Fog on the Danube (1962)

From the March 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

From a Comrade in Vienna

Turning over the pages of the Arbeiter Zeitung, the interested intelligent reader must surely ask himself where this so-called Socialist journal differs from other daily papers that do not pretend to stand for Socialism. There are the usual features of all the other newspapers: pages of commercial advertisements, pages of sport, programmes of all the theatres, cinemas and other entertainments, Police and Court reports on crime and the daily tragedies of misery and want, murder and detective stories, appeals for funds to help victims of natural catastrophes, to help the blind, the cripples, the orphans and all the other unfortunates dependent on alms and charity culled welfare.

Here are a few examples of the way these “Socialist” journals deal with news items that would offer good chances of driving home the Socialist case and lessons for the workers:

A report in the Arbeiter Zeitung stated that the 89 year old Lord Bertrand Russell was continuing from his prison cell his anti-bomb propaganda. The paper quoted the aged philosopher as saying in an appeal: “You, your families, your friends and your States will be exterminated by the common decisions of a few but brutal men.” These, Lord Russell named as Kennedy, Kruschev, Adenauer, de Gaulle, Macmilllan and Gaitskell. What did the Arbeiter Zeitung have to say to enlighten its readers on the merits or demerits of Russell’s action and peace propaganda? Nothing.

But should not a journal and a party calling itself Socialist enlighten the workers on this, as on all other political questions? Should it not point out that it is not individuals alone who move the world, but the forces of capital? And that the Kennedys and Adenauers, the Kruschevs and Macmillans are only the temporary managers of these forces? Should it not be made plain that if these individuals were removed tomorrow, other executives and lackeys would take their place and continue the same policy, as has repeatedly happened in the past, and is daily happening before our eyes? Was not Asquith, the British manager of world-war I, removed and promptly replaced by another, Lloyd George? Was not the Kaiser (who had been denounced as having caused the war) exiled and replaced by other individuals who carried on the old system until it produced world-war II? Did the system of Capitalism end with the end of Hitler and Mussolini, who had been accused of having caused that second war? Were not Russian and Bulgarian Czars, Rumanian and Yugoslav kings dethroned, only to be replaced by reformers and more up-to-date administrators of Capitalism like Stalin, Kruschev, Tito, etc., to uphold and continue the private ownership basis and money economy of society, albeit State-Capitalism? Does Lord Russell really believe that if Kennedy and the other present top managers of Capitalism were removed, all would be well in the world, and the nightmare of an impending third world-war lifted from men’s minds? Does he not see that the other pretended “socialist” and pacifist politicians like Nehru, Ben Gurion, Spaak, Guy Mollet, Ollenhauer, etc., are equally staunch upholders of the universal conflict-breeding system that makes war inevitable?

Competition

As long as it is possible for men to exploit other men, war will be threatening humanity. The proceeds (profits) from Capitalist exploitation must be realized by selling the products of labour in the world’s markets. This is where the conflict arises. Commercial competition is war. Even when the rivalry is carried on at the business offices and in the State chancelleries, the clash of interests—the cold war—is there all the time and is eventually transferred to the battlefields of the various continents. What is at stake is big business, the question primarily of who can pocket the profits to be made from “assisting” the underdeveloped countries! Who can get in first? Who can “help” them—in truth, who will exploit them and make the big profits? And as the exploiters mistrust and are envious of each other, one tries to oust the other from the market. For this purpose all means are considered, including atom-bombs.

About Christmas time high functionaries of the Socialist Party of Austria, like the Vice-chancellor, and top Municipal councillors, painted dreary pictures of things happening in the Austrian Welfare State. Said Dr. Pittermann, leader of the SPA:

“In the days before Christmas we heard of the shocking tragedy at St. Polten, where four children burned to death in a barrack dwelling. In the country with the highest increase of the national income, a working class family with four children has to live in a barrack, not because there are too few houses in Austria but because inhuman greed does not place these flats at the disposal of those who are in dire need of a home: they are only for those who can pay higher rents than a worker’s family with many children. In the nearly 2000 years from the stable in Bethlehem to the death in the flames of the four children in the stable at St. Polten, usury with the housing and property has not been done away with. There are tens of thousands of flats empty or only partly occupied in Vienna alone, and innocent children become victims of borderless greed.”

During the budget debate of the Vienna City Council, councillor Mrs. M. Jacobi deplored the widespread unhappiness still existing in our welfare world. She said :

“The Vienna municipality has in its homes or with foster parents 3,900 children whose parents do not care for them. The background of nearly everyone of these children is a heart-rending life-story. Recently one of the boys wrote a letter to his mother, which read: Dear-Mother, I leave school this year. I should like to come to you, otherwise I shall have to stay at the home. If your new husband objects, please write to me.

A few days later the letter was returned. On the back it said, without salutation or signature: Sorry cannot take you; must stay at the home. My husband does not want you. Don’t write any more, it is no use. You are grown up, go to work! Do not think of coming to me. Please do not come, otherwise my husband throws me out . . .”

During the same debate, the Vice-Mayor Mandl also deplored the “cultural crisis” and said that:

“despite all the achievements of the welfare state there are alarming signs of decay, of a sick society. In Austria 1,630 persons committed suicide in 1960. 11,500 persons intending to take their lives were taken care of by one welfare centre alone. In another department 15,000 addicts to alcohol applied for treatment and the numbers of alcoholics, of alcoholic intoxicated and juvenile criminality and neglect are rising.

The place of the physical and material misery has been taken by the psychical and cultural misery. The invasion of the mass media of Press, film, radio and television into leisure is one of the main causes of the negative, often anti-social reactions ….”

Although the so-called Socialist journals report daily the threatening problems in all parts of the present turbulent world, they never advocate Socialism as a solution for society’s troubles and problems. Whether the scene of the turmoil is in Goa or Angola, in Algiers, Kuwait or in the Congo, in New Guinea or in other divided countries like India, Pakistan, Germany, or divided cities like Kashmir, Jerusalem or Berlin, the “experts” of the Arbeiter Zeitung will deal lengthily with these insoluble problems, claims, threats and demands: they will refute or support the “rights” or “wrongs” of this or that predatory clique, take sides for one or the other band of thieves, and so confuse the workers and entangle them in things that are no concern of theirs bill only of their masters.

However well they may know that drastic evils call for drastic remedies, however glaringly evident it is—often on their own showing—that the Capitalist system is responsible for the evils and sufferings of the workers, their leaders will not draw the attention of the people and will not have them concentrate their thoughts on the need for the removal of the cause of all the trouble. One does not expect the Conservative politicians to preach revolutionary change as the only wav to remove the social ills and incongruities, but parties and journals calling themselves Socialist or Communist and not advocating consistently the revolutionary doctrine and principles, stand identified with the enemies of the working class.

Rudolf Frank

News in Review: Disobedience campaign (1960)

The News in Review column from the November 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

Disobedience campaign

It would appear that true to their policy statement most of the CND leaders have completely disowned Lord Russell’s proposals for a civil disobedience campaign. According to Lord Russell the proposals are an appeal to the conscience and intelligence of all men about the dangers of mass extermination. What concerns us is the kind of society reflected in these measures to flout authority. The real tragedy is that at election times the overwhelming majority vote for the retention of Capitalism and consequently for most of the policies which go with it, including the H-bomb. For this reason the Socialist is not being cynical when he makes the remark: “You got what you voted for.”

To those CND supporters still undecided as to their next move it could be pointed out that by supporting any kind of civil disobedience they are fighting and will continue to fight the effects of the present system rather than abolishing it altogether and replacing it with a new and much less frustrating society.

Right to Strike

Patrick Neary has been released after spending six weeks in prison. He was the leader of the recent seamen’s strike, and was sent to jail because he did not comply with a court order which told him (in effect) to give up all connection with the strike. Some newspapers have claimed that he was imprisoned not because he was a striker, but because he disobeyed the court order. This is to reject the substance and catch at the shadow. The reason Neary went to jail was because he had been elected chairman of the strike committee, and had therefore emerged as the figurehead of the strike. The shipping companies wanted to remind the seamen of the Merchant Shipping Act. under which any striking seaman can be sent to jail. As far as the mass of strikers were concerned, the companies were perhaps afraid of having them all sent to jail, for fear of repercussions: and so decided to call in the state machine (which after all they maintain to look after their interests) only against one man, the figurehead, Neary. Therefore Neary has had to endure for six weeks the vile indignities which are the lot of anyone in jail, because he took part in a strike and was elected chairman of the committee which ran it.

