Letter: Top class (2001)

Letter to the Editors from the August 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Top class

Dear Editors,

I wish to ask a question – how best to describe collectively, what is the best term to use, to encompass “the ruling class”, “boss class”, “capitalist class”, “power brokers”, etc, etc? For when responding to pensioners in the supermarket. I am 81.

JH, 

Hull

Reply: 

Any of the terms you use will do. We tend to use “capitalist class” and “ruling class”, though our Declaration of Principles uses “master class” which is a bit dated. We don’t recommend you use the word “bourgeoisie” in supermarket queues.– Editors.

Voice From The Back: House hunting (2001)

The Voice From The Back Column from the August 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

House hunting

As young working class couples contemplate marriage and start looking for a house or flat that they can afford to buy or rent, it might be worth them considering how members of the capitalist class deal with their “housing problem”:

“This mansion in Surrey cost £70m. It has 30 bedrooms, five swimming pools and its own cinema . . . By American standards, of course, the Surrey mansion is at the mean end of the scale. This is a country where Larry Ellison takes on Bill Gates for the title of top cheese by building a bigger house than him. (Gates recently announced that he was extending his lavish $100m home near Seattle, to which Ellison replied with a $150m Japanese style mansion in California, twice the size of the White House and complete with artificial lakes, waterfalls and 3,750 tons of hand-chiselled Chinese granite for the retaining walls.) The world’s largest private house is believed to be the New York industrialist R.A.Rennert’s mansion Fair Field, which is 100 miles east of Manhattan and boasts 29 bedrooms, 42 bathrooms, a 164 seat theatre, two bowling alleys and an English-style pub.” (Guardian, 15 June.)

A cancerous system

Commenting on an article in a previous issue two letters to the editor in Time magazine (25 June) show that workers as far apart as Istanbul and Massachusetts have a pretty good idea about how capitalism operates :

“If there really is a war against cancer, as you contend then why not attack this disease on the battlefield? Why not go after its supply lines of tobacco, food additives and pollution? The drive for corporate profits generates many of the products that can cause this illness, and even more profits are made in treating it. Meanwhile, cancer victims fall by the wayside as collateral damage. Chris Glover (Istanbul)”. “Finally, the breakthrough in cancer drugs that we have long been searching for! Too bad that few of us will be able to afford them. David Chesterton (Massachusetts)”.

Touchy, feely socialists

We are often accused of class bias, of being nasty individuals who are only concerned about the working class, with never a thought for the plight of the capitalist class. Not so, we were almost moved to tears when we read the following :

“Ronit Lami, a London psychologist who treats people suffering from affluenza or ‘sudden wealth syndrome’, says her patients are highly motivated perfectionists who will do anything to achieve their ends. She says: ‘It doesn’t matter how much money there is in the bank, there is never enough. There is a huge fear of failure. If they suddenly lose their money, they suffer deep depression. Many identify themselves through their possessions, so their whole identity collapses’“ (Sunday Times, 24 June).

This “affluenza” is an awful disorder, one that we fortunate members of the working class will never suffer; so we think it only right to comfort these sufferers with the news that there will be no money or banks inside socialism. Another good reason to organise for socialism, you can relieve these poor souls from their insecurity fears and leave Ronit Lami free to get a real job.

Mao’s afterthought

Chinese state capitalism is desperate for foreign investment; so much so, that at its 80th anniversary celebrations the Communist Party revealed its long held admiration of capitalism :

“Liu Jingfeng, a history professor at the party school, told an on-line forum run by the official People’s Daily newspaper: ‘Mao Zedong did not oppose capitalism all the time. At the Seventh Party Congress, Mao Zedong fully endorsed the idea that China should develop capitalism.’” (Times, 5 July)

Science in fetters

Capitalism was once a progressive force in the field of science. The discoveries of chemistry and physics were essential for the advance of the new society. But now capitalism has entered its restrictive phase, where, because of copyright and information ownership, scientific investigation is being restricted. Immense publishing firms like Reed Elsevier zealously guard the copyrights that earned them profits of £231 million last year :

“More than 800 British researchers have joined 22,000 others from 161 countries in a campaign to boycott publishers of scientific journals who refuse to make research papers freely available on the internet after six months. ‘Science depends on knowledge and technology being in the public domain’, said Michael Ashburner, professor of Biology at Cambridge University and one of the leading signatories of the campaign, the Public Library of Sciences. ‘In that sense, science belongs to the people, and the fruits of science shouldn’t be owned or even transferred by publishers for huge profits’“ (Guardian, 26 May).

It seems that science is now being restricted by the ownership relationships of capitalism. Karl Marx wrote in January 1859 in his introduction to The Critique of Political Economy something that foresaw such a development:

“At a certain stage of their development, the material forces of production in society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or – what is but a legal expression of the same thing – with the property relations within which they had been at work before. From forms of development of the forces of production these relations turn into their fetters.”

Editorial: Life’s a riot (2001)

Editorial from the August 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the summers of 1981 and 1985 inner-city areas across Britain erupted in an orgy of violence and destruction as mass rioting returned for the first time in decades. In St Paul’s in Bristol, in Brixton, Toxteth, Moss Side and Handsworth, dispossessed and frustrated black and white youths looted shops, attacked the police and burnt down buildings in a sequence of events that shook the Thatcher government. Home Secretary William Whitelaw toured the battle-strewn streets like the Queen Mother during the blitz, only even less popular than she’d been. Michael Heseltine was despatched by Thatcher to Liverpool (when the two of them were still on speaking terms) to sort out a regeneration package for the city and for the riot-torn Upper Parliament Street area. It was a mini-renunciation of her free-market idealism – and was brought about by the sort of pragmatic attempt to buy off social discontent more typically associated with reformers of the centre-left.

The far left at the time – somewhat stronger in those days and certainly taken more seriously than now – liked to call the riots ‘uprisings’. It was wishful thinking of the type they are specialists in, as the disturbances in question did not have quite that sort of focussed, political dimension to them. They were in fact the directionless expression of frustration and bewilderment at rising mass unemployment, inner-city poverty and the type of crushing boredom associated with social decay rather than the stirrings of a potential revolutionary vanguard.

Fifteen, twenty years later, and the riots are back. In truth, of course, they never entirely went away. As violent crime has risen so has serious disorder in towns and cities across Britain. What is most noticeable about the most recent spate of riots though is the numbers of youths involved and the magnitude of the destruction caused. It is the sheer scale of events in Oldham, Burnley, Bradford and elsewhere that immediately leads to direct comparisons with the riots of the eighties.

There is another obvious comparison with the riots of the past too: “race”. In 1981 and 1985 the majority of those taking part in the disturbances were black youths from inner-city areas with large black populations. The rioters were not first generation blacks, but second and third generation, born and brought up in the UK but even more powerless and disenfranchised from mainstream social, economic and political life than the bulk of the rest of the working class. Theirs was a rebellion against the police who harassed and intimidated them and implicitly against a culture that still insisted on seeing them as outsiders.

This time around the rioters have been second and third generation UK Asians feeling the same sort of social exclusion and powerlessness felt by black youths in Britain before them and typically residing in some of the most deprived council wards in the country. Their rebelliousness has been given an added dimension by the intimidating presence of fascist and racist organisations – particularly the British National Party – in towns and cities where they are most heavily concentrated. If there was relatively little involvement by far-right groups in the riots of twenty years ago, the same could certainly not be said this time, with the provocative and violent activities of fascist gangs being the catalyst for some of the most serious events, most notably in Burnley and Bradford.

In Burnley it was alleged by elements of the white working class that Asian areas in the town had received preferential treatment from the local council and other agencies responsible for handing out regeneration monies. In Bradford local white youths complained that Asians were treated with “kid gloves” by the police, for fear the police be labelled as racists.

