Letter: Civil Rights Movement (2010)

Letter to the Editors from the August 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Civil Rights Movement

Dear editors

In the March issue, Andrew Armitage described the Civil Rights Movement (CrM) in the US as a “good cause” (in quotation marks). In the June issue, Roy Beat called this attitude “sectarian” because the CrM was “more than just a good cause”. Andrew Armitage responded in July that “socialists recognize the serious limitations” of the CrM in “at best only aspiring to parity” with white workers.

In the decades between reconstruction and the CrM black people in the South were helpless in the face of constant humiliation and terror. Any who might have taken an interest in revolutionary ideas would have been tarred and feathered or lynched as “uppity niggers”. So the “limitations” of the CrM were real but could hardly have been avoided.

This exemplifies the point that 

the struggle for democratic rights 

is an essential precondition of the struggle for socialism. In broad historical perspective, they are two stages in a single struggle for social equality. From this point of view, 

it is indeed sectarian to belittle the progress achieved by the Civil Rights Movement.

Stephen Shenfield, USA

Letters: Self-employed workers (2010)

Letters to the Editors from the July 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Self-employed workers

Dear Editors

I am writing in response to Tony Trafford’s letter (Socialist Standard, May) regarding self-employed status. I agree fully with the Editors’ response and analysis of the matter but wanted to add a couple of points.

As a self-employed skilled labourer in the engineering and construction industries, I do not fit in Marx’s capital-owning definition of the shop keeper and I think there is a clear definition to be made between self-employed small capitalists of the kind described by Marx and those of more modern times, like myself and indeed the subject of Tony Trafford’s letter, who merely supply their labour.

As such a person, I am in a similar if not worse position than an ‘ordinary’ employed person. I am not entitled to sick or holiday pay, my employment is not guaranteed down to a daily basis and all my costs for work (fuel, tools, telephone, etc) are my responsibility. As for exploitation, I neither employ and therefore exploit, any others and am contracted to be employed by others and therefore my labour is exploited by capital in the traditional sense. In reality my so-called ‘self-employed’ status merely refers to how I pay my taxes rather than any social or deeper economic definition.

D. Humphries, 

Sussex.

Pete Seeger

Dear Editors

Concerning Roy Beat’s letter (June Socialist Standard), I (mis)spent the 1960s immersed in the Folk Movement and recall nothing positive vis-à-vis the dissemination of Socialist knowledge. Politically the scene was one Leftist/Nationalist mess. Significantly Roy Beat fails to produce any contrary evidence.

The banjo’s early multi-racial history is common knowledge. However in the wake of the Minstrel Shows its image to many Negroes was tarnished and seeing one in the hands of yet another “condescending white, liberal Yankee” arriving to “emancipate” them was further aggravation.

The significance of the inverted commas around “good causes” appears to have evaded him. Socialists recognise the serious limitations of the Civil (and Woman’s, Gay etc) Rights Movements and how at best they can only aspire to parity with their white, male, heterosexual Working Class counterparts within Capitalism. The solution, of course, is Socialism. Who would need “rights” where common ownership and free access prevailed? Likewise, the anti-Vietnam War Movement dealt only with the specifics of that event; not the underlying causes of war at large. On what possible basis therefore could criticising all of this be deemed “sectarian”?

I have much time for Pete Seeger both personally and musically: politically, I have little.

Andrew Armitage, 

Scotland

Ballots or bullets?

Dear Editors

Your candidate (for Vauxhall) in the election was to my mind only propping up the outdated evil system with money.

It would have been far better to have spent the cash on leaflets informing the people whatever party they vote X for it will not be in their interests.

The state will never give over power to the workers – the mass of the people have to take power. If one wants something in this life, you have to fight to get it.

R. Bloomfield, 

London SE5

Reply: 

It is true that we did have to forfeit our deposit of £500 and that that went to the capitalist state but, as a party contesting the election, our election address was distributed free by the post office to 56,000 households in Vauxhall. Besides arguing the case for socialism, the leaflet did make the point you mention about the other parties.

We agree that if you want anything under capitalism you have to struggle for it, if that’s what you mean by “fight”. If by “fight” you mean take up arms we don’t agree. It’s just not true – for instance, workers can and do get higher wages and better working conditions without taking up arms. We do think that socialism can be established peacefully but getting there will have to involve a determined political and ideological struggle –  Editors.

Pedalling in Ever-decreasing Circles (2011)

From the July 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Cycling is popular again but what happened to the old Clarion Cycling Club?

The metamorphosis of the precarious Ordinary – “Penny Farthing” – into its essentially present-day “Safety” format in the 1880s and a steady reduction in manufacturing costs, saw the bicycle by the following decade fast-becoming the main means of personal working class transport. Villagers and townies, hitherto isolated, could now venture healthily afield, widening geographical and social horizons, seeking erudition and enlightenment, diversifying and enriching the gene pool.

Devastating as it undoubtedly was for “High Wheeling” aristocrats and toffs to find their pastime suddenly infested with hoi polloi, salvation, at least for the seriously affluent, was nigh: the internal combustion engine was already spluttering into life.

The latter decades of the century had seen also a renewed interest in the radical ideas that had faded somewhat in the wake of the Chartist Movement of the 1850s. In particular, Hyndman’s Democratic Federation, established in 1881, swiftly proclaimed its socialist tendency, renaming itself Social Democratic Federation by 1883. Ever an uneasy coalition, it suffered breakaway the following year when a revolutionary group that included Eleanor Marx, Belford Bax and William Morris left a fundamentally reformist organisation to found the Socialist League.

Around this same time, Sunday Chronicle journalist, Robert Blatchford – “Nunquam” – was winning acclaim with an impassioned weekly exposé of conditions in the slums of Manchester. Openly declaring for socialism however, proved just too much for a nervous proprietor and following an enforced resignation in 1891, he set up his own penny weekly, The Clarion. On relocating south to Fleet Street some four years later, circulation rose steadily eventually, by 1908, doubling to 80,000.

The Clarion’s ideals were indeed lofty: to “make socialists” by writing fearlessly and honestly about injustice and inequality, to do so unpretentiously and humorously avoiding dogma and theory and to provide a forum for divergent viewpoints. This was its mission statement and – as time would ultimately prove – its suicide note.

Perhaps inevitably, cycling men and women, enthused by these ideas, would see the obvious advantages of the bicycle in spreading the message and at an 1894 meeting convened by young Brummie Tom Groom, a “socialist Cycling Club” was created; its name promptly amended to “Clarion” in honour of the journal. Reports of the club’s early activities – joyful, propagandising excursions requiring “boozometers rather than speedometers” – led swiftly to the formation of Clarion clubs elsewhere and an Easter Meet was arranged at Ashbourne in Derbyshire the following year to organise a national body.

The inaugural conference held there was an unpromising, damp, outdoor affair and the accompanying public rally fared little better; speakers harangued throughout by a “beery person”: “Aw don’t know nowt and Aw don’t want to know nowt.” Conference duly obliged by delivering…er, nowt. Notwithstanding agreement on a set of rules and adoption of a national badge and slogan – “Fellowship is Life; Lack of Fellowship is Death” from Morris’s A Dream of John Ball – no attempt was made to actually define socialism other than in the vaguest of “caring-sharing”, “happy-clappy”, “ethical” terms. Contentiously too, membership was opened to professed non-socialists, Groom strongly maintaining that “Clarion reasoning and comradeship” coupled with “physical exercise and glorious countryside” would effect speedy conversion.

