Classic Reprint: At the conscientious objectors tribunal (1964)

A Classic Reprint from the August 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Devine Comedy of the Watford Tribunal

Dramatis Personae

Lord Clarendon – Chairman.

Mister Hudson – Clerk to the Council.

Mister Longley – Draper.

Mister Clarke – House Builder.

Mister Solomon – Photographer.

Mister Gorle – Solicitor, Conscriptionist, Labour Leader and acquainted with the King of the Belgians.

Crowd of N.C.F Men, Comrades, Constables and attendants.

————–

The Bushey and Watford comrades did in the month of March appear before the local Tribunal with the now familiar result.

The chairman was the Lord and the Military Representative, symbolically enough, was on the left hand of the Lord. A Draper sat next to a House Builder and a Solicitor next to a Professional Photographer.

To the right of the Lord’s chosen people were portraits of two old-time councillors done by a Bushey painter, who, when he has no commissions from local legislators, will condescend to paint angels for church windows. These pictures were as interesting to artists as pathology is to humanitarians. No cantankerous sentiment could be detected on their placid faces, for when the local man took up his brushes there was no European War and all the Conscientious Objectors had been robbed of their telescopes and books and burned and decapitated many centuries ago.

But I must not digress now for I am come to the point when the Lord spoke. I had arrogantly suggested on my appeal paper that what was valuable and precious in Art and Science and Literature had emanated from intellectual research; and that militarism either supported or created all those things hostile to a free and secure existence. Before I came to these chosen of the Masters I had suggested that intellectual progress and military pursuits are antagonistic. Then when the Lord asked me if I was a Quaker I saw that my policy and sentiments still remained misunderstood, so I rose to explain that I had accepted the communistic principles of Karl Marx, and consequently believed that the world could not progress towards a beautiful ideal of society or a scientific one until the nations federated on an amiable basis. But while these words were yet unspoken the Solicitor, with prophetic acumen and godly insight, denounced them as “Propaganda”, while the Chairman said he was there to “elicit facts and not listen to speeches”.

This last indiscreet sentence must now pass as ignorance. This is the more lamentable as had it read, “elicit facts and not listen to the evidence” it would have passed with the public, not as bias and illiteracy, but as a decisive, rich, and becoming paradox. I had further evidence to show that the literature of Greece had done more for humanity than the wars of Greece; that Van Tromp, with all his magnificence did not do so much for Holland as Rembrandt and Discartis; that the Spaniards’ best day was not when the Armada was loosened but when Valasquez took up his palette. The Lord waved me down. How could I rise from my insignificance? I only had on my side the lessons of ancient decapitated scientists and charcoal heretics while the Tribunal were greatly inspired and strengthened by the methods of Torquemada. Their actions taught me that the man with estates was in the place of Democracy; the Camera Man in the place of the Artist; the Attorney in the place of the Economist, and the Draper of Bodies in the place of the Humanitarians. Before the Tribunals the appellant with artistic ideas is dismissed, the man with rheumatism postponed, and the wine merchant exempt from military service. Then after having stopped me speaking in my own defence one had the temerity to ask if I objected to bloodshed.

Our comrade Russ sat next before the Tribunal and his case was dealt with in the same clean and aristocratic spirit. They “elicited” genealogical facts about his grandmother and partly forgotten brothers; details which are most valuable to any analysis of scientific ideals or the individual conscience. But while on the side of lineage the examination was most wise and thorough, there are three small points to which the Tribunal was inexcusably indifferent. I admit that a consideration of the forgotten details would in no way have altered the result of the trail, for in all cases the conduct of the Tribunal showed great forethought and preparation. In no instance can I remember a hasty and spontaneous injustice being done to the appellant, for the Socialists were only dismissed after careful consultation with the versatile Labour Leader, while the Religionists were dismissed only after the Chairman’s chat with the Christian member. The first of these three unconsidered trifles in Russ’s case was that he wore a black scarf of crepe-de-chine, which should have been noted by at least one member of the Tribunal for its photographic possibilities; the second, that sometimes in the summer he slept in the open at night, which should have been elicited and condemned by the Builder; the third, that as a Socialist he would not fight in a capitalist war, which should have been considered by all, as in this assertion, all were alike equally implicated and condemned. But if we review the matter with a milder and less intolerant mind we will understand that if Russ did not know what parts of his Marxian economics were a heritage from his grandmother, his own statement of International Faith is, in the ten or twelve eyes of the Tribunal, robbed of half its value. But the trial ended well, for, as he declared he would not do medical work and assist the wounded, the Tribunal considerately gave him non-combatant duties in which he will only have to help the injured.

When our comrade Hudson sat next in the chair the modern God filled his pipe and the Clerk read the appeal. It was a reiteration of the communists’ ideal of Wealth Production. The Lord asked what denomination he belonged to. Now with myself, as I have a pale face, there was some pertinence in the Quaker question, but with Hudson it is different. He is not sickly or peevish; there is not a trace of suffering on his face. It would have been more relevant to have asked the noble Lord if he was the only support his wife had or ask a poet if he sold matches. Our comrade replied that he was an atheist. The Christian Draper sniffed. A man here who would not submit to Kitchener and denied the authority. “You are one of them who resent all kind of control then, eh?” he said. “Not all control”, our comrade replied, “only such as you have.” The Chairman was indignant to hear a youthful idealist give such a retort to a shopkeeper who has sold the best linen within a farthing of a shilling in the town; to a man who has distributed more bibles and advertisements and subscribed to more church organs in a year than the applicant would do in fifty years. In these days of heresy and commerce one can forgive a taunt to God, pass over a slight to Kitchener, but what Chairman of what Tribunal can pass over an Internationalist’s insult to a homely employer. He cautioned our comrade and later dismissed the case.

The next judgement was to be upon our comrade Wilkins. He too was an Internationalist. Had the first been the only one of the day the idea could have been discredited and regarded as isolated Quixotism and futile faith. The poor, bewildered master of the show moreover learned that this Socialist was a Monist. “What is a Monist?” Alas! My Lord, you have given Oxford over to ignominy; the hallowed pile is desecrated. In the past, we were told, much damage and havoc was done with the jaw-bone of an ass, but it was infinitesimal compared with that done to the gray and hoary university with the jaw-bone of our Tribunal Lord. Alas! Poor Chairman, you came, you told me, to “elicit facts” but you remain to complete your education. Although comrade Wilkins explained on his appeal paper that he could more effectively assassinate Rothschild with a new ideal or a new economic law than with an old hatchet—although unlike an Indian God he did not wear a necklace of human bones or a girdle of human skulls, they still enquired whether he was prepared to take life. He replied that he did not believe in the sacredness of the individual existence, only in the sacredness of humanity, and would therefore help to establish Socialism by the ballot if possible but by force if force was essential. “We dismiss your case, Mister Wilkins.” As the lordly judge spoke his loyal mouth pennies to the Escutcheon. “You may appeal to the County Tribunal”, he said. “To the County Press Gang”, our comrade retorted with such truth and emphasis that it became quite inaudible to the Newspaper Correspondent.

There was a long hush. The last of the pearls had been cast before the Tribunal.

The Draper demanded that the room should be cleared of the public. This was assented to by the Labour Leader, and endorsed by the Lord.

No one moved.

Then in this Earthly Paradise the Provincial God’s still, small voice with a slight Oxford accent, said “Let there be police”, and there were police. But this latter day Lord’s behests are not so instantaneously obeyed as formerly, for his wand is only a telephone and his angels wear thick-soled boots.