And what happened to the protests which we might have expected? The last war (our leaders told us) was fought to defend democratic freedoms. The right to withhold labour is a central democratic freedom. The alternative—sending men to jail because they refuse to work on the terms offered them by the capitalists—is slavery. But our ruling class had no objection to Neary's sentence. Their newspapers applauded it. Let us remember this the next time our rulers want our help to “fight for freedom and democracy."

Kennedy v. Nixon

BBC television has given up an hour of its time to show one of the debates between the rival candidates for the Presidency now being staged in the United States. It isn't clear why, unless it wants to demonstrate to British workers that there would be no point in emigrating. For the debate showed that politics have reached much the same stage over there as they have here. There are two great parties contending for the support of the working class. One of them holds that the system as it now stands is as near to perfect as anything ever devised by man. The other, which has the support of the unions, wants one or two reforms, which would do nothing whatever to change the class basis of society. Each of them has a programme and a policy, the essence of which is that each would run capitalism better than its rival.

In one respect the parallel is even closer. Over here we have become used to the Government of the day (whether Labour or Conservative) attacking any claim made for higher pay made by members of the working class, and treating any strike or threat to strike as if it heralded the end of civilisation. And then at each election, the Government, with superb effrontery, brings out any figures of higher pay won by the workers against the strenuous opposition of that very Government, as if it alone was responsible (and, at the same time, usually skates over any figures showing how inflation has left the workers in much the same position as they were before). In the televised debate Nixon, who has been vice-president for the last eight years, performed this very trick. He brought out the figures of wage increases as if he individually had led the workers in all the struggles which must go before the smallest pay rise. And no doubt if Kennedy wins this time, he will re-appear in four years using exactly the same argument which Nixon uses now.

The Referendum

The South African government has been given a majority vote in favour of a republic—a majority, that is, of white voters, as the vast mass of the population (the Africans, Indians and Cape Coloureds) in this referendum, as in all elections, have no vote. This winning of the referendum has, no doubt, pleased Dr. Verwoerd and his Nationalist supporters, but not all white South Africans are so pleased, although Dr. Verwoerd hoped that the creation of a republic would at last end the bitterness and hostility existing between the Boer South Africans and the English-speaking South Africans, which has remained since the Boer War. But this has not, so far, happened, and one of South Africa's leading industrialists, Mr. Harry Oppenheimer, is frankly worried that the Republic may have a harmful effect on industry, should it not be readmitted to the Commonwealth, partly because of loss of the imperial preference.

Suicides

From a recent meeting of the British Medical Association at Middlesbrough, comes further evidence of the anti-social consequences of competition and production for profit. Dr. Sargent, physician-in-charge of the Department of Psychological Medicine at St. Thomas's Hospital. raised the matter of the 5,000 suicides which occur in this country yearly. According to Dr. Sargent, many patients who go on to commit suicide do so after wrong courses of treatment often resulting from confusion created by drug manufacturers in their publicity campaigns. Recently, advances have been made with a new group of anti-depressant drugs. “Unfortunately intensive competition between drug manufacturers to capture their share of an enormous potential market had resulted in excessive claims being made for them and wrong groups of cases suggested for their use," said Dr. Sargent.

Clearly the human considerations of treatment of the sick are secondary in the drive towards commercial success. Even so, anti-depressant drugs can at best only hope to treat symptoms. A far more satisfactory way of preventing suicides would be to establish a society based on more harmonious social relations and which takes no toll of the individual in terms of emotional stress.

Nigeria changes

Nigerians living in London marked Nigeria's coming to independence by publicly wearing their colourful and roomy national costumes. Was it worth celebrating? At the most, Nigeria will develop into another minor capitalist state; and we have seen enough of those to know that they have no more to offer their workers than any of the older established powers. Dr. Michael Okpara, the President of Eastern Nigeria, stated in the region's Assembly on 8th October that Nigerians would rather lay down their lives than lose their newly won freedom. At a guess this is a correct estimation of the loyalty of patriotic Nigerians who, like any other politically ignorant workers, are wide open to the propaganda of their masters.

But Dr. Okpara's statement gives the lie to those who pretend that the emerging capitalist countries are basically different from those whose power they have replaced. All over the world, workers are periodically called upon to die for the protection of their master's interests—and always they are told that they are dying to defend some high minded principle. British workers, for example, have fallen for this for a very long time. Now, the Nigerians are getting the same treatment. With, presumably, the same results—bloodshed and tragedy.

Blowing their tops

Mr. Khruschev had a rare old time at the United Nations. Hugging Fidel Castro, making violent speeches, banging his desk and shouting. He even heckled Mr. Macmillan, which gave the British Prime Minister the chance to show how an Old Etonian deals with that sort of thing in the House of Commons. Such bad behaviour, it was reported, upset Mr. Eisenhower, who cancelled any intention of shaking hands with, or talking to, the Soviet Premier.

Now diplomatic conferences are not like chats over the garden wall, when boorishness can cause a man to be bad friends with his neighbour. Capitalist powers do not split on points of etiquette—their disputes are over rival economic interests. International politicians know better than to lose their tempers as openly as Khruschev did—unless it suits their purpose to do so. And all of them will willingly hobnob with people guilty of worse than bad manners. If the immediate interests of their capitalist class demand it, they will talk to, shake hands with, embrace, pose with, other diplomats who are little better than murderers.

The disputes of capitalism have always involved a large measure of humbug. The stakes are high—and no trick barred. A dirty game.

Russia and Democracy (1946)

From the June 1946 issue of the Socialist Standard

On March 23rd, under the title “True Democracy,” the Manchester Guardian opened a discussion on democracy when reviewing a recently published lecture by Professor E. H. Carr. This review was followed by contributors from Lord Lindsay, Mr. Laski and Mr. Bertrand Russell on April 20th and May 4th respectively.

The striking thing about all the contributions was that they distinguished an entirely different outlook on democracy between Russia and the Western Countries, but, to all of them, the Russian outlook is accepted as a sincere one, tied up with the view that the Russian rulers are acting on behalf of one section of society alone, the workers, and that their dictatorship signifies the rule of the workers. This, the writers agree, explains the difference between “Proletarian Democracy” and “Bourgeois Democracy.” This, for instance, is the reviewer puts it:-

“It is important, as Professor Carr points out, to realize that the Russians are just as sincere in their use of the word democracy as we and the Americans are in ours.”

We have not the space to examine the many misleading ideas that are foisted upon the Marxian point of view by these writers, but must confine ourselves to the alleged basic difference between the Russian and the Western definition of democracy.

Cutting away all trimmings, democracy simply means a state of affairs in which the will of the majority of a group, a nation, or an international society, shall always prevail. The will of the majority cannot prevail unless circumstances exist which make it possible to know at any time what the will of the majority really is and whether, for any reason, it has changed. This cannot be known unless there is at least freedom of discussion and means existing for this purpose; freedom of equality of voting; freedom to select those who are to carry out the will of the majority; and equality of electoral conditions.

Although in theory these four fundamental conditions exist in the Western democratic states, in fact there are considerable limitations. One needs only to remember the private and business votes processed by some, the enormous influence of a press owned by a propertied minority, the economic penalties suffered by the workers who express their opinion too freely; and the governments who coalesce instead of dissolving. In spite of the limitations, however, there is sufficient democracy in most of the European states and in America to enable the majority of the people to change the basis of society if, and when, they wish to do so. The point is to get them to wish it. It is therefore to the interest of the workers, who form the great majority in the nations, to use these democratic avenues and not to ignore or destroy them.

The Russian Government was, and is, fundamentally undemocratic, and under its inspiration Communist parties of the other countries have worked to discredit democratic institutions. Sometimes the plea has been that these democratic institutions were barrier to the taking over of power by the working class. In fact, however, they were simply the barrier to the taking over of power by the tiny minority, the Communist Party. The workers did not want to take over power because they had not sufficient confidence in themselves and would not know what to do with power if they got it.

