70 Years of the S.P.G.B. and the Socialist Standard (1974)

Party News from the June 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

Both the May and the June 1974 issues of the Socialist Standard carried details of an exhibition that was to be held at Head Office in June of that year marking the history of both the Socialist Standard itself and of the SPGB.

We are lucky enough that a slide show of the exhibition and a recording of a narration by Edgar Hardcastle ('H.' in the Socialist Standard) was preserved, and it has been uploaded onto YouTube by 'DJW' on his excellent YouTube channel, The Monument.

Embedded below is the video of that slideshow with 'Hardy's' narration. Obviously, it would have been wonderful if there had been actual close-ups of the individual photographs, leaflets, journals and pamphlets from the exhibition but that wasn't to be. We will enjoy what we have. According to Hardy's narration, there were over 400 visitors during the course of the week, and there was a write up of the exhibition in The Guardian. I'll have to see if I can find that Guardian piece. If I locate it, I'll post it on the blog.

Liberal Democrats: Power Hungry Opportunists (2019)

From the December 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

A former Lib Dem member writes.

The enlightenment idea of Liberalism is based on equality before the law, consent of the population, and on liberty. ‘Liberalism sought to replace the norms of hereditary privilege, state religion, absolute monarchy, the divine right of kings and traditional conservatism with representative democracy and the rule of law.’ (Wikipedia)

The foremost exponent of liberalism historically is John Stuart Mill who was a British contemporary of Karl Marx. Mill rejected the labour theory of value of Karl Marx (and economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo) and the class struggle. The class struggle aspect was elucidated in our 1911 pamphlet ‘The Socialist Party versus the Liberal Party’ where we also said ‘society to-day, with its rules and regulations, is shaped by those who are in possession of political power, and … Parliament. It is here the crux of the situation lies … The control, therefore, of political power means the control of society’.

The Liberal Democrat Party today adopts the mantle of liberalism. In theory party policy is made democratically by conference, but in reality, by the Federal Policy Committee chaired by the leader. If that seems cynical, readers are invited to recall the Lib-Dem-Tory coalition government between 2010 and 2015 and their abandonment of their pledge to abolish student tuition fees. The Socialist Party is committed to hostility to all other political parties and the fullest democracy, and this is important because without it, backroom-deals are made behind the backs of ordinary members. Expect the current Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson (who was former leader Nick Clegg’s Private Parliamentary Secretary and later a junior minister in the Coalition government), despite her denials, to politically trade principles for power too. We will not.

DJW

From Handicraft to the Cloud: Part 1 of 2 (2012)

From the March 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

As in the industrial revolution, progress in the computer revolution comes at a price.

Despite all the technological innovation, computing is all too often a frustrating and limiting experience. Is this because Google, Apple, Facebook or Microsoft are evil and lock down hardware, platforms, software and content? NO! Is this because we should all avoid proprietary software, even freeware in favour of mutual co-operative open-source projects such as Linux? Well this is barely half the story as can be seen when free open-source software is not immune to industry trends such as cloud computing, bloat, eye-candy, new version fetishisation and app stores. The elephant in the room is the broad historical trends in the industry which affect free software somewhat less than proprietary software and mirror the industrial revolution and tend to disempower, limit and alienate (in the Marxist sense) the end user. Software and personal computing suffers from class divisions.

2011 was another year of hype for cloud computing. In June 2011 Google launched the Chromebook and Apple announced iCloud. The Google Chromebook is no ordinary laptop, it relies on storing software and your data on Google servers. This is called cloud computing and has been considered the next big thing in IT by market experts for some years. The term ‘cloud’ is appropriate since its benefits are nebulous and it may also represent dark clouds on the horizon for personal computing.

The history of personal computing is almost as old as the first manned moon landing in 1969, and in technological terms, the personal computers of today are certainly more advanced. Why on earth is personal computing then, a frustrating and limiting experience? By 1965, Gordon E. Moore had predicted the rate of advancement in computer hardware (doubling every 18 months), which has proved largely accurate. By 1973, the first mouse-driven graphical user interface had been produced.  Niklaus Wirth observed that ‘software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is getting faster’. This parallels Stanley Jevon’s observation over a century earlier that ‘advances in efficiency tend to increase resource consumption’. To find out why this is the case we have to look at the history of personal computing and its potential downfall.

‘A computer in every home’
The first million selling computer book was the Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth in 1968. Although it was an incredibly technical book, Knuth liked to stress the art aspect of the title, and it was certainly in stark contrast to the industry that it is today. In other respects, sentiments among computing enthusiasts would be familiar (especially to socialists) throughout history. In particular, The Hacker Ethic (Steven Levy, 1984, Hackers) which included such noble statements as ‘all information should be free’ and ‘access to computers should be unlimited and total’. This was not unusual for the time. Popular computing literature including magazines and books such as 101 Basic Computer Games (David H. Ahl, 1973) printed lines of code and encouraged users (especially children) to input the code to produce games. Most personal computers offered a command-line interface (even those with an additional graphical user interface) and were bundled with some form of the BASIC programming language, so named because of its ease of use and suitability for learning. The learning curve for using home computers was steep when compared with today but popular computing literature at the time helped make the curve somewhat more graduated. Despite its significance, very few writers have lamented the disappearance of BASIC, perhaps the most well-known article is titled ‘Why Johnny Can’t Code’ (David Brin, 2006).

As Neal Stephenson put it, in the beginning there was the command-line and Microsoft had the odd idea of selling operating systems. It was Apple Macintosh however, who introduced the first commercially successful graphical user interface with drag and drop capabilities and WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointers) interface in 1984. Just a year later, the Commodore Amiga 1000 made colour, animation, sound and multi-tasking affordable to home users. Although the desktop metaphor for graphical user interfaces was used by rivals, the Amiga offered an indicator of the ethos of the time. It used the metaphor of a deeply-customisable workbench for its operating system. The desktop metaphor prevailed partly because home computers in the West evolved out of the office at a time when industrial capital was on the decline.  But also, the desktop prevailed over the workbench metaphor, because empowering users to control the means of production was gradually becoming an alien notion.

No single business seemed to be able to establish a hardware monopoly, let alone a software monopoly, that was unchallenged by rivals. In January 1986 PC Magazine reviewed fifty-seven different programs for word-processing. Even the most popular application software such as WordStar, AmiPro and WordPerfect was largely produced by small teams and in some cases individuals. The spirit of the age was described as the era of the bedroom programmer, although this is possibly a little exaggerated. Sharing software was widespread, computing magazines distributed cover disks with public domain and shareware software and users exchanged software in classifieds advertisements. Software developers might not have liked it, but magazines were an important channel for distribution. Acceptable software costs to users were generally regarded as the cost of the disk and this was the attitude in businesses as well as at home. The limitations of the hardware of the time meant also that developers were expected to optimize code to be as fast as possible.

