Letter: Class and the Individual (1975)

Letter to the Editors from the April 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Class and the Individual

Being one who glories in the uniqueness of the individual, and who believes, at the end of the day, there are two fixities in this world—the individual and the world—all other relationships are created by man himself, I sometimes wonder where your concentration on the “class” leaves the individual. What will his part and his place be in the Socialist Society? The lessons of modern China repel me.

R .Thomas

Llanberis.

Reply:

Certainly an individual is unique—by definition. Having said that one is no further forward—one has learnt nothing, clarified nothing, explained nothing. Our emphasis on class is an important part of our analysis of society. History shows that all propertied societies have been divided into economic (and social) classes each of which has a different relation to the means of production. In capitalist society there are two classes—owners and non-owners of the means of life. We call these classes capitalists and workers respectively.

The class to which any individual belongs is determined objectively by his relationship to the means of life. No matter how unique he is as an individual, if he is a member of the working class he will have interests in common with other workers, interests which conflict with those of the unique individuals who make up the capitalist class. The most obvious clash of interests being the price at which labour-power is bought and sold. This is the interminable wages struggle which is inseparable from capitalist ownership.

The expression of one’s unique individual personality is viciously limited by economic circumstances. For many people at present the highest aim in life is simply to be the same as everyone else. Look round you at the armies of workers churned out by the so-called education process as machine minders and office fodder. Millions of passive participants in the labour process stripped of virtually all individuality by the need to conform to a system of class exploitation. Your example of China (which is not Socialist but state-capitalist) is just as repellent as anything the “free” west has to offer.

Only Socialism can give the individual the freedom to develop his personality and abilities to the full, unrestricted by today’s profit-seeking and measurement by money. When we have established common ownership the individual will take his place as a free and equal member of society, able to give of his best secure in the knowledge that society is being run in a harmonious way for the benefit of all its members.

Editors.

It’s class that counts (2024)

Book Review from the January 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Here Be Monsters: How to Fight Capitalism Instead of Each Other. By Rhys Wildermuth. Repeater. £12.99.

The idea behind the title is that monsters were once seen as signs that something was wrong in the world, but also as messengers pointing to a solution. However, this aspect of the book is not very convincing, so we will not deal with it here.

The book is basically a critique of ‘social justice identity politics’, a set of ideas that employs the concept of intersectionality. So a black woman is oppressed in two ways, by being a woman and by being black. The real oppressor is then, apparently, the white, heterosexual, able-bodied, cis-gender man, who subjugates anyone who is black, gay, disabled, transgender or a woman. Wildermuth argues that class has no position in such a system, and that introducing class would in fact undermine the entire framework. A man who matches all the above criteria but is homeless and jobless has little in common with a capitalist who has the same traits. And a black woman millionaire has equally little in common with a black woman struggling to pay the rent and feed her children. Intersectional social justice, he says, is perfectly compatible with the continuation of capitalism, and having more black women CEOs would not alter capitalism at all.

The concept of class employed here is however not entirely clear. There are references to the professional-managerial class, who supposedly ‘share and reproduce the cultural values of the capitalists’ and are ‘guardians of the social order’. They are part of the working class, though are paid more than most, and at one point are roughly identified with white-collar workers. The author is correct to say that both rural and urban workers belong to the same class and are exploited, but more needs to be said on how class is defined.

Wildermuth states that it is unfortunately all too easy for some on the left to dismiss any contrary view to theirs in very strong terms, such as the feminist academic Judith Butler, who considers as fascist the anti-gender movement in parts of eastern Europe (Guardian 23/10/21).

The account is enlivened by the author recounting some of his personal experiences, such as the time a black man in a cafe shouted at him, ‘The only good white person is the one who knows he should be shot and killed because he is incapable of not harming others.’ The book contains a lot of interesting points on how identity politics fails to address the real issues of poverty and exploitation, but (despite the sub-title) says disappointingly little about the real way to fight capitalism. There is a reference to how Lenin’s vanguardism was quite different from the views of Marx and Engels, but nothing about the abolition of the wages system. Wildermuth says at one point that the left had given up on trying to change material circumstances and instead ‘settled for symbolic struggles with no clear end goal’. Sadly, there is little here on end goals, either.