The rest, as they say, is history. Whilst number-wise at least, the Club blossomed – membership nudging 7,000 in 1913 – and did despite Blatchford’s hankerings for informality, bring some order to its administrative procedures, this collective failure to achieve understanding and consensus over the actual meaning of the term “socialism” and how it might be implemented, rendered it politically impotent; tyres well and truly punctured at the bikeshed door. Ironic indeed since by 1914, the Club badge now also incorporated a proud “Socialism the Hope of the World”.

And as for the redoubtable Blatchford, it was terminal decline; his initial demand for “common ownership” and boast of “converting England to Socialism in seven years”, soon becoming a plea for “brotherly love and respect”, before plummeting to an outrageous exhortation for young Clarionettes to both shed and spill their working class blood in the Imperialist Cause, firstly in Transvaal and subsequently Flanders. In later life, embittered and disillusioned – “The Working Class is not yet ready for Socialism” – he embraced Conservatism, supporting Stanley Baldwin, “the finest British politician”, in the 1924 General Election.

The Clarion remained popular until 1914 but its jingoistic stance, abhorrent to so many, saw circulation collapse from sixty to ten thousand. Hostilities ended, it emerged as a smaller threepenny weekly but readership continued to haemorrhage in the wake of the 1917 Russian Revolution and the seductive pull of the new-born Communist Party of Great Britain. Repackaged in 1927 as a sixpenny monthly, life became increasingly difficult for a self-styled “independent Socialist review” supporting a Labour movement “as opposed to Bolshevism as it is to Fascism” and after a last brief tango as The New Clarion, it disappeared in 1934.

Oddly, the journal’s demise coincided with an upturn in Club numbers. Despite serious economic recession, bicycle ownership was increasing and on the back of the 1930s “outdoors/fitness” craze, membership soared to an all-time high of 8,300. To what extent the Club’s politics contributed is, of course, debatable: other pastimes, rambling and hiking for example also flourished and besides, activism within the ranks, by no means universal from inception, had continued to diminish. For that minority who remained otherwise, there was little evidence of improvement in the calibre of that activism.

Discord reigned between the pro- and anti-war camps, whilst both the Workers’ Sports Movement and Esperanto language were lauded as the keys to “developing solidarity”, “dismantling international prejudices” and “eradicating misunderstanding”. Never, throughout decades of fresh air, camaraderie and carousing, did there ever appear to have entered into the broad Clarion psyche, a recognition of the single global root cause of Humanity’s multiple socio-economic problems and therefore of the single global remedy required. It really was, and is, that straightforward.

Post-war, a brief membership boom was followed by serious decline as growing affluence brought with it mass car-ownership and in the prevailing Cold War environment, there began an inexorable process of airbrushing out its political roots. The Constitutional “propagation of the principles of Socialism” clause became “support for…” and office bearers, once required to actually belong to “an approved Socialist organisation”, could now be simply avowed socialists. And so it continued.

These days, the Clarion Cycling Club survives as a 600-strong rump and – lest it deter potential sponsors – presents itself as “The Club for Wise Cyclists”. May it prosper: pro-Human sentiments are, after all, preferable to none. It is tragic, nevertheless, that so much benevolence, enthusiasm and integrity should, for want of a bit of clarity and direction, have gone to waste; doubly so because in terms of its sloganeering at least, the Club had it pretty-well nailed all along.

And since the Socialist Party remains – on several levels – untroubled by commercial considerations, we are pleased on behalf of countless long-departed and intrepid wayfarers to brandish the muddied Clarion banner one final time: “Fellowship is Life” and “Socialism” – properly defined and understood, is indeed – “the Hope of the World”.

Andrew Armitage

Letters: Trend to fascism? (2010)

Letters to the Editors from the June 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Trend to fascism?

Dear Editors

 The letter from David Lee (April Socialist Standard) in calling for a socialist government shows a lack of understanding – that socialism means an end to government and governed – but you are too dismissive of his seeing the inherent trend of capitalism to fascism. The “ideal” of fascism is not necessarily the pre-war examples of Germany and Italy. The philosophy of fascism is the corporate state, the well-ordered state, where the most able, that is by their own definition, assume the positions of power in politics and industry etc. The majority accept that their position is due to their being less able and grateful to accept their position as decided by “natural abilities”.

 Other ways of describing this attempt of natural selection of order in society are meritocracy and equality of opportunity. So this sorts out the order of society by “natural” rule and a “benign” ruler or ruling class makes the nation as one. Classes are dismissed because the order of society is as it should be. The division between capitalists and workers is again presented as the natural order so fascism can claim it is a classless society. This obfuscation between the owing class and the majority is the common good of the whole nation, that the interests of all as are of one. A phrase which appears regularly to plaster over this is “the third way” to mean a way which is neither capitalism nor socialism, but taking the best elements of each. Blair used it early on in his career, those in the social sector – or third sector of co-ops and the like, even Ted Heath in his attempt to square the circle in his conception of corporate capitalism – the human face of capitalism. But the earliest use of “the Third Way” was the NSDAP considering this before settling on “the Third Reich” (see Michael Burleigh’s A New History of Nazi Germany).

 Bismarck’s Germany, sometimes called state capitalism by Lenin already exhibited all the signs of “benign” fascism and was probably as formative to Hitler as to Lenin/Stalin. That Lenin thought state capitalism was the route to socialism and acknowledged the greater power of state capitalist Germany had beaten Russia was enough to show two apparently diametrically-opposed dictatorships grow as fascism.

 But probably most prescient was Marx in the Communist Manifesto what could be seen as the development of what was to be called fascism, the reactionary becoming radicalised in German or “True Socialism” which presaged the “eternal truths, the model nation”, opposing the “brutally destructive” tendency of Communism. And so on, I won’t repeat it all but summed up as the bombastic representative of the petty bourgeois Philistine. Which is as good a description of the true nature of fascism as any.

 So, yes, the expressions of fascism of the pre-war variety are not visible, at least on the surface, but aside from this the tendency for fascist thought lingers in every cell of capitalism, from the infantile individuals you sometimes meet who always have a ready list of sexist, racist, anti-Semitic “jokes” to share with guilty pleasure often on their mobile phones to the more discreet smoothing over by politicians whose job, if it can be called that, is to confuse the majority that it’s in all our interests to do whatever are the problems of the moment. To blur over the divisions in society and represent the nation as symbolic as Unity, the problems of capitalism are all our problems, we are all in it together – the National interests (sic or sick).

 The well-ordered nation state is the capitalists and politicians’ dream and aspiration, the corporate state of successful regulation of private and state undertakings, the self-defined meritocracy and the worker held in wage-slavery, happy to accept his or her lot in the best of all possible worlds.

 This is fascism in “idealised” form but capitalism’s also on a tendency towards it. But even if this should appear attractive to the petty-bourgeois Philistines it always comes along with the horrors experienced in the 20th century.

