The Persistence of Religious Ideas (2003)

Book Review from the July 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Persistence of Religious Ideas in the 21st Century: a Contribution to a Debate, Revolutions Per Minute, number 10. £3

This short pamphlet is like the proverbial curate’s egg: good in parts, but addled by the political purpose this work is supposed to serve. There are references to working class liberation, but Lenin and assorted anarchists are quoted approvingly. Marx is also quoted and it is of course from him that we get the most famous quotation concerning religion: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” However, the basic assumption in this pamphlet that an anti-religious thinker is worthwhile as long as they oppose religion is open to challenge. Antony Flew, a leading light in the Rationalist Press Association (full contact details are given in the pamphlet) and past debater with the Socialist Party, is a vehement opponent of both religion and socialism. Mere opposition to religion is not enough, and a religion-free capitalism (as Flew wants) would not bring socialism any nearer.

So why have religious ideas proved so persistent? Religion, the pamphlet argues, “is the tool which helps to explain away fundamental inequalities which are rooted in material circumstances (that is, economic realities). It is in this sense that debates about whether God exists or not are irrelevant. Changing economic realities will inevitably lead to the redundancy of the religious imperative . . . God exists only for as long as the economic realities which created him exist; when these wither away, so will he.”

For socialists, the struggle against religion cannot be separated from the struggle for socialism. We fight religious superstition wherever it is an obstacle to socialism, but we are opposed to religion only insofar as it is an obstacle to socialism. We leave the atheist gospel to those organizations that specialize in the spreading of secularist reason.

Lew Higgins

Nationalization—a Professor’s Misconceptions (1973)

From the December 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the problems in expounding Socialism is the persistent myth of “clever” men whose endorsement of other views is impressive to many people. Eminent scientists have followed the zig-zag Communist line; philosophers and mathematicians are found to be Catholics, racists or advocates of capital punishment. The common sentiment is that these opinions are given authority by learned men’s holding them, because someone with all those letters after his name cannot be a fool.

Can he not? In fact the opposite is true remarkably often. To the degree that a person has specialized in some field, his ignorance of others can be so acute as to take away the sense of his specialist knowledge. A classic example is that of Sir James Jeans, the most eminent astronomer of his time, who held religious beliefs so crude as to be comical. The “clever” are not exempt from fear, petulance or prejudice, or the propensity for putting material interests first. Harold Nicolson’s diaries show how a scholarly man’s thoughts may go when he wants a peerage, or under pressure from people round him. The whole idea of learned men who are superiors to the rest of us is a fallacy, a meritocracy-version of “God made them high and lowly, and ordered their estate”.

Higher Authority

In the October issue of The Freethinker, Professor Antony Flew lays down the law about Socialism. To give the background first, the September issue had an article by Professor Flew on the currently-fashionable Karl Popper. This was criticized in a letter by R. W. Morrell, who wrote:

Professor Flew seems to labour under the impression that nationalization has something to do with socialism, and that the criterion by which to judge the political colour of a party is its attitude to the issue. As a self-declared Popperian, he dislikes ‘sweeping’ social change; but is nationalization really ‘social change’, sweeping or other wise?

Professor Flew’s reply is as follows:

Mr. Morrell says: ‘Professor Flew seems to labour under the impression that nationalization has something to do with socialism . . .’ Yes, so I do. So clearly did those who wrote clause IV into the constitution of the British Labour Party. So clearly do all the Communist Parties, who make the implementation of Clause IV a first step after seizing power. So clearly do those who are now dominant in the Labour Party, and who disagree only on precisely how massive an extension of public ownership to propose in their next election programme.

If Mr. Morrell wishes to use the word ‘socialism’ in such a way that nationalization is not a necessary condition of socialism, that, indeed, it has nothing to do with it at all, then the very least he should have done was to indicate what sort of glory he wants to make the word refer to. It is hard to be condemned for not following Mr. Morrell’s eccentric usage when he does not even tell us what it is.

What has to be noted is how the conviction of learned authority works. Every “expert” believes there are other, higher experts — presumably, at the end, a supreme expert before whom nobody may speak. Professor Flew does not consider answering the point. Instead, he refers to the authority of the Labour Party’s Clause IV, the Communist Parties, and “those now dominant in the Labour Party”; to say anything different from them is mere “eccentric usage”. However, there is a much greater eccentricity in his own approach. In the September issue he attacked Marx and “socialism”. Yet Marx’s writings make abundantly clear what Socialism is, and that it is not nationalization. Are we to understand that the learned Professor criticizes what he has not read?

Where's this Better World ?

Professor Flew does speak of concern to “change the world for the better”. It is possible to look at nationalization in that light, without recourse to its economics. People get their definitions of Socialism wrong, but all associate it — however vaguely — with equality, freedom and production for social needs instead of profit. One ought first of all to ask if nationalization achieves any of those things, as a means to judge whether it has “something to do with socialism”.