Paul Bennett

Missing Class (2023)

Book Review from the June 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

No Politics But Class Politics. By Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed, Jr. Edited by Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora. Eris £20.

This volume consists of a number of essays written individually by the two authors over the period from 1997 to 2020, together with a foreword by the editors and a conclusion by the authors. There are also four interviews of the authors, conducted by the editors.

The main argument presented is that focus on inequality in terms of ‘race’ distracts attention from the more general inequality that exists. As economic inequality in general increases, so (it seems) does the enthusiasm for addressing every non-economic kind of inequality. The US is less racist, sexist and homophobic than it was several decades ago, but it is also more unequal. Neoliberalism, the dominant capitalist ideology, is opposed to discrimination but perfectly happy with economic inequality. Equality of opportunity, while good for business, justifies inequality. Equality of race and gender is in no way contradictory to inequality of class.

Most white people are badly off, with sixty million white Americans having basically no wealth at all. Would it really benefit black people if roughly one in eight of the top one per cent were black, in keeping with the proportion of black people in the whole population? Gains for a few do not help the many, but are part of a system that hurts the many. Universities have become more diverse as far as students are concerned, though Latinos and Latinas are underrepresented, and poorer students struggle to get accepted. Professors are also more diversified, but increasingly teaching is being done by people who do not have full-time or ‘permanent’ contracts (adjunct faculty, as they are known). Adjunct staff are not so diversified, but the problem lies really in their low pay and poor working conditions.

The authors are of course not against resistance to discrimination in terms of ‘race’ or gender, and they give a good account of racism; rather, they see this as less fundamental than struggle against inequality and for a world where nobody lives below the poverty line. The problem with the book, however, is that not much at all is said about the class politics mentioned in the title, in terms of what the classes are or what its aim should be. There are a number of vague references to particular classes, such as ‘the black professional-managerial class’, an ‘upper-class professor’ and an ‘upper middle class’, and to the one percent. It is all very well saying that ‘class matters more than race or sex’ (in the context of personal care aides, who are very badly paid and are mostly women of colour), but more needs to be said in terms of how class is defined and what classes exist under capitalism. As is said, fighting exploitation is a way of fighting the effects of discrimination, but fighting discrimination is not a way of fighting exploitation: ‘if nobody were the victim of racism or sexism, lots of people would still be poor’. A reference to Marx’s solution of abolishing (private) property is not enough to show the kind of system the authors stand for.

So an interesting text, though it does not quite deliver what might be expected.

Paul Bennett

Misidentity (2021)

Pamphlet Review from the November 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Politics of Division. An Engagement with Identity Politics. Anarchist Communist Group. ACG/Stormy Petrel, 2021. 26pp.

The introduction to this short pamphlet states: ‘We want to create a society in which exploitation is abolished and all resources are held in common. We also struggle for a society without a State and in which no group oppresses another: a society without hierarchies. We envisage a society of co-operation, mutual aid, equality and freedom.’ This clear expression of the Anarchist Communist Group’s aim mirrors very closely the kind of society we seek to see established. We are also in agreement with what ACG have to say about the system we currently live under, capitalism, in which ‘only a few own and control the earth’s resources’ and the vast majority (ie, the working class) ‘need to sell their labour power in order to survive’, with the explanation that they ‘use the term working class to include all those of us who cannot live on the proceeds of their property or capital’.

And the point of this pamphlet is to explain how, if progress is to be made towards establishing that completely new society, the common interest of that vast majority must override the divisions and diversions that are constantly arising within it associated with race, gender, disability or any other type of so-called ‘identity politics’. It gives a readable account of how capitalism has, in its development, used those divisions to its advantage and how, even today, ‘identity politics sets us against each other’ and divides us as a class. It points out how ‘cultural diversity’ is used to divert attention from the shared working-class issue of wage slavery and insecurity and to divide workers from one another, when, in a different kind of cooperative, materially secure, tolerant society, diversity between different people or peoples would be a cause for interest and celebration among everyone. The pamphlet sums up the situation well: ‘Class is the fundamental division in our society, not because it is more important in terms of affecting people’s lives than oppressions such as racism or sexism, but because it is the one thing that unites us into a potential revolutionary movement.’