 Effectively, as for as real alternatives are concerned, this turns the country into a one-party state, the consciousness of the majority is formed by the prevailing accepted norms of society, education, the press, the whole structure of production. This is as effective for control as any secret police and more acceptable as being “democratic” than totalitarianism – you get to leave a mark every few years, that’s democracy, isn’t it?

Stuart Gibson, 

Wimborne, Dorset

Reply: 

We still think it’s an exaggeration (and misleading) to refer to present-day Britain as “fascist” – Editors.

Pete Seeger

Dear Editors

 As regards the article on Pete Seeger in the March Socialist Standard, isn’t it about time we looked at the positive rather than the negative aspects of the folk revival in the US?

 To quote from the article: “The 1960s saw Seeger affiliating with the current ‘good causes’, plucking his banjo at Civil Rights rallies (an unfortunate instrument, given Negro memories of stereotypic minstrel shows) and supporting the Anti-Vietnam War movement”.

 The banjo in American music was played by both blacks and whites and goes back to a time when music was more integrated, before the minstrel shows.

 Civil Rights was more than just a good cause. It was a colossal task to say the least. When people like Seeger sang at freedom rallies in the southern states they were putting themselves on the line, and to be dismissive about the role they played is sectarian. Anybody that fails to see the importance of music in the Civil Rights/Anti-Vietnam War movement is not really looking at the role it actually played.

Roy Beat, 

London SE27.

Crime - legal and illegal (2003)

From the May 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Crime, according to the Collins Dictionary, is “an act or omission punishable by law”. This definition is more or less what you would expect to find but nevertheless it's somewhat chilling. Nowhere is there any requirement for this “act or omission” to be either benevolent or malevolent; pro-human or anti-human. It simply has to be “prohibited by law”.

So what actually is “law”? When it comes down to basics, law is what any dominant authority actually deems to be law. Putting it crudely, if a yob wielding a screwdriver accosts you in an alleyway demanding possession of your wallet, he is effectively defining the law, albeit an extremely localised and fleeting version of it, and failure to comply, a “crime” punishable in the obvious manner.

Naturally the law undergoes a process of considerable tarting up as it rises through the scale until at national level, recorded in masses of leather-bound volumes, endorsed by an array of pompous blokes in wigs, ermine, mitres and crowns, and further supported by a compliant media, the whole idea of law and crime, or rather, statutory crime, can be readily presented to the population at large as somehow legitimate, permanent and operating in everyone's best interests.

Since the dawn of civilisation humans have lived in a variety of types of society – slave, feudal and, of course, currently capitalist. These societies have however had one thing in common; they have all featured minority ownership of the prevailing wealth of that society. Naturally, they have also featured minority control, via the law and the machinery of government. Needless to say, our metaphorical yob, suitably tooled-up, is lurking constantly in the background to concentrate the mind of the non-owning majority on compliance.

Legalised robbery

In modern capitalist society, ownership of the land, factories, transport, etc. is concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority, the capitalist class, comprising around 5 percent of the population. In essence this minority employs the other 95 percent, the working class, to produce wealth and otherwise run society in its entirety. By paying them a monetary wage which represents only part of the wealth they produce, and creaming off the surplus for themselves, the capitalists maintain a privileged lifestyle whilst the working class endures varying degrees of poverty, both relative and absolute.

You may think that this situation is a bit unfair. But scrutinise the statute books until you're blue in the face and you'll find that it's all perfectly legal. But try, if you dare, to redress the balance a little; pinch a few paperclips or whatever from your workplace or life a couple of designer garments from a boutique, and you'll have those selfsame statute books flung in your face. Shock, horror, you will have committed a crime.

So there we have it. On the one hand, the everyday ongoing, but legal theft perpetrated by the capitalist class on the working class, and statutory crime, which likewise is the everyday ongoing reaction from the working class to try to claw back some of its losses; to make up its wages, so to speak. Unfortunately at present there is no class consciousness informing this, and the victims will all too frequently be fellow members of the working class.

Numerically speaking, big heists such as the Great Train Robbery and the Millennium Dome Diamond Raid are rare. In reality, petty larceny is very much the norm.

According to crime figures, around 95 percent of all statutory crime is property-related. This breaks down very roughly as follows: 25 percent theft from or of motor vehicles, 25 percent burglary, 30 percent other forms of theft – fraud, forgery, shoplifting etc., and 15 percent criminal damage to property. The remaining five percent comprises four percent violence against the person and one percent sexual offences.

The capitalist class in Britain numbers around 3 million people, only a small proportion of whom are in the public eye. Via the media, we peasants are entreated to revere and adulate our titled aristocracy and royalty for the fine example they set us, and to respect and emulate the new-wealth, self-made brigade – the “entrepreneurs”, the “innovators”, the “wealth-creators”, the “providers of jobs”.

What incredible effrontery. What appalling self-congratulatory arrogance. These philanthropists are after one thing and one thing only – a fast buck. Bear this in mind at all times.

Aside from all this, the overwhelming bulk of the capitalist class are unsung and anonymous. They are the inheritors of old wealth; the descendants of medieval merchants, New World traders, eighteenth and nineteenth century industrial capitalists, etc. – the swindlers, slave-dealers and tyrants of a bygone age. They may well, for the most part, be perfectly decent people; they can hardly, after all, be condemned for the particular environment into whey they happen to have been born. One thing however, is certain. If they, along with the other members of their class, collectively disappeared tomorrow from the fact of the Earth, the buses would still run, the factories and farms still produce, the hospitals still function. All as normal. These people are non-productive, surplus to requirement, useless. They are economic parasites.

The capitalist system is legalised theft; real crime, through and through. The working class is employed solely to facilitate the profit process. Where profits cannot be realised because of the prevailing phase of the economic cycle, workers are thrown on the scrap heap, goods stockpiled, food destroyed, houses left unbuilt and land uncultivated. As a result, we have massive and ongoing worldwide deprivation, starvation, disease, premature death.

Again, when rival groupings of capitalists find themselves in conflict over colonies or raw materials, the working class is mustered to resolve the situation. Murdering or being murdered in your country's cause is perfectly lawful. Unleash a missile or bomb on some defenceless city slaughtering countless thousands of innocents and you'll have a nice shiny medal pinned on your chest. Kill one person, back on Civvy Street, in a momentary act of anger or desperation and they'll lock you up for life.

Ninety-five percent of statutory crime, as already indicated, is property-related. The great bulk of the residual five percent (violence against the person and sexual, offences), can be attributed to the everyday stresses and alienations that are part and parcel of our existence in capitalist society. We are conditioned into seeing our fellow workers, with whom, economically, we have everything in common, as rivals; as competitors for jobs and houses.

Where those fellow workers also happen to possess characteristics that proclaim the greater diversity of our species, be it skin pigmentation, accent, age, gender, sexual proclivity, disability; whatever then they are all the more readily identifiable as potential targets for abuse or violence. The real enemy, capitalism itself, sits unchallenged, safely clear of the firing line.

Social behaviour

The system is almost entirely responsible for statutory crime. In socialist society, common ownership and production solely for use would prevail. There would be no legalised theft; there could not be legalised theft. Likewise, almost all statutory crime would fade away. Theft would not exist. What would there be to steal? Your own property?

