Gunter gives his Orders (1967)

From the December 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Scratch beneath the skin of any complacently Right Wing Labour Minister and in nine cases out of ten you will find he has a history of Left Wing militancy. Minister of Labour Ray Gunter is the tenth case—the man who has always defended the official party line, who has always infuriated the firebrands by his unrepentant stance way out on the right.

Stumpy, thick-necked, with a coarsely drawn face, Gunter can look like a ventriloquist’s dummy. At times he sounds like one, frothing out cliches and platitudes like an unconscious satire on a trade union official eager to let the world know he has recently mastered the use of words like “auspices”, “context”, “relevant.”

Perhaps Gunter is living out of his time; many of his public outbursts sound as if the ventriloquist had cast him in the role of a Dickensian workhouse master, dishing out strong doses of brimstone and treacle to the boys and fiercely crushing any tendency to ask for more:

“The economy of this nation has to be put right.. . with a measure of harsh government”. (Scottish TUC, Glasgow, 12/2/67.)

“We as a nation are living beyond our means.. . too many people drifting and dreaming that all is well” (Ilford, 8/1/66.)

Gunter may infuriate those who think that Labour lost its soul somewhere on the road from Scarborough 1964, but apart from that he cannot be described as an exciting man. His background is undeviating to the point of tedium; trade union branch officer, Divisional Labour Party secretary and agent, joined the Army in the war, rose from private to captain, Labour M.P. after the war, President of his union, member of the Labour Party National Executive and finally Minister of Labour in 1964. Now, he is said to have reached the peak of his ambitions; according to one political correspondent Gunter has no desire to move on to greater things and does not think of himself as a future Prime Minister.

Of course they said the same thing, long ago, when the colourless Major Attlee became Postmaster General in the 1929/31 Labour government— and they kept saying it about him, almost to the day when he took over at Number Ten. Has there ever been a politician who has not seen himself as a future Premier? It is hardly in Gunter’s make-up to be that unique.

Indeed, there is some evidence that his rise in the Labour hierarchy was anything but unconsidered. Gunter first won fame by his spirited defence of the platform at Labour Conferences during the early Sixties, when the long period in opposition had them frustratedly and constantly chewing their own tails. It was temptingly easy, then, for a rising star to rise still further by making attacks on the leadership and by speaking in the wild, airy manner so beloved by the Left Wing. Not a few of the present government did just that— but not Gunter. His stand at the Conferences was enough for the newspapers to decide that here was a man of the future, who could be relied on to do capitalism’s dirty work with never a qualm.

Very soon, Gunter was building up his reputation for preaching what he calls hard facts:

“He said there was nothing sacred in the present methods of collective bargaining, and he could not accept that the rewards must inevitably go to those who could, because of the nature of their work and the power of their organisation, command the greatest economic power.” (The Guardian, 17/9/62.)

I am persuaded that unless the unions face the facts of life as they are in the late 1960s, then in seven to 10 years’ time the State will have to intervene.” (Socialist Commentary, April 1964.)

Gunter was not alone in this; other Labour leaders, among them Callaghan and Wilson, had said roughly the same. Those were the days when the Incomes Policy was being drawn up, for action when Wilson’s honeyed words on the scientific revolution won power for Labour. The unions were being given due warning—and a lot of voters were being convinced that a Labour government would be anything but a tool in the unions’ hands. Prominent among the graspers of this particular nettle, one of the readiest to throw a gauntlet before the unions, was Ray Gunter.

Of course this went down very well with the newspapers, who always seem tremendously impressed by any evidence that a politician may be honest. Gunter, they decided, was a candid man of the people, who could always be relied on to speak his mind. Perhaps that was why, when Labour’s day of victory dawned at last, the television interviewers made a point of asking him what he thought of Gordon Walker’s notorious defeat at Smethwick. Gunter was obligingly blunt; this, he said, was a victory of which the Conservative Party should be thoroughly ashamed.

A lot of people looking in that night must have decided, approvingly or not, that this reply meant Gunter was opposed to the electoral exploitation of racism. But Smethwick, and the later result at Leyton, left their scars; when the Labour government outdid the Tories in their restrictions on coloured immigration, one of the two Ministers to submit memoranda pressing for drastic cuts was Gunter. (The Guardian, 31/5/65.)

But this change of policy did not dent the new Minister of Labour’s reputation for common sense. Nothing, it seems, can do that; even when he is so rash as to say, as he did at Blackburn on 5 January 1966, that there were signs the coming year would be industrially more peaceful than 1965. That risky prediction turned out to be right. In 1966 the number of stoppages of work through disputes, the numbers of workers involved, and the number of working days lost, were all lower than in 1965. But that can hardly be called an achievement of Gunter’s; by recent standards 1965 was a bad year—many more working days lost than in 1964, nearly twice as many as in 1963 although much lower than any year between 1958 and 1962. And 1966 was the year when the railwaymen came within an ace of striking and when the seamen had their first official stoppage for over fifty years—incited, said Wilson, not by any desire to improve conditions but by “politically motivated men”.

But right or wrong, Ray Gunter has kept stolidly on, preaching, bullying (“. . . the conference this week has been … roughly handled by Mr. Gunter.” The Guardian report on the Labour Party conference, 30/9/65) sometimes giving way to self-pity (“Sometimes I felt a bit grim under the skin. Some of you seem to think that blokes like myself, when we have arrived at positions of authority, somehow have deserted all the things we stood for. I resent that.” Scottish TUC, 12/2/67.)

Last summer he won new fame by wishing aloud that not so many Labour Party members would equate the Means Test and profit with original sin (who said they did?). Then a rash of publicity on unofficial strikes—the Cameron Report on the Barbican dispute, the stoppage at the London and Liverpool docks—had Gunter at it again.

First he returned to an old theme of his: discipline. (“Mr. Gunter, the Minister of Labour, said yesterday that the prevalence of unofficial strikes was indicative of a state of indiscipline in industry which we should have to tackle. The Times, 17/10/67.) He has plugged this one before: “There is far too much indiscipline in every part of this nation” (Co-operative Congress, Edinburgh, 7/6/65.) “If, perchance, inner disciplines and voluntary contributions are not forthcoming in a short time, this nation must look to other means to prevent the ultimate disaster” (TUC, Brighton, 6/9/65.)

Then from the very bottom of the rag bag of excuses which all politicians keep handy, Gunter produced the tatty old Red Bogy:

“There is now little doubt that the Communist Party are plotting to make this a winter of disruption. They now, unhappily for the well-being of the nation, have entered into an unholy alliance with elements of the Trotskyist Party. Their aim is to destroy our hopes of economic recovery and thereby they hope to bring ruin to the social democratic movement.” (Gillingham, 18/10/67.)

If it was clear from this that the government were getting desperate, it also seemed that Gunter was living in a nightmare world peopled with wildly undisciplined workers—overpaid, underworked, striking at the first word from Communist Party headquarters.

Now one of the Oxford Dictionary’s definitions of discipline is “. . . order maintained among schoolboys, soldiers, prisoners etc.” Perhaps this is what Gunter thinks is lacking among workers—perhaps he, the ex-officer, would like to have us all recruited into some sort of school, or army, or prison, where there would never be any nonsense about struggling to improve our conditions; disciplined, we would take what was coming to us and be thankful.