It follows from this that it is in the interest of the class of wage and salary workers (ie, the vast majority of us) to be as free as possible to spread the idea of a revolutionary change of society, not to be hampered by fear of the kind of censorship that seeks to silence discussion in case it may offend a certain identity group. This is an argument summed up in a section of the pamphlet entitled ‘Identity politics kills freedom of expression and suppresses debate’, which then however goes on to say that ‘a more effective approach is to support the self-organisation of oppressed groups into autonomous groups’. And it is here, in its closing pages, that the pamphlet somewhat loses its way.

Its attempt to argue that ‘autonomous groups’ are less of a diversion from the united interests of workers than identity groups, because the latter focus ‘only on the oppression of the group’, while in the former ‘there is no anti-capitalist perspective that may see other workers as the enemy’ is far from convincing, drifting as it does into discussion of how these autonomous groups might go about influencing, for example, trade unions or the operation of professions, such as the legal one. A far cry this from the earlier call for ‘a completely new society’.

This drift into a focus on relatively minor details of how the capitalist system operates flows, one suspects, from a refusal, endemic among anarchists (even those who share our ambition of a stateless, world society without frontiers, without leaders and led, without money and buying and selling, and based on free access to all goods and services), to contemplate using parliament and the ballot box as democratic revolutionary instruments. The fact is that, as socialists, we cannot reasonably see any other way of achieving the end that both we and many anarcho-communists envisage and we fear that the anarcho-communist rejection of the ballot box marks them out as a tendency which misunderstands an important element of how capitalism works and thus removes credibility from their arguments about how socialism (or anarcho-communism) can be achieved. Our basic point is that the ballot box is a sort of genie that has been let out of the bottle and, though currently used to run and bolster capitalism, once socialist consciousness is widespread, it cannot be put back in but instead can be the tool for getting rid of capitalism, ‘legally’ so to speak.

Howard Moss

Rear View: Koch & Co. (2018)

The Rear View Column from the July 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Koch & Co.

Socialists have long said that political parties of the left, right and centre exist to preserve the status quo. ‘The Republican and Democratic parties . . . are the political wings of the capitalist system and such differences as arise between them relate to spoils and not to principle. With either of these parties in power one thing is always certain and that is that the capitalist class is in the saddle and the working class under the saddle …The ignorant workingman who supports either of these parties forges his own fetters and is the unconscious author of his own misery’(Eugene Debs, 1904). Recent evidence supports this view. Capitalist Shri Thanedar is in the race for governor of Michigan. Differences in policy between the two main parties are of little concern to him and apparently his decision to run under the banner of pseudo-socialist Bernie Sanders is based purely on advice that Independents and Republicans are less likely to win. And, ‘the political arm of the Koch network, long reputed for championing conservative causes and politicians, has launched an ad campaign thanking a Democratic Senator up for re-election in a red state for her work in passing a financial deregulation bill’ (time.com, 4 June). The brothers are actively opposed to Trump’s tariffs and other issues of concern to capitalists.

