Liberating Women's Lib (1979)

From the December 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The fact of women's oppression in many eras and in many places is undeniable; the determination of the ‘women’s movement’ to end this oppression is understandable; but their specific aims are much more dubious. They make their views known in many spheres with various demands: 24-hour nurseries, abortion on demand, wages for housework, freedom for women to work in manual trades, to name a few. None of these reforms is worth fighting for within the framework of capitalism, for even if they are achieved they could not radically alter the position of women as members of the working class, any more than reformist action will genuinely improve the position of any other oppressed group. Black people, children, the disabled, the old, for example, all have pressure groups devoting their energies to reforms which will supposedly alleviate their particular problems.

The futility of such reformist aims can be demonstrated by taking a look at some recent examples of women’s liberation campaigns taken to their logical conclusions. One such is the question of prostitution. Recently, at a well-attended meeting at Central Hall, Westminster, baronesses, MPs, and leading figures in the women’s movement shared a platform with prostitutes fighting for recognition of their right to sell their bodies freely without harassment from the police. This was followed by the first national meeting of PROS, which is campaigning to end the imprisonment of prostitutes, to abolish the offences of loitering and soliciting for the purpose of prostitution and to stop the use of the term ‘common prostitute’ in legal proceedings. They also want to “get more street women involved on a regular basis so that they are taking the initiatives and finding a voice for themselves. That is where real change will come from" (our italics) (Guardian, October 9, 1979). Just how such reforms could make any appreciable difference to the life of a prostitute is hard to imagine. Nearly all prostitutes are driven into their trade by poverty and no matter how many reforms are enacted this will not change. Yet we have the spectacle of ‘liberated’ women seriously suggesting that removing a few restrictions and harassments will enable prostitutes to ply their trade with dignity and honour.

Another example of the absurdity of certain women’s campaigns relates to the ‘inferior’ position of women in the armed forces. Here we are expected to struggle for equal “rights” of women to fight and kill alongside men, and unfavourable comparison is made between the British armed forces, where women may only perform auxiliary duties, and the armed forces of Israel and the USA, where they are entitled to undertake full combat duty. In other words “liberated” women should be calling for the right to kill their fellow workers (men and women alike) in other countries an example of emancipation at which the mind can only reel.

Similarly, the fact that only one per cent of bank managers and two per cent of chartered accountants are women (Observer, 23 September 1979) must reflect the subordinate position of women. But are we to demand that these professions, which exist merely to service capitalism, should henceforth employ equal numbers of men and women? If, overnight, 50 per cent of bank managers and accountants were women, capitalism would be exactly the same and socialism no nearer. Even with total equality in the labour market women will remain wage-slaves, like men.

It is mistaken to assume that men, because their pay is generally higher, and because hitherto they have done some jobs to the exclusion of women, and because they usually go out to work for most of their adult lives, therefore have something that is worth striving for. The serried rows of clerks, factory hands, salesmen, plumbers no more have jobs which are intrinsically satisfying than housework and childcare are intrinsically stultifying. This is not to say that women are better off staying at home but it is a warning that exchanging one situation for another is not an act of liberation. The main, if not only reason most members of the working class—male and female—go out to work is for the small brown envelope they receive on Fridays; and it confers not dignity but humiliation that their worth as human beings should be so narrowly defined. The fact that many men have misconceptions about their role in society and their relationship with women does not warrant either wholesale hostility to them nor the belief that equality with men within capitalism will lead to emancipation.

Another example of women tying themselves in knots in furtherance of their cause is the support given by some sections of the women's movement to Margaret Thatcher: simply by virtue of her sex we were encouraged to vote for her, what she might or might not do in power being apparently of secondary importance. Although some of those who took up this position before the election have now repented, there are those even now who cling to this absurd notion; the writer of a letter to Spare Rib (July 1979), although abhorring the Tory Party, writes, “But when I read or hear the words ‘the Prime Minister was present. She said . . . ’ I am filled with a deep, half-incredulous satisfaction”. Another example of equal irrelevance to women’s real interests, is the decision by the Swedish Parliament to make “the monarch’s first-born child rather than the first male child heir to the throne” (Guardian, 8 November 1979), thus disinheriting the young prince in favour of his elder sister. Big deal.

There are many other areas where women seek to remove petty restrictions and barriers which make no real difference at all, and yet they are hailed as some kind of achievement. We learn, for example, that American Catholics may remove ‘sexist language’ from prayers; apparently sexist “language in liturgy has been a target of feminist groups”, so now a revised prayer instead of reading Christ’s blood is “shed for you and for all men” would read “shed for you and for all” (Guardian. 25 October 1979). Now there's something to make us feel better.