In any case, workers are subject to all sorts of discipline, whether they recognise it or not. There is the discipline of relying on a job for a living, and of this job existing only so long as it is profitable. There is the discipline—or perhaps degradation is a better word—of producing goods for sale, which usually means a debasement of skill and knowledge in making a shoddy imitation of the real thing. There is the discipline of living two lives—the workaday life of tongue in the cheek, judging everything in terms of our employer’s profits, the job, the wishes of the boss; and the other life at home, when a worker can judge things, as far as possible, in terms of human comfort and welfare.

This is not all that employment means. Because a worker sells his working ability to an employer, employment means that the interests of both are opposed. This opposition is bound to break out into disputes—over wages, conditions of work, security of employment and so on. Gunter prides himself on being a realist but it is highly unrealistic to expect these disputes to be gentle, disciplined affairs confined to the agreed lines of official action. When it suits the employers’ interests they close down a factory or a mine or a railway line and dismiss their workers and Gunter sees no sinister plot behind it. But when workers decided that their economic interests demand something more militant than lining up like soldiers, or schoolboys, or prisoners, for what their employer likes to give them, Gunter sees red.

It is true that at times (the present, for example) it is Communist Party policy to involve themselves in industrial disputes. Gunter takes this as proof that the disputes are caused by the Communists, which is something like the Communist claim that troubles in Russia and eastern Europe are the work of the CIA. In any case, what about the time, during the war, when the Communist Party were opposed to strikes? Who caused the disputes then? The fact is that industrial trouble is bound to happen and workers become involved in it because they work for wages and not because of any political affiliation.

Let us be blunt with Gunter. He is a member of a government which came into power on a wave of optimism and warm promises. So far their most spectacular achievement is their failure to deliver the goods, and the ebb wave of disillusion which is losing them one by-election after another. The reaction of Gunter, and others, has been to blame outside influences—the gnomes of Zurich, the storm which blew them off course, the alleged laziness and indiscipline of the workers.

This is typical of all governments and typical, too, of Dickens’ workhouse masters, who always said the boys’ hunger was really their undisciplined greed, and had nothing to do with the thin and meagre gruel.

Ivan

Letter: The Committee of 100 and Politics (1967)

Letter to the Editors from the December 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have received a letter from Mr. L. Otter, of Witney, listing and enclosing various anti-Labour and anti-political leaflets handed out by the Oxon Committee of 100 during the 1964 and 1966 elections. He makes the following criticism of the article “Is Politics Corrupt?” in the July Socialist Standard:

“Your attack on the Committee of 100 implies that the Committee were in 64 and 66 campaigning for one of “Conservative, Labour, Liberal or Communist”. The 100 did not exist in the 59 election so we must start with 64. As you reviewed at the time of the 59 election the Voters’ Veto leaflet, and as you are aware that the groups that came together on this were later active in building the Committee, you would hardly have had a case even if you were going back before the formation of the Committee.

“The black on red sticker—”Conservative . .. they are all alike, Vote for humanity” was in fact printed for the 1964 election by the National Committee. Various local committees had their own stickers and posters as well as publishing their own leaflets.

“It is true that some people left the Committee in 1964 disagreeing with its quasi-anarchist position, the majority of these however were not Labour Party supporters but supporters of INDEC (which became the Radical Alliance).

“Since you have not the honesty or the intelligence to know that this position of the Committee’s dates back to the 1964 election it is hardly surprising that you also do not know that both before and after the 1964 election the Committee published leaflets giving social analysis.

“The Harlow CND-Committee of 100 which publishes its own paper Candis, whose editors were in 62 flirting with Anarchism, became so struck by the fact that Stan Newens (Labour MP for Epping since 1964), an ex-trotskyist, became their candidate that though they did not themselves adopt entrism, they did take the same position that the ILP rightwing and the Socialist Leader took at that stage. But the committee as such was very firm on the matter, insisting that all committees should oppose the major parties of the “left” since all supported one or other of the nuclear powers and the social system that makes powers become nuclear.

“This meant that it was regarded as consistent with the Committee position, to support independent unilateralist candidates or to take an uncompromisingly anarchist position. The committee journal contained at least one letter advocating ND support for your own party. It is notable that not merely did the few remaining Labour Party and Communist Party members who had for a time supported the Committee drop out in 1964, but also the Trots, the ILP right-wingers, groups such as Candis and

“In 66 there was no debate in any committee circles, as far as I know, on the matter.”

We thank Mr. Otter for pointing out that the Committee of 100 did not support Labour, Tory, Liberal or so-called Communist in the last two elections. We admit we may perhaps have been a little vague and thus may have caused some misunderstanding. But we did not in fact say that the Committee supported Labour in 1964; nor did we mean to. What we said was that “the Nuclear Disarmers were among the supporters which the Labour Party had when it took office for the first time in some thirteen years” and then went on to quote from a leaflet issued, we assume, by Edgware Peace Action Group, advertising the 1967 Aldermaston March. Our point was this: In 1964 many nuclear disarmers backed Labour and were now becoming disillusioned and rejecting political action altogether. This, we argued, was a mistake. It was not political action as such that was wrong but reformist political action. 

Mr. Otter does not deny that the attitude of the Committee to politics has changed in recent years. He even describes the process in some detail. But, let us go back to the beginning. The Committee came into being in early 1961 as a breakaway from CND over tactics. It backed civil disobedience to get the same aim of unilateral nuclear disarmament by the British government. It was made up of much the same people as CND, viz, pacifists, Christians, supporters of Russia, Labourites, anarchists. The man who was President of the national committee for its first two years. Earl Russell, was throughout this period a member of the Labour Party (he did not tear up his card until October 1965). There was also a curious, and revealing, incident in January 1962. The Spectator of 5 January published part of an abusive letter from the secretary of the Scottish Committee. Bernard Levin took the writer to be a supporter of the Russian government and challenged the national committee on it. Next week two replies were published. One from the Acting Secretary, Tony Southall (now secretary of Glasgow Woodside Labour Party), said:

“The Committee of 100 has never attempted to disguise the fact that our movement contains people of widely differing political persuasion. We have stood for mass non-violent civil disobedience against nuclear weapons. Beyond a belief that this is a viable and necessary programme of action for the people of this country we have never demanded any political qualifications of our members.”

The other, from Nicolas Walter, said:

“The central Committee has no official policy beyond unilateral nuclear disarmament.

No doubt there are Communists who belong to or support the Committee of 100.

The Committee exists solely to organise its demonstrations.”

So, at that time, the Committee was an amorphous body, a kind of ad hoc committee for organising civil disobedience against nuclear weapons (by Britain). Beyond this it had no policy. It was not opposed as such to the Labour, or even the so-called Communist, or any other party. How could it be if it allowed its members to belong to these parties also? But times change. Now, the Committee has a much wider programme, including such reform measures as:

“USE the taxpayers money to build more houses, schools, hospitals and colleges. (One Polaris submarine costs £70m—enough to build and service two new towns).

LAUNCH a ‘crash’ programme for the training of teachers.

CUT rates by reducing the interest rate on loans to Local Authorities to what it was in 1946—1½ per cent.”

(“Our Candidate—Humanity”, 1966 election manifesto).

Editorial Committee.

Letter: China’s Communist Party (1967)

Letter to the Editors from the December 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Friends,

Frank Offord states that the early Chinese Communist Party consisted entirely of an affluent and educated elite—”the ordinary worker being conspicuous by his absence”. I wonder where he gets his information from, he should read Red Star over China by Edgar Snow, an unbiased account of the early days of the revolution written inside the Communist areas of North West China in 1937.

