Postal censorship—An Old and Respected English Custom (1947)

From the November 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

The opinion of most people on the practice of opening letters in the post would probably be that it is a nasty foreign habit, suitable to Totalitarian Russia, but out of place in a democratic State. Perhaps some such attitude of mind influenced the Financial Editor of the Manchester Guardian to write the following.

“The decision to search letters, leaving this country for currency notes, securities, and other valuables, will come as a profound shock to the public …. It is a necessary evil in the present situation of the country, but nothing can make postal censorship in peace-time anything else than an abomination.” (Manchester Guardian, 24/9/47.)

In truth all governments, ever since the Post Office was first formed, have interfered to some extent with the “secrecy of the post” ; in war always and in peace sometimes, and not always within the powers granted by law.

The Labour Daily Herald, reporting the new policy, seems to have felt somewhat ill-at cease about it, and sought re-assurance in the thought that only a small number would be affected.

“In any case only letters selected at random will be opened or X-rayed—there is no question of censorship or opening all overseas mail.” (Daily Herald, 24/9/47.)

Even this comfort was removed a few days later when a Post Office official told the Evening Standard (24/9/47) :

“We shall gradually increase the percentage of mail to be examined.”

How extensive the practice can become was shown in connection with the opening of letters believed to relate to lotteries. In 1932 100,000 letters relating to Irish Sweepstakes were seized, and another 250,000 relating to other lotteries.

Labour M.P.’s who in the past have protested against the opening of letters can see what their policy of trying to subject capitalism to controls leads to. Labour M.P.’s were prominent among those who protested against the seizure, in 1929, of the manuscript of poems by the late D. H. Lawrence. On that occasion it came out that the poems (regarded by the Home Scretary as indecent) were discovered accidentally in a routine examination of book packets to find out if letters had been enclosed, this making the packets liable to letter rates.

The excuse that the number of letters opened under an order of the Home Secretary (apart from Sweepstake letters) is very small has often been used. It was put forward in the secret report of a Committee appointed by the House of Lords in 1844 arising out of the protest made by the Italian refugee, Joseph Mazzini, that his correspondence was opened and the contents conveyed to foreign governments.. As their Lordship’s report had it:

“the issue of six or seven warrants upon a circulation of 220 million of letters cannot be regarded as materially interfering with the sanctity of private correspondence, which, with these exceptions, there is not the slightest ground to believe has been ever invaded.”

The Report also mentioned the Committee’s interesting discovery that “for a long period of time, and under many successive administrators,” it had been the established practice of the Foreign Office to open and read all the correspondence of foreign ambassadors in this country before forwarding it on. This had been done without even legal authority, so the Postmaster General discontinued it in 1844.

Earlier still, when Sir Robert Walpole was Prime Minister (1721-1742), the government kept its own private organisation at the Post Office, ostensibly to keep an eye on foreign correspondence but additionally to open the letters of its political opponents, including M.P.’s. The M.P. ‘s were incensed about this. The opening of other people’s letters they could tolerate but it was not playing the game to open their own. Horace Walpole, remembering what his father did, always assumed that his letters would be opened by the Postmaster-General in a later government, and took elaborate precautions to circumvent it.

That is the kind of thing that still goes on wholesale in the modern dictatorships, where the secret police are a main instrument of government. It is true this is not what the Labour government is doing, but we note that Labour M.P.’s who used to protest so vigorously when Conservative governments opened letters in the post are silent now.

P. S.

Useful work, useless toil (1989)

From the February 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is no point in work 

unless it absorbs you like 

an absorbing game.

If it doesn't absorb you 

if it's never any fun,

don't do it.

When a man goes out into his work 

he is alive like a tree in spring, he is 

living, not merely working.

                               (Work, D.H. Lawrence)

Work under capitalism is a drudge for the vast majority, an activity forced upon us rather than entered into voluntarily. Philip Larkin's poem, Toads describes more accurately the attitude of the majority towards their work;

Why should I let the toad work 

Squat on my life?

Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork 

And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils 

With its sickening poison —

Just for paying a few bills!

Ah, were I courageous enough 

To shout Stuff your Pension!

But I know, all too well, that's the stuff 

That dreams are made on.

The narrator of Three Men in a Boat, is fascinated by work. He says he can sit and look at it for hours. If Jerome K. Jerome had ever met a socialist he might very well be one of those people who object to a wageless, moneyless society on the grounds that no one would work at all if coercion were removed. This is of course a fallacious argument: when the clock-watching stops and people are free to do what they choose, nothing becomes too much trouble. When a majority of the working class understand and want socialism, it is hardly likely that everyone will sit on their backsides and do nothing.

Forty hours tied to work he hates.

Unable to undo his fate.

Locked inside those iron gates 

Stocking up his hate.

Blue skies, hot summer days 

Filter through the industrial haze.

The poor automaton can only gaze 

Perplexed by ultra violet rays.

Five days, eight hours.

The sentence is complete.

Alas, money is small recompense 

For labour so mis-spent.

