SPGB Meetings (1984)

Party News from the December 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

The November 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard carried details of the audio recording of one of the meetings which was part of the advertised Working For Socialism educational weekend. [See above.]

As an aside, the listing above also gives details of the SPGB's Bristol Group's meeting in December 1984 on the subject of Anarchism, where the speaker listed was Guildford Branch's Brian Rubin. On the SPGB's website, there is an audio recording of another meeting from the same year which was organised by Islington Branch, where the speaker was again Brian Rubin, and the topic under discussion was Anarchism. This meeting dates from earlier in the year. There is a strong chance there is an overlap in content in both meetings. Anyway, it's a cheap excuse to provide a link to the audio recording of the Islington Branch meeting from June of that year.

SPGB Meetings (1984)

Party News from the November 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

The March 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard carried a report of the SPGB's debate with Tom Sackville, the Conservative MP for Bolton West. The SPGB speaker in that debate, Howard Moss, revisited that debate in his Life and Times column in the November 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard.

SPGB Meetings (1984)

Party News from the November 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

A recording of one of the meetings from the Islington Branch Weekend Educational Conference on Working For Socialism is available in the audio section of the SPGB website. Click on the following link for more information:

How to organise a branch 

Islington Branch meeting

Date: 9th December 1984

Speaker: Clifford Slapper

SPGB Meetings (1984)

Party News from the August 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

A recording of the SPGB's Birmingham Branch's meeting on 'Terrorism' (speaker: Christine Moss) is available at the following link.

SPGB Meetings and Lectures (1984)

Party News from the March 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

SPGB Meetings (1985)

 Party News from the May 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Audio recordings of some of the meetings listed:

SPGB Islington Branch

ABOLISH THE WAGES SYSTEM

Panel: Alf Atkinson, Brian Rubin & Clifford Slapper

Venue: Duke of York, Kings Cross, Islington

Date: 6th May 1985

SPGB Guildford Branch

AFTER THE MINERS STRIKE – WHICH WAY FORWARD FOR SOCIALISTS?

Debate between Colin Tipton, (Socialist Workers Party), and Steve Coleman (SPGB)

Venue: The Star, Quarry Street, Guildford

Date: 10th May 1985

Ultra Right (1985)

From the October 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Earlier this year, a Bengali family in need of re-housing went to look at a council house on the Lincoln Estate in Tower Hamlets. They were greeted by a pair of pig's trotters hanging over the door, inscribed with the initials NF. This type of racially motivated incident. like excrement shoved through the letter box, stone-throwing and verbal abuse, constitutes "low grade" harassment. The more serious incidents involve arson attacks and physical assaults. Over the past few months there has been a wave of arson attacks in Ilford, Leyton and Bow. resulting in the death of a young Asian mother and her three small children. Tower Hamlets in East London is one of the worst affected areas with local police figures showing that the number of "reported" racial incidents has increased from 230 in 1983, to 370 in 1984. What is going on?

One of the most popular explanations for the rising number of racial attacks is that they are being organised by the Ultra Right. David Shannon, writing in the Guardian (30 July 1985) comments:

Racist attacks continue to be the most vicious expression of right wing violence and arson is a favourite weapon.

The Commission for Racial Equality believe that the most sustained and organised racial attacks in recent history are being carried out against Asian families in the East End of London. Similarly, CAPA, the Tower Hamlets police monitoring group, argues that there has been a qualitative change for the worse in these attacks and that they may have been organised by fascist groups. Who are the Ultra Right and what are their tactics?

There are about thirty Ultra Right groups operating in Britain today, ranging from the obscure Hounslow SS. to the more familiar and rapidly declining National Front. Many of the larger groups have their origins in the time when Commonwealth immigration became an important political issue. The NF was formed in 1967 out of a coalition of tiny parties, with the aim of unifying the Ultra Right and presenting a respectable image to the electorate. On the surface, the appeal of the NF was simple as its slogan. "If they are black, send them back". In other words, the NF was the organised expression of anti-black prejudice in Britain. Martin Walker, in his book The National Front (1977) put it:

Today, as when it began, the NF's issue is race. The NF's role has been to act as a particularly effective and unprincipled pressure group in the development of British immigration policies.