People will, naturally, retain their capacity to discuss, disagree and quarrel. Likewise, romantic creatures that we are, situations will periodically arise where two persons desire the same person or partner; the Eternal Triangle as it's rather prosaically known. Consequently, tempers may flare; fists (and handbags) may be brandished. Inevitably therefore, there will be occasional, recourse to acts of violence and accordingly there will, be a need for procedures to restrain the protagonists and address the causes.

Others, too, will suffer from mental illness, brain damage, simply draw an unlucky ticket in the genetic lottery and behave, not criminally, but non-socially.

So within socialist society there will, we suggest, be regulation of sorts and maybe even places of detention. But will the inmates find themselves banged up and slopping out? Surely not. We would think that their very inability to participate appropriately in society would be sufficient reason to extend to them the finest care, compassion and support that we can muster.

Henri Charrière's book Papillon is a very moving true-life account of life in the penal colonies of French Guyana. During one of his several escapes Charrière lived with a Venezuelan Indian tribe, the Goajira, and he recounted with great warmth, their uncomplicated communistic lifestyle, describing how they lived with a commonality of purpose, without money, without judges, without laws. The barbaric punishments meted out by “civilised” Europeans to their miscreant fellows would have been totally beyond their comprehension.

We suggest that it will be pretty much like this in socialist society. Although it will be global as opposed to tribal, people will still live in small localised communities and, freed from capitalism's physical and mental shackles, will spontaneously look out for one another. It is after all our nature to do so. What need will there be for a mass of laws to oversee this process?

Capitalism's politicians are a contemptible and shameless bunch; none more so than our current messenger-boy-in-chief, Tony Blair. Nevertheless, we are indebted to the dear chap for providing the grand finale for this article. During the last general election, he chuntered endlessly on about being “Tough on crime; tough on the causes of crime”.

Socialists would readily endorse these sentiments but would take things just a little bit further than his own wishy-washy, and by no means original, list of measures. If you really want to be “Tough on crime; tough on the causes of crime”, the solution is very simple – abolish capitalism and establish socialism.

Andrew Armitage

Woody Guthrie. Resonant Voice for the Downtrodden: Woolly-Eyed Lefty (2006)

From the July 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Curious things were afoot in Greenwich Village, New York City around the year 1960. Droves of earnest denim-clad youths could be observed traversing the streets, all affecting the same hunched posture and shuffling gait. From every clenched jaw a king-size sprouted and (curiouser and curiouser) each throat emitted the same sporadic dry cough. One such poseur, a Minnesotan balladeer, Robert Zimmerman, would presently win universal acclaim as Bob Dylan.

Curiously too, the template for all those cardboard cut-outs also happened to be in the vicinity. Just across the Hudson River, those five years past, he had languished in New Jersey’s Greystone State Institute. His name was Woody Guthrie.

As writer, broadcaster, political activist and composer of some one thousand songs, Guthrie had been famous long before the birth of any of his young impersonators although this had since faded and, anyway, was always heavily laced with both controversy and notoriety. Why then was an ailing, ageing figure suddenly the focus of such adulation that the very hackings of his tobacco-addled bronchial tubings were deemed worthy of reproduction?

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born in 1912 into a tragedy-prone family in Omaha, Oklahoma, being named in honour of the Democratic contender and President-to-be. Guthrie senior was an opportunistic businessman and Ku Klux Klan member whose racist views his son ingested and held well into adulthood. Mother, an unstable woman, was destined to die in the “insane asylum” from the hereditary condition then known as Huntington’s Chorea. In her more lucid moments however, she bequeathed Woody her rich musical heritage. She sang to him ballads of farmers, of sailors, of the humble triumphs and sorrows of ordinary people; an art-form that decades later, would find itself neatly sanitised, packaged, and marketed as “folk” music. At conception, unknowingly, she had also bequeathed him the Huntington’s genes.

Inevitably, this upbringing left its mark and young Guthrie developed into a decidedly maverick adult; as erratic in his business affairs as he was neglectful of his several wives, his numerous children, his personal presentation and hygiene. He developed also an enduring, and endearing, aversion to money, observing that “getting it turned people into animals and losing it drove them crazy”. Money to him was only ever a means of satisfying immediate requirements; any surplus being promptly squandered. At the height of his fame he would spurn lucrative contracts with the same panache that had seen his younger self regularly bestow entire evenings’ busking tips upon any convenient vagrant whose needs he perceived to exceed his own.

The final disintegration of the family unit saw a teenage Guthrie embark on an itinerant life, hitching rides and hopping freight trains across America, using his musical skills to access life’s basic necessities. He dossed in railway boxcars, under bridges, in hobo encampments, all the while adding to his repertoire. This would later constitute much of the romantic “Hard Travellin’” Guthrie legend but in reality it was a precarious existence, with regular harassment from the authorities; the next meal or bed a constant preoccupation.

There were an estimated 200,000 drifters and migratory workers during the 1920s, a figure which increased drastically in the 1930s as first the effects of the Great Depression then the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, bit deeper. This latter calamity, so graphically portrayed in Steinbeck’s magnificent novel, The Grapes of Wrath, saw entire communities forced off the barren land and on to the highways.  Guthrie was both moved by their plight and angered by the hostility shown towards them; the taunt “Okie” so widely used that it swiftly became the generic term for all “poor-white” destitutes.

Round the hobo campfires, Guthrie encountered grizzled, broken men; erstwhile members of the Industrial Workers of the World, muttering about there being a class struggle within society between the “rich” capitalists and the “poor” workers. In the finest of  leftist traditions, the IWW had been a chaotic outfit with little idea of what actually constituted socialism, nor indeed how it might be established; violent strike action and sabotage being foremost amongst its strategies. Its nickname, “Wobblies” was indeed apt.

The propaganda potential of both music and humour was however, recognised and its Little Red Songbook, largely parodies of Salvationist hymns, contained such gems as “The Pious Itinerant (Hallelujah I’m a Bum)” and “In the Sweet By-and-By” with its irreverent promise of “pie in the sky when you die”.

If nothing else, the IWW provided Guthrie with a simplistic political consciousness beyond which he never materially developed. More significantly, it lent a focus to his growing anger and taking his cue from the songbook, began creating his own material. In an anthology, “Dust Bowl Ballads”, he berated the “Vigilante Man” who would “shoot his brothers and sisters down”, lampooned the bungling incompetence of “these here politicians” in “Dust Bowl Blues” and mocked the preacher who, having first pocketed the collection, abandoned his flock with a “So Long it’s Been Good to Know Ya”.

Settling down briefly around 1937, Guthrie worked with the radical Los Angeles radio station KFVD. Here his racism underwent transformation; a Negro listener labelling him “unintelligent” for performing his “Nigger Blues” over the airwaves. Guthrie had used the term casually since childhood and was mortified. He apologised unreservedly, expunging the disgusting word forthwith from his vocabulary - although the “Japs” and “Wops” did continue to catch it in the neck for some time to come.

