Sting in the Tail: Timex (1) (1993)

The Sting in the Tail column from the August 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Timex (1)

Another expert on capitalist enterprise has bitten the dust. He is Timex president Peter Hall. He resigned his post in June although in May he was telling The Herald that “he wasn't a quitter and he would see the dispute through to a resolution".

At that time he was full of confidence about the future of the Timex factory in Dundee:

Timex has been in Dundee for 50 years and we will he here for at least another 50 years, despite the fact that some people seem not to want us here.

Five weeks after that confident forecast he had resigned and the company announced that the factory would close in December. Just another example of the complete unpredictability of the capitalist system and the “experts'" lack of understanding it.

Timex (2)

When Timex’s owner Fred Olsen told the striking Timex workers that they should “reflect calmly” before rejecting the reduced wages and conditions they had been offered, Willie Leslie, the deputy shop stewards’ convenor, replied angrily:

How dare a man described as one of the richest multi-millionaires in the world tell workers who earned £125 a week that they need to tighten their belts to make sure . . . that the profits continue to roll into the Olsen empire. (Guardian. 5 June).

His anger was a natural reaction but does he think Timex is in business to provide jobs for workers? Its aim must be to maximize profits but the Dundee factory is a loss-maker, and as Peter Hall put it bluntly “we have to turn this place round".

Faced with the resolve of the strikers, Timex will now close the Dundee factory. Is this another defeat for the working class? Maybe, but if this dispute serves as a warning to other employers that there is a limit to what workers will endure then the struggle of the Timex strikers will not have been in vain.

Tinkerbenn

Tony Benn has in the past shown that he has grasped at least some of the Marxist analysis of capitalism.

You would never suspect this from his ridiculously idealistic waffle in the Guardian on 29 June. Writing in anger about the American missile attack on Baghdad he correctly describes this as:

a return to Victorian imperialism with its gun-boat diplomacy, carrying out punitive raids whenever the imperial power wishes to demonstrate its strength and assert its authority in defence of its economic interests in oil and the wealth of the Third World.

And his solution? He tells us “what we need is a real New World Order". No, not the abolition of the social system which produces all this hut merely “a reformed United Nations"! Its domination by the “rich nations" is to he swept away and “replaced by policies that are in accord with the Charter of the UN”.

Benn, like all reformers, really believes that with a bit of tinkering capitalism can exist without the warts which are such a fundamental part of it.

That reserve army

Will Hutton, economic editor of the Guardian, wrote on 22 June:

In the middle of the 20th century Keynesian economics came to the rescue of capitalism and dispelled the Marxist claim that to work it required a reserve army of the mass unemployed.

Marx certainly held that capitalism needed what he called an “industrial reserve army" and explained why in Capital (Volume 1, chapter 25). This army was needed to provide labour for new industries without disrupting old industries which also required it and, of course, to keep down the wages of those in work.

Hutton now cites the growth of unemployment in the EC which is expected to rise to 17 million in 1994 as evidence that Keynes's rescue “has proved only temporary" and concludes:

Thus the current spectre haunting Europe is that Marx has finally been proven right—if wrong on the solution.

Marx’s “solution" to unemployment was nothing less than the establishment of socialism and obviously Hutton doesn't agree with that.

Some celebration

Did you know that the United Nations is celebrating its first International Year for the World's Indigenous People?

Trouble is no-one told the Brazilian gold and tin “wildcat" miners. The Yanomami, an ancient Amazon tribal people, are being wiped out by the “progress" of capitalism's development.

In this column we reported in February 1990 that the Yanomami, who have lived in the area for 40,000 years, had been reduced to 20,000. We now learn (Observer, 20 June) this number is down to 7,500:

In some villages there are no surviving old people and no children under two. Gold miners have shot children out of trees calling them “monkeys”, they have raped women and bombed villages, where they want to mine.

Thus does capitalisms market system “improve" the world. Only the mining companies are celebrating such progress.

Africa: left to rot (1993)

From the August 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Africa has begun to look like an immense illustration of chaos theory. Much of the continent has turned into a battleground of contending dooms: poverty, starvation, illiteracy, corruption, social breakdown, war, and drought. It has become the basket case of the planet, the poorest of the third world, a vast continent in free fall.

In the face of political instability. disintegrating roads, airports and telephone networks, and other disincentives, investors from Europe, USA and Japan are withdrawing from Africa and looking elsewhere; why risk expropriation or failure in a continent with a weakness for one-party dictators, where drainage by corruption often equals the legitimate economic intake?

Expatriate businessmen estimate that wealthy Nigerians have enough money in personal deposits abroad to pay off the country’s entire foreign debt, more than £36 billion. Zaire’s President Mobuto Sese Seko has a personal fortune that has been estimated at from £4 billion to £6 billion, somewhere not far below the level of the country’s external debt. He has isolated himself from his subjects—and from gathering political unrest—aboard a luxury yacht that cruises the Zaire river, with a helicopter waiting on deck.

There are 160 countries on the United Nations Annual Development Index, a measure of comparative economic and political progress; 32 of the lowest 40 are in Africa.

For decades Africa could count on the Cold War as a kind of economic resource. The USA and the former Soviet Union struggled with each other through African proxies, poured in money (though mostly for strategic purposes rather than development) to prop up pro-Western or pro-Soviet surrogates. Now the Cold War is over and so is the geopolitical game, at least for the time being.

As the Berlin Wall tumbled, a Le Monde article was luridly dismissive of the continent:

our priorities are elsewhere, in Europe, in Asia. At a time when our brothers on the other side of the Iron Curtain (eastern Europeans), after having chased out the infamous, desperately need us, why continue favouring ghastly African regimes?

Colonialism

Africa’s inner rhythms of evolution and development were shattered many years ago by the intrusion of Europeans, who brought in alien controls, boundaries and forms of government. Colonialism was slowly introduced as a direct control of Africa. This colonization eventually developed into a direct and brazen exploitation of natural resources and peoples for the exclusive benefit of foreign imperialists.

The African states which exist today are an imposition from the West. The political map of Africa drawn up by the colonizers was dictated by a European cartography of power rather than by any internal dynamic of allegiances. Africa was in this manner brought to the threshold of capitalism with new social divisions, those of capitalists and wage-workers.

Despite the great enthusiasm for liberation and independence of African countries in the 1960s, the African continent is still dependent upon subservience to the highly developed capitalist powers. But the nature of dependency in these times is different from classical colonialism; in fact the so-called independent states have been aided by the colonial-imperialists to break down the old. outworn colonial set-ups which have become a hinderance to the latter’s effective control in Africa. For example, the abolishing of apartheid in South Africa is not an accident or an act of good will from De Klerk; it is being done under pressure from the Western capitalists, who believe that they will benefit more under a President Mandela.

There are immense advantages to be derived for the Western capitalist powers from the newer types of colonialism, such as the “commonwealth” form as exemplified by Britain and France. By such means the former colonies are transformed into economic satellites. Even more effective than this is foreign "aid’’ (at the highest rate of interest to pay back). This benevolent guise conceals the real purposes and serves the interests of the capitalists. Newly-independent countries must come under the yoke of the Western capitalist because of their dire need for aid. And aid without strings does not exist.