Mao tse-Tung’s father was in fact a poor peasant who had managed to increase his property and income until he acquired the status of rich peasant, employing only one labourer—his family doing most of the work. Mao himself started working in the fields at the age of six, later became an apprentice in a rice shop. He finally went to a proper school at the age of sixteen, and then against his father’s wishes and with a minute allowance. Lin Piao’s father had once owned a small factory, but had been forced out of business by extortionate taxes. Only Chou en-Lai is a member of a traditional mandarin family. It is true that the Communist Party was founded by intellectuals—so are most organisations—but this is hardly surprising considering that the peasants and workers, oppressed as they were with fiercely reactionary landlords and their attendant thugs, and by immense taxes, had no chance to come into contact with Marxist thought. Once the party had been founded the proletariat joined in large numbers.

One thing is certain, the Chinese revolution was achieved not by power-seeking members of the bourgeoisie, but by men who suffered over twenty years of continual fighting and hardship simply because they believed firmly in their convictions. Maybe these same men betrayed their convictions when they gained power, nevertheless the Chinese worker is now a responsible citizen, not a slave. Of course there will always be people seeking wealth as long as money continues to exist, and these people are worthy of our hate. The SPGB attacks everybody and everything—sometimes justifiably and sometimes not—but exaggeration will do nothing to help the cause. By taking it too far you are liable to isolate yourselves and become entirely impotent. You’ll be saying that ‘Che’ Guevara was in it only for the money next.

Tim Deane,

Wimborne, Dorset.

Reply

Edgar Snow got his information through being in China at the time, but we can refer our correspondent to what is in our opinion the best work on the subject written so far—Revolution in China by Fitzgerald, from which we quote from page 193:

“At present the Chinese Communist Party is recruited in very large measure from the educated class, the university students … It is thus not really at all a party made up of members of the toiling masses. It could not be, because the peasants are still mainly illiterate, the workmen very little educated, and too few to supply the dominant clement. The university students come from the classes which Mao Tse-tung has stigmatized as only in part reliable, and lacking in vision and courage, the former country squires or landlords, the city bourgeois and the old official families . . . The present generation of recruits, taken into the party in very large numbers after ‘liberation’ are mainly university students, still very young. They will form the bulk of the Communist Party for another forty years

. . . . . 

The new members from these mandarin families are, of course, ardent Communists, sincere believers in the New Democracy, servants of the people. They are also precisely the same group of people who have governed China for the last two thousand years. It is in their blood. They are born to rule, and whether by virtue of Confucius and the Emperor, or Marx and Mao Tse-tung, makes very little real difference. Deep rooted, not in any way destroyed by the Revolution, is the old Chinese conviction that government is an affair for the elite, for those who sit in the seats of authority, and that the qualification for such a seat is knowledge of the orthodox doctrine, not blood, nor wealth, but ‘book perfume’ is the real test.”

Regarding Mao Tse-tung’s background we can give a tip—’straight from the horse’s mouth’ by quoting the statement made by Mao himself taken down by Edgar Snow and published in Red Star Over China which, as our correspondent says, is an unbiased account. On page 121 he says that it took the five members of the family plus a hired hand to run their farm while his father devoted his time to his prosperous grain business and other activities. “The old man continued to amass wealth or what was considered to be a great fortune in that little village. He did not buy more land himself, but he bought many mortgages on other people’s land”.

It should be remembered that due to lack of development in China at that time it was not necessary for a prosperous business man to own a firm the size of say Marks & Spencer in order to be “one of the nobs”.

Mao had the equivalent of a provincial University education and graduated at the age of 25 (Mao Tse-tung by Stewart Schram—Pelican Books), and so became one of the educated elite and typical of the recruits to the Mandarin class that has traditionally ruled China right up to and including the present period of Capitalism there.

We do not hate, as individuals, either the capitalists or the wage slaves who work for them; it is the capitalist system of society which we seek to abolish and replace with Socialism.

Editorial Committee.

Letter: Distorting Marxism (1967)

Letter to the Editors from the December 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Sirs,

While not in any way wanting to associate the beliefs of our group with those of the SPGB, we are deeply amused at your efforts to emasculate Marxism. Your hatred of Lenin and Bolshevism rather stands in contradistinction to your espousal of Marxism. Most of all, quoting from the works of Kautsky and Bukharin in your literature, as if to prove your Marxism by the choice of books you quote from, is also most humorous. Take any Marxist conception and there the SPGB will be found revising and distorting it. It is perhaps paradoxical that the two works of Marx you base your policies on, Value, Price and Profit and the Critique of the Gotha Programme, are the very works in which Marx exposes and smashes present SPGB policy, in his attack on Lassalleanism. Nevertheless, we are not as sectarian as your Party, and are prepared to listen to any quasi-Marxist group.

M. E. Therrien,

Secretary, Exeter China Policy Study Group.

Reply

The theory and practice of the Socialist Party of Gt. Britain is based on Marxism; that is, we accept as valid the main theories put forward by Marx about history, political economy and politics. We accept that the materialist conception of history is a very useful method for examining and understanding social and historical events and changes. We accept that Capital is a brilliant analysis of the workings and historical tendency of capitalism and exposition of how the working class are exploited. We accept too that the working class can be freed from wage-slavery only by its own efforts, by taking class-conscious democratic political action to get Socialism. We were unaware that in so doing we were “emasculating” Marxism and we are not prepared to consider the allegation that we have distorted Marx’s views until and unless Mr. Therrien, or anyone else, produces some evidence.

As a matter of fact it was Lenin and the Bolsheviks who twisted Marx’s theories. For Marx the emancipation of the working class had to be the work of the working class itself. Lenin rejected this. In What Is To be Done? he says, contemptuously, of the working class that “exclusively by its own effort” it can only reach a trade union consciousness. Socialist understanding, Lenin argued, must be brought to them from outside—in Russia by a band of professional revolutionaries organised as a vanguard party. In other words, Lenin and the Bolsheviks held that a vanguard party could free the working class rather than the working class, through it own class-conscious democratic political action, free itself.

Before trying to pin labels on us Mr. Therrien really must make up his mind which one he is going to use. Kautsky (foremost thinker of European Social Democracy) and Bukharin (Bolshevik thinker and leader, later murdered by Stalin) were both opposed to Lassalle (a nineteenth century playboy who did some pioneer work in organising workers, of Iron Law of Wages fame). And of course Kautsky and Bukharin were opposed to each other. We, in the Socialist Party, have serious criticisms to make of all three. In fact, we would say that Lassalle had nothing to contribute to Socialist theory and Bukharin next to nothing.

The policy of the Socialist Party is not based on two works of Marx. It is based on the interests of the working class in the modern world. Value, Price and Profit is a basic work of Marxian economics always worth reading. The Critique of the Gotha Programme, some marginal notes written by Marx on the programme adopted by German Social Democrats at a unity congress held in Gotha in 1875, has certain defects precisely because it was not written for publication. It is odd that we should be accused of basing our policy on these since the Stalinists use them to try to justify their theory that Socialism and Communism are two separate societies. The notes don’t bear this interpretation anyway and Marx used the two terms interchangeably to refer to the classless society of the future, based on the social or common ownership of the means of life.

Finally, may we express the hope that Mr. Therrien’s group’s study of the policies of state capitalist China is conducted on somewhat more scientific lines than their study of Socialist Party policy appears to have been.