On that basis, the policies of the Communist Parties can be dismissed immediately. In their model state, Russia, almost all industry is nationalized; personal and political freedom are minimal, the working class has a very poor standard of living and privileged sections have the fat of the land. Some industry was nationalized also in Nazi Germany, and that did not “change the world for the better”.

In this country, the same questions can be asked about the well-established models of nationalization: the Post Office, the railways, the coal industry, the .electricity and gas undertakings. Are workers better-off and more secure in these concerns? On the contrary, all pay poor wages and in recent years have got rid of large numbers of employees. An item in The Guardian on 27th September said:

At a recent Cabinet meeting, according to Field, Ministers were discussing the effects of Stage Three, and the low paid. Somebody asked who exactly were the low paid; nobody round the table knew. Lord Rothschild’s Think Tank was asked to find out, and present a paper on it within two or three days. Among other things that Rothschild came up with was the (fairly well worn) conclusion that it was the Government which was, directly or indirectly, the largest single employer of low paid workers.

Nor is there any benefit to the workers as “consumers”. Each enterprise is bound, as much as it would be in private hands, to compete in the market and try to make a profit. The prices of the commodities produced reflect the general level of prices. Is not Professor Flew ever curious as to why this “socialism” is indistinguishable from capitalism?

Control and Compensation

The purpose of nationalization and the public utility corporations is not to abolish or weaken capitalism but get it to function better as a whole. The last words have to be stressed, because they explain the arguments which take place over any project for State control. Generally, an industry is nationalized when its efficiency is vital to the rest of capitalism, and private groups either are an obstruction in themselves or cannot handle the costs of necessary developments. So far from seeing it as a threat, capitalists are always prepared to consider nationalization so long as their interests — that is, their property incomes — are acceptably arranged-for. What the capitalist loses is control, but not ownership.

Thus, every nationalization scheme includes “compensation”, the exchange of direct shareholdings for State bonds or the securities of whatever corporation is set up. This was done in the post-war Labour government’s nationalizations, and its necessity was reaffirmed in a Labour Party statement Industry and Society in 1957:

It may be that public participation in a private firm can be secured through State investment in it. Where public ownership is extended, full and fair compensation will of course be paid.

Of the present proposals by “those now dominant in the Labour Party”, the Fabian Society has published a pamphlet on housing nationalization called The End of the Private Landlord. The suggested financial arrangements are:

Instead of the standard practice of compensation at market rates, the group proposes the issue of irredeemable but marketable stock whereby landlords would receive the equivalent of a fair rent minus some deduction for management and repairs.

(“Guardian”, 10th September)

This would reproduce what happened in the nationalization of the railways in 1947, where the shareholders were relieved of huge capital expenditures they would have had to make to attain the “fair” level agreed in the compensation terms.

Ownership and Equality

But where do these incomes arise, to be paid to people who — it is said — have ceased to own? They can be provided only from the exploitation of the working class and the production of surplus-value. Nothing, in fact, is altered. The capitalist may have been removed from direct participation in industry and commerce, but he remains the effective owner in that they are conducted as before for profit and interest: which go to him. Professor Flew refers to “those who wrote Clause IV into the constitution of the British Labour Party”. They were more aware of what they were doing than he is. The 1918 statement Labour and the New Social Order spoke of “the progressive elimination from the control of industry of the private capitalist” (our emphasis); nothing about eliminating ownership.

So nationalization has nothing to do with Socialism, but is one form of capitalism. Reformers, attracted by inaccurate phrases like “public ownership”, have seen in it a means of obtaining more equitable distribution under capitalism. How unlucky they have been is shown by facts repeatedly given by Labour spokesmen, when they are in opposition. On 27th September Michael Meacher wrote in The Guardian:

. . . four out of every five households have less than the average income, and only one-fifth have more, largely because in the richest 1 per cent there are some exceedingly rich individuals. If we were as tall as our incomes, they would be 10 miles high whilst most people would be dwarfs.

And in September Lord Shinwell, asked in a television interview what had been achieved in his seventy years as a Labour politician, said: Nothing. There were still the rich and still the poor — just the same.

Socialism, unlike those Professor Flew cites as authorities on it, is concerned first and foremost with ownership, simply because that is the foundation and changing-point of every social system. Capitalism exists on the basis of private or limited ownership of the means of living. From that, all the apparently ineradicable problems of our present world arise. Socialists know, however, that they can be eradicated: by establishing common ownership as the basis of society. The obstruction to it is ignorance — including what a 19th-century essayist called “the ignorance of the learned”.