As a consequence of the low development of industry and agriculture, the newly-emerged government leaders are compelled to concentrate their efforts upon developing modern agriculture based on cash-crops, and new industries, new resources and new sources of energy. To do this they have to rely heavily on imports from the developed capitalist countries by diverting their limited home industrial and agricultural products for export.

Avoiding capitalism

The question arises: Can Africa’s problems be solved within the framework of capitalism? Is it in fact necessary for the African countries to go through capitalism before it could have socialism?The answer is no, it is not necessary for Africa to go through to highly developed capitalism. The world today is rotten-ripe for socialism. The development of communications to a split-second level means that, given a victorious Socialist majority in the industrialised world, the painful period of capitalist development could be avoided for the millions of people of the Third World countries.

The collapse after seventy-four years of Soviet-Russian “communist” rule was a bitter disillusionment to some African rulers attracted by Leninism. Things might have been different had the growing maturity of the working class crystallized into Socialist consciousness rather than into a defense of Russian state capitalism. Socialists in Africa and all over the world have a job to do working to spread the truth about real Socialism: a world society in which every man, woman and child has freedom of access to all the resources of the world.

Michael Ghebre

Latin America: poverty and pollution (1993)

From the August 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Latin America has provided many of the striking images of ecological devastation which have fuelled debate on the environment in recent years. Few have been left unmoved by the relentless deforestation of the Amazon Basin or the mercury-polluted moonscapes left by gold prospectors still searching for the mythical Eldorado.

Reactions to the crisis vary. Some view the problems as intractable; the result of overpopulation and a flawed human nature. They retreat into defeatism—mouthing prophesies of the eco-Apocalypse as they go. Others retain their faith in the tired arguments of the reformists; there’s no environmental problem that couldn't be solved with a few more laws, a change of leader, some nature reserves and a little more charity. Socialists, however, reject both reformism and defeatism, recognizing that the roots of environmental destruction lie in the capitalist system and its uncontrollable production for profit, a system incapable of incorporating the rational and democratic decision-making process which will be necessary to ensure an ecologically- sustainable future.

How then has capitalism developed in Latin America, and what have been the consequences for the environment?

Precious metals

Following colonization by European powers in the 15th and 16th centuries Central and South America and the Caribbean were forcibly subjected to the priorities and demands of the fledgling capitalist world market. The new social system imposed on the Americas gradually swept away the technologies, agricultural techniques and cultures of centuries and replaced them with an economic system geared solely to capital accumulation for the few based on the exploitation of the many.

Greed for precious metals led the colonists all over Central and South America. The resultant human misery and environmental degradation was catastrophic. Open-cast mining left wastelands from Mexico to Bolivia, and the timber extracted for mineshafts accelerated deforestation. As the richest seams were exhausted the colonists used mercury from the Peruvian Andes to separate metals from the crushed ore of poorer seams. The waste was just dumped, and poisoned workers and polluted ecosystems bore witness to the new exploitative social system which saw no need to worry about environmental conditions.

The introduction of sugar-cane plantations early in the 16th century, first in the Caribbean and later on the mainland provided the basis for the exploitation of further wealth. However, owing to the genocidal effect of colonization on the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas the ruling class needed a further source of labour.

The African slave trade developed and millions were transported to work on the plantations. The triangular trade routes which flourished between Europe, Africa and the Americas not only strengthened the emerging capitalist class, and left a bitter legacy of racism but led to wholesale deforestation and soil erosion in the plantation areas. The irrigation systems of the plantations also facilitated the spread of infectious diseases such as malaria.

Cash crops

The political map of the continent was reshaped by the nationalist independence movements of the 19th century as local élites freed themselves from the remaining shackles imposed on them from Europe. However, the workers and peasants remained shackled with a class society organized around their exploitation. Environmental problems escalated as new cash-crops such as coffee, bananas and cotton were introduced. By the late 19th century much of the fertile arable land had been taken over by commercial plantations. Cattle ranching and deforestation developed apace.

Those displaced by the plantations and huge estates were forced to find new land on which to grow food. They found it on steep hillsides where rain washed away the topsoil, leading to serious erosion. New land was also found as more and more forest was cleared. The monocultures, deforestation and soil erosion affected the hydrology of many parts of Latin America. Topsoil washed into lakes and rivers causing silting problems and ultimately affecting delicately balanced marine ecosystems. For example, the coastal mangrove swamps of El Salvador were reduced from 300,000 to 6,800 acres and local fish populations dwindled.

As ecologically unsustainable monocultures bled the soil dry and were plagued by pests the owners turned to fertilizers and pesticides to bolster production. Again, it was the workers and the environment who suffered the consequences. Harmful pesticides were, and still are, used with abandon. In many parts of Central America cotton workers are sprayed along with the crop, while their children bathe in and drink polluted water. Mother's milk in parts of Nicaragua reportedly carrries the world’s highest levels of DDT. On the extensive banana plantations on the Atlantic coast of Central America thousands of workers have been sterilized by pesticide poisoning.

Debt crisis

The large-scale borrowing from Western banks made by Latin American governments and private companies during the 1970s and the ensuing debt-crisis have had profound effects on worker and environment alike. With the falling prices of cash-crop and raw material exports such as coffee, bananas, tin etc and the rising prices of essential imports, e.g. machinery and oil. Latin American economies faced serious balance of payments crises. Following the advice of those in power in Western countries many Latin American governments sought to boost their own industrial base in a vain attempt to compete on more equal terms with the more highly developed capitalist economies. Huge amounts were also borrowed to fund the military forces necessary to maintain the status-quo within their borders.

The Western banks were only too keen to lend the “petro-dollars” deposited with them by the oil-producing countries as a result of the OPEC price rises in the early 1970s. The industrial developments financed by the borrowing were often totally inappropriate to local conditions, and incredibly environmentally destructive. For example, huge hydro-electric power schemes in Amazonia necessitated the damming of many rivers flooding vast forested areas occupied by indigenous groups and poor farmers. The dams affected the regional hydrology causing silting problems and the proliferation of floating weeds. Malarial parasites also spread in the artificial lakes.

The Latin American economies borrowed at floating interest rates, so that as interest rates rose in the early 1980s a debt crisis developed when they were unable to keep up with the interest payments. They were also hit by contemporaneous further falls in the prices of their essential exports, and a world slump. Fearing the consequences of large-scale defaulting to the international banking system, the World Bank and the IMF negotiated Structural Adjustment Programmes for those Latin American countries troubled by debt. All the Structural Adjustment Programmes included the slashing of public expenditure, and the boosting of cash-crop exports in order to provide governments with extra revenue for debt repayments.

The benefits to the capitalist class of the IMF and World Bank plans are clear: the stabilization of their economic system. The victims, as ever, are the propertyless majority. The slashing of public expenditure has led to redundancies, wage-cuts, less social services, and less environmental protection. Boosting cash-crop production has led to further deforestation, soil erosion and the increased use of fertilizers and pesticides.