This view was criticised for ignoring the way in which the NF grew, both organisationally and ideologically, out of the unambiguously fascist parties of the past. This was put right in the Guardian of 11 October 1983, when Walker wrote:

. . . the NF was designed from the beginning to use racism against the blacks as a kind of Trojan horse that carried neo-Nazi and anti- semitic doctrines secreted in its belly.

The NF was relatively successful in adopting an electoral strategy to obtain support for its ideas, winning the greatest electoral support that any Ultra Right wing party has ever achieved in Britain. The ninety NF candidates who stood in the October 1974 General Election polled 114,000 votes. In the County Sections of 1977, the NF polled 200,000 and membership stood at 20,000. High levels of unemployment, the entry of Ugandan and Malawian Asians and the skillful manipulation of publicity produced a favourable climate for the NF's obnoxious ideas. In the 1979 General Election they confidently entered 303 candidates. What followed was an electoral disaster in which all the NF candidates lost their deposits and the party's vote fell in every constituency where they had stood in 1974.

This failure was partly explained by the success of the Conservative Party in capturing the race issue with a new hard-line policy on immigration. In January 1978, Margaret Thatcher had appeared on World in Action explaining that people were really afraid that Britain "might be rather swamped by people with a different culture". Also, the media coverage of the NF has succeeded in exposing the leadership's Nazi past and identifying the party with thugs and hooliganism. The electoral defeat of 1979 led to splits within the NF and a change of political strategy. There were two main options open to the NF. Firstly, it could try to change its image and become more "respectable" to the electorate. This was the option chosen by the National Front Constitutional Movement and the British Democratic Party. Secondly, it could accept the difficulties of trying to appear respectable in order to win votes, and become more militant and confrontational in its activity. From a NF members' newsletter. Our Plans for the 1980s, we learn:

If it is true that the National Front has no hope of gaining power under conditions that are stable, economically, socially and politically, we should not be preoccupied with making ourselves more "respectable" under present conditions. We must appreciate that the "image" that we have been given by the media and which may well lose us some potential support today, will be a positive asset when the streets are beset by riots, when unemployment soars, and when inflation gets even beyond the present degree of minimal control.

This was the option chosen by both the National Front and the New National Front. The former, led by Martin Webster, wanted to pursue a more populist strategy of mass recruitment which would include skinhead gangs. The latter, led by John Tyndall and now called the British National Party, wanted to be more selective and elitist in its approach to recruitment. Webster has subsequently been expelled from the NF and has recently founded yet another organisation. Our Nation, which is partly financed by the French perfume heiress Françoise Dior, who was imprisoned in 1968 for conspiring to bum down synagogues. Webster has ditched the skinheads and is now trying to recruit university students. Today, the NF is controlled by Ian Anderson, Joe Pearce and Nick Griffin. Membership is young and inexperienced and down to around 3,000. In an effort to make inroads into the white working class the NF is attempting to put the “socialism" back into "National Socialism". The National Front News and the journal Nationalism Today, talk of "wage slaves” and the "propertyless workforce '. "Tories', we are told, "put profit before people". while the NF is determined to make sure that "production is geared to need, as opposed to profit".

A number of other popular issues have also been taken up. including ecology, ritual slaughter, nuclear power, and the "national heritage". Of course the NF is still dedicated to what it calls "British Racial Nationalism" and we call racism. In the recently published Statement of Policy, (April 1985) they state:

   The National Front is committed to the ending of all non-White immigration and to the phased and financially assisted repatriation of all non-Whites, together with their dependents and descendants . . .
   We propose a truly positive policy of putting Britons first in jobs, housing, education and welfare and of providing separate facilities for Afro-Asians while they await repatriation.

The demise of the NF as an electoral force and its fragmentation into competing groups does not mean that the Ultra Right is a spent political force. In Paul Wilkinson"s book. The New Fascists (1981) he argues:

. . .  electoral showing is by no means the only significant indication of contemporary fascist activity. In Britain much of this has been channelled into street corner violence and racial attacks by skinhead gangs often incited by neo-Nazi supporters of the British Movement

The British Movement was one of the groups which temporarily benefited from the collapse of the NF. It was formed in 1968 by Colin Jordan, as a revolutionary Nazi party to replace the National Socialist Movement of 1962. In 1975 Michael McLaughlin took over the leadership and pursued a policy of recruiting young skinheads at football matches and rock concerts. The British Movement saw its role as the vanguard in the coming "White Revolution", one which would involve wholesale repatriation of blacks and the assertion of total White power. The British Movement lived up to its ugly and violent reputation, engaging in organised attacks on Blacks. Asians and Jews. According to the anti-fascist journal Searchlight (November 1984) McLaughlin has decided to fold up the British Movement and concentrate on his business. selling authentic Nazi memorabilia. Colin Jordan told Searchlight:

I deplore the fact that the organisation I started many years ago has been run down to such a state by McLaughlin, that it really isn't worth saving from going under.

