Architecture and Politics: The Key to the Radiant City (1969)

From the December 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

  Architecture is not fulfilling its mission as long as it has not provided a roof (tectum) for all that should be sheltered. In this sense it should concern itself with collective services, with the agglomerations.

Letter from Paul Otlet to Le Corbusier, 1928

No architect in this century has had more influence through his ideas, buildings, and books than Le Corbusier. So much of modern architecture shows signs of his influence that it is impossible to imagine how different most of the buildings going up around us would have looked had he not existed. In city planning some of the methods he proposed 40 years ago — such as complete separation of cars and pedestrians — have only recently taken root in the minds of a few planning authorities. His ideas on almost every aspect of architectural design — from the free facade and buildings on stilts (pilotis) to 'brute concrete’ and sculptural building form, to name but a few — are still such a potent force and subject of controversy today that it may seem surprising that architects play down his political views (which he expressed no less strongly than his views on design) and even appear to ignore them.

But this is not really so surprising. To most architects and city planners politics is an embarrassment, and although every building programme is at the mercy of political and economic forces they consider these to be outside their professional scope altogether. Le Corbusier was notorious for his unique ‘arrogance’ and ‘outspokenness’. And although his political views were unsystematic, it is very encouraging to find this unique man starting out from the need to provide all his fellow-men with a decent environment and from there working out a programme similar in many respects to Socialism.

He was born in Switzerland in 1887. In 1933 his book The Radiant City (one of many) was published in France. (In a republished edition in 1964, the year before his death, he endorses everything he says in it.) The Radiant City is designed for leisure, sun, greenery, and open sky; large expanses of parkland separate rows of apartments; the playing-fields are right outside the apartments; the roofs are 60-foot-wide sun decks (beaches, in fact); the street no longer exists (except inside the buildings); homes are fully soundproofed and air-conditioned; there are nurseries, swimming-pools, and laundries minutes away, and industry in a separate zone two or three miles away (but minutes by car or bus) . . . Even though many architects disagree with various details of Le Corbusier’s scheme, it is hard to see how anyone can quarrel with the standards and quality he was aiming for. A utopia? Far from it—it was well within our technological and other resources back in 1930. Only the political structure prevented it then and prevents it now. Listen to what Le Corbusier says:

  It is recognised that industry is submerging us with products that are irrelevant to our happiness. We have been propelled by machines into a false adventure, into a misadventure: these machines that can produce ten or 20 times as much as we ourselves ought to enable us to work at least five or ten times less. Modern industry, organised according to the laws of supply has inundated us with useless consumer goods. Wandering down this primrose path, allowing one thing to lead to another, we have finally allowed ourselves to be taken over entirely by what we call free competition, which is to say a form of slavery, which means that any effort is immediately countered by an opposing effort . . . we have become merely a flock of rams, horns locked together . . . The flock’s strength is drained away, yet it is not moving . . .  we can make no progress! Free competition has been forced to invent advertising, the prospectus, the exhibition, product prizes, etc.: all those competing have to summon up all their energy to cancel out the efforts of their competitors. 

  It is indisputable that this frightful competition gives rise to the most violent emulation and effort. 

 But is it also certain that the human spirit is incapable of creative enthusiasm when faced with fruitful tasks? 

  An economy based on demand would put an end to the reign of the travelling salesman and the advertising agent, but it would necessitate a programme . . . for the production of useful consumer goods. Though not a narrow and exclusive one. The mind must always be left enough elbow room to satisfy its deepest purposes: quest for quality, supremacy, straggle and competition — but on the fertile soil of disinterest.  

   Our programme will concern itself with consumer products of a useful nature and with the redirection of industry onto the path towards its true aims; with providing work for all and guaranteeing every man his daily hours of freedom; and with providing physical sites and quarters designed to permit the man of today to enjoy this new freedom without constraint, instead of being hemmed in like a hare in an ever-dwindling square of wheat at harvest time.
(Le Corbusier's own italics etc. throughout all extracts.)

Le Corbusier also underlines the socialist case in his attacks on money —though he doesn't make it too clear whether he would get rid of it altogether or replace it with some ‘purer’ form of exchange.

  Let us measure the full and cruel meaning of our present state: for some time now, we have been working merely for money. 

  A deceptive goal. It stimulates only a few of our qualities and leaves the most precious of them inactive. Worse, it encourages the defects in human nature . . . 

  If society were to reorganise itself, to distribute the fruits of its labour in a new way, then our concern for money could diminish, and our energies, freed in this way, would find the roads opened towards goals set by higher passions.

And of his programme for a new environment he says:

  It means replacing the violent, savage, cruel and ruthless civilisation of money with another based on harmony and collaboration; one in which each member of society will feel himself a vital agent in this enterprise . . .

Le Corbusier realised that his plan for a Radiant City involved the ‘replanning’ of private property (though he did not go so far as to suggest abolishing it). In August 1932 he wrote that until then he had never found it necessary to discuss politics or economics; but through his professional life he had encountered an obstacle: unproductive property. Land which could form part of a wonderful human environment, in which the senses were no longer starved, in which freedom and privacy were possible, and in which work was cut to five hours a day and leisure used to the full, was lying waste — derelict, uncultivated, or misused.

  Today we own land, but without any obligation to work it. In fact, a law which no-one would dream of disputing gives one the right to work it or not, just as one wishes.

And the ‘denaturalisation’ of property, he adds, made impossible the kind of work from which springs collective action. The present form of land tenure is invested with private rights antagonistic to the public right. ‘But if the public right is infringed, then THE INDIVIDUAL SUFFERS.' And in the caption to an aerial view of Alsace, showing plots of farmland endlessly subdivided between heirs for generation after generation: “We live in a machine age, but machines cannot be used here.”

Capitalism forces its workers into the moulds that best suit its ends, regardless of whether these moulds cramp its workers' spirit. Le Corbusier passionately resented this. He poured scorn on football stadiums and other 'arenas’ in which the few are paid to perform while the many — whose need for active sport and whose ability to enjoy it is no less—sit and watch. He lamented the fact that most city-dwellers leave one compartment giving onto a street, (home) for another (work) and in between experience nothing but asphalt or stone under their feet, the ephemera of the daily paper or advertisements in their mini, poisoned air and smoke in their lungs, and barely a tree or a decent-sized stretch of sky, greenery, or water in sight.

But his programme had serious limitations.

Although he believed that architecture and city planning would, one day become extensions of politics, sociology, and ethics, he believed that ‘research into the correct solution for this problem (common ownership of land) is not part of the architect’s professional task.’ More food for the myth that ‘professional politicians' are essential! But in fact Le Corbusier planned to toss the problem to another profession: the law. ‘Let the lawyers find a way!' he exclaims. And:

  It must be the task of our jurists to find a way of initiating the indispensable changes in present land tenure . . .

And although he wants international standardisation for building components, an international technical language, and so on, his thinking is still in national terms. He refers constantly to “mobilisation of the country’s land” (i.e. France’s) and to a national authority. Perhaps it is this acceptance of the nation state that leads him to accept war as inevitable — he points out the great advantages of pilotis for raising buildings above clouds of poison gas, and proposes armour-plated roof-decks to resist aerial bombardment.

Nevertheless, his political awareness is amazingly advanced compared with that of most architects. This is perhaps because his mental scope exceeded theirs. After all, it is terribly difficult to work out a viable political philosophy all on one’s own. There may be millions of people (architects among them) who, on having Socialism explained to them, will say: “That’s just what I’ve believed for a long time—but I could never put it properly into words!” And we believe with Le Corbusier that, despite the scornful laughter of cynics and spokesmen for capitalism, “there is a power for enthusiasm in the human soul that can be made to. explode”.

