Our radical history (2001)

Book Review from the November 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Zinn on History by Howard Zinn, Seven Stories Press, New York, 2001.

Readers may be familiar with the work of the radical American historian and activist, Howard Zinn. It includes the witty, humane play Marx in Soho, as well as his magnificent Peoples Histories, of the United States and the twentieth century. During the Vietnam War it was Zinn, together with Noam Chomsky, who helped copy, smuggle out and then edit and publish the Pentagon Papers, official documents that illustrated the full and savage involvement of the American ruling class in the appalling invasion and destruction of South-East Asia.

This current volume is a collection of Zinn’s essays that date from the mid-sixties to last year, and concern themselves with broadly historical themes—sketches of individuals, tales of action, meditations on the role of the academic and history in general, on Marx and “Marxism”.

This sense of history shines through in his essay on the Seattle protests. Zinn welcomes the shift away from the single issue campaigns that characterised much of left-wing US protest in the eighties and nineties, and a growing targeting of capitalism itself. He reminds readers of North America’s rich (and sometimes overlooked) history of class resistance and militancy. Seattle was the stage for a general strike in 1919 of some 35,000 dock workers. Moreover, the area was often deeply militant, with the “Wobblies” (the anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World) strong and much anti-war agitation against US involvement in World War I. So often today’s anti-capitalist protestors are ignorant of this legacy; Zinn’s work is going some way to remedying this.

Socialists will, I think be most interested on his thoughts about Marx and his ideas. Zinn, like Marx before him declares “je ne suis pas marxiste!” (“I am not a Marxist!”). The present reviewer feels the same. Marx’s turn of wit was, on this occasion given to one Pieper, a young German sychopant (or “nudnik”, as Zinn calls him in wonderfully colourful Yiddish)¸ a self-styled “Marxist”, who was attempting to get Marx to attend his Karl Marx society. Zinn, in quoting Marx’s weary and witty reply is saying that we ought to reflect on what is relevant and alive in Marx’s writings, rather than turning them into sterile dogma.

Marx wasn’t just a scholar, but an activist and commentator on the world he often painfully lived in. Zinn points readers to the Theses on Feurbach and the 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. These are not “early” or “immature” works, he says, but rather rich in insights that are still as profoundly relevant as when they were written. The alienation and exploitation produced under capitalism are appalling; “It [The 1844 Manuscript] simply stated (but did not state simply) that the capitalist system violates whatever it means to be human”. To overcome this alienation a complete change—indeed , a transcendence—of capitalist society’s social, economic and political relationships is required. Zinn reminds us of Marx’s hostility towards nationalism, and points out that he would have been horrified by the so-called “socialist” societies that Stalinism created. Marx instead lauded the 1871 Paris Commune with its direct democracy, egalitarianism, levelling of wages and abolition of the guillotine as his idea of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, as he called the political transition to a socialist society.

The rest of the book is devoted to accounts of Zinn’s own activism, mainly against the war in Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement. One of the best essays is on the Freedom Schools in Mississippi the free, egalitarian summer schools for poor blacks that Zinn and others set up in 1964, often at risk of injury and death. Zinn reminds us that “education is not just a tool of indoctrination, but a powerful tool of emancipation as well.

I can’t pretend to agree with Zinn all the time; yes, some of Marx’s economics is dense and difficult, but an understanding of surplus value and commodity production is vital to understanding capitalism. Zinn is also too often prone to supporting reformism on grounds of “pragmatism”, provision of public healthcare in the US being a case in point. However, given where he comes from and the generation he belongs to, it is at least understandable. “Human beings make history, but not always in circumstances of their own choosing,” as Uncle Charlie was fond of saying. Given all the history out there being written by bourgeois apologists, plodding careerist empiricists, dull local-fixated antiquarians and childish, pretentious postmodernists, we need more radical historians like Howard Zinn. A touching and worthwhile collection; read it and start reading and researching your own radical history.

Rob Worden

Blogger's Note:

Zinn's famous essay,  'Je Ne Suis Pas Marxiste',  is available on the blog.

Letter: Civil Rights Movement (2010)

Letter to the Editors from the August 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Civil Rights Movement

Dear editors

In the March issue, Andrew Armitage described the Civil Rights Movement (CrM) in the US as a “good cause” (in quotation marks). In the June issue, Roy Beat called this attitude “sectarian” because the CrM was “more than just a good cause”. Andrew Armitage responded in July that “socialists recognize the serious limitations” of the CrM in “at best only aspiring to parity” with white workers.

In the decades between reconstruction and the CrM black people in the South were helpless in the face of constant humiliation and terror. Any who might have taken an interest in revolutionary ideas would have been tarred and feathered or lynched as “uppity niggers”. So the “limitations” of the CrM were real but could hardly have been avoided.

This exemplifies the point that 

the struggle for democratic rights 

is an essential precondition of the struggle for socialism. In broad historical perspective, they are two stages in a single struggle for social equality. From this point of view, 

it is indeed sectarian to belittle the progress achieved by the Civil Rights Movement.

Stephen Shenfield, USA

News in Review: Unions to heel (1965)

The News in Review column from the May 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Unions to heel

The time when the Attlee government were in office was the heyday of the unofficial strike. The reason was that very often an unofficial action was the only method of pushing a wage claim; whatever the official union leaders were compelled to do at the negotiating table, in public many of them championed the wage-restraint policy of the Labour government.

Since then, times have not been so good for the wildcat striker. The official strike has come back into respectability.

The Wilson government did not find the unions so docile. On the very night of Labour’s victory last October, TUC General Secretary George Woodcock made it plain that he still thought the unions’ first job was to stand out for their members’ interests, independent if need be from government policy.

But it was predictable that some union leaders should decide that, simply because Labour is in power, the economic fortunes of the employers should come first.

Last March Mr. John Boyd, who is on the executive of both the Amalgamated Engineering Union and the Labour Party, appealed to the annual women’s conference of his union for “. . . sympathetic understanding, co-operation, discipline and restraint . . ."

The moderates have an even more impressive convert. Mr. Ted Hill of the Boilermakers, who was once the enfant terrible of the unions’ left wing, wrote in his union journal last January that unions should help the TUC to reduce strikes and restrictive practices: "If there is likely to be a demarcation dispute, submit the matter to arbitration . . . if there is likely to be a strike, take the matter through procedure before taking strike action.”

Are the unions, then, tamed? Will they give up the struggle for better wages and conditions? On the contrary, the pressures of capitalism will themselves show up the words of men like Boyd and Hill for the wishful thinking that they are. For example the AEU women, just like the Labour Party women before them, have demanded equal pay. All the time, the more usual type of wage claim is coming in, as inevitable as tomorrow's dawn.

This is not surprising. During Labour's first three months of office the Official Index Retail Prices which, whatever, its deficiencies is some sort of guide in these matters, rose by about one and a half per cent. This means that the buying power of the pound, taken as twenty shillings when Labour came into office, had fallen to 19s. 8d. by last January.

The working class cannot afford to ignore such factors as this. Rising prices mean a decline in living standards, unless they are balanced out by a rise in wages. Apart from that, there are other things which ensure that the working class will carry on the struggle to improve their wages and working conditions.

This is an inevitable by product of the basic employer/employee relationship of capitalism, which as long as it lasts will always produce strikes and other disputes.

This situation will not be abolished, nor even changed, by speeches and resolutions, nor by the breathtaking manoeuvres of union leaders who are left wing firebrands when the Tories are in office and who disappoint their deluded followers by becoming staid right wingers when Labour takes over.

Art, for whose sake?

An essential part of the popular British conception of an American millionaire is that he is a vulgar Philistine who yet likes to flaunt his wealth by buying up famous works of art which mean nothing to him.

It follows from this that, whenever a rich American buys a famous picture, or piece of sculpture, over here, and wants to take it back home, there are protests on all sides.

This is what happened when Mr. Norton Simon bought Rembrandt's picture of his son, Titus, at Christie's. The protests were all the stronger because Mr. Simon appeared to have put in his successful bid after the auctioneer's hammer had come down for the last time.

The press reports of what they called this “dramatic” incident inspired many workers whose usual experience of artistic enjoyment is confined to studying the Maidenform Bra adverts on the Underground to assume a sudden knowledge of the intricacies of top rank auctions.