At the time of the Russian Revolution the Bolshevik or Communist Party was a small minority in a largely peasant country. By taking advantage of the favourable circumstances and by carefully planned manoeuvres they succeeded in getting control of government power; every action since that date has had behind it the aim of strengthening the hold on power of the leaders of the Communist Party. Some statements of Marx and Engels on the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” were misused to support the false claim that the workers were in control in Russia. In fact the Russian dictatorship is at present the rule of a small group, with Stalin at their head, who have so tightly organised their autocracy that it is difficult to dislodge them. In this, certain peculiar circumstances have played directly into their hands. From the beginning there was a bitter struggle between members of the ruling clique, and the successful ones imprisoned, deported or executed their rivals. The secret police, as in Germany and Italy, was, and still is, one of the principal of props of power. Lately the church is also taking a hand in the game.

With such background, to write of the Russian idea of democracy as being a sincere one is just nonsense. The rulers of Russia are solely interested in keeping their privileged position as rulers and, like the capitalist rulers here, are only concerned with democracy to the extent that it achieves this object. To write of the Russian dictatorship, as the contributors to the Manchester Guardian have done, as being a dictatorship exercised in the interests of the workers is contrary to the facts. On similar grounds they could as logically argue that Capitalists rule in the interests of the worker.

The business of the Communist parties of different countries has been to serve the interests of the Russian Government, and their “day-to-day” policies have twisted and turned and been reversed merrily in tune with the needs of Russia. On this question of democracy, so far as it concerns the parliament, their somersaults have been particularly spectacular. Starting twenty-five years ago with fierce denunciation of parliament as a sham and a snare, they have alternately denounced and applauded participation in parliamentary action. We will extricate two examples of this lunatic policy:-

In 1932 the Communist Party published a 20-page pamphlet entitled “Report on the Crisis Policy of the Labour Party, the T.U.C. General Council and I.L.P.” This report was submitted to the twelfth Congress of the Communist Party. It repudiates parliamentary democracy in the following manner:-

“Revolution for the Communists means the forceful overthrow of the capitalist and the establishment of the workers’ dictatorship, this to be achieved by the organisation of the daily struggle of the workers as the road to the seizure of power” (p. 17).

Any Party which accepts parliamentary democracy, however revolutionary its phrases is an instrument of the capitalists” (p. 20).

“We must expose the sham of parliamentary democracy, and show the positive results of the workers’ dictatorship based upon the workers’ councils. …” (p. 20).

The Daily Worker of March 6th, 1943, tells an opposite story. It opened its columns to a discussion of the oft-recurring enigma “Communist Affiliation to the Labour Party.” Mr. James Walker put the case of the Labour Party and Mr. William Gallacher replied for the Communist Party. In his reply Mr. Gallacher made the following bland statement:-

“Of course we believe in parliamentary democracy. That is why I am in Parliament. That is why I am such a regular attender, and why the Party is so anxious that I should a good account of myself.”

Could blatant impudence and political perfidy go further? It might, but not very much!

In the West the capitalists find that they can rule under democracy. In Russia the Bolsheviks found they could not do so. To veil their dictatorship and obtain support at home and abroad they rigorously applied the censorship and produced quantities of literature urging the claim that the workers are the real rulers who endow their leaders with supreme power and authority on the ground that the leaders know better than they do themselves what is best to be done. This autocracy was then labelled as a new form of democracy, proletarian democracy, though the proletarians have, at the most, only the influence of the dumb, obstinate cattle who may stray this way and that along the road but are always driven home in the end. In social systems based on chattel slavery the slave either acquiesced in his slavery or went under. In Russia the position of the worker is fundamentally similar. No one before has had the brass to suggest that the slaves participated in democracy. It has been left to the twentieth-century dictatorships, with the unbounded cheek of the confidence man, to foist his fantastic view upon an apprehensive and credulous world.

With an extraordinary tenderness towards Russia the contributors to the Manchester Guardian discussion find a basis for Russian views in an idea that has been revived again. Russia, they urge, has not political democracy, but it has economic democracy. This is how Mr. Laski puts the idea:-

“Soviet Russia is a more democratic society than Great Britain. No special privilege attaches either to birth or to wealth, to race or to creed. There is a wider and more profound attempt to satisfy maximum demand than in this country. … The maddening distinction which we make between the high social prestige attached to intellectual labour and the low social prestige attached to manual labour has no meaning. … Access to the courts is not dependent upon the wealth of the parties to an action.”

Democracy is a term that is used to signify the opposite of privilege. Whatever it is called, political or economic, it either means, in the circumstances that are being considered, that everyone has an equal standing or it is meaningless. Mr. Laski is out of touch with the practical world and, consequently, his description of the economic position in Russia is a travesty of the real position.

What economic equality is there between Soviet millionaires, who can command the best food and everything else, and the average poorly paid Russian worker; between the rich, who can take their holidays in pleasant surroundings, and the poor, who must stew or freeze in the cities; between the wealthy writers and the poor manual workers; between the trembling critic of the Government and the ruling group with its ruthless instruments of oppression; between the rich, to whom all the avenues of divorce are open, and the poor, who cannot afford to pay the court procedure, between Soviet ambassadors giving sumptuous feasts and Soviet workers who can barely get enough to live on; between the prisoners in the labour camps and the Secret Police? If there is economic equality in Russia, why, and for whom, do the black markets flourish? The economic democracy that critics and servile adherents alike admire in an illusion, as the ugly facts testify.

While conditions remain such that modern society is composed of capitalists and workers, two classes with antagonistic interest, then the modern democratic state is the capitalist state, the executive committee of the ruling class, no matter what name is applied to the party in power nor what theory it masquerades under.

But the democratic state has been forced, against its will, to bring into being methods, institutions, and procedure which have left open the road to power for workers to travel upon when they know what to do and how to do it. In this country the central institution through which power is exercised is Parliament. To merely send working-class nominees there to control it is not sufficient. The purpose must be to accomplish a revolutionary reorganisation of society, a revolution, in its basis, which will put everybody on an equal footing as participants in the production, distribution and consumption of social requirements as well as in the control of society itself. So that all may participate equally, democracy is an essential condition. Free discussion, full and free access to information, means to implement the wishes of the majority which have been arrived at after free discussion, and the means to alter decisions if the wishes of the majority change.

Conditions such as these have no room to grow in Russia at present. Those who rule there to-day are essentially anti-democratic. They rule by the secret police, the concentration camp, and the executioner. They hoodwink their subjects into believing that that is the best of all possible worlds.

Gilmac.

News in Review: The Profumo affair (1963)

The News in Review column from the July 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Profumo affair

It was in the May Socialist Standard, at a time when Mr. Profumo’s strenuous protestations of the innocence of his relationships with Christine Keeler still held public water, that we pointed out how unimportant are the personal morals of the administrators of capitalism.

Now that Profumo has come clean, and now that we have been treated to the squalid detail of the Argyll divorce case, what we said in May still stands. With something to be added.

The rather nasty stories have lifted a corner of the curtain on a life which is completely foreign to most workers.

The life of rich houses, glamorous holidays, expensive women and powerful men. Of easy luxury and sophistication. The life, in fact, of people who can dedicate their lives to what they conceive as living.

Which is something very foreign to most members of the working class, who are only the people who make possible the lives of luxury and glamour.

Profumo was a member of a capitalist government and capitalism teaches us, when we are children in school and when we are grown up enough to read its journalism, that the basis of morality is monogamy.

Many workers absorb this teaching and, no matter what it costs them in terms of personal strain, conform to it. Others conform because they cannot afford to do anything else. Promiscuity can be a costly business.

It can also be a tragic business, for workers. Only recently The Observer ran a series on illegitimate children in this country, which showed up the sadness of many unmarried mothers who are forced by their circumstances to give up their babies when they desperately want to keep them.

This sort of tragedy need never happen to rich people who are also promiscuous. They have no trouble in taking care of any number of children, 'legitimate" or no.

In more ways than one, capitalism is a sordid, inhuman social system in which only the ruling class are free.

War in the air

The early railways fought each other tooth and nail for freight and passengers, often taking enormous physical and economic risks in the process. In the same way, the great airlines are currently coming to grips over the pickings to be had on the world’s busy airlanes.

For some time, the American transatlantic carriers have been fighting the rest —and particularly Britain—over fares and cargo rates. This provoked the recent crisis in which British airports were on the point of being closed to Pan American and Trans World aircraft; something which was averted only when the American Civil Aviation Board made a temporary climb down. The situation remains threatening.