Other Ultra Right groups active in Britain today include the National Socialist Action Party, the League of Saint George, the White Defence Force, The Rising, SS Wotan, Column 88, SONAR (the secret organisation for national recovery) and The Exterminators Although the last two groups are new, Searchlight has revealed that many of the above groups are organised and trained in paramilitary activities and have links within the Territorial Army and Army Cadet Force.

The evidence would seem to suggest that the Ultra Right has become disillusioned with the ballot box and turned towards the more traditional methods associated with fascist activity — street violence, intimidation and terrorism. The capitalist system, by generating social problems like unemployment. poverty, bad housing, and inner city decay, produces the fear and the racial hatred that the Ultra Right breeds on. Frightened people in need of someone to blame for the social insanity pick on an identifiable minority group, who become the target of racial hatred and racial attacks. Immigrants. like all other workers, are not the cause of social problems but the victims.

Brian Rubin

Making the grade (1985)

From the August 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

In early summer notices appeared in schools, colleges, and universities reading: "Silence: Exams in Progress". Inside, rows of anxious students sat behind desks carefully arranged to prevent them "cheating". It was all part of the mysterious examination ritual, a competitive game which offers a bewildering assortment of GCEs, CSEs. BE-TECs and BAs to the "winners" and sweet FAs to the "losers". The belief that these certificates have some intrinsic educational value is of course a myth.

Capitalist education is dominated by exams, grades and assessment for two main reasons. Firstly, they are a mechanism for selecting and grading the future workforce — employers need an efficient and standardised method of finding the right person for the right job. Some people are trained as accountants and doctors, while others are required for the docks and cash registers. Schools are rather like factories which process both people and knowledge: children are fed in at one end and come out the other neatly packaged, assessed and labelled, ready for wage slavery. This is why money is spent each year on setting, marking and administering exams.

Sir Keith Joseph, the Education Secretary, plans to "improve" school standards and introduce yet another exam, the General Certificate of Secondary Education, to be taken at the age of sixteen. This shake-up is partly explained by the fact that only 25 per cent of school leavers achieve what many employers consider the bare minimum of five ‘O' levels. Presented as a new way of broadening children's education and helping the less academic pupil, the ideas have rather more to do with the interests of the British capitalist class and their need to compete internationally for profits. Keith Joseph could not be unaware of the 1983 report of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, which showed that West German school leavers achieve much higher standards than the British, especially in maths.

Secondly, exams create the illusion of equality of opportunity. According to popular myth, people generally get what they deserve in life. So if you work hard at school, keep out of trouble and pass your exams, the world is your oyster. Were this the case, you would expect someone like the Duke of Westminster, who owns 200,000 acres of land across the world, and has a reported income of £10,800 an hour, to have been very successful at school. In fact, he left Harrow with only two 'O' levels. Any feelings of anxiety he may have felt about his future were eased when he inherited 500 million pounds on his twenty-first birthday.

The sons and daughters of the capitalist class do not have to worry about poor exam results and career prospects as their future is comfortable and secure. These sorts of problems are reserved exclusively for the working class, who are forced by economic necessity to compete with each other in the humiliating examination race. Their prize—a college place, a dead end job. a place in the dole queue. This is something they do not teach you in school.

Brian Rubin

All quiet on campus (1986)

From the April 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Good news if you missed the "Swinging Sixties": a revival is underway. However, while the music and fashions might be making a comeback, one of the most popular products of that period is not. The long haired, tee-shirt wearing, slogan chanting, banner waving student appears to be dead and buried.

Most undergraduates today are too  young to remember the Sixties, when a wave of student upheavals swept across America and Europe. In Berkeley, Berlin, Madrid and Paris, young men and women turned against the very institutions that had nurtured them. The student leader, Cohn-Bendit, mimicking Marx, wrote: "A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of student revolt." In Britain, too, higher education became a battleground with anti-war demonstrations, marches, sit-downs, sit-ins, rent strikes, days of action and grant campaigns. Hornsey College of Art was occupied and declared a "Student's Republic". Inevitably, there were casualties as students clashed with the police. At the London School of Economics, a porter died of a heart attack when students occupied the building. Today the slogan, "Essex, Oxford, Kent, Unite. One Struggle One Fight" must sound rather strange to students.