A.M.B. 

People or profits? (1969)

From the December 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Under capitalism the land and industry are owned by a small section of society who thus form a privileged class. Modern industry, however, can only be worked by the co-operative labour of society as a whole. It is this conflict between sectional ownership and social production that causes today's many social problems since it prevents wealth being produced to satisfy human needs.

Only when ownership and production have been brought into harmony —by the establishment of the common ownership and democratic control of the means by which society lives —is there any hope of solving problems like war, world poverty, the colour bar, destitution, bad housing, the transport muddle, poor health and its poor treatment.

These of course are the problems which the other parties promise to solve if only you will elect them to be the government. But they always fail. Why? Because what they are trying to do cannot be done. It is just not possible to solve these problems as long as class ownership is retained. No matter how sincere or efficient a government may be it cannot make capitalism work as if it were a rational system geared to satisfying human needs.

Capitalism runs on profits and can only work as a profit making system for the class that owns the means of production. As this class ownership, in preventing production solely for use, is the cause of these problems any attempt to deal with them within its framework is bound to fail.

So capitalism, as a class system that runs on profits, is constitutionally incapable of serving human needs. Socialism, on the other hand, will provide the framework within which these problems can be solved. With the means of production owned by and under the democratic control of the community, there will be no class privileges to stand in the way of production solely for use. With the abolition of the profit motive society can set about solving these problems with the satisfying of human needs as its guiding principle. For it is not as if enough comfortable houses could not be built or enough food for the whole world could not be grown. It is just that under capitalism it is not profitable to give priority to basic needs like food and shelter.

This is why we say nothing short of Socialism will do.

50 Years Ago: Dictatorship in Russia (1969)

The 50 Years Ago column from the December 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Bolsheviki have often defended their dictatorship by quoting Marx’s Criticism of the Gotha Programme (1875) where he refers to the transition from Capitalism to Socialism as the Dictatorship of the Proletariat pending the abolition of classes altogether. Marx, however, refers to a dictatorship asserted by a working class majority over the capitalist few, and not the dictatorship of a minority attacked by Engels in his Criticism of the Blanquist Program.

Lenin has admitted the Blanquist character of the 1917 seizure of power:

  Just as 150,000 lordly landowners under Czarism dominated the 130,000,000 Russian peasants, so 200,000 members of the Bolshevik party are imposing their proletarian will in the interest of the latter.

(The New International, New York, April 1918)

Lenin's defence of this as due to the lack of knowledge among the masses is in these words:—

  If Socialism can only be realised when the intellectual development of all the people permits it, then we shall not see Socialism for at least 500 years. The Socialist political party, this is the vanguard of the working class, must not allow itself to be halted by the lack of education of the masses, using the Soviets as organs of revolutionary initiative (Lenin at Peasants Congress. Ten Days that Shook the World. P. 303).

(From an article 'Democracy and Dictatorship in Russia' by E. S. Socialist Standard, December 1919).

Aspect: Socialists and Christmas (1969)

The Aspect column from the December 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

To a greater or a lesser degree, we are all conventional—yes! Even socialists. In many instances we find life in capitalism more tolerable and comfortable if we comply with those customs and traditions, of which Christmas is one, that do not conflict with our case. Anyway, to register protests against patterns of behaviour which are virtually caused or perpetuated by the system of society in which we live, is so much wasted effort.

If we accept—as all socialists do— the historical materialism of Marx, for analysis we divide a society into two parts. The first part is the economic foundation which consists of actual means of production (factories, mines, tools, power) and also the relations people form around these productive forces. These relations are the vital part of the base: they determine what sort of system it is and so they are the part that makes the system 'tick'. In capitalism, they are the antagonistic relations of the wage-labourers and the capitalists, which form a class division and consequently a class struggle. The second part arises, as it were, from this base and forms a kind of superstructure. Capitalism's superstructure consists of such things as governments, armed forces, the church, prisons, and in the less tangible field: orthodox ideas and morals, customs, laws, which are compatible with the base because in the main they serve and protect the interests of the ruling class of capitalists.

Now the institution of Christianity is some few thousand years old; the system of capitalism is only as many hundreds. However, because ruling classes in many parts of the world have been able to use Christianity to serve their own ends, to enrich themselves and to pacify and fool the subject classes, it has been carried over from one class society to another.

In spite of the continued existence of the church, its influence declines so that the original meaning of Christmas as a celebration of the birth of (a perhaps mystical) Christ, is becoming lost. In spite of this, the tradition remains because both classes find it serves a purpose. Workers look forward to it as a time for family reunions, feasting, a rest, and social enjoyment and of course as a break from the monotony of their lives. This is where the capitalists 'cash in'; they do this by promoting and encouraging through advertisements and shop window displays, what is to them the focal point of Christmas: the present giving custom.

Unlike previous customs, capitalism is entirely an exchange economy. It has to be in order that the ruling class can realise the surplus value which is produced by the working class. As goods are produced for the purpose of being exchanged on a market for their equivalent in money, we are taught in our schools and colleges that exchange is the moral order of things. Among adults, therefore, gift giving usually takes the form of exchange. On those occasions when we receive an unexpected gift, we tend to react with acute embarrassment and rush out to buy an equivalent: the result is two embarrassed people!

Even where presents to children from parents are concerned, it is still not a very satisfactory affair as far as the workers are concerned. As they always produce more wealth than they receive in the form of wages, the worry when they 'overspend' can be great. This may be the case particularly when they happen to have developed a 'keeping up with the Jones’ complex. Which is understandable in a competitive system of society.

These are all little points, we know, and capitalism is responsible for far worse results, but they do illustrate the 'knack' the system has of spoiling human relationships.

When it comes to the Christmas bonus from the employers, at least things are a little more straightforward and everyone knows where they stand. The wheels of capitalism are being oiled.

In case we should be sounding a bit 'sour' we hasten to add that socialists manage to enjoy the season like any others of their class, despite all the petty snags. Nevertheless, we think that in the society we were aiming for Christmas will quietly fade away, simply because nobody will have any use for it. There will be no-one wishing to celebrate it in a religious way and that doesn't leave very much else except the presents. The gift ritual (a reflection of commodity-exchange) would serve no purpose in a society where commodities do not exist, but only products of labour which are communally owned.

It may occur to you that perhaps in a way it will be a pity to be deprived of the pleasure of giving. But think for a moment: our values will be different in Socialism. We shall be able to give to our children and friends much more of our own time than we can spare now. If this should sound ridiculous to you in capitalism, imagine the absurdity of trying to give presents in a society where everyone contributes to production to the best of his ability and takes from the common pool what he needs!

C & J. MCL.

Capitalism did not collapse (1969)

From the December 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part I

Part II of the abridged version of our pamphlet, Why Capitalism Will Not Collapse, originally published in February 1932.

The depression shows itself, every few years, in the accumulation of stocks of goods in the hands of retail stores, wholesalers and manufacturers, farmers and others. While trade is relatively good each concern tries to produce as much as possible in order to make a large profit. It is nobody's business under Capitalism to find out how much of each article is required, so that industries quickly expand to the point at which their total output is far larger than can be sold at a profit. Quite young industries, like artificial silk, soon reach the degree of over-development shown by the older industries. Goods such as farm crops, that are ordinarily not produced to order, but with the expectation of finding a buyer eventually, naturally tend to accumulate to a greater extent than those produced only to order— such as railway engines.

