The Socialist-Myth Countries (1974)

From the June 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Among the: many factors which have contributed to the undoubtedly disappointing speed (if that is the word) at which the working class have progressed towards an understanding of Socialism in the years since the Socialist Party was formed, one which has undoubtedly had a serious effect is the emergence of the so-called socialist countries, commencing in 1917 with Russia and continuing with many others in more recent years. The effect has been pernicious in two ways. First, the picture of life as it affects the working class in those lands has been of sufficient grimness as to cause those workers who think at all about these things to say: if that is Socialism (and only the tiniest handful realise that it is isn’t), you can keep it.

Secondly, and perhaps of even greater importance, large numbers of workers who are dissatisfied with capitalism as they experience it in their daily lives, especially the younger and more idealistically-inclined elements, have been taken in by the propaganda put cut by these countries from Lenin’s time onwards, the mouthing of pseudo-Marxist phrases, the glib misuse of the terms Socialism and Communism for realities which were so different, often horrifically so. If all the youthful energy and enthusiasm which have been wasted on these false dawns had been channelled into genuinely Socialist effort, it is reasonable to suppose that the cause would have been materially advanced. The damage done to Socialist progress by Lenin and his ilk hardly bears thinking about.

It is of course no coincidence that the Socialist Party was never taken in by the spurious talk about the creation of Socialism in Russia. Our party was from the first anchored to the doctrine that there can be no Socialism until the material conditions for a society of abundance have been achieved (this, ironically or not, being the task of capitalism); and, equally important, till the majority of the working class understand and want the new system of common ownership. We stood behind Marx’s dictum that the establishment of the new society must be the work of the working class itself. And we therefore regarded with contempt Lenin’s completely opposite teaching (in What is to be done ? and other works) that the workers were not equipped to understand Socialism, which must be brought about by an élite Bolshevik leadership who were so equipped (presumably either by God or by nature). (It should be noted here that with Marx and Lenin having two mutually exclusive attitudes on this fundamental aspect, the very phrase “Marxism-Leninism”, always on the lips of the so-called Communists, is about as meaningful as square circles or black snowflakes.)

The rest of the world expressed puzzlement in 1917 (still does) that, contrary to Marx’s ideas, Socialism should come first not in the industrialised west but in backward Russia. We had no bother in dealing with this puzzle; we knew it was just a figment of the imagination. Lenin kept talking about Socialism. To many people that proved it existed. It didn’t. And doesn’t. The vast majority of Russians are propertyless workers who are forced to allow themselves to be exploited just as in the west. Marx’s “abolition of the wages system” is not even on the horizon in Russia. Any more than it is here. And the Russian workers are not even permitted the luxury of being allowed to talk about the idea or to publish papers like this one to propagate the idea of Socialism.

Since the Hitler war ended, the plague of fake socialist countries has spread widely. The countries of eastern Europe fell under the control of the military might of the state-capitalist giant in Moscow. The feelings of the workers who live under those pernicious régimes show through from time to time in the form of uprisings in Berlin, Budapest, Prague or Danzig (where Polish workers who merely protested against a massive increase in prices were mowed down by tanks sent by their “Communist” masters in Warsaw).

In China, a tiny gang of Maoists have imposed their iron grip over 800 million workers who are exploited without mercy and without the slightest vestige of trade union rights and other freedoms. And a British Labour Peeress, Lady Wootton, who has the nerve to call herself a Socialist, actually wrote in Encounter that it was quite right that these millions should not be allowed trade unions ! While in The Observer, an ignorant intellectual, Professor Galbraith, actually wrote: “It works for the Chinese” (this echoing a previous-generation American intellectual who returned from Moscow with the infamous remark : “I have seen the future and it works”). Of course it works well enough for these impudent carpet-baggers who enjoy VIP trips to see the exploitation of the Chinese workers and then return to their home comforts to get paid for writing lies about it. But it is a sad fact that many young workers and students, who apparently now see through the Russian fraud, have simply switched not to studying Marx but to bootlicking Mao.

The rash has now spread so that every tin-pot black dictatorship in Africa has the nerve to call itself Socialist. And of course, so-called radical papers like the Guardian play their ignoble part in fostering the myths and the confusion by conning their readers into thinking that Socialism exists in such unlikely places as Zambia, Tanzania or Cuba. It never seems to worry these western apostles of freedom that all these places have one thing in common — prisons crammed with poor wretches whose only crime is to have fallen foul of the tyrannies run by Kaunda, Nyerere or Castro. Perhaps they have a great deal to learn, but many of them must be already learning it.