Women are rightly disgusted by blatantly sexual advertisements which display their bodies to sell products, but although putting stickers on these posters to express their outrage will make some women feel better, it will have little effect. The capitalists must sell their products in order to realise their profits, and they will use whatever means they find most effective to do so. Furthermore, men are just as degraded by the macho, he-men advertisements also used to sell products, or the “It’s a Man’s Life in the Army” type of approach used to incite workers to kill other workers on behalf of their masters. But what about the television advertisements which, in the pre-Christmas period, aim to inspire in children a crazy lust for worthless toys? Even if an organisation such as Affirm—"a feminist alliance against ads, articles and images that exploit women” were to succeed in its aims “to abolish all sexism in the media” (Spare Rib. July 1978), where would that leave us? Advertising would still be there, capitalism would be intact. Protesting about any of these advertisements is useless without tackling the underlying cause.

The most positive thing to emerge from the women’s movement will be the active involvement of large numbers women in questioning their role in society. Let us hope it is not too long before they turn their attention to a more constructive approach to the problems which face us all, men and women.

J.

The Family Way (1979)

From the December 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The position of women in society is one of the most significant examples of social, political and economic subordination; various major social movements have arisen committed to changing this situation, ranging from the Liberal feminism of the Suffragettes to the biological determinism of one of the current supporters of “Women's Liberation”. Women as a group share a common oppression for three main reasons: firstly, as potential child-bearers they lack the power of completely determining when and in what circumstances they will bear children; secondly, right across the class structure women are found in subordinate positions in economic and political organisations; lastly, women are socialised and educated to take a domestic role and to be attractive to men rather than to be part of economic activity outside the family.

In all capitalist economies there is a difference in power, income, status and responsibility which operates against women and turns them into a disadvantaged group. (Women are obviously also disadvantaged in other forms of society too. but in this article attention is focussed on capitalism). It is to the property relations of capitalism that we must look in order to explain this all-pervasive inferiority of women. Women's condition is an historically changing aspect of the material situation — the division of labour has developed from division based on sex. natural predisposition, physical strength and so on to a formal institutional division firmly based on the ownership of property. The structure of the present-day family and the role women play within it and in society at large, have been determined by past developments in the organisation of production and will continue to change in response to future changes in capitalism until eventually they are transformed in socialist society.

The transition period from feudalism of capitalism was a crucial one in this long process of change — the lives of women were inevitably profoundly affected. Engels pointed out that the monogamous family had come into being as a result of economic development. In The Origin of the Family. Private Property and the State, he writes “Monogamy was the first form of the family not founded on natural but on economic conditions, viz: the victory of private property over primitive and natural collectivism”. He goes on to elaborate on the change for women that these larger changes involved:

“Supremacy of the man in the family and generations of children that could be his offspring alone and were destined to be the heirs of his wealth — these were openly avowed by the Greeks to be the sole object of monogamy . . . Monogamy then does by no means enter history as reconciliation of man and wife, and still less as the highest form of marriage. On the contrary, it enters as the subjugation of one sex by the other".

The transition in Britain, from feudalism to capitalism destroyed and undermined many relations in the old society, not least of which was the structure of the family. Out of the upheaval were to come the bourgeois proletarian family. Under feudalism, land had been the immediate source of life for rich and poor alike — men and women had lived in predominantly self-sufficient rural households. The feudal family was the unit of production and women played an important and acknowledged role in the survival of the household. However, by the 1640s there were an estimated half million workers who had been ‘freed from the soil’ and their lack of property became the basis for the accumulation of wealth by the growing capitalist class. In Manifesto of the Communist Party Marx and Engels wrote 

“The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his '‘natural superiors’ and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest. than callous ‘cash payment’ . . . (It) has torn away from the family its sentimental veil and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.” 

The landless poor, their ranks swollen by dispossessed and unemployed craftsmen and tradesmen, were forced to rely entirely on selling their labour power. As a result a new family structure came into being, and many women found their lives profoundly altered. They could no longer combine child-bearing and rearing with their work: without land they could not contribute in the same way to their families’ livelihood. The family, in fact, ceased to be the basic economic unit and wives became dependent to a far greater extent on their husbands. Many peasant women became financial liabilities to their menfolk and the family was undermined as an institution.

