Voice From The Back: Stay At Your Desk, Slave (2008)

The Voice From The Back Column from the September 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Stay At Your Desk, Slave

Now and then a wonderful product comes along that the owning class just love. This may be one of them. “The maker of a new product that combines a treadmill and computer workstation is banking on the notion that companies will invest in products like the “Walkstation” as a way of keeping health care costs down and improving overall fitness levels. The device allows people to work on their computers while walking on a treadmill at a slow speed of up to three kilometers (two miles) per hour, enabling small amounts of movement that supporters say have the potential to reap big health benefits.” (Yahoo News, 13 July) Now all we need is a “Feedstation” that shovels food into your mouth while you work. Oh, Charlie Chaplin already envisaged that in Modern Times didn’t he? How about the “Bedpanstation”? Too much perhaps?

What's ethics got to do with it?

“European and US defence companies will this week kick off talks on a joint code of ethics to cover arms sales. Representatives from the industry’s leading trade bodies will meet at the Farnborough Air Show  in the UK on Tuesday. European companies have recently developed an anti-corruption code in a bid to improve the industry’s reputation, which has suffered in the wake of allegations of bribery and corruption in connection with some of its biggest players.” (Financial Times, 13 July) As these guardians of morality meet to discuss whether it is more ethical to kill a child with poisonous gas, napalm bombs or good old fashioned high explosives we ask ourselves what do sellers of death know of ethics. They are money grubbing killers. 

Chinese Workers Wake Up

“Doing business in China is beginning to cost real money. Not that Chinese workers are buying second homes or anything like that: Their average wage is still a little short of a dollar an hour. But so many Chinese have now left their villages for the factories that the once bottomless pool of new young workers is beginning to run dry, and the wages of assembly-line employees are rising 10 percent a year.” (Yahoo News, 15 July) We should echo the sentiments of an old song, probably banned in China now. They occur in The Red Flag – “Arise like starvelings from your slumber” Let’s hope so!

Health And Hypocrisy

The following announcement caused a storm of controversy in the media. “Patients cannot rely on the NHS to save their lives if the cost of doing so is too great, the Government’s medicines watchdog has ruled for the first time. The National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice) has said the natural impulse to go to the aid of individuals in trouble – as when vast resources are used to save a sailor lost at sea – should not apply to the NHS. The disclosure follows last week’s controversial decision by Nice to reject four new drugs for kidney cancer even though they have been shown to extend life by five to six months.” (Independent, 13 August) To socialists the announcement is far from shocking. That is how capitalism operates – if you are rich you have access to the best food, clothing, shelter, education and recreation. Why should it be so shocking to learn that if you are poor you cannot afford the best of medicine either.

The Perfect Worker

“A Ugandan official has suggested to MPs that funerals should be limited to Saturday afternoons to stop people taking time off work to attend them. Speciosa Kazibwe, a former vice-president who now heads a state development agency, noted that Uganda’s death rate was very high. (BBC News, 25 July) Socialists used to say that the capitalist’s idea of the perfect worker was one who left school at 15, worked 50 weeks a year for 50 years and dropped down dead the first day he went to collect his pension at the post office. We will have to amend this ideal blueprint in view of the Ugandan official’s view. Ideally he would die on the Thursday so that his family could attend his Saturday funeral without missing out on a day producing surplus value for the owning class.

Spycatchers (2022)

Book Review from the November 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard 

A good number of years ago the branch of the Socialist Party I’m a member of was holding its meetings in a room in a pub on the edge of Swansea town centre. We would advertise our fortnightly Monday meetings via posters, leaflets and in the local daily paper. When I arrived at the pub early for one of the meetings and stood at the bar, the landlady informed me, quite innocently, that a detective had been there asking what we were doing. I thanked her for telling me and suggested that, if he came again, she might tell him that our meetings were open to everyone, nothing was hidden and he was perfectly free to find out by attending. She thanked me and we heard nothing more, but at the time it reminded me of conversations members sometimes had about being spied on, either by having their telephone tapped or by someone from the Special Branch attending meetings covertly or even infiltrating the Party by becoming members.