If the Sixties were characterised by "student unrest", the late seventies and eighties have seen a general decline in protest. This is not surprising given the bleak climate of cuts, competition, and record levels of unemployment. Much student energy today is taken up with grades, jobs and overdrafts, which leads to a number of problems. In an article called "When Finals are the Final Straw". (New Society, 30 June 1983), the writer states:

. . . all the counsellors I spoke to agreed that the economic climate is greatly increasing the stress on students. Their grants are worth less than ever, and many have overdrafts. Academic staff, facing redundancy themselves cannot always give them support they need. And they risk not finding a job after they've finally achieved that degree.

Two recent government papers have angered students into organising limited demonstrations at Southampton, Portsmouth and Oxford. Firstly, the Green Paper, Higher Education into the 1990s, described by P. Flather (New Statesman, 11 October 1985 "The Sack of Academe") as "perhaps the greatest peace time threat to higher education". This paper will not surprise socialists as it sets out in plain terms the purpose of education under capitalism - to meet the needs of the economy. Vocationalism is the new "in" word. Subjects in the arts and social sciences which do not directly contribute to the economy are to be severely cut and the cuts presently hitting higher education are to be extended. Libraries are closed in the evening, research is shelved and universities are losing one in seven of their staff. Secondly, the White Paper on Social Security proposes proposes to exclude students from claiming Supplementary and Unemployment Benefits in the short vacations and intends to withdraw the right of students to claim Housing Benefit if living in halls of residence. The National Union of Students believe that the combined cuts will cost individual students up to £1,100 a year.

There have been mixed fortunes for those organisations involved in student politics. Left Wing groups have been on the decline for several years now; their heyday was in the late Sixties when students were "in struggle" - demonstrating against the Vietnam war and campaigning against bad housing, social services cuts, rent increases, the wage freeze, unemployment and racist government policies.

This provided groups like the International Socialists (now the SWP) and the Workers' Revolutionary Party with the opportunity to recruit concerned students. The activity of these groups is at best silly and at worst undemocratic and anti-socialist. The fact that marching up and down and chanting reformist slogans is considered "exciting", says a great deal about college life. Far more serious is the undemocratic behaviour of groups like the SWP who, acting as a self-appointed vanguard, decide which views can and cannot be heard by other students. When the SWP organised a mass picket to prevent Patrick Harrington entering North London Poly, not only were they suppressing free speech in the name of "socialism", but they were also giving the dwindling NF valuable publicity. Similarly, in January, the SWP broke up a meeting at Southampton University because it was being addressed by the Right Wing MP, Harvey Proctor. Fascist ideas need to be exposed and defeated, along with all anti-working class ideas, but this is not achieved by disconnecting the microphone.

If the new economic climate in higher education has led to the general decline of the Left, the Right have fared much better. Indeed, the balance of intellectual and academic thought has shifted as professors, departments and students have realigned themselves with the new Right. In the past, Keynes dominated university economics; today, free market economics is taught in the departments of York, Bath, Exeter, Liverpool, Southampton and the LSE and the so-called "Libertarians" have become increasingly active on campus. They even have their very own guru. Professor Roger Scruton, a sort of intellectual Rambo whose task in life is to remove Left Wing academics from their privileged position. He sets about this task in his recently published book, Thinkers of the New Left. Conservative student organisations are also flourishing. The Federation of Conservative Students (FCS) which is dominated by a libertarian faction, made the headlines last April when its members were involved in acts of hooliganism during their conference at Loughborough University. Then then Chairman of the Conservative Party, John Gummer, set up an investigation into the FCS, but the intended crackdown never came. David Rose, writing in the Guardian, (15 November 1985) comments:

The grip of the hard Right on the Federation of Conservative Students was strengthened last night by the internal party inquiry originally supposed to curb it.

This change of style among Conservative  students was commented on by the Tory MP, Michael Brown, in the Guardian (31 May 1985):

Traditionally, in the 1960s, the FCS was no more than a mouthpiece for the Party to disseminate party literature for that small band of short back and sides, sports jacket and tie brigade.