Windows 95
The personal computer industry grew rapidly over subsequent years. By 1992, Amigas had fallen by the wayside. Ataris were cheaper and in 1993 could boast multi-tasking but by then it was too late. A monopoly position had already been established by IBM-PC compatible hardware and Microsoft consolidated their monopoly in software with a $300m launch of Windows 95. Although users may have been reluctant to embrace planned obsolescence, this was a time when the vision of ‘a computer in every home’ still involved selling hardware to first-time buyers.

The truth behind the hype was a little different, RoughlyDrafted.com (5 February 2007) comments:

 ‘From the mid 80s to the mid 90s, Microsoft amassed fortunes as an application developer for the Mac. Even in 1996, Microsoft reported making more money from Office–$4.56bn–than it did from all of its Windows sales combined–$4.11bn. Tying sales of Windows 95 to Office helped to boost sales of both. Microsoft pushed the new version of Office as a reason to buy Windows 95, and Windows 95 helped kill sales of rival applications, including the then standard WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3, neither of which were available or optimized for Windows 95 at its launch. By the release of Windows XP in 2001, Microsoft had swallowed up 98 percent of the OS market’

Innovation, but not for the masses

Although Windows 95 firmly established the desktop metaphor over rivals, this was the limit of its innovation and other enhancements were criticised as merely cosmetic. The successful introduction of encyclopedia software called Encarta on CD-Rom was regarded as cutting edge use of technology for encyclopedic content. That encyclopedias might not be traditionally editorially controlled and might instead be participatory by the next major Windows release was not anticipated by Bill Gates in his published book The Road Ahead in 1995 or its heavily revised 1996 reprint.

Many innovations after the achievement of software monopoly never reached the masses or if they did, many years later than when they first appeared. IBM OS/2 never replaced Windows 95, though some considered it more advanced. By 1997, an operating system called BeOS had been introduced with instant-on boot, 64-bit, journaling, indexing and metadata tags, but this too never reached the masses. The first 32-bit internet web browser, with FTP client, usenet group reader and internet relay chat (IRC) client was not from Microsoft but from Cyberjack in 1995. But by embedding Internet Explorer into Windows just as the internet was taking off, Microsoft was able to delay tabbed web browsing as standard (until 2006) which already existed in the relatively popular Netscape Navigator. Internet Explorer became so popular for about 5 years after 2001 that it felt no need to introduce a new version. By then it could no longer ignore the threat of Mozilla Firefox (loosely descended from Netscape) which was rapidly gaining market share.

At least, the marketing for new versions of Windows did claim to offer usability improvements and fix the many problems identified in previous versions rather than just eye-candy. What became clear beyond any doubt was that software was getting inflated at a rate roughly in proportion to each passing year (faster than Moore’s Law). Benchmarking tests are one way to test this, and are sometimes used in the independent computing press.

Bill Gates commented: ‘I’m saying we don’t do a new version to fix bugs […] We’d never be able to sell a release on that basis’ (Focus Magazine 23 October 1995).

The vision of ‘a computer in every home’ began to look dated. Instead, focus shifted to encouraging existing computer users to upgrade software. It suited hardware manufacturers that software updates should make older computers slower. Whereas the earlier trend was for first-time hardware sales to come packaged with software, now software sales (with artificial barriers)  would drive the need to buy new hardware.

Games also played a big part in driving early hardware sales of the first personal computers in the home. Games revenue eventually overtook the movie and music industry and games were even described as the leading artform of the era. The latest ‘Call of Duty’ game was the biggest entertainment launch ever in revenue terms. Games helped drive the industry upgrades but many users’ reluctance to upgrade persisted, and Windows sales through retail channels continued to decline. Planned obsolescence needed introducing more forcefully, and subscriber-computing and the internet was about to offer the opportunity to do it.

The emergence of viruses and malware on the burgeoning internet helped the software update industry. The idea of software spying on the user or otherwise compromising privacy, was something malware and viruses did, not legitimate software. Users owned their software and anything else was an alien concept. As one user on MSFN.org put it:

  ‘I will never understand why users tolerate or accept this. If an individual or company demanded that you prove that you did not steal your home or car, you’d eventually file some kind of complaint or harassment charges against them. If the same standards that are used for applications were applied to operating systems, XP and newer systems would be classified as spyware. Windows has been going in the opposite direction for some time, with each new version giving the user less control over what it does and less access to the data it stores.’

This comfortable position of around 90 percent market share could not be threatened by any rivals. Journalists of the computing press might have been tempted to describe the hardware and software monopolies as the end of home personal computing history. But to do so, would have been as foolish as Francis Fukuyama’s claim to have reached ‘The End of History’ a decade earlier.

DJW

Link to Part 2

From Handicraft to the Cloud: Part 2 of 2 – The 21st Century (2012)

From the April 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 1

The Internet versus the iPod

The first year of the 21st Century was a remarkable one for mass personal computing in many respects including the launches of Windows XP, the iPod and Wikipedia. In 2001, XP was introduced for both home and office users – for over a decade, these had been separate. For home users it was the first version of Windows that required activation (Microsoft Office soon followed suit). Installation CDs were not included with new XP computers which discouraged experimenting with alternative systems. Various legal and illegal projects took the XP operating system and stripped it down for performance gains, proving it could still be functional with less bloatware. Windows Media Player was ‘bundled’ (included in the installation) but was still unpopular, being bloated with eye-candy, and many users replaced it. XP also removed the command-line interface option, a key route out for power users.

The Scratchware Manifesto (at the Home of the Underdogs website) sums up the state of games development but the comment equally applies to software generally.

  “An industry that was once the most innovative and exciting artistic field on the planet has become a morass of drudgery and imitation. A project that costs millions must have a development team to match; ten people, twenty, thirty, more. It must take years from project start to completion. It must involve so many talents, and so much labour, that no single creative vision can survive. … You need thirty talents to develop a game? Bullshit. Richard Garriott programmed Ultima by himself in a matter of weeks. Chris Crawford developed Balance of Power sitting by himself at his Mac. Chris Sawyer created RollerCoaster Tycoon – last year’s number 1 best-selling game – almost entirely on his own. What do you need to create a game? Two people and a copy of Code Warrior. You need millions in funding to create a great game? Garbage! As recently as 1991, the typical computer game cost less than $200,000 to develop. NetHack, still one of the best computer games ever created, was developed for nothing, by a development team working as a labour of love, in their spare time.”

It wasn’t that Microsoft was incapable of innovation, nor was it a company uniquely bad for users’ needs. Windows XP actually introduced decent multi-user accounts albeit some 10 years after Linux. But Microsoft has held back many features that might have made life easier for users. In Windows Neptune, Microsoft experimented with task-orientated interfaces (allowing users to focus specifically on relevant tasks without unnecessary screen clutter) pre-empting by about a decade those of the Chromebook and Ubuntu Linux Unity. Unlike XP however, Windows Neptune was never released. Driven by short-term commercial and compatibility considerations, the standard desktop metaphor of files and folders remained for the mass of users while no-one got to hear about alternatives. Microsoft even tried to incorporate the desktop metaphor into the Windows phone, which finally proved its uselessness beyond all doubt. Windows 8, predicted for release at the end of this year, finally drops the desktop metaphor to some extent. Eventually perhaps Microsoft will provide features long in existence such as live CD/USBs from which you can run an operating system, bespoke installations rather than bloated generic ones, unattended installations you don’t have to babysit, and installation direct from USB.