As the region has been progressively immiserated by debt, unemployment and worsening environmental conditions thousands more have flocked to the urban squalour of Latin America’s shanty-towns. The poor sanitation, over-crowding, pollution and disease suffered there is a direct result of a social system which organizes all production around the prospects of profitability for the owning few.

What is the way out of this intolerable state of affairs? As ever reformists offer national solutions, piecemeal reforms and schemes to preserve nature in isolation from humans. What they fail to recognize is that the environmental problems faced are not new or isolated phenomena but intricately linked with the rise to dominance of world capitalism over the last 500 years. It is the uncontrollable nature and ecological unaccountability of capitalist production which must be abolished to rid Latin America and the world of environmental destruction and of working-class poverty. Socialists work to replace a divided world governed by capital with a stateless, moneyless commonwealth under the democratic control of a socialist majority.

Peter Owen

The super-rich . . . (1993)

From the August 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

In April the Sunday Times published its guide to Britain’s super-rich persons. The list comprised the top 400 wealth-owners with assets between them of some £55 billion, roughly equivalent to the amount of revenue that the government will receive from income tax this financial year. It was stressed that the list was based on estimates of minimum wealth and the actual assets of the flush four hundred are probably worth much more.

At the top of the list, not surprisingly, is the Queen, who as head of state is said to be worth some £5 billion, of which at least £450 million is her own personal wealth (this makes a mockery of the paltry sums raised for charity by her and her family in an attempt to justify their parasitic-status).

The survey then goes on to rattle off a roll-call of revenue-reapers (of whom 25 percent possess an aristocratic title), along with the business or industry with which they are mainly associated, until we arrive at the relative paupers at the bottom who have only managed to amass a trifling £20 million each.

The list includes not only the famous and infamous; far from it. As you might expect there are the Richard Bransons, the Dukes, the smattering of pop stars; but the majority of names would be completely unknown to those of us who don't regularly make killings on the stock market or mount the occasional take-over bid for a multi-national corporation. No, most of these super rich supremos wouldn’t even stand out in a crowd, and yet they control huge businesses and properties and yield influence over millions of lives.

Significantly, the top three wealth-owners after the Queen have amassed their fortunes through food production and distribution, proving that selling people something they must have in order to survive is highly lucrative and certainly not sacrosanct in capitalism’s thirst for the divine dollar. Of course, not all fortunes are made through business. Many are acquired through inheritance, kept in the family so to speak, much as workers inherit a life of exploitation and drudgery from their parents. Some 45 percent of those surveyed were born to their riches, and can look forward to obtaining further revenue via rent, interest and profits.

Assets race

In case you've been moved to rush to the sideboard to retrieve your investment portfolio in order to discover just how far you’re lagging behind in the assets race, it should be mentioned that some of our affluent tycoons have fallen on hard times and find themselves not quite so flush of late. For instance, spare a though for the embattled Duke of Westminster, who has seen the value of his assets fall from £3.5 billion to £1.5 billion since the bottom fell out of the property market. The Duke, who owns budget deficit-sized chunks of ultra-cache Mayfair in the heart of London, has also been clobbered by a recently introduced amendment to the leasehold law which means that tenants have the right to buy their freehold after 21 years. Despite this unforeseen "hardship”, the Duke hasn’t been dissuaded from splashing out on a £650,000 executive jet for commuting to London, but one does after all have to keep up appearances. Likewise, further down the table, poor old Cameron Mackintosh, a 46-year impressario, has seen the value of his theatre production company fall from £200 million to £60 million. Mackintosh has apparently not been prone to self-pity however, having paid himself a salary of £8.3 million in 1991.

However, the tale is not all of doom and gloom and some of our entrepreneurs have experienced substantial windfalls during the past year. Take the Sainsbury family (they of local supermarket fame); its members have seen the value of their empire increased by some £1 billion, without them having to lift a finger. Last November, half-year profits were up 19.4 percent to a staggering £391 million. So next

time you pop out to Sainsbury s to pick up a few essentials and find yourself dismayed by the size of the deficit in your pocket afterwards, take comfort in the knowledge that a good deal of the hard-earned cash you have to hand over every week just to cat is further enriching, amongst others, the Sainsbury folk.

Plutocracy

If you think that Britain's richest have rather more than their fair share of a very sumptuous cake, consider the fact that even the Queen ranks only fifth in the worldwide league table. In fact her fortune is dwarfed by that of the world’s wealthiest man. the Sultan of Brunei, whose oil-rich state has provided him with a tidy nest egg of $37 billion (£19 billion).

This tribute to Britain's under-worked and overprivileged plutocracy did not of course lake the form of a denouncement but was more of a celebration of the vast inequalities created by a property society. Despite several pages being devoted to honouring a mere 400 capitalists, who take no direct part in producing goods or services, not a single column inch was given over to the plight of the millions of workers (who actually produce everything) and their struggle to make ends meet week after week. But then producing an article listing the poorest members of society with total assets up to £55 billion would require several volumes and an inordinate degree of monetary exaggeration.

You’d think that by actually publishing this information the Sunday Times would be guilty of incitement to riot, or at least precipitating several angry letters to the editor. Not a bit of it; it’s a remarkable testament to capitalism's power to persuade and influence the majority of the working class that one of the mouth-pieces of the ruling class can openly boast about the inflated fortunes of its leading members without provoking mass outrage and calls for a fairer system of wealth distribution.The fact is of course that most workers actually believe that the current system, while perhaps, not entirely fair, is nevertheless immutable and that there is no viable alternative.

Socialists have no personal grudge against the people described above; when all the affectations and the airs and graces are stripped away they are just ordinary people like everyone else. It is however very important to recognise that it is the economic system known as capitalism which causes such disparity between the haves and the have-nots. It is the job of socialists to campaign for an alternative economic system under which each and everyone can partake of the wealth that this planet can yield and to persuade workers that things can be run differently, that is, not only in the interests of the few. Dare we even imagine a day when a future socialist equivalent of the Sunday Times may produce a special supplement entitled "Revealed: The World’s Wealthy”. More difficult to imagine is how you could fit into such a supplement the name of every person in the world . 

Nick Brunskill

. . . and the super-poor (1993)

From the August 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Figures just released show that since 1979 the poorest ten percent of the population got poorer. Not just relative to the rest of the population, but in absolute terms. The latest official government Households Below Average Incomes survey shows that the average fall in the real living standards of the bottom ten percent between 1979 and 1991 was a staggering 14 percent.

In concrete terms this means that in 1991 they could buy 14 percent less goods to satisfy their needs than they could in 1979.

These figures confirm previous studies and give the lie to those—not just Tories—who claim that under modern capitalism the poor no longer get poorer. One such earlier study, published last September, was the Fabian Society Working Group Paper Income and Wealth in the 1980s by Thomas Stark of the University of Ulster.

