and unwaged labour) and of the state, common ownership and production for human needs, and the encouragement of the fullest possible range of human creative activity unmediated by the capital class relationship.

(d) In arguing for the importance of the self-activity of the working-class. Wages for Housework argues against vanguardism and the centralised Party (with a capital "P") and for the development of autonomous organisations within the working-class. These have enabled women, for example, to challenge the sexism of male-dominated socialist organisations which have colluded, perhaps unintentionally, with capital and the state in rendering women's work socially invisible, "natural" and unproductive, and relegating to "side issues” any attempts by women to organise independently to challenge their exploitation. It is only by supporting the autonomy of various organisations throughout the circulation of struggles within the working class, that divisions can be overcome as a prerequisite for class unity and fundamental social change.

It is in the above respect that the campaign for Wages for Housework should be understood. not as just another single-issue reformist group. Rather than an end in itself, the campaign for a guaranteed income for women and men homeworkers is best looked at as a strategic intervention designed to expose patriarchal capitalism's dependence on the unpaid labour of women, and bring to the forefront some of the unique experiences and struggles faced by women as members of a divided working-class.

With their fixation on wage/salaried labour as the source of surplus value for the capitalist class, socialists (following Marx) have generally ignored the production and reproduction of labour-power and have historically accepted the false division between "private"/reproductive/unwaged work and "public"/productive/waged work imposed by capital on the working class. Furthermore the Socialist Party has always maintained that the only worthwhile vehicles for defending the living standards, wages, working conditions etc of the working class under capitalism are trade unions. The Socialist Standard continues to pay scant attention to forms of working-class struggle outside of unions, such as that waged by women in Wages for Housework. Such a monolithic class analysis does little to overcome the many divisions within the working class at the same time as it provides cannon fodder for those who feel that Marxism is now outmoded.

Feminists argue that the liberation of women entails more than simply the abolition of wage labour and the establishment of "free access" to wealth produced. It is quite possible, they argue, to conceive of a socialist society (as defined by the Socialist Party) where the wages system has been abolished yet an exploitative sexual division of labour continues to exist, where women continue to lack control over their bodies, sexuality, or reproductive rights, or where male violence continues on a substantial scale. We might, then, question ALB's assertion that "the energies of those who are. quite rightly, concerned about the economic dependence of women on men would be much better directed to campaigning for socialism”, and ask instead whether at least some of the energies of those socialists who are concerned about the liberation of women might be better employed listening to feminists. 

Julian Prior

Burnaby, Canada.

Reply:

The claim that the Wages for Housework Campaign is now a single-issue campaign for a reform within capitalism was based on the contents of the pamphlet Marx and Feminism itself and of the accompanying publicity material sent us by the publishers.

In the 1970s Selma James did talk about "class struggle”, "revolutionary action", “abolishing capitalism", etc (though not so much about abolishing wages, money and markets and instituting common ownership and production solely and directly to satisfy people’s needs) and she saw the launching of a campaign for "wages for housework" in this context.

We wouldn't deny — and weren’t concerned to deny — that James and others made some valid criticisms of the narrow definition of the working class (and so also of the agent of revolutionary change) held by Trotskyists, Leninists, Stalinists and other leftists. In defining the working class only as miners, dockers, factory workers, etc these excluded whole sections of the working class from being able to play a full role in the transformation of society and downgraded their problems and struggles to being marginal or secondary.

But this criticism didn't apply to us since we have always had a broad definition of the working class as all those excluded from the ownership and control of the means of production irrespective of the job they do (or don't do). OK. perhaps not so broad as to include "subsistence producers, peasants and indigenous peoples” but this issue has been discussed amongst our members.

Nor is it accurate to say that we have "always maintained that the only worthwhile vehicles for defending the living standards. wages. working conditions, etc of the working class under capitalism are trade unions". We may see trade unions as the main vehicles for doing this, but we don't exclude other organisations like tenants associations, claimants unions, student unions — or some women’s organisations such as those advising women of their legal rights or refuges for battered women. The Wages for Housework Campaign. however, does not enter into this category. It is a politically-motivated reformist group.

James came from an ex-Trotskyist tradition, but one which had not got rid of all the assumptions and methods of Trotskyism, in particular the so-called "transitional demand". This is a demand put forward by militants for discontented workers to struggle for but which the militants know full well is not achievable under capitalism: their hope is that when, as a result of their unsuccessful struggle, the discontented workers realise this they will turn against capitalism and become revolutionaries.