Dumb & Dumber

The comedian John Oliver has been taken to task in a recent article (businessinsider.com, 3 June) by José Niño of the Mises Institute. Both agree that ‘socialist’ countries exist, but the advocate of a dystopia known as free market capitalism objects to remarks made by Oliver on his TV show such as there are ‘plenty of socialist [sic] countries that look nothing like Venezuela’. This country has long been the bête noire of the Institute and other right-wing groups (with the opposite being true for supporters of state capitalism) and José, unsurprisingly, adds Cuba and North Korea for good measure before insisting that price controls are an essential feature of ‘socialism’. He then delivers what he clearly thinks is his coup de grâce: ‘For those that remain skeptical about Venezuela’s socialist status, they can look no further than the second section of the Communist Manifesto, “Proletarians and Communists,” to understand the government’s true nature. Marx sums up the socialist program with ten essential tenets.’ The measures ranging from nationalisation to a heavy progressive or graduated income tax may have had merit in 1848 but not today. Indeed, Marx and Engels in their joint preface to the 1872 edition state: ‘No special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That passage would, in many respects, be differently worded today.’ Besides, as Rosa Luxemburg said succinctly: ‘without the conscious will and action of the majority of the proletariat, there can be no Socialism.’

More huff and puff from Hedges

Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, New York Times best selling author, former professor at Princeton University, activist and ordained Presbyterian minister, has given talks on Red Rosa –although even viewing the YouTube videos after reading a recent essay of his titled Teaching ‘Les Misérables’ in Prison (truthdig.com, 27 May) may leave you in doubt.  Hedges writes in his introduction: ‘the socialist [sic!] British Prime Minister Lloyd George said “Les Misérables” taught him more about poverty and the human condition than anything else he had ever read and instilled in him a lifelong ambition “to alleviate the distress and the suffering of the poor.”’ There follows a reasonable summary of the book and comments from some inmates, but no call for a world without the prison industry, no mention that the 99 percent worldwide remain in chains: ‘earning a wage is a prison occupation’ – D H Lawrence, or acknowledgement that ‘the paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor’ –Victor Hugo.

No leaders, no led

‘I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition; as it is now the capitalists use your heads and your hands’ ( Debs, pre-1908).

What if We’re Wrong? (2018)

From the June 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some time ago I attended a ‘Question Time’ type meeting at a local college. Selected members of the audience put questions to a panel of politicians; one of which was a question of mine. I asked: ‘When was the last occasion that you were clearly wrong about something of political importance?’ As I had intended, this caused an initial confusion in those who had made a career out of being publicly confident. Any admission of being mistaken about anything is anathema to professional politicians. But in ‘real life’ when we meet someone with absolute certainty about anything we are usually wary of them. In terms of character assessment the line between confidence and arrogance can be a very fine one. Given the complexities of life is it ever possible to be certain or even unduly confident about anything? And if we can be certain about anything surely politics is one of the last arenas where this is a possibility. Does a person’s certainty tell us everything about his or her character and nothing about the subject of their confident assertions?

For a confident bunch like us socialists it is an unnerving concept that we might be mistaken in our values and beliefs. But what we all know, with absolute certainty, is that anyone can be wrong – including us. It is an interesting experiment to try and come up with an historical individual who was never wrong. Leaving aside the gods and demigods of religious belief (to whom we will return later) there seems to be no individual or school of thought, with which they are associated, that is not subject to various levels of relevant criticism. Phrases like: ’he was a man of his time’ or ‘the science of genetics didn’t exist then’ are used to explain why many respectable theories of the past are now rejected and consigned to a dusty bookshelf as a subject of academic interest only. How many of our contemporary theories will also become just of interest to the academics and esoteric historians of the future? Many lack this kind of historical perspective and are continually seduced by the latest theory when a closer look might reveal it as merely a repackaged version of an old idea. Technologically and scientifically our species has made great advances but can we say the same of our philosophy? We know that human technological progress provides the context for the concepts and language of his beliefs and values so why is it that some of the phrases of people like the Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, Shakespeare and Marx still have a powerful contemporary resonance?

  One thing that all of these people shared was, of course, confidence. And we can be certain that if they were resurrected and placed in a contemporary philosophical debate they would all give a good account of themselves. Why? Because they all had a grasp of historical perspective and context. In this age of ideological consumerism there seems to be little room for history. Politics is seen as an intellectual riddle where all of the information needed for its resolution is entirely contemporary – there is a great contempt for the past. But the reality is that many of these shiny new economic and political theories are superficial philosophical regurgitations with flimsy ideological facades. Culturally capitalism has reached a dead end and the theories used to defend it are, like the food in supermarkets, just repackaged basics.