As traders find it more difficult to sell, they reduce their orders to the wholesalers, who in turn stop buying from the manufacturers. Plans for extending production by constructing new buildings, plant, ships, etc., are cancelled and the workers are laid off.

Here is a situation that always arouses grave discontent. It is from this discontent that the believers in the theory of the collapse of Capitalism think that they can draw the force which will overthrow the capitalist system. But it does not work out like that. In spite of riots and agitations, Capitalism still continues. The actual events show why this is and why it must be so.

IV. What happens in practice

In Great Britain two outstanding events may be considered. First, there was the great depression of 1921 and 1922, when, as now, unemployment was between 2,000,000 and 2,500,000. Then, in 1926, there was the spontaneous demonstration of sympathy with the miners in their resistance to wage reductions, that resulted in what is known as the “General Strike." Since the communists have been the most persistent advocates of the doctrine we are attacking, let us see what came of their efforts to take advantage of these two crises.

Round about 1921 and 1922 the communists claimed that they had the leadership of the hundreds of thousands of members of the unemployed organisations. They organised marches and demonstrations, deputations to Cabinet Ministers and local authorities, and attempted to seize public buildings. They did everything they could to force the authorities to grant their demands for better treatment. By winning the confidence of the workers in this way the communists then hoped to be able to lead them on to an attack on Capitalism.

What was the result? A writer in their official organ tells us: —

 The unemployed have done all they can and the Government know it. They have tramped through the rain in endless processions. They have gone in mass deputations to the Guardians. They have attended innumerable meetings and have been told to be “solid". They have marched to London, enduring terrible hardships . . . All this has led nowhere. None of the marchers believe that seeing Bonar Law in the flesh will make any difference. Willing for any sacrifice, there seems no outlet, no next step. In weariness and bitter disillusionment the unemployed movement is turning in upon itself. There is sporadic action, local rioting, but not central direction. The Government has signified its exact appreciation of the confusion by arresting Hannington.
  The plain truth is that the unemployed can only be organised for agitation, not for action. Effective action is the job of the working class as a whole. The Government is not afraid of starving men so long as the mass of workers look on and keep the ring (Workers' Weekly, 10th February 1923.)

In 1926 the communists had an excellent opportunity to try out their theory on the millions !o workers who were involved in the strike or were sympathetic towards it. The result was just what we have said it must be. Strikes can serve a useful purpose in resisting wage reductions or securing increases, but they cannot overthrow Capitalism. To begin with, the workers themselves have not that purpose in mind, and even when they become socialists they will still need political organisation in order to capture the real centre of power — the machinery of government and the armed forces controlled by it. This no strike can do.

In a large strike, as in a small one, starvation fights on the side of the propertied class against the wage earners. We know from the General Strike, and from revolts of workers attempted in many countries at different times, that desperate men and women will take desperate action when goaded to it by the hardships of their life under Capitalism. But we have seen in the General Strike of 1926 how such spontaneous outbursts are always crushed by the forces at the disposal of the ruling class through their control of the machinery of Government. How much easier it is, and how much less costly in human suffering, to convert a majority to Socialism than to engage in these blind revolts!

There is, too, another factor of great importance. The ruling class usually and in the long run are not blind to their own interests, and do not drive the working class as a whole into revolt. They are not so foolish as to leave only that alternative. By means of charity, doles, and unemployment insurance, and, if need be, the grant of higher wages and other concessions, the capitalists can always take the edge of the workers' bitterness and misery, and thus tide over the difficult periods of the more acute industrial depressions.

V. The only road to socialism

The lesson to be learned is that there is no simple way out of Capitalism by leaving the system to collapse of its own accord. Until a sufficient number of workers are prepared to organise politically for the conscious purpose of ending Capitalism, that system will stagger on indefinitely from one crisis to another.

So long as the workers are prepared to resign themselves to the evils of Capitalism, and so long as they are prepared to place in control of Parliament parties that will use their power for the purpose of maintaining Capitalism, there is no escape from the effects of Capitalism. The workers will continue to suffer from the normal hardships of the capitalist system when trade is relatively good, and from the aggravated hardships which are the workers' lot during trade depressions.

That is the prospect before the workers of all the world unless they actively interest themselves in understanding socialist principles and assisting in socialist organisation.

(Concluded)

Letter: Irish civil rights (1969)

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

Sir,

While none would argue that the Civil Rights Movement as a whole in Northern Ireland is out to abolish capitalism, and while I would agree that only this can finally solve our most basic problems, I would nevertheless suggest that our indirect potential in this direction is much greater than you appear to anticipate.

But first let me make it clear that this movement did not “tend to divide the working class”, as you say in your October issue, since at best only a very spurious unity ever existed. We have not however brought its various sections together—at this stage.

You correctly suggest that sectarianism has been deliberately fostered by the Unionist Party in order to prevent the development of a class consciousness which would be the result of unity between Catholic and Protestant workers. But you fail to point out that the denial of Civil Rights—such things as political patronage and electoral malpractice—has all along been the chief, though admittedly not the only weapon at the government’s disposal. The “privileges” bestowed upon the Protestant workers have been relatively “puny”, but one thing is clear, the World Socialist Party of Ireland has failed to convince them of this. To the Protestant worker, a small but concrete privilege is worth more than an abstract political promise, and to the Catholic worker the difference between spending six weeks or six years in a rat-infested slum, is not “puny”. In an area of high, and chronic unemployment, bad housing, and low wages any privilege is enlarged, any injustice magnified. Protestants fear they will lose what little they have, Catholics that their intolerable situation would be relieved but for Protestant selfishness. In these circumstances it will continue to be impossible for the Socialist Party of Ireland, or any other group to bridge the gap between the vast majority of Northern Ireland workers.

The first step on this bridge therefore will be the removal of just those things which in the past have facilitated a Capitalist government and opposition to encourage the working class to misuse “the overwhelming superiority” of its votes.

Only when a Protestant worker no longer has the irrational feeling that he is a member of a privileged group, and when a Catholic worker realises that his condition has not improved quite as much as he had hoped, can there be the possibility of a class consciousness emerging. This will not inevitably follow a successful conclusion of our campaign but it cannot precede it. Only when full Civil Rights have been wrung from a fearful and unwilling government can the working class ever be united, and only the Civil Rights Movement, I would submit, is equipped to do just that.

Respectfully yours,

J. Quinn, 

Newtonabbey, Co. Antrim.

Reply:
The World Socialist Party in a pamphlet, Civil Rights or Socialism, issued in January of this year said:

  If the campaign for Civil Rights earns every worker in N. Ireland an equal opportunity to live in a slum and face unemployment and if all are afforded equal rights to vote for the continuance of the economic regime from which their miseries flow, the “Civil Rights” will have achieved its purpose. Theirs is not to question the economic circumstances behind slums and unemployment but simply to see that all share equally in the misery.

This sums up the line of argument taken by the various articles on the subject of the Civil Rights Movement in the Socialist Standard, including the October contribution to which Mr. Quinn’s letter refers.

Mr. Quinn agrees that only the abolition of capitalism can solve our basic problems but he infers that between those basic problems and conditions as they are in Northern Ireland today there is an ’indirect potential’ for improvement. If he means that better community relations and an end to open sectarian violence can be brought about, we are prepared to accept this and prepared to accept that all manner of people and organisations can help to bring this about but, while capitalism remains to shape the events of everyday life, discrimination must continue to exist.