I’d always wondered about this, but on balance thought it was unlikely to be happening. After all, if even a small number of such people had attended our meetings or otherwise found out what we were about, surely they would quickly realise that we didn’t pose a threat to ‘national security’ in the sense that the Security Services understood it. While it’s true that we are ‘dissidents’, we have never supported one government or state against another and we have never advocated any kind of violence. Yet that incident couldn’t but shift my thinking a little and what now, many years later, has shifted it even more is a recently published book entitled Red List: MI5 and British Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century by David Caute (Verso, 2022, 404 pp.). It’s a book that draws on official MI5 documents released to the National Archive and so publicly available which provide startling insights into the enormous efforts (and massive resources) put into tracking the activities and affiliations of an extraordinarily wide range of people who, over most of the 20th century, were suspected of being sympathetic to or interested in regimes deemed to be enemies of the British state (largely the Soviet Union) or were seen as constituting a possible ‘threat to national security’.

Threat to national security?

The main thing that switched on the light of suspicion in the minds of the security men and women (mainly men) of MI5 (or Special Branch, as its police service was called) was any connection whatever to the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) or to anyone associated with it. While it’s true that the Communist Party was in thrall to Moscow and in effect the British arm of the Soviet regime during most of the years of its existence and some of the individuals targeted by MI5 were members of the CPGB, many were not and some had only peripheral connections to it or to any of its members or sympathisers. But MI5 did not, as David Caute’s book shows, stop at the CPGB. It extended its investigations to any other organisations it considered potentially ‘subversive’, for example to small left-wing groups who were not actually supportive of the Stalinist Soviet regime and in fact were disciples of Stalin’s arch-enemy, Leon Trotsky. Their investigation also extended to trade unions, to anti-colonial national independence supporters, and, from the 1970s onwards, to the IRA. Given MI5’s apparent failure, as made clear in this book, to distinguish between different kinds of potential ‘subversives’ , it seems quite likely that not just those small Trotskyist groups but any group with the word ‘socialist’ in its name was being targeted, and perhaps still are today – even if, as the author points out, much more of their attention nowadays is likely to be focused on newly perceived threats to national security such as militant Islam and, maybe, a resurgent non-Soviet Russia.

But what of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and the detective asking questions in that Swansea pub? Surely anyone attending a single meeting or reading just one Party pamphlet or issue of the Socialist Standard would have understood that we didn’t pose an immediate, violent, non-democratic threat to the British state but that our aim was to openly spread socialist ideas among workers with a view to a socialist society being established democratically through the ballot box once the majority had come to understand those ideas? Yes, but what emerges from the pages of this book is that neither the security system nor its operatives stood out for their brightness or intelligence. Despite countless and ongoing phone taps, mail interceptions, buggings, burglaries, physical surveillance and even infiltration by ‘moles’, the released papers investigated by David Caute show that they seemed to find it difficult to work out whether individuals or organisations constituted genuine, plausible threats to ‘national security’ or whether they just happened to be friends or associates of those who might have ‘subversion’ in their minds and might quite innocently have found themselves in particular places at particular times. So, as we learn, ‘the net cast was incredibly broad’ and ‘guilt by association was paramount’, even if that association was sometimes imagined rather than real. In these circumstances it is hardly surprising that the Socialist Party and its members, though they could not be sensibly categorised as any kind of immediate threat to national security, should be (and probably still are) lumped together with those who perhaps could be seen as some kind of threat – even if of course most of them weren’t.

Incompetence and bungling

The result of all the glaring incompetence recorded in this book (referred to by the writer with typically entertaining wry commentary as ‘the stumbling confusion of M15 minds’) is that most of the targeting of potential spies came to nothing, simply because they weren’t spies and never constituted any feasible threat to the British state, while the real spies, such as Burgess, Maclean, Blunt and Philby, operated for many years before their activities became known. The lenses of MI5 were clouded partly because it was staffed at the top by out-of-touch former military and colonial officers and its agents on the ground, the ‘Special Branch’ operatives, were, as already noted, simply not very bright. They often included manifestly irrelevant and sometimes unintentionally comic details in their reports. Surveillance of the home of poet C. Day Lewis, for example, produced such vital information as ‘seldom wears a hat, not altogether smart appearance in dress’, and the agent reporting from Harwich on the historian Christopher Hill returning from Russia wrote: ‘He has the appearance of a communist; but his baggage, which was searched by HM Customs, did not contain any subversive literature.’ Charlie Chaplin came under investigation but was deemed to be ‘a progressive or radical rather than communist’, even though it was widely known, as the book points out, that ‘Chaplin had long been an out-and-out fellow-traveller of Stalin’s Russia’. The contents of the papers examined here also reveal MI5 culture as highly bigoted and in particular, perhaps predictably, racist and anti-semitic. One memo quoted states that ‘the chief Bolshevik leaders are not Russians but Jews who carefully hide their real names’. Another report talks about a suspect’s home being visited by ‘a number of young men who have the appearance of Communist Jews’, while an uncle of the historian and Communist Party member Eric Hobsbawm is described as ‘sneering, half Jew in appearance, having a long nose’.