James's disagreement with the Trotskyists was not over whether or not to put forward "transitional demands" but over what these demands should be and at who they should be aimed. They favoured demands of a trade union-type like “indexisation of wages to prices". “35-hour week", "workers' control". She rejected this on the grounds that these demands could only be attractive to unionised, mainly male, factory workers and left out unwaged women doing housework as “the slave of a wage slave". The alternative she proposed was "wages for housework" as a transitional demand to mobilise women as an autonomous movement. independent of (and even opposed to) the Trade Union and Labour Movement.

We always rejected "transitional demands". As far as we are concerned they were just reforms. while the Socialist Party had been founded on the principle that a socialist organisation should not advocate reforms; this was not because we were against all reforms but because we recognise that reformism cannot solve the problems of the working class within capitalism and because of the effect we felt that campaigning for reforms would have on the socialist nature of the organisation. We argued that for it to campaign for reforms would attract the support of people who wanted reforms not socialism and that this would eventually lead to it becoming a reformist organisation.

The fate of the Wages for Housework Campaign which James helped set up over twenty years ago illustrates this perfectly.

Whatever might have been her original intention (and there is no reason to doubt that she then wanted to get rid of capitalism with its privileges for the few and exploitation and oppression for the many), the WFH Campaign has become a single-issue reformist pressure group.

The publicity material accompanying the review consisted of an interview of Selma James and Margaret Prescod in the Los Angeles Times of 7 May 1987, a news item from the same paper headlined “Bill Would Make Housework Count in Calculation of GNP" (12 December 1991), and an article on Selma James from the London Times of 19 February 1992.

All these articles have a common theme: that the payment by the state of money to women for doing housework is a demand that should, and can, be achieved within capitalism, and is in fact on the way to being realised thanks to successful lobbying by James and others of the United Nations, the European Parliament and the US House of Representatives. James is quoted as follows:

"There are. she says, two questions. women always ask when confronted by the concept of wages for housework. "Who will pay for it?" and "Will we ever get it?' Her answers are "Trident" — she would siphon off the entire military budget to pay for unremunerated labour — and "Yes'. 

Her optimism springs from existing welfare provisions. "Child benefit and income support are forms of recognition that women working in the home have an entitlement to wages, even though it is not enough. Those benefits are creeping wages for housework and after you creep you walk, after you walk you run." (Times, 19 February 1992)

.

A far cry from what she was saying in the 1970s. Now it’s the inevitability of gradualism. We once heard somebody (not a member of the Socialist Party) describe "wages for housework" as a “crap demand". His point was that if you were going to make such a demand on the state you might as well demand a basic state income for everybody. We said you might as well establish socialism, at least that was achievable.

There are feminists and feminists. Some (most, these days?) feminists wouldn’t know what you were talking about if you mentioned "the abolition of the wages system" and "free access": they are concerned with getting women an equal chance to compete in the rat-race that capitalism is and to scramble to the top of the heap if they can. Or, in a language they wouldn't understand. to turn women from unequal wage slaves and from “slaves to wage slaves" into "equal wage slaves” with men.

Other feminists may well be able to conceive of a socialist society in which discrimination and oppression of women continued. Well, we can't and we're socialists and they're not. Socialism involves people voluntarily co-operating to produce and distribute wealth and to run their common affairs on a democratic basis, with free access for all to the things they need to live and enjoy life. Under these circumstances there would be no economic pressures on women to put up with discriminatory or oppressive practices: women could simply walk away from them and still have free access to what they needed. So there’d be no basis for their continued existence. In fact the feminist — and indeed socialist aim — of women’s equality is only going to be fully realised in a socialist society.

Editors.

World View: Teetering on the brink (1995)

General Sani Abacha

From the March 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Nigeria is on the threshold. Chaos and the demons of war, of anarchy and hell are gathering imperceptibly . . . the best minds have fled. Hunger wanders the highway. Corruption has become a god. Distrust lurks everywhere and cynicism pollutes the air.”

Thus wrote Ben Okri in the Guardian last 6 September. The image is immediately one of impending doom, a nightmare scenario. Okri’s words, though, were not overly pessimistic, for in the January 1995 issue of New African, they were echoed by Pini Jason who described the situation in Nigeria as a "chillingly frightening regression into absolute despotism".

Okri and Jason were both referring to the terror now felt by tens of millions of Nigerians, a terror made all the worse by a world that watches from die sidelines, as witnessed most recently in Rwanda.