Everyone seemed to be agreed that it would be a calamity if Titus left this country. In some ways it was reminiscent of the hooha over da Vinci's Madonna and Child; there were attempts to stop the Board of Trade granting an export licence for Titus, appeals to the Chancellor of the Exchequer to provide for repurchasing the picture in his Budget, schemes to raise the £798,000 needed to buy it back. A simple soul would have assumed from this that Titus was a British picture, and that there had been long queues of art-hungry people to view it. In fact Rembrandt was, of course, a Dutchman, which, on the protestors’ own arguments, means that the Dutch are the only people who have a right to be annoyed about the affair.

Then again, the picture had not been open to public viewing but had been part of a rich Englishman’s collection in the Channel Islands. (Were the Dutch annoyed when Titus was originally bought out of Holland?)

Nationalism is never logical, but it is blatantly stupid when it works up its ire over the artistic products of another country.

Most of the people who were indignant over the Rembrandt picture can never have come remotely near to seeing it when it was in the Cooks’ private collection. At any rate, Mr. Simon intended it for wider enjoyment than that; he planned to show it at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Indignation would be better directed against a social system in which works of art can be bought and sold, and bargained for, and be the subject of nationalistic emotions. Rembrandt, who died in neglected squalor, might have been bitterly amused by it all.

Gas in Vietnam

The world has never recovered from the shock of the first gas attacks on the Western Front in 1915, and the sense of shock has been in no way lessened by the knowledge that there were many other horrors borne of that war.

Why the shock should have been so intense and so long-lasting has never been adequately explained. It persists today, although there is no gas which inflicts a worse death than napalm, or the fringes of a nuclear flash, or indeed many other of the ghastly machines which capitalism has invented and developed to a high degree of efficiency to prosecute its wars.

Poison gas is outlawed by what are called the international rules of war something which, although it allows all manner of horrors to flourish uncondemned, seems to convince many people that war is really a comfortable, humane occupation for gentlemen.

It was this combination of fear and hypocrisy which caused the storm over the American gas attacks in Vietnam. The United States government protested that they would not dream of using such barbaric methods of warfare (at the time they were busily dropping napalm bombs) and that the gas was really harmless stuff which any government might use against strikers or demonstrators.

The only comment to make on this is that it may be true. And then again it may not. No government—especially one which has such widespread interests and involvements as Washington—thinks twice about lying when it suits its purpose, and purposes are particularly open to being suited in wartime.

Gas warfare has one great thing to commend it to the designers of capitalism’s war machine. It destroys human beings but it does not damage property. The only snag, from their point of view, is that ways of delivering the stuff have to be found, and that these will he attacked by the other side with all the old methods of destruction—high explosives, incendiaries, nuclear missiles—which means that property is going to suffer after all.

There is no way out of it. War is not going to become a humane business. Even a comparatively small affair like the struggle in Vietnam can call into use some ghastly methods of dealing out death and destruction.

It is futile to expect capitalism to take a step backwards and humanise its wars—futile to expect a great power to throw away powerful, and possibly dominating, weapons. The people who have protested over the use of gas in Vietnam—many of them are the usual weary crowd of “Progressives’’—are once more turning their backs on the facts of capitalist life.

This js a dangerous habit. Capitalism has a way of making us face facts—and plenty of equipment with which to do it.

The Budget

Budget Day is usually the occasion for a certain amount of clowning about on the part of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Some of this is undoubtedly stimulated by the newspapers’ anxiety to unearth what they call a human story behind the impersonally vast amounts of money with which the Chancellor juggles.

Thus there was Mr. Heathcoat Amory feeding the birds on his window sill. There was Mr. Maudling’s comely young daughter suddenly bursting to fame as a film starlet after the press had discovered her. And this year there was Mr. Callaghan’s new dispatch box—symbolising, he promised us, a new era in the Treasury.

After this it came as no surprise when the Chancellor chose the old faithfuls of tobacco and alcohol to bear increased taxes. These are two of the fields where government control has established near-monopoly conditions, which enables prices to be high enough for the State to skim off a nice, creamy dollop of tax.

Many of the Budget's extra imposts were widely forecast by the financial journalists. These “experts” get their living by discussing the effects which the government's financial policies are supposed to have on the British economy. But while they predict in one breath that a certain tax will operate in a certain way, they have to admit in the next that the whole thing is unpredictable.

For example, Alan Day in The Observer:

. . . very large tax increases . . . are needed if the Government wants both to slow down inflation and to keep up a more reasonable pace of expansion of output

And in the same article:

The authors of last week’s Economic Report were clearly bewildered by the task even of explaining what happened last year . . . Any judgement about this year's developments must involve a high degree of uncertainty.

For example, Richard Fry in The Guardian:

. . . the Chancellor must devise his tax claims so that the total effect will have just the right impact on demand, production, and employment over the coming year. That is always a delicate and chancy operation and it will be harder than usual this year.

This confusion persists, even after the Budget is out Mr. Callaghan himself, in a television interview, admitted that he was not sure what the result of his Budget would be and that he could only hope his sums and forecasts would turn out right Nobody pointed out the obvious, that capitalism is a chaotic social system which cannot be planned or budgeted or controlled.

Workers, also, are confused by Budgets. They are convinced that what the Chancellor decides will have a significant effect on their livelihoods. In fact, with or without tax, everyone who has to work for a living gets a wage which is generally enough to reproduce their working energies and abilities.

Taxation is really a concern of the capitalist class. They are the class who need the vast State machine, the armed forces and their costly weapons. It is in their interests that State medical and social services are run. They are the only class who can afford to bear the immense tax burden.

These facts are not generally accepted. Budgets are excellent subjects for the customary political shadow-boxing between the Labour and Conservative parties, and this year’s was no exception. But no Budget has ever had more than a negligible effect upon the lives of the mass of the people. Their poverty and problems have deeper roots.

It is unfortunate, to say the least, that most workers ignore this, preferring to spend their time grumbling about a few pennies on or off beer, fags and the other consolations of their drab existence.

Ku-Klux-Klan

One of the results of the much-publicised Civil Rights activities in Selma, Alabama, and the murder of a white woman civil rights worker, has been to focus attention on that grotesque body the Ku-Klux-Klan.

The excesses of this gang of bigots and racketeers are too well known to need repeating, but they are probably nearing the end of the road. A mere shadow of their former selves, although still a murderous shadow, President Johnson’s violent attack on them, and the Congressional Committee of Investigation, that looks as if it means business, will probably finish them off.

After all, a powerful modern state like the U.S.A. cannot tolerate an Invisible Empire within its boundaries, that defies its laws and holds it up to contempt.

Perhaps just as important, this is a world in which a large number of independent states with predominately coloured populations exist, and are growing in importance. These have economic, political and military value to the United States, particularly as other powerful States are looking for opportunities to muscle in. American Capitalists do not want visiting diplomats or businessmen to be insulted or threatened because of their skin colour.

The Ku-Klux-Klan, with its lunatic mumbo-jumbo, with its Imperial Wizards, Exalted Cyclops, Klokards, Klokams and Nighthawks, to quote just a few, its passwords, bloodoaths and burning crosses, sound like an exaggerated form of such harmless but futile organisations as the Freemasons and the Buffalo’s.

Except that its purpose is terrorism. It is amazing that anyone should take it seriously, but the grim fact is that in its hey-day its membership ran into millions. Its childish costumes and antics make it sound like a schoolboy game or a joke, but it was no joke to the victims of its obscene brutality.

Based on an organisation that arose in the bitter aftermath of the American Civil War, and which flourished for only about three years during the Reconstruction period before being disbanded, the KKK was resurrected in the early years of this century.

Anti; foreigners, Jews. Catholics and Negroes, it appealed to the worst prejudices and the ignorance of the American working class. From time to time it has ridden on waves of hysteria to national importance, but most of the time its power has been more local. In the I930's it added Communists and “labour agitators” to its list of victims.

The progress of the Klan has been marked by a trail of misery. Murder, mutilation, flogging and branding have been amongst its methods, and although its end is probably in sight, as the time-bombs of Alabama show, it looks like making a bloody exit.