Viewpoints such as these are rarely the product of genuinely held grievances. Asians in Burnley live in the same type of slums by and large as many white workers do in the town; and in Bradford claims of harassment by the police are far more likely to be made by Asian youths than white youths. Instead, these ideas are in essence the product of a situation where the existing poor fear being made even poorer through the close presence of even more of their number. If the ‘new poor’ in question have a different colour, different religion and different culture from the majority, the suspicion and distrust is all the easier to justify.

One thing is certain: whatever the precise causes, the rioting that has been taking place is unlikely to get either the Asian or white youths involved very far (unless a police cell for the night is the extent of their ambitions). If New Labour do what Thatcher did and throw a little money in the direction of the affected areas as a token gesture, that will be something (as it was in Liverpool); but the laws of the market dictate that just as one hand gives so the other takes away – probably in the form of lost investment and business shut downs (again as happened in Liverpool).

Tony Benn has said that rioting is the oldest form of social protest and in that he may well be right. But there is no point in white and Asian youths protesting about the other’s allegedly preferential treatment and conducting running battles in front of the TV crews each evening. Any meaningful action has to be democratic and organised and based on the recognition that white and Asian youths have far more in common than they have that divides them. They would both do well to recognise that as the poor and excluded they are kept poor because the rich are rich. For it is only then that they can formulate actions based on where there interests truthfully lie – and in fundamental opposition to those who have really gained from keeping them in their subject, inferior position all along.

The politics of madness (2001)

From the August 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Provisional IRA’s guns have been almost silent now for some seven years. The spin doctors of republican terrorism have now got their snouts in the political trough – two of them government ministers mouthing the same sort of nostrums and excuses as their erstwhile unionist opponents. The power of Sinn Fein over their paramilitary first cousins in the IRA has been demonstrated by the fact that, despite the opportunist manoeuvrings of their political wing, their cease-fire has held largely intact.

It would have been a bold political prophet who would have predicted in 1970, when a few die-hards of the pure faith of Pearse and Connolly established the Provisional IRA – in contradistinction to the more quiescent policies of the Leninist “Official” IRA – that the new movement would achieve such lofty peaks in the small range of Northern Irish politics.

Today, the mouthpieces of the Provos have become the epitome of political respectability. People like Adams are welcome guests of the Irish government. They can speak man-to-man with Blair and they are been in the White House. Now, internationally recognised political celebrities, they can be heard arguing the case for what they contend is the road to a permanent peace.

Slaughter of the innocents

Of course, there was a price to pay. Thousands of people have died, most killed by the Provos. The lives of many young men and women have been marred by years of imprisonment. Still others have been tortured and murdered on the authority of kangaroo courts. Additionally, the quite fearsome atmosphere of hatred and division that stalks Northern Ireland at present is in no small way the product of the IRA’s violence – the alleged purpose of which was to establish unity between the people of Ireland irrespective of religion.

In the recent elections that division was emphasised: Most of the Catholics who voted did so for Sinn Fein, allowing the republicans to claim that they were now the larger of the two nationalist parties. Sinn Fein celebrated with an orgy of flag-waving triumphalism remarkably reminiscent of the behaviour of their traditional enemies. Adams and his political cohorts are astute enough to know that a resumption of IRA violence would dramatically reduce their electoral fortunes and scupper their strategy for becoming an effective all-Ireland political force. There was another vital point that might have made some thoughtful republicans see their electoral victories as somewhat Pyrrhic. What they had done to the moderate nationalists of the SDLP, the virulent forces of Paisley’s miscalled “Democratic” Unionist Party had done to the more accommodating representatives of Trimble’s Ulster Unionist Party.

The leader of the traditional Unionist Party, David Trimble, is an Orangeman with a past. In the early seventies he was associated with the neo-fascist Vanguard Unionist Party. A few years ago he danced a victory jig with Paisley on the Garvaghy Road while the police forcefully cleared a path for the Orangemen to march. But Trimble is a lawyer with strong political aspirations and, as the leadership of Sinn Fein were becoming aware that there was no real future in violence, Trimble was coming to the view that there was political kudos in the politics of accommodation.

John Hume, the leader of the SDLP, and Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein were already working on the detail of that accommodation. At the same time, while declaring in the House of Commons that talks with republicans would upset his digestive system, John Major’s emissaries were in secret talks with the Provos – without Adams advising Hume or the British telling their “peace partners” in the Irish government.

Eventually, the various strands of a possible agreement was arrived at and presented jointly by the British and Irish governments as a framework for peace. Weeks of frenetic discussions ensued in which the real social problems of the majority of the people were never mentioned. The discussions were about flags, about the religion of the members of the police force that enforces capitalism’s laws, and about reflecting the close co-operation at governmental level already existing between capitalist enterprises north and south of the border.

There was much talk by the republican side about “equality of esteem” but it was pure political vapour, the same absolute rubbish that Sinn Fein’s military wing thought justified the slaughter of the innocent for nearly thirty years. It was wholly unrelated to the lives of working class people irrespective of religion or whether they lived north or south of the Irish border. Inequality is a vital part of the mechanics of capitalism; Sinn Fein’s perception of equality of esteem simply means that they want workers who are Catholics or nationalists to share equally in the inequalities of capitalism as it exists in Ireland.

Hotchpotch of ambiguities

The so-called Good Friday Agreement was a hotchpotch of ambiguities written in convoluted language calculated to deliberately obfuscate disagreements and placate the more threatening opponents of compromise. Worse, it was a sectarian charter, institutionalising the very bigotries that has traditionally helped to feed conflict and division in the province. Both sides would give a little and take a little and life would go on with the majority of the population still enduring the slings and arrows of outrageous capitalism. There were to be rewarding political positions for yesterday’s hard men and women with all the trappings of low-grade power and a generous modicum of economic affluence. For some, the struggle was paying off.

But there were those who felt aggrieved either because they had been left out, or wanted more or were so poisoned with hatred of their opponents that they disdained the idea of any compromise even if it contained the possibility of ending the killing. Paisley, the bellowing fundamentalist firebrand, and his “Democratic” Unionist Party were outraged. Theirs is a peculiar conception of democracy in which the majority, always providing it is a Protestant majority, has the right of absolute political domination over the those who are not Protestant and Unionist. The calibre of the DUP can be gauged by their silence when, during the recent election campaign, Paisley put his sanction on line dancing, making us aware that God didn’t like it and that it was the road to eternal damnation.

Still, the DUP went to the Assembly, sat in the Chamber with members of Sinn Fein, took the generous salaries, in some cases substantially incremented by local Ministerial salaries and in others by the generous salaries of Westminster MP’s. Being a party of principle, however, they refused to sit at the cabinet table with Sinn Feiners but did sit with them on Assembly committees and, of course, in many local government chambers.

Paisley, as always, was demanding the political head of anybody who would countenance the remotest idea of co-operation with republicans. Together with the Orange Order and the majority of Trimble’s own Westminster MP’s, they were frantically engaged in promoting the idea that Protestants were being increasingly denied their traditional “rights”. The “rights” referred to are mainly areas of largely cosmetic privilege or blatantly sectarian discrimination designed to kid working class Protestants that they were a privileged section of the community. The main stumbling block, however, was the failure of the IRA to decommission its weapons.

The weapons issue was, and is, a vital ploy in the power struggle between the Paisley Unionist and the Trimble unionists for the hearts and minds of the Protestant community. IRA guns are, in the main, silent; some of their arms dumps have been inspected and sealed by the body of international commissioners established to oversee paramilitary arms decommissioning and there can be little doubt that most of the rest of their arsenal in the Republic has been compromised.

On the threshold of the last election, in the hope that his action would forestall advances by the Paisleyites, Trimble announced that if the IRA did not show some evidence of actual decommissioning by the end of June he would resign his position as First Minister of the Assembly. Obviously Trimble was not really concerned at the trickle of arms the IRA might have conceded in order to allow him to retain his post. The gesture was intended to save him from his erstwhile supporters and, since he is the most accommodating Unionist leader, it might have seemed reasonable for the IRA to throw him a political lifeline in the shape of a few kilograms of Semtex or some ageing guns.