So there was still time left for further heresy and the “Red Flag” was sung, and just as it ended the Constables entered the room and faced the perplexed Tribunal and those pigment Councillors on the walls, whose pensive eyes are fixed on the distant utopian Watford when each of the ten thousand inhabitants was docile and diligent and none had dreamed of Marxian Economics.

H. M. M.

(Reprinted from the Socialist Standard, May, 1916)

On Passing the New Menin Gate by Siegfried Sassoon. (1964)

From the August 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who will remember, passing through this Gate,
The unheroic Dead who fed the guns?
Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate,
These doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones? 

Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own.
Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;
Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,
The armies who endured that sullen swamp. 

Here was the world’s worst wound. And here with pride
“Their name liveth for ever," the Gateway claims.
Was ever an immolation so belied
As these intolerably nameless names?
Well might die Dead who struggled in the slime
Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime. 

We thank Siegfried Sassoon for letting us publish his poem.

Fifty years too late (1964)

From the August 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

It has taken the world a long time to get back its breath after the shock of the First World War. Now it is time for a reassessment. Not surprisingly, this is proving to be a painful business.

The war is under severe criticism: the defenders of that episode in human history are finding it difficult to hold their lines and in many cases are in full retreat. Books, articles, photographs—even a West End musical have been devoted to a merciless exposure of the war. The generals are now regarded as cold blooded fools, the politicians as impotent puppets. Only the Poor Bloody Infantryman comes out of it well, slogging up to the Front, grovelling in the slime, resignedly going over the top whenever he was ordered to.

A new generation of exceedingly articulate historians have analysed the war. Alan Clark has written bitterly on the “experiments” of 1915, Brian Gardner has exposed the 1916 Battle of the Somme, Leon Wolff that of Passehendaele in1917. Alan Moorehead has told the story of the massive blunder of Galllipoli. And so on. These writings have taken full profit of the historian’s natural advantage of hindsight—the advantage which men like Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, who had actual experience of the war, did not have. Although they eventually came to doubt the motives of the war, Sassoon and Graves were at first aware only of the confusion of it all. They could not know of the more horrible mistakes, of the conceited indifference of the generals. Theirs were snap judgments, put down in white heat.

It is different now. Almost everyone seems to agree that the war was a mistake just like an accountant adding up his books wrong or a mechanic leaving a nut loose. Good—but only as far as it goes. It was, after all, a “mistake” which cost ten million lives. At the time, the war was generally accepted as a good idea. And it is a “mistake” which the world can make again, at any time, because the elements for it are still there.

The condemnation of the Great War fits in with the ever popular theory about the Bad Old Days. But this does not alter the fact that the case against the war, on all scores, is overwhelming. It is pitifully easy to show up the leaders for what they were; Robert Blake, in his edition of the private papers of Sir Douglas Haig, avoids criticising the British commander but in truth Haig’s own words are enough. Many of the generals were hopelessly wrong in their estimations of military prospects which was, after all, their job. Haig, at the beginning of the war, considered the machine gun a much overrated weapon and thought that it would be impossible to use gas.

Sir John French, who was at the time the commander of the British troops, sited his headquarters for the disastrous battle of Loos at a place which had no telephone communication with Haig, whose First Army was to fight the battle. The French General Nivelle sent his men to attack on the Aisne in 1917 although he knew that his plans had fallen into German hands. The French soldiers were massacred: 180,000 of them were lost. Yet General Sir Henry Wilson, who was supposed to be the contact man between the British and the French forces, wrote to Haig, “I don’t think, luckily, that the French losses are very heavy.”

Wilson was only one of the generals who did not seem to know what was happening to the men under their command. However badly his armies were mauled, Haig never lost his confidence. The day before twenty thousand British soldiers were killed on the Somme he wrote: “The weather report is favourable for tomorrow. With God's help. I feel hopeful.” The battle of Arras, in April, 1917, cost 160,000 casualties for an advance of seven thousand yards. Haig's estimate of the losses was sixteen thousand—one-tenth of the actual total—and, of course, he had planned for a much greater advance. In March, 1918, just before the German armies smashed through his lines, he told his Army commanders that he was “ . . .  only afraid that the enemy would find our front so very strong that he will hesitate to commit his army to the attack with the almost certainty of losing very heavily.” 

Haig's Chief of Staff. Lieutenant General Sir Launcelot Kiggell, did not visit the Passchendaele battlefield until the fighting was all over. When he did go there he was appalled by the impossible conditions in which the soldiers had fought. He broke down and went: “’Good God. did we really send men to fight in that?”

Perhaps the leaders suffered from a lack of imagination. Most of the generals were firm Westerners: they believed that the only proper place for the war to be fought was in France and Flanders, and they scorned any suggestions of bypassing movements like Gallipoli. Most of these officers started the war as ardent cavalrymen, dreaming of sleek horses prancing across the battlefields under vivid lance pennants. The mud strangled those romantic visions, as surely as it popularised the opposite theory of attrition.

In its baldest terms, this theory was that a general committed his troops to a battle which had virtually no chance of significant success — no chance of bursting through the opposing trenches into the open country beyond. The most that such attacks could achieve was a slogging, bloody advance of a few miles. At the end of the battle the general got his Staff to add up his casualties and those of the other side. If his were less than theirs (and Haig's Staff usually took good care that that was how the figures came out) he had won. Simple. Even for the millions who were attrited.

The result of this theory was that the soldiers were continually being asked to do the impossible and were being blamed as cowards and slackers when they faded to overcome the combined obstacles of trench ailments, shellfire, bottomless mud, barbed wire and machine guns. On July 1st, 1916, the opening day of the Battle of the Somme, one of the Corps under Haig's command the Eighth lost thirteen thousand men. Haig's comment on this day's work; was that he was “. . . inclined to believe . . . that few of the 8th Corps left their trenches.”

It is fashionable now for the critics to point a horrified finger at the attrition policy. There is no doubt that the commanders did not seem able to think up any other way of getting their men killed yet the policy had succeeded convincingly in the American Civil War. Were the general really to blame for apparently applying what was then up to date military theory?

Attrition is, in fact, one of war's logical conclusions. The theory sounds too callous to be true but has anyone ever heard of a humane war? Did ever a general plan a battle in which nobody was going to get killed? It was not the commanders, but those people who supported the war and the social conditions which nurture war, yet who objected to the long casualty lists, who were illogical. And in those people we can include most of the young historians who are now so bitterly critical of the war’s conduct.

What, after all. did the world expect? About a year before he was killed, Wilfred Owen composed a moving sonnet which opened with the words: "What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? ” By the time he wrote that Owen, and many others, were in despair at the endless slaughter. Yet when the war broke out the working class, hysterically patriotic, were not expecting to die like cattle: they looked forward only to swift, glorious victory and a hero’s return.

This was true of both sides. The cheering crowds in London were matched by those in Berlin. This was how Walter Limmer, a law student from Leipzig, who died of wounds in September, 1914, described his regiment's departure for the Front:

   Our march to the station was a gripping and uplifting experience! . . . Such enthusiasm! — the whole battalion with helmets and tunics decked with flowers — handkerchiefs waving untiringly and cheers on every side. . .

It is a bitter fact that the workers eagerly took in the propaganda which was fed to them. The British government were surprised by the response to their appeal for volunteers, which kept up until the losses in the battles of attrition brought conscription on to the scene.