Letter: Pete Seeger again (2010)

Letter to the Editors from the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pete Seeger again

Dear Editors

For a nonagenarian, Pete Seeger sure possesses some staying power. First Roy Beat and now Stephen Shenfield (June and August issues) have gone into print, both missing the main thrust of the March article. Instead, they laser-in on my flippant swipe at the Left’s perennial practice of hijacking every convenient bandwaggon –”good cause” – to promote itself.

In no way was I “dismissing” or “belittling” the Civil Rights Movement as they suggest; merely noting its inbuilt shortcomings. A southern negro could, of course, be summarily lynched for much less than displaying revolutionary tendencies; a reluctance to step into the gutter or an admiring glance (“rape”) sufficing.

All of us abhor Capitalism’s myriad injustices and obscenities but recognise that the solution begins with a rational understanding of the root causes rather than an emotional piecemeal assault on their effects. Is this “Sectarian”? Having pored long and hard over my dictionary, I can only conclude that in commonsense everyday terms it’s nothing of the sort. Personally I’m happier with “Socialist”.

Andrew Armitage

News in Review: Birmingham, Alabama (1963)

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

Birmingham, Alabama

Alabama had to have its turn, sooner or later. Now that it has come, ignorance and violence seem to be taking command.

Ignorance because the ugly scenes in Birmingham have been caused by the assertion of the simple fact that differing skin colours is no reason why people should not share buses, restaurants, schools, and so on.

Violence because we live in a violent world, in which an indefensible idea can often be asserted by the breaking of heads—and worse.

And, as far as racial theories go, Alabama is the very pit of ignorance. That is the one state to have held out completely against the federally decreed desegregation of schools. That is the state where they still salute the Confederate flag, where they wish that the Civil War was being fought all over again. That is the state described by Attorney-General Robert Kennedy as like a foreign country.

It is no surprise that the Negroes have developed their own counterpart of Southern repression. The Black Muslims talk in the same terms as the most extreme segregationists, except that their policy is for black people to discriminate against white. Once again, the inevitable result of ignorance and violence has been to breed yet more of its kind. 

Is there no glimmer of hope? As American industry expands into Dixieland, it takes with it no nonsense about segregation. It wants to exploit them all, white and black.

This development is likely to give the Negroes the weapon they lack at the moment—the vote. When they have that (as President Kennedy acknowledged so blatantly in his 1960 campaign) they will be a political factor to reckon with. We shall probably see a lot of Southern Congressmen hurriedly changing their tune.

That still seems a long way off. At the moment the South presents a doleful picture, especially for Socialists, who know that the future of the world depends upon how long it takes the international working class to throw off its manifold ignorances and to unite for the establishment of a sane, humane society.

Spies for peace

It is in the nature of the misuse of words which characterises capitalist organisations that the Spies for Peace were not spying and that they were doing nothing for peace.

The existence of the Regional Seats of Government was a very loosely kept secret, one which was divulged to plenty of everyday Civil Defence volunteers. In any case, anyone who was not actually in the know need not have been a Sherlock Holmes to have deduced that such places existed. The capitalist class will obviously make their preparations to re-establish the government of property society after a nuclear holocaust.

What will the Spies for Peace achieve? They are unlikely to get hold of any secrets which really matter to British capitalism. If they do, it will hardly safeguard peace to reveal them to other capitalist powers, who will doubtless use them to bolster their own military machines.

All that the Spies can do for themselves is to fall foul of the law (which they all, by implication, support) and to stir up the irritation of the masses of workers who so ardently defend their masters' interests.

And when we have said that we are only just beginning.

What is so wearying about the Spies for Peace—and about the Committee of 100, and the March Must Decide brigade, and the CND itself—is that they are yet another group who steadfastly ignore the obvious.

Wars, and their weapons, are part of capitalist society. The only way to abolish all of them is to get rid of capitalism. Some unilateralists, in fact, would say that they agree with this.

Nevertheless, they continue with their antics and as each of the stunts fails to have any effect upon the build up of the world’s nuclear arsenals they carry on to other, sometimes sillier, escapades.

Anything, in fact, rather than work for Socialism.

As we said, it is very wearying.

Hunger and profit

We are now, in case you have not had a collecting box stuck under your nose, or have missed the big spread adverts, in the middle of another campaign, the Freedom from Hunger Campaign.

Hunger is certainly a massive, depressing problem. The third World Food Survey, published last April by the F.A.O., reported that between ten and fifteen per cent. of the world’s population is undernourished and up to one-half suffer from hunger or malnutrition. There are plenty of other eminently quotable statistics which all add up to the fact that a large chunk of the people on the earth simply do not get enough to eat.

Some people regard this as a problem of overpopulation, of the world’s resources being outstripped by human breeding powers. Others think that it is a problem of getting enough money to send a tractor here, or a shipload of fertiliser there. In fact, this is only playing with the problem.

Capitalism is the barrier between man and the solution of hunger. The physical difficulties of society will never be tackled sensibly as long as capitalism lasts. Take, for example, the case of the Dutch milk. Reported The Sunday Telegraph on May 12th last:

A plan to fine farmers who produce too much milk is being considered in Holland by Mr. V. G. M. Marynen, Minister of Agriculture.

The object is to cut production by four per cent. The scheme has been agreed with provisionally by the farmers and workers unions.

Mr. B. Van Dam, director of the Netherlands Milk Marketing Board, said: “ The time has come to set a new course for our milk producers. It is no use going on increasing production in view of the present state of the market.”

It is typical of the enduring stupidities of property society that millions of people starve in one part of the world while in another people are penalised for producing food. For capitalism, human suffering does not matter; the "state of the market” is what brings in the dividend cheques, and so that is what counts.

The Freedom from Hunger Campaign has recruited a great many sincere helpers. This sort of campaign usually does. The deeper their sincerity, the greater the tragedy that their efforts are always so wide of the mark.

The Labour Party itching for power

The Labour Party, itching for power, is like a man listening to the last few football results with seven draws on his pools coupon.

They suffer. They perspire. They are fearful lest a wrong word should shatter their glorious dream.

That was why the Labour Party was so worried about the railway strike which never got started. Perhaps the strike was something of a forlorn hope. But, after all, strikes are the only weapon workers have in their disputes with their employers.

The Labour Party, let it be recorded, did not oppose the strike for any reason connected with the welfare of the railway workers. They opposed it because they judged that it may have damaged their chance of winning the next election; it might have upset their Treble Chance. For Labour, as for other capitalist parties, votes are tremendously important.

Mr. Wilson is doing his best to gather as many of them as he can. He celebrated May Day, for example, by propounding a plan to “. . . make a reality of the Commonwealth . . .” (although there was nothing very new in what he said—just some more mucking about with Imperial Preferences).

He also threw in his now customary make weight about the Labour Party not being prepared to see Britain as a second rate power.

Now all this may have been palatable to retired colonels in Bournemouth and to the floating, drifting voters whom the Labour Party has wooed so coyly for so long. But it has absolutely nothing to do with the Socialism which Mr. Wilson protests he stands for, nor with the working class interests he professes to defend.

There must still be some members of the Labour Party who can remember the days when strikers were people to support and when patriotism was something of a dirty word. What do they think of their party, as they watch it take its inevitable path to the status of a fully fledged party of capitalism, with power as the one and only object of its miserable life?

Education and the Southern Negro (1956)

From the November 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some parts of the Southern States of America have recently been the scenes of intense anti-negro mob violence. This violence was part of resistance to the attempts by the American Government to integrate negro and white school children within the American system of education. One of the reasons given why the negro should be rejected is that he is “biologically inferior" to the white, and that integration of negro and white will ultimately create a general lowering of human standards, both biologically and socially. We of the Socialist Party do not accept these vicious assumptions. The question important to us is this: What is it about the biological make-up of the various branches of the human family that prevent it from living together in a universal harmony of mutual co-operation? The answer is nothing, and this is the principle that is a guide to Socialists on this issue.

It is now a little over two years since, in 1954, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the segregation of negro and white students, within the American educational system, was unconstitutional. It is little over a year since the High Court ordered Federal District Judges to enforce this ruling “. . . with all deliberate speed." The Atlantic Edition of the New York Sunday Times (9th September) gives a State by State account of what has been accomplished toward the integration end since these decisions were made. Its message to those who claim such integration as an ideal, particularly when dealing with the States of “ the deep south," is grim.

“Virginia.—There has been no integration in the State’s public, elementary or high schools, nor is there likely to be any this year."