But just as Trimble is the prisoner of his backwoods supporters, so are Adams and the Sinn Fein leadership hostage to those wilder elements in the IRA who see any act of decommissioning as an act of surrender. Trimble must know that the IRA guns are a threat now only insofar as they might get into the hands of the political nutters of the Real IRA who want to continue killing and dying “for Ireland’”. He must be aware that Sinn Fein’s ambition is to win sufficient seats in the Republic’s Dail to enable the Party to become a participant in a future coalition government in the Republic. Ensconced thus, in government in the South and remaining a major player in the North, would extend Sinn Fein’s influence and power to a point previously undreamed of.

If the Northern Ireland Assembly is killed by the decommissioning issue, it will be a major impediment to the plans of the Sinn Fein leadership and a death knell to the political ambitions of the Trimble Unionists. Ironically, both parties need each other in the further pursuit of their disparate objectives. It is a need that underwrites the madness of what passes for politics in Northern Ireland.

Paisley has won a resounding victory, another one! The difficulty with Paisley’s victories is that each one seems to reverse the fortunes of his cause. It is more than thirty years since he and his bigoted cohorts started the battle to “save Ulster”. Over the years his party has gathered strength and now boasts that it is the true representative of the Unionist. But as the party progressed, the cause regressed because it is a throwback both in religious and political terms to the grosser lunacies of the sixteenth century.

Richard Montague

Anti-capitalism or just anti-capitalists? (2001)

Book Review from the August 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Naomi Klein’s book No Logo has been widely proclaimed as a manifesto for the anti-capitalist movement. Klein herself disclaims any notion that she has written a manifesto, but the book is still well worth examining. It deals with the development of enormous global corporations and some of the resistance to this; the title reflects a general anti-corporate attitude.

It is common to observe that all high streets look very much the same nowadays, with Next, Virgin, Pizza Hut and McDonalds being found more or less everywhere, and not just in the UK. This illustrates the rise of the brand or superbrand, which is constituted by an image or a logo much more than just a range of products. Marketing gurus see the brand as crucial – companies should create a brand, not just sell a product. For instance, John Grant’s The New Marketing Manifesto argues that a brand is “a popular idea or set of ideas that people live by”. Brands “add value to people’s lives”, and are the new traditions (now that older traditions such as a sense of community have decayed). This kind of celebration of brands shows an uncritical acceptance of capitalism’s values.

In contrast, Klein looks behind the logo and the label to expose the darker side of branding. The logo has expanded in size and importance with items of clothing just being empty carriers for the brand. She quotes the boss of Nike:

“For years we thought of ourselves as a production-oriented company, meaning we put all our emphasis on designing and manufacturing the product. But now we understand that the most important thing we do is market the product. We’ve come around to saying that Nike is a marketing-oriented company, and the product is our most important marketing tool.”

Companies such as Nike, Gap, McDonalds, Disney and Starbucks are not simply multinational corporations (which would mean they have different brands and products in different countries), but are truly global corporations (with the same brands and marketing wherever they operate). Nike in particular has emerged as a real superbrand: its swoosh logo is an immensely popular tattoo in the US, among both customers and workers. Imagine flaunting your status as a wage slave by having your employer’s logo tattooed on your leg. Some American teenagers are quoted as saying that Nike is more important to them than their girlfriend is.

One theme of No Logo is the way in which advertising, sponsorship and the market have expanded into areas of life which were previously free of them, thus resulting in the loss of what Klein calls “unmarketed space”. A blatant instance of this is in schools, where companies sponsor lessons and TV programmes and all manner of equipment. Sponsorship of sporting and cultural events is now far wider than it has ever been.

But perhaps the biggest effect of the growth of the top brands is on employment. Increasingly, such companies are moving production to developing countries, especially in East and South-East Asia, in pursuit of cheap labour. Countries such as Indonesia, Vietnam, China and the Phillipines have been happy to provide so-called free-trade zones or export-processing zones, with tax breaks for companies and no right to union organization for workers, as a means ot attracting the global corporations. Sub-contractors are used, so that, when questioned about wages and working conditions, Nike, Reebok and so on can reply that they do not actually employ anyone in Indonesia or wherever. Their production becomes far more flexible, as they don’t need to own land or factories, and can respond more easily to fluctuations in demand. They will also happily move prodution ftom one developing country to another in pursuit of a cheaper and more docile workforce. Young workers are often drawn into these zones with promises of good pay, only to find appalling wages, long hours, dangerous conditions, and tyrannical bosses, who may lock workers up if they refuse to do overtime. Some of the descriptions are reminiscent of nothing so much as Engels’ accounts in Condition o/ the Working Class in England in 1844—sweatshop conditions have just been exported to the “Third World”.

Companies such as British Airways and Debenhams have relocated much of their call centre work to India, where wages are a fifth of the UK level. The workers are given crash courses in British culture, everything from soaps to football, so they can chat knowledgeably with the callers, who don’t suspect that they are speaking to someone in Delhi or Bombay

However, while workers in Indonesia or Vietnam can make clothes, shoes or whatever, they cannot sell them in North America or Western Europe. Here, the global corporations have led the way in the notorious Mcjobs – part-time or temporary work often on near-minimum wages. In coffee bars such as Starbucks, workers may have to work two or three shifts a day, to coincide with the busy periods. This gives the company the flexibility to cope with fluctuations in business without having to pay people to just stand around, but for staff it is, to say the least, extremely disruptive. In other companies, Microsoft for instance, jobs are contracted out to agencies who (surprise!) pay far lower wages. Again, this boosts flexibility and the ability to respond to booms and slumps in demand, avoiding such problems as redundancy pay. Many “permatemps” have been employed in this way for years, without gaining proper employee rights.

This, then, is the picture that Klein presents, of a world increasingly dominated by global corporations and their cultural and economic impact, where wotkers slave away in sweat shops for a pittance with little ability to fight back, and where temporary jobs hold sway. Profits soar, while the workers suffer.

The final section of No Logo deals with various kinds of opposition and resistance to the superbrands and the kind of society they represent. This can range from the fun but ineffectual – such as parodying advertisements or throwing custard pies at Bill Gates – to to the more substantive responses of Reclaim The Streets and the wider ‘anti-capitalist’ movement. Such activity Klein describes as “laying the foundations for the first truly international people’s movement”. Here are some examples:

• Exposing sweatshop and child labour, including school pupils discovering who made their uniforms
• Local councils entering into selective purchasing agreements, and refusing to buy from companies that (for instance) trade with Burma
• Secondary boycotts against cornpanics that supply other companies rather than the public directly
• Campaigns such as that against Shell in Nigeria
• Klein is well aware of the limitations of brand-based politics, e.g. that boycotts can be counter-productive and that such campaigns tend to miss the broader economic context. Her argument, though, is that “you’ve got to start somewhere”, so you might as well start with aiming your attacks at one big corporation, normally Nike.

However, the idea of “starting somewhere” naturally implies going on to address other issues in the fullness of time, and it’s here that Klein’s ideas become mundane and just plain disappointing For instance, she advocates enforcement of existing ILO treaties, and that employment codes of practice be drafted by the workers themselves rather than by the corporations. All this of course assumes the continued existence of employers and employed, and offers no vision of the ending of class division.

Global capitalism is not a new creature, it is just capitalism writ large and even nastier. A return to pre-global capitalism would be no altetnative, even if it were practical. But it should now be clear beyond dispute that national-based solutions to humanity’s problems are pointless, and that a world movement, leading to world socialism is urgently needed.

Paul Bennett

Blogger's Notes:

Though not listed in the contents of the August 2001 Socialist Standard as a book review let's be honest, to all intents and purposes, this is a book review. No Logo was also reviewed in the December 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard by Cyril Evans.