Just as the lives of the peasant women were changing as the proletarian family was forced into existence, so too the growing affluence of the bourgeoisie meant that they developed a lifestyle and a family structure appropriate to their new economic roles. As the division of labour became more complex and specialised, the successful craftsman or tradesman hired others to work for him: his wife tended to withdraw from her previous activities in the workshop and she became increasingly confined to the home. The roles of husband and wife became more specifically differentiated and the home ceased to be a productive part of the community. “The external world of work became the sphere of the man exclusively. The internal world of the family and the household was the proper business of the women . . . Not to work, for the women of the middling people became the mark of class superiority at the very moment when their men were establishing work as the criterion of dignity and worth” (Women, Resistance and Revolution, Sheila Rowbotham). The administration of the household lost its public character and women were excluded from participation in social production.

Thus, as feudalism gave way to capitalism women's lives changed radically and they found themselves increasingly at a disadvantage in the new organisation of industry. The process was a continuing one, affecting different groups of women in very different ways. For some the separation of the workplace from the home reduced their productivity and limited their role. For others, the introduction of a new machine excluded them from production, or alternatively their position in the guilds and crafts organisations was weakened sufficiently to drive them out, and trades which had been reserved for women were taken over by men. Yet other women moved out of the search for work outside the home altogether and into leisure and domestic isolation. “Modern industry in overturning the economical foundation on which was based the traditional family and the family labour corresponding to it. had also loosened all traditional family ties” (Marx. Capital. Vol.l)

Women’s position in society and their role within the family have changed greatly in the past 400 years, and they will continue to change as capitalism itself develops. However, so long as capitalism remains, the exploitation of women will also remain Not until we establish a system of society based upon common ownership and democratic control of the means of production will everyone — both women and men — be able to realise their full potential.

J.S.

Gender myths (1979)

From the December 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many words have been written to explain, justify or rationalise women's social inferiority as against men. There are those like racists with their particular prejudice, who have claimed that this social inferiority is a direct reflection of women's biological inferiority. For example, it has been said that the average brain size in women tends to be smaller than that of men, the inference being that women are less intelligent. It is true that the brain of the female sex in homo sapiens tends to be smaller than in the male, but then the whole morphological structure tends to be smaller in the female than in the male — something known in scientific jargon as sexual dimorphism. The Neanderthal human, who preceded — and was for a time a contemporary of—homo sapiens, had an average brain size of 1,4550 cc. or 100 cc larger than the modern human. However there have been few, if any, attempts to claim that Neanderthal people therefore must have been more intelligent than homo sapiens.

There can be no doubt that the social position of women is closely bound up with the emergence of private property relations and class society. Lewis H. Morgan who, together with Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, can be said to be the founders of social anthropology, was the first to discover this connection. His claim was that people living in those stages of human development which he called savagery and barbarism, had social organisation democratic in character. They practised communism in living and operated a matriarchal kinship structure, in contrast to institutionalaliscd private property and territorial government which. Morgan claimed, had evolved from primitive society. He was able to show that the patriarchal and monogamian type of families had not always existed — a complete break from the theory of original sin and the idea that primitive people were the result of degeneration from previous civilisation.

Morgan’s works greatly upset the academics of contemporary society. While Morgan put no special emphasis on the social position of women in primitive society, in the much more free society he described the implication was that women were not oppressed as in civilised periods. Much of what he claimed for primitive society is substantiated by modern anthropology.

However, it must be remembered that the peoples he studied were organised in tribal society and were not primitive in the prehistoric sense as understood by modern anthropologists in their studies of hunter gatherer bands. For example, Elman R. Service, who has made a close study of hunter gatherer peoples still existing in various parts of the world, and who are the closest approximation of early homo sapiens society of 40,000 years ago, says this in his book The Hunters:

Food gathering is the major enterprise of course, but more than that, it is a direct confrontation of man with nature. That is to say, there are no specialised groups who get their food by buying it from, the producer or exchanging services for it in some way. There is no full-time specialisation of labour other than the domestic age and sex divisions that are found in any family. Among hunting-gathering peoples this division of labour is simply that men do the hunting, at least the kind of hunting that takes them any distance from the camp. Women, probably because of the relative confinement of bearing and rearing children, are left to forage near the camp for vegetable foods and such small game as can be easily caught. But this does not mean that men's hunting is necessarily of greater economic importance than women's work.

Service calculates that in aboriginal Australia, even on the northern coast where game and fish are abundant, vegetables make up 70/80 per cent of the people's diet—collected, of course, by women. Woman’s work is important: most hunting-gathering populations could not be maintained without it. On the other hand, they can, and do, go for long periods without meat hunted by men. Only the Eskimos live by hunting and fishing alone, and Eskimo women do most of the fishing.

The question now arises: why was it that the oppression of women by men took place at all? In spite of its shortcomings, the probable explanation for this is that contained in Engels' The Origin of the Family Private Property and the State based, as it is, on the concept of historical materialism and with much use of the researches carried out by Morgan. 