Unequal increase

The statistics analysed by Stark show that between 1979 and 1991 the average earnings of adult wage and salary earners went up by 34.6 percent after allowing for rising prices. It would, however, be wrong to conclude, as some have done, that therefore the whole working class became better off by this amount and could buy 35 percent more goods and services in 1991 than they could in 1979.

For a start, the increase wasn’t distributed evenly. The earnings of the top 10 percent of wage and salary earners went up 71.1 percent and only the top 30 percent got an increase equal to the average or more. So the great bulk of wage and salary earners—70 percent of them—got less than 34.6 percent, with the earnings of the bottom 10 percent only going up by 16.2 percent over a twelve-year period (Table 22).

Secondly, these earnings are gross earnings, before, that is, deduction of tax and NI contributions. And. third, these figures exclude that section of the working class that depends for its income on state payments rather than wages from an employer (about one in six of the population is on income support). When these are taken into account a rather different picture emerges.

A person’s standard of living depends on their total income from all sources: wages, cash benefits from the state, any occupational pension, interest on any savings. The government statisticians don’t provide figures for this for individuals but only on a family or household basis. These are obtained from the Family Expenditure Survey that is carried out each year and provide a much more reliable guide to working class living standards, even if they do also include the incomes of capitalists and the self- employed.

Growing gap

The relevant figures are those for income after tax and other deductions (called "disposable income”). These show that, after allowing for rising prices, the average annual disposable income of households increased between 1979 and 1989 by 19 percent (rather less than the trumpeted 35.4 percent above) (Table 7). Once again this is an average figure and, once again, it was the highest income groups that got the biggest increases.

This can be seen by looking at what happened to the shares of the various bands. That of the bottom two (the bottom 20 percent, a common definition of the poor) went down, from 6.5 percent in 1979 to 5.3 percent in 1989. Over the same period the share of the top 10 percent increased from 22.7 percent to 26.9 percent (in 1988 it reached 28.2 percent). The gap between them increased: in other words, the poor became poorer, relative to the rich. Such figures were the basis for the statements made increasingly from the mid-80s on that “the rich were getting richer and the poor, poorer".

After 1987, however, it is not just the shares of the bottom two bands that have fallen. Between 1987 and 1989 those in these bands became worse off in real terms: they became absolutely as well as relatively poorer. The real annual average income (i.e.. money income after allowing for inflation) of households in the 80- 90 percent band fell by 1.6 percent and that of those in the bottom band by 5.1 percent (Table 10).

Even these figures can be said not to give a true picture since they don’t take into account the differing size and composition of households. Clearly, a household with more members is worse off than a household with the same income but less members. The government’s statisticians have taken this criticism on board and since 1988 have been providing figures, including backdated ones, which take this into account. These show that, after housing costs have been paid, the real weekly income of the 80-90 percent band increased by a mere 2 percent (2p in the pound) over the whole of the period 1979 to 1989 while that of the bottom 10 percent fell by 6 percent ( Table 13).

With the current slump things have got worse. Not only has the fall in the real living standards of the poorest ten percent now reached 14 percent, but, according to the latest issue of Social Trends that came out in January, the average real “disposable income" of all households fell between 1990 and 1991. So. the government’s own statistics refute the self-satisfied view that capitalism provides continual and automatically rising living standards for all. It doesn’t and it can’t.

Adam Buick

Profit . . . (1993)

From the August 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

A bit random, I know, but this capitalist advert was included in the August 1993 Socialist Standard. I'm sure it's self-explanatory for a regular reader of the blog. I'm guessing this sort of advertising wouldn't be so brazen in 2022.

Socialist principles explained (1993)

From the August 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Object: The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community.

What do we mean by a “system of society"?

The world is a “global village". Each region may have its own particular and distinct customs, but they are part of a greater system of society that is world-wide. This system of society is capitalism and every region and nation operates within this in one way or another. Socialism is not a co-operative island in the middle of capitalism, but a global system of society that will replace capitalism.

"The means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth"?

This includes the forests, mines, and oceans from which natural wealth is extracted, the factories in which this natural wealth is processed, and the distribution of that wealth via transportation networks (such as roads and truck lines) and distribution centres (such as grocery and department stores). It does not include your personal belongings such as your toothbrush or clothing, or family heirloom.

“Common Ownership”?

Common ownership means that society as a whole owns the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth. It also implies the democratic control of these means and instruments, for if everyone owns, then everyone must have equal right to control.

Common ownership is not state ownership. State ownership is merely the ownership by the capitalist class as a whole, instead of by individual capitalists, and the government then runs the state enterprises to serve the capitalist class. In the old self-proclaimed “communist” states the state enterprises served those who controlled the party/state apparatus. The working class did not own or control. It produced for a privileged minority.

1. That society as at present constituted is based upon the ownership of the means of production (i.e., land, factories, railways, etc) by the capitalist or master class, and the consequent enslavement of the working class by whose labour alone wealth is produced.

How are decisions about the operation of society made? What principles govern what goods will be produced in what quantity and quality, and what social programmes and laws will exist?

If decisions were made based upon the needs of humanity then the food that is regularly destroyed by the truckload would instead feed the starving.

Decisions are made based upon the expectation of making a profit. The ecology of the world is being devastated, even though this devastation may wipe out the human race, because of profit. Poor quality goods are produced, not because people want to have junk, but because it is profitable to produce junk. The rich can get the best—the rest of us often have little choice. Anyone can think of dozens of examples of how decision-making puts profit-making before the satisfaction of human needs.

The owners of the production and distribution facilities are responsible to no-one but themselves. Governments pass laws that maintain profits for the owners as a group. Sometimes one owner of one subgroup of owners loses a bit but, overall, the class of owners always benefits in the long run. By focussing on the worst excesses, and legalizing the rest, their profits are protected from demands for significant changes.

While people in Western Europe and North America have generally seen the benefits of increased production in terms of material wealth, the decisions are made not to improve our lives, but to improve the lives of those who own the means of production. The gap between the very rich and the rest of us continues to grow.

2. That in society, therefore, there is an antagonism of interests, manifesting itself as a class struggle, between those who possess hut do not produce, and those who produce but do not possess.

There are many different divisions in society. Divisions of hatred by sex. skin colour, national origin, religion or the amount of money that a person makes, among others. The insecurity of capitalism breeds these hatreds. We must eliminate their breeding ground, before they infect our children.

Socialists see a division of society based upon the means of acquiring wealth. If you must work for a living then you are working-class, if your main income is derived from the work of others then you are a capitalist. This distinction clearly exists. Even though some of us own shares, workers do not have the luxury to quit their jobs and live off investment income.

When you analyze society using this class division, many problems that otherwise defy understanding have obvious solutions.

Profits are derived from owning. Wages or salary are derived from labouring, by expending our physical or mental energy working for those who own the means of production and distribution.