Obituary: Michael Gill (2001)

Obituary from the August 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is with much regret that we record the death from cancer in June, at the age of 70, of Michael Gill who will be familiar to readers as our theatre critic. Michael originated from Manchester but moved to London as a young boy. He joined Edgware branch in 1950. Later his jobs took him to different parts of the country and then back to the South East, to Braintree. He was a founder member and secretary of the Colchester Branch and one of the driving forces behind the East Anglian group.

Michael was trained as an industrial chemist and worked in the chemical industry before leaving to teach in further education. For a while he was an inspector in this field from which he eventually resigned in protest. Retirement allowed him more time to devote to socialist activity and since the early 1990s he was one of the Party's most devoted and active members. He was several times an Executive Committee member, and was always willing to lend his educational expertise and diplomatic skills to various committee tasks. Among other pieces, he wrote regular theatre reviews for the Socialist Standard, the last one appearing as recently as January. A good play from a socialist point of view would earn his lyrical praise — a bad one his measured wrath.

Kind, considerate and helpful, Michael was a keen advocate, and personal exemplar, of the ways in which socialists should treat each other. As he put it in a message dictated shortly before his died and read at his non-religious cremation:

"My life has been concerned with staff development, education, socialism and change for the better in human lives. Increasingly there seems to me to be a unity between fraternity, equality, and the full flowering of human potential. And in respect of my professional concerns and political convictions, I aspire to a transformation of society to allow for the growth of fulfilled and rounded people, able to be creative, fraternal and empathetic in meeting one another's needs. I hope there is a visible coincidence between my personal, professional life and the nature of socialism. I want people who have known me in different capacities to understand the connections between my aspirations and behaviors and ways of knowing — a gestalt view across all these perspectives . . . go well."

We offer our condolences to his wife, Jan, and children.

Blogger's Note:

A further obituary for Michael appeared in the Guardian. According to the Guardian website, it was published on the 10th July, 2001.

More nationalist madness in the Balkans (2001)

From the August 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Late June and early July saw much tension in Macedonia, threatening once more to ignite nationalist hatreds that have ripped the Balkans apart now for almost a decade.

It was uncannily ironic that as Yugoslavia was sending former president Slobodan Milosevic to stand trial in The Hague on war crimes, a mob of 5,000 Macedonian protestors, including police, soldiers and reservists, stormed their parliament and forced president Boris Trajkovski flee in fear of his life. His crime? He had agreed to a Western brokered cease-fire with Albanian rebels and also allowed NATO to ferry rebel fighters to safety from a village they had captured six miles away from the capital Skopje. Not only was the mob furious that their government had signed a cease-fire with a movement that Nato’s own command had labelled “terrorists” and “murderers”, but here was the West once again coming to the aid of insurgents.

Ostensibly, the Albanian rebels claim to be only interested in winning equal civil rights for Albanians and constitutional changes. This however is no civil rights movement. If so, then why the armed insurgents and why do they call themselves the Albanian National Liberation Army (NLA)? The answer is simple, they are nationalists bent on creating a greater Albania. They are after territorial gain and control of the porous borders which show a fair profit in drugs and arms smuggling and the lucrative trade in “illegal” immigrants. Violence and guerrilla warfare as practised by the NLA is not normally the stuff of “civil-rights” movements, which generally pursue a non-violent agenda. It is the remit of liberation forces intent on wresting territory from its present owners. What has prompted the NLA to pass themselves off as a “civil-rights” movement is NATO’s refusal to redraw the borders of the Balkans.

Moreover, why do they launch attacks on government forces? Simple – they hope to incur a heavy-handed response from Macedonian forces which would win them support from Macedonia’s Albanian population, who perhaps need a little egging on, bearing in mind their social and economic gripes, and from Kosovo – Albanians and Albania itself. They have further counted on benefiting from a similar situation when their parent organisation, the KLA, incurred such a harsh and brutal response from Serb forces that NATO was forced to intervene on behalf of the Albanians in 1998.

The risk of all-out war is serious enough. It is feared that the mob fury could now be focused on isolated pockets of Albanians in Macedonia (they make up one third of the population) now that Trajkovski has agreed to the temporary EU brokered cease-fire. At present the rebels have captured areas of territory in the west of the country and have cut off water and electricity supplies, further inciting Macedonian hard-liners in Skopje to demand armed intervention – a situation made all the worse with the rebels threatening to descend on Skopje to protect Albanians living there.

Chief protagonists of the Macedonian Slav majority, including Prime Minister Ljubco Georevski still hanker after a ham-fisted solution to the problem and perhaps the fact that the government has recently taking delivery of eight new attack aircraft – doubling the size of its air force – and that Georgevbski’s VMRO-DPMNE political party have recently handed out automatic weapons to 2000 reservists suggests they are not putting much faith in a peaceful solution to the crisis. If Macedonian Slavs, tired at the slow pace of a settlement in their favour, frustrated with the unchecked gains of the rebels, decide to even the score and attack ethnic Albanian areas, this will most certainly witness the beginning of a new wave of civil war.

 A political settlement however is still on the cards, with negotiators from the EU and NATO having set an unofficial deadline for a peaceful solution, which would then pave the way for British, French, Italian and Greek soldiers to take part in a mission to disarm Albanian rebels. The cease-fire, signed by the heads of the Macedonian army and police force as well as the NLA, consists of two linked agreements – one between the NLA and NATO and the other between the Macedonian forces and NATO, with the NLA agreeing to disarm if a political settlement can be reached.

Critics, meanwhile, warn that by acknowledging the NLA as a legitimate protagonist in debates about Macedonia’s future, the West has effectively conceded the carving up of Macedonia along ethnic lines – and this is cold comfort for Macedonian nationalists and the paramilitary groups now springing up and arguing for the expulsion of Albanians from Macedonia’s mixed communities. Many Macedonians still remain distrustful of the US, who they see as pro-Albanian following the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 and are contemptuous of any Western-designed solution.

Little surprise, then, that Balkan analysts see only a deteriorating situation and one that can’t be solved by further Western solutions that sparked the storming of the Macedonian parliament.

To date the present conflict has not been as bloody as previous Balkan disagreements, but it has nevertheless resulted in 100,000 refugees who represent perhaps 5 percent of the population. It is perhaps too early to predict events in the coming weeks in Macedonia. Whilst nationalism, like the disease it is, can be diagnosed, there remains no immediate prognosis. For it feeds on fear and insecurity, alienation and ignorance which themselves can lead to irrational passions and attempts at quick-fix and spontaneous violent attempts at remedy which always prove counterproductive and detrimental to all concerned.

Nationalist conflict has raged for 10 long years in the Balkans. What, in all honesty, have any of the victors gained? What is the “independence” they yearn after, if it means being trapped within borders – artificial constructs, no, prisons – inside of the bigger prison of capitalism?

John Bissett

Mass media and mass politics (2001)

From the August 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Parliament is a place full of games and flippancies, so what better basis for a new drinking game? The rules are simple, sit down and watch the live-feed television channel BBC Parliament just after the election, and wait (bored beyond tedium by the irrelevancies of the place) for the swearing in of the new MPs. Simply, knock down one drink for each MP who affirms rather than swearing to God, and knock down two for each MP who clearly indicates that they don’t believe a word they’re saying – and its guaranteed after all that you’ll be as sober as a fish.

What sharp-eyed readers will have noticed, is that there is no provision for those MPs refusing to believe in the Queen. Indeed, they are not allowed to not believe in the Queen, and so must swear by her, whether they swear the oath on the Bible or “honestly and sincerely” affirm. Many see such oaths as an irrelevant anachronism, and so take them without caring about the substance. Socialist delegates sent to Parliament, too, would not allow the requirement to swear fealty to the parasite and her family to prevent them taking up their seats.

The reverence to the monarch, though, is all-pervading in Parliament, as when MPs considering “The Queen’s Speech” (i.e. the announcement of government business for the year) debate motions “humbly and gratefully” thanking the Queen for a speech she had no hand in, other than reading aloud (badly). All of which is a throw-back to the times when Parliament was simply a forum for expressing views, which could be conveyed to the person of the absolute ruler of the land, the monarch. Despite the historical changes in power, the superficial forms have been retained.