Intellectuals and others

Yet what we have in this study is only a small taste of everything MI5 has got up to over the years. That is firstly because the records made publicly available only cover people already deceased, and secondly because this study focuses only on ‘intellectuals’, (eg, writers, artists, scientists, historians, politicians, actors, musicians, lawyers), for the most part well-known ones (eg, John Berger, Benjamin Britten, Jacob Bronowski, Cecil Day-Lewis, Michael Foot, Eric Hobsbawm, Doris Lessing, Ewan McColl, George Orwell, J.B. Priestley, Paul Robeson, Stephen Spender, E.P Thompson). Yet, despite the 200+ suspect ‘intellectuals’ covered, many records relating to deceased individuals have, as the author tells us, not been released (without any reason being given) and there is significant redaction of some of those that have been. So who knows how much other bungling, how many other dead ends would be revealed if the totality of security records were available, especially if those also included people still alive? And who knows whether, if the net were cast wider than those the authors see as ‘intellectuals’, suspicions many other people have had about being spied on over the years would be confirmed? And who knows whether there would not be reference to the Socialist Party and any covert investigations carried out over the years on both the organisation and its members, living or dead? From what we find here, there very likely would.

It should be added that, despite the vast majority of this activity leading nowhere in particular and being a pale shadow of the McCarthyite witchhunt that took place in the US in the 1950s where intense persecution took place of anyone deemed to be or to have been in any way associated with ‘communism’, MI5 spying did nevertheless have negative consequences for some in the shape, for example, of difficulty in finding or keeping employment or being refused entry to or residence in Britain if you were a non-British subject. And in some cases, when spying was proved, prosecution did lead to prison sentences, such as the 10 years given to physicist Alan Nunn May (he served 6½).

All this took place and was sanctioned under both Conservative and Labour governments, with Caute’s book highlighting the particular emphasis put on this work by the immediate post-war Labour government under Clement Attlee, who in 1947 introduced a new more stringent vetting system. One of the results of this – perhaps ironic – was that a not insignificant number of Labour Party politicians, even leading ones such as Harold Wilson and Tony Benn, found their way on to the ‘red list’ and the author of this book has discovered that others still living (eg, Harriet Harman) have unreleased files against their names.

The BBC and democracy

The BBC was complicit too. David Caute dedicates a whole chapter, ‘The BBC Toes the Line’, to illustrating how, until recent times at least, the BBC was ‘up MI5’s armpit’, functioning as a servile collaborator of the Secret Services. It was, as he calls it, ‘a semi-covert department of state’, which even carried out its own extensive vetting procedures on those within it or seeking to enter it to check whether there was any sniff of ‘subversion’ about them. This led, for example, to the BBC cancelling a planned series of radio talks on atomic power scheduled to be given by a listed MI5 ‘suspect’, the celebrated scientist Jacob Bronowski.

Finally any security set up, any ‘spy industry’ involves a colossal squandering of resources, human and material, and, as David Caute’s book uncovers, MI5 was no exception. It should be added however that this kind of waste is an inevitable function of a social system that pits capitalist classes and governments of whatever kind (even those that may falsely call themselves ‘communist’, ‘socialist’ or ‘Marxist’) against one another in the battle for political and economic control of the world’s resources. But it also throws significant light on the severe limitations that the system, even in so called ‘liberal democracies’, inevitably imposes, via institutions like MI5, on freedom of speech and free exchange of ideas and thought. In the end capitalism, whether it takes the form of state control or a relatively unfettered market, needs state secrecy to assist the national interests of each country’s wealth holders in their never-ending quest for profit as they compete on the world market with those elsewhere who own and control the world’s wealth.