L. E. Weidberg

SPGB Meetings and Lectures. (1940)

Party News from the April 1940 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Pilgrims to Peking (1974)

From the October 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the nastiest aspects of the fake-socialist revolution perpetrated against the Russian workers and peasants was the slimy stream of western intellectuals who, in the '20s and ’30s, made their pilgrimages to Russia (almost always paid for, on VIP level of course, by the Bolshevik government out of the surplus-value wrung from the Russian masses who were literally starving in those days.) The pilgrims returned to the west to tell (and sell) their stories of Russian “socialism” from the comfort of their western-capitalist armchairs. Such execrable names as the Webbs (who wrote a great monstrous book in praise of Stalinism), Shaw and Kingsley Martin spring to mind, but there were innumerable others. They could have known all about the anti-Socialist tyranny of Lenin and Stalin (and Trotsky, of course, despite the latter-day idiots who call themselves Trotskyists) without leaving these shores. It was all in the Socialist Standard of those days (and quite often in the newspapers too).

The miracle did happen at least once, oddly enough, The French writer André Gide went to Moscow as a propagandist for their cause (he would not have been invited otherwise) and the eyes which he had kept closed in France refused to stay closed when he saw Stalinism at close quarters so he spilled the beans when he got back. The CP’s answer was to revile him as a homosexual. (Oddly enough, Hitler did the same trick when he murdered his henchmen Roehm, Heines and company. He said they were homosexuals — as though unaware of this when they were his faithful lieutenants. Just another instance of the close relationship between red-fascism and the other kind.)

In recent years, specially since the Khrushchev “secret speech” in ’56, the new generation of intellectuals have been busy writing books like Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror which have exposed the turpitude of the western fellow-travellers of those days. But does that mean that the present lot of academics and other politicians and scribblers have learnt the lesson of history? You must be joking Having learnt only that Moscow is no longer the Mecca for leftist hypocrites to visit, they have looked around to find “a substitute for a prostitute” as an old joke has it. There is the pudgy face of Mao Tse-tung beckoning benignly to them just as Uncle Joe did in days of yore. The East is Red, so is the carpet; the grub is better than the Chinese Take-away and you can come back from your free holiday and make your fame and fortune scribbling and gibbering about your first-hand knowledge of the Utopia which has replaced Russia. (Up to a decade ago, the word was “supplemented,” not “replaced”. But now the two “socialist” giants are calling each other fascists as loud as they can. And how right both are!)

If it were not that so many students and workers in the west fall for the lies about Socialism in China (as their fathers did about Russia), “hilarious” would really be the word for it. An article in the June Socialist Standard referred to the leftist intellectuals like Professor John Galbraith and Baroness Barbara Wootton, both of whom returned from VIP trips to China to sell confusion to the western press. The former said “it works for the Chinese”, thus using practically the same words as a previous generation Yankee intellectual, Lincoln Steffens, who came back from Moscow to pronounce: “I have seen the future and it works”. Presumably even Galbraith wouldn’t dare to say that it would work for the west where only a handful of half-baked students seem to respond to the call.

It is also worth noting that neither Galbraith nor Steffens before him ever dreamt of living in the paradises they described, but put 10,000 miles between themselves and Utopia. (Which recalls the case of that other modern scribbler Graham Greene who said he would rather live in Russia than America. And merrily carried on living in his fabulous villa. On the French Riviera!)

It was more than interesting to learn from that same Standard (our 70th Anniversary number) that this same Baroness Wootton, who says she agrees with Mao for not allowing trade unionism among his 700 million blue ants, debated against the SPGB. She was then a youngish economist and Labourite. Now she is an old Baroness and clearly more pseudo than ever. How sad that the comparatively free workers of the west should then and now permit this monstrous nonsense to be talked at them.