In August 1994, General Sani Abacha, Nigeria's “leader", overturned what legal rights Nigerians had enjoyed by forcing through some of the most repressive decrees ever known in Nigeria. He earned himself the title of dictator (in every sense of the word) by firstly passing a decree that places himself and his regime above the law. He went on to make anti-Abacha opinions illegal, curbed the right to free assembly and abolished several human rights associations. Were that not enough, Abacha banned three opposition newspapers. dissolved the executive bodies of the Nigerian Labour Congress and the oil-workers unions, and lengthened the period a prisoner can be detained without charge to three months.

The decrees were, of course, pathetically justified by Abacha last November. In a broadcast a year after he came to power in November 1993. he declared his intentions were "to halt the drift towards anarchy . . . to strengthen our security system, revitalise respect for law and order and to restore faith among the citizens whose confidence has been stressed by political crisis in the country" (Quoted in West Africa, 28 November/ 4 December 1994.)

Annulled election

Since independence from Britain in October 1960. Nigerians have known nothing but "political crisis". The country has witnessed coups, counter-coups and internal military coups on six occasions: January 1966. July 1966.1975. 1976. 1983 and 1985.

The June 1993 elections, supposedly the fairest ever witnessed in Nigeria, were initiated by General Ibrahim Babanginda who had ruled the country since 1985. However, when only half of the result had been declared, Babanginda had the count stopped and the election annulled. The reason? Opposition leader Chief Moshood Abiola was storming ahead, capitalising on his promises to build more schools and health centres, to provide cleaner drinking water, cheaper food and improved roads. He was detained shortly after the elections. A leaked military statement later declared that Abiola had secured 58 percent of votes cast.

Arguably, the main reason why Abiola is not president is that he is a southerner, for in Nigeria the same north/south hostilities abound that were in existence at the time of the Biafra war.

Babanginda, however, was soon chased out of office. He was replaced by a civilian, Ernest Shonekar, who went a similar way when the state court ruled his office illegal. It was then that Abacha stepped forward and took power and. with it, brought Nigeria to the brink of ruin.

Abacha is guilty of untold human rights violations. But this does not seem to bother the governments of other countries much. The EU and the US might have imposed the token sanctions, but this did not stop Britain selling tanks and other military hardware to Abacha. The fact is that Britain has always sided with such northern tyrants in times of duress. More, the British High Commission have given their blessing to the judiciary set up to try Abiola.

Oil revenues

Between May and June last year Abacha ordered his army into southeastern Nigeria to destroy the villages of and murder, the Ogoni people. The Ogoni people number some 500,000 but it is to their great misfortune that the land they occupy is also the site of 112 of Nigeria’s 138 oilfields.

For years the Ogoni have protested against the environmental pollution caused by oil production, at the smoggy atmosphere they live in. at the contaminated soil they till — they are an agricultural people — and at their rivers choked with oil run-offs. They have every reason to protest. Nigeria is the largest gas-flaring country in the world. Some 16.8 billion cubic metres of natural gas are flared annually. The acid rain this produces is only matched by the region’s oil spills — 573 spills between January 1986 and May 1992.

The protests reached a high point in late 1992 and in reaction Shell Nigeria put a hold on oil production in Ogoniland and pulled out most of its staff.

In retaliation for this sudden loss of vital revenue, a certain Major P. Okunomo called for a “ruthless military operation” against the Ogoni. sending in 400 troops to stifle protests and opposition to oil production. Not only did the soldiers destroy dozens of villages and kill hundreds of the Ogoni people, they carried out military sabotage against various oil installations in the hope that the Ogoni would get the blame.

Oil provides Nigeria with 95 percent of its foreign exchange and has been the stake in Nigeria’s conflicts since 1966. The country makes some $6 billion a year from oil sales. During the Gulf War. the Babanginda regime made a staggering $12 billion from oil sales — money yet to be accounted for. None of it, however, seems to have benefited the people, least of all the Ogoni. At present 85 percent of the Ogoni are unemployed. They have seven doctors between them (remember they number 500000), a literacy rate of 10 percent and infant mortality stands at 40 per 1.000 births.

In the past twelve months there have been strikes by oil workers and medical workers, aimed directly at the Abacha regime, in a country already teetering on the brink of an economic calamity.

Western capitalists can only look on shrug their shoulders and tut; Nigeria, after all is still Africa — "the white man’s burden”. As one New African writer commented last October: “The international community showed with its reluctant response to Rwanda that it is tired of Africa’s problems."

Socialists, on the other hand, can only imagine how “tired" Africa is of capitalism. and how so utterly tired Nigerians must be of the cabal that rules that country in the interests of capitalism. 

John Bissett