The historical hangovers, however, go further than in the simple fripperies of the place. When Parliament became open to a general franchise (i.e. read, open to the votes of the capitalist class) after “The Great Reform Act”, the 1832 general election saw 827,776 people eligible to vote. They were voting for some 658 seats, which meant at least one MP per 1,258 voters (although some voters lived in multi-member constituencies, an undemocratic practice which managed to survive until 1950 until the abolition of the University Seat.

This ratio of electors to members is more reminiscent of the ratios on modern local councils, and it would have meant that there was more than a fair chance of actually knowing (at least by sight) the person being elected. As the franchise was generally widened, the number of seats in Parliament was not (at least within the same ratio). What this effectively meant, was a diminution of the effective power of each vote. Obviously, if the number of MPs had risen with the number of voters, it would have meant a corresponding decline in the power of vote for each MP in the Commons. Our current 40 or so million voters would need around 31,000 MPs in order to have that much effective control. The point, though, is not about mathematics, or pragmatic power, but about the “quality” of the vote. In the modern constituency, it takes a huge number of electors to change, to register any sort of shift in the public mind. It also takes huge numbers of people to effect a quantitative change into the qualitative change of having a representative in Parliament.

What this approach encourages is the aggregation of voters into an undifferentiated mass, votes expressing difference or disagreement needing to be lost into the swamp of a high bar majority. This aggregation is furthered by the attempts of politicians to turn the elections into presidential style elections for a government, rather than for representatives, thus making it the sum across the whole country, resulting in one qualitative change, that of the government overall.

It’s no wonder that people feel no pragmatic connection between their voting preferences and the outcomes; and no wonder that people feel so little connection with any of the parties. All these become are technocratic career structures for advancing politicians, a platform from which to project policy ideas to be reflected off the undifferentiated mass, which has no control over what is projected, beyond passive reflection.

This process of “mass culture” has, of course, been assisted by the spread of the mass media. The social relationship is the same, a few technocratic broadcasters/media barons, projecting images and ideas to be passively reflected by a land mass of consumers. Indeed, representative politics follows the same course. Instead of abstractedly measuring response in terms of money, it reads response in terms of flat votes, formally equal but failing to register differences in value or quality.

The politics of mass powerlessness

The mass media, though, has effected another change in the political scene. Where once parliament was intended to function as a forum, representing the views and analysis of “the people”, this can now be achieved by the mass media. Whenever a story breaks, or significant events are occurring, the media produces “community leaders”, and “representatives” of consumers, fishmongers or whatever so-called “interest groups”. Thus, the media can claim to represent the divergent views on a particular topic.

This claim, however, is undermined by the fact that the media self-selects these “representatives”, and by the fact that more often than not, these representatives are not even vaguely appointed by the people they claim to represent. In selecting who can speak, the media exercises power similar to that of the medieval monarch determining who gets to sit in their parliament. Indeed, the modern mass media presents itself as a forum for the people, as the place for representation and for determining legitimacy. It is effectively a third house of parliament, the House of the Mass.

A clear example of this can be seen from the recent general election. The BBC published their broadcasting guidelines on the internet, boldly stating that Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrats and the assorted Nationalists were to be regarded as “major parties”, and thus entitled to technically unlimited national coverage, and anyone else could only be guaranteed the coverage of their manifesto launch if they were contesting over 100 seats. In this way, they effectively determined who was going to do better in the parliamentary elections, who got the all important media coverage.

The eighteenth century Liberal philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (whose thought Marx spent so much time criticising and adapting) postulated the ideal state as one in which an absolute technocratic ruler, freed from social interest, held power, and in which all other classes in society were recognised and represented in a parliament for/by this ruler. For such opinions he has been execrated in the past; however, his analysis finds itself borne out in the genuine movements of liberal society, for that is exactly what obtains today in modern politics.

Advisers and hangers-on maintain a stranglehold on the state apparatus, while the mass media provides a means of identifying and recognising certain interest groups within society, and constructing the playing field on which political battles are fought out. The media, though, always lies within the hands of the ruling elites, and so ensures that representation remains within the bounds of holding the existing social relations together.

Given, though, that these “representatives” only exist by and through the virtual world of the media, and only exist through the recognition of power and not through the active involvement of those they claim to represent, they can only present an abstraction of the views they claim to put forward; akin to the abstract “people” of radical bourgeois politics. As such it is the politics of mass powerlessness.

Unlike some anarchists who claim that democratic decisions represent a tyrannous act against the sovereign individual, we state that a free society can only be one in which people can directly and actively take part in politics, and concretely have their minds known through democratic voting on the ideas, rather than for representatives, to talk in their place. The important point must be that debate on issues is two way, with the full and active involvement of all parties concerned, not a one-way monologue to reflect off the enforcedly passive audience.

This all means that those engaged in political struggle must battle against the media for access and for the opportunity to air views. The opposite response, like that of those anarchists who refuse to deal with the media, leads simply to surrendering the field of political combat to the opposition.

Pik Smeet

Letters: Religion – again (2001)

Letters to the Editors from the August 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Religion – again

Dear Editors,

I am not sure that I would go along with all you say in your response to Tony Curry and Rachel Pass on the subject of religion (June Socialist Standard).

I would say that our primary purpose as a political movement is the establishment of socialism and that our attitude to religion should be purely governed by this objective. Looked at from this perspective, does that attitude, which seeks to justify the policy of excluding anyone with religious beliefs from membership of the Party, hinder or advance the cause of socialism?

I would say that, on balance, it hinders it. Why? Because it unquestionably turns off a large number of sympathisers who would otherwise join our movement and accelerate its growth. The counter-argument to this which you give in your response is that religion “is a weapon in the hands of our class adversaries” because it (1) acts to “divide the working class” and (2) is based on a world view “totally at odds with the working class perspective of scientific dialectical historical materialism”. I do not feel either of these arguments are sufficiently persuasive to warrant our blanket bar on all applicants holding religious views (though this might be justified in some cases).

As far as (1) is concerned, I do not see this is necessarily the case at all. Certainly one can point to examples where religion is used as a pretext for dividing the working class – look at Northern Ireland or the clash between Sinhalese Buddhism and Tamil Hinduism in Sri Lanka. But how can it possibly be maintained that a vague personal religious belief such as that there is such a thing as a supernatural lifeforce permeating the universe, really be construed as “divisive”? On any reasonable interpretation it cannot be. Surely, if religion is divisive then one way round this problem may be to make a distinction between personal religions and organised religions, so that only individuals adhering to the former may join our movement.

As far as 2) is concerned I don’t find the argument particularly convincing either. It is entirely possible for individuals to hold two theoretically incompatible sets of views without one interfering with the other. There are scientists who are Christians but whose religious beliefs do not in any way interfere with their scientific work. Similarly, one may entertain a personal religious belief (such as the above) and yet be an ardent supporter of socialism. One may wholly accept the materialist conception of history as a paradigmatic model of historical explanation and yet still believe in a supernatural entity. Besides which, I would suggest that, as far as we are concerned as a practical political movement, “metaphysical materialism” (which has to do with deeper questions of why we are here and so on) is completely and utterly irrelevant to our purpose; the only kind of materialism that is relevant to us is historical materialism which is emphatically not the same thing as metaphysical materialism.

In the final analysis, the objection to members holding religious views is that it might subvert in some way the integrity of our socialist outlook. But this objection is wholly superfluous; if it were the case that a religious outlook were antithetical to our socialist viewpoint, then this would soon enough manifest itself by the individual concerned coming in to conflict with one or other of our several principles. These principles act as safeguards to ensure the integrity of our socialist movement; our current policy on religion is redundant to this requirement and as such an unnecessary obstacle to the growth of the socialist movement itself.