Not all the “volunteers” joined up entirely of their own free will: many of them were subject to varying types and degrees of force. There was the moral force of the girls with the white feathers. There was the sort of persuasion which Siegfried Sassoon mentions in his poem Memorial Tablet: “Squire nagged and bullied till I went to fight (Under Lord Derby’s Scheme).” And there was the direct economic pressure from the firms who suddenly declared that they would no longer take on any fit men of military age. (The London County Council, when their tramway men went on strike in 1915, said that they would not take back any strikers who were eligible for military service.)

But even taking all this into account, there can be no question about the workers’ support of the war and of their eagerness to get into uniform. Whatever they saw and experienced at the Front, they kept coming back for more. They never gave up. The French, it is true, were mutinous for a time after Nivelle’s catastrophic offensive in 1917. But they were soon settled and the war ground on. The Germans, of course, suffered terribly but there was still enough fight left in them in 1918 for their great attack in March of that year. All that happened was that the mud got deeper and bloodier and more repulsive as the corpses rotted down into it. Visions of glory gave way to blank despair: most people thought the war would never end.

 

Yet even that did not shake the basic support for the war. It is all very well for confident journalists now to expose the terrible blunders that were made. At the time such exposure would have been generally regarded as acts of gross, unpatriotic indecency. So the journalists held their tongues. In his life of Lloyd George, Tempestuous Journey, Frank Owen tells of the Prime Minister crying:

   If people really knew, the war would he stopped tomorrow, but of course they don’t — and can’t know. The correspondents don’t write and the censorship wouldn’t pass the truth. The thing is horrible, and beyond human nature to bear, and I feel I can’t go on any longer with the bloody business.

Those words sound very heartfelt and sincere but they need not be taken too seriously. It was, after all, Lloyd George’s government who did their best to suppress anyone who tried to tell the truth about the war, even if in this they played up to the mob ignorance of hooligan patriots.

Those were dark days for the world, with only a gallant few holding out. In .September, 1914, the Socialist Party of Great Britain immediately made its opposition to the war plain: " . . . no interests are at stake justifying the shedding of a single drop of working class blood . . .” From that moment we kept up a barrage of opposition. Our speakers were physically attacked and we were forced to discontinue our meetings. Said the Socialist Standard of December, 1914: 

   Owing to various circumstances, including the peculiarly British sense of fair play of our opponents, the Party's Lecture list is considerably curtailed this month.

The next issue advertised no meetings at all, only a defiant attack on

   . . .  the rampant jingo hooligans of the streets, and . . . the “patriotic" fury of certain parasites “dressed in a little brief authority ”.

Our headquarters were raided by the police and almost every issue of the Socialist Standard carried matter which, under the Wartime Regulations, was illegal. Our “crime” was that we were saying then what most people, in part, are thinking now. Here, for example, is an extract from the issue of May, 1915 before the big battles had given second thoughts to some of those who had once been so enthusiastic about the godlike omnipotence of their leaders:

  The men in the trenches are being butchered. It is necessary to hide from them certain contributing factors. It is necessary to hide from them the fact that military experts, whose business it was to understand war, failed utterly to grasp the power, scope and requirements of the awful instruments of slaughter placed in their hands.

The members of the Socialist Party of Great Britain were not thanked, during those terrible years, for their stand. But they did not want to be; for them, the facts were enough. Time has shown how correct they were. The Europe which was spawned by the 1919 Conference was ready to father the Second World War. Until recently the conduct of the last war was thought to be above the sort of criticisms which have been levelled at 1914/18. But now, as time allows a better perspective and as the facts come out, opinions are changing. The raid on Dresden has become notorious as an example of shameless mass murder, as are the two atomised Japanese cities. The Dieppe landing has been exposed as a pointless flourish, partly undertaken to occupy troops who were bored with camp life in England. Perhaps the long bomber offensive will one day be seen as the Passchendaele of 1939/45 a drawn out campaign of attrition, in which hundreds of thousands were killed on both sides, with little real effect on the course of the war. The late Lord Alanbrooke has put on record the doubts about Churchill's infallibility. And there are now the same hungry questions over the war's conclusions —over the division of Germany and of Berlin, for example as there were about the conditions imposed in 1919 at Versailles.

Perhaps in 1989 there will be smug journalists to point out the mistakes of the Second World War. But can we afford always to wait fifty years to agree that war is an obscene waste of human lives and resources? Capitalism, with its inevitable competition of economic interests, causes modern war. From that flows all the rest the ghastly weapons, the shattered lives, the terror, the confusion, the mistakes. To bemoan the natural results of war without attacking the cause of it is to start at the wrong end of the problem.

The Great War happened a long time ago and it is safe, now, for the truth to filter out. The blinds can be lifted, now that there are only a few people to remember it all—a few old men who still wheeze from the gas, a few white haired women with an aching grief for someone who went out and was left in the mud. Nothing now can bring back the dead, nor put together the splintered limbs, nor erase the intolerable anguish of those four years. The strenuous apologists of capitalism are congratulating themselves on having just woken up to the fact that the First World War was a stupid, pointless bloodbath.

But they are too late.

Fifty years, and ten million lives, and an untold burden of human suffering, too late.

Ivan

What They Said (1964)

From the August 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some Labour Leaders and the War

In an article by Mr. Keir Hardie in yesterday's Pioneer (Merthyr) he says: "I have never said or written anything to dissuade our young men from enlisting. 1 know too well all there is it stake/' (Manchester Guardian, November 28th, 1914.)

I returned about 1.30 and received the Rl. Hon. J. H. Thomas at lunch, a Labour M.P., and head of the Railwaymen's Union. I found him a broad-minded patriot. Most anxious to help and fully alive to what the gentry of England have done in the war. He is a great admirer of Asquith. . . (The diary of Sir Douglas Haig, Commander of the British forces in France. October 31st, 1917.)


Ruthlessness

Nothing for which the masses of our people have ever striven is more important than that they and all of us should win in this tremendous war against the ruthless military caste . . . that menaces the rights and freedom of mankind. (H. M. Hyndman. writing in the Daily Dispatch, July 7th. 1915.)

Sir Douglas Haig's diary far the same day shows that ruthlessness was not confined to one side. . .

At 11 o’clock Lt. Col. Fowkes. RE., called on me from G.H.Q. regarding the use of asphyxiating gas. I said better wait until we can use it on a large scale, because the element of surprise is always greater on the first occasion.

The First Casualty

It is difficult to imagine what could be more despicable than the attitude of the capitalist Press during the past year. The persistent and ever more complete suppression of truth, the distortion of facts, the hypocrisy, the false and maudlin sentiment, and stupid advice to the workers, the idiotic praise of everything British and the belittling of the same thing when done by the alien, all make it increasingly obvious that the “glorious institution”, the capitalist Press, is one gross insult to the intelligence of the people. The Socialist Standard. September, 1915.)

It would be an admirable thing if all unmarried men between 18 and 30 without the manhood to offer themselves, were forcibly pressed into the Army and put into battalions where the kicks should be far more than the ha’pence. (The Daily Express, August 20th, 19I4.)

God’s Purposes and the War

It is God's leading that we are following now. War is the instrument through which God is working out his own purpose. (Canon Alexander of St. Paul’s. Standard, August 25th, 1914.)

And this is what the war really meant. . .