Editorial Committee.

The Problem of Transport (1967)

From the December 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

A constant and pressing problem today, especially in a greater conurbation like London, is the problem of transport. Crowded trains, buses late or cut out, the constant whine of jet planes, dirt, noise and fumes — the list is endless.

At the heart of to-day’s transport problems is the motor-car, loved and hated to an immoderate degree, transforming the very face of the country, as a century ago the steam locomotive was transforming it. Any tenth-rate comedian can get a laugh by just saying ‘Barbara Castle’, as if a change of personality at the head of the Ministry of Transport would make an atom of difference to the problem.

In an effort to ease the jammed-up roads, pleasant gardens and tree-lined avenues are cut up for wider roads, while parks and squares are ruined to make car parks, and even the humble pub garden becomes a little asphalt desert. Motorways run like a scar across the countryside, and winding lanes are ‘improved’ out of recognition. Worst of all is the ever mounting toll of accidents.

None of this is particularly new; it is merely a change of form. That profit is the only serious consideration, with human comfort and happiness coming a very poor second, is true to-day and has been true for as long as capitalism has existed. London, and all big cities, have for centuries been very noisy places. Iron clad wheels and horses’ hooves, clattering over cobbles, made a terrible din and congestion in London was notorious.

Rowlandson, in a typically unflattering series of etchings, drew a picture of traffic chaos in the early 19th century. In the late 1850’s the London General Omnibus Company alone had about six hundred horse-buses, and horse trams appeared on the scene in the 1860’s. Congestion in the City gave rise to plans for a pedestrian bridge over Ludgate Circus, and the first underground railway (imagine the “Met” with steam engines) was put through to relieve congestion.

By the 1890’s there were over 1,700 buses and about 900 trams in central London. Over it all rode the locomotive, a smoky monster that blackened the working class districts through which it cut into London. The childish squabbles indulged in by rival railway companies, as in 1884 when the District Line chained a locomotive in a disputed siding at South Kensington Station and three Metropolitan Line engines tried to pull it out, make the snarling of motorists at traffic light to-day seem very tame.

The protests at Motorways ruining the countryside echo the protests of a century ago when the railways were doing the same thing. No, the problem hasn’t changed, but the vast increase in population, and the much greater powers of production, have made it more acute.

Now, the canals that once drove men and horses hard for greater speed and profit are pleasant, green oases in endless suburbs, and the once hated steam engine a romantic memory. It is the internal combustion engine that dominates the 20th Century.

No other modern industry has had such a profound influence on the social and economic life to-day as the motor industry. Its development has resulted in the decline of once important industries, and has given an impetus to a mass of others that were unimportant at the turn of the century. It was one of the main factors in the migration of industries, from the North of England to the South and to the Midlands, that took place between the wars.

Like the steam engine that preceded it, the internal combustion engine began its existence as a static form of power, and was later adapted for locomotion. Steam cars had been in existence since the early years of the 19th century, but they were heavy and fuel was a problem. The internal combustion engine made possible a much lighter vehicle. More important, it could be run over existing public roads, unlike the railways which had to stick to a set route; this made for greater mobility. By the beginning of the present century the motor vehicle was with us.

Its application followed existing patterns, in the various forms of road transport in existence at the time—the private carriage, the bus and the wagon. In its early days the motor-car was still a luxury reserved for the type of people who could afford a carriage. The bulk of the population travelled by public transport.

The first motor buses appeared in Britain about 1898, and by the early 1920’s they had been joined by the long distance coach.

One of the selling points used by the promoters of coach travel before the war was that coaches took you through the heart of towns and villages, and gave you a better view of the country. Today more and more coaches trail along dreary motorways and by-pass towns and villages.

Slowly the motor buses pushed the railways into the background, and drove the tramcars off the road. The swing was first from the railways to public road transport; the golden age of the bus was the 1930’s.

But now, by changed production methods and a heavy reliance on hire purchase, the private car has become available to the mass of the people. There were four times as many cars on the roads in 1964 as in 1939 and the number is still growing. Furthermore, the number of people travelling to work from a fair distance away has grown steadily over the last 100 years. The resulting chaos has brought home the importance of the railways, with their much greater carrying capacity. Without their rail systems, cities like London woud seize up in the rush hour.

Since the war a favourite pipe-dream has been an ‘integrated public transport system’, with transport used in a balanced way to its best advantage. But capitalism doesn’t work that way. If profit can be made it will be made, however pleasant or unpleasant the result may be. If, on the other hand, something like the railways no longer pays, but is considered necessary to the general interest of capitalism, then it will be subsidised, but as cheaply as possible.

The grim railway arches that overshadowed the mean terraces of south and east London were held up as examples of the inhumanity of the Victorians, but the new fly-overs that overshadow houses to-day show the same contempt for the people who live underneath. Transport has changed. It will change again, we can only guess how; but one thing is certain. If capitalism remains the new transport will be as nasty as the old.

Les Dale

50 Years Ago: The Question of Alsace Lorraine (1967)

The 50 Years Ago column from the December 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

The question of Alsace Lorraine has received considerable attention from the political and journalistic hirelings of the capitalist class. A vast amount of sloppy sentiment has been thrust upon us with the object of covering up the real facts at issue, a good example of which comes from Mr. Lloyd George. “However long the war may be”, says that worthy, “however great the strain upon our resources, this country intends to stand by her gallant ally, France, until she redeems her oppressed children from the degradation of a foreign yoke”.

Knowing the history of the capitalist class, Socialists reject with scorn their professed sympathy for the workers of any nation. Material interest dominates their every action, as the following demonstrates:

“If Germany could secure a peace based on her present military position”, says a writer in the Daily Chronicle 24.10.17. 

“the whole of this wealth of iron ore, estimated at some 5,000 million tons, would pass under her control . . . Liberate these provinces from her clutch with their 21,000,000 tons of iron ore a year, their 3,800,000 tons of iron smeltings, their 2,300,000 tons of steel smeltings, and useful coalfields of the Somme Valley, and a long step has been taken towards peace”.

“It is clearly an almost vital interest, both for France and Great Britain, that the formation of a huge Franco-German cartel, based on the reciprocal exchange of coal for ore, should be prevented, that we should ourselves supply France with the coke that will enable her to do her own smelting, and that we should take from her in return the iron ore that we now import from Sweden and from Spain”. (“Daily Chronicle”, 24.10.17.)

The evidence given shows the capitalists in their true character, as a cold-blooded, profit-seeking tribe, ready to slaughter millions of workers to gain an advantage over a commercial rival.

From the Socialist Standard, December 1917 Article by E. L. Wake.

SPGB Meetings (1967)

Party News from the December 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Correction (1967)

From the December 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

We regret that an unintentional mistake rather changed the meaning of a passage in the letter from Mr. Raymond V. McNally in the third column of page 145 of the September Socialist Standard. Mr. McNally wrote “Yet, theoretically, the capitalist appears to be a disembodied spirit…” but this came out as “… appears to be a dismembered spirit…” We apologise to Mr. McNally, and our readers, for any confusion this mistake has caused.

Editorial Committee.

Blogger's Note:

Corrected for the blog.

Autumn School (1967)

Party News from the December 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard 

There was a good response to the school on Saturday November 11th when Comrade McClatchie addressed the session. It is hoped that the next school will be arranged for a Saturday in March 1968.