Robin Cox, 

Redruth, Cornwall

Reply: 

We still say that socialist understanding is based not simply on a materialist approach to history (no supernatural intervention) but also on a materialist approach to the universe (no supernatural intervention there either), and also to life – this is the only one all of us are going to get, so let’s make the most of it by establishing the best material environment for it, down here on Earth, i.e the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production. We readily accept that people can – and do – hold contradictory views but don’t see this as something to be encouraged by opening our ranks to them.– Editors.

… and again

Dear Editors,

The letter from Tony Curry and Rachel Pass, in your June edition expresses a criticism that I have made in the past myself. (In my case, as a Christian.) You overlook the following passage from Alasdair MacIntyre’s summary of Marx on religion, in his book Marxism and Christianity:

“At the same time, by holding before them a vision of what they are denied, religion plays at least partly a progressive role in that it gives the common people some idea of what a better order would be”.

There has always been a stream of Christian thought that stresses the coming kingdom of God and its difference from the kingdoms of this world. It therefore stands in judgment over the established political order, encouraging Christians to live by the values of the coming kingdom as a witness against that order. One example of that stream is condemned in Article 38 of the 39 Articles of the Church of England: “The riches and goods of Christians are not common, as touching the right, title and possession of the same, as certain Anabaptists do boast”. There are an increasing number Christians who would see ourselves as heirs of those Anabaptists.

Those, such as myself, who belong within that stream of thought would echo Marx’s criticism of “religion” ourselves, on Biblical grounds, since true Christianity is not a “religion” in that sense. Religion is about humanity creating gods to help them cope with their present state. Christianity is about the true God breaking in on his creation to upset that state. He did this (we believe) above all in Jesus’ death (that of a rebellious slave) and resurrection (God’s verdict on him). You may dispute our claims about Christ, but please do not question my sincerity in saying I am socialist, a believer in common ownership under democratic control, not in spite of, but because of those beliefs.

Bob Allaway, 

London N22

Reply: 

We don’t challenge your sincerity. We just say you’re wrong: there is no evidence for the claims you make about “Jesus” and “God”. But thanks for identifying the article Marx must have had in mind when he said that the Church of England would give up 38 of its 39 articles rather than one-thirty-ninth of its income.– Editors.

Greasy Pole: Politicians on probation (2001)

The Greasy Pole column from the August 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tony Blair and his government are on probation. They spent the years between 1997 and 2001 in hardened delinquency – telling us that things were changing, getting better, when all the evidence said that they were as bad as ever. It was not surprising that so many Labour voters stayed away from the polling booths in June – not because of what Blair denounced as apathy but to assert their disappointment in Britain under New Labour. So it came about that after the election the government could spend little time congratulating themselves on their historic win but had to consider the fact that they had not delivered what they had promised.

Thousands of sick people still have to wait for admission to hospitals for treatement by under-resourced, overworked staff in conditions which can often be described as appalling. Poverty is as deep and as damaging as ever. Many children go each day to schools in crumbling, overcrowded buildings. University graduates are qualifying with huge debts through having to pay tuition fees.The “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” policy has not proved to be the magic formula for reducing it ; in fact violent crime continues to rise. For these reasons – and for many others – the voters’ assessment of the government was – “Could do better. Must do better. After all, you’ve got to come back asking us to vote for you again in another few years". And like any subdued delinquent on probation, the government has had to promise to do better.

But of course the Tories – for different reasons – also made a dismal showing at the election. For them, it is even more urgent to do better in their appeal to the voters. First of all there was the matter of their leader but they were spared the embarrassment of pushing William Hague over the cliff by his obligingly jumping before a hand could be laid on him. At this time of his humiliation there were few people cruel enough to recall all the glorious promises that were made about him when he became leader – promises about how this young, vigorous judo hobbyist was destined to lead his party out of the gloom and divisions of the Major years. After Hague’s resignation there was some doubt about whether anyone would be mad enough to want to lead a party which is unlikely to get a sniff of power for the next ten years. But in the end there were five MPs so devoted to their duty to their party and country that they were prepared to make the necessary sacrifice to serve the rest of us – or, to be more accurate, in order to fulfill an ambition which has dominated their political lives.

Portillo

All these candidates agreed that the Tories were also on probation. In 1997 they had failed to convince enough voters that the previous 18 years had been notable for their achievement in building a prosperous, secure, healthy, crime-free country. Now, they had to do better. Portillo thought they had been too hard line in their policies; Davis thought they had not been hard enough. Ancram thought they had been too divided. Duncan-Smith said the leadership election was about “. . . how we renew, how we change, about how we stay Conservative” – which was muddled enough to appeal to just about every Tory in the country. They got plenty of advice from psephologists and media hacks about the need to occupy what they called the Middle Ground – a kind of unstable political swampland – except that Blair and his New Labour people are there before them. Covered in that kind of mud, the two parties look exactly alike.

The most gruesome personification of this approach was Michael Portillo, who has spent the four years since he was rejected by the electors of Enfield Southgate trying to expunge the memory of a number of unwisely hysterical speeches – like the one when he had a Tory conference swooning with his reference to the SAS and their “Who Dares Wins” motto (Ted Heath snarled that the reaction to this speech “hit new heights of offensiveness”). Portillo came into Parliament with the reputation of a fast rising star and as soon as he had changed his hair style from the gawky schoolby fringe to a proudly sweeping quiff he began to make his mark as an unrepentant, straight-down-the-line Thatcherite. The Iron Lady herself knew him as “beyond any questioning a passionate supporter of everything we (stand) for” – which should have been enough to finish him off. In another provocative speech he informed an audience of students that had they been studying in some other countries they would have been able to buy their degrees. He took on the job of pushing through the hated Poll Tax, on the grounds that it was one of the most beneficial pieces of legislation dreamed up by any government. The embodiment of Tory arrogance, he seemed to glory in being one of the most hated politicians in the country.

Rumours

Portillo’s apparent personality change, his efforts to get people to love – and to vote for – him has only made him look more ridiculous and gruesome than ever. He is no longer the arch-privatiser; now he promises that a Tory government would match any money Blair’s government spends on the NHS. He has accepted the minimum wage, although he once said this would lead to mass unemployment (perhaps even more people out of work than there were under the Tories?). In fact he has committed a future Tory government to “full employment” – as if that can be brought about through government policies. He no longer regards the Labour Party as a mortal enemy; now he praises Blair’s lot for how they are running the economy (as if governments have anything to do with how the economy runs). And, most crucially, he revealed that all those rumours over all those years about him being homosexual were true. He could hardly have bared his soul more dramatically – which is a measure of the effect on him of that defeat in 1997.

Portillo’s best-known opponent for the leadership, Kenneth Clarke, is very different. He has been called “blokey”, which means he has no time for soul-searching, he wears rumpled clothes and suede shoes, carries a large beer gut, smokes cigars. “Sod my image” he once said to a journalist who was worried about what he looked like as he sat munching a mammoth sandwich at a boxing match. The late Alan Clark, a rather different Tory MP because he was wealthy and disdainful, sneered at him as a “pudgy puff ball . . . lazy, flawed . . . wanker . . . not worth 25 votes”. Thatcher, Clark wrote, “cannot stand him” “which may have had something to do with the fact that Clarke was not afraid to stand up to her (in fact she thought him a “persuasive bruiser, very useful in a brawl or an election”). Kenneth Clarke showed what he thought of his rich antagonist by suing the manufacturers of Trivial Pursuit when one of their questions got the two men muddled up.

Ambulances

But being the sort of guy who would stand his mates a drink at the club bar does not mean that Clarke is at all relaxed in his attitude towards the working class and the priorities of British capitalism. As Education Secretary he had a running battle with the teachers in his drive to impose teaching standards on them while he squeezed more and more work out of them. When he was Health Secretary he was more concerned to scorn striking ambulance crews as “taxi drivers” than to settle a dispute which put many lives at risk- which made not a few people hope that one day he would himself need the kind of emergency attention which ambulance crews provide every working day. His imposition of budgets on GPs met with opposition from the doctors, who Clarke dismissed as motivated by their wallets before the needs of their patients. These budgets are now suspected of discouraging some GPs from spending money on treating their more elderly patients – perhaps because worn out workers are not economically fruitful to keep alive.