"North Carolina.—No negroes have entered the high or elementary schools of North Carolina.” 

“Georgia.—Relying upon legal safeguards enacted prior to and after the U.S. Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in the public schools, Georgians expect to operate their schools on the customary dual basis.”

“Florida.—In Florida a record number of students have started back to school—all in completely segregated classrooms—without incident.”

“Alabama.—There is no integration anywhere in Alabama’s public schools, except at the college level”

“Mississippi.—Not a single negro student has been integrated in a white school.”

“Louisiana.—Louisiana begins the school year with segregation still strictly enforced in all elementary and secondary schools.”

In all these States, which include a total of 1,900,000 negro school children, resistance to integration is being organized at the highest civic levels.

In Texas, Arkansas, Delaware, Oklahoma, Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee, with a total of 550,000 negro school children a very casual interpretation has been placed on the directive “. . . all deliberate speed,” although some measure of integration has been achieved. In no sense is the principle of integration completely accepted by appropriate State Boards of Education.

Border States, such as Columbia, Missouri and Maryland, which contain 250,000 negro school children, whose populations are less than 10 per cent. negro, are steering a definite course in the direction of integration. In a word, action on the Supreme Court’s ruling, for the majority of America’s southern States, is being resisted in one way or another.

Both negroes and whites have founded organizations to protect what they think are their best interests. Negroes have founded the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured Peoples, and throughout the south this organization has attempted, by court order of Federal law, to enforce the ruling. On the other side of the tragic rift the White Citizen’s Councils exist solely as anti-negro bodies. Their doctrine is an irrational horror of “Jim Crow.” Their hopes and desires probably amount to nothing more than the realisation of the sentiments expressed in the corrupt version of the song sung to the tune of John Brown’s Body, “we’re gonna hang a nigger from a sour apple tree.” At all events, he should certainly be kept in his place.

This September began the new school term. In some border States of the south, where integration has been partial, some ambitious negro mothers packed their children off to schools which had formerly been exclusively white, and so were produced some explosive, very ugly situations. Clinton, Sturgis, Oliver Springs, Clay, and Mansfield were towns that received much publicity as scenes of mob violence.

Sturgis is a mining community of 2,500 in Kentucky. On Wednesday, the 5th September, nine negro students tried to register at the local high school. They were confronted by an angry mob. The New York Sunday Times (9th September) reported: “That night four units of the Kentucky National Guard moved into town: next day the guardsmen escorted the negro youths to school. A crowd of five hundred townspeople yelling for "nigger blood," tried to break through the ring of troops . . . As the negro youths left school Thursday the mob shouted: “We'll get you niggers if it takes all year." Friday the negroes did not go to school—several reported their parents had been threatened with loss of jobs unless they stayed home . . . But all across the south last week there were sporadic outbreaks—every day new demonstrations against desegregation were staged, and every night, in front of some southern schools, a cross was burned."

What are the motives behind the 1954 Supreme Court decision? In 1950, when President Eisenhower was president of Columbia University, he commissioned an enquiry into manpower wastage. The report of this enquiry was published in a book written by Dr. Eli Ginzberg, director of the enquiry, entitled “The Negro Potential." Reporting the results of this enquiry under file title “Waste of Human Resources," The Manchester Guardian (15th May, 1955) said: “America’s 15,000,000 negroes are its single most under developed human resource, and they cannot reach their full potential usefulness until they are thoroughly integrated with the white population . . . The report said that if education for negroes was raised to the level of that now available for whites, the annual rate of negro high school and college graduates would be more than doubled . . .  It said that file record of negro troops in the war (1939-45) was less good than that of white troops. It attributed the difference to the handicaps brought from civilian life by the negro soldiers and the fact that they were segregated. It said that records of Korea, where negroes were integrated, showed a marked improvement." Quoting the report itself, The Manchester Guardian further said: “Only when negro and white families can live together as neighbours, when negro children and white children can play together, study together, go to the same church—only then will the negro grow up properly prepared for his place in the world of work” (Our italics.)

The results of this enquiry, which are bound to have influenced the thinking of men in high administrative positions, should be noted in conjunction with other facts. The conference of Southern Governors held in Alabama in 1955, was told that in 1900 the south had only 9 per cent. of the nation’s manufacturing facilities; now it has 25 per cent. In 1939 the south’s industrial output amounted to 11,000 million dollars; in 1955 it reached 60,000 million dollars. In the next ten years the south expects to build 10,000 new factories

What does all this mean?' It means that in conditions of general boom, when the southern States are expanding their industries fairly rapidly, because of prejudice and segregation, the southern negro lacks the modern cultural equipment necessary to his efficiency as an American wage worker. It means that the vast mass of human material in the shape of the southern negro is not being exploited to its full capacity. The issue is not one involving any “forces of progress,” and the New York Sunday Times (9th September) will only assist confusion when it claims that the issue is “the right to learn." The real issue is that Capitalism, in its further development, in its further consolidation, is being fettered by the prejudices of local southern opinion.

What then is the role being played by the pro-integrationists and reformists in the south? The end to which they work is the integration and consolidation of the American working class as a stereotyped, regularised social grouping, efficient to the highest degree, regardless of colour, creed or clan. They seek to make all American workers the mass products themselves of a mass production technique, known as the American education system. This education is the cultural priming that the mentality of the modern wage worker presupposes. It is geared to the demands of industry. It accomplishes much more than a working knowledge of the three r’s. It cultivates a nationalist sentiment, it inculcates the values and moral concepts that provide the solid ideological pillars supporting modern propertied society.

The word integration, within the context of this problem, is used narrowly to mean negro school children receiving the same education as white children within the same classroom. This may or may not be accomplished. What is certain is that capitalism cannot contain any truly integrative principle. Capitalism of necessity sets man against man in one way or another. Even if negro children did receive the same schooling as white children, it still would not make the process of education integrative, for the education system constantly selects and excludes. Its streams and channels are selective, and its examinations are designed to exclude rather than incorporate. The education that a child receives marks his handicap or his advantage in the race, which at the lowest level starts out from being a dustman’s son and finishes ideally in being a bank manager, or perhaps even a doctor. But this is “success," and “success” comes only to the few. Education is one of the ladders by which it can be reached. At the bottom of the ladder is the broad thick base of “failures," but with selection and exclusion, the ladder is narrowed down until at its topmost pinnacle we find those for whom initiative was a virtue. They made the grade. The worker is in constant competition with the worker next to him, competing for places to live, competing to get food, competing to get jobs, and competing to hold them. Any truly integrated social situation would have to be outside this narrow individualistic competition. Only the society functioning along lines of mutual co-operation and meeting the real needs of man as a whole can be truly integrative.

One thing surely will frustrate the southern integrationist’s hopes, and that is a slump or a margin of unemployed. With little point in taking up the negro labour .slack, surely the fervour of the Government's bent on educational integration will be cooled, and events have taught us that in such a case we should expect an intensification of race hatred. Such events should teach the white worker that he is a victim not of any “black menace," but a victim of the indiscriminate vicissitudes of a system which is not concerned with his true human needs. The “black menace” problem for the white worker is a myth, just as the hope that educational integration under capitalism will bring the negro worker happiness is also a myth. In fact, with each other’s help, they have a new world to win—Socialism.

P. K. L.

50 Years Ago: Education and the Southern Negro (2006)

The 50 Years Ago column from the November 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some parts of the Southern States of America have recently been the scenes of intense anti-negro mob violence. This violence was part of resistance to the attempts by the American Government to integrate negro and white school children within the American system of education. One of the reasons given why the negro should be rejected is that he is “biologically inferior” to the white, and that integration of negro and white will ultimately create a general lowering of human standards, both biologically and socially. We of the Socialist Party do not accept these vicious assumptions. The question important to us is this: What is it about the biological make-up of the various branches of the human family that prevent it from living together in a universal harmony of mutual co-operation? The answer is nothing, and this is the principle that is a guide to Socialists on this issue ( . . .)

One thing surely will frustrate the southern integrationist’s hopes, and that is a slump or a margin of unemployed. With little point in taking up the negro labour slack, surely the fervour of the Government’s bent on educational integration will be cooled, and events have taught us that in such a case we should expect an intensification of race hatred. Such events should teach the white worker that he is a victim not of any “black menace,” but a victim of the indiscriminate vicissitudes of a system which is not concerned with his true human needs. The “black menace” problem for the white worker is a myth, just as the hope that educational integration under capitalism will bring the negro worker happiness is also a myth. In fact, with each other‘s help, they have a new world to win – Socialism.