. . . some have gone into dug-outs to try to get a few hours sleep, but this is almost impossible, for the earth shakes from the vibrations of the artillery. The lice crawl all over the body, driving one nearly frantic, and the rats are in swarms and run over us. But there are some corpses lying out on the top, with plenty of rats around them, so they won’t go hungry. (A Soldier In The Trenches, The Ploughshare, March, 1917.)

The War for “Freedom”

The Daily Mail wants the names of every known pacifist or active friend of Germany in your city, town or village . . . the names of every speaker or writer who favours Germany, with all you know about the source of his income, the societies to which he belongs, and the relations he has, or has had, with Germany. (The Dailv Mail, October 25th. 1917.)

Talking about Homes . . .

It is a pitiful thing to think of, but thousands of these brave men of ours have belter homes in the trenches of Flanders than in the sunless alleys of our Motherland. (Arthur Mce, writing in Lloyd’s News, March 26th, 1916.)

Sir Derek Keppel (Master of the King’s Household) arrived and went round to inspect several Chateaux considered suitable for the King’s occupation. He fixed one which (for secrecy) is to be prepared for me. Derek is enjoying himself so much that he has asked to stay another day. (The diary of Sir Douglas Haig. Commander of the British forces in France. August 2nd, 1916.)

Marching on whose stomach?

We then went to Poperinghe. It was now past 2 o’clock, so we stopped and had lunch near some stacks on the road south of Steenwoorde. A party of refugees passed us and a well-dressed woman and a man came up and asked if they could go by Tournai to Brussels. . . . They had walked all the way from Ostend with a basket on the arm or a pack of clothes on their backs. All that was left to the poor things of their property. . . . I gave them 2 doz. “Oxo’’ soup squares for which they seemed most grateful. (The diary of Sir Douglas Haig. Commander of the British forces in France. October I7th, 1914.)

Prince Arthur of Connaught arrived with the Crown Prince of Servia. . . . Lunch lasted two hours and all enjoyed themselves hugely. (July 7th, 1915). We had coffee after lunch in my writing room, and Joffre enjoyed himself so much that it was 2.20 p.m. before he went. . . . They are, indeed, difficult Allies to deal with! But there is no doubt that the nearest way to the hearts of many of them, including that of the “Generalissimo”, is down their throats, and some 1840 brandy had a surprisingly smooth effect on him and Castlenau! (May 26th, 1916.)

A PRAYER FOR THE TROOPS

by Alderman Henry F. Morriss

Keep the Officers who lead us; help us all to render them cheerful obedience. May we all endure hardness, as good soldiers of Jesus Christ. When suffering or death comes to us. may the Holy Comforter be as a friend at our side. Grant us speedy Victory over our Enemies; if it be Thy Will. God save the King, the Queen, and all the Royal Family. Give wisdom and courage to all who control the affairs of our Empire. Bless all our Allies, and save them and us with Thy Great Salvation; through Jesus Christ Our Lord. Amen

News In Review: Police (1964)

The News in Review column from the August 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

AT HOME

Police

As many people who have been roped in for some minor offence know, the “half bricks’' case is only the part of the iceberg above the water. It does not need a cynic to wonder whether the official, explanation for the rampages of Detective Sergeant Challenor, that he was overworked and mentally sick, is just another cover-up.

To be imprisoned for something which you have not done is galling in the extreme; no sum of money can restore a period of lost liberty. To be submitted, in addition, to the sort of indignities which Challenor and his men were accustomed to visit upon their unfortunate arrests is intolerable.

Yet outraged sympathy for the victims is not enough. Why is it only now admitted that Challenor was unbalanced? Did this not show up in court when he gave his evidence? Was it not apparent to his superior officers?

The plain, awful fact is that a system of law-enforcement must rely in some cases on men like Challenor, and upon magistrates and high police officers closing an eye to any doubts about the methods he has used to gather the “ evidence” which puts people away.

Crime must be an undercover business, which means that some police work must also go underground. It is a known fact that often, when the police think they have a criminal in their grasp, they are not above cooking a bit of evidence to make their case conclusive. Only occasionally are these practices uncovered—in most cases the accused is guilty anyway.

But sometimes he is not. Challenor's victims suffered nothing worse than a spell in prison, bad as that may be. In the case of Timothy Evans there is good reason to believe that the police technique cost a man his life.

Capitalism is not without its legal rights and it is anxious that these should be protected. But in the end the complex scientific police force and massive judicial machine which capitalism has developed to protect its property structure depends on the man on the beat.

It depends on the distraught detective, the not over-sensitive constable, the inspector with a down on political demonstrators. These men have an awesome power over someone’s life—and too often there is nobody to call them to account for their actions. Property society is a dirty business and so are the various organisms it has fashioned to maintain itself. It is hard going for anyone who tries to keep it all clean and above board.

ABROAD

Cyprus

Politicians say some silly things, some of which live on to mock their memory long after they are dead.

One of these was Alan Lennox Boyd's famous “Never” over Cyprus. When he said that, the British government seemed immovable over the fate of the island, basing their attitude on the 1956 Colonial Office Report:—

  Her Majesty's Government formally recognised the principle of self-determination, but considered its application not to be a practical proposition at the present time on account of the existing situation in the Eastern Mediterranean.

To support that classical piece of diplomatic evasion, hundreds of British soldiers—and not a few civilians—were killed. The strife and the confusion in Cyprus have persisted until today, even after the so-called truce, the island remains one of the world’s ugliest spots.

And among the confusion, a certain fact gleams. Lennox-Boyd—now Lord Boyd—is a political ghost, his foolish words gone down in history. The policy he applied is almost dead. Britain is no longer hell bent on staying in Cyprus.

Only reluctantly did Whitehall agree to send a British contingent to the UN force in Cyprus; they are now anxiously pulling their soldiers out. Lennox Boyd made many biller attacks upon enosis but his latter day successor, Duncan Sandys, now refuses to be drawn on the issue.

This sort of volte face is not new, nor particularly remarkable. But it is pari of a very sordid story and someone should point out the moral of it.

The British government have now virtually admitted that, even by their own standards, the casualties of the war against EOKA were incurred for no good reason. This sort of things has happened before and each time it happens it should rouse the working class to a fury of dissent.

But they are never so roused. Each time the call goes out for another lot of colonial cannon fodder—for Aden, for Malaya, for Borneo—there is no hanging back. The official propaganda about primitive savages desecrating the graceful achievements of the British colonisers, continues to be accepted almost without question. There seems to be no end to it. No wonder politicians say so many silly things—they get away with them so easily.

POLITICS

Nationalisation

The Tories are doing their best to blow up Nationalisation into one of the big issues of the coming general election. In this, they are helped by organisations like Aims of Industry (Say No To Nationalisation) and most of the big steel firms, who are preparing to sell themselves dearly if they are taken under State control.

Naturally, this side are rather careful in their choice of arguments. They stress the large deficits which, after payment of interest, are declared by some nationalised concerns. This impresses many workers who, although they live on the edge of insolvency, like to think that the Bank of England and the other State industries belong to them.

The anti-nationalisers make cracks about slate in the coal and dirty railway carriages, although they know perfectly well that these existed before the State took over.

All this is good for a laugh. It may even win a few votes. But it ignores the basic facts of nationalisation.

State control is not something dreamed up by the Labour Party in the nineteen forties. It has nothing to do with Socialism. It is an old established method, which the capitalist class have used from time to time, of trying to deal with particular problems. All three big parties in this country have had a crack at it—including the Conservatives.