                (Forty Hours in a Birmingham Factory, C. Mulchrone)

It is a misconception that only those engaged in manual or productive labour are "working class”. How many men could match the work-rate of a mother or housewife? We belong, the majority of us, to the working class because we are denied free access to the means of production and distribution. We produce, but we do not own; our whole life-style is conditioned by the need to sell our labour power to a minority class in order to live.

Work is an integral part of human existence, but only in socialism will it become part of the realisation of human potential. To achieve fulfilment, work for socialism.

Dave Coggan

Learning machines: Algorithmic Dreams (2020)

From the March 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

The apparent brains behind the Johnson ministry, Dominic Cummings, has been ruffling feathers with a blog post [since deleted by the looks of it] calling for ‘data scientists, project managers, policy experts, assorted weirdos’. Tellingly, the posts are advertised via his blog, rather than the usual civil service recruitment routes, and applicants are asked to apply to a Gmail address. Cummings has form for trying to use personal accounts to circumvent freedom of information rules. This is all part of his ‘disruptive’ persona, looking to shake up the stuffy old civil service, and get things done:

  ‘We need some true wild cards, artists, people who never went to university and fought their way out of an appalling hell hole, weirdos from William Gibson novels like that girl hired by Bigend as a brand “diviner” who feels sick at the sight of Tommy Hilfiger or that Chinese-Cuban free runner from a crime family hired by the KGB. If you want to figure out what characters around Putin might do, or how international criminal gangs might exploit holes in our border security, you don’t want more Oxbridge English graduates who chat about Lacan at dinner parties with TV producers and spread fake news about fake news’.

It is a bit strange to complain of liberal arts graduates via citing a work of fiction, and tellingly, Cummings remembers the name of Hubertus Bigend, the uber-capitalist anti-hero of Gibson’s Blue Ant series, but not Cayce Pollard (‘that girl’).

He also wants data scientists to look at models of system change and dynamic modelling of viral information. Seemingly, Cummings wants to bring systems analysis and mathematical thinking into the heart of government. He’d have to be prepared to pay well, since those skilled with such talents can find good work in automated trading and business analysis in the City.

Maths not everything

The mathematics populariser Dr Hannah Fry took issue with Cummings’ call:

  ‘There is some truth to this – there are a host of government questions that could benefit from a more mathematical take. In everything from bin collection timetables to Brexit policy, I’d love to see more decisions made on the basis of evidence over instinct. The big-data revolution has transformed the private sector, and I wholeheartedly believe it has the potential to profoundly benefit broader society too’ (Guardian, 5 January).

She points out there are limits to using maths to model society, and that an understanding of humans must go alongside any such scientific modelling.

As Noam Chomsky has pointed out:

  ‘A vision of a future social order is in turn based on a concept of human nature. If in fact man is an indefinitely malleable, completely plastic being, with no innate structures of mind and no intrinsic needs of a cultural or social character, then he is a fit subject for the “shaping of behavior” by the state authority, the corporate manager, the technocrat, or the central committee. Those with some confidence in the human species will hope this is not so and will try to determine the intrinsic human characteristics that provide the framework for intellectual development, the growth of moral consciousness, cultural achievement, and participation in a free community’ (Language and Freedom).

Fry herself had addressed these questions in the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures (which should be available via YouTube by the time this article comes to print). In one of them she addressed the:

  ‘decade in which we learned the lessons of charging ahead without first carefully thinking about the ethics of forcing equations on to human systems. There were the stories about racist algorithms in the criminal justice system, and sexist algorithms designed to filter job applications. YouTube was accused of unwittingly radicalising some of its viewers. Indeed, some would argue that the world is still reeling from the consequences of mathematical equations gone awry, both during the time leading up to the 2008 financial crash and Facebook failing to consider the consequences of its newsfeed algorithms’.

She also explained, however, how algorithms are being taught to learn, through deep reinforcement learning, being ‘rewarded’ for successfully finding the correct result in their task, and ‘punished’ for failing. She demonstrated this via a pile of matchboxes that had been ‘taught’ to play noughts and crosses.

The problem, as with the racist and sexist algorithms, is that if the original data used to teach the algorithm is skewed: Fry, in her Guardian article, linked to an example of how Amazon’s recruitment algorithm had learned that most successful applications came from men, and thus decided that being male was a desirable quality in an applicant.

Resource allocation

Deep reinforcement learning, though, is a powerful tool. AlphaGo defeated a human grandmaster at the immensely complex Japanese boardgame ‘Go’ after teaching itself the game (this is radically different from when human programmers helped Deep Blue to defeat Gary Kasparov at chess).

‘Systems employing this approach have already been used to optimise system performance in areas including resource management, device payment optimisation and data centre cooling’ (Gemma Church, The maths problems that could bring the world to a halt).

Such systems are beginning to solve problems that have hitherto been considered computationally intractable: involving too many permutations and requiring too much processing time to be realistically solved using traditional computing techniques.

The capacity of such algorithms, Church points out, brings into play the possibility for them to handle resource allocation, to actively supply human wants in a real-time fashion:

  ‘Over the last few decades, researchers have developed a range of pretty effective mathematical solutions that can allocate resources across a variety of industries and scenarios so they can attempt to keep up with the daily demands our lives place on them. But when an allocation made at one time affects subsequent allocations, the problem becomes dynamic, and the passing of time must be considered as part of the equation. This throws a mathematical spanner in the works, requiring these solutions to now take into account the changing and uncertain nature of the real world’.