(From an article by P. K. L., Socialist Standard, November 1956)

Sheharazad's thousand and second tale or would you let your daughter marry a green hair? (1964)

A Short Story from the November 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Know then, oh glorious king! that in days of yore and in times and tides long since gone there existed a strange and wonderful land known as Vespucci. The inhabitants of that country, as was universally the case even in those days, were divided into rich and poor, but this fact was not that which made Vespucci a strange and wonderful land. There was a different sort of division among the people that cut across economic status and which, confusing as it may seem to us, was the cause of much more confusion than it is easy for us to imagine. For the Vespuccians were also divided according to the colour of their hair.

Not that they had as many divisions as there are colours! No! There were but two general divisions—those with green hair (the minority) and all the others regardless of colour and combination of colour. A Vespuccian might have but a faint tint of green in his hair against a background of any other colour or combination of colours, but the green tinge officially stamped him as a Green Hair. He might have no green hair visible whatsoever yet he was classified as a Green Hair if both or either of his parents were officially Green Hairs. Only if he chose to hide the fact that there were Green Hairs in his background could he pass as a Normal Hair when, of course, the green in his hair was not visible. There were a few of the Green Hairs who disappeared from the census each year but by and large the divisions were constant.

Vespucci was also divided geographically into Upper Vespucci and Lower Vespucci and although there was a common law for all citizens which was inscribed in a book and interpreted, from time to time, by a group of nine old Cadis in the capital city—a town named Dryington— the separate sections of the country also had sectional laws pertaining to Green Hairs, written laws in Lower Vespucci, unwritten laws in Upper Vespucci. In Upper Vespucci the Green Hairs were, for the most part, segregated in housing and schools in a de facto manner while in Lower Vespucci the segregation was maintained as a matter of law. And this arrangement lasted for many generations with segregation carried out fairly generally and even in the armed forces and the prisons.

But certain developments began to take place in the economic life of the nation, developments which caused a great stir throughout the length and breadth of Vespucci. On the one hand a growing number of Green Hairs began to earn more money than had been the case hitherto and, at the same time, to get more education. On the other hand the larger manufacturers and merchants of the land found it expedient to expand into the more backward areas where more underprivileged Green Hairs were to be found and these big moneyed interests felt that a greater degree of stability among the working population (Green Hairs and Normal Hairs alike) was in order.

The wealthy Vespuccians, like the rich of our own times, were altruistic and never had other than the general welfare at heart. And so the group of top-ranking Cadis decreed in their wisdom that the arrangement that had, up until now, been legal was no longer legal and that all Vespuccians regardless of the colour of their hair were equal under the law, the only inequality , henceforth, to be that which is natural and normal and fitting—the inequality caused by the possession or non-possession of money in large quantities.

There was no great rush, however, to obey the new law on the part of the Lower Vespuccians and several years passed with no more than a token breakdown in the segregation pattern and even this in a restricted area of the Lower section. So great discontent became generated among the Green Hairs of Lower Vespucci while, in the other part of the nation, their fellow Green Hairs decided that de facto segregation would also have to go. They felt that their children were getting an unequal education and they resented the social inequality which was their lot despite there being no written laws on the matter in their area. And so they, too, began to demonstrate and to demand rights.

As of now, Your Highness, the affair should not seem to be too confusing. The Green Hairs were discriminated against in every manner and they were organizing to do something about it with the help, let me add hastily, of a number of Normal Hairs. They demonstrated in the streets, they picketed places of employment, they argued with school boards and with politicians, they boycotted stores, and many of them were subjected to various degrees of brutality by the forces of law and order. All of this is understandable. The Green Hairs wanted “Freedom” and they shouted to the rooftops that they wanted it now. But despite the fact that everything seems to have been quite in order, a certain confusion begins to develop in the story and seems to hinge around the meaning of the word Freedom, and also of the word Equality.

The Green Hairs were by no means united in their fight for Civil Rights. There were a number of organizations which represented them and which ran, in attitudes, all the way from conservative advocates of passive resistance—meek and humble followers of Christianity in its meek and humble forms, down through the more militant sects of that Infidel Religion, and even to the followers of the one, true, faith, the Muslims (Green Hair Muslims). And even the chosen of Allah were to become divided on the basis of militancy and action between the followers of the old leader, Mustapha Prophet, and the adherents of a younger and more fiery leader, Roderick Zee. But despite the divisions and differing attitudes there seemed to be one thing in common among the organizations of the Green Hairs and that was their universal agreement in a “practical” interpretation of the meaning of the terms Freedom and Equality. And this will best be explained by recounting the following adventure of a colour-blind Vespuccian who spent much time among the Green Hairs.

Our hero, who we will call Ali McKhan, chanced one day to step into the office of the largest of the Civil Rights groups, the National Brotherhood for the Aid of Green Hairs. He felt impelled to have a look at some of the literature of this organization and he entered into conversation with an official named Emmanuel Prince. “ Right at this moment,” he was told, “ Our main concern is in breaking down discrimination in housing. We are attempting to compel landlords in all neighbourhoods to rent to Green Hairs, and real-estate brokers to sell to them regardless of how snooty the neighbourhood.”—“ Very interesting,” remarked McKhan, “but tell me something. I know a lot of Green Hairs in the Ghetto and I'm certain that most of those I know can't afford to pay the rents in the better neighbourhoods and certainly don't have enough money saved for a down payment on a house in the swank sections. What about them? ”

Prince waved a deprecating hand, “ We can't be concerned with those people. The trouble with a lot of my fellow Green Hairs is that they just don't have the initiative to better themselves. Let them stay where they are.”

“ But,” argued McKhan, “ It is my understanding that there are some new and wonderful machines on the scene today that make it possible to produce an abundance of food, and clothing, and houses, and everything else. Don't you think it would be better if your organization tried to get all Vespuccians, regardless of colour, to see that it is now easy to produce enough for everybody and that something should be done to change the present basis of production for sale — change it to a system where everybody can have free access to their needs? Don't you think that nobody would pay any attention to colour of hair under such conditions? That all Vespuccians would become colour blind? ”

“My dear fellow,” snapped Prince, “ You arc obviously some sort of Red. What we want is freedom and equality. The freedom to rise on the economic ladder and an equal chance with Normal Hairs to compete for his freedom. How can you have freedom if you do away with poverty? And we don't want everyone to become colour-blind. We’re proud of our colour. We are a rich mixture of great ancestors and we have a glorious history. Furthermore, we are loyal Vespuccians and we demand nothing more than our rights under the Constitution of our glorious nation.”

So McKhan sadly bowed his way out and went down the street in the direction of the Green Hairs Freedom Now Society. “They’re a militant bunch, not like that other gang of phonies,” he muttered. But on the way he suddenly noticed a bright sign with a star and crescent over the doorway of a building. He straightened his shoulders and pounded fist in palm. “ The devil with the rest of them. This is the real McKhoy, the headquarters of Roderick Zee, the New Muslim Leader. (The name was formerly Zed, but the new arrangement called for a revolutionary change.) This bunch will really understand what freedom and equality mean.” And he went in.

Fortunately for McKhan, Roderick Zee had overcome the old dislike of being friendly with Normal Hairs and he found the young Green Hair Muslim to be not only enthusiastic but affable. “ \Yes, my friend. What we Green Hairs need in order to attain freedom is a country of our own. We demand that the Vespuccian Government give us an area where we can set up our own government and produce and distribute for ourselves. We want Separation, and we want it now, even if we have to organize rifle clubs among the Green Hairs "

McKhan was dubious about the separation bit and even more dubious about the rifle clubs. “Seems to me," he interposed, “ that it will take more than rifles to offset the weapons of the Vespuccian Government. And what's this business about separation into your own country? I like the idea of producing and distributing for yourselves, but why restrict this to Green Hairs? Don't you think it is possible to produce enough for everybody, regardless of colour of hair, to have all they want if we stop holding back the machinery and produce for use?  Of course, we would have to abolish private property universally, though, and not just for Green Hairs"

Roderick Zee's eyes bulged in horror. “ Get rid of private property? ” he screamed. “ What in the devil are you talking about? ” Didn’t you hear me say we want Freedom Now? How can we have freedom if we don’t have the freedom to own private property and hire other people to work for us - Green Hairs, of course. We don’t want any Normal Hairs in our factories.”