Needless to say, this explanation has been, and still is, rejected by most of the supporters of that epitome of all private property societies, capitalism — and by sonic of those who are interested in what is constantly referred to as “the liberation of women”. One such is Simone de Beauvoir who, in her work The Second Sex, says:

. . . On the same grounds it is impossible to deduce the oppression of woman from the institution of private property. Here again the inadequacy of Engels' point of view is obvious. He saw clearly that woman’s muscular weakness became the real point of inferiority only in its relation to the bronze and iron tool; but he did not see that the limitations of her capacity for labour constituted in themselves a concrete disadvantage only in a certain perspective . . . 

Instead, she implies as a metaphysical explanation:

Thus it is that man’s interest in his property becomes an intelligible relation. But we see that man's interest cannot be explained through the tool alone: we must grasp in its entirety the attitude of man wielding the tool, an attitude that implies an ontological substructure, a foundation in the nature of his being

It is not surprising that someone with these ideas can write the following passage in relation to the aspirations of women:

I have pointed out in the introduction how different women's situation is, particularly on account of the community of life and interests which entails here solidarity with man — and also because he finds in her an accomplice: no desire for revolution dwells within her, nor any thought of her own disappearance as a sex — all she asks is that aspects of sexual differentiation be abolished.

In other words, let capitalism remain providing women are not discriminated against. If the determining factor in women's inferior standing is an existentialist one and is not linked to the rise of private property relations and class society, why did women allow it to happen? If the special oppression of women is not a necessary corollary — as de Beauvoir suggests — why was it that the agitation for woman’s liberation had to wait for the 20th century?

During the 20th century there has been much anthropological field work and study of the cultural diversity — and similarity — of various peoples in different parts of the world, with the emphasis on the differences. Margaret Mead, in her book Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, describes her study of three tribes living in New Guinea; the Arapesh, the Mundugumor and the Tchambuli;

We have now considered in detail the approved personalities of each sex among the primitive peoples. We found the Arapesh—both men and women displaying a personality that out of our historically limited preoccupations, we would call maternal in its parental aspects and feminine in its sexual aspects. We found men as well as women trained to be cooperative, unaggressive, responsive to the needs and demands of others. We found no idea that sex was a powerful driving force either for men or for women. In marked contrast to these attitudes, we found among the Mundugumor that both men and women developed as ruthless aggressive positively sexed individuals, with the maternal cherishing aspects of personality at a minimum. Both men and women approximated to a personality type that we in our culture would find only in an undisciplined and very violent male. Neither the Arapesh nor the Mundugumor profit by a contrast between the sexes. The Arapesh ideal is the mild responsive man married to the mild responsive woman: the Mundugumor ideal is the violent aggressive man married to the violent aggressive woman. In the third tribe, the Tchambuli, we found a genuine reversal of the sex attitudes of our own culture, with the woman the dominant impersonal managing partner, the man the less responsible and the emotionally dependent person. These three situations suggest, then, a very definite conclusion. If those temperamental attitudes which we have traditionally regarded as feminine, such as passivity, responsiveness and a willingness to cherish children — can so easily be set up as the masculine pattern in one tribe and in another be outlawed for the majority of women as well as for the majority of men, we no longer have any basis for regarding such aspects of behaviour as sex-linked. And this conclusion becomes even stronger when we consider the actual reversal in Tchambuli of the position of dominance of the two sexes, in spite of the existence of formal patrilineal institutions.

Whatever the other conclusions or speculations one can draw from this, one thing is certain. It show's that human society is capable of a variety of behavioural patterns, and that the so-called masculine and feminine characteristics are not based on fundamental sex differences, but reflect the cultural conditioning of their societies. The question could be posed here, what are the crucial factors which determine the cultural conditioning? It would seem that these studies go some way to support the implication of Simone de Beauvoir of an ontological explanation, and to invalidate the universal approach of Morgan in his insistence that “The history of the human race is one in source, one in experience, one in progress.” However, what has to be taken into account is that all of these studies have been carried out with peoples living in tribal society where private property relations had already developed to a considerable extent, as indeed were Morgan’s, and should not be regarded as examples of the hunter-gatherer society of prehistoric people of some 40,000-50.000 years ago. As E. R. Service points out in his introduction to The Hunters “All the hunting gathering societies listed above have certain characteristics in common that serve to set them apart from tribal and other higher levels of society.”

As mentioned earlier, the hunter-gathering peoples studied by Service and others are the nearest approximation to the society of primitive humanity. There is no substantial evidence whatever to suggest that ownership aggression or the domination of one sex by the other has any part either with the hunter-gatherer peoples living, or in the society of primitive peoples of prehistoric times.