Legalistic formulae may remove, wholly or in part, the religious element of selection from the spheres of housing and employment but, we repeat, there is no devisable formula for running capitalism in such a way as to end either its housing or unemployment problems or for removing the social and economic degradation of second-class citizenship from the working class, Catholic and Protestant. This discrimination against the overwhelming majority will continue as long as capitalism remains and any organisation that diverts the attention of the working class away from this discrimination merely canalises their revolutionary potential into the safe stream of reformist politics and, thus, helps perpetuate injustice.

Unquestionably, Unionist ‘ward-healing’ politicians have entrenched their position by throwing crumbs to the more active section of their supporters and since these supporters are Protestant, inevitably Catholics often have their claim to such crumbs set aside. In similar circumstances, Catholics, Jews, or atheists would act likewise. Obviously, therefore, it is not against the distribution of the crumbs that we should militate, but against the ’circumstances’—the circumstances of capitalism which creates not only its political priorities but the conditions of scarcity and poverty that makes selection or discrimination necessary.

Mr. Quinn claims that a small but 'concrete privilege’ to a Protestant worker or the difference to a Catholic worker between spending six weeks or six years in a rat-infested slum is worth more than an abstract political promise. His comparison between the Protestant workers’ 'concrete privilege’ and the Catholic workers’ ’rat- infested slum’ may, in his case, be purely accidental, but it is typical of many who follow the reasoning of the Civil Rights movement to assume that such a comparison exists. It is nonsense.

There are at least as many Protestant denizens of slumdom as Catholic—indeed the most outrageously ’loyal’ of the ‘loyalists’ of Belfast's Shankill Road, who embellish their slum gables with the legend “This we will maintain!”, are victims of the same notion as that suggested by Mr. Quinn’s comparison.

Of course their notion of privilege, like the individual Catholic’s heart-cry for a decent house, may appear more real than ‘an abstract political promise'. The new house is achievable for a few—and with it, incidentally, new problems, often as great as the one the new house solved—but for the working class the housing problem, like the unemployment problem, the problems of poverty, insecurity, violence, etc., is insoluble in a system of production for profit.

It is the tragedy of our class that individual workers work and hope for the solution of their own immediate problem and it is the strength of capitalism that its conditions can create the political climate for workers to organise against some feature of the system rather than unite for its complete overthrow. In fact, organisations like CRA, insofar as they draw the attention of the workers from the real cause of their problems and lend credibility to the capitalist fiction that working class problems are soluble within capitalism, are the enemies of the working class—ably abetting the political administrators of capitalism in concealing from the working class the real nature of capitalist exploitation.

Mr. Quinn takes us to task for claiming that the activities of the CRA have tended to divide the working class and he makes the point that the workers were not, in the first instance, united. The point is a valid one and we would agree that the use of the term ‘further’ before ‘divide’ may have better expressed the position from our point of view—since the workers were never united in pursuit of Socialism. On the other hand, from Mr. Quinn’s reformist point of view, considerable unity on a number of broad issues did exist prior to the recent troubles and this unity is certainly a casualty of the sectarian strife. Anyone who has moved about in the different areas affected by the shootings, burnings and lootings could not be other than appalled at the very real fear and hatred which the recent outbreaks, and the frictions attending thereto, has engendered between Catholic and Protestant members of the working class. As we indicated in our article, the CRA, not because it wanted to, but because it failed to understand the real nature of the problem, has become an instrument of sectarianism and that sectarianism is a further obstacle on the road to a final solution of our problems.

Mr. Quinn rightly points out that, to date, the WSP has failed to convince the workers of the need for Socialism. It must be said that our failure is not attributable to the prowess of the avowed upholders of capitalism; it is the temporary victory of the unconscious upholders of that system, those who, like Mr. Quinn, fed the working class should devote their energies to the administrative problems of capitalism rather than to the task of abolishing that system.

We accept that Mr. Quinn makes the point about our failure to influence the working class not as a snide political broadside but as an honest contribution to political debate. In the same spirit we would point out that, in the matter of failure, the record of those who support the idea of the reform of capitalism is an all-time high—despite the fact that on numerous occasions they have won the overwhelming support of the working class. Generally, their argument, like that offered by Mr. Quinn, is that, while Socialism is the only real answer to the basic problem of the working class, there are certain ’immediate' problems to which we should turn our attention. They have been struggling with the problem of slums, the problem of unemployment, the problem of violence, of bombs, of war, of crime, of discrimination and all the other ugly features of capitalism for hundreds of years. They have formed mass organisations, elected people to parliaments, signed petitions, sat down and stood up, they have sent workers to early graves and filled capitalism's gaols . . . but the problems remain to drive the workers into disillusion and apathy.

We would not boast our records; we are pitifully few and our energies and resources are dissipated mainly in endeavouring to counteract the activities of those bodies that waylay our class into the abortive struggle for reforms. But we are the only organisation in Ireland upholding the Socialist claim for a wageless, classless, moneyless society of production for use. During our various electoral activities we have brought that message into the most bigoted Unionist strongholds in Belfast. To date that message has been rejected but, such has been its nature that it has not, and could not, provide the basis for sectarian strife.

Finally, we would say that the CRA has achieved its purpose and will now limp its way into political oblivion. Time will demonstrate the futility of the reforms it has achieved. We would hope that as this becomes clearer we will be able to welcome people like Mr. Quinn into our ranks to put their undoubted enthusiasm, courage and ability in the service of Socialism.

Richard Montague

The World Socialist Party

Religion no cure for naked ape-ism (1969)

Book Review from the December 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Naked Ape or Homo Sapiens? by John Lewis and Bernard Towers (Garnstone Press, 21s.)

This book was written by a supporter of the “Communist” Party, and a Christian. It is published under the auspices of the Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Association.

There is an increasing amount of collaboration between the admirers of Russian capitalism and the Roman church. In this reviewer’s neighbourhood the “Communist” Party recently held a closed meeting with local Christian leaders, to plan common political activity, e.g. against racism. For denouncing this I was called a “sectarian.” These CP members seem unable to see that you cannot fight Capitalism’s consequences by combining with those forces which support Capitalism. (Quite apart from the fact that the CP itself advocates State Capitalism and, like most pro-Capitalist organizations which have been going for any length of time, has found it necessary in the past to publish racist propaganda).

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a priest and scientist who wrote some books trying to reconcile religion with science — a hopeless cause. At the moment his ideas are disowned by the dictators in the Vatican, but these wily politicians have often changed God’s mind for him in the past, and will probably embrace Teilhard’s philosophy eventually, in a bid to keep up-to-date.

Surely the weakness of a Catholic-CP alliance could not hamper the simple task of demolishing Morris’s Naked Ape? Yes, the author’s religious approach cannot be concealed. For instance, to criticise the popular press for arousing “baser human appetites” such as “sexual stimulation” and “aggressive behaviour patterns” is the sort of silly platitude which helps to convince people like Morris that opposition to their view of human nature is based on sheer sentimentality.

The many references to Teilhard (as though they were plugging his latest disc) are unnecessary and distracting.

Having said all that, there are some useful facts and perfectly correct arguments here, to refute the human nature myths —though no more than you would get from reading the Socialist Standard for a few months. So let’s have your nine-pences for Socialism, instead of your guinea for the purveyors of superstition.