“But,” argued McKhan, “why would anybody want to work for you if they were producing for themselves? I thought people worked for other people just because they have to in order to eat, because they don’t own the means for producing things. And you say they—all of the Green Hairs—will own their own factories and workshops and still most of them will go to work for some of them? Its all quite confusing.” He was still mumbling as he was led out the door.

And so you see. Oh Illustrious King, that the Vespuccians, regardless of the colour of their hair and regardless of the animosities between the Green Hairs and the Normal Hairs, did have a common belief in the meaning of freedom and equality. They understood that unless one could rise above his fellows, climb over the bodies that form the broad base on the bottom of the economic pyramid toward the narrow apex at the top, there can be no freedom. This was the basis of Vespuccian Ethics and Vespuccian Religion and Vespuccian Morality and Vespuccian Law, and it was written in a big book in the capital city of Dryington and interpreted, from time to time, by nine old Cadis.

H. Morrison.

The Racial Problem: Conflict in the U.S.A. (1963)

From the August 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our comrades in North America are making most effective use of the radio in putting over the case for Socialism. They recently broadcast a talk over WBCN in Boston on the current racial disturbances in the United States. We believe that this on-the-spot Socialist analysis will be of interest to our readers and have pleasure in reproducing it below.

It took place in Birmingham, Alabama. Thousands filled the streets, hundreds of Negroes were jailed. The police and firemen used water and vicious dogs on the marching men, women, and children who practiced, as they marched, the doctrine of non-violence. Then an agreement was reached by the Negro spokesmen and the committee of the “white power structure ” made up of a group of “white” civic and business leaders.

A week before, swarms of Negroes overwhelmed the police lines and swept through the downtown area, so state troopers were called in to reinforce the local police.

After Birmingham was quiet for a few days the “white” activists struck, They bombed houses in the dead of the night of May 10, also a motel where many of the Negro leaders were staying. The reaction was a renewed frenzied wave of emotion. Mobs roamed the streets smashing windows, overturning cabs and seeking revenge. The situation finally was subdued but not until President Kennedy sent some 3,000 Federal troops to the area and alerted the national guard.

Whether the situation in Birmingham, Alabama, breaks out anew or remains quiet, there still will be the large question that the events in that city are bringing into focus. Where is the racial problem in the United States heading?

Throughout these remarks, when we refer to Negroes, we have in mind the overwhelming majority—the exploited Negro workers. Their interests are basically as one with the workers everywhere. There is a small section of the negroes who are capitalists (some millionaires, but mostly petty capitalists) and these have a common interest with their fellow capitalists, regardless of colour, country or creed.

This is the fourth of a series and we welcome this opportunity to make our case known to you, our listeners. We have limited funds as we are supported only by our membership and sympathizers. However, we are expending our funds and our energies in this manner because we seek your attention and your support.

Capitalism is beset with all kinds of problems. Last week we focused our attention on war, and we would be pleased if those who listened would communicate with us so that we might know how you feel. Tonight we will deal with the Racial Problem.

We maintain that it is not enough to be informed. It is important to have a point of view. We cannot be indifferent to our fellows having segregation forced on them, treated like inferiors, denied equal opportunities, and worse. We maintain that prejudice is basically economic. There are more than twice as many Negro workers unemployed as there are so-called White workers out of work. The question of racial discrimination is rooted m economic prejudice.

Why are more Negroes unemployed? Why is there an unemployment problem? It is our thesis that unemployment is inexcusable. That the profitability of the capitalist arrangement is dependent on having unemployment, as well as on other factors. The employers need a reserve army of men and women out of work for two good reasons:

1. In order that those who are working will properly respect their jobs and fear the loss thereof, and
2. To keep wages in check.

Supply and demand would send the price of labour-power (wages) soaring if there were not millions of workers looking desperately for job openings. For the capitalists it is a good thing to have their workers hungry and apprehensive and not too independent. This, incidentally, is another illustration of the conflict of interests that separates society into classes.

What does the worker want? He wants employment . . . steady . . . at top pay.

What does the boss want? He wants a labour pool available in order to select his workers and at wages that are as low as possible. The more workers competing for each job, the lower will be the rate that the employer will have to pay.

And the thing that marks off our contemporary times is the wholesale introduction of automation. What does this do? It throws out of work and into the street those workers whose skills are displaced by these new monster machines. The expression in economic statistics is no longer unemployment, but—disemployment. In the steel industry alone hundreds of thousands are out of jobs and due to these new methods and machines they will never be recalled. These new processes in the mass production industries that displaced labour (which, of course, is the primary reason for their introduction) have now created a level of unemployment that has remained constant for many years. It will go higher, it cannot go lower.

Now it seems that we have strayed from our subject. Not so. As a matter of practice the first group to be affected by disemployment is the unskilled worker. As a matter of reality, the Negroes make up a large percentage of the unskilled population. And the viciousness of the circle becomes even more acute because the Negroes are the first and the worst affected. They are the first to be fired and the last to be hired.

Our contention is that capitalism breeds unemployment. Just as my colleague demonstrated last week that war is inevitable, given the relationship of rival, competitive nations, we maintain that racial discrimination can only be eliminated when we get rid of capitalism with its prejudice-breeding competition for jobs.

Let us spend a moment on the subject of racial prejudice. We might start by asking ourselves: What is “race "? Because of the factor of time we will content ourselves with making a few general observations on the question and immediately refer anyone who wants to explore thus subject further to our literature list in The Western Socialist. It might be of interest to those of our listeners who have never heard of the World Socialist Party that we are part of an international group of organizations that have in common a Declaration of Socialist Principles. There is besides our own party, the Socialist Parties of Canada. Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and the World Socialist Party of Ireland. One of the Principles which unite us is particular apropos at this time: . .  "The emancipation of the working-class will involve the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex.”

So once again, what is “race”? Biologically, there is no such thing as race. If ever there was such a concept, modern investigation discloses that the mixing and mingling of the human animal homo sapiens, through the centuries and over the continents has completely sullied the purity of any grouping. The colour of a man's skin, the shape of his head, the thickness of his lips, the kinkiness of his hair, his height, his weight only proves how varied is Man. In Hawaii the mixing process of different groupings is in its infancy and already it is nigh impossible to identify any individual. In Brazil the Indians and the Europeans and the Negroes are so fused that there is no Indian problem. Nor is there a European problem or a Negro problem. In the United States where chattel slavery existed until 1865, the Negroes were imprisoned in one sector of the country. Upon their legal release at the end of the Civil War and all the way up until the events in Birmingham, they have still remained imprisoned by economic shackles. This may be a good time to define slavery.

It was Shakespeare who wrote: “He who owns the means by which I live, owns my very life.” The southern Negro escaped from chattel slavery into wage slavery. Under the former he worked for a master from sun-up until sun-down and in return he received his grub, hand-me-down rags and a roof over his head. Under the wages system, the worker toils by the clock for a boss in return for which he gets an amount of money, which barely enables him to buy food, clothing and shelter to maintain himself and his family, so that he can go back to repeat the -process. Most workers will resent the description of their lot as slavery. And we answer that none are so blind as those who will not see. This is not the time for too much elaboration but suffice it to say that the government statistics support this description. Average wages of the industrial workers faithfully match the cost of living index.

Following the Civil War some Negroes came North looking for freedom and opportunity. However, with few exceptions, most were herded into ghettos— Harlems and South Ends—and in the competition for the available jobs, they were always the scapegoats. They were forced to accept menial work as servants, as elevator operators, dishwashers and worse.

Today the situation is aggravated by events taking place elsewhere. The world is in turmoil. The drive to exploit every possibility on the part if imperialist nations finally has caused Africa to explode. What formerly was anti-colonialism now is a demand for independence. The Negroes now constituting approximately 10 per cent, of the population in the United States are showing signs of being fed up with being pushed around. They are still segregated, not only down South where the vestiges of the past persist, but in the North as well. And they resent it. The Negroes are segregated but they are not ex-communicated. They listen to TV and read newspapers. Every channel of communication flashes the injustice of their lot. Some turn to extremes such as the Black Muslim movement. Others are influenced by the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) and many other groups. It is the Socialist analysis that to get rid of so-called race prejudice there is only one method, to get rid of its cause, capitalism. There is no other way.