Back on his travels, it seemed to his open, if blinkered eyes that those striving hardest to assist the Okie refugees were “communists”. The American Communist Party had been founded in the wake of the 1917 Russian Revolution by an enclave of native radicals, Wobblies and immigrant Europeans, all mistakenly identifying it as somehow connected with the establishment of socialism - the reality being that it was simply one more chapter in the global triumph of capitalism over feudalism, taking in this instance, the form of state capitalism.

Routinely persecuted by a nervous government, it endured as a zealous, paranoid sect, but as the “Roaring Twenties” gave way to the “Hungry Thirties” following the 1929 Wall Street Crash, it effected some popular headway by depicting the apparent success of Stalin’s “planned” Soviet economy, with unemployment (officially at least) non-existent.

Then, following the Nazi triumph in Germany and the growth of Fascism elsewhere, the 1935 World Congress of the Communist International urged member parties to forgo their “ideological purity” and unite with other leftists in a Popular Front against this menace. Accordingly, the Party began to “Americanize”, becoming active, indeed dominant, in the labour union movement and supporting the 1936 election of “progressive” Franklin D. Roosevelt.

This then was the organisation that Guthrie embraced. Whilst never adopting actual membership, he sang at party rallies and contributed a rather folksy column, “Woody Sez”, to its journal, Peoples’ World. “I ain’t a communist necessarily,” he quipped, “but I’ve been in the red all my life.”

The Hitler/Stalin non-aggression treaty of August 1939 which caused such heartache for the Party faithful (and headache for its leadership), troubled Guthrie not the slightest. With the Popular Front now summarily dispatched, he blithely swallowed the spluttered explanation that Russia was simply pro-peace; not pro-Fascist. It was Roosevelt, instantly transmogrified from hero to villain, who was trying to drag America into conflict on behalf of British imperialism. “Pact sets peace example”, proclaimed the Peoples’ World. 

And when the “peace-loving” Red Army invaded Eastern Poland shortly afterwards, why, they were merely liberating the place. “Stalin,” sang Guthrie, “stepped in and gave the land back to the farmers.”

The German attack on Russia in June 1941 meant about-turn yet again and with America’s entry into the war six months later following Pearl Harbour, the Party became in a trice the most fervently patriotic of institutions; union organisation and strike action now subordinated to the overriding imperative for military success. “Sure,” reasoned our Woody, “the Communists change policy, but so do the Democrats and Republicans.”

Victory secured, the western alliance quickly foundered. Stalin denounced his former bedfellows as worse than Hitler, Churchill responded with his “Iron Curtain” speech and the Cold War was underway.

In an era of low unemployment and rising wages, the American left found itself in decline. Labour unions were now established in society, requiring pension fund managers rather than militants and among the newly-consumerist working class, a fear prevailed that its relative prosperity might be in jeopardy from leftism. Guthrie too was in decline, succumbing by degrees to the lingering horrors of Huntington’s Disease, dying eventually in 1967.

By the late 1950s, further societal change was underway. Following Eisenhower’s 1954 election, the “Great Red Scare” was evaporating and in the emerging teenage generation, an intellectual curiosity and idealism could be discerned, transcending the parochialism and acquisitiveness of its War-era parents. Political activism, particularly in the Civil Rights Movement reawakened and nonconformity of sorts, became acceptable.

Guthrie had somehow filtered into the “radical psyche” as a free-wandering spirit representing all things open, honest and unmaterialistic. His songs began to be listened to.

Tin Pan Alley too, had its role to play and profits to consolidate. Rock ’ n’ Roll had arrived some years earlier and had proved anathema to “White Middle America”, a subversive presence inciting youthful rebelliousness and promiscuity; the term itself Negro slang for sexual intercourse. For the first time, black musicians, Little Richard, Chuck Berry and others were accessing mass white audiences. Could the unthinkable happen and integration ensue?

Clean-cut Caucasians - the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary etc, - churning out “folk” songs seemed a much safer option and from record stores everywhere wafted bowdlerised versions of “Oklahoma Hills” and “This Land is Your Land” - to the joyful ringing accompaniment of the cash register.

Woody Guthrie was never a socialist in any scientific sense of the word. He was however, manifestly “socialistic” in his whole outlook on life. “This land,” he sang “was made for you and me” and the fruits of his “Pastures of Plenty”, rightfully everyone’s.

He once wrote, “The worst thing that can happen is to cut loose from people and the best thing is to vaccinate yourself right into their blood….We have to get together and work and fight for everybody.” Hardly apocalyptic, but nonetheless sentiments with which socialists will heartily agree.

Andrew Armitrage

World hunger: why Harry Chapin failed (2004)

From the October 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the annals of popular music, Harry Chapin’s name is not one that particularly stands out. For starters, a couple of decades have elapsed since his untimely demise and besides, his twelve albums, according to biographer Peter M. Coan, typically gained the ‘anonymity’ of 250,000 sales; no way in the multi-million league of contemporaries Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson and Elton John. Chapin himself could muster a wry smile at his sobriquet, “Harry Who?”

 In truth, Chapin’s music was never designed to be ‘popular’ in the first place. Not for him the trite, maudlin, ‘boy-meets-girl’ mush of mainstream pop. His lyrics were literary, emotional, packed with detailed imagery and ironic twists; his melodies haunting and poignant. And furthermore, it’s generally acknowledged that Chapin could never quite capture on vinyl the warmth, empathy and rapport generated in his live performance. He was a dynamic, ebullient, larger-than-life character, devoutly teetotal and devoutly anti-drugs; virtues somewhat nullified by his being also devoutly promiscuous. He adored his audiences; his audiences adored him.

 Chapin’s recordings did nevertheless enjoy some successes. Cat’s in the Cradle from his 1974 Verities and Balderdash album was a US number one hit single. Several others, Taxi and W.O.L.D managed to loiter in the Top 40 charts and What Made America Famous became the theme for the film The Great Divide. Additionally, All my Life’s a Circle rode high in the British Top 10 despite the best efforts of the covering group, the unspeakable New Seekers, to render it unlistenable. Briefly, he was amongst the hottest of America’s musical property, earning around $2 million per annum.

   

Born in New York City in 1942, Chapin was a relatively late arrival on the music scene, releasing his first album Heads and Tails just prior to his 30th birthday. His earlier career as a film-maker had taken him in 1969 to Ethiopia and it was there that he first encountered the issue of World Hunger. In 1974, a more mature and reflective Chapin again addressed himself to the hunger issue, taking the view that his relative fame and high earnings conferred an obligation to ‘do good’, to ‘improve society’ , to ‘benefit humanity’.

   

The recent Bob Dylan and George Harrison Bangladeshi hunger concert had raised $400,000 and Chapin quickly realised not only the total inadequacy of this sum in relation to the scale of the problem in question, but also the futility of such one-off gestures. Henceforth indeed, he would rail against what he called the “event psychosis” of American culture and was openly scathing of celebrities who, with motives clearly more to do with advancement than altruism, would latch themselves on to these affairs. Chapin instead sought to identify the root causes of hunger and to this end he affiliated with the Institute for Food and Development Policy, more commonly known as Food First.