And now the war is hotting up in the freight carriers.

BOAC has been happily operating piston engined freighters across the Atlantic and had no immediate intention of spending any more millions on jets to speed up this service.

This intention has been upset by Pan American’s opening of the first all jet freight service, over both the Atlantic and the Pacific. Fast and capacious, the Boeing freighters have started an air cargo sales war which may, as in the case of passenger traffic, develop into a rate war.

If this happens, we shall probably see every airline which aspires to a place in the sun on the transatlantic run being forced to buy aircraft which they cannot afford, do not want, and which they often have to send off only half full of cargo. We may see countless aircraft which have plenty of useful life in them being scrapped or sold off for a song. And perhaps we shall see the airlines taking the same sort of physical risks which the primitive, battling railways took.

Competition, we are often being told, is one of capitalism’s health-giving substances. In fact, just like the other features of the all-wasteful society, it is a ludicrous way of running human affairs.

Advertising for votes

Do you vote for capitalism? You do?

Well, how does it feel like to be in somebody’s sights? You should know —both the big parties are now drawing a bead on you.

You have probably seen the big spread ads. which the Tories have been taking in the papers. You have probably heard that the Labour Party is indignant about where the money comes from, and you may have reflected that this argument has lost a lot of its point since Labour started putting out its own big ads.

These are part of a very expensive 
campaign. And it is all aimed at you.

The Tory ads. are punchy, with facts and figures about the roads they will lay down, the hospitals they will put up, and so on. If only, that is, you will give them the chance. Has it struck you as strange that after twelve years of Conservative paradise there are still no new hospitals in this country and the roads are still in a mess?

The Labour ads. are perhaps rather more airy, with some distant ideals of justice and equality—and Mr. Wilson just caught in the act of almost giving the new Labour thumbs-up sign. Labour has to go easy on the facts and figures. Their own record is pretty awful and to say too emphatically that there is anything wrong with Britain today leaves them open to the countercharge of running down the old country, dammit. That wouldn’t go down with a patriotic voter like you, would it? So Labour puts in the plea that everything could be all right. If only you give them the chance.

And will you? The big parties are lashing out the thousands in an effort to persuade you to put them in charge of British capitalism. But whoever gets that job will make no difference; the black spots which capitalism makes will remain unerased.

The tragedy is that the ballyhoo, the big splash, is what so often counts.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain cannot afford expensive publicity campaigns and indeed has to bleed itself merely to run one or two candidates in an election. Yet only Socialism can give us the sane world which most people, somehow, are looking for.

Remember that, when you read the next big ad. Remember it when you vote. They’ve got you in their sights but, in a way, you are the one who pulls the trigger.

The Pope is dead

Pope John died when, just before the Profumo scandal burst, news was in short supply. Especially the juicy "human interest” sort of news on which the popular press thrives. On thin rations, the papers made the most of the drawn out death agonies. Some of the headlines were almost ghoulish.

This gave us a peep at one of the nastiest sides of capitalism—the side which works for a profit out of human suffering, even when it is the suffering of one of the great upholders of property society.

Not only reporters rushed to say nice things about John XXIII. Bertrand Russell, a professed non-believer, echoed the popular estimation of the dead Pontiff as a man of peace:

The Pope used his office and his energy to bring peace and to oppose policies which lead to war and mass murder. His encyclical is a magnificent statement of the deepest wishes and hopes of all men of decency. . . I mourn his death.

There is, indeed, some rather tenuous evidence that the dead Pope was prepared to act as some sort of a go-between in a new world carve-up by the United States and Russia. This is the sort of diplomatic dabbling which often qualifies all sorts of people for the description of "peace loving.”

But this holds good only in peacetime. We know that, just like his predecessors, the Pope would have done nothing to oppose a future war and that in such a war there could well be Catholics on both sides, killing each other.

Thus does capitalism make warriors of them all.

In any case, modern war has nothing to do with a supposed lack of men of peace among the world’s leaders. Capitalism itself causes war and the leaders always go along on the tide of destruction.

And let all peace lovers remember that capitalism has always done well out of the servile ignorance of the religious, and especially of the Church of which John XXIII was so briefly the Vicar Supreme.

Postscript on housing

Of all the people to write a postscript to the special issue of the Socialist Standard on housing last May, it had to be the Minister of Housing himself, Sir Keith Joseph.

The last few days of that month gave birth to yet another White Paper which is supposed to be going to solve the housing problem. (“. . . promises,” commented The Observer, “borne on fairly insubstantial wings.”)

The new plan is to give housing subsidies only where the government thinks they are needed. Thus is quietly killed off the old policy (which was also going to solve the problem) of giving subsidies virtually indiscriminately. How long before the latest plan is pronounced to have failed?

There will be a bit more entertainment from the government’s financial jugglers; £100 million is intended to be available to encourage the building of houses for rent. From the merry shouts of welcome which greeted this announcement, nobody would have thought that these were the very policies which, in one form or another, have failed so blatantly in the past.

And, of course, the government will be speeding up slum clearance and will build more houses. The happy day when everyone will be living in what Housing Ministers think is a decent home has had to be postponed for a bit more, what with all this planning. Actually, it has been put off for another ten years. Said Sir Keith:

This programme will within 10 years transform the country's housing position, and will bring within reach of nearly every citizen in the land either a modern or a modernised house.

Presumably the Tories are hoping to win a few votes on this programme. Perhaps they will. It would not be the first time the working class have been hopelessly deceived about one of the ways in which capitalism blights their lives.

Philosopher off the rails (1963)

Book Review from the June 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Perhaps it was inevitable that Bertrand Russell would be asked to write in the current Penguin Special series. After all, it would be churlish to deny that he is a remarkably vigorous old man with a mind more alert and youthful than many men half his age. Anyway, he is certainly an able writer.

But there our compliments must end. We are not really concerned with the attractiveness of Russell’s personality but with whether he has any grasp of the capitalist situation in relation to the hideous problem of war. For that is something on which he has spoken loud and often in the past few years. When judged from this standpoint, he scores very low marks.

Readers will, of course, be aware of his prominence in the C.N.D. and later the Committee of One Hundred, of some of the foolish things he has said and done in the name of Nuclear Disarmament. But if you want a concise handbook of pathetic political ignorance, then Unarmed Victory (Penguin Special 2s. 6d.) is a must. This tells of the author’s frantic appeals to the various statesmen involved in the Cuban and Sino-Indian crises toward the end of last year. The short note on the back cover even suggests that perhaps it was Bertrand Russell’s efforts which really saved the world then from nuclear disaster.

There is no evidence to support this at all. The Soviets certainly took a gigantic risk (maybe a calculated one) when they started supplying missiles to Cuba. They must have realised early on that the U.S. would bridle sooner or later, but having gone so far, it is ludicrous to suppose that the cries of Lord Russell made much difference. They were, after all, quite well aware of the man in the street’s horror of war—how often have they used this very point in their propaganda—and apart from anything else, war is a costly business, not to be embarked on lightly.

It was suggested at the time by such journals as The Economist that perhaps the Soviet Union had never really intended to go to war over Cuba, that Krushchev’s advisers probably warned him that Russia was just not ready to take a showdown that far. But who knows, maybe next time they may think differently. There will certainly be other crises to make our hearts jump with fright as we face again the prospect of obliteration.

If we are to get behind this problem, we must recognise first of all that the gathering of the war clouds is not just a nasty accident. We have, in fact, to acknowledge that the Cubas and the Berlins are manifestations of a bitter struggle which is waged incessantly between the various capitalist powers. It is useless to appeal to the statesmen, because such people are caught up in the tragedy and, as spokesmen for their respective ruling groups, are not there for humanitarian reasons. They are prepared to go to war if their interests so demand.

Lord Russell certainly has not grasped this. True, he recognises the existence of American capitalist interests in Cuba and the readiness of the U.S. Government to bolster up Batista in support of them. But he does not seem to understand a new group of rulers now has the island in its grip, having risen to power on the tide of seething discontent generated by the hated Batista regime. It has happened elsewhere in the world and is a familiar story. Dr. Castro promised to “take immediate steps to resolve” the problems of housing, unemployment, education, health, etc., but instead took immediate steps to turn Cuba into an armed camp. And for the Cuban workers there was a distinction without much difference—they could now die for Castro instead of Batista.