The agitation for women’s liberation is a phenomenon of modern capitalism. The oppression of women by men only arises in those societies where the form of marriage and the family is patriarchal or monogamian. and is associated with private property relations of an advanced kind. The problem is only recognised after the possibility of its solution has become apparent.

The social problems engendered by capitalist society, which dominates the whole world, cut across all speculation, all special pleading. The liberation of women is inextricably bound up with the liberation of the whole of humanity. Capitalism exploits its working class regardless of their sex. The question to-day is not just the emancipation of women, but the emancipation of the working class, regardless of sex.

Harry Walters

SPGB Meetings (1979)

Party News from the December 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Stalin and the rise of the Russian ruling class (1979)

From the December 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

On December 21 a hundred years ago was born in Gori, in Russian Georgia, the man who was to become the blood-thirsty dictator of All-Russia, Joseph Djugashvili, better known as Stalin. Like Trotsky, he became an anti-Tsarist revolutionary while still a teenager, being active mainly in his native Georgia and other parts of the Caucasus, and like Trotsky also served a number of prison sentences and terms of exile.

One fact distinguished Stalin from most of the others who were to become leaders of the Bolshevik Party: he came from a poor background—his father was a cobbler not from the intelligentsia, that social group peculiar to Russia composed of university-educated people working mainly for the Tsarist State at national and local level. This was the group from which most anti-Tsarist revolutionaries—Mensheviks and Populists as well as Bolsheviks—were recruited and which in the end carried out the task which the Russian bourgeoisie was too weak and too dependent on Tsarism to carry out itself: the “bourgeois revolution” against absolutist rule and the restrictions it placed on the development of capitalism in Russia.

Although imagining themselves to be socialists and even, some of them, having a very good knowledge of Marx’s writings, the members of the revolutionary intelligentsia were in no doubt that it was they who should lead the coming anti-Tsarist revolution. Their disagreements were over who—the peasantry or the industrial working class—should provide the mass basis for this revolution. Lenin’s theory, that the working class left to themselves were incapable of reaching a revolutionary consciousness and that this would therefore have to be brought to them from outside, thus perfectly expressed their aspirations.

The Bolshevik Party, which was the most disciplined and the best organised of the various Russian revolutionary' organisations, was led from abroad by Lenin and others who cultivated close relations with the leaders of the Second International and who were able to discourse brilliantly on the finer points of Marxist theory. Inside Russia their organisation was run by men of a cruder type—like Stalin who seems for a while to have been in charge of a special section organising bank raids and hold-ups to help finance the Party’s activities.

Stalin was one of the editors of the Bolshevik paper Pravda when it first appeared in 1912, a post he resumed when the paper was allowed to appear again following the overthrow of the Tsar in March 1917. He had also been a member of the Central Committee of the Party since 1912 and as such was one of the group which took the decision to seize power in November 1917. Stalin thus played a somewhat greater part in the Russian revolution than Trotsky and Trotskyist writers have been prepared to credit him with but less than he himself was later to claim (to read later eulogies you would think that the Bolshevik seizure of power was engineered by him and Lenin alone).

On the strength of a pre-war pamphlet on the national question. Stalin was appointed Commissar for Nationalities in the first Bolshevik government but later, after the Civil War was over, ensconced himself in the secretariat of the Bolshevik Party. This was a key post since the Bolshevik Party was the government of Russia, both effectively in practice and in Leninist theory. According to Lenin, not only was the working class left to itself incapable of acquiring a revolutionary consciousness but it was also incapable of running society on its own; this latter would have to be done for it by, once again, the vanguard party which was supposed to represent its interests.

By the time Stalin became general secretary of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party in 1922, not only had all other political parties been suppressed but organised groups within the Bolshevik party itself had been banned. As secretary of the sole and monolithic political organisation in Russia Stalin was well placed, following the death of Lenin in 1924, to ensure that it was he who would emerge as future dictator. By 1928, he had out-manoeuvred all his rivals—Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamanev—even, in the end, Bukharin who had been his ally and who was the real author of the absurd theory of “socialism-in-one-country” which Trotsky attributed to Stalin. He was then in a position to turn on the only other social group in Russia that could represent a threat to the rule of the Bolshevik Party he controlled. This was the new private bourgeoisie of rich traders (nepmen) and peasants (kulaks) which had grown up under the New Economic Policy inaugurated in 1921 by Lenin and officially described by the Bolshevik Party as “the development of capitalism under the control and regulation of the proletarian state”. The kulaks and nepmen as well as many not-so-rich peasants were to be brutally eliminated in the forced collectivisation and industrialisation that began in earnest after 1928.