The tactics and new found enthusiasm of the Right mirrors the Left. Some members of the FCS wear provocative tee-shirts which read, "Hang Nelson Mandela". Opponents' meetings are boycotted or disrupted. Slogans are chanted, such as "The Right united will never be defeated!" The ideas of the libertarians include extreme market economics, leading some members to advocate the legalisation of heroin and paedophilia, loans for the unemployed and students, and no doubt the right of prisoners to buy their own cells. They are generally pro-South Africa and anti-Soviet. At the annual societies' fair at Cambridge, a poster of the Cambridge University Right read, "Apartheid OK, Apartheid UK". The FCS also supports Ulster Unionism and is firmly opposed to the recent Anglo-Irish Agreement; indeed, some of its members are said to hold Loyalist and Protestant views which make Ian Paisley look positively middle-of-the-road.

Students, like all other members of the working class, need to organise themselves within their own organisations to protect their position within capitalism. Although the protestors of the sixties have grown old and, for the most part, disillusioned, the problems are still with us in one form or another. The only effective protest against them is the struggle to abolish capitalism itself.

Brian Rubin

Jack Common and Working Class Writing (1991)

From the October 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

It could easily have escaped your notice that Jack Common is back in print. Jack who? Here is a write whose life was dogged by bad luck, never receiving the recognition he deserved. Passed over by the literary and academic world, his writings have been highly acclaimed by a small group of admirers, the most famous being George Orwell. Reviewing Common's Freedom of the Streets in 1938, Orwell wrote that "this is the authentic voice of the ordinary man, the man who might infuse a new decency into he control of affairs if only he could get there, but who in practice never seems to get much further than the trenches, the sweatshop and the jail."

So who was Jack Common? He was born in 1903 and grew up in the back streets of Heaton, a working class suburb of Newcastle. His father worked on the railways and his mother in the home. Common received a basic education and picked up some office skills at a local college. His working life was punctuated by a variety of jobs such as clerk, mechanic, labourer, museum caretaker and film scriptwriter. He was to use these experiences in his writings. A prolonged period of unemployment led Common to move to London in 1928 in search of work.

Some of his early essays impressed Middleton-Murry and he was given a job as a circulation pusher on the left-wing literary magazine the Adelphi. Common progressed quickly, contributing more articles and obtaining editorial responsibilities. It was here that he met and became a close friend of Orwell. While Common continued to write for a range of newspapers and journals he had to take labouring jobs to support his family financially. During the 1950s, writing against a backdrop of poverty and house evictions, he produced two important biographical novels. His death in 1968 went largely unnoticed and his writings slipped out of print.

Common's literary output over a period of 40 years was rather small and can be divided into two phases. Firstly, in the 1930s there were the social and political essays he wrote for Adelphi, Tribune, New Statesman, Manchester Guardian, etc. In these he explored various aspects of working class culture, an area which was just beginning to attract attention. Writing in the Adelphi in December 1934, he provides a map of the side of town which interests him:

" . . . the queer half-lit geography familiar to the proletarian, an affair of boozers, boxing halls, fried fish-saloons, corner-ends where meetings are held, missions, secular society rooms, spiritualist haunts, odd debating societies and Labour Halls." (Christmas Carol)

Amongst these articles are sketches of street life, factory work and the life on the dole. There are also discussions about politics, religion, unions and schools. This is how he describes the experience of signing on the dole:

"What a day! An invalid's wife with daily attendance at a hospital for financial incurables, maddening in every restriction, because normal good health with its healthy wants is beating in the blood. A day to be endured, to be got through, like all those who come till the luck changes." ('Why Work?', Manchester Guardian, 27/10/1930)

Common was ahead of this time in exposing the role played by the mass media, advertising and consumerism in maintaining capitalism. Ken Worpole described him as "perhaps one of the most original political and cultural commentators of the 1930s" (New Society, 14/8/1980).

The selection of writings, Jack Common's Revolt Against An 'Age of Plenty' (1980) compiled by Benyon and Hutchinson is out of print but the good news is that another small book of essays, Freedom of the Streets (1980), is available from People's Publications. One of the concerns found here and elsewhere is that the working class have not got many books which express their own views and experiences. They are what Grey has aptly called the "silent majority" in his study (1973). In his essay The Silent Majority: A Study of the Working Class in Post-War British Fiction'How Proletarian Are You?', Common Writes:

"Glance into any library and you'll come across acres of accurate and lively descriptions of life amongst the bourgeoisie. The proletarian, though, has few books to his name, and those fumbling ones. He's no hero, that's why. He's a something-something, poor fellow, busy trying to spell it out and make it come different this time."