The internet had effects on the industry in ways which both benefitted and hindered users. At the turn of the millennium, the hacker ethic of sharing was dramatically revived, Napster popularised peer-to-peer sharing of information, principally music. It was tremendously popular and free access but it was also illegal. After Napster’s demise at the hands of the industry, Apple launched iTunes Store in 2003 which was only accessed through iTunes software and could only update iPods. Such artificial software ‘lock-ins’ were a way to stimulate hardware sales in the post “computer in every home” heyday.

The sharing ethic was also channelled into legal collaborative efforts. Many innovations came from the Free and Open Source Software movements. Linux had become a workable operating system for ordinary home users and Knoppix introduced the first popular live-CD environment. Puppy Linux stripped down bloated operating systems without harming functionality and proved modern software can run on old systems. Debian Linux was software with an ethical sharing philosophy. Wikipedia dwarfed all of these innovations, becoming one of the biggest encyclopedias in human history. Several CD-Rom based encyclopedias that had been considered so innovative only a few years before promptly went bust.

Analysing the trend

Criticism of the industry is varied and to some extent constrained by the industry press reliance on advertising revenue from the targets of their criticism. Some criticism is little more than vendor tribalism, but some goes deeper, exploring the mode of production itself. In one popular article, commentator Joel Spolsky in December 2003 claimed somewhat idealistically that making software is not a production process, as if design is not part of production.  Some, like Eric S. Raymond, came up with a novel critique. He makes much of the open source aspect, but little of the free access part. In a 2008 essay he says “More precisely, I hate the proprietary software system of production. Not at the artisan level; I’ve defended the right of programmers to issue work under proprietary licenses because I think that if a programmer wants to write a program and sell it, it’s neither my business nor anyone else’s but his customer’s what the terms of sale are.” This is similar to those who complain that software encloses content in “walled gardens” and want to tear down the walls, but are still content to let the produce of these gardens be exploited by private interests.

The most radical voices tend to come from the free software movement who add free access (an aspect of freeware) to their open source critique of walled gardens. Even among these advocates it is becoming clear that the free access and open source software is not enough. Founder of Linux, Linus Torvalds complained of the “users are idiots mentality” on 12 December 2005.

  “This “users are idiots, and are confused by functionality” mentality … is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it. I don’t use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long since reached the point where it simply doesn’t do what I need it to do.”

The present

This leads us to the present where the industry has resorted to practices blatantly not in the interest of users such as the Microsoft policy to “extend, embrace, extinguish open standards”. Software aims for complete simplicity for the mass of home users while at the same time being increasingly difficult for power users to work with. App stores are characterised by software or content as a commodity with ultimate control by the store owner, which is a far cry from the hacker ethic. Even free software supporters talk approvingly of creating app stores. Maybe they would even support remotely bricking (disabling) iPhones if they are jailbroken (hacked) in order to update their applications.

Some primitivists seek solace in retro-computing and oldversion.com has the slogan “because newer is not always better”. Meanwhile Microsoft markets new versions of Windows with gimmicks including a 3D desktop, better voice recognition, touchscreen and Office with a ribbon interface. These gimmicks extend to using bogus version numbers. Windows 7 was actually revealed to be marketing hype and known internally as Windows 6.1, meaning that it was a lot less different than it pretended. Microsoft is working on artificially locking new hardware to only work with Microsoft operating systems, no doubt calling this better ‘security’. Windows 8 invites users to hand over the ability to wipe clean their computer data to remote Microsoft servers, supposedly for greater ease of use. Then there is ‘shovelware’. Sales of new hardware are driven by low prices subsidised by advertisers who ‘shovel’ in pre-installed low-value software as advertising filler.

Conclusion

The personal computer revolution bears comparison to the Industrial Revolution, only the personal computer revolution has happened more quickly. The sum of all human knowledge will soon be available at our fingertips. The tools to create any recordable media such as film, music and books will be too. ‘Infosocialists’ such as Anonymous and HackBloc (whose motto is ‘Exploit code not people’), the Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallman all support the free software movement and co-operative enterprises such as GNU/Linux. There are also Lawrence Lessig and the Electronic Frontier Foundation who approvingly argue that ‘free culture helps free markets’, clearly only seeing part of the solution from a socialist perspective. History and industry trends show that all code should be the common treasury of all and developers should be encouraged to develop passive consumers into empowered knowledgeable end users. Although Marx wrote some notebooks on the history of technology they are now lost, so perhaps the last word should go to Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain’s predictions of the end of personal computing.

  “The PC is dead. Rising numbers of mobile, lightweight, cloud-centric devices don’t merely represent a change in form factor. Rather, we’re seeing an unprecedented shift of power from end users and software developers on the one hand, to operating system vendors on the other—and even those who keep their PCs are being swept along. This is a little for the better, and much for the worse.” (Jonathan Zittrain, 2011)

DJW 

Further reading

Inside the Black Box: Technology and Economics (1983) by Nathan Rosenberg (particularly Chapter 2).

Autonomist Marxism and the Information Society (1994, 2004) by Nick Dyer-Witheford, Treason pamphlet

Cyber-Marx (1999) by Nick Dyer-Witheford.

The Anarchist in the Library (2004) by Siva Vaidhyanathan.

Free Culture (2004) Lawrence Lessig.

Free culture, P2P networks, alternative economic models, and why some people do not want freedom (2005) by Jorge Cortell

Critical Information Studies: A Bibliographic Manifesto (2006) by Siva Vaidhyanathan.

Why I Hate Proprietary Software (2008) by Eric S. Raymond.

Karl Marx on Technology and Alienation (2009) by Amy E. Wendling.

Free Software, Free Society (2010) by Richard Stallman.

Film Review: The Way Back (2012)

Film Review from the April 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Way Back (2010) Directed by Peter Weir

This DVD is bleak, long and grim. In these respects it may accurately represent the allegedly true story of an escape from a Siberian gulag in 1942. It is based on the bestselling book The Long Walk by Slawomir Rawicz who claimed to have escaped the gulag with six other POWs and walked 4,000 miles south through the Gobi Desert, Tibet and the Himalayas to British-ruled India. In a concession to commercial pressures, the dialogue is in English with a Russian accent, which does little for its credibility. Colin Farrell portrays a violent Russian petty criminal with nationalistic ideas and a tattoo of Lenin and Stalin on his chest. As by far the most interesting character it is a shame that he decides to stay in Russia out of some misguided loyalty “to the motherland”. As might be expected, the film makes some attempt to tie valid criticism of the Soviet Union into criticism of Communism by including, for instance, a desecrated church. Even if you can put this to one side (and these parts are small enough to ignore) the film is still only averagely enjoyable.