Amazon is already using the data it collects to train algorithms to anticipate what it needs to stock and ship. Amazon has to solve optimisation problems, trying to maximise use of its warehouses, while minimising its delivery routes and matching that with courier availability and flights, trains, etc. The trick with such immensely complex problems is not to solve them absolutely, but to approximate as closely as possible in a computationally realistic amount of time. It is this non-absolute characteristic that enables algorithms to steadily improve. The solution to the millions of variables in a delivery system is to look for good enough, not the perfect.

The algorithms that YouTube and Amazon use to recommend content to customers are changing and evolving in an ecosystem that drives them to improve and ultimately provide us with the goods and services we want. Effectively, producing a profit-driven, private planned economy.

Algorithms are unhuman, as per Serle’s Chinese room (see: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room) they can learn to follow a set of rules and respond to inputs, but they lack intentionality and the inherent structures of feeling and humanness that people possess. Humans are essential to working with algorithmic artificial intelligence to make it serve our needs, rather than that of the special form of Artificial Intelligence that is the capitalist firm. The computing resources are there to enable us to better model and predict chaotic systems, but they need a political determination on the part of us all to avoid them being used to service the needs of the ruling minority. We don’t need Cummings’ technocratic weirdos to change and shape our world, but we can use their ideas to improve our lives: but only if we are running society on our own behalf.

In the words of D.H. Lawrence:

For God’s sake, let us be men
not monkeys minding machines
or sitting with our tails curled
while the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone.
Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces.

Pik Smeet

Rear View: Everything is for sale (2016)

The Rear View Column from the October 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Everything is for sale
‘Brokers in Egypt’s underground trade in human body parts use prostitutes to tempt migrants to sell their kidneys as hospitals turn a blind eye to illicit dealing in donated organs for transplants, a report says. Undocumented African migrants arriving in Cairo, desperate for cash, told the British Journal of Criminology that sex workers were offered as a “sweetener” before or after removal of their organs. “(One pimp) used the services of sex workers as leverage when negotiating fees with both sellers and buyers,” the report said. “A night with a sex worker was offered as an extra inducement to sell.” Organ purchase is banned in Egypt, though the country is a common destination for transplant tourism, along with India, Pakistan and Russia, according to separate research by Erasmus MC University Hospital Rotterdam in the Netherlands’ (news.trust.org, 2 September).


Wages in a sick world
The Daily Mail is a mine of misinformation which has supported fascism and today works with the People’s Daily, the official organ of the so-called Communist Party of China. That the British Medical Association’s ‘Junior Doctors Committee (JDC) is full of Labour Party members’ and ‘many are Jeremy Corbyn supporters and have links to Left-wing group’ may well be true, but to say they ‘idolise [sic] Marx’ and want to make ‘capitalism history’ (dailymail.co.uk, 2 September) is nonsense. Socialists support action by doctors, just as we do with any such activity fought on sound class lines, but would urge them as fellow members of the 99 percent to note the remarks of one Dr. Marx: ‘the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects…that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady’ (Value, Price and Profit, 1865).


Not yet endangered
Some 40 percent of animal species are parasites, a fact recognised by the nursery rhyme Fleas:

Big fleas have little fleas,
Upon their backs to bite ’em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas,
and so, ad infinitum.

D. H. Lawrence in one of his poems compared the mosquito and capitalist:

The mosquito knows full well, small as he is
he’s a beast of prey.
but after all
he only takes his bellyful,
he doesn’t put my blood in the bank.

‘Mosquitoes kill more humans than any other animal and were linked to roughly 500,000 deaths in 2015, mostly from malaria. For more than a century, humans have used bed nets, screens and insecticides as weapons, but mosquitoes keep coming back. They are now carrying viruses like Zika and dengue to new parts of the world’ (wsj.com, 2 September). Capitalism has eradicated Rinderpest and Smallpox. and the spread of Zika may hasten the demise of its carriers. Yet, the driving force of capitalism is the pursuit of profit not health. Neglected tropical diseases are aptly named as they are largely confined to members of our class living in Africa, Asia and the Americas. The eradication of NTDs is possible but not profitable. The establishment of socialism means the end of capitalism and the parasitical 1 percent.


Not FARCical
‘Colombia’s Marxist FARC rebel group said on Friday it had rescheduled its conference to ratify a peace agreement with the government to Sept. 17-23. After almost four years of protracted talks in Havana, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the government agreed last week to end a five-decade-long war that has killed more than 220,000 and displaced millions’ (reuters.com, 2 September). Socialists are, of course, pleased that the slaughter may soon be over but are sick to their back teeth with media lies and distortions. FARC is Marxist in the same way that North Korea (DPRK) is democratic. In fact, FARC declare themselves to be Bolivarian and call for ‘Colombia for Colombians, with equality of opportunities and equitable distribution of wealth and where among us all we can build peace with social equality and sovereignty’, rather than for Marx’s call for workers of all lands to unite for the overthrow of all existing social conditions. Marx during his lifetime was implacably opposed to political terrorism and fought a bitter battle with the anarchist, Michael Bakunin, which resulted in the expulsion of the latter from the International Workingmen’s Association. Marxist socialists oppose terrorism, individual, group or state, guerrilla ‘armies’ and so-called national liberation struggles. Instead we organise for and propagate worldwide common ownership, democratic administration, control of the land, means of production and transportation and the abolition of the wages system.