Austria (1967)

From the December 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

ALLE MENSCHEN SIND BRUDER—DIE GANZE ERDE IHR VATERLAND is the headline of the latest issue (Oct.-Nov.-Dec. 1967) of the WFW, quarterly journal of our comrades in Austria. The WFW is also serialising our pamphlet Russia 1917-1967 A Socialist Analysis. The first part appears in this issue. Obtainable price 1/- (excluding postage) from our Head Office, 52 Clapham High Street, London, S.W.4.

The Russian Revolution (1967)

Book Review from the December 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Russian Revolution by R. Goldston, Phoenix. 224 pp. 30s.

The bulk of this book is a simple, narrative account of the events in Russia leading up to the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in October, 1917. Both text and accompanying illustrations do this job quite well, although there are dozens of books of a similar standard.

John Crump

The Nature of Russian Society (1967)

Book Reviews from the December 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Unfinished Revolution: Russia 1917-1967 by Isaac Deutscher, O.U.P. 21s.

A Revolutionary Socialist Manifesto by Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski, International Socialism, 4s.

Every Revolution creates its own myths. The French revolutionaries thought that all privilege had been abolished when kings, nobles and priests had been dealt with. Even today in America the dominant ideology denies there is a class system there. And so in Russia where the official mythology proclaims a classless society. But even many who are critical of the government there argue that it is wrong to talk of Russia as a class society. Among these is the late Isaac Deutscher. Deutscher, a freelance trotskyist, was invited to give the George Macaulay Trevelyan lectures in Cambridge this year. He chose to outline what can be called the orthodox trotskyist theory on the nature of Russian society. This may have been new to Cambridge professors but it is old hat to Socialists. All the same, since Deutscher, like Trotsky, can write well the arguments are worth going over again.

Deutscher closely follows Trotsky. [1] Owing to Russia’s economic backwardness and political isolation a bureaucratic caste (not class) was able to usurp power. This bureaucracy cannot be said to be a class as its privileges are not based on property. Their relationship to the nationalised means of production is the same as that of the working class. Its privileges appear in the consumption not in the production of wealth.

  What this so-called new class lacks is property. They own neither means of production nor land. Their material privileges are confined to the sphere of consumption. Unlike the managerial elements in our society, they are not able to turn any part of their income into capital: they cannot save, invest, and accumulate wealth in the durable and expansive form of industrial stock or of large financial assets. They cannot bequeath wealth to their descendants; they cannot, that is, perpetuate themselves as a class.

Deutscher was of Polish origin. By coincidence two young Poles, now in jail, Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski, provide a complete answer to his points in their Open Letter to the Party written in 1965:

  It is said that the bureaucracy cannot be a class, since the individual earnings of its members do not come anywhere near the individual earnings of capitalists; since no bureaucrat, taken by himself, rules over anything more than his mansion, his car and his secretary; since entrance to the bureaucratic ranks is determined by a political career and not by inheritance; and since it is relatively easy to be eliminated from the bureaucracy in a political showdown. This is quite wrong. All the above arguments prove only the obvious: The property of the bureaucracy is not of an individual nature, but constitutes the collective property of an élite which identifies itself with the state. This fact defines the principle of the bureaucracy’s internal organisation, but its class character does not depend on its internal organisation or its mores, only on its relationship—as a group—to the means of production and to other social classes (above all, the working class), (our italics).

That a privileged class could own property collectively seems to have escaped both Trotsky and Deutscher. Perhaps because they attached too literal a meaning to “private property” (after all, in English, private often means individual), they held that nationalisation abolished privilege based on property. Whereas in fact nationalisation is just another form of sectional property. Marx himself, in an early essay discussing the role of the Prussian bureaucracy, showed that he realised a class could own property collectively. [2] Kautsky knew this too. Discussing what, in Western Europe, is the classic case—church property in feudal times— he wrote that after the priests had suppressed the primitive democracy of the early churches “it goes without saying that the property of the community now became in fact the property of their administrators, though not their personal property, but that of the bureaucracy as a corporation”. [3] Some trotskyists even realised this. But the most thorough examination of this species of sectional property was done by Karl Wittfogel. [4] He spoke of “political property”. Kuron and Modzelewski have “bureaucratic property”. But whatever it is called this relationship is clearly a form of class monopoly over the means of production.

In their first four chapters the two Poles brilliantly argue the case that Poland (and, by implication Russia) is a class society; that the working class and peasantry are exploited by the elite “who occupy conspicuous positions in the (Party) hierarchy and who collectively make basic decisions” (a group they call the central political bureaucracy). They show how the working class are propertyless and so have to sell their mental and physical energies to this bureaucracy for wages in order to live. They show too how the peasants are deprived of all surpluses above subsistence so that cheap food is available to keep wages down in industry. They conclude that the way out for the working class is to overthrow by force the bureaucracy and introduce genuine democracy into administration and industry.

Deutscher shares this aim. But because he denies that Russia is a class society he thinks that this change will come about not through a political struggle of the working class but as a result of the evolutionary process he sees now going on. His arguments here are very weak. He says that while managers in the West are responsible to the shareholders

  Soviet managers have not only to acknowledge that all shares belong to the nation, but to profess that they act on the nation’s behalf, and especially on behalf of the working class. Whether they are able to keep up this pretence or not depends solely on political circumstances. The workers may allow them to keep it up or they may not. They may, like a sluggish lot of shareholders, accept bad managers; or they may dismiss them. In other words, bureaucratic domination rests on nothing more stable than a state of political equilibrium. This is—in the long run—a far more fragile foundation for social dominance than in any established structure of property relations sanctified by law, religion, and tradition.

But neither Kuron and Modzelewski (nor we) would argue that it is the managers of industrial concerns who are the privileged class in Russia. They, like those in the West, are really a very highly-paid grade of worker. In Russia they, like the working class generally, must take orders from the bureaucracy (the real equivalent of the shareholders).

Deutscher's argument that the rule of the bureaucracy is less firm than that of the capitalist class in the West has even less merit. For it is true here also that capitalist class rule “rests on nothing more stable than a state of political equilibrium". Here the capitalist class rule primarily because their rule is accepted and endorsed by the vast majority of workers. In fact surely it is they who are in the the weaker position. For as a result partly of past working class struggles and present working class understanding and organisation they are forced to seek, every now and again, a mandate to rule from the working class. The Russian ruling class has to undergo no such indignity. They have all the means they need ruthlessly to suppress any opposition—which they don’t hesitate to use. Kuron and Modzelewski disclose that as late as 1962 tanks were used against workers in Novocherkassk, a small town near Rostov in southern Russia. For the working class to get the ruling bureaucracy off their backs requires quite as much political knowledge and organisation as we need to get the traditional capitalists off ours. Indeed, it requires more for first they must establish elementary rights of expression and association. In fact their struggle, and ours, are part of the same movement of the working class the world over to free themselves from exploitation and oppression.

Adam Buick

Footnotes
[1] Trotsky, Revolution Betrayed.
[2] Marx, Critique et Hegel’s Philosophy of Law.
[3] Kautsky, Foundations of Christianity.
[4] Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism,

Work under Socialism (1967)

From the December 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

However man organises society, be it chattel slavery, feudalism, capitalism or Socialism, work is necessary to provide his basic requirements of food, shelter and clothing. How he produces and distributes his requirements determines that society’s attitude to work.

For example the ancient Greeks considered that mechanical work, which was mainly performed by slave labour, made man unfit for the practice of higher, more civilised cultural activities.