Food First

Food First had been founded with the proclaimed aims of highlighting those selfsame ‘root’ causes and establishing food as a fundamental human ‘right’. As sincere and well-intentioned an organisation as it undoubtedly is, an examination of its website (www.foodfirst.org) and in particular its “12 Myths about Hunger”, makes frustrating reading. In brief summary, it rightly observes that “abundance not scarcity best describes the World’s food supply”; many of the “most hungry” countries are in fact net exporters of food. Nobody need starve.

Similarly, those perennial old chestnuts, Nature and Overpopulation are discounted as significant factors in world hunger. In the former, “human-made” forces such as deprivation of land by the “powerful few”, low pay and debt are cited as responsible, whilst in the latter, abundance juxtaposes with hunger even in sparsely populated countries like Nigeria and Brazil. Again, poverty is the governing factor. Those with money eat; those without, don’t.

 Foreign ‘aid’ is exposed for the lie it is, operating directly against the hungry. Official government aid serves to impose advantageous trading arrangements and to arm and reinforce repressive régimes. Humanitarian aid, a mere five percent of the total anyway, helps enrich grain companies in the donor countries, undercuts local food production and frequently fails even to reach its intended recipients.

   

And the culprits in all of this? – the aforementioned “powerful few” – large landowners who “leave fertile land idle”, multinational corporations, World Bank, governments who “obstruct progress”, the “tightly-concentrated distribution of economic power”, a society that places “economic efficiency over compassion”.

   

In all but name they are describing aspects of the insidious, everyday workings of the capitalist system, but do they recognise it as such; do they draw any conclusions? On the contrary, they eulogise the Market’s “marvellous efficiencies”, arguing that it requires only a wider dispersion of purchasing power to enable it to work towards the elimination of hunger. And how will this dispersion be achieved? Through “genuine tax, credit and land reform”, and by (somehow) curtailing the unlimited private accumulation and unbridled use of wealth-producing property. Food First, sadly, presents as an outfit totally imprisoned by capitalism’s mind-set.

   

Having boarded, as it were, this rudderless, leaky vessel, Chapin set off, at full steam, on a voyage of campaigns, fund-raising and lobbying. He founded his own resource organisation, World Hunger Year (WHY), pretty much along the lines of Food First, financing it personally through a series of benefit concerts that would continue for the remaining years of his life.

   

Aside from the global issue, Chapin was outraged to learn that 25 million of his compatriots suffered malnutrition, that one quarter of all tins of pet food were purchased by impoverished elderly Americans and of an instance where institutionalised youngsters had supplemented their meagre diet with paint peelings, contracting lead poisoning in the process.

   

To highlight this, he organised a Congressional vegetarian Thanksgiving dinner co-sponsored by Senator Hubert Humphrey and Representative Tom Downey (both doubtless delighted to add a bit of “compassion” to their political CVs), and subsequently berated his motherland in the autobiographical 14-minute epic, There Only was one Choice:

Step right up Young Lady,Your two hundred birthdays make you old if not senile,And we see the symptoms there in your rigor mortis smile,With your old folks eating dog food and your children eating paint,While the pirates own the flag and sell us sermons on restraint.

Chapin persistently lobbied Congress, making a gruelling series of visits to Washington DC, becoming sufficiently well-known and informed to testify, successfully, before the House Committee on Oilseed and Rice, on a bill to outlaw price-fixing by growers.

Following this, he focused on a bigger prize – a Presidential Commission on Domestic and International Hunger. This was actually set up in February 1978, but thereafter it was all downhill. The Commission’s 20 members had initial difficulty even agreeing that hunger and poverty were actually linked and its final report in October 1980 was an assortment of palliatives and platitudes; that token increases in non-military aid be made and encouragement given to “self-reliant growth” and “a more equitable distribution of land . . . etc”. Carter’s Commission had been, in reality, a sop; a buy-off, much akin to Nixon’s previous 1969 effort.

After the election of Reagan, Chapin tried to woo fresh backers in the new Republican-dominated Congress, performing a May 1981 benefit to publicise the legislation and attempt to lobby it into law. The situation was, however, truly forlorn and with his own rather horrendous death, aged 38, a couple of months later in a Jericho, New York road accident it really was the end; the final nail in the coffin, metaphorically – and literally.

Vainly striving

It would be reprehensible to sneer at Chapin, at Food First, at the myriad worldwide charities and organisations all vainly striving to address and redress the countless oppressions and outrages that abound. Such activity is testimony to the highly social nature of the human species even in that most unpropitious, cut-throat of environments – capitalist society.

In the course of history, various socio-economic systems have, for many centuries at a time, prevailed. Primitive tribalism gave way to classical slave-based society which in turn was superseded by feudalism before it was itself supplanted by capitalism some 300 years ago. Capitalism is, therefore, a relatively recent incursion into human affairs. It features ownership of the means of living – the land, factories, etc. by a tiny parasite minority, the capitalist class – Food First’s “powerful few” – and production for profit rather than the fulfilment of need.

As a system, it did serve the vital function of developing society’s potential productive capacity to a level at which global need could be satisfied. This role was however accomplished around a century ago and capitalism, as is manifestly obvious, has since been a constraining influence upon further human advancement. To accept that it is here to stay is to demonstrate not only a slavish mentality but an ignorance of historical reality. Contrary to what “thinkers” like Francis Fukuyama and his ilk would have us believe, history has not ended. How could it? Have the clocks ceased to tick?

   

Food First and the others have yet to grasp that their own activities, however benign, in helping offset the privations that are the inevitable consequence of capitalism, actually serve to prolong the very conditions they seek to alleviate. Capitalism can only function in one way – the inexorable pursuit of profit. Large landowners do not wantonly “leave fertile land idle” nor governments gratuitously “obstruct progress”. In specific, transitory circumstances where adequate profits cannot be realised, then crops will not be grown (or alternatively, be stockpiled or destroyed), and governments, as the agents of the dominant class, simply help facilitate this process. The plain incontrovertible truth is that there is but one root cause of world hunger and that is capitalism.

   

Thankfully, an altogether grander option is available. Try this for size – a truly democratic, classless, moneyless, global society in which the consumption of food would not be a ‘right’, (which requires both a bestower and a recipient), but an act as spontaneous and natural as the drawing of breath; a society in which access to clothing, housing, transport, leisure, all the requirements for the leading of a full and fruitful life would be freely and instantly available; a society of communal ownership, liberated from exploitation, from alienation, from tyranny both terrestrial and celestial.

   

And the downside, the catch, the ‘small print’ to this seemingly fabulous arrangement? Simply that the members of that society contribute their sundry energies and skills to the common pot; or as Karl Marx succinctly put it, “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”. In short, a socialist society.

   

For this to become reality requires only that the overwhelming bulk of the majority working class recognise both its practicability and its achievability; that as they currently run society from top to bottom in the capitalist minority’s interest, then they could equally be running it in everyone’s interest and take the necessary political action to bring it all about. Humans are, after all, naturally gregarious, industrious and co-operative creatures.

   

Harry Chapin exemplified this. Heart firmly pinned to his sleeve, he responded in the best and only way he knew to the obscenity that is world hunger. Ever-generous both with his time and his wallet he was, in Coan’s words, “almost broke” at the time of his death. It is tragic that he was never able to make that leap of the imagination (or take the short single step through the Looking Glass), to realise that however much the capitalist system is tinkered with, it cannot be made to operate for the benefit of humanity at large. Lock, stock and barrel, it has to go.