  Socialists see capitalism historically as the last incarnation of private property society. We see no reason why this form of economic exploitation will not vanish as did its predecessors slavery and feudalism. The reason for the decline of these former societies was the emergence of new classes that deposed the old ruling elites.  This same dynamic, the class struggle, still rages remorselessly. With this perspective history takes on a meaning and trajectory that no society can resist for long. This is the element that provides such confidence for Marxists/socialists. Without fail all attempts in the past to counter or ignore this momentum have been disastrous. It would seem that this theory of historical materialism has passed every test in terms of both explanation and prediction. To an outsider this may, however, sound quasi-religious in its certainty and its ability to predict.

  To allocate meaning to history has a very long pedigree and, as with most of European intellectual activity, it has some of its roots in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. But rather than seeing it, as many critics of Marxism do, as a reformulation of a traditional messianic vision we can turn it on its head and see the prophets and saints of religion as merely projecting the essentially human need for justice, righteousness and meaning onto a non-existent supernatural realm. The reason that some of what these religious individuals had to say continues to resonate is because they were witness to similar injustices, in terms of economic exploitation etc., that we still endure today. In an increasingly secular society any undue expression of political confidence can be interpreted as religious. Certainly the dualism of the final resolution of the class conflict has an uncomfortable parallel in Christianity’s Armageddon where good and evil will fight it out for the last time. Socialists’ belief that the revolution will redeem our lost humanity can also be seen in this pseudo-religious light. We are therefore sometimes condemned as yet another sect of prophets that, as with those in the Christian context, will all be proven to be mistaken.

  So is it possible that we are wrong and that history has no meaning? As we have said, the theory that backs up this belief continues to be robust and successful. The great irony is that even if we’re mistaken in attributing meaning to history once a great majority believe it to be true then, for the first time, we will have the ability to impose meaning and direct our future accordingly – we will make our own history rather than just be manipulated by it. Humanity will no longer be subject to the vicissitudes of an amoral, destructive and perpetual class struggle and will finally emerge from the long dark age of private property.

Wez

Letter: Capitalism a class society? (1969)

Letter to the Editors from the November 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sirs,

While agreeing entirely with your aims of socialism, I would quarrel with the idea, enshrined in your declaration of principles, that society is still clearly divided in such a way that everyone is a member of either the “master class” or the “working class”, or as you put it those who produce but do not possess and those who possess but do not produce. There are now a vast number of people who, for example, work and own shares. It seems to me that the idea of a divided society is no longer valid: all the other objections to capitalism are in themselves more than enough, but the concept that everyone can be put on one side of the fence or the other is not acceptable. In particular, this would suggest that anyone who, for example, receives interest on a bank account, or who is partly paid in shares of the firm he works for, cannot support the SPGB' as “all political parties are but the expression of class interests.”

Yours sincerely,

Neil Mitchison, 

Edinburgh.

Reply.

A class is a group of people who all have the same economic interest. The make up of classes, the dividing lines between them, their functions in society, the number of them in existence, have all varied with different social systems.

One thing which capitalism has done has been to tidy up classes. There are now only two of them and, with relatively few exceptions, the whole population of the capitalist world is in one or other of them. The exceptions may be peasants living and working under social relationships more akin to feudalism, or shopkeepers and tradesmen existing in a sort of class twilight These people — and they are a small minority — may be unclassifiable but this does not affect the overall, significant class division of capitalism.

The vast majority of people can be placed in one class; they are forced to sell their working abilities in order to live. They do this to the owners of the means of production and it is only by selling their working power that they are allowed access to the means of production. It is reasonable, and accurate, to call these people the working class and to call the other class, who own the means of production and who therefore buy labour power, the capitalist class.

Now what about the person who sells his labour power to an employer but who also owns some shares, or receives interest on savings? . This does not alter the fact that he depends for his living on selling his ability to work; his relationship to the means of production make him a member of the working class.