DJW

Breivik’s Philosophy of Hate (2012)

From the June 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

We look at mass murderer Anders Breivik’s attempt to imitate Mein Kampf.

On 16 April the trial of the Norwegian right-wing terrorist Anders Breivik started and is scheduled to conclude by the end of June. Breivik has confessed to the bombing in Oslo, killing eight, and the shooting of sixty-nine at the Norwegian Labour Party’s youth camp in Utoya.

Like young, white, male right-wing terrorists before him, such as Timothy McVeigh and David Copeland, Anders Breivik (despite his claims to be part of the Knights Templar) seems to have acted alone. Like McVeigh and Copeland, Breivik became disillusioned with co-operating with anyone in larger far-right organisations preferring a kind of messianic narcissistic individualism.

All grew up under the capitalist system, but with varying provision for welfare. McVeigh became transient after the leaving the army, and ended up in a dead-end job with long hours. Copeland struggled through a series of failed jobs before working on the London Underground. Breivik perhaps enjoyed the best welfare provision growing up, McVeigh quite possibly the most meagre. All were alienated from society and all found familiar scapegoats for their degrees of alienation. McVeigh expressed some of this in writing before the bombing and after in a 1,200 word essay. Only well-educated Breivik, however, seemed well-paid and not precariously employed (traditionally the far right exploit unemployment), and took a language other than his first and wrote a 1,518 page manifesto entitled 2083: A European Declaration of Independence by Andrew Berwick. This somewhat troubles those keen to label anything outside the political mainstream as “extremist” and medicalise his condition as insane. He wrote that his main motive for committing the atrocities on 22 July was to market this manifesto.

The far-right scapegoat which finds the most traction post-9/11 happens to be Islam. It used to be Jewish immigration or Afro-Caribbean immigration. While Copeland talked of a Zionist conspiracy, the far-right, after 9/11, switched support from Palestine to Israel. In any case, like European efforts of the English Defence League, Breivik is more pan-nationalist than nationalist. He writes:

  “One of the reasons why hardcore anti-Semites (David Duke would be a case in point) are unreliable allies is that they hate Jews so much that it shuts down the rational parts of their brain and they end up making common cause with Muslims, based on mutual hatred. The same logic applies to hardcore anti-Europeans, of which there are many even at ‘conservative’ websites such as LGF. They have an irrational hatred, a dark cloud in their minds which prevents them from seeing the world clearly. In a way, some LGF-ers thus have more in common with David Duke than they’d like to admit. If mindless anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism should be considered a problem then so should mindless anti-Europeanism.”

What matters chiefly is that the group persecuted by fascists is in a position of weakness. Breivik implicitly acknowledged this “If I was a bearded jihadist there would be no question of insanity”.

Only about half of the manifesto was written by Breivik and the rest is compiled from other sources. “I’ve spent a total of 9 years of my life working on this project. The first five years were spent studying and creating a financial base, and the last three years was spent working full time with research, compilation and writing.”

The introductory chapter of the manifesto defining “Cultural Marxism” is reprinted from Political Correctness: A Short History of an Ideology by the right-wing think tank, Free Congress Foundation. Very early on, the fabrications and leaps of logic jump out. “Political Correctness now looms over Western European society like a colossus.” then “Political Correctness is Marxism, with all that implies: loss of freedom of expression, thought control, inversion of the traditional social order, and, ultimately, a totalitarian state.”

By the end of the introduction, Political Correctness and other restrictions of freedom of speech or language are treated as synonymous with Cultural Marxism. The conclusion then is to get rid of both, which somewhat discredits later claims to defend free speech.

It should come as little surprise then that Breivik’s particular bête noire was “Marxists”. He is reported to have repeatedly shouted during the shooting, “You are going to die today, Marxists!” and the badge on the left arm of his diving suit read “Marxist Hunter”.

A lot of what follows is tortuous, wrongly interpreted, one-sided opinion, or just plain invented. Long-term demographic projections, an old favourite of fascists, make an appearance despite being notoriously dubious.

Book 1, entitled “History and Islam” focuses on largely historical disputes about genocides, falsification and apologism.  Islam and its adherents are selectively demonised while religion generally gets a get-out-of-jail free card.  The manifesto states “Negationism in Europe is practised with the most prowess by historians and writers who are under the spell of Marxism. Lenin had wanted to use the Muslims against the French and British colonialists. Modern Leftists with Marxist sympathies see Islam as an ally against Israel and the US.”

Book 2, entitled “Europe Burning” is dull speculation about a conspiracy theory of “Eurabia”, and some reprinted rambling about Feminism. ‘Cultural Marxism’ is also used interchangeably with multiculturalism and becomes a phrase for any bad thing you can think of.

One chapter is entitled “Why the discipline of Sociology must be completely removed from Academia”. As far as Breivik is concerned, the reason for this is that it is Marxist. He suggests replacing it with ideas from The Bible, Machiavelli, George Orwell, Thomas Hobbes, John Stuart Mill, John Locke, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Ayn Rand and William James. The selective philosophising is tedious and tiresome to read. Perhaps because he knows he is on shaky ground with capitalism and democracy, the chapter on “Globalised Capitalism” gets a mere four pages and in any case is traditionally code on the far-right for anti-Semitism.

In the rest of Book 2 he writes chapters entitled “Discrimination and harassment against cultural conservatives” and “ ANTIFA/Labour Jugend – State sponsored Marxist lynch mobs” where he states, “These brave Leftists or ‘anti-Fascists’ do, for some curious reason, seem to behave pretty much like, well, Fascists, a bit like the Brown Shirts in the 1930s, physically assaulting political opponents to silence them.” Some of this unfortunately can be levelled at SOS Rasisme and Blitz in Norway.

The manifesto concludes in Book 3 with a mixture of practicality and pure fantasy. One of the final chapters oddly reproduces a ‘Marxist’ study course.  Breivik also credits Wikipedia. All in all, the manifesto represents years of wasted time, money and effort and, most important, wasted lives.  It reads as a hotchpotch of prejudices, has little nuance and is full of generalisations, principally about wrong assumptions. As if to remind us where these prejudices come from, U.S. conservative commentator Glenn Beck came out with the most offensive stupid response. He compared the victims to the Hitler Youth before being reminded that groups affiliated with the Tea Party movement and the Beck-founded 9-12 Project also sponsor politically oriented camp programs for children.

The trial continues.

DJW

Letters: Free (2012)

Letters to the Editors from the July 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Free

Dear Editors

Pathfinders (June 2012) writes the concept of free access seems to be extending and that the ubiquity of online delivery is normalising free access, a quiet revolution in which charging money for important and socially useful things begins to be seen as selfish. This assessment is too optimistic, although intellectual property generally has never had much popular support. In the computer industry the trend is certainly more mixed to say the least and has been the case throughout personal computer history. Political action will be necessary to effectively uphold popular demand and combat the encroachments of property by the powerful in the same way the commons were enclosed in the 17th Century.