   

Chapin will, notwithstanding, be quietly remembered not only for his fine musical legacy but also as a caring, committed and courageous figure. He could have made one helluva Socialist.

Andrew Armitage

Wilfred Owen — war poet, icon . . . visionary? (2005)

From the May 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

As one of the most popular and widely-read poets of World War One, Wilfred Owen’s legacy is a body of work deeply critical of war and its effects. But what was his attitude to the ultimate causes of war?

That turbulent decade, the 1960s, with its "Peace Movement" - CND, Aldermaston Marches, anti-Vietnam protests and all that – witnessed also the rediscovery of the works of World War I poet Wilfred Owen and his popular elevation to something of a "moral exemplar" and "voice for his generation"; a process further enhanced by composer Benjamin Britten's inclusion of several of his poems in the opera War Requiem.

A whole eclectic range of groupings have, often on the flimsiest of pretexts, claimed him as their own; from pacifists, feminists, Christians to so-called socialists, and whilst politically he did "tend to take the liberal side of the question", he was no pacifist and certainly no socialist, "so called" or otherwise.

Owen was one of a cluster of poets -Sassoon, Graves, Brooke and others - who endeavoured to view war from the perspective of the common soldier, portraying it in all its stark inglorious horror; a genre miles (well, easily half a league) away from the triumphal propagandist outpourings of late - Victorians Arnold, Newbolt and Tennyson. Whilst they, from distant drawing-room safety, could narrate glowing sagas of heroic charges, famous victories and sabres clashing, Owen’s poetic tapestry was an altogether more realistic one, interwoven and spattered with images of carnage and suffering.

Infantrymen "shiver and cringe in holes", "curse through sludge", "bleed and spew", lose limbs, eyesight, sanity. The air resounds to "the monstrous anger of guns", the wailings of "shell on frantic shell", "stuttering rifle fire" and "stinks sour" of mud, of men - of corpses.

It is perhaps not widely known that Owen spent little actual time on the Front Line - a mere 30 days between January and April 1917, from which period most of his poems emanate, followed by a further month through October into November 1918. Moreover, although he did suffer all the tribulations of combat and did indeed pay the ultimate price, he was spared the month on month, year on year wet, freezing, verminous conditions and the prolonged tedium, intimidation and gnawing uncertainty endured by so many. Whilst he could with every justification write, "Those 50 hours were the agony of my happy life" and, "Those last 4 days I've suffered Seventh Hell", his overall war experience was by no means typical.

The son of a minor railway official, Owen was born in Oswestry, Shropshire in 1893 and if money was sufficiently tight to preclude university education, his upbringing was not a deprived one. Displaying some small academic talent, Owen pursued careers initially as pupil-teacher then parish assistant.

Already, inspired by Keats, he was dabbling in verse. The outbreak of World War 1 found him eking out an existence as an English tutor in Bordeaux, France whence he displayed not the slightest inclination to "answer his Country's call". Eventually however, feeling "traitorously idle" and galvanised by the views of his French literary mentor, Laurent Tailhade, he crossed the Channel in October 1915 and enlisted as a private in the Artists' Rifles, "to defend his language and culture".

Thereafter, through sheer graft, "Little Owen", a frail diminutive figure and "perceptively provincial", secured a commission as Second Lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment and in January 1917 arrived in the trenches "to fight Fritz whom," he insisted, "he did not hate". Then ensued intermittent periods of ferocious action until in April, already traumatised by a recent gassing incident later featured in verse, Owen was blown up, rendered temporarily unconscious and subsequently diagnosed as suffering from "shellshock".

By 1917, a more scientific attitude had been adopted towards this phenomenon. The Somme offensive the previous year had yielded 30,000 such cases and as they clearly couldn't all be "degenerates" or "cowards", a new term, "Neurasthenia", had come into vogue. The importance of immediate therapy being recognised, this was provided in nearby field hospitals; not it should be noted, from any humanitarian considerations, but solely to enable the less serious cases, around two thirds overall, to be speedily "cured" and returned to the trenches for another dose of the same.

Owen, as a more severe case, was invalided home, hospitalised in Edinburgh and set about creating the poems that would eventually secure his reputation. In Dulce et Decorum Est, an ironic comment on the famous line by the Latin poet Horace, that it is "pleasant and honourable to die for one's country", Owen recounted the plight of an unmasked Tommy caught in a mustard gas attack, concluding:

"In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dream you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend you would not tell with such zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori."

The "old Lie"? During his prolonged convalescence, Owen encountered various viewpoints, dissenting and otherwise, on the conduct of the War but there is no evidence that he ever developed any understanding of the underlying reasons for its having been waged in the first place. Nevertheless, however inadvertently, Owen has, as it were, "landed a direct hit". It does require a lie; a veritable pack of them in fact, to persuade the artisans, the farmhands, the clerks in one country that their own best interests are suddenly and mysteriously at variance with those of their direct counterparts in another and to spontaneously quit their respective workplaces, dole-queues, semis and slums to participate in the act of mutual slaughter that is war. Always "freedom", "democracy", "ways of life", "national pride" are at stake and, remarkably, "God" is ever on their side.

Specific to the 1914 affair, German "militarism" had to be rebuffed and "plucky little Belgium" supported. The truth is decidedly less exotic. Wars are always and only waged for entirely commercial reasons - access to raw materials, markets, trade routes and strategic positions from which to defend them all. In short, to consolidate existing profits and aspire to the accumulation of others. The present globally-dominant economic system, capitalism, features within each country, the ownership of the means of wealth - the land, factories etc. - by a tiny parasite minority, from which it follows therefore that any profits will accrue only to that minority. The overwhelming non-owning majority; those who do the fighting and the dying, effectively get nothing. Would any worker, apprised of this, raise even a peashooter to their lips? Hence the need for the "old lie".

Germany did not become unified until the 1870s, by which time the bulk of the world's exploitable resources had been colonised by longer-established nation states like Britain and France. To develop and expand, therefore, required attempting to "muscle in on the action", precisely in the way that criminal organisations have long engaged in feuds over bootlegging, gambling and drug-trafficking rights. World War I was only ever a sordid largescale turf war between rival "families" within capitalism's mafia - although by the time the politicians, the media, the clergy and the educationalists had spun their lies, old and new, very few people saw it as such.

Ignorant of the real causes of the War, Owen could only see its solution in terms both abstract and impracticable, if not downright silly. In this he was not alone. Some held that the war was a "natural tragedy" to which the only responses could be of sorrow and compassion; others that it represented merely the periodic erupting of some innate human predisposition towards aggression. Bertrand Russell and H.G. Wells believed the war would "exhaust itself", enabling wise and devoted people (like themselves, presumably), to step in and "rebuild Society". Owen himself considered that when the war machinery had "choked itself to a halt", then "art" and "beauty" could be deployed to "help refresh the human spirit".