The division of society into classes, with opposing interests which cause so much unrest, is only one of capitalism's malaises but it is not to be ignored or minimized. The revolution for Socialism will overthrow the capitalist class and take away their monopoly of the means of production. It is, therefore, against their interests but it is in the interests of the other, subject class — the working class. That is why it is only the Socialist Party which stands for the interests of the working class and why all who oppose Socialism, or who stand for something less than Socialism, express the interests of the capitalist class.

Editorial Committee.

Political Organisation (1964)

From the November 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why must the working class organise as a political party to achieve Socialism? The answer to this question is to be found in an examination of the nature and role of the modem State.

At present the capitalist class control society through their possession of political power, through their control of the machinery of government. They did not construct this machine for this purpose, as the anarchist claim; the machinery of government evolved along with the evolution of society as a whole. It is one of the facts of social life that the government machine is the centre of social control. The working class must base its policy on a recognition of this. If the working class is to become the master of society—which it must do in order to change it—then it too must recognise itself as a class, and organise itself politically. This political party must be Socialist expressing workers’ recognition that their emancipation can only be achieved by the expropriation of the capitalist class and the establishment of Socialism.

Given the need for a Socialist political party, on what lines should it be organised? A movement which aims at the establishment of a social democracy in which human instead of commercial values can flourish cannot employ means which are in conflict with this end. It must to a certain extent reflect the new society it aims to create. This means that it must be organised on democratic lines. Its membership, even when it is only a small group, must have complete control over policy; all its officials must be responsible to the membership; there must be complete freedom of discussion within the party; there must be no division into leaders and led; there must be no secret meetings from which any section of the membership is excluded. But not only must the party be democratic, it must also be open in its methods.

It must hold no meetings from which members of the working class are excluded. A Socialist political party can have nothing to hide from the working class. No gain can ever accrue to a Socialist party from seeking and getting support by subterfuges. Nor can it gain from using political dishonesty or terrorism. Such tactics would fail in their object. It's not a question of the end justifying the means. The end just cannot be reached by such means. Workers cannot be tricked or coerced into booming conscious of their position as a subject class. They can only come to such an understanding through their collective experiences as a class.

The Socialist political party will not appear ready-made. Like other social phenomena, it will grow out of social conditions. This raises the whole question of the role of a Socialist party in the class struggle. At present there are two obstacles which stand in the way of achieving Socialism: the political ignorance of the working class and the control of the machinery of government by the capitalist class. To overcome these obstacles Socialist understanding must come first. For this reason the main activity of a Socialist party in its early days must be propaganda. It must seek to dispel the political ignorance of the working class.

This does not mean that the relation between the party and the working class is to be that of teacher and pupil. Socialist understanding is not something that can be constructed out of nowhere; it must grow out of social conditions. Such understanding—or class consciousness—will not arise purely as a result of the propaganda of the Socialist party. Ideas only grip the masses when they are relevant to social conditions. There are any number of cranks around with utopian schemes for social reconstruction. What distinguishes Socialists from them is that Socialism is in the material interest of the working class. Socialists have social evolution on their side. The cranks have not—that’s why they’re cranks.

Education is not just a question of learning from books and pamphlets; that is just one aspect of learning from experience. The class experiences of the working class under capitalism will teach it that Socialism is the answer to its problems. The party can help this development of Socialist understanding by storing up and propagating the past experiences of the working class so that these are easily accessible. The principles of the Socialist party will be based on these experiences and will serve as a guide to social issues, being used to expose useless remedies. To carry out this task its members must necessarily have a fairly high degree of political knowledge, know their opponents’ case and be able to expose the flaws in their arguments. In its educational phase, precisely because it is such a phase, a higher degree of political understanding must be required of the members of the party than the working class need have to establish Socialism. As Socialist understanding spreads the number and importance of its opponents, and hence also of the need of a knowledge of their arguments, may well decline.

Once Socialist understanding grows to any appreciable extent, political conditions will completely change. Socialism will become a political issue. The comparative trivialities of present-day politics will be cast aside. The issue will be Capitalism or Socialism. With the changed conditions will come a change in the role of the party. It will become the political organisation of the working class which they can use to capture political power.