Because of this, the capitalist class generally take a view of nationalisation rather different from that of the theorists of political parties who, apart from their concern with their theories, are also worried about getting into power.

This viewpoint is being pressed, as the election draws nearer, by some of the papers which speak with the voice of the capitalist class as a whole. The Economist, although it does not welcome the prospect of steel nationalisation, was pleading last May for the “least bad way" of imposing it. The Observer of June 21st concluded that:

  Ideally it ought to be possible for a Government, whether Labour or Tory, to launch new, competitive publicly-owned enterprises . . . public ownership and competition, far from being contradictory, are complementary.

The Guardian at the beginning of last month went into the figurework of the matter, comparing the incomes of some private and State industries. They pointed out that what the Prime Minister has called “the junkyard of nationalisation" in fact has “some extremely healthy giants ” in it.

The meaning behind this is that capitalists as a whole are not over interested in political theories on nationalisation, or indeed on any other matter. They treat political policies on their merits, by which they mean their profitability, sometimes in isolation, sometimes to the economy as a whole.

Thus they may require some industries to be nationalised, because they are large and nationally important or because they have an appetite for investment which only the State can guarantee to satisfy. (The Guardian says that the Electricity Boards are investing enough money every ten days to build the Channel Tunnel.)

Both Labour and Conservative Parties, as their recent policies show, have broadly adopted this attitude. On the hustings they grapple with each others' shadows but in the background the business of capitalism goes on undisturbed.

The Legacy of 1914-18 (1964)

From the August 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the first world war was declared amid scenes of hysterical enthusiasm from crowds of workers on both sides, few thought that it would drag on for four dreadful years. Nor did many envisage the weapons that would be produced and developed in that period of carnage.

Much of what has been written recently has touched on these weapons, and criticism has centred on the failure of the high-ups to see their possibilities and exploit them to the full. A few months ago, The Sunday Times Magazine had this to say about air power, for instance: -

For much of the war pilots were more concerned about painted duels than with the destruction of men and material. The hero worship such individuals gained was great for the home front, but didn’t do a lot for the man in the mud . . . real ground strafing did not begin until Messines and Cambrai (1917). Only in the final weeks was the aeroplane fully used as a striking weapon!

Be that as it may, it is not our intention to join the largely futile arguments about who was right and who was wrong, who was far-sighted and who not. Perhaps from the viewpoint of some contemporary historians, the perfect war effort would be one which organised its resources up to the hilt and exploited every weapon to the limits of its potential. Thank goodness there is no such thing as perfection, for had it been achieved, the ghastly story of it all would have been that much ghastlier.

The great lesson is that the war-like nature of capitalism continues, whether or not hostilities are actually in progress. Once a weapon has arrived on the scene, it will be developed, refined and used until changes in the conduct and techniques of warfare make it out of date. Perhaps the brasshats will be slow to grasp when a particular weapon has had its day and there will be the usual controversy among the war councils.

Let us consider one or two examples. In 1916 the first tanks appeared on the western front, much to the annoyance of the cavalry men. The tank was an early sign that warfare was to become much more mobile.. It was the answer to the machine gun nests which had prevailed until then, although some of the Allied chiefs were slow to realise its possibilities. Who, then, would have foreseen the day over twenty years later, when tank warfare would grow to the extent that it did, and Panzer divisions overrun France in a few weeks? But even the tanks of early 1940 were as babies compared with the sixty-ton monsters which smashed their way through Germany from all directions only five years later.

When the first world war broke out, the aeroplane was in its infancy, but at the end it was being used more extensively, and a fleet of four-engined bombers was being prepared to raid Berlin. Here, perhaps, is one of the most apt examples of our point, for the inter-war years saw rapid changes in the design of fighting aircraft. The Spitfire and Hurricane, and their German opposite numbers, could fly at well over three hundred miles per hour, and by 1939 the day of the bomber had really dawned. It is as well to remember, incidentally, that only just before this, the Spanish civil war had provided a testing ground for some of the new ’planes. Even in the midst of “peace” we are in war.

The growth of air power during 1939- 45, and its use against soldier and civilian alike, had its roots in the events of twenty-odd years before. During the first war, the allies had produced incendiary and high explosive bombs which were dropped on enemy airfields with devastating effect. Practically the whole of Baron von Richthofen’s Flying Circus was destroyed on the ground in one such raid. German Zeppelins bombed London and other parts until around 1916. But if civilians found the Zeppelin raids terrifying, a glimpse into the future would certainly have widened their eyes still further in horror. For there they would have seen the firestorms of Rotterdam, Hamburg and Dresden, the flying bombs and rockets on London, and the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The casualty lists of 1914 shocked many of those who had been so enthusiastic for a fight, and the relief when it was all over was matched only by a “never again” feeling. Post-war conferences of the big powers outlawed dumdum bullets and poison gas, and supply us with a fitting example of the futility of such a piecemeal approach to the problem of war. For even by then, developments had rendered these weapons obsolete and far more efficient means of killing were to be our lot. Yet it is one of the tragedies that this attitude has persisted until the present time. Even the anti-war movements of the inter war years never got down to an examination of causes.

They have been succeeded by that prime futility of the fifties—the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. This body has canalised the fright which many understandably felt when Hiroshima and Nagasaki hit the head-lines, but like its predecessors, CND has based its policy on the false assumption that the way to abolish war is to begin by outlawing its worst weapons and then work backwards through the list. “There is no war but nuclear war” was the remark made by one of their young supporters to an S.P.G.B. speaker a few years ago, and it seems a fair summary of at least their earlier attitude.

Last summer saw the signing of the test ban treaty, and this went to their heads a bit, having the effect of diverting their attention somewhat to other sources of capitalism. The words of Bertrand Russell illustrate to some extent their current feelings. At the end of January this year, he said;

  Owing to changes in government opinion, it seems more possible than it did to avert nuclear war . . . friends of peace should look for compromise solutions possibly acceptable to both sides. It should also be part of our work to expose punishments inflicted by governments which are unjustifiable and exacerbate international hostility. (Guardian, 29.1.64.)

It has been left to the SPGB to point out that the danger of war is just as great as ever and that the test ban treaty was only a sign of the changing balance of power between the major capitalist countries. It will be the same sort of story as long as capitalism is with us.

The horror of war weapons past, present and future, cannot be divorced from the social system which produces them. Let us correct the words of the young C.N.D.'er:--There is no war but a capitalist war.

Eddie Critchfield

Let's put the kybosh on . . . (1964)

From the August 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

People who were alive in the Twenties and Thirties will recall the "Songs that won the war." They will remember the song sheets given away by the newspapers, and the gramophone records with singers struggling against a background of phoney battle noises.

Every November brought its Armistice rallies when the same old stuff was ground out once again. The mixture was usually unvaried, the sugary ballads of the Home Front mixed with cleaned up versions of the songs actually sung by the front line soldiers. The impression was always of men going light-heartedly into battle. The memoirs have been published, with their revelations and recriminations, and charges and countercharges have been flung backwards and forwards. More important still, time has removed many of the participants from the scene. You cannot libel the dead; bitter attacks can now be made which, true or false, would have been dangerous during their lifetime.

Recently there have been radio programmes on the Great War songs, and, of course, the much discussed Theatre Workshop show Oh! What a Lovely War, with its witty and savage denunciation of the murder of a generation. They have brought back to life the real war songs. These songs, a product of the ordeal through which so many men passed, sound as fresh and real today as if fifty years had never been. The others are, at their best, museum pieces and, at their worst, nauseating.