Howard Moss

Hands off Wadiya! (2012)

Film Review from the August 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Dictator. Directed by Larry Charles

  “Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.” Arundhati Roy

The Dictator (2012) stars Sacha Baron-Cohen as Admiral General Aladeen, dictator of the fictional country called the Republic of Wadiya. The story is loosely inspired by Charlie Chaplin’s character Adenoid Hynkel, dictator of the fictional country called Tomainia in The Great Dictator (1940).  Baron-Cohen’s character is based on Colonel Gaddafi.

Sacha Baron-Cohen built his career on satirising superficial identity politics and testing the limits of tolerance of those identifying with groups who express offensive opinions. In an early appearance he defended the right to be lazy against a rattled Tony Benn’s fantasy of full employment.

Admiral General Aladeen is described as anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist. These are often the main claims made by real-world countries who find support from groups calling themselves socialist. Even in Britain, where most people do not get beyond the position of support for the country they are born in, some calling themselves ‘socialists’ get little further than ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’.

The Communist Party of Britain (Morning Star) has been known to use Marx and Lenin’s support for national liberation movements (a position which Rosa Luxemburg demolished), as the basis of their opposition to wars waged by some countries but not others.

Trotskyist opponents of war, such as the Socialist Party of England and Wales (SPEW), although more critical than Stalinists, are also selective, and support ‘the lesser of two evils’, depending on which countries are waging war. The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) claims to come from the unorthodox Trotskyist tradition and does not automatically or uncritically defend all so-called anti-imperialist countries. Smaller groups such as the Alliance for Workers Liberty claim a ‘Third-Camp’ position and have had a supporter who has been known to fly both an Israeli and Palestinian flag on a demonstration. So all represent a nationalism of sorts, but a nationalism nonetheless. The delusion is that powerful states can be condemned as imperialist but less powerful states murdering workers can be (critically or otherwise) supported as anti-imperialist. When this is couched in anti-interventionist terms, the socialist answer should be to intervene by promoting socialism everywhere, workers have no country.

At the end, even Aladeen’s final speech manages to distinguish between real democracy and a situation where both states are milked for oil by local dictators or by states with more powerful militaries. For this reason it is unlikely to be reviewed widely on the British left.

Where Baron-Cohen’s efforts to include romance and politics in his film fall flat, the more talented Chaplin succeeded in including both and was able to sum up his message of social freedom most eloquently – even better than most groups calling themselves socialist:

  “You the people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness. You the people have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then in the name of democracy let us use that power – let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power, but they lie. They do not fulfil their promise, they never will. Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people. Now let us fight to fulfil that promise. Let us fight to free the world, to do away with national barriers, do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness.”

DJW

What is a Capitalist? (1976)

From the December 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nature in the raw — in fact, on Sunday mornings in Hyde Park. Real-life questions asked at actual meetings by genuine people; nothing added or taken away; nothing invented or simulated.

Question: Am I a capitalist? I run a hairdressing saloon. I am a taxi-driver with my own cab. I run a greengrocer’s shop. I am a jobbing builder. I have an accountant’s office. I am a free-lance photographer, journalist, general practitioner . . . and so on. Short, clear, firm, definite answer: No, you are not!

The long answer is the explanation. Why not?

*

It is a popular fallacy that, since capitalists are obviously rich, all Socialists (who oppose the capitalist system) must be poor. Many people have a hazy notion that all poor people are Socialists and all rich ones anti-Socialists. In other words, they do not know the difference between actual objective conditions and ideas about them.

Nothing is, unfortunately, farther from the truth. The poorer people are, frequently, the more devoted to capitalism. Who has not met the destitute wretch, subsisting by cadging hand-outs, who runs round shrieking nationalistic or religious rubbish (often a psychiatric case through sheer physical deprivation)?

Conversely, nothing is more fallacious than the notion that all rich people are (or were) anti-Socialists. Many rich men and women have been most creditable Socialist thinkers and writers — some outstandingly so. Frederick Engels immediately springs to mind: a successful manager of his father’s cotton mill. In fact, his financial aid made the production of Marx’s Capital possible.