Early Protestantism justified and made pre-eminent the conduct and feeling about work necessary for modern capitalist society. Luther thought that work was “the base and key to life".

As capitalism has developed it has been realised that constant work does not maintain the efficiency of the worker— ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy'—and so concepts of leisure and recreation have in recent years been much discussed. The use of leisure under capitalism must make the worker fit for the continuation of toil, and so there have been recurring complaints against leisure activities which are considered frivolous or degrading.

It should be noted that leisure in the re-creational sense expends energy, and in that sense is work. The opposite to work, idleness, could not be continued for long for it becomes insufferably boring. Work is necessary to meet mankind’s basic requirements. Also it is necessary to maintain the full health of man’s body, physically and mentally.

One of the objections to Socialism is often framed in terms of man's laziness. Given the opportunity to have his basic needs met, it is argued that man would be lazy or idle.

It should be realised that man must exercise his body, or make it work, in order that various organs and parts—muscle, brain, heart, continue to function efficiently.

Man is essentially a social being, not merely because he enjoys the companionship of his fellows, but out of sheer necessity. This social bond shows at times of great disasters. Without society there could be no man. The reason mankind has gained the control over nature that we know at present is due to his developing social organisation. The various problems throughout his evolution have been met by a changing society. Capitalist society throws up problems which are not soluble in its own terms. Those regarding work are principally: no work unless you can find an employer, alienation from the means of production and the product of labour, debasement of quality, trivialised craftsmanship, and specialisation which results in the worker being an extension of the machine. These are some of the conditions of work that Socialism will remove.

Socialism will be a democratic, classless society. All mankind will stand in the same relationship to the means of production. Production will be organised to meet the needs of society, and science will be used to remove work that the community finds distasteful. All labour will be useful. That is, it will be concerned with the production and distribution of goods and services. Commodity production with its requirement of numerous commercial workers, adding nothing useful to meet mankind’s needs, will be no more. Leisure will be idleness or recreation as the individual desires. There will not be any pressure to conform to any given pattern of work and recreation. Men who are working in their own interests do not have to be driven, coaxed, or cajoled. Work under Socialism will be inspired by the greatest of all incentives— the knowledge that the function required of workers will enable each and every human being to have “according to his needs”.

In Capitalist society life is compartmentalised into Infancy, Training, Work and Retirement. Under Socialism people will endeavour to work their bodies to maintain their maximum efficiency in order to gain the greatest enjoyment from life. When young much of the work process will be educational, but the learning process will not cease at any given age. All people will have the opportunity to further their knowledge, ability and interests whatever their age. There will be no such thing as compulsory retirement.

As people get older they will desire to play a greater and eventually a smaller part in society. This will be demonstrated by greater and later a smaller participation in the productive process.

Work will be a pleasurable activity of free men and women, taken up consciously by them and continued as long as the effort is rewarding. There will be no time wasting as today, for time wasting is a reflection of the fact that there is no satisfaction in the work being done. Under Socialism when work becomes distasteful the worker will seek activities more in line with his need and ability.

Production under Socialism will design and produce goods to meet the needs of man in the best way possible. When the products of labour are the best possible, when production is organised to meet the needs of mankind, when man can demonstrate his interest in constructive work, when the alienating conditions of work experienced under Capitalism are gone—then the social constructiveness of work will have removed the cause of much mental ill-health and work neurosis experienced under Capitalism.

Man will then be free to pursue recreational games and pastimes. The do-it-yourself leisure activities of today—man’s limited opportunity to express himself through work and take pride in his achievement—will be part of the production of goods and services that society will require. This means that man will bring the standards of craftsmanship to production, which can be contrasted with today’s cheap shoddy goods with built-in obsolescence designed to meet the requirements of the market.

The historian and his observations today can tell us much, with considerable detail, about the conditions of work under earlier societies and present day capitalism. We cannot be as specific with regard to work under Socialism, for the problem when looking into the future is that we do not know the scientific and technological tools, instruments and machines that will be available. The means of production will obviously strongly influence the method of organisation. Nevertheless knowing the social conditions it can be said that work will be necessary, that man will gain pleasure from creative work, that the free time he will enjoy will enable him to widen and deepen his interests—all in the knowledge that by co-operative efforts the welfare of all mankind will be furthered.

Man, a social being, will recognise that his first vital need is work.

Ken Knight

Religion Retreats (1967)

From the December 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

The last decade has seen the rise of a new phenomenon— Christian Unity. Salvation Army bands play in Anglican cathedrals; Baptists, Methodists and Congregationalists co-operate in “Free Church Councils" and, most startling of all, priests of the Roman Catholic Church, that most unbending of bodies, preach in the churches of other denominations.

A glance at the strife-torn history of Christianity will show just how novel such a situation is. Britain, like the United States, has always been particularly rich in religious denominations. Each denomination, with its particular theories held as essential truths, was in conflict with others. These conflicts were bitter, often bloody. What has happened to draw the members of this much divided society together?

The early development of Capitalism in Britain, and comparative freedom from autocracy, produced an unusual degree of religious freedom. Controversy could rage and it became both the right and duty of dissenting minorities to form their own circle, and to proclaim the truth as they saw it. This was unlike Catholic or Lutheran countries, where a strong tradition of conformity prevailed. There, when disagreements occurred, new groups were formed, but within the framework of the main body. A united front was thus presented, that was often deceptive; war to the knife, as between Jesuits and Dominicans, could be fought within the folds of the Church.

One of the results of the religious freedom in Great Britain has been the virtual absence of politico-religious parties. Catholics and Protestants, Atheists and Jews, are found in any and every political party, according to individual conviction, and there are no anti-clerical parties. Only in Ireland, with its tragic and violent recent history, does religion wear a political garb.

Towards the end of the last century a fundamental change began. Scientific discoveries, and the works of biologists like Darwin, ceased to be the prerogative of the educated few and began to be accepted as commonplace by the many. The great retreat had begun. The dogmas upon which each denomination stood began to become obsolete. When you are struggling to prove the very existence of a God, such questions as whether the bread and wine used at the Mass actually turn into the blood and flesh of Christ, or whether they are just symbolic, become academic.

But there was nothing academic about it 400 years ago. Then men were prepared to kill and be killed for it Many people went to the stake for denying the dogma of Transubstantiation, as it was called, while as many more died for upholding it. Faced with this dilemma not only theology, but large chunks of the Bible itself, have been jettisoned in an effort to make Christianity fit in with modern knowledge. It is difficult at times to know just what Christians do still believe. Fundamentalists have become a minority.

There are many denominations, large and small, in Britain, each one a product of a particular stage in history. First, there are the three Churches, the direct descendants of the Medieval Churches of England and Scotland: Anglican, Roman Catholic and Presbyterian. In Medieval Western Europe only one religious authority existed—the Catholic Church with ultimate authority in Rome. Any attempt to deviate was ruthlessly crushed. The English Church had always been rather more independent. Britain’s geographical position, plus its excellent army, made Papal intervention difficult and its early emergence as a centralised State produced an extreme chauvinism.

Saintly kings, like Henry III and Henry VI, had always been regarded with suspicion, as being too open to foreign influence, and the suppression of foreign based monasteries was always a popular move. When the Church of England withdrew its allegiance to Rome, it still remained the Church of England. The monarch became its head instead of the Pope, but it remained in all other respects a Catholic Church. Its doctrine, its organisation, its ceremony and vestments, remain to this day basically Catholic. It is Episcopalian, which means the government of the church by Bishops, and it is still the official church. This makes it unique among religious bodies. It is not, contrary to popular misconception, financed and run by the State, but in keeping with the British practice of forgetting out of date legislation, rather than repealing it, the Church possesses vast powers in theory that it has long since lost in practice.