It says a lot about the politics of capitalism that one of these men could be the next leader of the Conservative Party. The other candidates have no more to recommend them. Scary Iain Duncan-Smith is an unrepentant Thatcherite who was once described by Norman Tebbit as “normal”, which should have been enough to finish him off politically but as he sits for Tebbit’s old seat at Chingford may have done him some good. David Davis is a hard man, admired by Alan Clark because he is a very good skier – which may have a limited appeal to anyone who is not to be seen on the ski slopes. He is another who thinks the Tories lost the election because they were ideologically too soft. Davis was in the SAS although whether this has impresed Portillo is not known. And trying to unite them all and the rest of the Tory rag-bag, and to show that the ghost of Macmillan still walks,was the amiable toff Michael Ancram.

No one should be impressed by the attention we are getting from apparently remorseful politicians. We should treat them as delinquents on probation; if they don’t improve they will have to answer for it. There is no need to punish them, as delinquents are punished by the courts. It will be enough, to trust ourselves to run human society without them.

Ivan

The little vanguard’s tail (2001)

A Short Story from the August 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

[Please see the blogger's note at the end of this short story.]

Once upon a time there lived a little vanguard. It was only very small, but very hard. It was so tightly packed with cadres that there was not room at all for revision or deviation. No sinister ideas from outside ever penetrated the vanguard. All the cadres were carefully streamed and graded, taught not to step out of line. Consequently, the little vanguard was always extremely pure and correct. Sometimes bits broke away; but they always ended up by deviating or revising something-or-other, and the vanguard used to shake its point over them. “No-one is as correct as the vanguard,” it would say to itself.

Nevertheless, sometimes the vanguard felt lonely: it would long to put its bottom up, have a rest, and not bother to inject its correct ideas anywhere. It got so puffed by its efforts to raise the level of consciousness and, in such moments, it thought how nice it would be to go all soft and floppy and not poke or pull any more. But where would a soft floppy vanguard get you? It might even find itself mistaken for a tail and begin to wag or straggle. Everyone knows that any self-respecting vanguard has to be hard. A floppy vanguard is a contradiction in terms.

The vanguard’s task was to poke about until it found some unorganised lumps and clusters; then it had to inject them with the right ideas and turn the people in the lumps and clusters into cadres. Sadly, however, the people were often unresponsive; they didn’t want to become cadres or receive correct ideas. The vanguard became quite blunt with all its poking and injecting. It grew lethargic and suffered from lassitude: it was obviously suffering from routinisation.

One day there was a terrible mumbling among the cadres. Splits appeared and the cadres were no longer so tightly packed. One lot were fed up with the disorderly lumps and clusters. They complained, “Where do we get with all our poking and prodding? We get puffed and blunt, but these lumps and clusters never move – they just sit around watching TV. It was okay for the vanguards of the past, the masses weren’t so dozy in those days.” These cadres became nostalgic and went off to join the ruling class.

Another lot began to send each other lengthy essays on organisation; they began to question the structure of the vanguard. But the top cadres warned them, “You’d better watch out with that kind of talk – if you’re not careful you’ll find the vanguard will disappear and where would we be then? The same as any old lump!” However, the bottom cadres were determined and began to say they didn’t see what was wrong with people in lumps and clusters: they had been there themselves, after all, and if the vanguard only stopped being so snooty and stuck-up, maybe the lumps and clusters would be more helpful.

After a top cadre meeting at the highest level, the following statement was issued:

“A threat to top cadres is a threat to the whole vanguard. The whole existence of the vanguard is challenged by adventurist, centrist agents of the swamp. Now, at a time of crisis for the entire movement, certain cynical elements are playing on the political immaturity of the bottom cadres to get them to say that they should not be bossed around by us. Comrades, the struggle intensifies, the swamp gets wetter. We have a long haul ahead; but you are fortunate, cadres, in having our leadership. The lumps and clusters are useless without us – we are going to drag them on to the right path.”

This shut up the bottom cadres for a while. Though it sounded like hard work, it was something new. And how could they argue with the so-correct leadership? They had nobody who knew what to do at the highest level of the vanguard. And they also felt quite important, having to drag the unorganised lumps and clusters out of the swamp. Also, if they stopped asking awkward questions and kept quiet, they might become correct enough to be promoted to higher rank.

And so the vanguard turned to the lumps and clusters and started to tug and pull. “Ouch!” cried the lumps; “Let go!” cried the clusters; “Bugger off!” they shouted together. “It’s for your own good,” argued the cadres, “you’re an ignorant lot, too brain-washed to know your own interests. We are raising you to a higher level.”

“Now look here,” protested a group from the lumps, “we don’t want to make trouble – we let you poke us about – but we’re not going to be dragged off without knowing why or where we’re going, and without having any control over what is happening. Keep an eye on a vanguard, we say: vanguards can get out of hand . . .”

 “Economism!” barked the top cadres. “Lumpism!”

“They’re right,” chirped a commune of clusters. “We groove with the lumps. We’ve had our disagreements in the past, and we don’t dig their lifestyle, but we don’t want any vanguard either.”

“Petty-bourgeois anarchism!” hissed the top cadres, quivering with rage at the highest point of the vanguard, top-heavy with stern correction.

More communes of clusters spoke up. “We aren’t as solid as the lumps, but we’re more mobile. We can get out of the swamp with a little help from the lumps. We are willing to accept that even the most hardened cadres can become people again; we are willing to work together, but not with top cadres bossing us around.”

So the lumps and clusters forged an alliance. “Opportunism!” bellowed the top cadres. “Lumps and clusters are useless without a vanguard! The way through the swamp is dangerous: in order to get anywhere, you must be hard like us. Without us to lead you, you’re bound to come to a sticky end.”

“What,” said the lumps, “if you get cut off from us? If you’re our leaders and we don’t know what to do, we’ll be in a worse mess than ever, stuck in the middle of the swamp – very exposed.” “Quite so,” agreed the clusters.

Some bottom cadres started muttering again: “They have a point there, you know. If we all got together, we won’t need to be so hard and poky all the time. We could be a bit squelchy and squashy sometimes – more human. After all, when there’s a movement of lumps and clusters, the vanguard can become people and join in like anyone else.”

Will the top cadres inject the correct ideas into the bottom cadres? Will the latter be absorbed by the lumps and clusters? Will the latter maintain their unprincipled alliance? Will the top cadres dive into the swamp? Will the lumps and clusters gain the right to make their own mistakes and learn from history? Will they get out of the swamp?

There is no quick answer to these questions: the tail of the little vanguard is very long indeed.

David Finlay*

Blogger's Note:

There's an asterisk against David Finlay's name 'cos there was a bit of a mishap surrounding this short story. 'Mishap' is a polite way of saying 'a fuck up'.

David Finlay isn't the author of this short story; Sheila Rowbotham, the socialist feminist writer and academic, is. I discovered this 'error' when I picked up a copy of her 1983 book, Dreams and dilemmas: collected writings, a few years back where I stumbled across a short story entitled 'The little vanguard’s tail'. Ouch. According to Rowbotham's notes in the book, it was an unpublished piece dating from 1968/69.

So what happened? No fault on the part of the Socialist Standard editors. How were they to know? Maybe David Finlay originally submitted the piece in good faith, and just happened to forget to mention its true authorship. We'll never know.

I can't help but notice the irony in that it was a case of a man taking the credit for a woman's work. Maybe the Socialist Feminists are onto something? Sadly, it also confirmed that Sheila Rowbotham wasn't a regular reader of the Socialist Standard back in the early 2000s. That's a shame. Our loss.