Money for Socialism (1969)

Party News from the December 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Once again we ask you, our readers and supporters, to help us expand our Socialist activities by contributing what you can to our funds. The money you give us will be spent on bringing out this journal (which is heavily subsidized from Party funds), on hiring halls and advertising meetings, on press publicity, publishing pamphlets (we have two or three such as reprints of ‘Questions of the Day’ and 'The Socialist Party and War' in the pipeline) and leaflets on important events as they happen, on contesting elections, and on the general expenses of running our party. This is a way in which if you can do nothing else, you can play your part in the struggle for Socialism,

Please send your donation to Anne Waite. Treasurer, SPGB, 52 Clapham High St., London SW4. All money will of course be gratefully acknowledged.

More Food Destroyed (1969)

From the December 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Farmers in East Anglia are in a fix because they have grown “too many” beans. The climate there allows them to grow French dwarf beans which they sell to processing firms for freezing. Ten years ago production was limited because the beans had to be picked by hand. Now there are machines to do this. These, coupled with this year’s good summer, have brought the disaster of a bumper crop—and a bumper crop under capitalism is a disaster more often than not. The beans cannot be sold at profitable prices and so are being ploughed into the ground.

The Financial Times (29 August), which reported this example of the destruction of food to preserve profits, says the farmers are “sore at having to waste so much good food”.

No doubt they are. We hope this episode will lead them, and others, to reflect on the absurdity of the capitalist profit system which demands that food be destroyed despite half the world being hungry.

Ploughing-in food is just one of the more dramatic ways in which the fetter capitalist ownership places on production is shown up. The world could produce enough food to feed everybody, but capitalism will not allow this because it would not be profitable.

Second opinion (1969)

Pamphlet Review from the December 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why We Have Resigned From The Socialist Labour Party of Great Britain by J. and N. Plant  (108 Cambridge Gardens, 1969)

Those who follow American presidential elections closely will have noticed that there is always a candidate for the “Socialist Labor Party”. But they are probably not aware that there is also a party of the same name in Britain which has maintained a precarious existence since its decline in the 1920s. The SLP of Great Britain was originally set up in 1902 by dissidents from the Social Democratic Federation and was one outcome of what has been called “the impossibilist revolt” in the SDF, a revolt which also led to the founding of the Socialist Party of Great Britain in 1904. The SLP gained some support up to and during the first world war because of its militant unionism. Many of its members were carried away by the Russian revolution and a breakaway section was one of the founding groups of the Communist Party in 1920.

Over the years we (and especially our companion party in America) have put forward a careful criticism of SLP policy: its industrial unionism, its De Leon worship, its undemocratic meetings, its exact blueprint of future society and so on. Earlier this year two members of the British party resigned and have published their reasons for doing so. Their pamphlet is interesting since it endorses many of the criticisms we have made. For instance:

1. “The Socialist Labour Party does not advocate and work towards a society where the principle ‘from everyone according to his faculties, to everyone according to his needs!’ will operate, but advocates as its goal, as fully developed Socialism, a society where man will still be enslaved by the Law of Value and its consequences.”

2. “The SLP has an opportunist and non-scientific attitude to religion . . . (a revolutionary socialist party) must treat religion as a social question, which it is, and not as a ‘private matter’.”

3. The SLP sees “socialism” existing “on an essentially national scale. It is forever talking about the workers taking over the industries of the nation’ and creating a ‘Socialist Britain’ or a ‘Socialist America'”.

4. “It is not scientific and permissible to lay down an exact blueprint of how future Socialist society will be organised. At most we can enumerate certain basic principles and guidelines, and give an indication in very broad and tentative outline of the way we think society might be conducted. But the exact administrative structure and precise mode of behaviour of people in a Socialist society will be determined by the specific material conditions of that society. What these specific material conditions will be, and how people will react to them, cannot be known to us at the present time.”

5. “Few incidents in SLP history have exposed the Party’s theoretical weaknesses, opportunist tendencies, lack of honesty about its own past and unwillingness to frankly admit mistakes to the full, than its attitude over the years to Soviet Russia . . . By the late 1930s the SLP had become a de facto supporter of , and apologist for, the Stalinist terror regime, albeit a critical supporter and apologist”.

6. “The SLP makes De Leon’s theories and teachings, including the faults and shortcomings, into an infallible doctrine that must not be questioned. De Leon is placed on a pedestal; a higher pedestal than his theoretical abilities and knowledge would warrant, even if it were a good thing to place anybody onto a pedestal.”

The Plants also reveal the undemocratic internal structure of the SLP in America and Britain, and make other criticisms (on the SLP’s attitude to peaceful revolution and participation in demonstrations) that we would not wholly endorse. Nevertheless, this is a very useful pamphlet which shows how correct we have been in consistently opposing the SLP.

Adam Buick

The Wages System Must Go (1969)

From the December 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Most people nowadays have some grievance with this or that aspect of society. Millions suffer the horrors of capitalist wars in Vietnam and Biafra. Mental illness is a growing problem. Old-age pensioners are dying from malnutrition, from cold. Slum violence and riots hit the headlines. Waiting lists for hospital beds and houses outstrip supply. Town planning is without reference to the individual: he has no control over his environment. Every day more strikes, more redundancies, and so on.

Most people would agree that each of these grievances could be remedied with a fair measure of goodwill and intelligence.

Socialists would disagree. They are all inherent in the way this society is organised. Their solution lies in abolishing capitalism, which embraces the entire world and whose motive is not the satisfaction of human needs or the alleviation of human suffering, but the creation of profit for disposal by the privileged few, and the accumulation of capital.

What, then, constitutes capitalism? Capitalism is the society in which a certain group of people, a small minority, monopolise the ownership of the factories, land, mines, transport concerns, and every other point where wealth is produced. In this country they are proud to be called the capitalist class. This appellation is a hallmark of respectability, of privilege, and of alleged superiority. In Russia, China, and Eastern Europe they are proud to be called people’s commissars and members of praesidiums and politburos.

But mere monopoly of these means of production is not enough to give them a privileged position in society. They must employ workers, people who will produce all society’s wealth but never own more than that which their wage represents. Some say that the workers get a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work, but what is ‘fair’? If the working class produce everything then they should receive all of it. But do they? No. The fact is that the worker’s wage represents only a fraction of the wealth he has created. He is robbed—but legally. And although he constantly struggles to improve his wage, he apparently never dreams of abolishing the entire wages system.

Some radicals think that this is unnecessary. After all, they argue, if you seize all the means of production from the capitalists and institute state ownership, then only the state (and through the state, the people as a whole) will benefit from the wages system.

And if the state machine is managed by people who call themselves Marxists or Socialists or Communists or the National Liberation front, then this is obviously a more just and sane society. A society where people can at last plan their environments; with human priorities to the fore, and unrestricted by the demands of the market economy. But is it?

Will these advocates of state ownership have eliminated the contradictions of capitalism, manifested in a class struggle between the capitalist who strives to intensify exploitation through lower wages, longer hours, and faster production, and the wage slave, whose aim is to raise his wage, slow down production, and lessen his working hours? And forced into competition with other states and their ruling-classes, will housing have priority over defence or more profitable industries like motor cars and cosmetics?

The rulers of Russia, China, Cuba, North Vietnam, and other self-proclaimed ‘socialist’ countries perform the same function as that of the capitalist described above. They must pump surplus value out of the working class or be destroyed in the international competitive process.

Periodically they urge their workers to fight wars for them, sometimes for ‘defence’ (of their capitalist private property), sometimes for blatantly imperialist aims. They crush strikes of dissatisfied workers, ruthlessly, with all the state power at their disposal.

Their workers are exploited and oppressed just as surely as we are. Perhaps more so, for in those so-called ‘workers’ states’, the workers are prohibited from forming their own independent trade unions.