Throughout this book are dotted examples of the confused and contradictory thinking which seems to afflict those who are tarred with the CND brush. In a footnote on page 34, the author chides the Labour Party Executive for advocating mediation through the United Nations. “. . . Whereas we may consider the UNO to be the cat’s whiskers,” he says, “most inhabitants of the U.S. consider it merely a cat’s paw.” Nevertheless, it was Lord Russell who telegraphed Krushchev only two days before, urging “condemnation (of U.S. actions) to be sought through the United Nations.”

Again, it is not disputed that “nuclear weapons are instruments of total annihilation,” but it is foolish to say in the same breath that they “ are themselves an imminent threat to the peace of nations and a hostile act ” (page 25). For such a statement begs the entire question—why nuclear bombs? In fact, why armaments of any kind? Such horrors do not exist in a vacuum. They are produced by society, but a society deeply divided into owners and non-owners in the means of life. It is here that we must commence our search for the way to free mankind from the terrifying prospect which faces it. Socialists discovered long ago that armed conflict is the ultimate method used by one group of owners to advance its interests against those of another. How ludicrous then to try and deal with atom bombs in isolation.

Nowhere does the author give any real consideration to this vitally important aspect. He has no inkling of what causes war and he is not opposed to it in principle anyway. To him there are some wars which are justifiable and others not (see page 11). Well, at least he is honest about it, but is it any wonder that he gets into such a mess when writing about present trends towards another bloodbath, and only a few lines later is blaming the “strength and habit of tradition ” for the strife between governments since the end of the last world war?

Having mistaken notions about the cause of war, it is not surprising that Lord Russell should have faulty notions also about its future prevention. He wants a joint statement by America and Russia:

That nuclear war cannot achieve anything anybody would desire . . . that they have a common interest, namely survival, and that both will sacrifice this common interest if there is a war.

What touchingly childlike faith he has in the statements of capitalist politicians, despite ample evidence of history to show how worthless these are, even granting the sincerity of those who utter them. But there is more to come. Let all states agree, he pleads, to submit their disputes to the arbitration of disinterested parties (whatever that may mean). He feels that arbitrating bodies “would acquire such moral authority that it would be very difficult for any government to flout the decisions of the arbitrators.”

Yet in the very next paragraph, he forgets this idea and advocates instead that prime fallacy of recent years, World Government. This will not rely on moral authority, because Lord Russell says it will have armed forces “. . . capable of defeating any state or combination of states that might attempt to resist its authority.” It will have to have a monopoly of all the major weapons of war and possess the raw materials necessary for weapons of mass destruction— presumably including those of nuclear origin.

Here is the final absurdity in one hundred and twenty pages, that strife can be abolished by indulging in it. For this is what the proposal really means, ignoring for the moment all the other objections which deny World Government even the remotest chance of ever being established. The strength of such an organisation, on Lord Russell’s own admission, would depend very much on its ability to wage war, the very evil we all seek to end.

As we have already said, Bertrand Russell is an able writer, but the whole of this book is a transparent illustration of his pitiful ignorance on how to solve perhaps the most terrible problem of our time.

Eddie Critchfield

Mitres and Miracles (1948)

From the February 1948 issue of the Socialist Standard

On October 15th, 1947, at the Convocation of Bishops, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Lang, mildly rebuked the Bishop of Birmingham, Dr. Barnes, for the views he expressed on miracles in his book “The Rise of Christianity.” The Sunday Pictorial published extracts from the book, and at the end of the series the archbishop appointed Dr. Blunt, Bishop of Bradford, to reply. Both bishops confined themselves to the authenticity of the gospels and the miracles.

This side of the religious question is of little interest to the Socialist, who ignores them for the same reason that he ignores so-called Lourdes cures and Mons angels. They are contrary to nature, and he cannot know all the circumstances of the happening and the telling. In particular the telling.

Nevertheless, miracles are of vital importance to the ecclesiastic. Dr. Lang admitted as much in his first protest.

While Dr. Garbett said “Acceptance of modern and scientific theories with regard to religion would leave the church only with the memory of a ‘good and courageous man,' who failed in his mission and whose body remained within the tomb.” Other bishops joined in the general condemnation, and Dr. Barnes was left in a minority of one. Needless to say they were all concerned, with or without miracles, in making religion acceptable to the credulous.

In spite of his objections to the literal acceptance of miracles, Dr. Barnes still believes in the greatest of all miracles: the creation of the world, universe or cosmos by a personal god. His explanation of the manner in which miracles came to be believed is probably true. But in retaining the creation miracle and a spiritual domain he gave away his case to Dr. Blunt. He says: “In the discussion of alleged miracles, much nonsense would be avoided by the ardent controversialists if they remembered the first rule of experimental religious psychology: spiritual truths must be spiritually discerned.” Which in plain English is a confession that religion is just a world of make-believe.

After Dr. Barnes’ concessions to spiritual power, miracles, like casting out devils, or turning water into wine, are only small fry, comparable with the spiritualist manifestations of today. And a god who could create the cosmos would take them in his stride. But Dr. Blunt said this in a round-about way. He says that man can modify the rigid working out of cause and effect, and then asks if God cannot do as much? He quotes Dr. Barnes’ statement, “That spiritual qualities do not use material media,” and then declares "This statement is falsified every time that a boy kisses his girl, or a friend grasps a friend’s hand.” 

Kissing a girl and shaking a friend’s hand, according to Dr. Blunt, are spiritual impulses causing physical effects. They are actually physical attractions evoking emotional responses; something not confined to man, but common to the whole biological world. Dr. Barnes’ second point: “Spiritual causes do not produce material effects,” is, he says, "falsified whenever a cricketer catches a falling ball, and so interferes with the law of gravity.” But the law of gravity persists whether the ball rests on the player’s hand, his head, or the ground. The player himself stays on the ground in accordance with the law; and when he catches the ball its weight is added to his own, and player and ball remain under the earth’s power of attraction. Even in its flight the ball was subject to that power. Had the ball rendered the player unconscious by falling on his head, it would have been just as true to say that the law of gravity had interfered with the life force.

Next, Dr. Blunt appealed to science, in the person of Sir Oliver Lodge, who for some years had been engrossed with psychical research under the guidance of spiritualist mediums. He is introduced with a flourish: “So it was that so eminent a scientist as Sir Oliver Lodge, lecturing to a body of clergy warned them ’not to give up the idea of miracle, just when science is preparing to concede it ’.”

On the strength of this, Dr. Blunt makes a more general statement, for which he supplies no evidence: “For fifty years science has been more and more conceding the limited scope of merely physical causation, and has been more and more admitting the power of spiritual forces in the processes of the Universe. Indeed the scientific question nowadays is not whether matter is absolute, but whether there is such a thing as ‘matter’ at all.”

When scientists popularise their ideas, especially among the clergy, they should explain what they mean by matter. As it is stated above it may mean any one of three things: an essential matter underlying all phenomena—the philosophers’ bugbear; matter in the form of atoms in motion; or just matter.

Matter and force are merely two names for one and the same thing. And this, in spite of the claim by a scientist, that a recent experiment could only be explained on the assumption that a minute quantity of matter had been converted into energy and lost. Which, in the telling, proves nothing except that it is just as easy to lose things in a laboratory as anywhere else.

The older materialistic theory was that matter in the shape of atoms in motion was responsible for everything in nature. It held the field until some hundred years ago. Its adherents were unsatisfied, they wanted to know of what did the atom consist, if force or energy was only motion of the atoms. A question that has intrigued philosophers and even scientists, and still confuses the ecclesiastical mind; as instanced by all the bishops in this controversy who insist on the influence of mind over matter. So this alleged disappearance of matter from the scene is of no help to either side in the controversy.

Throughout the middle ages philosophers thought of matter as the substance of the universe: the reality behind its manifold appearances. But neither the modern philosopher, nor the scientist has yet discovered this supposed reality, because however deeply they penetrate they still find only phenomena.