Final evolution

By 1936 the position had been stabilised, a situation Stalin marked by proclaiming that “socialism” had now been achieved in Russia. In reality what had been achieved was the final evolution of the Bolshevik party and government into a stable class ruling on the basis of state capitalism.

Before 1914, Trotsky was virtually alone in suggesting that, if they ever got power in the course of the anti-Tsarist revolution, they should hold on to it and try to develop “socialism”. Which, during and after 1917, is precisely what the Bolshevik Party tried to do. But at that time Russia, backward and isolated from industrialised Europe and North America, was not ripe for socialism. Only capitalism, in one form or another, was possible there. In maintaining themselves in power after overthrowing Tsarism the Bolshevik Party now assumed the role of the capitalist class not only in the bourgeois revolution but also in the subsequent development of capitalism. But capitalism can’t exist without a capitalist class and, the traditional Russian bourgeoisie having been eliminated, it was from the ranks of the Bolshevik Party itself that the replacement capitalist class was to evolve.

This evolution was not a smooth process, especially as the ideology of the Bolshevik Party committed it to working class interests and to social equality. All those who had qualms about the evolution of the Party into a stable ruling class had first to be cleared away, a task Stalin probably enjoyed carrying out as a means of avenging himself on those who had looked down on him as a non-intellectual and mere organisation man. There is evidence from Lenin’s last articles that he had begun to realise just before he died that the Bolshevik Party was beginning to evolve in this direction. The others—with Trotsky at their head—were cleared away over the next few years.

Stalin, in putting the consolidation of the situation in Russia ahead of foreign adventures, perfectly expressed the wishes of the newly emerging ruling class. By 1934 he, on behalf of this class, was in a strong enough position to publicly repudiate the earlier Bolshevik ideal of social equality. Describing those who continued to preach equality as “leftist blockheads” he went on to tell the 17th Congress of the Bolshevik Party:

  These people evidently think that Socialism calls for equality, for levelling the requirements and the personal lives of the members of society. Needless to say, such an assumption has nothing in common with Marxism, with Leninism. By equality Marxism means, not equality in personal requirements and personal life, but the abolition of class (quoted in the Webbs’ Soviet Communism: A New Civilization, 1936, p 702).

This is what the new privileged—with their bloated salaries, their exclusive shops and their special housing—wanted to hear. They wanted to keep their privileges and had no desire to be levelled down to the wage of an average worker as had once been Bolshevik theory.

Since under Stalin’s supposed “socialism” all the features of capitalism continued to exist—wages, profits, commodity production, banks, bonds, the state, social inequality—“Marxist” theory had to be revised. This can be said to have been Stalin’s main contribution to the Leninist distortion of Marxism, one that has been inherited by Communist Parties everywhere, Peking or Moscow line. None now has any idea what socialism means and originally meant (even for the Bolsheviks—see the extract we publish elsewhere in this issue from an article Stalin wrote in 1906): a moneyless, wageless, stateless society.

Dictator

After 1936 Stalin continued to pursue the interests of the new state capitalist ruling class of Russia—even if many of them were to be the victims of his whims as he sought to consolidate his personal position as dictator. He built up a powerful and effective police state which, if only for the reason that it lasted longer, tortured and eliminated many more people than Hitler’s in Germany. He turned the Communist Parties in other countries into simple tools of Russian foreign policy ready to zig and zag as dictated from Moscow.

Stalin died on 5 March 1953, but the state capitalist dictatorship he had built up continued intact even if some of the rougher edges were smoothed away in the interests of industrial and military efficiency, not to mention the personal security of the leading members of the ruling class. The worst thing about Stalin was that, though clearly to be classed amongst history’s many cruel and bloodthirsty despots, he should have been considered a socialist. The immense harm this has done to the cause of socialism will never be able to be calculated, but must certainly be listed as one of the more important factors that has delayed the emergence of a genuine socialist understanding among the working class of the world.

Adam Buick

Future society by Joseph Stalin (1979)

From the December 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

  The following article first appeared in 1906 in Akhali Tckhovroba, an obscure Social Democratic journal published in Georgia, and was part of a series on "anarchism or socialism". We have many disagreements with this article but we republish it not only because it gives a definition of socialism as a society without buying and selling, the wages system or a coercive government machine, but also because its author was the man who was later to become the dictator of Russia — Joseph Stalin. In comparing what Stalin wrote in 1906 with what he later claimed was "socialism” it can be seen to what  extent the so-called Communist Parties everywhere have distorted the original meaning of the word. In view of certain  observations in the article, we must add that it is our view that  the means of production are now sufficiently developed to  permit the implementation of the principle "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” with the establishment of socialism.