To summarise, capitalism means class monopoly of the means of production—its prime motive is profit, and to hell with the interests of the worker. Its mechanism, the means by which it robs, is the wages system. Solutions to capitalism’s problems can be found only after abolishing this system.

All other solutions, such as the ‘welfare’ state, housing squats, treaties to abolish or localise wars, non-aggression pacts, backing Britain, Labour or ‘communist’ governments or ‘workers’ control’ (of the wages system) are at best palliatives, at worst outright deceit.

And our solution? Don’t follow anyone, don’t believe anyone who offers you paradise—and a wage. And don’t expect us to lead you. We are allergic to sheep. Instead, cultivate your self-reliance and organise yourselves democratically (and that means equal participation in decision- and policy-making, with all tasks not assumed by leaders but delegates) for the conquest of political power. When you have political power as a class, you will be the last class in history to be emancipated. There are none below you, none you will need to dominate to maintain your position as free men and women at last.

Voluntary co-operation on a world scale will replace compulsory economic competition between individuals. Social antagonisms will fade into history. With the abolition of the wages system the interests of the individual will coincide with those of society. Genuine freedom will have dawned.

M. A. B.

Hippies: An Abortion of Socialist Understanding (1969)

From the December 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Everybody seems to think I’m lazy. I don’t mind – I think they’re crazy. Running everywhere at such a speed. Till they find there’s no need . . .

Ever since the explosion of “Flower Power” in Summer 67, the world’s working-class has been aware of the Hippy movement, or as it is now more frequently called, “The Underground”. Attitudes to the hippies have varied from amused fascination to angry revulsion.  Many people have grown more hostile to them over the past two years, as their emphasis on such harmless-sounding words as “Love” and “Beautiful People” has declined, and their tendency to smoke pot has become more widely publicised.

In Britain the occupation of 144 Piccadilly confirmed the hippies’ bad reputation—though the occupiers were not typical of the Underground by any means. TV news announcers put on their frowns for this item, were careful to identify the occupation with soccer hooliganism (both were “violence to property”), and equally careful to avoid dragging in irrelevant details like the fact of empty houses alongside homeless people.

A wave of horror swept the country at the realisation that there were people who not only wore long hair (and obviously smelt foul, as anyone could see by looking at their TV screens), but actually believed they had a right to live without working. In one television programme, David Frost, Hughie Green and Robert Maxwell—those highly productive labourers who toil so usefully to justify their existence—led an attack on the hippies for their conscientious objection to work. When Richard Neville (editor of the Underground magazine Oz) suggested that the idea of work as a duty hadn’t a very ancient historical pedigree, that work in the modern world was “really a form of slavery,” and that with today’s productive techniques there could easily be more than enough wealth for everyone, he was devastated by Frost’s crisply intelligent retorts: “Very high‑flown I’m sure” and “I really am an old fuddy-duddy you know.”

Hippy characteristics

The hippy phenomenon is a movement, a set of attitudes, a subculture or a nuisance, according to your point of view. It consists of several hundred thousand people, drawn mostly from the working class, in the advanced regions of Capitalism. It is vaguely defined, fuzzy-edged—no one can draw up a hippy manifesto; no one can specify who is a hippy and who isn’t. It differs from country to country: in America, for example, there are relatively fewer semi-hippies or weekend hippies than in Britain, for the simple reason that long hair is a much greater obstacle to getting a job in the States than in Europe. All the same, we can list some of the features which distinguish hippies from what they call “straight” society.

First, there is age—or rather, youth. Hippies are predominantly under-thirties. Second, they have an unorthodox pattern of drugs consumption—mostly pot, with occasional recourse to acid (“pot” is now common parlance for cannabis (marihuana), and acid for lysergic acid (LSD)) and minor use of amphetamines and other pills. Or as “straight” society (gaily swilling down immense quantities of alcohol, nicotine, barbiturates, aspirin, etc.) usually puts it: “Hippies take drugs.” Whatever may be the medical properties of the hippies’ chosen stimulants, they do have the important social property that their use is, for the time being, prohibited by the State.

Third, hippies possess a typical style of appearance: long hair, casual-to-scruffy clothes, beads, etc. And fourth, like all minority groups they have their own language: “mind-blowing” (stimulating to the point of powerful hallucination); “hang-up” (unfortunate disturbance of tranquillity); “fuzz” (policemen), and so forth. It is a measure of the commercial cashing-in on hippies that virtually all of their jargon is very widely-known through its dissemination in pop music. Most of it was borrowed from other sources, not coined, by the hippies.

Fifth, hippies are preoccupied with certain forms of art, for example beat music accompanied by displays of coloured, flashing lights. Sixth, they aim at an inversion of the values of “straight” society. They embrace spontaneity rather than self-control; childlikeness rather than sophistication; love rather than power; “dropping-out” rather than careerism; “doing your own thing” rather than imposed uniformity; admiration for the destitute rather than for “affluence”; disorder rather than method—and of course, Indians rather than cowboys. Seventh, hippies often show a greater than average susceptibility to superstition. They are generally against established “organised religion,” but fall for all sorts of religious and mystical clap-trap which have an exotic flavour ; astrology, transcendental meditation, palmistry, sunspots, or Krishna-consciousness.

Lastly, many hippies advocate a revolutionary change in society, though both the manner of achieving this, and the nature of their proposed new system, (sometimes described as “tribal” or “communitarian”) are extremely vague. An example of this vagueness was the slogan advanced in one Underground paper: “Alternative Society Now!”—its urgent tone somewhat cancelled out by the woolliness of its descriptive content, which could scarcely be less informative. At least many hippies are clear that the major social evils of today are all bound up together, and can be removed only by a total social change. Both of the important politically-oriented offshoots of the hippy movement, the Diggers and the Yippies, make specifically Socialist proposals, such as the abolition of wages and of money. In our opinion, both these groups are doomed to futility because of their methods, but they do constitute an advance on the previously fashionable assortments of youthful radicals. This groping towards Socialist understanding is particularly impressive when set against the temporary direction of trendy Leftism in the US: flirting with black racism, romantic idolising of Guevara and similar state-capitalist prophets, or the demagoguery and vanguardism the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

Causes of hippies

The Socialist argument that the majority of workers must arrive at a clear understanding of Socialism before they can get it, that a Revolution in ideas must precede the Revolution in politics and economics, is often sneered at by those who say that the mass of the population (except, for some reason, the extraordinary people who make this statement) are brainwashed robots, puppets manipulated by TV, and the press.

But Capitalism is not a conspiracy. It cannot be controlled by set of individuals, not even the Capitalist class.  Current ideas provide a support for capitalism (though the “mass media” are only a part of their reinforcement), yet Capitalism is dynamic, constantly advancing and frequently unpredictable in detail. The very ideas which defend capitalism have to be adjusted or replaced, to fit new conditions. Workers must be trained, not only to do their jobs, but also to be versatile, because their jobs are changing all the time, and also to make radical criticisms of the way capitalism is run, because otherwise inefficient and unprofitable blunders would result. As the Communist Manifesto put it:

  The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production . . . All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their trains of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned . . .

Today, traditional ideas about work, leisure and “the purpose of life” are under attack, and in retreat. Capitalism has killed God stone dead, and is stamping on the twitching corpse. Capitalism extends the juicy carrot of the “Leisure Society”—a golden age of short working-hours and automated abundance, which is ever imminent yet never arrives. Capitalism holds aloft an image of glamour, high-powered pleasure, rest and freedom—whilst the worker’s mind and body are reduced ever more thoroughly to instruments of accumulation. From the belief that work is a grim duty, consumption its reward, capitalism is shifting emphasis to the view that consumption is a duty, work something to be made rewarding.