John D White (by email)

Greece

Dear Editors

On reading this article I was taken back to my visit to Athens in January this year. I saw people going through the wheely bins of rubbish for something of value, the graffiti “profit = theft” daubed on walls, the shuttered shops, and the massive sale reductions of 75% off products. I was particularly struck by the busker singing The Beatles song, ‘Yesterday’, whose lyrics are very apt for the Greek situation (“all my troubles seemed so far away and now they are here to stay”). I was shocked by ‘needle park’ near the chic district of Kolonaki where young people were openly in daylight “shooting up” drugs. At the main railway station I discovered that all international train movements had ceased. The infrastructure projects started in the halcyon days after Greece adopted the Euro, after the Athens Olympics and the glory that was Greece winning the football Euro 2004 had been halted.  A telling sign was the abandonment of extensions to the main Athens railway station, overhead electrification had stopped mid-way and the Krupp-Thyssen escalator mechanisms still in their plastic coverings on pallets lying in the yard. The Greek Tragedy is capitalism in crisis.

Steve Clayton, 

London SW8

99 Problems and the Rich Are One (2012)

From the August 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is nice to see Occupy London explain its general ideological direction at greater length than we’ve seen in its meetings and previous writings in the June issue of The Occupied Times of London. (The Occupied Times is produced by an ‘autonomous working group of Occupy London general assembly.’) The initial statement on 16 October 2011 agreed by a ‘gathering of Occupy London’ leaves a little to be desired, and though Global Occupy Manifesto (May 2012) did consult international Occupy groups, Occupy London was not consulted to publish. The Occupied Times describes itself as ‘self-funded’ and states that it “does not operate an open-door policy like most other working groups, instead taking the form of an affinity group”.

Issue 14 carries a debate on whether capitalism can be ethical. This is written comprehensibly and well. Capitalism’s defender can barely be bothered to defend capitalism at all, calling instead for ethical consumerism. Its critic gives Marx a mention and writes well but sprawlingly and concludes his piece with a call for a sustainable economy or, seemingly, for a zero-growth economy. Though it’s easy to read, it’s not so easy to understand the detail of the author’s alternative proposal.

The issue also carries a correction of media reports on the verifiability of vacant tents, criticism of specific corporations and specific directors, criticism of the Olympics, pieces on the transatlantic slave trade Gullah/Geechee culture, the Medieval Icelandic Althing, and a Venezuelan documentary, Hip Hop Revolution, an irreverent look at tax resistance (more interesting than it sounds), various international reports and a free plug for London Chapter of the International Organisation for Participatory Society (IOPS). There is also a critical report on an autonomous group, Occupy Faith UK, which is rightly suspicious about co-option by faiths promising not to proselytise. An editor comments: “you can’t get much more hierarchical than gods”.

Transcending Liberalism by Steven MacLean is by far the best article about liberalism in the Occupy movement.  He writes:

  while the occupation at St Paul’s outlived most in the us, the movement here remains in the shadow of Occupy Wall Street. For OWS, the eviction of the camps turned out to be a blessing. Instead of focusing on site management and internal politics, occupiers were given an opportunity to shift tactics and look outwards, focusing on new directions for the movement. Meanwhile, the occupations in London rumbled on defiantly, but vital energy was expended on their upkeep. The occupation of physical space increasingly divided ‘occupiers’ from sympathetic members of the public, resulting in an exclusive lifestyle. we had created a ‘social’ without the ‘movement’, while in the us, Occupy remained an accessible wave of public outrage.

Although the Occupy Movement is still a work in progress, the Occupied Times of London seems relatively editorially free from attachment to some of the dubious ideas in Occupy. In any case, irrational or inaccurate ideas might tend to be undermined in a relatively open publication. A letters page would probably be redundant in the internet-minded Occupy movement, and Occupied Times of London do call for contributions – so seem committed to participation. If the content and commitment of Occupied Times is anything to go by, and the Occupy Movement can resist co-option by hierarchies and defend horizontalism, it will probably sustain the momentum to continue into another year.

DJW

Hands off Wadiya! (2012)

Film Review from the August 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Dictator. Directed by Larry Charles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DJW

Power to the 99 Percent (2012)

From the September 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is the first anniversary of the Occupy Movement this month something to celebrate? With a bit of perspective, we can now look at its tangible achievements and limitations.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” George Santayana, The Life of Reason (1905).

The background to 2011 was one of weak class consciousness, let alone socialist consciousness. Inequality remained firmly off the political agenda. The message from the millionaire ruling class was “We’re all in this together”. Ed Milliband’s challenge to the austerity myth was merely that the cuts were too deep and too fast. Little surprise then that cuts to welfare were implemented relatively free of political impediments.

Then in Spain, protests calling for “Real Democracy Now!” and to “Take the Square” formed the inspiration for Adbusters magazine to call for similar protests in the United States.  It asked, “What is our one demand?”

  “In the weeks leading up to Sept. 17, the NYC General Assembly seemed to be veering away from the language of ‘demands’ in the first place, largely because government institutions are already so shot through with corporate money that making specific demands would be pointless until the movement grew stronger politically. Instead, to begin with, they opted to make their demand the occupation itself—and the direct democracy taking place there—which in turn may or may not come up with some specific demand. When you think about it, this act is actually a pretty powerful statement…” (Reproduced in Occupied Wall Street Journal 1).

This was the start of the Occupy Movement, with the core slogan, “We are the 99 percent”. Various organisations participated in starting it, although Occupy remained much broader than any of them.

The methods of Occupy were not totally without precedent even in the last few decades. Back in the 1990s, the Zapatistas had used horizontalism for decision-making. One slogan that was used, “Another World is Possible,” also recalled the comparable international impact of the protests against the G8 in Seattle. These protests inspired the Anti-Globalisation movement (subsequently renamed Alter-Globalisation) which petered out, although Indymedia and World Social Forum proved more sustainable.

Occupy is formed along non-hierarchical lines.  Its decisions are taken by consensus in general assembly and in smaller working groups. Its commitment to organising without hierarchies seems to have so far deterred vanguards from hijacking it, as happened in the anti-globalisation movement. Regular (mostly weekly) General Assembly meetings have been held in London since its inception and despite repeated evictions from the Stock Exchange, St Pauls, Finsbury Park and Hampstead Heath.

Despite protests from unions, Occupy Oakland was able to partially mobilise for a march of 40,000 people. Occupy London occupied an abandoned bank building and created the venue, Bank of Ideas. They were evicted from that, but they had also formed the Tent City University to organise more talks. Several significant publications have emerged from Occupy locals around the US and UK including propaganda sheets such as Occupied Wall Street Journal, D.C. Mic Check, Occupied Chicago Tribune, Boston Occupier and Occupied L. A. Times as well as much lengthier papers such as Occupied Times of London and Occupy! Gazette by n+1 (literary journal publishers).