The owner of a particular factory may not even know that they own it. It may be just a part of an immense holding company that is administered by someone else. The workers in the factory, however, are directly connected to the production. It is the labour-power of these workers (including the plant management) that creates the profits that keep the capitalists rich. It is vital that the capitalists pay their workers less than the value of their labour-power produces. It is this difference between the value of what the workers are paid and the value of what they produce that is the source of profit.

3. That this antagonism can he abolished only In the emancipation of the working class from the domination of the master class, by the conversion into the common property of society of the means of production and distribution, and their democratic control by the whole people.

As long as the ownership of the means of production and distribution rests with the minority capitalist class, this antagonism will continue to exist. The antagonism is caused by the necessarily differing interests of the two classes. No matter how nice capitalists may be on a personal level, they will always have different interests from the working class. It is not a matter of good and evil or anything like that, it is inherent in any class system. Therefore the only way to eliminate the antagonism is to eliminate the class system and establish a system of common ownership where the previous antagonism has no basis.

4. That as in the order of social evolution the working class is the last class to achieve its freedom the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex.

The hate and distrust that exists in society today is a direct result of the nature of societies past and present. A society in which we must compete to survive, in which our jobs are threatened by other workers, in which we do not feel secure, is a fertile breeding ground for racism, sexism, nationalism and all the other hatreds that abound.

Even today, while this hatred is sometimes used to pit one worker against another, it appears that overall, these hatreds are being rooted out and made socially unacceptable. This is particularly noticeable in countries like South Africa where there is a shortage of white workers, and black workers must be brought into previously “white” workplaces without the major disruption that is caused by overt racism.

No society can properly meet our human needs as long as there are different classes of people. Every person has abilities that differentiate them from others, but we are all equal in our humanity. We all have strengths and weaknesses. What we need is a society that allows us to use our strengths, and that accepts and accommodates our weaknesses.

Socialism will be a society geared to meeting human needs and the need to be accepted for what we are is probably the most basic of human needs. When the breeding ground for these hatreds has disappeared, people will naturally be able to eradicate them with all the other negative leftovers of capitalism.

5. That this emancipation must he the work of the working class itself.

6. That as the machinery of government, including the armed forces of the nation, exists only to consent* the monopoly by the capitalist class of the wealth taken from the workers, the working class must organise consciously and politically for the conquest of the powers of government, national and local, in order that this machinery, including these forces, may he converted from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation and the overthrow of privilege, aristocratic and plutocratic.

It would be foolish to expect the capitalist class to voluntarily give up its privileged position in society. Governments exist solely to administer the society as it exists, in the interests of the ruling (capitalist) class, so governments will not end the privilege. Capitalism will continue as long as the working class accept it. The working class will have to force the capitalist class to give up its position of privilege.

Socialism will be the result of workers democratically choosing a new. classless society based on producing to satisfy human needs. And since capitalism is a global system of society, it must be replaced globally.

It is dangerous and futile to follow those who support violence by workers against the armed force of the state. Violent revolution has sometimes meant different faces in the capitalist class, always meant dead workers, and never meant the liberation of the working class. Until workers organize consciously and politically and take control of the state machinery, including its armed forces, the state will be assured of bloody victory.

Political democracy is the greatest tool (next to its labour-power) that the working class has at its disposal. When the majority of workers support socialism, so-called “revolutionary” war will not be required. The real revolution is for workers to stop following leaders, to start understanding why society functions as it does and to start thinking for themselves.

7. That as all political parties are but the expression of class interests, and as the interest of the working class is diametrically opposed to the interests of all sections of the master class, the party seeking working-class emancipation must he hostile to every other party.

Political parties of the left, right and centre, claim to be working for the betterment of society. Because society functions in the interests of the capitalist class, it is clear that these parties are then supporting the interests of the capitalist class. History shows us that no matter what these parties say, when elected they administer capitalism in the only way it can be administered—in the interests of the capitalist class.

Each of them has their own idea of how to run capitalism, often stealing the ideas of their supposed political opposites. The reforms that they implement must reflect economic reality. If they do not, they will not get re-elected—until the next party fails to reflect that reality. There is no way that capitalism can adequately meet the needs of the majority, but all of these parties pretend it can if only they find the right plan. None of them has any really new ideas, only rehashed reforms that have failed in the past. Voting for any of these parties is voting for capitalism, forever.

8. The Socialist Party of Great Britain, therefore, enters the field of political action, determined to wage war against all other political parties, whether alleged labour or avowedly capitalist, and calls upon the members of the working class of this country to muster under its banner to the end that a speedy termination may be wrought to the system which deprives them of the fruits of their labour, and that poverty may give place to comfort, privilege to equality, and slavery to freedom.

The Socialist Party is part of a global socialist movement that believes capitalism cannot meet the needs of the majority of the people in the world. It does not today, and it never can.

In order to meet these needs capitalism must be replaced by socialism.

The only way to achieve socialism is for the working class to recognize this and consciously and politically work to replace capitalism with socialism.

The Socialist Party does not support the idea of reforming capitalism and therefore does not work for reforms. There are plenty of other organizations that do and yet the problems remain. By relegating socialism to the future, it is relegated to never. Only a party dedicated only to socialism can promote socialism in any real, honest manner.

Among all the political parties in this country, only the Socialist Party is dedicated to socialism as an immediate goal. It is this objective that makes the Socialist Party revolutionary—our dedication to peaceful, democratic and immediate change.

Only the conscious support of the working class will create socialism, and to this end the Socialist Party seeks to increase understanding of, and mobilize support for, socialism.

The Socialist Party calls upon every worker to support these efforts in any way that they can.

—based on a leaflet brought out by the Socialist Party of Canada.

Between the Lines: What are flies attracted to? (1993)

The Between the Lines column from the August 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

What are flies attracted to?

In a bid to bring to our screens even more odious real people than the invented soap-bubbleheads of EastEnders. BBC1 has collaborated with Australian TV to make what is called a fly-on-the-wall documentary series about the lives of a Sydney family. The folks of Sylvania Waters (9.30 pm, Thursdays) are a nightmarish image of capitalist family life.

In Sylvania Waters the chief topic of conversation (this being a euphemism for the screamed abuse and hostile grunts which constitute most of their attempts at communication) is money. Noeline, the mother, has loads of it. And she likes telling us how much she has and how much she likes having it. Her partner in this world of styleless and avaricious possession is Laurie, a quite detestable factory-owner who has his own boat and a racing car and personal sewer in this mouth from which come relentless insults against Noeline’s “useless, lazy and work-shy" kids—not to mention the rest of the working class who exhibit the same faults, according to this small-time capitalist bigot.

One of Noeline’s sons lives with a girl in a condition of poverty which is caused, according to Noeline and Laurie, by insufficient attention to the god of money. On her younger son's birthday, plans for the party omit all humane talk of jollity and parental love and celebration and instead consist of endless negotiations about the cost of hiring a bouncer (for a boys sixteenth birthday party?) and parts of Noeline's property which the forty-plus guests must be banned from. (In the end the party was cancelled after yet another angry exchange between Laurie and the lad he regards as being good for nothing.)