One practical way Common tried to give the working class a voice is found in Seven Shifts (1938), a collection of short accounts of working-class life he edited, introduced and inspired. In the Preface he writes:

"My friends include members of the literary bourgeoisie and lads from the un-printed proletariat. Both parties talk well, and you'd probably enjoy a crack with them as much as I do. But here's the pity. The bourgeois ones get published right and left, especially left; the others are mute as far as print goes, though exceedingly vocal in public houses."

He continues:

"Well, here is the result: seven narratives in which workingmen describe their jobs, their conditions, and some of their reactions to the life they lead. They are not highly literary compositions, yet the lads can write, as you'll see."

The second part of Common's writing career involved two autobiographical novels: Kiddar's Luck and The Ampersand. These books were published in the 1950s before the upsurge of interest in working class writing. He was a forerunner of such writers as Braine, Barstow and Sillitoe. Kiddar's Luck (available from Bloodaxe Books, 1990) has rightly been described as a small masterpiece. Common draws upon personal memories of his childhood and youth to produce a highly authentic yet entertaining picture of working class life at the turn of the century. The writer Sid Chaplin described Common as "perhaps the finest chronicler of the English working class to follow Robert Tressell" ('A Wry Smile from Tyneside', Sunday Times, 12 May 1968).

The narrative traces the relative freedom enjoyed by Willie Kiddar on the streets with his friends and the increasing constraints and limitations imposed by the prospects of a life of mundane labour and wage-slavery. Common's sting-in-the-tail technique of writing allows him to deal with this is a self-mockingly humorous way. Take the marvellous use of irony in the opening passages where Kiddar (in the form of his genes) reflects on is bad luck on being born into the working class and missing all of the opportunities going on the night of his conception:

"I at once came under the minus sign which society had already placed upon my parents. They were of no account, not even overdrawn or marked 'R.D.', people who have worked for a living and got just that, who had a home so long as they paid the weekly rent and who could provide for offspring by the simple method of doing without themselves".

He continues:

"Naturally, there were some bad fairies gathered round the bed at such a conception. One, somewhat like a tramp, chalked upon the bedstead the sign which means 'no handouts here'. Another, four-belted as a ghostly navvy, swung his pick in promise of future hard work; a blear-eyed one, faintly lit up, lifted the bottle and one looking like a magistrate made a bitter mouth over the syllables of unspoken 'Borstal'".

Common used his childhood in Kiddar's Luck as a means of reworking many of the ideas and concerns found in his earlier writings like the Freedom of the Streets. For example, the self-taught uncle who introduces Kiddar to radical books and ideas is one of the most "unhonoured intellectuals" debating on the street corners in the essay 'Great Men of the Gutter'. A passing reference is made to the SPGB in this context. Common was opposed to capitalism and the way it limited and thwarted working class potential. One of the institutions involved in preparing children for the world of work is the school. In the Freedom of the Streets, he explains that school:

" . . . is in origin quite alien to working class life. It does not grow from that life: it is not 'our' school, in the sense in which in other schools can be spoken of by the folk of other classes".

This critique is taken up in chapter five of Kiddar's Luck:

"I had acquired the one faculty with which every school infallibly endows its pupils - that of being bored. It is very important, of course, that every child should in the course of time becomes fitted up with this negative capability. If they didn't have it, they'd never put up with the jobs they are going to get, most of them, on leaving school. Boredom, or the ability to endure it, is the hub on which the whole universe of work turns".

Sociological studies, such as P Willis's Learning to Labour (1977), show this is still the case. Kiddar's Luck ends in 1917 when Kiddar is fourteen and about to apply or work. The sequel, The Ampersand (which is out of print) continues the adventures of Kiddar, although her is renamed Clart. These autobiographical novels are not simply about Common or Kiddar/Clart; the experience and fate are intended to be representative of others in similar circumstances. Kiddar, as the name suggests, is a typical product of the environment. Returning to the opening passage:

"I had picked the bottom rung of the ladder with a vengeance . . . A sad mistake. Though millions make it, I think it still deserves a mourning wreath."These books show working class writing at its best. They are full of witty observations and interesting insights from one born under a minus sign".