Wages (1960)

From the December 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

The wages of work is cash.

The wages of cash is want more cash.

The wages of want more cash is vicious competition.

The wages of vicious competition is—the world we live in. 

The work—cash—want circle is the viciousest circle 

that ever turned men into fiends. 

Earning a wage is a prison occupation 

and a wage-earner is a sort of gaol-bird.

Earning a salary is a prison overseer’s job. 

a gaoler instead of a gaol-bird. 

Living on your income is strolling grandly outside the prison 

in terror lest you have to go in. And since 

the work-prison covers almost every scrap of the living 

earth, you stroll up and down on a narrow beat, about the same as a prisoner taking his exercise. 

This is called universal freedom.

From “Pansies” (1929) by D. H. Lawrence

(Published by Marlin Seeker)

The Cash Nexus (1960)

Theatre Review from the August 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

The people of a small German town foregather to welcome the return of Claire Zachanassian, a now fabulously wealthy women who had left her home as a girl of seventeen, many years before. The town is by no means well off, and has high hopes that she will offer them a not considerable part of her vast riches. This she does, but upon one condition: that Anton Schill, a leading member of the community—her former love who had disowned her, pregnant and poverty stricken, and had her driven from the town as a whore—forfeits his life.

Outraged, the people protest in the name of humanity and refuse her extreme terms. But since she had been so brutally treated, Claire Zachanassian has planned retribution on those responsible. After the refusal, she proposes to gather the people, slowly and unsuspectingly, into her power, by inducing them to incur an immense debt through extravagant living on credit which she knows they will never be able to meet. Which in turn forces them to abandon Anton Schill and condemn him to die. This briefly is the story of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's play "The Visit" produced at the new Royalty Theatre. The play's improbability is unimportant beside the sinister reality of its meaning: the power of money over the lives of men.

The progress of the play presents a remarkable study of a change in human behaviour. At the beginning, the people of the small town of Gullen, simple and easy-going folk although poor, have learned since the decline of their industry to be content with little and not to expect much more. The change in their way of life as a result of the intrigues of Claire Zachanassian, in whom they see the obvious virtuous of a rich woman, brings with it also a complete change in their attitudes and values.

Their lives now rest on a precarious system of credit, weighed down by a fake prosperity  that they naively regard as real wealth. But with this goes fear; for what they now they are afraid to lose. A fear that rots the fabric of their relationships with one another, for they now fear one another; afraid of treachery in the name of the humanity they one professed. Dire economic necessity can no longer sustain their one once outraged principles and in the new found values they now see every justification for the death of Anton Schill. For Schill, their once respected future Burgomaster, they have nothing but hatred; they brand him as an enemy of the people who stands between them and their dreams of wealth, and they demand his life. The people, and their once despised outcast, who ironically is the anonymous owner of their decaying industry, are united, but it is the uneasy union of slave and master. By playing on their greed, Claire Zachanassian has made them bring down her revenge on their own hands, and create their own bondage.

In one of his poems, D. H. Lawrence has written that the "Work-Cash-Want circle is the viciousest circle that ever turned men into fiends." The cynical disregard for humanity that capitalism inculcates makes us its playthings; its cat-paws, as Dürrenmatt's millionairess makes the people of Gullen. We destroy ourselves in the cash race. "This," wrote Lawrence in the same poem, "is called universal freedom."

Ian Jones 

One person, one vote (1981)

From the December 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Down the centuries upholders of privilege have recognised and feared the power of the masses to overthrow the rulers of society; but it took a poet to flip the coin of fear and turn it into a joke:

If you make a revolution, make it for fun,
don't make it in ghastly seriousness,
don't do it in deadly earnest . . .
do it just to spit in their eye.
(D. H. Lawrence, A Sane Revolution.)

Fear, irony and humour characterise the responses of many who contemplate for long the oddity that rulers are few and the ruled are many. Plato thought about it a lot:

The third group is the mass of the people, who earn their own living, take little interest in politics, and aren't very well off. They are the largest class in a democracy, and once assembled are supreme.
(Plato, The Republic, p.385, Penguin, 1975)

His ironic response was to spin out an analogy between society and a bee-hive. He wanted all drones cleared out of the hive and replaced by three brainwashed classes of people, presided over by a philosopher-king, who alone stung everyone into submission with a venomous dialectic.

The fearful response to popular power sometimes contains a magical incantation, as when Edmund Burke tried to ward off the evil influence of the French Revolution from his English readers:

We fear God; we look up with awe to kings; with affection to parliaments; with duty to magistrates; with reverence to priests; and with respect to nobility.
(Revolutions 1775-1830. (ed) M. Williams, Penguin, 1971, pp. 108-9.)

It is indeed a heathenish thing for the masses to rise up and bite the hand that whips them!