It is decidedly not the function of a Socialist party to lead the working class either in the struggle to live under capitalism or in the struggle for Socialism. The working class cannot be led to Socialism; it must emancipate itself. A Socialist working class will require no leadership; all it requires is organisation to put its aim into effect.

The day-to-day struggle of the working class, the economic phase of the class struggle, goes on in the place of work. To carry out this struggle is the task of the trade unions. In so far as they carry out this task they are class weapons. The task of bargaining with the employers is not one for which a Socialist party is at all suited. Of course, the members of a Socialist party, precisely because they are class conscious workers, will be active trade unionists, desirous of getting the highest possible price for their labour power.

Some workers are today organised in various political parties, in this country mostly in the Labour Party, but to a smaller extent also in the Conservative Party, the Liberal Party, the so-called Communist Party and the various Nationalist parties. But they are not organised as a class, they are not organised for Socialism. Those who make a political principle of joining and trying to lead the trade unions frequently also make a principle of joining such pro-capitalist workers' organisations as the Labour Parties. But here they overlook the essential difference between the political and the economic organisations the working class need. Trade unions are class organisations when they are used correctly in the economic phase of the class struggle. They cease to be such when, for instance, they back productivity drives or finance politicians and political parties. In no sense are Labour Parties class parties, working class parties. They can correctly be said to be organisations serving the interests of the capitalist class since they are an expression of the fact that the working class are still imbued with capitalist prejudices. As it is one of the functions of a Socialist party to dispel such prejudices its members cannot work within such parties which only stand in the way of Socialist understanding and organisation.

These Labour parties frequently struggle for reforms within capitalism. A Socialist party struggles to end capitalism. It is no part of the role of a Socialist party to campaign for reforms. To do so is to invite degeneration into a pro-capitalist party by attracting politically ignorant workers who are only interested in reforms. When the Socialist political party is small a reform programme is futile, indeed farcical. When it becomes large enough to have some effect it doesn’t need such a programme anyway. For when the Socialist party is the working class organised politically for Socialism the capitalist class will no doubt be only too eager to offer concessions in a bid to ward off their expropriation.

To sum up, the movement for Socialism must be open and democratic. At present its role is largely restricted to propaganda, but in the future it will be the working class organised consciously and politically for Socialism. It will be the instrument they will use to capture political power. The Socialist Party of Great Britain offers itself for this task.

Adam Buick

Are politics worth while? (1918)

From the May 1918 issue of the Socialist Standard

Are politics worth while? One would think that such were a crazy question to ask at this time of day. Yet probably the vast majority of the working class even to-day hold politics in the most profound contempt.

The folly of this attitude it revealed as soon as we consider what the functions and purpose of politics are.

Politics, we are told, are "the science of government; political affairs, or the contest of parties for power." The workers' interest in politics as the science of government is the governed. For they are the governed. They have no lot or portico in government. not withstanding appearances. What, then, is the purpose of government?

There are two classes in modern society. one of which—the working class—produces all the wealth, tbs other of which—the master class— appropriates all the wealth. A social arrangement in which one section of society is robbed by another section of society must necessarily always be productive of social friction. The class which are robbed, however ignorant they may he of the fact of the robbery, must hare a tendency to resist that spoliation. Even if in their view there was nothing but the sale and purchase of labour-power, still must they resist the spoliation in the form of a limitless and ceaseless struggle for a higher price for their labour-power.

Obviously. the extent to which this struggle for higher wages succeeds must be determined by the force which is opposed to it. In the total absence of opposition it must proceed until there is nothing left of the workers’ product after their wage-claim has been met, and the next step must he. consequent upon the breakdown of the sale and purchase of labour-power, the utter expropriation of the possessing class.