In this it resembles the Monarchy and the Nobility, to whom it is tied. Bishops sit in the House of Lords, the Royal Family must be members of the Church of England and Parliament decides major Church policy. It conducts all State religious ceremonies like Coronations. It is still a very large landowner, and finds itself the custodian of a vast number of historic buildings and works of art. It has always been very liberal in allowing a diversity of ideas within its ranks, even down to a “communist’’ Dean and a near-atheist Bishop. Because it is the official Church, the semi-religious turn to it for marriages, burials, and christenings, as well as somewhere to scamper in times of trouble.

The old joke about people with no fixed views being C. of E., is based on fact. This makes it difficult to gauge the Church’s true strength. The figures for 1964 gave the number of people in England baptised in the C. of E. as 27,005,000, the number confirmed as 9,748,000, but the number on the “Electoral Rolls of the Parishes’’, as only 2,739,023. This is nearer to its true strength. In spite of its landowning, and other special assistance, it ultimately rests, like all other groups, on its hard core of members.

Throughout the 16th century there raged within the Church a three cornered battle for control between the Episcopalians, the Catholics and the Puritans. Fortunes fluctuated; under the regency of Edward VI extreme Protestants got the upperhand. Later under Mary I England returned to Roman Catholicism. Parliament supported this move, but on the very important condition that they hung on to the lands plundered from the monasteries. Neither Catholic nor Protestant had the slightest intention of handing these back. The main body of Puritans favoured the Presbyterian system, a more democratic form of church government with no Bishops, and with government by presbyters or elders who are elected. They are Calvinistic. Once again there was no question of freedom, the Puritans wished to control the church, and were just as keen on coercion as the rest. Presbyterianism reached its peak in England during the Civil War, but lost out after the Restoration. In Scotland however Presbyterianism was adopted by the Church, and replaced Episcopalianism. In modern times Presbyterian Churches have been established in England, but Scotland and Northern Ireland are its main strongholds. Its membership in Scotland is 1,400,000 but in England only 71,000.

The third body, the Roman Catholics, lost out both in England and Scotland, and were forced underground for over two centuries. In 1829 the Catholic Emancipation Act removed most of the restrictions on them, and they began to build up anew. They are perhaps the largest, and certainly the best organised, religious body in the world, with about 487 million members. They are not very large in Britain—only about 3 million—but they are still the largest single denomination here. The most important factor is a constant influx of members from Ireland. If the Roman Catholics had to rely solely on converts in Britain, they would be much smaller.

The Catholic Church is the most authoritarian and keeps a tough grip on its members. Its organisation is such that it can retain the waverers that others would lose. The Roman Catholic Church is retreating, but it is an orderly retreat. The recent irony, when the Catholic Herald stated that the arch-enemy Luther was really a good Roman Catholic, will take some swallowing by the faithful but they will manage it. They’ve swallowed worse than that. The Hierarchy are masters at the game, and will certainly dig their heels in when they have to.

The Puritanism of the 16th century had another side—the Independents, and in them one can see the beginnings of modern thought. The mass of the people still tended to think in Medieval terms, and still visualised a State Church, but one dominated by their own particular ideas. The Independents, or Congregationalists, as the names imply believed that churches should be self governing bodies composed of believers only. Each church should be autonomous and the congregation itself should be the ultimate authority. In other words direct democracy. This was extremely revolutionary in the 16th century, and for long after, and brought down the inevitable persecution. The independents were sometimes called Brownists, after one of their founders. The Pilgrim Fathers were mainly composed of Brownists. They covered a wide range of ideas, and from the Independents arose the Congregationalists, the Baptists, and the Quakers.

They were strong in the manufacturing and trading areas, such as London, East Anglia, Bristol and Hull. They had their main following among the skilled artisans and the merchant class. Their great breeding ground was the New Model Army of Cromwell, and they found political expression in such movements as the Levellers and Fifth Monarchy Men. In the 18th century they slipped into obscurity and stagnation, to emerge again at the beginning of the 19th Century. The Congregationalists and Baptists each have a membership of about 300,000 in Britain but they have a very wide following throughout the world.

The Baptists are the largest religious body in the United States, with a considerable following in such unlikely places as Spain and Russia. The Society of Friends, or Quakers, have never been very large but their influence has always been much greater than their numbers. They have always carried Puritan simplicity and democracy to its ultimate. Their most outstanding feature has been opposition to war. One effect of this has been that Quaker industrialists have tended to avoid not only armaments but heavy industry, and concentrated on light industry. Their membership is about twenty thousand.

The early stages of the Industrial Revolution gave rise to extensive movements of reform within the Church of England. The most important offshoot was the Methodist movement founded by John Wesley, an Anglican priest, which eventually broke away as an independent Church. Unlike the old non-conformist bodies, the Methodist Church was authoritarian. Its greatest importance lay in its educational efforts among an often illiterate membership. Wesley was an extreme reactionary, although an outspoken opponent of slavery, but ironically in later years the movement became a breeding ground for Radicals. Many leading Chartists were Methodists. The Methodist Church has a membership of about a million in Britain but nearer to 20 millions throughout the world.

A typical product of the late 19th Century was the Salvation Army. Founded by William Booth in the 1870’s, it was proletarian in origin. Its unique feature was its quasi-military form of organisation, and it concentrated extensively on social welfare work. It was completely authoritarian in its organisation. It added nothing very new to religious ideas, its theories being uncomplicated and nothing more than basic Protestant dogma. Alone amongst large Protestant bodies it has not really changed its ideas, although it has ceased its extreme isolation and is prepared to co-operate.

The picture of the main religious bodies is one of retreat before the growth of scientific ideas and a steady but slow decline of membership. Their dilemma is that as they weaken their case, far from increasing membership, they decline. Too much should not be read into this; there are still something like ten million members of Christian Churches in Britain, although this would include a large number of very lukewarm members. Christianity is tough, it has had massive drifts away before, and could very well make a comeback. But at the moment the retreat is on.

Les Dale

The Review Column: Bombs in Orbit (1967)

The Review Column from the December 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bombs in Orbit

A few years ago the nuclear powers (there were then only three of them) signed the Test Ban Treaty, amid mutual congratulations at their humanity in lifting a shadow from the world.

Since then, a lot has been happening.

France and China have got the Bomb and have tested it. The older nuclear powers have carried out numerous underground tests and have devotedly improved the delivery systems of the bombs they already have.

Russia and America, apart from their well publicised space adventures, have fired up many unannounced satellites, which have gathered the data needed to develop a more deadly type of missile guidance.

Now, the Russians have FOBS—the Fractional Orbital Bombardment System—missiles which go into orbit around the earth and are brought back from space onto their targets.

The American Defence Department have stated that, in their view, the FOBS presents no greater threat than an equivalent number of the old, comparatively simple intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Anyone who can find consolation in that is free to do so. Meanwhile, U Thant’s report to the United Nations states the grim opinion that the world (or some states in it) now have enough nuclear weapons to “eliminate all mankind”.

It is pertinent to point out that the latest Russian horror has come into being in the year when they are remembering the 50th anniversary of the revolution which, they say, introduced Socialism.