The atom idea was put forward in Ancient Greece. It served as the basis for theories and experiments throughout the middle ages. And eventually all modern chemistry was based on it. Yet the modern scientist found that its hardness was not due to solidity. That it was in fact made up of electrons, which he described as mere points of force moving at incredible speeds. He tried to separate these points of force with a process called "splitting the atom.” The measure of success achieved was plainly revealed to the world at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

What a tribute to the wages system ! It drags the best efforts out of men in the service of the ruling-class. The scientist will give of his utmost to get into the four-figure wage class. All his discoveries add wealth and power to the ruling-class on the one hand, and on the other, greater insecurity and more highly concentrated labour for the rest of his class. The clergy, too, are wage workers. Badly paid in the lower ranks, but always striving for one of the high-up jobs; where they can juggle with spiritual metaphysics like “experimental religious psychology ”; and get big money by means of dignified eulogies on the sacred rights of private property, the essence of capitalist ethics, and a vital necessity for himself and the class he serves.

In spite of all the recent discoveries on the nature and structure of the atom, industrial scientists carry on with their table of elements, with its relative atomic weights, and it still works. They are continually discovering laws of substance of which man can take advantage in the struggle for existence. Most scientists, however, turn away from investigations into the nature of existence. It doesn’t pay. While labour-saving processes and atom bombs do.

The tendency on the part of the clergy to merge what they call the spiritual into human thought and mental work is the result of their inability to show, even the probability of a separate spiritual existence, so they are driven back on the mind, and some day they will discover that the mind is merely the function of a physical organ. An instance of this tendency occurred during a broadcast debate on “Belief and Unbelief,” when a prominent churchman made the absurd contention that it was an "example of the influence of mind over matter whenever he took off his hat.” Quite forgetting, in his innocence, that it was material nature, in the shape of rain, cold, etc., that made him wear a hat at all; while over-exertion on a warm day would necessitate its removal to mop his perspiring brow.

Before the clergy talk of mind influencing matter, they must first establish it as a fact that mind is something different from matter, and secondly, that it is independent of matter. It needs no scientist to tell us that there is nothing in nature that is anything in and by itself. Everything within our knowledge is a combination of many things, each of them parts of the universe, and all interdependent, related, and subject to incessant change by that relationship. In that respect the mind is no different from anything else.

Some light on this subject of "mind versus matter” was reported in the Daily Worker (8/4/47). Bertrand Russell had said "that modern physics make materialism very unplausible.” In reply to him J. B. S. Haldane said: "To my mind modern physics makes materialism far more probable than it seemed a generation ago. If the smallest bits of matter are not mere inert particles, but buzzing with activity, it is much easier to suppose that life and mind could arise from what we call dead matter. Materialists think that the gap between non-living matter and human beings is not absolute, and has in fact been bridged by evolution.”

There are, of course, no gaps in evolution; only in our knowledge of it. But the closing of the gap in our knowledge of evolution has broken down one of the main defences of the Church: the mystery of the ego, or soul, has been solved by the discovery that this is nothing but the primary sense of feeling; a quality possessed by the lowest and simplest organisms. In man this primary sense is reinforced by the development of the other four senses, as a result of the hereditary genes, and emerges as a persistent awareness of self early in life.

Mind is merely a function of the brain, just as digestion is a function of the stomach. A condition appertaining to certain dispositions of a special kind of matter evolved in the universal processes of infinite change and, therefore, like everything else, short of the universe itself, limited in its duration. Moreover, it has been scientifically established that man, during his embryonic stage, passes through all forms that have characterised his own evolution from nature’s "culture” upwards.

If spiritual merely means love, friendship or the higher feelings between men in social life, the clergy have indeed abandoned all their defences. Doctors Lang and Blunt are the diehards of a fantastic belief that a spiritual god of infinite power, who created an infinite universe and a class-divided human society, expects men to stifle the greed, hatred and conflict that such a system breeds, in order that they may inherit a state of eternal spiritual bliss. Many people, besides socialists, have already jettisoned these absurd notions. The clergy, under the pressure of scientific knowledge, the indifference of the vast majority, and a growing sense of their weakness, are being steadily forced to abandon these superstitions. They may be well-intentioned, they certainly preach charitableness and brotherly love; but the evil results that flow naturally from the conflict of interests in a class-ridden social system overwhelm their ever weakening efforts.

Brotherly feelings are only possible among those who, having discarded all forms of superstition, realise and affirm that the means of life are the common inheritance of the human race as a whole. Real comradeship is only possible with those who organise consciously to abolish this class-dominated system of capitalism, and to establish a system in which the wellbeing of the people as a whole, is the chief concern of the whole of the people.

F. Foan

Letter: The Committee of 100 and Politics (1967)

Letter to the Editors from the December 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have received a letter from Mr. L. Otter, of Witney, listing and enclosing various anti-Labour and anti-political leaflets handed out by the Oxon Committee of 100 during the 1964 and 1966 elections. He makes the following criticism of the article “Is Politics Corrupt?” in the July Socialist Standard:

“Your attack on the Committee of 100 implies that the Committee were in 64 and 66 campaigning for one of “Conservative, Labour, Liberal or Communist”. The 100 did not exist in the 59 election so we must start with 64. As you reviewed at the time of the 59 election the Voters’ Veto leaflet, and as you are aware that the groups that came together on this were later active in building the Committee, you would hardly have had a case even if you were going back before the formation of the Committee.

“The black on red sticker—”Conservative . .. they are all alike, Vote for humanity” was in fact printed for the 1964 election by the National Committee. Various local committees had their own stickers and posters as well as publishing their own leaflets.

“It is true that some people left the Committee in 1964 disagreeing with its quasi-anarchist position, the majority of these however were not Labour Party supporters but supporters of INDEC (which became the Radical Alliance).

“Since you have not the honesty or the intelligence to know that this position of the Committee’s dates back to the 1964 election it is hardly surprising that you also do not know that both before and after the 1964 election the Committee published leaflets giving social analysis.

“The Harlow CND-Committee of 100 which publishes its own paper Candis, whose editors were in 62 flirting with Anarchism, became so struck by the fact that Stan Newens (Labour MP for Epping since 1964), an ex-trotskyist, became their candidate that though they did not themselves adopt entrism, they did take the same position that the ILP rightwing and the Socialist Leader took at that stage. But the committee as such was very firm on the matter, insisting that all committees should oppose the major parties of the “left” since all supported one or other of the nuclear powers and the social system that makes powers become nuclear.

“This meant that it was regarded as consistent with the Committee position, to support independent unilateralist candidates or to take an uncompromisingly anarchist position. The committee journal contained at least one letter advocating ND support for your own party. It is notable that not merely did the few remaining Labour Party and Communist Party members who had for a time supported the Committee drop out in 1964, but also the Trots, the ILP right-wingers, groups such as Candis and

“In 66 there was no debate in any committee circles, as far as I know, on the matter.”

We thank Mr. Otter for pointing out that the Committee of 100 did not support Labour, Tory, Liberal or so-called Communist in the last two elections. We admit we may perhaps have been a little vague and thus may have caused some misunderstanding. But we did not in fact say that the Committee supported Labour in 1964; nor did we mean to. What we said was that “the Nuclear Disarmers were among the supporters which the Labour Party had when it took office for the first time in some thirteen years” and then went on to quote from a leaflet issued, we assume, by Edgware Peace Action Group, advertising the 1967 Aldermaston March. Our point was this: In 1964 many nuclear disarmers backed Labour and were now becoming disillusioned and rejecting political action altogether. This, we argued, was a mistake. It was not political action as such that was wrong but reformist political action. 

Mr. Otter does not deny that the attitude of the Committee to politics has changed in recent years. He even describes the process in some detail. But, let us go back to the beginning. The Committee came into being in early 1961 as a breakaway from CND over tactics. It backed civil disobedience to get the same aim of unilateral nuclear disarmament by the British government. It was made up of much the same people as CND, viz, pacifists, Christians, supporters of Russia, Labourites, anarchists. The man who was President of the national committee for its first two years. Earl Russell, was throughout this period a member of the Labour Party (he did not tear up his card until October 1965). There was also a curious, and revealing, incident in January 1962. The Spectator of 5 January published part of an abusive letter from the secretary of the Scottish Committee. Bernard Levin took the writer to be a supporter of the Russian government and challenged the national committee on it. Next week two replies were published. One from the Acting Secretary, Tony Southall (now secretary of Glasgow Woodside Labour Party), said:

“The Committee of 100 has never attempted to disguise the fact that our movement contains people of widely differing political persuasion. We have stood for mass non-violent civil disobedience against nuclear weapons. Beyond a belief that this is a viable and necessary programme of action for the people of this country we have never demanded any political qualifications of our members.”