All modern wars have one great need; the active support of the proletariat. The time is past when war could be declared without the knowledge and backing of the working class. Pro-war feeling must be whipped up, and then kept at fever- pitch. One of the means of doing this is the popular song—songs that appeal to the emotions not the intellect. The American Civil War first saw the mass-produced war song. Throughout the Victorian era many forces were at work —the growth of the Music Hall, the spread of literacy, and the sheet music that poured from the presses by the ton to feed the pianos that stood in every front room.

Pianos passed down the social scale, second hand or tenth hand until in the end, like the motor car today, you had a job to get rid of them. Songs had become big business and a profitable war song could not be wasted. When the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, patriotic songs were churned out for the occasion, but it was over too soon for them to be used. So as the South African war was brewing up they unloaded them in Britain. The famous "Goodbye Dolly Grey" was written in New York for the Spanish-American War, but it served very well as a morale booster in Britain.

When war broke out in 1914 it was much vaster and grimmer than anything the Victorians had seen, something for which people were totally unprepared. One can follow its progress by studying the popular songs that it produced. They began with pure Jingoism, that belonged to a world in which little campaigns against inferior forces had been fought on the other side of the world. Idiotic jingles like “Belgium put the Kybosh on the Kaiser," “We don’t want to lose you," with its references to cricket and football, and "Are we downhearted? No!” show a complete ignorance of the real situation, of the gigantic military machine that was rolling into France, to crash into another equally gigantic army. Those songs rapidly disappeared, to be replaced by the recruiting songs.

Great Britain was completely unprepared for this type of war. The standing army was small, conscription was unknown and extensively opposed, and so vast numbers of volunteers were needed. The upsurge of nationalist feeling that accompanied the declaration of war had brought many recruits, but the unparalleled slaughter called for ever more men. Men had to be bullied, cajoled or shamed into uniform. With the white feathers and every kind of pressure came such songs as “Make a Man of Any One of You" and “The Army of Today's Alright.” This kind of thing was not needed in 1939; by then conscription and total organisation for war were accepted. It was realised that modern war calls for a large labour force outside of the armed forces, and that people must do what they are told, and go where they are needed. Heroics were not welcome. Such feeble efforts as “He was a handsome Territorial” were ridiculed, even in the national press.

As the 1914/18 war progressed, and things got really bad, people turned to sentimental stuff like Novello's “Keep the Home Fires Burning’’ and “There's a Long, Long, Trail Awinding.” Later still they tried to escape the ever-growing horror, with its war weariness; they retreated into the pure escapism of musical comedy, like “Chu Chin Chow” and "The Maid of the Mountains."

But for the soldiers in the never-ending nightmare at the front, there was no escape. Divorced from the normal world in their own private hell, with a front line that never really moved, they wrote and sang songs that had nothing of patriotism or glory in them. Some of them were light-hearted, such as - 

Send for the boys of the Old Brigade
    To keep Old England free,
Send for me father and me sister and me brother
     But for Gawd’s sake don’t send for me.

But most of them were bitter and paint a terrible picture. The continual bombardments. the crazy offensives in which men were flung in their thousands to certain death, the gas attacks, the discomfort of the trenches and the barbed wire, recur again and again. The dreaded whizz-bangs, the stench of corpses, shortages, contempt for Staff officers, and, above all, a longing for peace, are in ditties usually sung to a hymn tune or popular song. One of the most famous. “Far, Far from Wipers," has the refrain:—

Sing me to sleep, the shadows fall
 Let me forget the war and all
Damp is my dugout, cold are my feet
 Nothing but biscuits and bully to eat.
Over the sandbags helmets you’ll find
 Corpses in front and corpses behind.
Damp is my dugout
Cold are my feet
Waiting for whizz-bangs
To put me to sleep.

Perhaps the most ironic was the savage “I Don’t Want to be a Soldier,” sung to the tune of the recruiting song “Make a Man of Anyone of You.’’

One must not, however, read loo much into the sentiments of the soldiers’ songs. Victims of the world in which they lived, and lacking the knowledge to change it, many of the survivors, on return to normal life, joined ex-service associations like the British Legion. They spent subsequent years parading with flags and medals, and some, who were young enough, were even ready for another dose 20 years later.

Les Dale

The Passing Show: Spanish Arms (1964)

The Passing Show column from the August 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

Spanish Arms . . .

What a fuss has blown up over the cancellation of the “Frigates of Franco” contract! Anyone would think that arms deals between powers had never taken place before. Both government and opposition are striving hard to make as much electoral kudos out of the affair as they can. What a godsend to Sir Alec, looking around for a reviver for the sunken Tory spirits; and as the game of shadow boxing is played out in the Commons, press and elsewhere, the same old stench of hypocrisy overall.

Self righteous indignation abounds. “Insulting a great and proud people!" roars a Tory. “No arms for fascists.” jeers Labour in return, although as Government spokesmen have pointed out. Franco will just get his warships elsewhere and British capitalists will lose a few million pounds worth of trade. The Prime Minister says that the opposition have done irreparable harm to “our” trade with Spain, which Mr, Wilson promptly counters by offering to trade with any fascist country, except in war weapons. Gibraltar, one of “our” major bases, has also been drawn into the squabble as an additional red herring. Franco has been after it for years and apparently plans to lay claim to it again in the near future.

A fair summary of the current Labour attitude was given by Mr. Patrick Gordon Walker, M.P. He said: ~

The Labour Party wants trade with all countries, including Spain. We do not believe in trade boycotts, but arms deals are different . . . 

which only goes to show how little H.M. Opposition really know about the capitalist world in which they live. First, we cannot resist reminding Mr. Walker that only two or three years back, his party launched a “Don't Buy S. African Goods” campaign in protest against Apartheid, and if that is not a trade boycott, then we don't know what is. (It failed to have any appreciable effect, needless to say).

But this is the sort of inconsistency of which every capitalist party is guilty, but have no difficulty in shrugging off as the shifting sands of politics force a change in posture from time to time. At the moment, the Labour Party is a very strong contender for government, in which case it won't want to be squeamish about whom to trade with. There are, however, matters of deeper import which should concern us, and which none of the other parties can be expected to raise.

The existence of arms anywhere and in any hands is an evil, and since Socialists are not concerned with choosing between evils, we refuse to enter into the futile squabble over the Spanish arms deal. We know that while capitalist society lasts, the State in all its various political complexions will be with us too. And that means coercion at home and abroad. It matters little, after all, whether the bullets which end our lives are home-made or imported.

And what of the trade which Labour and others are so anxious to foster? “ Peaceful trade ” is how they would all describe it, but there is really no such thing. Trade is a product of private property society. Its very existence means competition, and sooner or later, strife. It cannot be conducted on any other basis or with any different result, yet it seems to mesmerise everyone including workers - the very people who should view it as a curse, not a blessing. Modern trade typifies the anarchy which is capitalism. Despite all the market research, it cannot be regulated and makes a mockery of even the most cautious plans.

But, above all, trade presupposes ease and comfort for the few and deprivation for the rest of us, even when the economy is riding high on a boom. No wonder governments are so anxious for it to continue. These are some of the points which we ask you to bear in mind amidst the mud slinging and irrelevancies of the forthcoming election.

And British double think . . .

What does the word "usefully" mean to you? From our point of view the only satisfactory definition would be "aiming to advance human welfare and happiness." So anything short of that could hardly be called useful. Accepting our definition, would you then say that soldiers perform a useful service? No, neither would we. But it just shows how language can change, or can be changed to suit the interests of capitalism.