Goodbye To All That

Fear is creeping into Margaret Thatcher's voice now; with unemployment rising to three million and bankruptcies soaring, and yet insists she's doing us good. Presumably she'll get booted out at the next election and replaced by an earnest Labourite, or a smarmy Liberal-Social Democrat, who'll play at ruling capitalism for a further five years.

What potential for revolution remains among the workers now that parliamentary democracy has made the barricade and the guillotine decadent, even absurd, as a way of removing and chastising Thatcher?

One person, one vote: the implication of this democratic slogan is that there is a revolutionary use for the cube of black-japanned metal — the ballot box. It would not have amused Lawrence, would have puzzled Plato and infuriated Burke; but is something Thatcher and the working class could come to terms with. The ballot can dictate the shape of society. Provided Thatcher displays only the usual amount of incompetence over the next two years, then not the fulminations of Foot, not the hysteria of left-wingers and not the self-starvation of all terrorists will remove her from office. Yet sometime in 1984 she will meekly accept the probable dictate of the ballot box and cease to rule with her usual bad grace. Capitalism could be deposed throughout the world in just the same way; after all, how could an "ism" fight back?

Individuals are the bearers or agents of ideologies. When you vote, you put a cross against the name of someone and the sum total of ideologies borne by the successful names yields the style of society around you — give or take a nuclear hiccup or two. Putting a cross on a ballot for revolution would be much the same — give or take a capitalist or two. What about a world-wide referendum, where the ballot paper reads "capitalism or socialism: place a cross against your choice"?

Hello New World

But the simplest revolutionary use of the ballot box would be to nominate and vote for individuals as bearers of the ideology of the masses — the working class. Theirs is a beautifully simple ideology, well-fitted for revolution. It goes something like this:

Politicians never do the workers any good.
If you want something done, do it yourself.
Labour is the source of wealth and only a fool says otherwise.
You'll never change the world until you get the vast majority to agree.

The political programme to fit this goes as follows:

One person, one vote;
therefore the last thing we need are politicians and leaders;
therefore if anything is to be done to the world all must do their bit;
therefore away with all that nonsense about banks,
advertising and invisible earnings creating wealth — it's brain and brawn that will do it all;
therefore you can stick your United Nations, your summit meetings, your social security plans and all the rest;
we've got to talk it out like we do down the pub — then pick our team.

Strange that a colossal social system like capitalism can be toppled by something as ordinary as the process used by a darts club to choose team members; by the method an angling club uses to select venues for a season; by the way the local women's institute decides who'll make the sausage rolls, make the cakes and cut the sandwiches for the next whist drive. Yet all socialism requires is that workers put their heads together and decide about society, stick their men and women in the parliaments of the world and stick their fingers up at all those who said it couldn't be done.

B. K. McNeeney

Politics of poetry (1990)

From the December 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Words can convey different things to different people at different times and in different places. This is why definitions are so important—it all depends upon what you mean.

People play the cross-purpose game, confident in the belief that understanding is mutual. This is particularly true of words that are symbols for concepts like Socialism, Freedom, Democracy, Revolution, which are of a magnitude too great for single words to carry. On some occasions though, as in poetry, definitions are not only in the main absent, but would be out of place (inhibiting to flow and form), so that one is then free to make of the words what one will.

In 1929 D. H. Lawrence published a collection of poems entitled Pansies because, as he wrote in the preface, "they are rather 'pensees' (thoughts) than anything else". What is interesting about some of the poems in the book is how they can be seen to reflect socialist ideas and aspirations. Take for example the first and last verses from a poem called 'The Root of Our Evil':

The root of our present evil is that we buy and sell.
Ultimately, we are all busy buying and selling one another.
What we want is some sort of communism
Not based on wages, nor profits, nor any sort of buying and selling
But on a religion of life.

Lawrence was not a Socialist and, from a reading of his letters in terms of practical policies, very naive. But on the evidence before us his mind now and then flew on quite surprising social lines.

The nature of poetry wonderfully concentrates the mind, so what attempted in prose might be trite, in poetry achieves a cogent intensity. Critical accuracy is not important. If Lawrence says that "the root of our present evil is that we buy and sell", when in fact it is the ownership of property in the form of capital, this does not dampen its impact and essential social truth.

In the poem 'Kill Money' the literal interpretation is not the relevant point, more the power expression of working class life experience, that comes through.

Kill money, put money out of existence.
It is a perverted instinct, a hidden thought
which rots the brain, the blood, the bones, the stones, the soul.

Make up your mind about it:
That society must establish itself upon a different principle
from the one we've got now.

We must have the courage of mutual trust.
We must have the modesty of simple living.
And the individual must have his house, food and fire all free like a bird.

This theme is extended in 'Money Madness; to show how money comes into the way we estimate or value people, and the shame and stigma of poverty:

For mankind says with one voice: How much is he worth?
Has he no money? Then let him eat dirt and go cold.
And if I have no money, they will give me a little bread,
So I do not die,
But they will make me eat dirt with it.

There is also to be had a touch of William Morris's ideas on how important work is for people and how different it would be in a Socialist world. In 'Men Are Not Bad':

Men are not bad, when they are free.
Prison makes men bad, and the money compulsion makes men bad.
If men were free from the terror of earning a living
There would be abundance in the world
And men would work gaily.