It is in this context of irresistible change that confused vortices of rebellion like hippyism must be seen. The hippy movement has been centred in California—the most technically advanced region of the world, the window on the future. That is not an accident: it is just what Socialists and historical materialists have predicted. The embryo of Socialist ideas is constantly gestating in the womb of advanced capitalism: the foetus is aborted repeatedly, but the fertility of working‑class consciousness cannot be lost, and the insemination of Socialist organisation must grow more copious. The hippy movement is one of those abortions.

Hippies are a product of the youth cult, the commercialisation of young people and the “generation gap.” But this gap is not only a construct of the publicity men: the new generation does live and think differently from its elders. Many of the things our fathers and mothers were grateful for (and that is a measure of the servile depths to which the working-class has sunk), we take for granted. Young people in the advanced countries have never been brought to heel by a major slump, nor by a war at home.  Their standard of consumption has generally risen steadily throughout their lives, and they confidently expect it to go on doing so indefinitely. Given this outlook, mere technical progress and fatter wage packets lose their capacity to impress. Young workers are more likely to ask “What’s it all for, this endless treadmill? When do we start to live?”

The rapid dissemination of hippyism throughout the advanced world is a consequence of the similarity of conditions in these counties, plus the globe-shrinking communications network: any fad, fashion, doctrine or cult, once it has popped up in one nation is almost instantly mirrored in all. This buttresses our case that the notion of a Socialist revolution in a single country is ludicrous.

The hippies’ deliberate irrationality, and their earlier Love worship, are a protest against “straight” reasonableness and logic. (In fact the very term “straight,” like the archaic “square” reveals this). Capitalism manifests very thorough rationality in the service of inactive irrationality—scientific means to insane ends. Those who don’t understand capitalism’s structure often find its “logic” oppressive, and retreat into gooey, mindless sentimentality. This is a very common modern theme, exemplified in things like Godard’s early films, such as Alphaville.

Mysticism is favoured by a reaction against modern institutional Christianity, seen as a cover for the “straight” virtues of ambition and conformity, and mysticism links up with drug-induced hallucinations which provide escape from an aimless and insecure reality. It is romantically pretty, a source of poetry, in attempt to give back to life a lost “depth,” and in its imported forms it has the flavour of more primitive societies in which alternatives to the score-card mentality of “straight” achievement compulsion can be found.

The hippy movement is now virtually finished. Certain aspects—the dress, the jargon, the music—are steadily incorporated into a much broader and less rebellious area of commercial youth culture. “The Underground”, always a term with a more political slant, becomes infiltrated by Leftist reformists and insurrectionaries. It is to be hoped they will learn something from the Underground, for they have little to teach it. (1) A feeling of community, and a common set of values, will persist among those who smoke pot (and therefore dislike policemen), but this becomes vaguer as the habit spreads. The really important question of future movements, perhaps partly hippy-derived, perhaps bigger, perhaps more explicitly antagonistic to the economic system.

Criticism of hippies

A few young workers, whose anti-Capitalist tendencies were initially stirred by the Underground have progressed in their understanding to the point of embracing revolutionary Socialism, and joining the Socialist Party of Great Britain.  But much more could have been accomplished if there had existed a bigger Socialist movement with the resources to put its case more loudly. As it is, a potentially fruitful upsurge of critical and anti-authoritarian idea has in the main been diverted into reformism, anarchism and mysticism.

The hippies’ emphasis on a style instead of a programme, whilst in many ways endearing, and possessing an obvious advantage for propaganda, is a grave obstacle to their progress in understanding. Distinctions of dress, hairstyle and musical taste are, after all, fairly trivial—and many hippies come dangerously close to regarding them as fetishes. Flickering lights, a psychedelic design, a whiff of incense, a Clapton guitar phrase—such things can be combined into a powerfully unified appeal to all the senses, yet Capitalist society has no difficulty in prostituting this as it prostitutes all art and all enjoyment. Whereupon the market, having squeezed the Underground dry, moves on to the next short-lived modish fad. As Wilde put it, the trouble being very modern is that you become old-fashioned very quickly.

With the first, naive realisation that a new society is necessary, three elementary errors are committed in turn. First, it is supposed that the adoption of attitudes appropriate to the desired society will bring it closer—hence the “Love” phase. This is quickly seen to be largely unsuccessful, since the conditions of the present system generate completely opposed attitudes. To the extent that it is successful it merely helps to reconcile people to the existing state of affairs. The next stage is to go beyond mere attitudes, to try and act as though the new society were already here. This is like trying to get out of a prison by ignoring the bars, and equally futile. After this, attempts are at last made to overhaul the system, but only piecemeal, by changing bits at a time.  However the nature of the bits is mainly determined by the nature of the whole, not vice versa—as student militants are among the most recent to discover. Thus, what started out as something really radical, and in its implications revolutionary, has been shepherded back into the fold of orthodox reformist politics. Only clarity of thought, and courage in the face of the jeers about “sectarianism” which are always hurled at revolutionaries, can break out of this vicious circle.

Now the Underground veers between two courses of action: assaults on Capitalism and attempted withdrawal from it: respectively symbolised by the occupation of 144 Piccadilly, and the move to Saint Patrick’s Isle. But Capitalism will not fall before sporadic demonstrations and happenings, however defiant or amusing these may be.  Neither will it let anyone drop out.

It may be argued in defence of the Underground that this is the age of exploration rather than of Principles, and that there is much value in looseness, informality, and even incoherence. But exploration is worthwhile only if it leads to discovery, looseness if it leads to firmness, informality if it leads to definable formal organisation, and incoherence if out of it emerges a new coherence. The Underground is incapable of making these advances because, though often expert at dramatising its criticism of “straight” society, it seems quite incapable of criticising itself.

Hippies then, are only the symptoms of a sick society: Socialists the cure. Yet to those workers infuriated by the hippy way of life, we say: Don’t look for scapegoats. A few “spongers” are nothing compared to the vast wastage of Capitalism: the arms/space race, built-in shoddiness, the unnecessary monetary system, the “sponging” of the owners of industry. To blame hippies (students, immigrants, unofficial strikers) for your troubles is to lose sight of the actual cause—which is precisely what your masters the capitalists want. Anyway, the view that people ought to work to “earn” their subsistence is out-of-date in a world which could easily provide more than enough for everybody, with a tiny fraction of the work done today. Everything should be free; all work should be voluntary—that is Socialism.

To hippies themselves, we say: Pulling faces at Capitalism is not enough. Even talking about “tribal” alternatives is not enough. An uncompromising stand on Socialist Principles is required before we can start to bring about the new moneyless world society.

David Ramsay Steele

………………..

(1) One of these Bolshevik reactionaries, D. Widgery, recently remonstrated with the Underground, via the columns of International Times (Oct. 10):  “IT would still be publishing its twee pop-star interviews two months after workers’ soviets were declared on Merseyside and Clydeside.”  Widgery’s delusional system is so fantastic that he imagines an administrative apparatus which was a symptom of Russian backwardness half a century ago has some relevance to the working-class problems in the 1970s!  Notice how his two chosen regions are centres for manual workers, that proportionately declining  section (soon to be a minority) of the working class – a section which the Bolsheviks invest with unlimited Romantic potential.  Compared to the fairytale world of the Bolsheviks, Tolkien’s fables are scientific sociology, twee pop-star interviews the last word in revolutionary politics!