The other, from Nicolas Walter, said:

“The central Committee has no official policy beyond unilateral nuclear disarmament.

No doubt there are Communists who belong to or support the Committee of 100.

The Committee exists solely to organise its demonstrations.”

So, at that time, the Committee was an amorphous body, a kind of ad hoc committee for organising civil disobedience against nuclear weapons (by Britain). Beyond this it had no policy. It was not opposed as such to the Labour, or even the so-called Communist, or any other party. How could it be if it allowed its members to belong to these parties also? But times change. Now, the Committee has a much wider programme, including such reform measures as:

“USE the taxpayers money to build more houses, schools, hospitals and colleges. (One Polaris submarine costs £70m—enough to build and service two new towns).

LAUNCH a ‘crash’ programme for the training of teachers.

CUT rates by reducing the interest rate on loans to Local Authorities to what it was in 1946—1½ per cent.”

(“Our Candidate—Humanity”, 1966 election manifesto).

Editorial Committee.

Peaceful Co-Existence (1954)

From the October 1954 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our plans in Asia?” said Lenin on 18th February. 1920, to a correspondent of the New York Evening Journal, “Our plans in Asia? The same as in Europe: peaceful co-existence . . .” Thirty-four years later, after a hot war which entailed the refrigeration of the plans the Soviet leaders echo their predecessors words. On the face of it they should succeed this time, for they have powerful and influential echoes in Eisenhower and Churchill.

Churchill, speaking in the Commons about his recent visit to North America, said in reference to peaceful coexistence: “This far-reaching conception certainly had its part in some of our conversations at Washington. I was glad when I read after we had left that President Eisenhower had said that the hope of the world lies in peaceful co-existence." (Daily Telegraph, 13/7/54.) Earlier, on 29/6/54, Churchill and Eisenhower, in a signed declaration known to some as the Potomac Charter, had stated that they would "together and individually, continue to hold out the hand of friendship to any and all nations, which by solemn pledge and confirming deeds, show themselves desirous of participating in a just and fair peace.” 

It would seem that the Big Three share a basic desire, peaceful co-existence, and the time has come for detailed discussion and co-operative action. But what is the substance of their “co-existence”; what are the confirming deeds that distinguish the nations desirous of a just and fair peace; what is this peace, just and fair?

These are legitimate questions. Churchill, talking in the Commons about the Potomac Charter referred to the “necessarily general and sometimes vague character” of its declarations. “The expression of broad and simple principles likely to command assent and not excite the dissent of vast communities must necessarily be in guarded terms.” (Daily Telegraph, 13/7/54.) Those are words typical of statesmen,.men who know the world, who know “it would not be in the public interest” if a “detailed statement” about discussions and decisions affecting millions of people was made to those millions. All the more important is it then that we examine their broad and simple principles.

In the so-called Western world the idea has been fostered that there are now two kinds of human society in being, the Freedom-loving peoples and Communism. In the Russian “sphere” the same idea has been built up. but the terms are different: “Socialism or the lasting-peace-loving peoples on the one hand, and Capitalist Imperialism on the other.

The idea is fallacious. The mass of people on both sides desire peace and freedom from the tribulations which they suffer jointly and in common. Far from either side exhibiting the symptoms of Socialist or Communist society, both practise capitalism. In principle, they have the same way of life, the same ideology. Their politicians and generals speak the same language, even to the very phrase.

The signatories to the Potomac Charter “ believe that the cause of world peace would be advanced by... drastic reduction . . .  of world armaments . . .” They have resolved to “maintain the . . . military strength necessary to pursue [their] purposes effectively . . . In pursuit of this . . . we will seek every means of promoting the fuller and freer interchange among us of goods and services which will benefit all participants.” (Daily Telegraph, 30/6/54.) Can you not hear Malenkov repeating Stalin's 1939 words: “We stand for peace and the strengthening of business relations with all countries . . . as long as they make no attempt to trespass on the interests of our country.”

Bertrand Russell, whom we are told is a great thinker rather than a great statesman, has also given us his views on peace, in an article entitled “The Most Hopeful Road to Peace” (Picture Post, 24/7/54). Although he also relies on hope, as befits a thinker he goes further than Churchill, Malenkov and Co., and makes some proposals. As he sees it, there will have to be three stages to the establishment of a lasting peace. First, there must be a diminution of mutual suspicion; brought about by “eminent Indians . . . drawing up a carefully reasoned report as to the probable consequences of a World War with modern weapons”; if various governments would then signify their “acquiescence in the proposition that no Great Power can hope to achieve any of its purposes by World War” then “various governments might become persuaded that they have no reason to fear a sudden unprovoked attack.” (Our italics.)

Although there is much here to comment on, note how, in the modern fashion, he proposes that governments, all eminent men, are to be influenced by other eminent men. He ignores you and me. Quite right, too; after all we know the actual results of world war with modern weapons.

When tension has been reduced, Russell then wants conversations with a view to finding some compromise about a definite delimitation of spheres neither repugnant nor unfavourable to either side; meaning, peaceful coexistence. But as he says, “At present, each side is willing to take—but not . . . to give.”

The Russell plan concludes with a treaty, of course; and a World Authority, possessing a monopoly of all “the more important weapons of war" which would be concerned “only with what is necessary for the preservation of peace. It should not interfere with the internal affairs of nations.” With peaceful coexistence so established only “small and brief” wars will be possible and “Men (presumably including wage-earners) will enter upon a period of happiness. . . .”

If governments were to attempt to clarify their “ broad and simple principles” on peaceful co-existence they would have to follow a Russell-like plan.

The present major division in the world is a result, not of different beliefs, but of the second world war, which left Russia and America as the two biggest competitors in a world of competitors; each and all determined to hold and expand what it has. That is the background to disarmament, re-armament, and just plain armament. But the manufacture of arms is a costly, and on the whole unprofitable, business; except in wartime no government dare export such commodities on any significant scale. Further, it may be, since they have the facts, that even the rulers are a little disturbed about the hydrogen bomb; and it can be said of all governments that they do not want war, but the fruits of war.

There are good reasons then for an international search for what they call a formula and “peaceful co-existence ” is a good starting-point. The slogan embraces the dream of a world of buying and selling, of politics and' power, of competition and spheres of influence, without war and not too many armaments. It envisages the retention of capital exploiting wage-labour, of poverty and welfare, of governments and governed, of nations and signed declarations of friendship. Hence co-existence.

And if things once again go wrong, if the dream turns into a nightmare, well, as Lenin said in 1920, the obstacles to agreement are on the other side.

“Peaceful co-existence” panders to the ignorant and unthinking, but the expression by professional great men of the hopes of millions of small men will not solve problems; will not bring about a state of affairs wherein war is not merely impossible but unthought of; will not bring about conditions, to quote the Potomac Charter, “in which the prodigious nuclear forces now in human hands can be used to enrich and not to destroy mankind ”; will not bring about a community where, not Russian and American soldiers co-exist and occasionally work together to meet nature’s floods, but where men and women of all languages and colours dwell in practical cooperative harmony, every day.

Action, not hope, is required. The action of the wage-earners, the world's small men.

D. S. C.

Do It Yourself: How to make your own Atomic Bomb (1955)

From the November 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

To-day almost everyone does it himself. A large trade has grown up in kits of parts which you buy in a carton and stick together. Tables and chairs, of course, wireless and television sets, garages and garden-sheds, clothing and rugs, electric fittings and all-night-burning stoves; we all buy the bits and “do it ourselves." “Save pounds” says the advertisement. Even the Book of Instructions issued by one group in this line is published in separate parts. After studying the section on “Bookbinding" you buy the materials and "bind it yourself."

It is not unusual on Friday evenings to see a "City gent" (i.e. office-worker) staggering to the terminus, bowler hat and umbrella in one hand, so that the other may cope successfully with a bundle of wall paper.

This idea permits of some extension. No firm has yet put out kits of parts to build your own car or even bicycle, though "knock-downs” (cars in bits in boxes) have been exported for years.