Lawrence sees a distinction between work and labour. What comes through in the next poem is the social character of work, or rather, how the social relationships of work pronounce upon the way we view work and its effect upon our lives:

All that we have, while we live, is life;
and if you don’t live during your life, you are a piece of dung.
And work is life, and life is lived in work
unless you’re a wage-slave.
While a wage-slave works, he leaves life aside
And stands there a piece of dung.
Men should refuse to be lifelessly at work.
Men should refuse to be heaps of wage-earning dung.
Men should refuse to work at all, as wage-slaves.
Men should demand to work for themselves, of themselves,
And put their life in it.
For if a man has no life in his work, he is mostly a heap of dung.

The wages system is central to working class slavery and Lawrence could see in his poem 'Wages' the irony in the need to work for wages being presented as the freedom to obtain ones wants and needs, whereas it is in reality, vicious and constraining:

The wages of work is cash.
The wages of cash is want more cash.
The wages of want more cash is vicious competition.
The wages of vicious completion is - the world we live in .
The work-cash-want circle is the viciousest circle
that ever turned men into fiends.

Lawrence's politics, whatever they were, are none but of academic concern. Occasionally, as mentioned earlier, he touched on politics in his letters, as in January 1921 writing from Italy to the author Eleanor Farjeon:

If I knew how to I'd really join myself to the Revolutionary Socialists now. I think the time has come for a real struggle. That's the only thing I care for: the death struggle. I don't care for politics, but I know there must and should be a deadly revolution very soon, and I would take part in it if I knew how.

Words indeed, but what do they mean? One could, of course, say the same of Lawrence's poetic writings, but at least we may take what we will and use their inspiration to illuminate—imagination to spark upon imagination. What any writer may intend in his work is of little importance. The act of presenting it to the world makes that world the heir and the interpreter, to make what it can from what it already knows and understands.

Ian Jones

D. H. Lawrence and the abolition of money (1985-6)

From the Winter 1985-6 issue of the World Socialist

The novelist and poet, D. H. Lawrence, who died in 1930, was born one hundred years ago, on 11 September, 1885. He was not a socialist and did not profess to be one, but there can be no doubt that he possessed some excellent ideas about what was wrong with the money-wages-profit system and what sort of society would be fitter for humans to live in.

Certain rather foolish literary gentlemen and superficial Leftists have described Lawrence as a fascist. There is no evidence to support this claim, and we would argue that it is a label mainly put about by Stalinists who resented Lawrence for having been a non-conservative who was totally opposed to the state-capitalist dictatorship of the Russian Empire. In the 1930s to have taken up such a position, even if you were in favour of social transformation, meant that the so-called Communists would call you a fascist in the hope of discrediting you. In the case of D. H. Lawrence, who wrote explicitly about why he opposed fascism, the label struck and the smear has no doubt led many people to dismiss the social and political context of his poetry. To do so is to dismiss some of the most forcefully revolutionary poems ever written in English, a selection of which we publish below. They were written in 1929 and are taken from the second volume of Lawrence's selected poems published by Heinemann (the book is deceptively called Pansies, but we can assure you that it is not about flowers).

Why did Lawrence take up some of the ideas expressed in these poems? Reading them, one might think that he was acquainted with the Socialist Party of Great Britain, but there is no evidence to show that he was. More likely, Lawrence picked up the socialist content of his thinking as a result of visiting the home of his girlfriend until 1912, Louise Burrows, whose father was a committed socialist who possessed the socialist writings of William Morris and spent his time talking with Lawrence about the case for socialism whenever the young writer visited his house. The connection between William Morris and D. H. Lawrence is rarely made, and shallow critics would have it that the former was a romantic revolutionary while the latter was a fascistic reactionary (both utterly mistaken observations): in fact, it will be seen from the poems published here that Lawrence too shared a passion to change the insane society of capitalism, and that, if anything, his poetry was more expressive in its simplicity. Moreover, it is known that he had read Morris' News From Nowhere, and was inspired by its depiction of a socialist society. 

Money-Madness

Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.

And of course, if the multitude is mad

The individual carries his own grain of insanity around with him.

I doubt if any man living hands out a pound note without a pang;

And a real tremor, if he hands out a ten-pound note.

We quail, money makes us quail.

It has got us down, we grovel before it in strange terror.

And no wonder, for money has a fearful cruel power among men.

But it is not money we are terrified of,

it is the collective money - madness of mankind.

For mankind says with one voice: How much is he worth ?

Has he no money? Then let him eat dirt, and go cold -

And if I have no money, they will give me a little bread,

So I do not die,

but they will make me eat dirt for it .

I shall have to eat dirt, I shall have to eat dirt

if I have no money

It is that I am afraid of.

And that fear can become a delirium.

It is fear of my money-mad fellow-man.

We must have some money

To save us from eating dirt.

And this is wrong.

Bread should be free,

shelter should be free,

fire should be free

to all and anybody, all and anybody, all over the world.

We must regain our sanity about money

before we start killing one another about it .

It’s one thing or the other.

Kill Money

Kill money, put money out of existence .

It is a perverted instinct, a hidden thought

which rots the brain, the blood , the bones, the stones , the soul.