The ideological support for austerity was challenged, the genie was out of the bottle and, worse still for the 1 percent, opinion polling showed favourable attitudes to the Occupy movement. The 1 percent establishment were forced to respond.

Co-option by the 1 percent?

In the US, the Democratic Party seem to be targeting Occupy for co-option, using initiatives such as a “99 percent declaration” , “99 percent Spring”, “Occupy Congress” and “Occupy the Dream”. Although Occupy, seeking political support from the electorate isn’t necessarily harmful, Glenn Greenwald comments:

  “they are going to try to convert OWS into a vote-producing arm for the Obama 2012 campaign, and that’s what ‘Occupy Congress’ is designed to achieve. I believed then and — having spent the last few weeks talking with many OWS protesters around the country — believe even more so now that these efforts will inevitably fail: those who have animated the Occupy movement are not motivated by partisan allegiance.” (“Here’s what attempted co-option of OWS looks like”, Salon.com)

The members of Bush Snr’s administration, which Colin Powell is alleged to have called “the crazies”, are the now powerful neoconservative strain which has chosen to attack Occupy. Dirtier muckraking smears of the 1 percent than those in the film, Occupy Unmasked, would be hard to find. The trailer seems to suggest that Occupy is hierarchical, astroturfed and nihilistic. However, just because some participants may have such ideas, does not mean they should be taken as representative of Occupy. Only those agreed by the general assembly can. Whether the controversial body called the “Spokes Council” in Occupy Wall Street makes their movement hierarchical remains to be seen.

Divisions within Occupy

The most controversial argument within Occupy in the US seems to have been between Chris Hedges and David Graeber:

  “The Black Bloc anarchists, who have been active on the streets in Oakland and other cities, are the cancer of the Occupy movement. Black Bloc adherents detest those of us on the organized left and seek, quite consciously, to take away our tools of empowerment. They confuse acts of petty vandalism and a repellent cynicism with revolution. The real enemies, they argue, are not the corporate capitalists, but their collaborators among the unions, workers’ movements, radical intellectuals, environmental activists and populist movements such as the Zapatistas. Because Black Bloc anarchists do not believe in organization, indeed oppose all organized movements, they ensure their own powerlessness. They can only be obstructionist. And they are primarily obstructionist to those who resist.” (Chris Hedges, The Cancer in Occupy, 6 February 2012, Truthdig.com)

To which David Graeber replied:

 “I have on more than one occasion taken part in Blocs where property damage has occurred. (I have taken part in even more Blocs that did not engage in such tactics. It is a common fallacy that this is what Black Blocs are all about. It isn’t.) I was hardly the only Black Bloc veteran who took part in planning the initial strategy for Occupy Wall Street. In fact, anarchists like myself were the real core of the group that came up with the idea of occupying Zuccotti Park, the “99 percent” slogan, the General Assembly process, and, in fact, who collectively decided that we would adopt a strategy of Gandhian non-violence and eschew acts of property damage. Many of us had taken part in Black Blocs. We just didn’t feel that was an appropriate tactic for the situation we were in.” (David Graeber, Concerning the Violent Peace-Police, An Open Letter to Chris Hedges, 9 February 2012, n+1)

Like the World Socialist Movement, Occupy does not seek to impose its object on unwilling participants. It aims rather at facilitating the diversely ideological 99 percent to freely arrive at ideas. The above controversy demonstrated the need for a space to develop those sometimes conflicting ideas. This is where Tidal Magazine (OccupyTheory.org) comes in. In depth but plain-speaking and free from jargon, Tidal argue, “We believe we can’t have radical action without radical thought”.

Occupy is important since it is rare to arrive at an analysis of the class composition of society close to that of the World Socialist Movement but popularised independently. And it is anti-Leninist too.

For us, socialism is the best system for the interests of the 99 percent. For Occupy as well as for those who want socialism, the twin dangers are of treading the path of reformist demands (which would undermine the 99 percent core message), or the path of inevitably doomed insurrection, which was the fate of the Paris Commune of 1871.

Politics has come a long way since the era of the reforms demanded by the Chartists in the 19th century. The manifestos of Real Democracy Now and the Global Occupy Manifesto demonstrate that these have chosen the reformist path. If the iterative Initial Statement of Occupy London continues “veering away from the language of ‘demands’” they may be able to avoid this mistake.

China’s first modern capitalist premier Zhou Enlai is reputed to have said in 1972 it was too early to judge the significance of the French Revolution of 1789. Though the quote is thought to be misinterpreted, hopefully, this opinion rather than Santayana’s is more applicable to the green shoots of the Occupy Movement, still in its infancy.

DJW

The Falklands Again (2013)

From the February 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

They are back in the news following the recent disclosure, in documents released at the end of December under the thirty year rule, that Thatcher was taken by surprise, but this changes nothing and vindicates nobody. Opponents of Britain are encouraged by Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner’s renewed call on 3 January for the Falklands to become part of Argentina.

The Falklands (in Spanish, Islas Malvinas) are a group of small islands in the South Atlantic off the coast of Argentina. The present population can be traced back to European settlement in the nineteenth century, primarily the British approval in 1840 to form a colony there. Britain aside, many other countries have claimed them over time, but Argentina has the longest standing claim to these islands as their own territory.

In 1982, the Socialist Standard at the time described the country ‘in the grip of a severe recession. At the end of March a trade union demonstration against the effects of unemployment and rising prices brought some of the worst civil disorder … But the move against the Falklands brought a miraculous change; patriotic frenzy swamped the reality of the workers’ parlous condition’ (Doing the Bulldog Thing, May 1982). This was a description of Argentina, but one that in many respects might have equally applied to Britain at the time.

Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, then, just short of a thousand workers dead, over two thousand wounded and two months later the islands were retaken by British forces. A few days later the Argentine junta collapsed. American support was absent, the President, Ronald Reagan, had been advised the military junta led by the dictator General Galtieri was a bulwark against ‘communism’. We asked of Britain, ‘If the government was so disgusted by the Argentine junta’s record of repressively anti-working class dictatorship, why was it a major arms supplier to the Junta up until the invasion of the Falklands?’ (The War in the South Atlantic, July 1982.)  The famous left-winger Michael Foot, then Leader of the Labour Party, made a powerful speech in favour of the taskforce sent to retake the islands.

If you want to see how sincerely Britain or any ruling class protects the wishes of the islanders, look at what Britain did to the similarly populated Chagos islanders in Diego Garcia some years earlier.

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

DJW

Student Protests (2013)

From the May 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

The last twelve months have seen some of the biggest student protests in recent memory. On 11 April, Chilean students marched in their thousands, with 250,000 estimated national turnout and 100,000 in the capital. These protests have rumbled on since 2011. The leader of student representation is Camila Vallejo, a Castro-fan and member of (purportedly) Communist Youth of Chile, other members of this group involved in the protests include Camilo Ballesteros (President of the Student Federation of the University of Santiago de Chile), Camila Donato (president of the Federation of UMCE ), the secondary school leader Roberto Toledo. The protests are in part a result of tremendous inequalities across all the Chilean educational system due to the school voucher system. Some 1800 students have been arrested.