Common did not belong to any political party and was highly critical of those left-wing organisations that claimed to speak for and lead the working class. He ends Freedom of the Streets with:

"No conclusions, then. You can work them out yourself, and its odd's on you'll get at least as good an answer as I should. The things I've been talking about hit you as hard as they do me, mate, and that's a fact. I'll leave it to you, then - all the best."

Common's own highly individualistic "socialism" is often confused and confusing. However, whilst you will find plenty of things to argue with in these books they do help to show the potential ordinary people have themselves to change society. Get hold of these books while you can, because knowing Kiddar's luck, they will be out of print before you can say Jack . . .

Brian Rubin

Orwell's Nightmare (1983)

From the December 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face . . . Forever."

Surely no date has ever been awaited with such foreboding as 1984. The reason is George Orwell's novel of the same name which paints a nightmarish picture of a world divided into three huge superstates: Eastasia, Eurasia, and Oceania. It is a world characterised by dreary squalor, permanent warfare, spying telescreens, the "thought police", and Big Brother:

"The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible and glittering – a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons – a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting – three hundred million people all with the same face."

In Oceania all hopes of social change, revolutionary or otherwise, have been systematically eliminated by the all-powerful totalitarian state. History has come to a stop.

George Orwell was born Eric Blair in Mothari, India, in 1903. He was educated at Eton and held a variety of jobs including an Imperial policeman in Burma, a private tutor, a school teacher, and a bookshop assistant, He is best remembered however as a writer and social commentator who presented, analysed and advocated political ideas. In 1947 in a short essay called Why I Write, Orwell spelled out his aims and motives as a writer:

"What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice."

Not a bad starting point, but what were the political ideas Orwell advocated? They are difficult to pin down with any precision as Orwell did not wish to be compromised by commitment to a doctrine or programme – a subject he wrote about in the essay, Writers and Leviathan. His "socialism" was in fact little more than a moral stance, a call for "justice" and "liberty" and for a more humane and decent world. He attempted to live up to these convictions and in the Spanish Civil War enlisted in the POUM (Workers' Party of Marxist-Unification), a popular militia fighting at the Front. Eventually, political expediency led to the POUM being denounced by the Communist Party as a "fascist fifth column". Persecution and executions followed, forcing Orwell and his wife to escape into France. It was these experiences (vividly recaptured in the autobiographical Homage to Catalonia) that led to both Orwell's anti-Communist Party attitude and his distrust of "intellectuals".

Orwell's writing life lasted less than twenty years. His book output was relatively small although it was bolstered by his numerous essays and journalism. In January 1950, aged 46, he died from tuberculosis from which he had suffered for some time. Since his death his growing reputation as a writer stemmed largely from his last two novels, Animal Farm and 1984 – both satires on totalitarianism. In a recently published book (George Orwell: The Road to 1984), P. Lewis says

"One of the many paradoxes about him is that thirty years after his death, his work is more alive than in his lifetime . . . He is increasingly read, becomes more influential and remains perfectly relevant."

The novel 1984 is an extremely influential book. It has appeared in more than sixty languages, its sales are in the millions, it has been put on the curricula of schools and colleges and was turned into a film and a television play (the latter, in 1954, caused one of the BBC's biggest controversies). The book's appeal stems from its dramatic treatment of important ideas; 1984 has influenced the way in which people think about society and the future. It has introduced into everyday speech a number of words and concepts: even people who have never read the book are familiar with "Big Brother", "Doublethink" and "Newspeak".

One of the main themes in 1984 is the use of language to corrupt and distort thought. History is written in the Ministry of Truth, facts inconvenient to the regime are pushed down the memory hole, and Newspeak is the official language rendering certain modes of thought impossible. All of this is epitomised in the three slogans of the Party: "War is Peace", "Freedom is Slavery", "Ignorance is Strength". Today, the very term "Orwellian" has become an adjective to describe any institution or event which evokes oppression and organised lying. You may wonder why it is not used more often.

Since its publication in 1948 the novel 1984 has generated diverse theories to explain why Orwell should have written such a book. According to one view, 1984 is a deliberate and powerful attack on "socialism". Isaac Deutscher (the biographer of Trotsky) referred to the novel as an "ideological weapon in the cold war". While the novel has been used with great enthusiasm by the opponents of socialism, there is good evidence to show that even by Orwell's confused notions this was not his intention. When controversy surrounding the novel began he stated explicitly:

"My novel Nineteen Eighty Four is not intended as an attack on socialism, or on the Labour Party (of which I am a supporter), but as a show up of the perversions to which a centralised economy is liable, and which have already been partly realised in Communism and Fascism . . . . I believe also that totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences" (Letter to F. A. Henson, l6 June 1949. CEJL, Vol 4, p. 564.)