As the latest prime example of the genre a Labour MP, Joel Barnett (a year or so ago when he was in opposition; now he is in Wilson’s government) had the luck to get on one of the jaunts (which must be worth a few thousand quid in any language — quite apart from the fact that you can’t get into China without being approved by the red-fascists who rule the roost, the fact that there are about 700 million who can’t get out). Joel made sure that he copped for a spot of extra publicity which would be read by his friends and relations and constituents, not to speak of us. When the time came for him to be red-carpeted around the Great Wall of China, which is one of the highlights of all these picnics, Joel told them he insisted on seeing some genuine Chinese workers instead. This may not have been reported in the Peking Daily Liar but imagine what a sensational scoop it would make for the local rag in Rochdale or whenever. Our Labourite friend not only wanted to see real workers — he actually insisted on talking to them. What did he want to say? Nothing less than the 64-dollar question: “What do you really think about Mao Tse-tung?” Well, that’s what I read in the Guardian. But, I fancy, not quite. Because our Joel doesn’t speak much Chinese (seeing that most MP’s don’t speak English very well, this must not be regarded as surprising).

So what happened was that Joel popped it to the interpreter, who, as in Russia, is just another minion. Whether the minion really asked Joel’s question I can’t really say. Neither, of course, can Barnett. For all either of us knows, he may have merely mouthed the ancient Confucian proverb (before Confucius was arrested as an ally of Lin Piao): Ooh flung dung? Equally, we don’t know what the wage-slave replied. All we know is that the minion told our visitor that the reply was in the affirmative. Of course, Barnett was quite aware of the charade he was acting — at the expense of the Chinese working class and of the British working class too. What did he expect the worker to say under the noses of Mao’s very own thugs? And what could this poor devil have thought Barnett was? To a Chinese slave, a bespectacled accountant from Manchester would appear to be a different species. He might have been a Dalek from Outer Space. No matter, the purpose was served.

The Chinese workers are there for the purpose of producing all the wealth of the state-capitalist system so that the rulers can live high off the hog, as they do in Russia. And to provide good propaganda for the privileged trippers who are allowed to make the pilgrimage. The odd thing is that (as the writer happens to know), Barnett is by no means the most obnoxious type of politician. He may even think himself to be honest. But it comes to the same thing in the end. As long as the workers in England, China, Russia and the rest of the capitalist world, fail to grasp the true meaning of their class subjection and to realise that only a revolutionary change to Socialism (as distinct from the monstrosity that exists in China and Russia) will free them for a life worth living, then they will continue to be battened on by the jackals of capitalism.

L. E. Weidberg

Marxism and Russia (1933)

From the February 1933 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mrs. Barbara Wootton has a reputation as an economist and is accepted by many people as an authority on the theories of Marx. She holds views on the relationship of Marxian theories to the social system in Russia which are fairly common. In the Highway, organ of the Workers' Educational Association (December), she sets out to interpret Russia for the benefit of non-Russians who wish to understand what is going on in that country.

Her explanation is a simple one:

“The Soviet Mind is a single mind. It is this which gives life in present-day Russia its peculiar flavour. ... In other countries no such common collective purpose is known, unless it be the purpose of making war. . . . The Soviet mind not only knows what it is after; it is also after very strange things. . . . These strange things are, of course, nothing less than those embodied in the philosophy called Marxism.”

Mrs. Wootton describes briefly some of the strange things. Among them is concentration on increasing the productivity of industry, what she calls “the glorification of economic output.” This, she says, leads the Russians to esteem sobriety because the sober worker has a bigger output. He must shun “licentious pleasures.” He must get up early and be punctual.

Another of the strange things is that the Russian child is taught to study phases of the class-struggle in other countries, but not in Russia. (According to Mrs. Wootton the children are taught that the class-struggle no longer exists in Russia.)

These and various other examples are given by Mrs. Wootton to “illustrate the extraordinary unity and consistency of Soviet ideas in every field.”

The whole of this is rubbish. There is no “common collective purpose” in Russia. The “strange things” are not strange. They are perfectly familiar to every student of capitalism everywhere, and Marx is not responsible for them.

Let us first take the “single mind” of Russia. Not a week passes without authoritative reports of the shooting or imprisonment of peasants and others who have come into conflict with the Russian Government. Frequent armed punitive expeditions are sent against rebellious groups of private peasants or members of collective farms. Dissident Communists are disgraced, exiled and imprisoned. At the moment a wholesale purge of the Russian Communist Party is taking place. The “single mind” is that of the Communist officials who control the vast repressive forces of the State. The appearance of unity is like its counterpart in every other country: it is imposed by those who have power on those who have not. Mrs. Wootton's analogy of the alleged “common collective purpose” of the nation making war is not a bad illustration of the absurdity of her argument. The war-making governments had to use conscription, supported by intensive lying propaganda and the savageries of military discipline to drive millions of unwilling or indifferent men into the trenches. Mrs. Wootton thinks that this is a common collective purpose. It did not look like that to the conscripts.