Make up your mind about it all:

that society must establish itself upon a different principle

from the one we’ve got now.

We must have the courage of mutual trust.

We must have the modesty of simple living.

And the individual must have his house, food and fire all free—like a bird.

O! Start A Revolution

O! start a revolution, somebody!

not to get the money

but to lose it forever.

O! start a revolution, somebody!

not to install the working classes

but to abolish the working classes forever

and have a world of men.

Wages

The wages of work is cash.

The wages of cash is want more cash.

The wages of want more cash is vicious competition.

The wages of vicious completion is - the world we live in .

The work-cash-want circle is the viciousest circle

that ever turned men into fiends.

Earning a wage is a prison occupation

and a wage - earner is a sort of gaol-bird

Earning a salary is a prison overseer’s job,

a gaoler instead of a gaol-bird.

Living on your income is strolling grandly outside the prison

in terror lest you have to go in .And since the work-prison covers

almost every scrap of living earth, you stroll up and down

on a narrow beat, about the same as a prisoner taking his exercise .

This is called universal freedom.

WHY?

Why have money?

Why have a financial system to strangle us all in its octopus arms?

Why have industry?

Why have the industrial system?

Why have machines, that we only have to serve?

Why have a soviet, that only wants to screw us all in as parts of the machine?

Why have working classes at all, as if men only embodied jobs?

Why not have men as men, and the work as merely part of the game of life?

True, we’ve got all these things

industrial and financial systems, machines and soviets, working

classes.

But why go on having them, if they belittle us ?

Why should we be belittled any longer?

How Beastly The Bourgeois Is

How beastly the bourgeois is

especially the male of the species -

Presentable, eminently presentable -

shall I make you a present of him ?

Isn’t he handsome? isn’t he healthy? Isn’t he a fine specimen?

doesn’t he look the fresh clean englishman, outside ?

Isn’t if god’s own image? tramping his thirty miles a day

after partridges, or a little rubber ball ?

wouldn’t you like to be like that, well off, and quite the thing ?

Oh, but wait !

Let him meet a new emotion, let him be faced with another man’s

need,

let him come home to a bit of moral difficulty, let life face him with

a new demand on his understanding

and then watch him go soggy, like a wet meringue .

Watch him turn into a mess, either a fool or a bully.

Just watch the display of him, confronted with a new demand on his intelligence,

a new life-demand.

How beastly the bourgeois is

especially the male of the species -

Nicely groomed like a mushroom

standing there so sleek and erect and eyeable -

and like a fungus, living on the remains of bygone life

sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life than his own .

And even so, he’s stale, he’s been there too long .

Touch him, and you’ll find he’s all gone inside

just like an old mushroom, all wormy inside, and hollow

under a smooth skin and an upright appearance.

Full of seething, wormy, hollow feelings

rather nasty -

How beastly the bourgeois is!

Standing in their thousands, these appearances, in damp England

what a pity they can’t all be kicked over

like sickening toadstools, and left to melt back, swiftly

into the soil of England.

The Mosquito Knows

The mosquito knows full well, small as he is

he’s a beast of prey.

But after all

he only takes his bellyful,

he doesn’t put my blood in the bank.

D.H. Lawrence and Political Poetry

Originally published on the Mailstrom blog.

I don't profess to be an expert on poetry . School gave me a fondness for the war-poets and the only anthology of poems i ever possessed was by Wilfred Owen . I have read and enjoyed Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol and i have also enjoyed Percy Shelley's The Mask of Anarchy .

It was a pleasnt surprise for me to come across in a socialist journal a few of D.H. Lawrence's more biting political poems originally published in 1929 in a volume called Pansies .


O! Start A Revolution

O! start a revolution , somebody !
not to get the money
but to lose it forever .

O! start a revolution , somebody!
not to install the working classes
but to abolish the working classes forever
and have a world of men .


Kill Money

Kill money , put money out of existence .
It is a perverted instinct , a hidden thought
which rots the brain , the blood , the bones , the stones , the soul.

Make up your mind about it all:
that society must establish itself upon a different principle
from the one we’ve got now.

We must have the courage of mutual trust.
We must have the modesty of simple living.
And the individual must have his house , food and fire all free - like a bird.


Money-Madness

Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.

And of course , if the multitude is mad
The individual carries his own grain of insanity around with him.

I doubt if any man living hands out a pound note without a pang;
And a real tremor , if he hands out a ten-pound note.
We quail, money makes us quail .
It has got us down , we grovel before it in strange terror .
And no wonder, for money has a fearful cruel power among men .

But it is not money we are terrified of ,
it is the collective money - madness of mankind.
For mankind says with one voice : How much is he worth ?
Has he no money ? Then let him eat dirt , and go cold -

And if I have no money , they will give me a little bread ,
So I do not die,
but they will make me eat dirt for it .
I shall have to eat dirt , I shall have to eat dirt
if I have no money

It is that I am afraid of .
And that fear can become a delirium .
It is fear of my money-mad fellow-man.

We must have some money
To save us from eating dirt .

And this is wrong.

Bread should be free ,
shelter should be free ,
fire should be free
to all and anybody , all and anybody , all over the world.