But he was only one of many who contributed, or thought they were contributing, to bringing down capitalism. H. M. Hyndman spent much of his large fortune in publishing Justice and financing the Social Democratic Federation from which the SPGB emerged. Sergei Morosov, the Russian sugar millionaire, financed the Bolsheviks. Ferdinand Lassalle, a founder of the German trades unions, was supported by the fabulously wealthy Countess Hatzfeld. This writer was informed by Max Eastman that Charles Chaplin, when he was running a profitable film venture, regularly supported Eastman’s American radical magazine The Liberator.

It is true that capitalists do not need to work, untrue that no capitalist ever works. They are not all nitwits dedicated to gambling, boozing, etc. The late Lord Rothschild was a biologist of world repute, an acknowledged authority on fleas (though as in other subjects, especially science, this sort of research is not as altruistic as it may seem: nobody wants lousy workers — not only capitalists, but other workers). Other wealthy men and women have spent fortunes on the arts and actually participated in archaeology, exploration and science.

What makes a person a capitalist is not what he thinks, but what he has: his bank balance, not his mental balance. This is the crux of the question. A capitalist is a possessor of capital.

And what is capital? It is wealth invested to produce profit. That is why the Great Train Robbers immediately after their successful “job” were not capitalists. Their problem was to “get rid of it”, i.e. invest it, integrate it with social production. The trinkets and diamonds in the safe-deposits of the French banks robbed recently are wealth, but not capital; they play no part in production, make no profit. They are “hoards”.

This brings us to the mathematics. “Mr. Speaker, am I a capitalist?” Yes — if you have at least £250,000 in readily realizable assets (so-called “liquid funds”) in a bank, company, property or bonds. £250,000 at 10 per cent. (you’ll be lucky!) would perhaps realize £25,000 annually. £25,000 should net a little under £500 a week. Tax deduction (assuming no Capital Gains) at least £200 weekly. Net balance: £300 weekly (approx.).

Not too much, really — because, unless you choose to become a hermit living on raw onions in a shed (as one or two capitalists have done) you’ve got to be like the other capitalists. Not much for the wife’s mink. You could hardly park the Rolls or Merc outside the high-rise blocks in Brixton or Paddington : the neighbours would be ringing the police, and the kids smashing it up. Even the gardener or chauffeur would want about £50 a week.

For a real 1980 capitalist, a quarter of a million is peanuts. As Paul Getty remarked acidly, “How can you call yourself rich if you know how much you’ve got?” Another tycoon, asked by an ingenuous young admirer how much his fabulous yacht cost, said: “Listen, son — when you start counting the cost, you don’t buy one of these boats.”

Howard Hughes paid £500 a night (without Security, which was extra) for his modest pad at “The Inn on the Park”. Statisticians have calculated that if a common soldier landing with William the Conqueror had worked incessantly and frugally from then to now he would still not own as much as Sir John Ellerman in 1976.

No, you are not a capitalist, and you are even less likely to become one. But once you realize what the capitalist system is and how it works — you can become a Socialist.

Next question!

Horatio

This Month's Quotation: Charlie Chaplin (1941)

The Front Page quote from the January 1941 issue of the Socialist Standard

  "You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful—to make this life a wonderful adventure ” 

(Charlie Chaplin in the film "The Great Dictator”)

Modern Times (1955)

From the July 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Rev. Frederick Thompson, chaplain of Lewes Prison, is reported as saying: “It is extraordinary the number of prisoners who do not want to go out again because they have not a happy home to go to.” (Daily Express, 25/3/55). One is reminded of a scene from the film “Modern Times.” Chaplin, because of his part in stopping a jail break, has been given preferential treatment. The prison is visited by a sanctimonious parson and his wife, after the parson and the governor have discussed Charlie’s record. The Governor informs Charlie that he is now a free man, but Chaplin pleads to be allowed to stay a bit longer, preferring his life in prison to the dubious joys of his new-found freedom. However, he has to be free, whether he likes it or not, and apparently the same can be said of many of the prisoners from Lewes Prison. What an indictment on present day society, this so-called civilisation gets more like the madhouse every day.