Previously we related the fact of unemployment and tied it in with competition for jobs breeding prejudice. How do the current political leaders deal with this7 Their approach is tragically ludicrous. How do they propose to reduce unemployment? By reducing taxes! With the reasoning that this will give the economy a shot in the arm, stimulate business and, lo and behold!, unemployment will be lessened This is like throwing the tide back by using a bucket.

The alternative that we propose is Socialism. Under Socialism the causes of race-prejudice will no longer exist. The entire population will co-operate in producing all the things required by society. Each person will contribute, irrespective of differences, what he is able to society—and will take from society what he needs. Under Socialism competition between human beings will cease to exist. Privilege will be abolished. People will live in harmony.

This is one of the few opportunities we have to underscore an important element in the Socialist case. Usually we get involved in answering away so many misconceptions about Socialism that we fail to bring home the fact that we stand for world co-operation—common ownership and democratic control. And in the language of every Socialist the expression Comrade is used, not in the derisive sense it has come to mean due to the distortion of our ideas when seen through the caricature in the U.S.S.R., but is a manner of addressing our brothers, joined in the greatest job in the world today, the job of educating and organizing for a Socialist world.

Capitalism 1956 (1956)

From the July 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

The political parties which seek election on a programme of reforms, i.e., the Conservative, Labour, Communist and the now disappearing Liberal parties, all claim though some of them would deny it, that there is nothing basically wrong with capitalism; nothing that cannot be remedied without abolishing the wages system and establishing a classless society. Thus all that it is necessary for workers to do is to follow the right “leaders,” put their trust in promises and, given time, all would be well.

All of these parties have said and continue to say that the hardships and problems with which workers are plagued throughout their lives can be solved given the right leadership and the right policy.

The so-called Communist Party with its changing “cults” of worship is particularly hypocritical in this respect because its members are Communists in name only; obviously no party which believes that COMMUNISM (the abolition of the wages system, common ownership of the means of production and free access to wealth) is the ONLY answer to poverty, housing problems, wars and unemployment would advocate reforms and try to solve these problems within capitalism.

By the time this article is read, another series of Borough Council elections will have been held and workers will tragically once again have voted for the politicians who run the system that robs them.

Once again all the afore-mentioned parties have all promised the same things and childishly blamed one another for past failures in bringing the same “houses for the homeless,” “food for the hungry,” “pensions galore” and “better roads,” etc., as have been promised for many elections past.

One thing that should be glaringly obvious by now is that if any of them had ever redeemed their past promises there would be no need to keep coming back for re-election to do the same thing. This should clearly show to any thinking worker the utter futility of voting for any of them unless you want more in the future of what you have had in the past and if you do, then one could hardly call that thinking

We wish here to pin-point just two of the problems of capitalism, and we have taken, for purposes of illustration, examples of each problem, one at home and one abroad. The idea is to show the worldwide nature of capitalism and its problems and also the world-wide nature of the only solution, SOCIALISM.

First let us look at the housing problem. It is quite obvious from the start that the whole approach of the Socialist Party of Great Britain is very different from and opposed to that of the afore-mentioned parties of capitalism.

We recognise that Prince Rainier and his bride, along with the rest of the class of parasites to which they belong, will not be found in Battersea flat hunting. Shortage of proper housing accommodation is essentially a working class problem and the reason that workers go without adequate housing is the same reason why they go without a great deal of the other things THEY produce; NOT because there is a shortage but because they cannot afford them—they have only very limited access to goods and services of all kinds because they do not own the fruits of their labour they only get WAGES—part payment.

In this wondrous era of H-power, automation and universal “plenty” we read in the South London Press (April 27th, 1956) that “Battersea’s 3,000 housing applicants have no earthly chance of ever getting housed by the Borough.” This sad information comes from a London County Councillor, Douglas Rayment, who, as a Conservative Party politician, has the impudence to say “Too many people sit back and wait for us to do something for them, instead of stirring themselves;”

Was it not the Conservative Party whose Election Platform was based upon, among other things, the assertion that they could solve the housing problem?.

Does not the Conservative Party at ALL elections issue reform programmes of what they are going to do for people who, having voted Conservative, can “sit back” and have the world brought to them on a platter?

The despairing and apathetic attitude of workers is part of the fruits of their having blindly voted for people who promise them things.

The Councillor and some of his colleagues go on to explain that “nearly all new housing in the Borough would go to people moved from slums,” and, of the paltry 246 homes to be built in the “next five years” in “Winstanly Ward, only three go to housing applicants.”

We are told of course that the L.C.C. is not to blame, nor is the Borough Council; it is the fault “of the central planning authority in not allowing sufficient density.” It seems from this that the only thing which stops the L.C.C. and the Borough Council from packing dwellings (as they are aptly called) closer together and piling MORE people into file SAME space, is the central planning authority.

The point which all of these lamentable runners of capitalism miss, when trying to pardon their failure to run capitalism in the interests of the exploited majority, is that in their lying programmes they never say : “We will house you if slum dwellers do not move in from outside,” or “We will solve the housing problem if materials are cheap enough for workers to afford the rents,” “ or “We will bring peace unless war comes, prosperity, unless a slump comes and full employment unless unemployment sets in.” Could it be that to tell workers the truth before polling would be dangerous to their chances of election?

The second problem at which we will glance has had a great deal said and written about it, namely that of RACE. We have ourselves published a 78 page pamphlet on this matter which explodes the false theories of biological superiorities and other such prejudices. It analyses the whole problem from the Socialist point of view and goes into the subject with much greater detail than space permits here. We need only mention one incident as an illustration.

In what is boasted as the most “advanced” country in the world where a lot of shouting is done about “constitutions,” “citizens’ rights,” “freedom” and so on, a case is reported in the Daily Express (April 25th, 1956) of backward and ignorant conduct. The case being that of the segregation of negroes on ’buses in Montgomery, Alabama.

The facts as reported by the above newspaper indicate some “13 states with tough segregation laws” and a Police Commissioner, Sellers, who is a member of the so-called “White Citizens Council.” The Supreme Court having ruled that segregation on ’buses must end. this man said: “As far as I am concerned this damn thing applies to South Carolina only.” He threatened “to arrest any passenger who mixes with the opposite race.”

Of course to carry this threat out would be impossible if the “advanced” individual in question had to define the terms “opposite race” and give evidence that would hold water before he went any further.

It is of particular interest to note that although this threat was made by the chief of police, the ’bus company, despite the fact that the threat also applied to ’bus “drivers who permitted racial mixing on their ’buses,” sided with the Supreme Court ruling and told their employees they need no longer “give front seats to whites and rear seats to negroes.”'

We can understand the tenderheartedness of the *bus company; they were merely responding in the way Capitalists normally do when their gold coffers have been hit. The 50,000 negroes of Montgomery have boycotted the ’buses since last December and this has lost the company “over £1,000 daily.” The negroes, however, are keeping up their boycott “ until the confusion is ended.”

As Socialists we would say the action of the negroes in resisting this callous inequality is the only dignified and praiseworthy thing in the whole sordid and degrading affair.

The most tragic observation of all is not only that members of the working class should behave one to another in such a way, resenting skin colours of fellow members of their own exploited class while their common enemies, the exploiting Capitalist class, live on their backs, but that the move away from segregation came from outside and not from within the states concerned. Unfortunately, the ignorance of the economic forces at work within capitalism, from which this conduct springs, cannot be banished merely by the Supreme Court making rulings although to whatever degree events turn against segregation it is a healthier sign than its unchallenged continuation.

It will finally only be when workers turn to SOCIALISM that they will cease to be a prey to nationalist or racial prejudice of one variety or another, because only then will they no longer see themselves as one with their respective NATIONAL ruling class, but will see that their real oneness lies in union with the wage slaves all over the world, geography, sex and so-called race making no difference. We would conclude by saying that the “education” machine of capitalism whose function it is to turn out obedient, efficient wage slaves will never direct its efforts towards Socialism, but the hard facts of life and the common problems which universally smite all workers will direct their interest our way.