Life in Sylvania Waters is so devoid of mutuality and so permeated by monetary priorities and division that this family seems to be the ideal microcosm of what this system does to human relationships. Certainly, the theme of alienation jumps out of the sociology textbooks and hits us between the eyes as we observe these people who do not talk to each other, understand each other or want to be with each other. There was a deeply poignant moment in the programme on 1 July when Noeline's son (or is it Laurie’s son—who knows or cares?) walks into his living room, sits on a settee and then, observing that the TV is switched off, turns to his wife and says “Why’s this switched off? Is there something wrong? It’s like a bloody morgue in here”. What has life come to when you have to ask not why the TV is on but why its off, when no TV babble means that something must be wrong and home has become a mortuary. Perhaps we ought to refer to the room with the idiot box in the corner as the dying room rather than the living room. It is the room where alienated people let others live for them.

Sylvania Waters is a useful reminder that the rich might have money, but they sure don’t have any monopoly on brains. The standard of language between these affluent non-entities is charmless, to say the least. Their idea of luxury is reminiscent of that brilliant description of the capitalists at home written by Noonan in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. (Remember the Brigand’s Cave: “This was Mr. Grinder’s first visit at the house, and he expressed his admiration of the manner in which the ceiling and the walls were decorated, remarking that he had always liked this 'ere Japanese style. Mr. Bosher. with his mouth full of biscuit, mumbled that it was sweetly pretty— charming—beautifully done—must have cost a lot of money.") Indeed, Sylvania Waters must be the first ever fly-on-the-wall documentary in which even the flies exhibit higher tastes than the humans.

The news between the ads

In 1990 the ITV companies entered into a sordid franchise war in order to carve up the commercial network amongst the highest bidders. Out of the auction has emerged some pretty cheap and lousy TV. notably Carlton TV which now covers London. Carlton’s nightly London Tonight (like its radio counterpart, LBC now owned by Thatcherite tycoon Lady Shirley Porter, ex-Westminster council leader and dealer in very cheap graveyards) epitomizes the worst in tabloid TV. But then, like the Sun. this mindless drivel attracts investment—in the form of advertisements. So, serious news analysis is abandoned for the sake of market forces.

Last month’s announcement by the ITV network that they want to move News At Ten from its long-standing peak-time position, because it fails to pull in a high enough audience to please the advertisers, is further evidence of the market on the rampage. It is all very well for political figures such as the unlamented ex-Minister of National Heritage, David Mellor, and the Prime Minister, Major, making speeches of condemnation against the ITV assault upon tradition. What do they expect? When they encourage TV companies to throw themselves fully into the market while seeking to retain certain standards of higher journalistic responsibility it is like inviting burglars into your home and insisting that they leave everything as they found it. Perhaps the advertisers would cheer up if ITN employed Noleen and Laurie to read the news, with deep analytical observations from them both on each item, followed by The Saint and Greavsie discussing international affairs—-such as the World Cup and the Test Match.

Steve Coleman

SPGB Meetings (1993)

Party News from the August 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Letter: Alternative to market (1993)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

In your review of David Ramsay Steele's book From Marx to Mises (June issue), you mention his citation of a non-market, anti-centralist model of society, that is “anarcho-communism". You seem to accept his view that lack of central planning leads to local autarky and that anarchist communists advocate this. This is certainly not the case. We believe that much can be decided on a local level through a system of neighbourhood and workplace councils, but that there is a need for coordination of areas on a regional basis, right on up to a global level—to determine what is produced and how much, for example, to satisfy the needs of the population of the whole world.

In the same issue you ask if “anarcho-communists feel comfortable being grouped with these people” (that is people like Ayn Rand etc). Well, the answer is, we do not. We in the Anarchist Communist Federation have consistently argued that anarchism is based on class-struggle, and as a movement had its origins in the First International, a working class organisation. We have always dismissed descriptions of Ayn Rand. Tolstoy. Stirner and so on as “anarchist” (descriptions which they never used themselves) as inaccurate and misleading.

Ron Allen

London E1

Reply:

Glad to see you agree with us that the alternative to the market is not some impossible return to local self-sufficiency but common ownership with real democracy local to global. Not that we did any more than record, without discussing its accuracy, Steele's claim that Kropotkin stood for “local autarky”—Editors.

50 Years Ago: The Rise and Fall of Mussolini (1993)

The 50 Years Ago column from the August 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

One myth about Mussolini, still held by many who denounce him, is that he was the creator of modern Italy, the inspired and dynamic leader who moulded events to his will and took power by a brilliant and forcible “march on Rome" in October 1922. Mr. Bernard Shaw is an outstanding believer in the "great man" myth. If it were true that the great man could so mould events to his will, why the undignified and craven exit from power? Mussolini’s path to power was not through any bold and godlike masterstroke, but through the connivance and desire of those who had control of the political machine in Italy in 1922. Is it not related how General Badoglio offered at the time to "scatter this Blackshirt rabble with a whiff of grapeshot", only to be ordered by the King of Italy to let the rabble take office? 

[From article in Socialist Standard, August 1943.]

More Economic Bunk (1993)

From the August 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

In last months issue we showed how most economics textbooks bolster capitalism by unsupported claims such as “consumer wants are unlimited" and entrepreneurs are vital to production. Here we shall look at what another economist has to say, about the causes of poverty.

Writing in International Sociology in 1986. Erich Weede offered an explanation of “why the poor stay poor". The basis of his theory is what he calls “rent-seeking”, part of a free-market theory. We must warn you that study of these matters will seriously damage your patience with economists. But press on.

A trio of economists who sound more like a firm of solicitors (Buchanan, Tollison and Tullock) define rent as “a payment to a resource owner over and above the amount his resources could command in their next best alternative use". All right so far? No. well never mind—it will become clearer:

  In a truly competitive market where everyone is a price-taker, rents do not exist. Therefore rent-seeking is an attempt to distort markets and to evade competition. Where rent-seeking is on the rampage, we refer to rent-seeking societies. The fundamental problem of rent-seeking societies is that they suffer from a serious distortion of incentives. There are strong incentives to engage in distributional struggles and to seek contrived transfers, but comparatively weak incentives to engage in productive and growth-promoting activities. While rent seeking decreases growth, there is no reason to expect the poor to be particularly successful in distributional struggles.

Let’s try to unpack all that. In a truly competitive market (which exists only in economists’ heads) everyone buys and sells what they have at the best price they can get, and they all live happily ever after. But people are nasty enough to seek “rents". Instead of producing things, they try to make a profit out of other people producing things. If you can organise “contrived transfers” (buy something cheap or sell it dear) you’ll get rich. Otherwise you’ll stay poor.

Not a word from Weede about the biggest contrived transfer of all: that of the capital-owning class buying the ability to work of the working class and making a profit out of selling what that labour produces. The theory of “rents” enables the existence of such exploitation to be neatly sidestepped. It also puts trade unionists in the same camp as monopoly capitalists:

  Trade unions are a special type of distributional coalition or cartel . . . workers need skilful political entrepreneurs to guide them, and the application of selective incentives and coercion . . . If workers succeed in obtaining higher wages than they could in a competitive situation, then employers are likely to offer less jobs.