Robert Barltrop

A bad case of Flew (1981)

Book Review from the November 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Antony Flew, Professor of Philosophy at Reading University, is a committed opponent of the case for human equality. Last September he debated with the SPGB on the argument that “equality is just a socialist myth”. His latest book. The Politics of Procrustes, is a readable account of the confused and occasionally vicious views of a defender of capitalism.

Like most anti-socialists, Flew fails to give any clear definition of “socialism". Despite his claim that he aims “to clear up some of the confusion to be found around and about the notion of socialism” (Chapter One) he soon arrives at the typically confused definition of socialism as “state ownership and direction of — in the hallowed words of the original Clause IV of the Labour Party — all the means of production. distribution and exchange”. He proceeds to make the outrageous claim — rejected even by most Labour Party supporters — that the Labour Party “has been for more than sixty years, and still is, both in theory and in practice, socialist”. With Professors of Philosophy like Flew "clearing up the confusion" about the meaning of socialism in such a manner, we may well repeat the question of Karl Marx: “Who is going to educate the educators?".

Socialism does not mean state control and the Labour Party has never stood for the establishment of socialism. The basic features of the capitalist system are — minority class ownership and control of the means of wealth production and distribution: wage slavery for the propertyless majority; the production of wealth as commodities to be sold on the market with a view to profit. Those who fail to recognise these basic features of the system will fail to see through the spurious claim that state capitalism—either as proposed by the Labour Party or as practised in Russia and China—is socialism. Two opposite systems cannot be defined by identical characteristics; capitalism and socialism are mutually exclusive.

Only by absurdly distorting the real nature of capitalism can Flew and his colleagues in the misnamed Freedom Association, assert that capitalism provides us all with freedom. Flew informs his readers that "It is the friends . . . of the market generally who are in truth the friends of individual liberty.” For Flew, the buying and selling system of the market is the finest example of social Freedom:

  . . . trade is a reciprocal relationship. If I am trading with you it follows that you are trading with me. Trade is also, for both parties, necessarily voluntary . . . So, if any possible advantage of trade to the trader could be gained only at the expense of some corresponding disadvantage to his trading partner, it would appear that in any commercial exchange at least one party must be either a fool, a masochist or a gambler (p. 150).

Flew is right when he states that buyers and sellers start out in a position of reciprocity. For example, a worker selling his labour power needs a wage or salary in order to live and a capitalist buying labour power needs the worker’s mental and physical energies in order to produce profits enabling him to live. In this sense, both classes go into the market place upon equal terms, unlike in previous slave or serf societies where the producer was legally tied to the owner of the means of production. To this extent, then, we can speak of freedom. But Flew is wrong when he states that the contract between buyer and seller is “necessarily voluntary”.

The truth of the matter is that the working class is compelled to sell its labour power because it has nothing else to sell. (Such is the definition of a worker.) Legally, workers are free not to work (although it is illegal to remain on the dole for long without seriously seeking employment—and begging is illegal), but in reality it is impossible for a worker to survive for long without selling his mental and physical energies to an employer. The wage slaves who are regularly poured out of the schools and universities into the factories and offices are not entering into a voluntary condition of dependence upon wages or salaries—nobody asked them whether they would prefer to be wage slaves or capitalists: they are the compulsory victims of capitalist exploitation.

Flew argues that workers would only enter into an arrangement of exploitation, one where the capitalists’ gain results from their disadvantage, if they are fools, masochists or gamblers. The assumption is that such exploitative transactions only occur occasionally. In fact, such exploitation is the hallmark of the production of profit under capitalism. When the capitalist buys the worker’s labour power he pays a price for it which fluctuates around its value, or what is needed for the worker to subsist and to reproduce himself. But labour power is only employed if it can produce values over and above its own value. For example, if a capitalist buys a worker’s labour power for a wage of £80 a week and invests £30 in machinery and raw materials, the worker must produce commodities which will sell at more than the investment or £110 before a profit can be made.

The employer will only take on the worker if he can predict that surplus value will be produced. If the worker produces goods valuing £150, then the capitalist has made £40 profit. This unearned income is made for the capitalist at the direct expense of the worker. Workers cannot insist that they will only work long enough to reproduce their own value, for the very essence of the arrangement is that labour power will be exploited for profit. If the workers do not like the arrangement there is nothing they can do to opt out of it, for they are wage slaves dependent on obtaining money in order to survive and the capitalist class own and control the productive and distributive machinery. If the workers realise that they are being deprived of the fruits of their labour and decide to appropriate for themselves some or all of the surplus value they will be called thieves and locked up in a prison. The capitalists are not known as thieves (by those who seek to legitimise this theft) because their theft is legalised. As Flew says, workers who put up with this daily exploitation would seem to be “fools” or “masochists” do to so for long.