In Quebec, the symbol of a red square was adopted when 500,000 students took to the streets to protest in May 2012. Its objective was to freeze or eliminate tuition fees. It was described as the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history. One of the key figures has been Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois of the CLASSE (Coalition Large de l’Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante). It considers mass mobilization as a catalyst of social change. It favours local general assemblies as decision-making instances to referendums, which are considered less democratic. Anarchopanda is an unofficial mascot for the protests, known for hugging students and police. Some 2500 students have been arrested.

In Sussex in Britain, the symbol of a yellow square was adopted. Hundreds of students staged a rally and occupation in March in opposition to privatisation of campus jobs. Some students carried a huge black banner (the biggest thing visible) with white words reading Communism and on the reverse in Latin ‘Omnia Sunt Communia’ which translates to ‘All things are in Common’ and was used originally in the 15th Century by German rebel leader Thomas Müntzer. Despite the riot police presence and its retreat, no arrests were made.

Chile has been the most reformist, Quebec somewhere in between, Sussex, though the smallest, has been the most explicit to call for ‘Communism’. Student unrest could presage a positive movement in the class struggle.

DJW

Film Review: Searching for Sugar Man (2013)

Film Review from the September 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Searching for Sugar Man (2012). Directed by Malik Bendjelloul.

The American Dream is that anyone can succeed if they try hard enough. That didn’t happen for Sixto Rodriguez, a 1970s Detroit singer-songwriter combining the voice of James Taylor with the lyrical ability of Bob Dylan. Firmly in the American folk-music revival counterculture, his songs spoke of working class struggles, hardship and inner city poverty. Maybe it was his Hispanic name, maybe (and unlike Dylan) it was the humility so uncommon for a performer of extraordinary talent.

A mere six sales of two albums meant he was dropped from his label two weeks before Christmas 1971. As Rodriguez returned to poverty working various construction and labouring jobs, his albums took off in South Africa. There he was bigger than the Rolling Stones and his song’s anti-establishment sentiments helped provide the soundtrack for the end of apartheid.

The music industry cheated him of royalties for a reputed half a million sales in South Africa. Unaware of his success abroad, and still living in poverty, Rodriguez made an unsuccessful attempt to become Detroit city mayor, his name was even spelt wrongly on the ballot. Rumours of his on-stage suicide prompted two South African fans to investigate what happened to him. This Academy award winning and Sundance festival winning documentary doesn’t tell the whole story, but it is beautifully presented and what a story.

DJW

SWP Fallout (2013)

From the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many student members of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) have left in the past few months. Two new groups have been formed from the wreckage, the ISN (International Socialist Network) and the UK RevSoc (the Revolutionary Socialists) both composed largely of student ex-members of the SWP.

ISN published a prototype issue of a publication called Cactus. Two UK RevSoc regional branches have made publications: Leeds RevSoc called Dissent and Queen Mary’s RevSoc’s two issues of The Spark.

Spark Issue 1 April 2013 has the look of a cut and paste pre-computer magazine. It has 23 pages of articles on Sussex University, Occupy Sussex, University Education, Women’s Militia, the EDL, Thatcher, the Youth, the British Spring, Illegal Music Downloading and Food. Cactus Issue 0 (so-called because it is a prototype) is much more professionally presented and has 140 smaller pages of articles on Egypt, Brazil, Bangladesh, Women’s Oppression, Where Now For The Left and Culture. Richard Seymour (the key figure in ISN) suggests ‘[the ISN] is not, it seems to me, the ‘true bearer’ of the legacy of Marx …’ And ‘We do not even place an undue premium on self-preservation. Indeed, if all goes well, we won’t exist for too long.’

Another article makes a plea ‘The Left Unity project, in our opinion, has the potential to play the role of a broad, class-struggle party’. We disagree.

DJW

Left Unity, Broad Church (2013)

From the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

If you have ideas that aren’t supported, but you want your ideas to win support what do you do? Should you dismiss the ability of people to think and change and set out to deceive people not supportive of your ideas, since this is what most political parties do? Should you play down your ideas in an organisation, in order to win supporters, putting numbers of supporters as more important than your ideas?

Of course big ideas overlap, it would be sectarian to suggest otherwise, but what if those ideas are political and require political organisation for a political purpose? How important is sticking to your ideas, or what might be called principles, then? What if the idea is socialism, which represents a fundamental break with previous society? How important then, is clearly defining supporters from non-supporters?

The project called Left Unity then is going for the broad approach. There is a willingness to accept subscriptions from members not in agreement on political purpose with other members. Agreeing on action first, then (if at all) worrying about ideological agreement (as unfashionable as that is), is not the way to persuade people. Very quickly they will find out that some ideas negate other ideas, such as higher wages negates abolition of the wages system. Some supporters of the organisation will become ideological opponents (or at least non-supporters) when revolutionary change arises.

The greatest American orator for socialism once said ‘It is better to vote for what you want and not get it, than to vote for what you don’t want and get it.’

Brocialism and Manarchism (2013)

From the December 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Late October saw a few incidents which ‘feminists’ criticised. The Anarchist Bookfair in London saw a transwoman abused and an outdoor Catholic (not a religion known for being pro-women) called Ciaran O’Reilly heckled by ‘feminists’ (Sam Ambreen) shouting “kill all men”. At a meeting about Wikileaks in Liverpool, the same speaker was apparently harassed on account of rape apologism in respect of allegations against Julian Assange. Meanwhile Laurie Penny criticised Russell Brand (2 Nov 2013) for sexism after he wrote his views on revolution in the New Statesman.

The issue of feminism raises many questions. Do women bear the brunt of sexism? Generally, yes. Are women more likely to be victims of rape and domestic violence? Yes. Are allegations made by women less likely to even be investigated when reporting rape? Yes. Some have been surprised to find attitudes of sexism from ‘socialists’ and in the labour movement, (see Women in the Labour Movement statement) and even negative attitudes to disability (see LINK).

Feminists have characterised these problems as ones dismissed by socialists or relegated to the future, accusing sexist men of ‘brocialism’ (a portmanteau of brother and socialism) or manarchism (man and anarchism), but they must be speaking to the wrong so-called ‘socialists’. These observations are not ones dismissed by genuine socialists, as these problems have solutions that genuine socialists want and act to implement now. ‘Socialists’  perpetuating sexism only expose themselves as non-socialists. ‘Intersectionality’ is a modern term for different forms of oppression intersecting – for example, sexism intersecting with class society – but these types of concepts and connections were observations writers like Engels made way back in the nineteenth century.

Our socialism is in a sense  ‘feminist’ (although a better term would be egalitarian) as it is the socialism of the pioneering anti-sexist works of Lewis H. Morgan, Friedrich Engels, August Bebel and Eleanor Marx.

Film Review: Gasland (2010) and Gasland: Part II (2014)

Film Review from the April 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Gasland (2010) and Gasland: Part II (2013). Directed by Josh Fox.