So the theory not only explains poverty but also unemployment. Its all the fault of greedy workers.

Forget the class struggle between capitalists and workers. Instead, “there is a conflict of interest between urban and rural populations”. Then we are let into another secret of success: “In a conflict of interest between groups the recipe for successful collective action and overcoming resistance is to generate concentrated gains for a relatively small group and diffused and preferably invisible losses for a much larger group”. We just have to be smart enough to realise that what Weede says about urban and rural "populations” really applies not to them but to capitalists and workers.

Poor people will stay poor, and the rich will stay rich, as long as capitalism-supporting theories like those of Weede are swallowed instead of being spat out. In a smug conclusion he remarks that "it is possible that the true heroes of human history and improvement are those who aim for minor but useful reforms, who never gel tired in an uphill struggle against rent-seeking". A few useful reforms to that sentence will satisfy socialists: "It is certain that the true heroes of human history and improvement are those who aim for a major and useful revolution, who never get tired in an uphill struggle against capitalism”.

Stan Parker

The Silent Conspiracy (1993)

Book Review from the August 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Silent Conspiracy: Inside the Intelligence Services in the 1990s by Stephen Dorril. (Heinemann, London, £16.99.)

The existence, and function, of the modern state is accepted and not questioned by most people. Yet the state has not existed, in the words of Frederick Engels. “from all eternity. There have been societies which have managed without it. which hail no notion of state power" (The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State). The state came into existence with the emergence of class society.

The modern state, therefore, exists to facilitate the running of capitalist society as smoothly and efficiently as possible, and to look after and protect the interests, internally and externally, of the owners of capital—the capitalist class. Although at various times, and in varying degrees, in different countries, industries and means of transportation have been owned and run by the state (the nationalized industries), the central core of any modern state comprises the civil service, the armed forces and the police. Such organizations are there for all to see. But many of their functions, departments and offshoots remain secret, semi-secret and largely unaccountable. They are sometimes referred to as "the secret state”. This book deals in part, in some detail, with aspects of those parts of the modern state generally described as the security and intelligence services, largely in the 1980s and into the 1990s.

There are useful chapters on MI5, MI6 and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHO). Spying on trade unionists and unions as well as organizations such as CND are discussed. With the collapse of the Soviet empire, and the subsequent decline of the Communist Party, more emphasis by the security service, as well as the so-called secret intelligence service, is now put on other “subversives” and “terrorists" within the United Kingdom, and industrial spying by foreign capitalist states, "friendly” or otherwise.

The Silent Conspiracy provides useful information for socialists, striving for a world of production for use and the satisfaction of needs, and shows how necessary it must be for a socialist majority to gain control of the state. The book demonstrates just how impossible it would be for "revolutionaries" to abolish the state by “smashing” it. A socialist majority would have to dismantle the repressive apparatus of the state and, obviously, close down such organizations as MI5. MI6 and GCHO. No doubt the buildings, computers—and their staffs—could be put to different use. And as quickly as possible after a socialist majority wins control of the State. Socialism would have no use for a coercive stale machine.

Peter E. Newell

Modern Political Ideologies (1993)

Book Review from the August 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Modern Political Ideologies. By Andrew Vincent. (Blackwell.)

Starting with the origin and history of the concept of ideology, through Marx’s and Engels’s differing uses of the term, Vincent gives an analysis of its contemporary usage: a set of beliefs which has a view of society and how it ought to be. He then gives, from an unstated liberal viewpoint, detailed accounts of the “traditional" ideologies—liberalism, conservatism, socialism, anarchism, fascism—including accounts of feminism and ecologism, in all their manifold complexity.

Of particular interest to us is the chapter on “socialism”. Some insights are revealed:

despite the fact that Marxism is often regarded as a deeply statist doctrine . . . one looks in vain within the corpus of Marx and Engels's writings for any positive theory of the state. What one finds is an overwhelmingly negative analysis of the state.

But Vincent’s liberal standpoint leads him to look with favour on something that has been called “market socialism". Enough has been said in this journal about this contradiction in terms. It has to be said, however, that this concept illustrates a problem which pervades the whole book, and other books like it, the assumption that politics completely overrides economics. It is almost as if all that is needed to live the good life is to discover the right political principles and then live by them. But the global economic system, as Vincent partially realizes, is based on the accumulation of capital out of profits. When, as now, there is a widespread failure of profitability with its resultant social distress in terms of increased unemployment, poverty, ill-health etc, political principles can be rendered null and void. Even when the profit system is working "normally" it offers severe problems for most people: problems which governments are largely powerless to prevent or cure.

Vincent pulls together a lot of information which socialists will find useful. However, for a politics which is balanced with an understanding of the economics of capitalism just keep reading the Socialist Standard.

Lew Higgins

But Flies Are Not Human (1993)

Illustration by  George Meddemmen.

From the August 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is an American university of some academic esteem where it is the regular practice for the Professor of Political Ideas to begin his first class of the semester by showing his students a film of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. After eyewitnessing the portrayed depravity of the public school boys who are Golding’s model of human nature, the students sit silently to await the oracular words of their teacher: “Okay, now we know what human beings are like. If we propose to talk about politics let us never forget that these humans are our human material”. There commenceth the lecture and, all too often, locketh the impressionable minds.

Few novels have so eloquently served the cause of capitalist ideology which contends that humans are inherently aggressive, gullible, self-serving, easily led and un-cooperative than Golding’s Lord of the Flies which was first published in 1954. What is the novel about? Its plot is the conventional stuff of schoolboy adventure yarns. An aeroplane crashes and the survivors find themselves on a coral island, there to survive until they are rescued. It soon becomes clear that the personalities of the boys will determine their functions: the leaders, the followers, the outcasts. Soon they are organized hierarchically and, soon after, divided tribally. The adventure is provided by the boys’ growing fear of The Beast, an apparently natural danger which threatens to destroy them. Life adapts to a chain of ordered survivalism in defence against the Beast. There are those who think The Beast an invention and others who seek to hunt and kill it. But the reader, guided by Golding, comes soon to see The Beast is neither an infantile invention of self-torment nor a conquerable enemy from without.

The Beast is the metaphor of the natural darkness which is within all of the children – all humans – our inborn nature, no less. And in fighting the dark enemy, as the children proceed to do, it is the evil within themselves which becomes manifest. Encountered by Simon, one of the boys, this symbolic role of The Beast is articulated: “Fancy thinking The Beast was something you could hunt and kill!”, it says, “I’m part of you. Close, close, close . . . Why things are what they are”. In the final struggle against The Beast the full brutality of the children is exposed in an orgy of betrayal, mass hysteria, leader-worship and death. Golding has taken his little specimens of human nature and left them on an island exposed for all to see; how quickly the veneer of civilized behaviour turns into barbarism and boys become flies.