Meanwhile the politicians will go on with their “better world” promises and we for our part will go on vigorously advocating the abolition of the nightmare, which these hirelings seek to preserve, and its replacement by Socialism—the world of the social equality of all men and women of the world, of one community of interest based on holding the means of living in common, and production entirely and literally for use.

Harry Baldwin

The Roots of Race Prejudice (1965)

From the June 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is all too easy to discover examples of man clinging passionately to ideas which have no basis in fact. One of the most widespread of these ideas at the moment is racial prejudice, a term which conceals a multitude of aberrations all of them based on the notion that some people, in some way, are innately inferior to others.

This comes in different forms at different times. Before the war, when the Nazis were at their work, it took the form of intense anti-Semitism. This was then one of the most prevalent types of racial prejudice, and it was fearfully simple. The Nazis decided that the Jews were less than human and were, therefore, proper subjects for bestial experiments and finally mass extermination. Himmler, for example, put it like this to a gathering of his S.S. generals at Posen in 1943:

Anti-Semitism is exactly the same as delousing. Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology, it a matter of cleanliness. In just this same way anti-Semitism for us has not been a question of ideology but a matter of cleanliness.

No evidence worthy of the name was ever produced to support statements like that, any more than any was ever produced to support their corollary, that there was an innately superior type of person—a fair haired, blue eyed so-called Aryan—who was destined to rule the world. (Only one or two of the top Nazi leaders bore the faintest resemblance to their own idea of racial perfection:) But the gas chambers did not need evidence and rational thought to feed them; they lived on the evil fruits of barbarous prejudices.

In the same way, there is no proper evidence to support the racial theory which is now most prevalent—colour prejudice. Not so long ago, people in this country thought that violent colour discrimination was confined to places like South Africa and the United States, and could not happen here. The influx of coloured immigrants over the past twelve years or so, working its own type of aggravation on the problems of housing, employment and so on, has shown how false was this comfortable notion.

This is not to say that Smethwick is the same as, or indeed anything like, Selma. Nowhere in this country is there a tradition of militancy to compare with that of the American South. People in, for example, Alabama and Mississippi assert their prejudices in defiance of the law, yet they escape the law’s reprisals, which is something yet to happen in Great Britain. The conspiracy in the South is to all intents and purposes complete; it often includes the very people who are supposed to enforce the law. It includes the sheriffs and their deputies and the legal officers of the states.

In a letter to The Guardian of April 14th, 1960, a Judge Jones of Burke County, Georgia, revealed his thinking on the colour question:

Freely admitting that the number of our Negro voters is relatively small, we believe that this is due to the ignorance and indifference of the Negroes themselves rather than to any present policy of disfranchisement. 

Judge Jones described himself as “a friend sympathetic to the Negroes ”: it would be interesting to know whether he now thought the obstacles put in the way of the Negroes who tried to register to vote in Selma amount to a “ policy of disfranchisement ” or not.

In any case, it is this sort of stonewalling which helps to keep the Negroes deprived of their vote, their chance of employment on equal terms with the whites, the legal right to eat, or ride a bus. alongside a white person. And in the end, if the Negro refuses to accept an inferior social status, it sometimes deprives him of his life.

It is as well to say a word here about the laws, such as the Civil Rights Bill, which the Southerners defy. Many people think that these laws were inspired by humane motives. In fact, they were passed because American capitalism needs them. One of capitalism’s achievements was to make labour power free to move from one place of employment to another, as the prospects of profit require. But the archaic prejudices which are responsible for the Confederate flag being still flown above the Capital in Montgomery, Alabama want to enslave, and therefore restrict the freedom of, the labour power which is in coloured bodies.

Capitalism’s interests demand that it should not be concerned about skin colour; it wants to exploit all its workers at maximum intensity. At the same time, capitalism hates waste which depletes its profits—and having things like transport systems, hospitals and living areas divided into white and coloured is mightily wasteful. The Civil Rights, laws are designed to eliminate, or at least to lessen, all of this and to open up further fields of exploitation for American capitalism.

When the Southern racists defy United States law, then, they are ignoring the needs of the very social system they so ardently support. But capitalism is a ruthless system; it will not be denied by a crackpot minority who cling to the nostalgias of the Civil War and to the divisive theories of the Confederacy. It seems certain that the Klansmen will be forced into a sullen acceptance of integration. The Negroes will have the vote, and the other rights for which they are now demonstrating. But will they also develop their own delusions and prejudices, and at election times support, with the votes so clearly won, the system which exploits and degrades them? If they do, somebody is sure to call this progress.

Before that happens there is a long, hard road of brutality to be travelled. The Southern rebels are representing ideas sprung from the roots of an earlier social system, and such attitudes do not die easily. They will not quickly abandon their prejudices, especially as long as they can assert them in violence. (There is a chilling echo of Himmler’s words in this extract from Ku-Klux-Klan literature which was circulating in Mississippi last Summer: “Race mixing is more criminal than murder.”) 

The demonstrations, also, will continue; the Civil Rights workers have shown that they are not easily broken. These workers are doubtless confused, not to say ignorant, on many issues; they are certainly not Socialists; the end of their campaign will at best deliver the Negro from one type of suppression into another. It is easy enough to write this, in comfortable London. But it does not obscure the impressive courage of many of the Civil Rights workers—of the three young men who were murdered in Philadelphia, Miss., nor of those who were killed in the Selma marches, nor of the many others who have suffered in the Negro cause.

Compared to these people, the white racists are a poor lot. The novels of James Baldwin make the point that those who erect racial prejudices are themselves lowered by it. The many people who endured the concentration camps, and kept their dignity, were infinitely more mature and complete human beings than the insane brutes who tormented them.

The one hope in this is to be found in examining the reasons for racial prejudices. Capitalism rests upon the ignorance and the apathy of its people. It requires only a few to be sensitive and learned; the mass are expected and encouraged to absorb only as much knowledge as will fit them into their place in the routine of exploitation. Capitalism promotes a ruthless competitive urge, and all manner of conceits, It instils nationalism into the working class, and it sets its own example by living out its disputes in violence. Periodically, capitalism glorifies brutality—it makes heroes of military murderers, it ennobles the men who organise the mass killings of wartime.

In this situation, one type of ignorance begets another even one like racial prejudice, which capitalism generally finds a nuisance. But popular ignorance has its own momentum. The most recent example of this is the way in which the Labour Party has been forced to pander to electoral realities by imposing even stricter immigration controls than the Conservatives did. (It was, after all, Labour voters who changed their votes in Smethwick, on the issue of immigration control.) This has been done despite the bitter attacks which the Labour Party made on the original controls, and despite the fact that Mr. Wilson is still strongly condemning racial discrimination:

. . . we have a duty at home to show our deep loathing and to condemn by our words, and to outlaw by our deeds, racial intolerance, colour prejudice, anti-Semitism . . .

Those words were spoken at last November’s Lord Mayor’s banquet. Perhaps everybody there was too full of over-ripe pheasant to reflect that Mr. Wilson, like the other political leaders of capitalism, is after the votes of workers who are politically ignorant, and who are therefore easy prey to any rabble-rousing race maniac Mr. Wilson wants the support of people who, although they react against problems like bad

housing, unemployment, inadequate hospitals, have not the first idea of how to abolish them—and who cannot hope for enlightenment from Mr. Wilson's party. They are, therefore, liable to blame such problems onto anything or anybody. At the moment, many British workers are inclined to blame the influx of foreign, and especially coloured, immigrants. This, in its way, is no more foolish than the Labour Government blaming the financial crises of British captalism onto foreign financiers.

The roots of racial intolerance are now stirring in this country, and it is disturbing to reflect that they may yet blossom into the same sort of malignant growth as disfigured pre-war Germany, and which went on to transform the greater part of Europe into a paradise for sadistic thugs. Racial theories divide the working class and set them against each other. They deny the unity of workers’ interests, which overrides all barriers of nation, skin colour, language, and which joins all workers everywhere in the need for Socialism.

In some ways, the human race now resembles a blind, wounded beast, picking its way over a wilderness of smouldering ignorance. But human beings have eyes to see, and they are whole. There is massive hope in those who hang on and work for enlightenment, for the day when man ceases to wander like a tormented beast and starts to live like a man.

Ivan.