A current advert is appealing for male instructors for the Army Cadet Force, and if we are gullible enough to believe it, we will rush to lend a hand. Did you know, for example, that a youngster in the A.C.F. “uses his leisure well?” That the A.C.F. “ . . . is concerned with producing good citizens rather than with training future soldiers, but it does this by fostering soldierly qualities? ” There is a picture, too, of a smiling uniformed youth at camp with a rifle slung over his shoulder. (“ . . . worthwhile open-air activities ”)! Search as you may through this prime piece of double think, you will find no allusion to its object, which should be as obvious as a sore thumb, i.e„ to interest youngsters in joining the regular army, where they will have opportunities of exercising their “soldierly qualities" on the battlegrounds of the future.

Nowadays, the armed forces have to compete with industry for manpower, and rates of pay have been increased in an effort to attract youngsters. But despite the various improvements in pay and conditions, the dirt, discomfort and disciplines, to say nothing of the possibility of a violent death at sonic time or an". . .  professional.” In the Royal Signals, for instance, he speaks to his commander "in the capacity of professional adviser.” It says so in another advert. The place of our fresh-faced cadet has been taken by a good-looking young man in his early twenties, whom the camera catches in earnest discussion with his superiors during manoeuvres. Oh yes, they do discuss this officer's function in battle, but with a subtle air of detachment, deftly balanced against glamour and flattery, thus: -

And because he is first and foremost a soldier, he has also the most rewarding responsibility of all —the lives and welfare of his own men.

We can guarantee that never in any of the recruitment adverts will you find even a hint at the real purpose of the armed forces. Nowhere will you be told just what a really dirty job it is, in every sense, to be a soldier, sailor or airman. That whatever the inducements they hold out, the object is still to protect the interests of British capitalism at home and abroad. And that means sooner or later, killing other workers.

Eddie Critchfield

The verdict of history (1964)

Editorial from the August 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

Millions of words will be published this month about the world's first Great War. Few of them will be complimentary.

Over the last fifty years the war has come under a detailed scrutiny. The official propaganda has been exposed as a mass of blatant lies. The leaders, worshipped at the time, have been shown up as incompetents. The motive behind the war has been pronounced as a naked economic struggle. The popular verdict seems to be that the war was a ghastly mistake, which would never have come about if the world had been run by cleverer, more humane leaders.

In the manner of historical fashion, this verdict may one day be modified, and men like the late Earl Haig become restored to favour. The millions of killed and wounded may be ennobled into heroes whose lives were not wasted, but who suffered for a worthy cause. Historians may decide for us that we should be grateful the war was fought.

But whatever historians may decide, whatever historical fashion may decree, facts are facts. And the facts of the First World War have not changed.

In the first place, it is true that the war was a stupid and futile business. War always is. But it was not a mistake.

Whatever incidental errors may contribute to its horror, war in the modern world does not happen by accident. If it did, then the massive armed forces which all countries always maintain are mistakes. Weapons—nuclear and otherwise—are mistakes.

In fact, all these things are quite logical, once we have accepted the basic condition of the existence of the capitalist social system. We live today in a world in which a minority own the means of producing and distributing wealth. This minority—the capitalist class—are always in competition among themselves for economic advantage.

They compete for markets and for fields of important raw materials and minerals. They anxiously guard the trade routes which connect them with their markets and material resources abroad.. They are always trying, with their economic conferences, their tariff walls, their international trading clubs, to protect what spheres of influence they have and to expand into others.

Here is the root of war. The minor conflicts which have flared up since 1945 in, say, the Middle and Far East were not caused by a chain of mistakes, or by opposing designs on the ownership of an arid desert or of an impassable jungle. Neither were they caused by a concern in the world's more sophisticated capitals for the welfare of a few impoverished Arabs or Asian natives.

Those wars were fought for material advantages -  for oil, for tin, for rubber, for uranium, for access to key strategic points like the Suez Canal.

It was no different in 1914. At the beginning of this century Germany was struggling to establish itself among the other capitalist powers, who had got in first in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The German ruling class wanted an outlet to the markets in the Far East, they wanted to stake their claim in the Mediterranean. At the same time, France wanted to regain the valuable provinces which she had lost in the war of 1870, and Great Britain had her eye on the German colonies in Africa.

This was the power behind the headlong arms race of the early 20th century. This race provoked the political tensions in Europe, which needed only a fortuitous assassination to release them into the catastrophe of a war the like of which the world had not thought to experience.

That war shattered Europe's morale. It left the world set in the pattern from which came the battlefronts of the Second World War, which in its turn has bequeathed areas of conflict which have come close to provoking World war Three.

This is a continuous process, inevitable under capitalism. There is nothing accidental about it; it is not the result of miscalculation.

It is easy for the historians to show up the errors of command of 1914/18, just as it may be easy some time in the future to do the same thing about 1939/45. War can only bring untold misery misery to the people who suffer most under it—yet it solves no problems of theirs. It is, in fact, as foolish and as wasteful as the social system which causes it.

The solution to this is to put an end to the social madness of private property and to replace it with a new system in which the world's entire population own the things which are used to make and distribute its wealth.

This system is called Socialism. It was the solution faithfully propounded by the Socialist Party of Great Britain against the mob patriotism and official repression of 1914/18. Capitalism never climbs out of its own pit of turpitude, but in those years it was indeed impressive for its depravity.

If we are to look for some relief among this depressing memory, it can be found in the records of the Socialist Party—in the history of our members' gritty defiance, in the old copies of the SOCIALIST STANDARD.

The word pride does not come easily to a Socialist's tongue. So we are weighing every word when we say that we are proud to recall that our party stood out, in the bloodthirsty confusion which pulled down the human race fifty years ago, for a world fit for human beings.

When everyone else was dabbling in the slime, we kept our hands clean. While the "practical" men, the "respectable" men, the "courageous" men, were slaughtering each other, we persistently propagated the case for a world of decency, abundance and liberty.

We are proud to be identified with this history, and to carry on so worthy a tradition.

Economic Causes of the Great War (1964)

From the August 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

Half a century has passed since the beginning of the FirstWorld War. In August, 1914, the Executive Committee of the Socialist Party of Great Britain issued a manifesto — "The War, and the Socialist Position."

It was discussed and agreed before being issued but the discussion was not at all about the question whether the war should be supported or opposed but about the details of the wording. The Party's attitude to war between capitalist governments did not need to be discussed; it had been decided years before at the formation of the Party. It was implicit in the Declaration of Principles which was adopted when the Party was formed and has remained unchanged, in particular in Clause 6, which reads: —

. . . the machinery of government including the armed forces of the nation, exists only lo conserve the monopoly by the capitalist class of the wealth taken from the workers. . .

The Manifesto therefore took the form of re-affirming Socialist principles including the principle on which rests the Socialist attitude to war.

It opened with the declaration: —

Whereas the capitalists of Europe have quarrelled over the questions of the control of trade routes and the world's markets, and are endeavouring to exploit the political ignorance and blind passions of the working class of their respective countries in order to induce the said workers to take up arms in what is solely their masters' quarrel.

Later on it declared that: —

as the workers' interests are not bound up in the struggle for markets wherein their masters may dispose of the wealth they have stolen from them (the workers), but in the struggle to end the system under which they are robbed, they are not concerned with the present European struggle . . .