Phil Mellor

Joking Aside (2016)

From the October 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 9 September North Korea carried out yet another nuclear test. The further spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable while capitalism lasts.

It is now ten years ago that North Korea joined an exclusive octet of the US, Russia, Britain, France, China, Pakistan, India and Israel when it detonated a nuclear device which its neighbour South Korea recorded at 3.6 on the Richter scale. The group’s leader, a serial hypocrite and liar, responded immediately, with the White House braying: ‘an explosion would constitute a provocative act in defiance of the will of the international community’. The ‘international community’, being the name of the group, is very protective of their instruments, and the music they play, and new players can expect a discordant welcome. Thus the White House expected one its groupies, the UN Security Council, to ‘take immediate actions to respond to this unprovoked act’ (Guardian, 9 October 2006). Exclusion from the group meant North Korea was now a soloist intent on further developing its instrument. The leader of the group though felt reasonably secure as North Korea didn’t possess a nuclear warhead small enough to be mounted on a long range rocket, and thus capable of devastating targets as far away as the United States.

North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and by association the country he rules over are often depicted as comical, something we can safely laugh at, and thus swiftly dismiss. Two years after Kim Jong-un assumed supreme leadership of his country the 2014 film ‘The Interview’ was Hollywood’s shot at lampooning him that ends happily with a rescue for the movie's hero, a US talk show host, by an American Seals unit and a de-nuclearised North Korea advancing towards the American model of democracy. The trio of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao whose state policies were directly responsible for the murder of tens of millions of people were also early targets for satirists. Charlie Chaplin, who lampooned Hitler in the 1940 movie ‘The Great Dictator’ said later: ‘that had he known the true extent of Nazi atrocities, he could not have made fun of their homicidal insanity’.

Is it insanity – or just normality?  Killing people is big business. Developing and manufacturing weapons to kill is an everyday activity under capitalism.  Using them likewise. Whether it’s the evil dictator or the conventional elected leader neither has had any qualms about unleashing ‘blitzkrieg’ or ‘shock and awe’ or any of its deadly ilk when the circumstances demand it. Mass murder is ingrained in the social system as is the means to deliver it. North Korea’s own key arms dealer is the innocuously named Korea Mining and Development Agency (KOMID), and their military has its own little weapons enterprise called Hap Heng known to have provided missiles and nuclear technology to Pakistan and Iran. Syria has bought North Korean anti-tank guided missiles and KOMID has also been responsible for the sale of equipment, including missile technologies, gunboats, and multiple rocket artilleries, worth a total of over $100 million, to Africa, South America, and the Middle East’ (wikipedia).   North Korea doesn’t make it into the Top Twenty of arms dealing countries, but it probably rates highly in the Top Ten of international smugglers of nuclear and ballistic missile technology. Business as usual – just by other means.

The hydrogen bomb is the biggy. You can do a whole lot of killing with just one of these. Consequently all leaders desire one. Kim Jong-un is no exception. On 6 January, following on from three previous smaller nuclear tests, his dream may have become a reality. At the underground Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Site a detonation was carried out that the United States Geological Service measured as a 5.1 magnitude earthquake. The  South Korean government  played down North Korea’s declaration that it was a hydrogen bomb –unsurprisingly –because a back of an envelope estimate was that the ‘impact of such a weapon ‘detonated 1,000 meters over downtown Seoul would produce 78,000 fatalities and somewhere around 270,000 estimated injuries’. US ‘experts’ including those in the White House agreed with the South Korean scepticism.  However John Carlson, ‘a member of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission and former head of the Australian Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office declared that previous North Korean tests were purely a primary stage, that is, a nuclear explosion, 'and fairly low yield at that'. However, in the case of this test, he added that 'if it’s true, it means they have made something  smaller scale, capable of being put on to a missile' and that North Korea would be aiming to develop a weapon 'small enough and light enough to put on to a missile, and the usual parameters are something less than one meter in diameter, and less than a tonne in weight’ (wikipedia).