Gasland is an Oscar-nominated film about America’s frenzied drilling for natural gas using hydraulic fracturing (fracking) with more wells planned in the next decade than in the last hundred years. Rural residents (and workers) of Pennsylvania are suffering irreversible brain damage and excruciating pain due to neurotoxins in newly contaminated water and air following drilling. The response of the fracking industry has been a hundred million dollar lobbying campaign, in part to suppress criticism. Some lobbyists have even gone so far as to recommend the use of military manuals on psychological operations and treating critics as ‘insurgents’. Secrecy plays an important part too. No spokesperson from the industry agreed to interviews with director Josh Fox, and companies in the industry have been buying off contaminated land with confidentiality agreements. In public the argument has been made that there is no alternative, in private, industry figures refuse to drink the contaminated water and provide bottled water to residents. One resident commented, ‘you want me to shut my mouth? I ain’t gonna’ and ‘I ain’t no tree-hugger.’

Despite dismissal of environmental critics as unscientific, industry efforts have ensured actual science is hard to come by. Leaked internal industry memos report no way of completely fixing or preventing cement well-casing from fracturing, so perhaps it’s not just cowboy practices. Environmental scientist Bob Howarth comments ‘we tested shale gas [claims] as a transitional fuel and a better fossil fuel for global warming and it is neither.’ Satirist Stephen Colbert asked one industry figure if he could feed his toddler chemicals used in fracking, ‘because they’re perfectly safe, right?’ Fox’s Emmy-award winning sequel is even better than the first. Films about fracking such as the earlier Split Estate (2009), like many social justice films, can tend towards a glum tone. Josh Fox as an investigative film-maker avoids this and is as warm and hopeful as early Michael Moore in covering ‘the last gasp of the fossil fuel era.’

DJW

Letters: Bargain basement nationalism (2014)

Letters to the Editors from the June 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bargain basement nationalism

Dear Editors

The UK Independence Party is clearly being sold to ordinary voters as a movement to liberate us all. And sadly many workers will back it. Yet as the article ‘People Not Profits’ mentions, UKIP is no alternative at all (Editorial, May Socialist Standard).

UKIP sells a kind of bargain-basement nationalism that seeks to blame workers outside the UK for our problems. It wants to close the borders, and substitute ‘patriotism’ for compassion. And its policies are designed to transfer even more wealth and income into the pockets of the rich.

It’s the economic system that oppresses people, not those who move to the U.K. We need to reject the false ideology of nationalism UKIP promotes, as well as its economic ideas.

Graeme Kemp, 

Wellington, Shropshire.

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Blatant contrast

Dear Editors
Regarding the article on 15 Central Park West (‘Voice from the Back’, April Socialist Standard), some years ago I took a stroll of some of the streets where the buildings look out on to Central Park. The buildings, a mixture of mansions, hotels and apartment blocks, were beautiful and were obviously occupied by the wealthy. The streets which intersected with the prosperous-looking avenue contained some atrocious slums, many of which were right next to the above buildings. Here one saw a blatant and obvious contrast between wealth and poverty. It should have been enough to have the least perceptive onlooker wonder if perhaps there wasn’t something wrong in a society that could create such extremes.

Steve Shannon, 

Mississauga, Canada.

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Compelling Case

Dear Editors

I just wanted to write and say I really enjoyed reading the three election manifestos and supporting article carried on pages 10 to 12 of the May Socialist Standard.

In clear, modern and accessible language, they all set out a powerful and compelling case for a world socialist society, and certainly inspired me to do something positive to bring this about!

Andrew Northall (by email)

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Middle Eastern Marxists?

Dear Editors

Perhaps the most striking part of the International Workers’ Day demonstration on May Day 2014 was the large contingents of Turkish and Iranian ‘communists’ in London. Tens of attendees turned up parading plain red flags in co-ordinated outfits from organisations such as Alevi Federation, Day-Mer (ostensibly, the Turkish community centre in North London) , RedHack, Worker Communist Parties of Iraq and Iran. Perhaps the most prominent figure inspiring some of these groups is the late Mansoor Hekmat (who died in 2002), who rejected both ‘Stalinism’ and Islamism and urged communists to ‘go back to Marx’. Not in itself sufficient for a socialist, but if ‘Marxist-Hekmatism’ is popular enough for a ‘Marx-Hekmat’ society in London or in the large populations of Turkey or Iran, then perhaps it is worthy of further critique by the true socialists in London.

DJW (by email)

No Room for Dissent (2016)

Journal Review from the April 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marxist World Issue 1 – Spring 2016. £3.50 inc.

This is the first issue journal of the small split from the Trotskyist so-called ‘Socialist Party of England and Wales’ (known as SPEW and not part of the World Socialist Movement) ostensibly over the causes of economic crisis. The journal carries articles on the character of China’s economy, experiences in the Labour Party, Marx’s Capital, Bernie Sanders, a reprint of an article by Peter Taaffe, ‘The Greek Road to Socialism’, Electronic Voting in the Trade Unions and a book review.

Marxist World claims SPEW hold an underconsumptionist view of economic crisis; that there is not enough purchasing power to buy back commodities produced, whereas they claim the ‘tendency of the rate of profit to fall’ since the 1970s has caused the current economic crisis. This did not sit well with SPEW leader Peter Taaffe, and after some debate two critics were ‘indefinitely suspended’ and eleven ended up leaving.

The Labour Party account included here is one of left-wing Labour members’ disagreements with right-wing Labour members (business as usual in the Labour Party) and the left-wing author concludes by seeming happy to remain on this merry-go-round. The Peter Taaffe reprint argues the old Communist Party was reformist, Marxist World use this to argue SPEW are reformist. The Bernie Sanders article is a good exposé of Sanders, but boils down the problem to the wrong leader, never considering that leaders are unnecessary if not harmful.

In fact this goes to the heart of the problem of Marxist World, who welcome only activists adhering to general ideas of ‘Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky’. They claim willingness to ‘join any revolutionary organisation’ that ‘guarantees genuine democratic centralist rights and faction rights based on open discussion.’ But where has ‘democratic centralism’ ever allowed factions for long? Where has ‘democratic centralism’ allowed challenging incumbent leaderships? Where has ‘democratic centralism’ allowed public dissent?

Trotsky answered at a Bolshevik party congress in 1924 ‘Comrades, none of us wants to be or can be right against the party. In the last analysis, the party is always right, because the party is the sole historical instrument that the working class possesses for the solution of its fundamental tasks. I have already said that nothing would be simpler than to say before the party that all these criticisms, all these declarations, warnings, and protests – all were mistaken from beginning to end. I cannot say so, however, comrades, because I do not think it. I know that no one can be right against the party. It is only possible to be right with the party and through it since history has not created any other way to determine the correct position.’ And ‘We can only be right with and by the Party, for history has provided no other way of being in the right’.

The lesson here we should conclude is: don’t swap leaders, especially not living ones for dead ones.

DJW