We must regain our sanity about money
before we start killing one another about it .
It’s one thing or the other.


How Beastly The Bourgeois Is

How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species -

Presentable , eminently presentable -
shall I make you a present of him ?

Isn’t he handsome ? isn’t he healthy? Isn’t he a fine specimen ?
doesn’t he look the fresh clean englishman , outside ?
Isn’t if god’s own image ? tramping his thirty miles a day
after partridges , or a little rubber ball ?
wouldn’t you like to be like that , well off , and quite the thing ?

Oh , but wait !
Let him meet a new emotion , let him be faced with another man’s
need ,
let him come home to a bit of moral difficulty , let life face him with
a new demand on his understanding
and then watch him go soggy , like a wet meringue .
Watch him turn into a mess , either a fool or a bully.
Just watch the display of him , confronted with a new demand on his intelligence ,
a new life-demand.

How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species -
Nicely groomed like a mushroom
standing there so sleek and erect and eyeable -
and like a fungus , living on the remains of bygone life
sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life than his own .

And even so , he’s stale , he’s been there too long .
Touch him , and you’ll find he’s all gone inside
just like an old mushroom , all wormy inside , and hollow
under a smooth skin and an upright appearance .

Full of seething , wormy , hollow feelings
rather nasty -
How beastly the bourgeois is !

Standing in their thousands , these appearances , in damp England
what a pity they can’t all be kicked over
like sickening toadstools , and left to melt back , swiftly
into the soil of England .


Wages

The wages of work is cash .
The wages of cash is want more cash .
The wages of want more cash is vicious competition.
The wages of vicious completion is - the world we live in .

The work-cash-want circle is the viciousest circle
that ever turned men into fiends.

Earning a wage is a prison occupation
and a wage - earner is a sort of gaol-bird
Earning a salary is a prison overseer’s job ,
a gaoler instead of a gaol-bird .

Living on your income is strolling grandly outside the prison
in terror lest you have to go in .And since the work-prison covers
almost every scrap of living earth , you stroll up and down
on a narrow beat, about the same as a prisoner taking his exercise .

This is called universal freedom


WHY?

Why have money?
Why have a financial system to strangle us all in its octopus arms?
Why have industry?
Why have the industrial system ?
Why have machines , that we only have to serve?
Why have a soviet , that only wants to screw us all in as parts of the machine?
Why have working classes at all , as if men only embodied jobs?
Why not have men as men , and the work as merely part of the game of life?

True , we’ve got all these things
industrial and financial systems , machines and soviets, working
classes.
But why go on having them , if they belittle us ?
Why should we be belittled any longer?

The Mosquito Knows

The mosquito knows full well, small as he is
he’s a beast of prey.
But after all
he only takes his bellyful ,
he doesn’t put my blood in the bank.

D.H. Lawrence

Cages for animals - boxes for workers

From the Socialism Or Your Money Back blog:

Mary Riddell is just one of many journalists who have passed comment of late on the 'nasty, short and brutish life' of the factory farmed chicken. She is certain that Jamie Oliver's and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's related tv programmes will convince people to pay an extra £1 for the 'high-welfare' variety. Jim Plumley, head of sales and marketing for the Channel Islands Co-operative Society, disagrees:

"There are people who are less fortunate than others and are concerned about the price of free range chickens,' he said. 'People who are perhaps more fortunate will have a better choice."

Indeed. People starve while food rots. But what is interesting about Riddell's position in the reformist quagmire is that she goes on to compare the cramped living conditions of the 855 million meat chickens reared in the UK every year with those often suicidal unfortunates in that country's overcrowded prisons. This is, alas, as far as it goes. She does not come close to recognizing that the profit system is the cause of such animal and human suffering. As D.H.Lawrence said, earning a wage is a prison occupation. She does not, therefore, make the more pertinent comparison: cages for animals - boxes for workers:

"...But bad living conditions are not suffered by animals only. Look around the world and see the shanty towns, tenements, back-to-back slums, tower blocks and jerry built council and private estates. The majority of the working class live and die in cramped, overcrowded, unhealthy conditions, lacking privacy or quiet, and often in an environment of depressing ugliness. There are some workers who can negotiate a set of wages that allows them to live in some degree of comfort, rather as the race-horse or pedigree breeding animal may be housed in special quarters. More than a century agitation and legislation have not however eradicated cramped and inadequate living conditions for the majority of humans.
"Yet it would seem a simple matter to provide comfortable living conditions for people - and for animals. The arguments against doing so are couched in accountant's jargon -alternative methods are dismissed as 'uneconomic', 'too labour intensive', 'not viable', 'unprofitable'. Members of the working class hardly need reminding that resistance to higher wages is the first principle in the code of every employer. Economic self-interest and competition override all finer feelings.

". . . The human race and society are not superior to,or apart from, nature but a product of of the universal process of evolution. As the only living creatures on this planet capable of consciously changing the environment and with an insight into the laws of nature we have a special interest in protecting and conserving the earth which is our means of life. Such an outlook will permeate socialist society - a true respect for our environment and fellow living creatures." (From the article, 'Livestock Liberation', Socialist Standard, June 1979)

Rob Stafford