On 24 August Reuters ran the headline ‘North Korea fires submarine-launched ballistic missile towards Japan’.  The Daily Telegraph reported that ‘the launch of the missile, which the US Strategic Command believes was a nuclear-capable KN-11 Nodong-D, came less than 48 hours after Pyongyang threatened to carry out a 'pre-emptive nuclear strike ' unless South Korea and the US cancelled joint military exercises’. The Japanese response to the launch came from the its Prime Minister Abe: ‘It is the first time that an SLBM (submarine-launched ballistic missile) has fallen inside Japan's air defence identification zone. . . It is a grave threat to Japan's security and an unforgivable threat to regional stability and peace’.  It’s believed that this successful test firing followed two recent failed ones.

A South Korean military official told Reuters: ‘North Korea's SLBM technology appears to have progressed' and ‘South Korea believes the North has a fleet of more than 70 ageing, limited-range submarines. . . Acquiring a fleet of submarines large and quiet enough and with a longer range would be a next step for the North’. Moon Keun-sik, a retired South Korean navy officer and an expert in submarine warfare added: ‘they keep conducting nuclear tests and SLBMs together which means they are showing they can arm SLBMs with miniaturised nuclear warheads.'  The Telegraph also printed a quote from those that wield the biggest stick: ‘The US Strategic Command issued a statement in which it said the launch posed no threat to North America, but added that US forces remain vigilant in the face of North Korean provocations’.

As yet the US mainland isn’t under threat. But the empire’s tentacles encompass the planet and ten years of North Korean weapons development is reaching a crescendo. We have lived under the threat of nuclear war since Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Pundits who tell us a nuclear attack will never happen forget that it already has. Other experts tell us it’s just around the corner. An insider, Robert McNamara, who worked as Defense Secretary for capitalism’s pin up boy, President Kennedy, during the Cuban missile crisis revealed how close we came to nuclear war when he ‘wondered aloud whether he 'would live to see another Saturday night,' and later recognised that 'we lucked out' – barely’(tomdispatch.com).

Art Buchwald reflected that ‘you can’t make anything up any more. The world itself is a satire’. Henry Kissinger, Yasser Arafat, and Barrack Obama winning Nobel Peace prizes wasn’t a comic invention unlike Kim Jong-un’s treatment in The Interview. Nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them aren’t a joke. Neither are Kim Jong-un and the elite that rule North Korea.  

Andy Matthews

Recent Times (2015)

Book Review from the October 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Charlie Chaplin', by Peter Ackroyd. Vintage £7.99.

Charlie Chaplin was born in a South London slum in 1889. His childhood was extremely impoverished, including spells in a workhouse, and his first show-business job was as a clog dancer at the age of nine. He became an actor and stage performer, joined Fred Karno’s company and travelled to the US, where he made his first film in 1914. He survived the birth of talkies and became a director and independent film-maker. Already by 1915, according to Ackroyd, he was the most famous man in the world.

Chaplin was best known for his screen persona as the Tramp, the ‘little fellow’ who became a kind of universal symbol of failure and hopelessness. Some of his films were overtly political, such as The Great Dictator (1940), where he played Adenoid Hynkel. This applied in particular to Modern Times (1936), about factory life and the repetitive and dehumanising nature of the production line.

In the First World War, he decided to stay in the US rather than return to the UK and risk being conscripted; people sent him envelopes with white feathers in, and some British cinemas stopped showing his films. During the Second World War, he made remarks supporting the ‘Soviet Union’ as a wartime ally, and also expressed some admiration for Stalin. Together with the implied message of Modern Times, this led in the late 1940s to trouble with the House Un-American Activities Committee. Some thought it suspicious that he had lived in the US for thirty years without becoming a US citizen, and in 1952, as he and his family sailed to Britain, his permit to re-enter the US was withdrawn (though he was later allowed to visit). For some discussion of his political views, see www.cartoonresearch.com/gerstein/chaplin/commie.html.

Ackroyd describes Chaplin as ‘a libertarian with tendencies towards anarchism’. But this is hardly compatible with his authoritarian approach to directing, his support for President Roosevelt, and his chauvinistic attitude to women. He also accepted a knighthood and was very concerned to protect his US-based property and investments. Though he was hardly consistent, he is perhaps best seen as someone who, looking back at his impoverished childhood, identified with the poor and downtrodden, but had no ideas about restructuring or even reforming society. Claims about him being a ‘Communist’ say more about the hysteria prevalent in some circles in the US than about Chaplin himself.  

Paul Bennett