In this Manifesto the Socialist Party of Great Britain was restating three principles which are fundamental to the Socialist case — that war is not an accidental interruption of the peaceful operations of capitalism but is inherent in the structure of the system itself; that the interest of the workers in all parts of the world is to stand together against the governments of capitalism; and that the only way to end war is to end capitalism.

In the world of 1914 the great majority of the organisations which called themselves Socialist did not accept these three principles. They did not accept that it is capitalism itself which necessarily produces the conflicts over markets, trade routes, raw material sources, etc., which engender war. Along with the naive belief that war could be " humanised " by the banning of particularly destructive weapons they thought that war could be eliminated through international agencies appealing in the name of law, humanity or religion. Adding to the confusion there was one school of thought which relied on proving to the capitalists that "war does not pay," and another — we have it still — which envisaged an international agency having armed forces to preserve peace by waging war on war-making governments.

In August, 1914, when the Socialist Party of Great Britain was issuing its Manifesto most of the so-called Socialist parties were declaring their support for their respective governments.

Because they did not accept that capitalism was the cause of the war they readily succumbed to the excuses for the war offered to them by their respective governments. In Britain it was the defence of Belgium and France against the megalomania of the German Kaiser and German Militarism, and later, "the war to end war "; or the war for democracy. In Germany it was defence against Russian autocracy and Russian "barbarism." Although all of these parties, in the second International to which they belonged, had long seen the threat coming and had even formally declared their opposition to it at the Basle conference in 1912, most of them put loyalty to "their country " first, when the war actually came. Their lip-service to internationalism had never possessed the solid Socialist basis of recognising the mutual interest of all workers against capitalism and its governments everywhere.

Those who reject the Socialist contention that the root of modern war is in capitalism have to seek other explanations. These fall into several groups — the innate aggressiveness of human nature; the acts of wicked men or their rulers; economic causes other than capitalist ones; the strength of nationalist or religious feeling; and the conflicts of ideologies.

The human nature explanation of modern war is an irrelevance. It is true that individuals along with the capacity to live peacably side by side and to show humanity and compassion, will in appropriate circumstances engage in quarrels and violence. (The "appropriate circumstances" often being features of the competitive struggle inside capitalism). But when it comes to preparation for war it is always the governments which have to set out deliberately by lying propaganda to stir up hatred of whoever happens at the time to be "the enemy," and so little do the aggressive instincts of the mass of the population cause them to rush into war that almost all of the governments in the 1914 war (and subsequent wars) had to use conscription to drag the unwilling heroes into the battle line.

The argument that wars arise from economic but not capitalist causes, rests on the fact that long before capitalism came into being, or in places where capitalism did not exist, food shortage caused migrations and consequent wars, or caused wars among tribes in adjacent areas. But this situation has little bearing on the wars between capitalist powers in the modern world. It gives no explanation for the 1914 or 1939 wars, any more than it does for the long years of cold war between the American and Russian groups. The Powers involved in the 1914 war were not faced with inability to produce enough. All of them had for years been increasing their output of all kinds of commodities. Their worry was not over production but over the sale of what they produced.

The belief that modern wars are caused by nationalist or religious differences merely obscures the facts. What happens is that when capitalist rivalries have produced clashes in which governments consider going to war, the governments then calculatedly exploit nationalist and religious prejudices in order to popularise the war and cover up the real causes. Nations and the national religions are themselves products of capitalism as Louis Boudin showed in his Socialism and War (lectures given early in the 1914 war), it was the rise of capitalism in place of the feudalism of the middle ages which necessitated the division of Europe into separate national states. "Capitalism needed larger economic units for its development. The small groups therefore began to coalesce and amalgamate into larger units which would permit the larger economic life which is the characteristic of the new era ": —

Thus arose the modern European nations, each with its own language and separate and distinct social, political and economic life : England, France, Spain, the Scandinavian countries, Russia, Italy and Germany.

This development also needed and brought about the separation of the national religious organisations through the Reformation.

The other so-called ideological causes of war fare just as badly when lined up with the facts. British propaganda in 1914 made much of German "militarism"— this was argued also by leaders of the Labour Party — but halfway through the war conscription, the major feature of "militarism " was introduced in this country and, of course, Britain's European allies all had conscript armies. Another ideological charge against Germany was her brutal treatment of populations in her African colonies; but Britain's ally Belgium had an even worse record in Africa, and the British capitalist record in their colonies was equally open to charges.

There remains the argument that wars are caused by the acts of individuals, including individual rulers. It is still possible, fifty years after, for an article in the Sunday Telegraph (28/6/64) to start off: — "Two bullets that killed the Austrian Heir at Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, started the holocaust of World War I," And books are still being published about the degree of personal responsibility of the German Kaiser Wilhelm II for the first World War.

Professor Pigou writing soon after the first World War, in his Political Economy of War, dismissed the Sarajevo incident as being the occasion not the cause of the war. It may have been "the match to the powder magazine. The real fundamental causes are there that lie behind the assembling of the powder."

The Times Literary Supplement (26/3/64) reviewing two books on the supposed personal responsibility of the Kaiser, pointed out that in effect Germany long before Sarajevo had been in what would now be called a "cold war," the stage of preparations for the eventual fighting war of 1914.

An article in the Socialist Standard in September, 1914, on the same theme, showed that for years before 1914 the British and French governments had been building up their forces and arranging for the disposition of their navies to meet the counter preparations of the German government.

The origins of that war lay in the fact that the nineteenth century industrial military and naval predominance of British and French capitalism was being challenged by the rapid expansion of Germany. As German industry grew, German production and exports were catching up and the German navy had grown to a size and striking power comparable with the British.

After the German annexation of the French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine in 1871, the way was opened for the link-up of Lorraine ore with Westphalian coal, and Germany's pig-iron production soon jumped ahead. In 1870-74 it was 1,800,000 tons a year against Britain's 6,400,000, but by 1908 German production was far ahead. The same was true of steel and the German mercantile shipping fleet was being rapidly expanded.

A warning had been given by the Commission on the Depression of Trade in its Report as early as 1886 about German competition in world markets : —

A reference to the reports from abroad will show that in every quarter of the world the perseverance and enterprise of the Germans are making themselves felt. In actual production of commodities we have now few, if any, advantages over them, and in a knowledge of the markets of the world, a desire to accommodate themselves to local tastes or idiosyncrasies, a determination to obtain a footing wherever they can and a tenacity in maintaining it, they appear to be gaining ground upon us.

An area of acute conflict was in the field of colonies. Britain and France, along with Belgium, had been first in this field, Britain in India and Asia and all of them in Africa. Germany, the late comer, seeking to enter and expand in Africa, more and more threatened the future of those who were there first and had taken most of the more profitable areas. When Germany showed in 1911, by sending a gunboat to Agadir, that she intended to get a foothold in Morocco, Mr. Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer, at once reacted with a speech threatening war. This incident had the effect of bringing French and British capitalism nearer together in mutual self-protection.

One of the more dramatic forms of the conflict was the German plan for a Berlin to Bagdad railway, a counter-blast to the British scheme of the Cape to Cairo line. The German plan involved pushing Russian influence out of the Balkans, cutting Russia off from the Mediterranean by control of the Dardenelles, and opening up a way for Germany to expand towards the Persian Gulf and India.

The 1914 war did not start overnight through an assassin's bullets; it was the outcome of years of conflicting capitalist interests.

Edgar Hardcastle