Editorial Committee

Future society will be socialist society. This means, primarily, that there will be no classes in that society; there will be neither capitalists nor proletarians and, consequently, there will be no exploitation. In that society there will be only workers engaged in collective labour.

Future society will be socialist society. This also means that with the abolition of exploitation commodity production and buying and selling will also be abolished and, therefore, there will be no room for buyers and sellers of labour power, for employers and employed there will be only free workers.

Future society will be socialist society. This means, lastly, that in that society the abolition of wage labour will be accompanied by the complete abolition of the private ownership of the instruments and means of production; there will be neither poor proletarians nor rich capitalists—there will be only workers who collectively own all the land and minerals, all the forests, all the factories and mills, all the railways, etc.

As you see, the main object of production in the future will be directly to satisfy the needs of society and not to produce goods for sale in order to increase the profits of the capitalists. Here there will be no room for commodity production, struggle for profits, etc.

It is also clear that future production will be socialistically organised, highly developed production, which will take into account the needs of society and will produce as much as society needs. Here there will be no room either for disintegrated production, competition, crises or unemployment.

Where there are no classes, where there are neither rich nor poor, there is no need for a state, there is no need also for political power, which oppresses the poor and protects the rich. Consequently, in socialist society there will be no need for the existence of political power.

That is why Karl Marx said as far back as 1846:

  The working class in the course of its development will substitute for the old bourgeois society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power properly so- called . . . (see The Poverty of Philosophy).

That is why Engels said in 1884:

  The state, then, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it, that had no conception of the state and state power. At a certain stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up with the cleavage of society into classes, the state became a necessity . . .We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes not only will have ceased to be a necessity, but will become a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as inevitably as they arose at an earlier stage. Along with them the state will inevitably fall. The society that will organise production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into the Museum of Antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe. (See The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.)

At the same time, it is self-evident that for the purpose of administrating public affairs there will have to be in socialist society, in addition to local offices which will collect all sorts of information, a central statistical bureau, which will collect information about the needs of the whole of society, and then distribute the various. kinds of work among the working people accordingly. It will also be necessary to hold conferences and particularly congresses, the decisions of which will certainly be binding upon the comrades who are in the minority until the next congress is held.

Lastly, it is obvious that free and comradely labour should result in an equally comradely and complete, satisfaction of all needs in the future socialist society. This means that if future society will demand from each of its members as much labour as he can perform, it, in its turn, must provide each member with as much products as he needs. From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs! —such is the basis upon which the future collectivist system must be created. It goes without saying that in the initial stage of Socialism, when elements which have not yet grown accustomed to work are being drawn into the new way of life, when the productive forces also will not yet have been sufficiently developed and there will still be “dirty" and “clean” work to do, the application of the principle: “to each according to his needs”, will undoubtedly be greatly hindered and, as a consequence, society will be obliged temporarily to take some other path, a middle path. But it is also clear that when future society runs into its groove, when the survivals of capitalism will have been eradicated, the only principle that will conform to socialist society will be the one we have pointed to above.

That is why Marx said in 1875:

  In a higher phase of communist (i.e. socialist) society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual. . . only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’.” (See Critique of the Gotha Program.)

Such, in general, is the picture of future socialist society according to the theory of Marx.

Political Notebook: Boo, Hiss (1979)

The Political Notebook Column from the December 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Boo, Hiss.

In politics it is like panto time the whole year round, with all the capitalist parties having their demon king for the others to boo and hiss.

Tony Benn, for example, is guaranteed to cause nervous Tory ladies to have more nightmares than The Exorcist. Rhodes Boyson has the ability to reduce keen Labour supporters to a small cloud of indignant steam.

Each of these demons plays the part; Benn has a formidable stare, to convince all the spinsters of Bournemouth that he will have them raped under their beds. Boyson’s high dome and jungle of side- whiskers are straight out of Dotheboy’s Hall; quite clearly, he is plotting to starve all schoolchildren and to bring back hanging for theft of a hankerchief.

But the pantomime tradition has a habit of undermining itself, as the political bogey men become respectable — even loved — and sometimes in power, Churchill, for example, was once hated by many committed Tories. Aneurin Bevan, as he died, had almost cast off the diabolical image and seemed about to mellow into Gaitskell’s compliant right hand man. And Wilson, who was once thought to have ambitions to serve notice to quit on the fiddling business men of British capitalism, ended up by giving many of them honours, at the same time as he took one himself.

One of the uses of the demon kings is to draw the opposition’s fire and to become a personalisation of the popular misconceptions of their party’s policies. And if they are very clever, they can judge correctly when to stop being the demon king and start being the good fairy.