It will probably come. So far nobody has issued instructions on how to make an Atomic Bomb which, though of moderate proportions suitable for the "little man" is still quite effective. Yet as our diagram shows the actual construction is fairly simple. The "secret" of the whole business is apparently in the "critical weight" of the two separate pieces of uranium. According to our information about 3lbs. of refined uranium should be sufficient. It should be clearly understood that we are not supplying kits of parts, neither can we give addresses of firms supplying materials. Nor can we accept responsibility for accidents. Our information is culled from "Achievements of Modern Science,” by A. D. Merriman, Gregg Publishing Co., 1949.

We would emphasise that although the atom bomb is the trigger for the modern hydrogen bomb, the latter is quite beyond the capacity of the ordinary home constructor, however enthusiastic.

According to the statement published by Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, and other scientists, while the atom bomb "only" obliterated Hiroshima “no one knows how widely such radio-active particles might be diffused, but the best authorities are unanimous in saying that a war with H-bombs might quite possibly put an end to the human race ” (Evening Standard, July 9, 1955).

Therefore we do not see that any objection can be raised to a small weapon of the type we have mentioned. Those numerous “Pacifists" who are not against wars fought with old-fashioned weapons but only against large atomic missiles; all the supporters of the Russian disarmament schemes which propound the limitation of only those arms in which Russia is deficient; cannot logically object to a small home-constructor's effort, which, compared to the tests now opening craters in the sea-bed, is only kid-stuff.

Neither can we see how people who support “Peacetime" Capitalism with its fantastic road casualties alone, which regularly exceeds one million a year in one country, the U.S.A., can really care whether people make their own bombs or not. These could never compete with the most lethal weapon of modern times, the motor-car in the hands of a harassed and worried driver.

In the first flush of the Socialist Movement the idea of the “Citizens Militia" was popular. It was a hang over from the days of the National Guard in France when workers could buy cannon and maintain them at their own expense. The scheme was that each citizen kept his own weapon in readiness at home. Perhaps the next Labour Government could revert to this; instructing each “Z” class man to report with his birth certificate and home-made atomic bomb all ready, thus making considerable economies in Defence Expenditure. We make no charge for this suggestion. The Labour Party badly needs some.

Finally may we urge those desirous of undertaking private research in nuclear physics in the garden shed (after all, the Curies discovered radium in a derelict shed) to see that their personal papers are in order. Bequests donating money or property to the Socialist Party of Great Britain should be drawn up by a qualified solicitor, who will also supply the necessary Government stamp.

On the other hand, perhaps it might be better to send a smaller donation, and remain alive to advocate Socialism. Work of that sort will eventually produce a Socialist Society where atoms will be controlled by intelligence.

Horatio.

Labour Party Politics: A Confused Jumble. (1907)

From the June 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. J. Ramsay MacDonald, M.P., Chairman of the Independent Labour Party, Secretary of the Labour Party in the House of Commons, writer on capitalist politics in capitalist newspapers, has, according to the Morning Post of May 8th, written to the Leicester branch of the Church Socialist League as follows :—

 “I give my episcopal blessing with much pleasure. The Church Socialist League ought to flourish, for upon what more congenial soil can Socialism grow than the ethics of the Gospel and the maxims of the Fathers? Moreover, I think, when we know each other better, it will be found that the materialism which the Church is always saying that she is warring against is precisely the thing that we Socialists are warring against. The dross of life is oppressing us. It is in our eyes and we see not ; it is in our mouths, and we cannot speak the truth ; it is in our hearts, and we cannot worship what it is meet that we should worship. We are striving for all sorts of rights—the right to hold acres and to enjoy incomes which we have never earned ; the right to have drink on Sunday; the right to be fleeced by bookmakers; the right to starve our children ; and we do not seem to have the faculty to discriminate which of these are of God and which of the Devil. So our politics are a confused jumble of futilities at their worst and an ineffective striving after vague desires at their best. We have to discover the qualitative things of life, and it is because your Church Socialist League is going to strive to do that that I readily respond to your request to bless you.”

This letter is such a “confused jumble” that one has a difficulty in understanding it, but we will try. “We Socialists” of course refers to Mr. MacDonald and his fellow members and supporters of the Labour Party, Independent or otherwise. These cannot speak the truth because the dross of life is in their mouths and is oppressing them. It was not known before that this was the reason, but a note can now be made of their excuse. It is hoped they will succeed in their attempt to secure the right to drink on Sunday. To do so is very refreshing especially after an hour or so’s open-air speaking. When they have secured this right may they be oppressed by sufficient of the dross of life to exercise it—to afford a decent drink and plenty of it. It may interest them to know that a prominent Liberal Statesman, now deceased, is credited with having declared that “bitter beer is the finest drink that has been invented since the nectar of the gods went out of fashion.” Be that as it may, they are of course at liberty to select their own “pizen” from the various kinds on tap.

Undoubtedly their politics are a confused jumble at their worst, and one may go farther and declare that they are usually at their worst.

They may think this is due to the seeming absence of the faculty to discriminate which of these rights are of God and which of the Devil, others think it is due, in some cases, to their ignorance of the working-class position, and in other cases to their desire for political aggrandisement.

In the columns of the Socialist Standard, month by month, have been given evidence of this confused jumble. The writers have not got the dross of life in their eyes and can see.

The Independent Labour Party, of which Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, M.P., is chairman, claim to be the proud parent of the (Parliamentary) Labour Party, of which Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, M.P., is Secretary. The electoral policy of the two parties is, on paper, identical. It is also identical in practice, but whilst on paper it is understandable, in practice it is a “confused jumble.” The paper policy is summed up in the following clause of the Declaration of the Labour Party : “To abstain strictly from identifying themselves with or promoting the interests of any section of the Liberal or Conservative Parties.”

Although subscribing to this policy several members of the Labour Party threw it over at the General Election, when they saw that by adhering to it they would fail to secure election. Amongst them were Mr. Ramsay MacDonald at Leicester, Mr. Parker at Halifax, Mr. T. F. Richards at Wolverhampton, and Mr. Stuart at York. Details of the compacts made with the Liberals will be found in the Socialist Standard for March and July, 1906.

Mr. W. Crooks, M.P., has signed the Declaration, but that did not prevent him attending the Banquet to Mr. S. L. Hughes at the Trocadero Restaurant on April 7th, 1906, organised by “some of the best known names in Liberal politics” because “the great Radical victory which had just been won was due to men like Mr. Hughes.”

Mr. W. Thorne, M.P., has signed the Declaration but yet supported Mr. Percy Alden, Liberal member for Tottenham, at the General Election in company with Messrs. Will Crooks, John Burns, H. H. Asquith, Herbert Gladstone, and others.

Messrs. C. W. Bowerman, M.P. and John Hodge, M.P., have signed the Declaration, but identified themselves with the Liberals (masquerading as Progressives) at the last London County Council Election. Mr. Bowerman was advertised to speak at Risiughill Street Schools, Pentonville, and Mr. Hodge was announced to take the chair at Maryon Park Schools, Charlton.

On April 21st last, Mr. A. Henderson, Whip of the Labour Party, was one of the chief speakers at Ilford Town Hall, at a “Temperance” meeting. Every student knows that this “Temperance” brigade is a wing of the Liberal Party. Mr. Henderson declared that they did not intend that the Government should put off “Temperance” reform in favour of Land Reform, or Home Rule or anything else. They must tell the Government straight that “Temperance” must be first.

When the Stepney Bye Election took place last month Mr. Ben Cooper was adopted as the official Liberal Candidate. He declared the issue was simply Free Trade versus Tariff Reform. According to the Daily Chronicle Mr. Bowerman was one of the first to write and offer his services in support of the Liberal nominee. The Parliamentary Committee of the Trade Union Congress endorsed his candidature. Messrs. Shackleton, Gill, Barnes, Bowerman, Wilkie and Thorne, all Labour M.P.’s who have signed the Declaration of the Labour Party are members of the Parliamentary Committee.

Mrs. Philip Snowden was a delegate to the Annual Conference of the Independent Labour Party at Derby this year. During the Wimbledon bye-election last month she was one of the hardest workers for the Liberal candidate, the Hon. Bertrand Russell, who “supported tie Liberal Government in everything excepting its attitude on the question of Women’s Suffrage.”

In view of these facts there can be no question that the politics of Mr. Ramsay MacDonald and his Labour Party friends are a “confused jumble of futilities.” Mr. MacDonald’s phrase “touches the spot.”

Jack Kent