Workers v. State Capitalism (1969)

From the December 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

On October 13 thousands of Yorkshire miners went on strike in support of their union's demand for a 40-hour week, inclusive of mealtimes, for all surface workers which the state capitalist National Coal Board had just rejected. At its height the two-week strike, which spread to other parts of the country, involved 125,000 men and closed about 140 of the 307 pits owned by the NCB.

Like most strikes these days it was "unofficial" in that it had not been called in accordance with the constitution of the National Union of Mineworkers. All the same, it was supported by many union members especially in Yorkshire, Scotland and Wales though many in other parts of the country like Durham and Northumberland were opposed to it and refused to take part despite the pleas of pickets from pits on strike. Most newspapers recognised that the strike had widespread support, though the Economist (25 October) kept up its vicious anti-union record by talking nonsense about "the minute but effectively destructive minority of extremists in the union".

The NUM had put in a claim to the NCB for an increase in the minimum wage for working five full shifts from £13 12 6 on the surface and £14 12 6 underground to £15 and £16 respectively. Earlier the union had also demanded the 40-hour week, inclusive of mealtimes. This the NCB had already rejected offering a 40-hour week, but exclusive of mealtimes, a difference of only twenty minutes.

The Board replied that they would grant the wage claim in full, but would stand firm on hours of work. The union's negotiating team decided to recommend that this offer be accepted, a decision which was endorsed by the full executive the day after the Yorkshire strike began. A special delegate conference, however, turned down the executive's recommendation and now the matter has gone to an individual ballot of union members.

Whatever else this shows, it is that opinion amongst NUM members is fairly evenly divided. The Socialist Party of Great Britain has always recognised that the people best qualified to run their union affairs are the union members so we are not getting involved in the arguments about the best course for the miners to take on this issue. Are the executive right in saying that the NCB will not move on hours whatever happens? Or, are their critics right in refusing to regard wages and hours as a "package deal" and demanding that the issues be voted on separately? These are questions to be settled, as we said, by the workers who are the members of the union including any who might also be members of the Socialist Party.

The British coal industry is state-owned and at one time people used to look on nationalisation as a form of Socialism. But now even Lord Robens admits that the NCB is a state capitalist body (Times, 1 April 1968). Producing coal for sale with a view to profit, the NCB is forced to behave like other capitalist employers. It must resist demands it cannot afford. It must close pits and workshops that are not profitable. Its workers, on the other hand, have to organise in trade unions and strike just like workers in individual—and corporation-owned—industries in order to protect their wages and working conditions.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain supports workers in their struggles over wages and working conditions and we wish the miners every success in getting 40 hours inclusive, but we do not see it as our task to give detailed advice on how to conduct these struggles. That is something for those involved to work out themselves. We would merely urge workers to recognise that they have a fundamental conflict of interest with their employers (whether private or state); to subordinate sectional demands to the interests of the working class as a whole; and to decide democratically on what action to take, whatever it might be.

Trade union action, whether official or unofficial, has its limits. It defends wages and working conditions, but it leaves the places of work in the hands of their owners. As long as this class ownership lasts, workers will have to —and should—take such defensive action but they should also realise its limits and the need to organise on the political field too in order to capture the machinery of government and make the means of production the common property of society as a whole

Perils of an elitist system (1969)

Book Review from the December 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our Own People, by Elisabeth Poretsky OUP 42s.

This is not a book for the squeamish, it is not only more horrific than a Bond thriller; it bears the stamp of truth.

The author is the widow of one of a group of six young men from the same small town (often referred to but never named) in Poland who were fired with what they thought were communist ideals and became professionally attached to the Soviet Communist Party, mainly as members of the secret police, the dreaded NKVD. The story traces their history over a period of some twenty years between the wars till all six of these comrades had been duly liquidated. The title is taken from a remark made by one of the six that they would either be hanged by the enemy or “our own people” would shoot them. In fact all except one were murdered by their own NKVD which they had served so faithfully. The exception hanged himself.

The book teaches yet again the fatal trap of expecting that an elite of intellectuals and professional revolutionaries can lead the working class (who are not socialists) into Socialism. It led them instead into a murderous dictatorship which killed millions of ordinary people, as well as innumerable dedicated Bolsheviks. And which still maintains its grip on the Russian workers. But perhaps the most tragic aspect of the book, perhaps even worse than the nightmare atmosphere of Moscow at the height of the Stalinist purges, is that the dreadful lesson was, even at the bitter end, not learned by the highly intellectual victims whose fates are here described. The author’s husband, who finally broke with the regime when he could no longer tolerate its sheer horror, wrote in a resignation letter to the Communist Party that he intended to devote the rest of his life to the cause of Lenin and of Trotsky’s Fourth International. With sublime indifference to the fact that it was precisely they who had laid the murderous foundation on which Stalin was to' build. In practice the rest of his life was a mere few days before the NKVD murdered the letter writer in Switzerland. Once an agent’s number was up, he merely had the choice of obeying the summons to return to Moscow to be killed there, or to refuse and be killed in the country where he was on assignment. And the author describes how the murderers in the latter case were usually emigre Tsarist officers who obtained both pay and pleasure out of killing communists.

Nothing in the book indicates that the six friends realised that the Russian masses were the victims of spurious communism even more than the NKVD men who waited paralysed with fear for their apparatus to liquidate them. Nothing in the writing, that is. But there is one photograph which speaks volumes. It shows a fat and well-dressed Russian bureaucrat addressing a factory meeting calling for a vote of thanks to Stalin for butchering his opponents (and even Stalinists). One does not need to be specially sensitive to have nightmares from looking at the terrified faces of the thin and ragged workers as, without the slightest sign of enthusiasm, they dutifully raise their arms to condemn Radek, Zinoviev and the rest.

The question of why all these people confessed in the great trials is again raised and the pertinent point is made why Radek, for example, who had risen so high, should want to spy for fascist enemies. What possible motive could he have had? There is no doubt from this book, any more than from Khruschev’s “secret speech” twenty years later, that fear of torture for themselves and their families was reason enough. The columns of the Socialist Standard in those days were just as prescient on this issue as they were in 1917 when they stated that the revolution could not produce Socialism because neither objective conditions nor the minds of the workers (still less of the peasants) were ready. Yet on the confessions the position of such as Koestler was that the old Bolsheviks all confessed to save their revolution. Despite the fact that the arch-victim, Trotsky, tried in absentia in all the trials, never dreamt of confessing to the preposterous crimes they were charged with. (On the contrary, he did not even confess to the real crimes which he and Lenin committed such as the massacre of the sailors at Kronstadt.) The difference being, of course, that he was out of reach of the NKVD torturers.

The photograph referred to above contrasts vividly with the pictures of well-fed and well-dressed Soviet families which were to be found at the same time in the pro-Russia press of the West. This book shows how these pictures were faked by the minions of Willi Münzenberg, well-known before the war as the “communist millionaire”. The book tells us what happened to him. He eventually quarreled with Stalin and was found hanging from a tree in France. Suicide, clearly. But French police found something odd. He had been strangled before being strung up. “Our own people” had struck again. We also read how other German communists were handed over by Stalin to Hitler to be murdered in Nazi concentration camps instead of Russian ones.

One could go on with these gruesome stories but the moral has been pointed often enough. Only an informed socialist working class can bring a socialist revolution. And only free democratic conditions can produce such enlightenment Leninist elitism can lead only to disaster.

L. E. Weidberg