Then for the boosting of big output. Here Mrs. Wootton herself has to admit that the Russian “strange thing” bears a resemblance to the propaganda used in the U.S.A. before the present depression. She might also recall the official British “increased production” campaign of 1919-1920, backed by politicians in the three big parties (Labour included) and made the subject of innumerable newspaper articles, coloured posters in the streets, platform speeches and divinely-inspired sermons in the pulpits of churches of every denomination.

Then there is Mrs. Wootton's discovery that in Russia the children are taught to ignore the class-struggle at home and fix their eyes on the shocking state of unrest abroad. This is precisely what happens in every capitalist country. We are allowed to know that there were class struggles in the past and class struggles in benighted foreign countries, but the educational system does not recognise the existence of a class struggle here and now. There is no need to deal with her belief that the class struggle has disappeared from Russia. The rulers of that country officially admit that it is more acute than ever. That is why they have to depend for protection on their huge police and military forces, and that is why, in spite of Mrs. Wootton's nonsense, they do not trust to the “common collective purpose” supposed to have been derived by the Russian population from the theories of Marx.

Anyone acquainted with Marx's writings would know how he denounced the inhumanity of capitalism, sacrificing the comfort and health of the workers in order to build up huge production plants for the profit of the investors. Yet Mrs. Wootton holds Marx responsible for precisely the same process imposed on the Russian workers by the dictatorship. While the majority of Russian workers tighten their belts the home and foreign bondholders get their 10 per cent, or more on their investments out of the proceeds of the workers' labour, and specialists and bureaucrats draw their high salaries.

Mrs. Wootton shows by her article that she knows little of Russia, not very much about capitalism elsewhere, and understands nothing at all of Marx. Her views are not in themselves of special importance, but unfortunately her misrepresentations of Marx are widely held and do great harm to the Socialist movement.

Edgar Hardcastle

A New Magazine (1962)

From the December 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nothing that is new can be dismissed out of hand. If that sounds like a truism, it is at least one that bears and needs repetition. Ignorance and prejudice still stalk the world, and the untried, the unknown, are ruthlessly annihilated.

The approach of the Socialist is completely opposite to this. Our approach is and always must be scientific. In that spirit then, we examine yet one more journal, amid the welter of journals that fill the bookstalls, which claims to spread enlightenment.

October saw the launching of New Society, described as the social science weekly. The general layout is excellent, while the actual printing is a model to many of its contemporaries. Some idea of the range of subjects can be seen in a few of the articles in number one. "Softening the Sack" deals with redundancy and job security. "New facts on Teen-Age Marriage" with considerable detail. Barbara Wootton contributes "Socrates, Science and Social Problems" — a plea for the scientific approach to social problems. The Home Secretary is interviewed by editor Timothy Raison on his approach to crime, and Robert Bierstedt, head of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology of New York University, gives a report on the various papers read to the recent meeting of the American Sociological Association.

Taken in all, there is much to interest and inform. But a word of warning. The leading article endeavours to explain the aims and methods of New Society, thus:

We shall not ignore ideas and theories; indeed we see their interpretation as one of the principal challenges to us. But we aim above all to link the study of society with practice; to tell the manager what the psychologist has to say, to make the town planner aware of what the social anthropologist is revealing, to inform the local government official or councillor of the trends revealed by the demographer, to enable the magistrate to know what the criminologist has to offer and—in each case equally important—vice versa. The experience of the practitioner and the research of the academic are complementary, and our contributors will be drawn from both groups.

We can be under no illusion then, of the path that will be taken. However scientific the approach may be in intention, the sciences must be kept within the bounds of the existing social order—capitalism. This makes a mockery of the very name of the science and means that just one more hunter joins in chasing a will-o-the-wisp, for we know that the problems of society can only be solved by the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of Socialism. Nevertheless, there will be much worth studying in this journal if the early issues live up to their promise.

H. J. W.