Accordingly, he hoped to avoid being returned to the Front, but his hopes were not to be realised. In due course, he was deemed "cured" and returned to France nicely in time to participate in the final decisive attack on and through the Hindenberg Line. For bravery under fire he was awarded the Military Cross but as this particular incident involved him also single-handedly exterminating numerous "Fritzes", the actual text of his citation tends not to be quoted by those who would portray him as the "Poet of Pity". He himself perished at St. Souplet just one week prior to that supreme exercise in pretentious cant -"The eleventh hour of the eleventh day, etc., etc." - that was the signing of the Armistice.

The September 1914 issue of the Socialist Standard, observing the entirely "business" nature of the war embarked upon, both extended the hand of friendship to the workers of all countries and declared that there was nothing at stake "to justify the shedding of a single drop of working class blood". This uniquely principled stance, maintained throughout, s one of which socialists can feel immensely proud. More importantly, a solution, concrete, practicable and eminently sensible, was offered. Since wars arise solely from conflicts of interest between rival groupings of capitalists, and are merely an extension, a more turbulent or intense phase of this ongoing struggle, then it follows that their eradication lies with the universal replacement of private ownership with common ownership. If the world's natural resources and means of producing wealth were the property of Humanity at large, what possible reason for conflict would, or could, remain?

Wilfred Owen's poetic voice was an exceptional and developing one, prematurely stilled. Who knows to what heights it might have soared? His poems depict their subject matter in ways that are once beautiful and repulsive and are, albeit unintentionally, a damning indictment of class-divided society. Furthermore, they serve as a dire warning to any testosterone-fuelled youth "ardent for some desperate glory", that the net result of "taking the shilling" might just be the sudden and catastrophic loss of his testosterone-producing faculties. As much, however, as his poems deserve to be read, to be appreciated, to be cherished, they do merely observe; they neither investigate nor solve. This requires the altogether more prosaic process of examining and understanding the underlying reasons for war.

Andrew Armitage

Sport and the Spirit of Capitalism (2012)

From the November 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Today the scandal in professional cycling is doping: a hundred years ago it was racism.

Traditionally, things have tended to be difficult for the American athlete who happens also to be black. Jesse Owens, snubbed by his own President, had to travel to the 1936 Berlin Olympiad for the “warmest ovation of his life” – and a friendly wave from the Fuhrer himself – whilst a young Cassius Clay, disgusted by his homecoming reception some 24 years later, reportedly consigned his Rome Olympic Gold to the muddy depths of the Ohio. Practically unknown today, although in his time as famous as Owens or Clay, is cyclist Major Taylor. Why?

In the couple of decades straddling the turn of the twentieth century, cycling was as hugely popular in the USA as baseball or boxing. Before the arrival of the motor car and aeroplane, it was effectively the world’s fastest sport with its own galaxy of highly-paid superstars, drawn mainly from the ‘artisan classes’. However, as the century progressed this popularity steadily diminished until, by the outbreak of World War Two, it had sunk into almost total oblivion; its traditions and gladiators – particularly its black ones – forgotten.

Marshall‘Major’ Taylor – as a performing trick-cycling youngster, he sported a mock-military tunic – was born into rural Indianan poverty in 1878, his slave parents having crossed into freedom from Kentucky. Effectively adopted by a wealthy white family as companion to their only son, he spent several happy years during which he was treated, and encouraged to view himself, as racially equal. Taylor was, therefore, no Jim Crow-era ‘uppity nigger’, never having been a ‘downity’ one in the first place.

Such lifestyle gave him access to the unheard-of luxury of a bicycle, upon which machine, when he duly returned, aged thirteen, to his birth family, he displayed such prodigious competitive prowess that, allied with his acrobatic skills, he was able to turn professional some five years later.

World champion

His rise thereafter was meteoric. Within a couple of years he had won both national and world titles, broken and re-broken no fewer than seven world records – and all in the face of appalling racial hostility. With cycling’s then governing body, the League of American Wheelmen attempting an outright colour ban to supplement prevailing member antipathy, Taylor experienced frequent difficulty both entering events – and then exiting them in one piece. Under the noses of prejudiced officials, he was routinely fouled and assaulted, at best having to single-handedly overcome the combined efforts of the entire field. Spectators and journalists, however, loved this gutsy, stylish rider – “the few hissed: the many cheered” – and promoters, recognising his box office appeal, welcomed him.

A devout Baptist, Taylor’s refusal to compete on Sundays effectively precluded further world titles and when physically attacked his response, invariably, was to turn the other cheek – and simply pedal a bit faster. Over several years he was, unquestionably, the best short-distance cyclist on the planet, idolised throughout Europe and the Antipodes, practically unbeatable in fair competition.

Retiring in 1910, Taylor, like so many sportsmen, struggled with life-beyond-adrenalin. He entered the fledgling motor trade but proved a better cyclist than businessman. Ever-generous and charitable, his fortune slowly evaporated, his marriage foundered, his health collapsed and dying penniless in Chicago in 1932, his unclaimed corpse was accorded a segregated pauper’s burial.

So much for ‘sport’ within class-divided, socially fractured society. In truth, how could it be otherwise? With life for billions a constant struggle for basic economic subsistence or paltry reward – a rat race – its recreational elements must surely reflect this. Where winning, acquiring, surviving are the overriding imperatives, then cheating, shortcutting, colluding will inevitably follow. And anyway, the race itself is pretty well fixed – odds fiddled, running order predetermined, from boudoir (parked Bentley or park bench) to battleground (boardroom or building site).

When the rat race is over

What then, when humanity has finally transcended the rat race? With the world’s resources now the common heritage how will societal attitudes towards sport have altered and in what ways might the calibre of performance have been affected? Will there actually be competitive sport?

The great post-war Australian coach, Percy Cerutty once averred that the finest athletic displays he ever witnessed were in Aboriginal communities where, uncluttered with and unfettered by what he called “Western values” and religious hang-ups, participants deported themselves with a natural elegance and fleetness of foot, and could endure levels of pain and suffering well beyond those of their ‘civilized’ counterparts.

Replicating that in a concrete stadium would, however, have been problematic. Chucking a spear across an empty field, jumping in triplicate into a pit of sand, lumbering endlessly around a plastic track with neither tasty kangaroo up front nor hungry crocodile behind to stimulate the pace? And what use would a communistic tribesman have had for a gold medal except to dangle it on his didgeridoo?

Such issues will be, of course, for society’s members – locally, globally, varyingly – to settle. Many will doubtless see sport purely as a means of healthy exercise and recreation whether strenuous and vigorous or painstaking and skilful; others may prefer to merely spectate or do nothing.

Some competitive elements and means of recording may well of course linger: football retaining its goalposts and referees, athletics its measuring tapes and stopwatches, judo its belt and points systems, but gone surely will be the all-pervading need to defeat, vanquish and rout: the tackle above the ball, the punch below the belt, the bouncer, the beamer and the hypodermic. Imagine: the Corinthian Spirit restored; amateurism regaining its true meaning and status within sport – and beyond. Imagine: world festivals replacing international competitions; sport for sport’s sake. Imagine too: divisive national flags recycled into cleaning mops; chauvinistic anthems supplanted by…Imagine.

And if some future Major Taylor is observed swooping around a velodrome with a posse of somewhat paler gentlemen in his wake, there will be no question whatsoever of bullwhip or hood: he’ll simply be pedalling a wee bit faster.

Andrew Armitage