What were these totalitarian ideas which Orwell was attacking? Firstly, they were the ideas of the "intellectuals", especially those on the left wing, who were prepared to distort history and obscure the truth in order to further their own ends:

"The truth is, of course, that the countless English intellectuals who kiss the arse of Stalin are not different from the minority who give their allegiance to Hitler or Mussolini . . . All of them are worshipping power and successful cruelty. It is important to notice that the cult of power tends to be mixed up with a love of cruelty and wickedness for their own sakes." (Raffles and Miss Blandish, 1944. CEJL, Vol 3, p.258.)

Secondly, they were the tendencies Orwell saw around him in 1948 – in particular the growth of central state power. Fascist Germany had been defeated but there was state-capitalist Russia, and a nationalising post-war Labour government in Britain.

Others have attempted a psychoanalytical explanation of the novel, believing it to be the cry of a disillusioned and dying man. An examination of Orwell's earlier writings shows quite clearly that this is not the case. 1984 is the fruition of a number of ideas and preoccupations which Orwell had been developing for a number of years. As his friend R. Rees says, ". . . he succeeds in packing into 1984 nearly all the ideas of his previous books". It is interesting to see how Llew Gardner of the Daily Worker (18 December, 1954) managed to combine both of these theories to attack Orwell (obviously unhappy to see the ugly face of Russian "communism" so accurately portrayed:

"When he wrote 1984, the anti-socialist work that shocked the nation on television, George Orwell was sick in body and mind, a fast dying man."

This must have a familiar ring to it, especially for the numerous Russian dissidents who are sent to hospitals for "psychiatric treatment".

Most ridiculous of all is the use of 1984 as a yardstick to measure future developments. For example, in September 1974, the Daily Telegraph magazine produced a special issue devoted to the novel. It had in bold print on the cover: "George Orwell predicted complete oppression by 1984, and a soul-less society, without love or freedom". A recent article in New Scientist by C. L. Boltz ("1984: A Passed Future") criticises Orwell for, among other things, not foreseeing the growth of feminism and the revolt of the young. This type of explanation not only misses the point of 1984 but attempts to turn Orwell into something he never claimed to be – a prophet. On the contrary, he said:

"I do not believe that the kind of society I describe will arrive, but I believe (allowing, of course, for the fact that the book is a satire) that something resembling it could arrive." (Letter to F. A. Henson.)

Certain important criticisms must be made of 1984 arising from Orwell's limited understanding of the nature of class and power in society. For example, what are we to make of his vision of the "proles"? Can the class struggle be subdued so that nobody ever protests about the appalling conditions in Oceania? Most serious of all, can we really be expected to accept the central argument of the book that "power", as an end in itself, is the motive force of the whole social system?

Every study of Orwell sooner or later discusses his obsession with his own social background and upbringing. In The Road to Wigan Pier he describes himself as a member of the "lower upper middle class". Commentators talk of the "transformation" of Blair into Orwell as the rejection of his upbringing and the search for a new social identity. This may explain Orwell's attachment to what he considered "the working class". Yet Orwell never understood what class meant. Class is an economic condition, an objective social relationship, derived from an individual's relation to the ownership and control of wealth production. There are only two classes in capitalist society, those who possess but do not produce (capitalists) and those who produce but do not possess (workers). There is no choice in the matter; there are no alternatives. If you work for a wage or salary you are a member of the working class. It follows from the existence of a class-divided society that the two classes pursue antagonistic interests: there is a continuous class struggle. Yet although production continues in the class-divided society of Oceania with the "proles" doing all the necessary work social unrest, the other side of the coin, has disappeared. Orwell never explains why there are no more strikes, no more stoppages, no more disputes. Finally, it is because of Orwell's inability to explain class that he is unable to detect the real material force behind capitalist society – the relentless pursuit of profit.

Despite this criticism 1984 remains an important and stimulating book. And as for Orwell? We can apply the epigraph he uses for one of his own characters, George Bowling, in Coming Up for Air:

"He's dead, but he won't lie down."

Brian Rubin