What a way to celebrate! And what a comment on the true nature of that revolution, that one of its results has been to add an even more fearsome weapon to the arsenal of an already desperately unsafe world.

George Brown

A section of the press has been gunning for George Brown for a long time. That was why, when Brown put on one of his displays of temperament at the dinner given by Lord Thompson, some newspapers revealed a sudden, strange interest in meticulously accurate and detailed reporting.

Brown is by now established in popular estimation as a man who is always ready to show off his personal weaknesses in public. It is, of course, not unknown for politicians to have personal weaknesses of every kind but usually—as is now being increasingly revealed about the private life of the late Lloyd George, for example—the self-appointed guardians of public information have no qualms about suppressing the facts.

Brown’s tormentors excuse themselves by saying they are worried that a British Foreign Secretary should act in so undignified a way, because this must damage British interests abroad.

The first thing to say about this is that whatever influence the British capitalist class may have in international affairs is founded in their economic and military strength and has absolutely nothing to do with the personalities of their diplomats.

The second thing is that a Foreign Secretary must become involved in all sorts of unsavoury matters. He must promote, agree to, arrange, all manner of treachery, duplicity and intrigue. He must deceive and, if he can carry it off, bully. Sometimes he must back his word with armed force—with destruction and killing. He lives in a savage and cynical world.

It is typical of the hypocrisy of capitalism in general, and of this affair in particular, that all sides in it should think it is perfectly alright for a Foreign Secretary to dabble in the slime, provided he does so with all the traditional ceremonies and dignity.

By-elections

There have been Labour governments before, and Labour governments with unpopular policies, and Labour governments which have lost by-elections. But in all these things the Wilson government are breaking the records.

The Attlee government, just after the war, were unpopular—they imposed the wage freeze, they rationed bread and potatoes, they met the severe winter of 1946/7 with drastic power cuts which sent thousands to bed early in cold, dark homes.

Yet at the by-elections they held the line; as one monotonous result after another came in, it seemed the two big parties were immovably entrenched, each in their respective seats.

Wilson’s record is different. The loss of constituencies like Walthamstow and Leicester means that almost nowhere are Labour candidates safe; that the most massive majority is now vulnerable.

This is a surprisingly rapid change in voting sympathy; it is, after all, only some eighteen months ago that the voters, seemingly mesmerised by the magic of Wilson’s political trickery, swept Labour back into power with an increased majority.

Disenchantment was bound to come and what is now in question is whether, under the pressure of these reverses, Wilson will lose his nerve in the same way as Macmillan did after Orpington.

Either way, and even if in a few odd constituencies like Hamilton the electors decide to vote for one of the smaller parties, there will be no change worth getting excited about. As long as the working class express their frustrations and disappointments by turning from one capitalist party to another the problems they complain about, and which persuade them to change their vote, will continue.

So will the deceits of the political leaders’ magic which, however dazzling in the proud, confident morning of victory, always fades in the dim despair of reality.

What is Anarchism? (1967)

From the December 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the difficulties in explaining the Socialist attitude to anarchism is that there are many different varieties of anarchism, some involving violence, some non-violence; some are anti-religious, some religious. Some anarchists are influenced by Freud; others by different schools of psychology. Some favour the setting up of anarchist communities now, as a transitional step. Others are individualistic, being mainly unconcerned about society's problems. Most envisage the abolition of money, yet some are interested in monetary reforms. The list is endless. Each would have to be examined separately. The best procedure now would be to take a school of anarchism that appears to be close to our standpoint and discuss this.

Basically this form of anarchism envisages the abolition of the state, of buying and selling, of international trade, of frontiers and the like. Its aim would be a consciously regulated society where production would be to satisfy human need; where the workers in particular industries and plants are loosely associated with others in co-operating federations. The adherents of this school argue that the only way in which this state of affairs could be brought about would be by the growth of a majority sufficiently independent-minded to see the need for this kind of world and to begin to organise for it. This would mean withdrawing support from all political activity (parties, voting, etc.) and ultimately destroying the state and all related institutions, and building the nuclei of the new society within the old.

Our basic arguments against the anarchist attitude are these. Any movement concerned with the problems of society (and of the working class in particular) must have certain unified theoretical conceptions. It must have a theory embracing coherently the past and the present, the dynamics of social change, the nature of human behaviour and so on. Without such a unified theory it is not possible to take consistent action on a rational basis, or to modify it meaningfully in the light of experience. We argue that anarchists lack such a theoretical system. In fact the views of even a limited segment of anarchists such as that under discussion involve a wide variety of theories. Such eclecticism preludes the possibility of sound theory and therefore the possibility of sustained correct action. Of course, we are not suggesting that one should not examine and re-examine all relevant theories.

With regard to the attempt to establish a libertarian society by direct action without the ballot-box a number of points can be made.

Anarchists, in their criticism, tend to argue that all "parliamentary" parties, within which they include the Socialist Party of Great Britain, have in the past, and in the present, betrayed the working class; that Parliament is not the real seat of power (a "power-house") but a "talking-shop" or "gas-house"; that the Socialist Party contests elections, aims at parliamentary majorities and so on; and that therefore it is and will be no different from all other parties. Also, the SPGB participates in all the activities which perpetuate what anarchists see as harmful illusions about law, the state and parliamentary democracy.

Our reply is that these anarchists fail to distinguish between the different content of the term "parliamentary" as applied to orthodox parties and to the Socialist Party. They do not see, or perhaps do not want to see, that we insist on the necessity of majority understanding behind Socialist delegates with a mandate for Socialism, merely using the state and parliament for one revolutionary act, after which the Socialist Party has no further existence, subsequent action being the responsibility of society.

We hold it to be absolutely essential that the transformation to a new society be started by formal democratic methods—that is, by persuasion and the secret ballot. For there is no other way of ascertaining accurately the views of the population. The result of a properly conducted ballot will make it clear, in the event of an overwhelming Socialist vote, to any minority that they are the minority and that any attempt to oppose the desires of the majority by violence would be futile. An attempt to establish an anarchist society by ignoring the democratic process thereby gives any recalcitrant minority, possibly violent, the excuse for anti-libertarian direct action itself. They could claim that the assumed majority did not in fact exist or that the assumed majority was not likely to be a consistent or decisive one. In any event there would be no secure justification for a radical change. There might well be unnecessary setbacks and disruptions of the revolutionary movement—possibly involving hardship or loss of life among the working class.

In general, the denigration in a sweeping fashion of Parliament and so on makes it easier for authoritarian movements of all kinds to lay the blame for social problems on democratic institutions instead of on capitalism—as, for instance, did the Nazis and so-called Communists in the Weimar Republic.

The anarchists propose to ignore the state saying, paradoxically, that it does not reflect real social power and that in the desired transformation of society its controllers would be corrupted. Socialists argue that it does reflect real social power and consciousness; that a majority of society comprising class-conscious Socialists would effectively control its mandated delegates who, having free access to things, would have no need of power (individually or as a group). Finally, the anarchist proposal to ignore the state is short-sighted in so far as the formal establishment of the Socialist majority's control of the state does avoid the possibility of effective use of its forces against the revolutionary movement.

Anarchists also tend to refer to the regimes in Russia, Eastern Europe and Cuba as Marxist or Communist, saying that all the antisocial aspects of these systems arise directly or indirectly as a result of the ideas of Marx. In so doing, of course, they do a disservice to the truth.

J.