Obituary: Albert Elliott (2001)

Obituary from the August 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

We regret to have to report the death in May of Albert Elliott at the age of 91.

The son of an early Party member, Albert joined the old South-West London branch in 1936 and it was in that area that he was active as a socialist. For reasons related to his work he left the party in 1960, rejoining in 1985, attending the party’s public meetings till very recently. Before he retired he worked as a technical photographer in an engineering factory. When the war came he refused to go out and kill his fellow workers and went before the conscientious objectors board and was ordered to continue to work at his trade. This enabled him to use his house to help comrades on the run from the authorities. Outside the party his interests were in fishing and operatic music. A party member delivered an address at his non-religious funeral on 30 May.

Leadership (2001)

Book Review from the August 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Leadership and Social Movements. Edited by Colin Barker, Alan Johnson and Michael Lavalette. (Manchester University Press, 2001.)

Socialists are interested in leadership from a number of different perspectives. Capitalism as a class society engenders owners of the means of wealth production, the privileged, the leaders; and non-owners, the unprivileged, the followers. Most of the followers don’t oppose the system, which is why it persists. They elect leaders to get the best deal they can from the system. Socialism as a classless society based on social and political equality (though not on the absence of difference) is inconsistent with leadership. However, socialism is not inconsistent with some functions associated with leadership such as organisation, co-ordination – and even inspiration.

Then there is the perceived necessity and inevitability of leadership as an objection to socialism – “There will always be leaders and followers and you can’t change human nature.” This objection needs to be met.

Leadership and Social Movements touches on some of these issues but doesn’t really deal with them. As an edited book with 14 authors (mostly sociologists, social psychologists and related academics) it lacks the coherence of a single-authored work. The editors are frank about this: they invite readers to find “that it is worth poking about further in the black box of leadership”.

After an introduction, there are chapters on Robert Michels and the “cruel game” (of the alleged inevitability of leadership), Leninism, the French anti-racist movement, the women’s liberation movement, Martin Luther King, the Sefton Two, Brazilian youth leaders, a radical environment group, crowd leadership, suffragette movements, and the Soviet Revolution of 1905. The chapter on Michels has most of the book’s few references to the word socialism – “socialism from above” (the Labour Party’s Clause 4) and socialism as “the enhancement of state power via the nationalisation of property and state planning”. Not socialism at all, in other words, but state capitalism.

Readers interested in how leadership relates to the socialist movement would do better to read the three relevant pages (195-7) in David Perrin’s book The Socialist Party of Great Britain than the 215 pages of this rambling collection.

Stan Parker

50 Years Ago Irish Politics and the Church (2001)

The 50 Years Ago column from the August 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. Ritchie Calder, writing in the “New Statesman” (28/4/51) gives an account of the dismissal from the Eire government of their Minister of Health, Dr. Noel Browne. Appalled by the high infantile death rate he proposed to give free medical services, “without any means test, to all mothers and children, to provide mothers with specialist gynaecological care, and to give health education.”

The Cabinet had not objected until the Catholic Bishops intervened, one of their objections being that “the right to provide for the health of children belongs to parents and not to the State.” They objected to the possibility of information on birth control being supplied though Dr. Browne had given safeguards on this matter.

Although Dr. Browne was able to show that Vatican spokesmen did not object, the more reactionary views of the local Catholic Bishops prevailed and Dr. Browne was dismissed.

Mr. Calder quotes some statements made by Ministers:

“As a Catholic, I obey my church authorities and will continue to do so” (Prime Minister, Mr. Costello). “There is going to be no flouting of the Bishops on Catholic morals and social teaching (Minister of Labour).

And finally Dr. Browne, describing the Health Service before his resignation, said:

“As a Catholic, I accept the ruling of their Lordship, the Hierarchy, without question.”

Mr. Calder points out that one result of these disclosures is that the Northern Ireland parties opposed to Union with Eire are using the incident effectively as propaganda among Northern Ireland Protestants, as proof of “the political duress exercised by the Catholic Church.”

(From Socialist Standard, August 1951)

Middle class or working class? (2001)

From the August 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

If you are a member of the so-called “middle class”, is your life better than a member of the “working class”? Well, your income may be higher, and this may enable you to obtain a better home, a better car, better food, better electronic goods, a better pension, better child education, better holidays . . . But then again, let's take a closer look at those “better” benefits.

Keeping hold of that better home may depend on you not losing your better income. But with globalised free markets, there comes unavoidable pressure on employers to minimise wages and maximise savings in order to stay in business and increase profits. This results in job losses from mergers and takeovers as firms seek efficiencies of scale, greater market share and more financial clout and protection from becoming bigger players. There is also further pressure to keep up with more competitive rivals who sack employees here as new technology permits switching over to cheaper workers in large call centres and other remote business service facilities in counties like India. Previously “safe” occupations like banking and insurance have already seen such transferences of many jobs, and this trend will inevitably continue with many more lower-paid employees in other countries taking over from the middle class in additional occupations as the technology and business opportunities make this more attainable and appealing.

That better car will often get snarled-up in traffic with all the others wasting your precious time. The police will set up increasing numbers of speed cameras to raise revenue as you rush about to, from and during work, causing you further aggravation. Privatised traffic wardens, too, will want to keep their jobs by taking some of the pay from yours if they can. Your insurance will keep rising as growing inequality causes poorer motorists to choose inferior cheaper policies, or avoid paying altogether. Eventually, the carcinogenic chemicals and particulates from exhaust fumes inhaled during all those years of driving may exact their toll on your health – perhaps just after you retire to enjoy your last work-free years.

That better food you bought – organic of course – may in fact turn out to be nothing of the sort. When it's so easy to use deceptive labels or sell ordinary food as organic and thereby pocket far bigger profits, and there are no, or very few, expensive checks on quality, your hopes of avoiding pesticides, fungicides and other nasties will be defeated by others ruthlessly pursuing that same capitalist necessity called money that you yourself are also chasing, day in, day out.

The better video cameras, TVs, computers and other electronic gizmos are being manufactured to become obsolete in ever shorter periods of time as businesses ever desperate for more profit want you to buy another new replacement. And another. And another. And as you do so, the landfill sites grow ever bigger with dangerous poisons that will leech into the water we drink, and rubbish incinerators will pump ever more quantities of cancer-causing PCBs, dioxins and other chemicals into our lungs.

The better pension you expected to enjoy after you retire turns out to have not been as successfully invested as you thought, and will only provide a half or even a third of what you had expected, leaving you with the prospect of either making do with a much worse standard of living in your old age, or continuing to work into your 60s or even your 70s, assuming you are able to, and can find an employer wanting someone who may then be far less efficient than a blindly enthusiastic younger employee.

The better educated children will no doubt “benefit” from their schooling and parental encouragement to become middle class workers themselves, doomed to carry on the same crass competition for bigger pieces of cheese in the endless rat race.

And when you go on your better holiday – assuming you haven't been affected by “presenteeism”, and avoided taking it for fear of being seen as lacking commitment – do you honestly think that a couple of weeks in the sun will make up for all those months of pressure and stress?

Worst of all there's your failure to see that you never did belong to a superior middle class, since your exploitation to produce profits for employers meant you were in fact a member of the working class, with problems and suffering just as bad as experienced by those stacking supermarket shelves, selling McFood or sewing clothes in sweat shops. And by failing to see that you were all collectively exploited by capitalism – instead believing yourself to have been above others – you helped maintain the divisive system that unnecessarily cheated, manipulated and punished you all. An overwhelming majority of people who had always possessed the opportunity to come together and get rid of all their problems for good, but never had the sense to do it.

Do you agree that all workers who produce profit for others, by being denied full payment for their work – the only way profit can be made – are in the same capitalist boat? You do? Then why not row with us towards a money-less, stress-free, socialist future of free access to whatever we need, rather than keep going round in inescapable circles by constantly competing with one another? Wouldn't that be “better” for us all?

Max Hess