Original sin

So what are we to make of this parable? If we were the students of the above-mentioned professor, how should we be expected to think? That when left to ourselves we humans will survive as beasts of the jungle. For beasts constrained by Bibles is all we can aspire to be. Indeed, Leighton Hodson, in his students’ handbook on Golding, states explicitly, lest any be in doubt, that The Beast “is only an external device for referring to the evil that is within people” (Golding, p.26).

No writer comes to a novel with only a story in mind. The trite romances of Barbara Cartland are never divorced from the aristocratic respect for parasitism which is her obsessive faith, just as Noonan’s Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is intimately linked to his experience as a skilled painter and a socialist (and, moreover, a socialist building worker amongst the crass conservatism of Tory wage-slaves in stultifying Hastings). So it was with Golding. He did not write the most powerful and popular literary defence of innate human depravity by accident. And we can prove this.

Despite having at one time paid some sort of lip-service to some sort of socialism, Golding was essentially an ardent anti-socialist. He referred to Marx, Darwin and Freud as “the three most crushing bores of the Western world”. Having dispensed summarily with the thought of those who might have saved him from his blinkered outlook, where did he turn? On that point there is no need for doubt: Golding scraped the very bottom of the barrel of ideas in defence of property relationships and therein discovered an abundant supply of long-fermented Original Sin, a doctrine upon which he remained intoxicated throughout his life. Here is how he put it in an interview with Biles published in 1970:

“Man is a fallen being. He is gripped by original sin. His nature is sinful and his state perilous.”

Fifteen years later, in conversation with Professor Carey, the Merton Professor of English at Oxford, Golding was peddling the same old tripe:

“Original sin – I’ve been really rather lumbered with original sin . . . I suppose that . . . both by intellect and emotion – intellectually after emotionally – I’m convinced of original sin. I’m convinced of it in the Augustinian way . . . the root of our sin is there, in the child. As soon as it has any capacity of acting on the world outside it will be selfish; and, of course, original sin and selfishness – the words could be interchangeable . . . You can only learn unselfishness by liking and by loving” (William Golding, the Man and his Books - A Tribute on His 75th Birthday, p. 174)

So, Golding’s little boys on their island are not just any kids: they are sinners, born selfish and bound to fight their inner evil. Augustine was made a saint for advancing this kind of ideological child abuse and Golding was given a Nobel price (worth more than a sainthood in the current market).

Born human

Socialists are historical materialists and contend that humans are born neither good nor evil. We are born human and therefore possess the unique capacity to adapt culturally in accordance with the environmental conditions which surround us. In opposing this, Golding’s plot includes some highly convenient ideological weights which serve to tilt the story’s conclusion his way. Firstly, the boys we meet are not any boys, but public school boys: members of that privileged minority who are bred for tribalistic division. Would children who were the products of a caring community, not abandoned to the threatening rituals of the incarcerating dorm, have behaved differently, we may ask. And in Golding’s story here are children as abandoned survivalists in a hostile environment. In short, Golding takes unrepresentative children in a highly untypical situation and then, with the dogmatic wisdom of one who can with one breath dismiss Marx, Darwin and Freud, throws up his arms and says “Look, this is what children are like. And because children are humans, this is what humans are like. Case proven”. It convinces the American professor.

Anthony Storr, the psychiatrist, wrote of how Golding’s literary theme is confirmed by experiments in which children are taken to holiday camps, put into hostile gangs and only parted on the point when they are about to murder one another. It is quite remarkable how men with degrees in pure ignorance can express themselves freely upon matters which are routinely contradicted by experimental results. No, children do not rush with enthusiasm towards violent situations, but enter into them only under enormous pressure: extreme frustration, upbringing in a culture of routinized violence or, as in Storr’s evidence, monetary payment by psychological experimenters whose aim is to encourage children to behave anti-socially. As the more serious social psychologist, Herman Kelman, has written, “we can learn more by looking not at the motives for violence, but at the conditions under which the usual moral inhibitions against violence become weakened” (Journal of Social Issues, 1973, p. 38). Given that wise advice, would it not make more sense to ask why a group of isolated, frightened and strangely bred children should behave like beasts than to assume that their beastliness is within them – and within us?

Golding died recently and, unsurprisingly, the sort of people who praise great rogues praised him. By all accounts he was a decent enough fellow. The issue is not the virtue of the man – or even the skill of his pen or the power of his plots. The novel, in a time of war, can no more be neutral than can the military band or the cook in the arms factory canteen. And when there is a war of ideas between those of us who refuse to submit to the self-hating conception of human sin and inherent selfishness, and those who blast out such ideology with the weight of a mighty publishing and cinema industry behind them, novels are weapons. Read as it is intended, Lord of the Flies is a literary shot against the reader’s consciousness of human power; it is disarming and enervating and, for the present writer, one of the most anti-human novels of our age.

Steve Coleman

What is democracy? (1993)

Editorial from the August 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

In all probability the most distorted and misused word in common use today is the word democracy.

The attempt to make world-wide capitalism and political democracy compatible, is a major exercise in deception and futility.

Capitalism is a class structured society, divided between the working and capitalist classes, whose interests are always in a state of conflict (hidden or open) with one another. Strikes, lock-outs etc prove it.

The capitalist system is economically and politically organized so that the means of life—the natural resources, the industries and the wealth produced (goods and services) are owned and controlled by a minority, and not by all the people.

Those who own do not produce. Those who produce do not own. Obviously, the major social decisions are made to benefit the owning, capitalist class. Governments (who are the servants of the capitalist class) process these decisions. enforce them by law, and the working class does the leg-work to carry them out. The vote is incidental, because as yet the working class always votes in favour of capitalism. They have been so trained. All the current claims of a democratic society by both the rulers and the ruled are spurious. A free society is for the future—not of the present.

Meanwhile, there arc none so appallingly enslaved as those who think they are free.

The “public” does not elect the captains of industry, the generals of the army, or the judges of law and order.

Governments are always in the business of liberalizing or imposing restrictive laws, and the rights of the capitalist class always come first, which includes the right to make war. We live under a plutocracy—not in a democracy.

The age-old right of the few to exploit, expropriate. use and abuse human beings is never seriously challenged by most people; that the wages system exists proves this, and it is disgustingly healthy.

For a democracy to be meaningful, a necessary requirement is that the means of life are in the hands of society as a whole, and democratically controlled in the interest of everyone.That means being informed, involved and participating in the decision-making of all social issues. That’s when the vote comes of age.

A formula for success could be initiated by a politically class-conscious majority to capture political power—to transfer the means of life from private to common ownership—to dismantle capitalism and to establish a democratic society. That’s when a detailed social plan will appear, and the cynics and pessimists disappear.

A true democracy would not have a class structure, and would not exploit, expropriate and abuse human beings. There would not be the need to lie, cheat, thieve and prey upon one another; to rob, ravish, oppress the weak, cringe before the strong, prostitute for a pittance and traffic in all things—good and bad.

Isn't it high time to make democracy safe for the world and to replace the governing of people with the administration of things?

We have nothing to lose but our political ignorance, and a world to gain.