Having examined the real nature of the profit system, we may now return to the Professor’s ignorance of the meaning of socialism. It does not mean that instead of private capitalists exploiting the working class, a state bureaucracy will do it. Workers who are exploited by the government are no less exploited than any others. Socialism means the common ownership and democratic control of the productive and distributive machinery. In a socialist society everyone, without distinction of age. race or sex will own and control the social wealth. Instead of wage slavery, people will contribute to society as much as they are able to. Instead of buying and selling, people will take according to their needs. Instead of production for sale on the market with a view to profit, all production will be solely for human use. Socialism will be a system of society where the spurious freedom of the market place (the liberty of the capitalists to take liberties with the working class) will be replaced by free access. In a society of co-operative, conscious human control of the earth and all its resources there will be no exploiters and exploited, robbers and robbed—we will at last be free, equal social beings.

Steve Coleman

Malthus, Ricardo & Marx (1972)

Book Reviews from the January 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, by Ricardo with introduction by R. M. Hartwell. 40p.

An Essay on The Principles of Population, by Malthus with introduction by Antony Flew. 36p.

The introductions to both these books claim that there has been a revival of interest in these early works. Both of them quote Keynes, but from opposite points of view. Flew quotes Keynes’ observation that the “almost total obliteration of Malthus’ line of approach and the complete domination of Ricardo’s for a period of a hundred years has been a disaster to the progress of economics”, while Hartwell points out that Keynes was writing against the background of the heavy unemployment of the nineteen thirties, and that since then economists have become increasingly interested in problems of “growth analysis” and this has led to a revival of interest in Ricardo’s analysis and especially in his attempt “to integrate the theory of distribution into a model of long-term change”.

So the wheel has turned a full cycle, and Ricardo’s stocks are high once again, and comment on his work frequent and complimentary.

So the conflict between Malthus and Ricardo in their lifetime is to be fought all over again by their respective backers.

Marx made many criticisms of Ricardo but regarded him (and Adam Smith) as the best exponents of "classical economy”. In particular Marx showed the inadequacy of Ricardo’s treatment of value and surplus value. On the theory of value Ricardo got into a dead end through failure to distinguish between labour and labour power. Engels summarised this in his introduction to Capital Volume II. (This and earlier formulations of a theory of value were dealt with in the Socialist Standard July 1934).

Marx and Engels were much less impressed by Malthus—Flew calls their reaction “apoplectic” (A very useful collection of their views will be found in R. L. Meek’s Marx and Engels on Malthus) Flew attacks Meek on the ground that he “speaks throughout in his Moscow’s Voice”. The criticism is valid to this extent, that Meek treats state-capitalist Russia as if it were socialist and argues that what Marx wrote about the laws of population under capitalism do not apply there.

Flew’s attack on Meek and Russia as if he were attacking Marx and Engels is therefore misdirected. Meek quotes the letter Engels wrote to Kautsky in 1881 about possible population problems in a socialist society, which contained the following:

There is, of course, the abstract possibility that the number of people will become so great that limits will have to be set to their increase. But if at some stage communist society finds itself obliged to regulate the production of human beings, just as it has already come to regulate the production of things, it will be precisely this society, and this society alone, which can carry this out without difficulty. It does not seem to me that it would be at all difficult in such a society to achieve by planning a result which has already been produced spontaneously, without planning, in France and lower Austria. At any rate, it is for the people in the communist society themselves to decide whether, when, and how this is to be done, and what means they wish to employ for the purpose. I do not feel called upon to make proposals or give them advice about it. These people in any case, will surely not be any less intelligent than we are.

It should be noted in the reproduction of Ricardo that in Hartwell’s introduction Professor Cannan and Professor Wicksteed are repeatedly referred to as Cannon and Wickstead. 

Edgar Hardcastle

Party News (1981)

From the October 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last month two debates took place between the Socialist Party and organisations standing for free market capitalism. On September 10 in Islington, with 83 people present, Ron Cook of the SPGB debated with David Steele of the Libertarian Alliance. The declared principles of the Libertarian Alliance include "The right of all persons to life, liberty and justly acquired property". For the Libertarians, "justly acquired property" includes the wealth accumulated by the owners of capital through the work carried out for them by the rest of us, with the threat of enforced hunger of we refuse. David Steele's objection to socialism was that without the mechanism of profit and prices, goods could not be efficiently distributed to those who need them. It was pointed out that millions starve at this moment, precisely because they cannot afford to pay the prices, and that a system of production for use according to needs could be based on the modern means of communication which already exist. People could declare needs directly and worldwide as the basis for production, instead of the present buying and selling mechanism. The following day, in Guildford, Steve Coleman of the Socialist Party debated with Professor Antony Flew of the Philosophy Department of Reading University. 65 people attended the debate, which was on the question of "Is Equality Just a Socialist Myth?"