In order to prevent things taking this course, in order to maintain their position as an exploiting class on the one band, and render their exploitation as complete as possible on the other, a controlling force is necessary. This controlling force is a complex thing, being nothing less than the whole instrument of the State. The forces of coercion, civil and military: the judiciary and its minions; the local authorities: these and many others are the components of the instrument of suppression which we call the State.

This machinery of the State, by means of which the social system is maintained upon a basis which presupposes a class living by the sale of their labour-power—a class of wageworkers—is controlled politically. Its control is the object of politics in the sense of "contests between parties for power" —the political struggle. Are politics, then, worth while?

Politics, it is seen, lie at the root of all social power. Through politics the workers are kept subject and robbed. Through politics the masters assure that all the benefits which accrue from human progress— every advance in science, every improvement in the means and methods of wealth production—go to them. Through politics they are able to throw the workers into the streets to starve when their labour has filled the warehouses with goods which they are not permitted to consume, and glutted the markets with wealth which chokes its producers. Through politics the tyrants of the universe are able to drag the workers from their homes to die in countless thousands in the trenches of the battlefield. Through politics they are able to fill the land—all lands—with widows and orphans, and with mothers mourning sons who will never return.

All these things politics mean and more. More on the side of the masters, and more, infinitely more on the side of the workers. For politics are the means which will give them control over the armed forces’. over the police and the judiciary, over every stone and timber of the structure of the State, and through these over the instruments of labour, the means of production. Through politics it shall yet be secured that the mills grind for human feeding and the shuttles fly for human comfort. Politics ARE worth while.

A. E. Jacomb

The Wealthy Socialist. (1921)

From the November 1921 issue of the Socialist Standard

The general attitude of the worker towards those possessing wealth is amusingly paradoxical. It is the heritage of serfdom, together with his present servile existence, that engenders the attitude of respect he will always adopt. Yet let him learn of a member of the bourgeoisie who has taken up a stand on behalf of the workers and displayed a knowledge of working-class conditions, and he will regard him sceptically, as who should say: “He’s got money; how can he know anything of us who haven’t? ” Although that very same worker, and this is where the paradox comes in, refuses to think any other way than with the bourgeoisie. He reads and quotes the propaganda they disseminate in their press. He prefers to vote for a candidate who is of the master class, because he feels that such a candidate, being educated and well endowed with the world’s goods, must be, necessarily, better able to represent him in Parliament. It is still quite common to regard M.P.'s in the same category as "toffs,” and a little high-sounding rhetoric and an Oxford accent is a good deal more than half the battle at election time.

A grand example of the falsity of such a position is brought home to us when we consider the life and work of Frederick Engels. Engels was bourgeois by birth and environment, and died worth a considerable amount of money, yet no man, perhaps not even Marx himself, understood the proletarian psychology better. He was the son of an affluent Manchester merchant who needn’t have bothered a bit about the working-class had he chose. But the very fact that his studies and investigations had discovered to him the workings of the social system, forced him, being honest, to write the monumental works so invaluable to the student of Socialism, in spite of his wealth.

This must not be confused with the Fabian argument that the emancipation of the Working Class can only be accomplished by the ” intelligentsia ” of the middle class. The emancipation of the working class must be the work of that class itself. All that is necessary is that it shall become class-conscious and organise to capture the political machinery at present in the hands of the capitalist class. The slum workers and social reformers of the middle class do not understand the economic forces which dominate Society. If they did, they would not waste time in patching up a system which is rotten right at the roots.

It is not necessary to go down a mine, to understand that miners are exploited, nor is it impossible for. a millionaire to know that his millions come from the blood and sweat of a robbed proletariat. There is. nothing, save, of course, a misunderstanding of the. Socialist philosophy, to prevent any member of Society, of whatever social standing, proclaiming himself a Socialist and joining the Socialist Party to work for the emancipation of Society itself; The working class must take the trouble to think for themselves, not waste time wondering whether a man with unsoiled hands really can know anything about factory hells and slums, analyse their position, form their own conclusions, and act upon them, then the day of capitalism will close upon the horrors and terrors it has given birth to, and the morrow will, dawn brighter and happier for the whole human family.

S.