The danger in all this is that, like the panto, it is a diversion: it attracts attention away from the real political issues. Whatever the guise of the people who get into power over capitalism at any time, their basic function is the same—to try to run the system and survive politically. The workers who vote for or against them because they are entranced or frightened by the spectacle are living a fairy tale—and one with no happy ending.

Teddy Bares His Soul.

Edward Kennedy has everything—or almost everything. He is rich, famous, handsome, atheletic; and now, in a dramatic baring of his soul, he has revealed that he has the added quality of generosity.

For years he has been resisting the efforts of his friends who want him to take over running American capitalism. At one time Kennedy protested that, with a glut of fatherless nephews and nieces, his family commitments were too pressing. It was also hinted that, not surprisingly, he was reluctant to end up being assassinated like his two brothers.

But now the pressure has proved too strong; Kennedy has relented and will contest the Democratic nomination— and he is doing it all for the good of the American people. Having originally supported Carter for the presidency, Kennedy has suddenly found out that American capitalism is in an awful mess—and he has decided that Carter is to blame.

Even more, he is persuaded that only he can sort the mess out, although it is unusual, to say the least, for a sitting President to have to fight for re-nomination. At times, Kennedy’s enthusiasm seems to be getting the better of him; on a recent campaign tour in Carter country in the Deep South he was rash enough to promise that he would “roll back” rising prices (how many politicians have lived to regret that one?)

And, even more enthusiastic, Kennedy has persuaded his wife, who was driven to alcoholism by the stress of his life style, to totter to the platform to support his candidacy.

If such open cynicism succeeds, it will be because the Carter administration is so thoroughly discredited; even the media have stopped showing him to be a nimble, active man and have begun to put out pictures of him stumbling and falling to the ground, just like they used to with Gerry Ford.

None of this promises that it will be a dignified, analytical election campaign. Carter’s government has had no more success in doing the impossible—controlling capitalism so that it works in the interests of the American working class than has any other. The Kennedys are famous now as ruthless operators of a political ambitions machine—and Edward Kennedy is perhaps the most ruthless, ambitious and unsavoury of them all.

So it seems the campaign will be a savage, cynical affair. The best man may or may not win (if there is a best man) but in any case it will not matter—the victor will carry on trying to do the impossible and capitalism will come out on top.

Stormy Front.

Like some malignant tumour, the National Front took root and flourished through a sort of cellular subdivision among other racialist organisations in this country. For some years, it has led the field in this particular brand of anti-working class propaganda, trumpeting its object of making racism respectable. It has had some ominously successful election campaigns.

But behind this facade—and behind the dramatic, flag-forested parades, the strutting leaders, the hooligan rank and file all has not been well with the NF. It has gone through a succession of leadership crises and has seen its votes fall away.

Now the Front is experiencing yet another schism from which, perhaps, another equally obnoxious party will emerge. This schism is reported to revolve around the objectionable personality of the NF propaganda specialist Martin Webster, who has indeed never gone out of his way to cultivate a reputation as a sensitive artist in human relations.

There is a certain irony in this struggle. If the Front were in power it is likely that the losers of the battle within its ranks would suffer a consequence a lot less gentle—and a lot more final—than that of simply being expelled from the organisation. So perhaps they have something to be thankful for, in those poor election results.

If there should be an open split in the Front, there will probably be rejoicing among such bodies as the Anti-Nazi League and the Socialist Workers Party, who will see this as a triumph over racism. In fact, the pernicious ideas put out by the NF and the like will always find a receptive audience among workers who are degraded, exploited, poverty-laden and confused about the reasons for their condition.

Racism is the nomination of a scapegoat for the evils which capitalism brings. The most effective weapon against it is not in violence or repression but in a clear, consistent analysis of capitalism and of how it causes workers’ problems. No banners are waved in that but it is more enduring—because it answers to reality—than any parade.

Islam and banking (1979)

From the December 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Koran—which is supposed to be the literal word of God as dictated to Mohamet by the Archangel Gabriel — bans the taking of interest. Or at least that is how it is being interpreted by the Ayatollah Khomeini in Persia and by the Moslem fundamentalists who advise the military dictator of Pakistan, General Zia.

The trick of course is in the definition of interest. It can be admitted that, from the point of view of economic theory, there are two kinds of interest, depending on what the loan is granted for: consumption or production. Before capitalism most loans were not investments in production but were to people to spend on consumption, the luxuries of the rich or the necessities of the poor as the case may be. When such loans are made to the poor the moneylender can exploit his client’s dire need to extract a very high rate of interest and can eventually reduce him to a state of virtual slavery, as occurred on numerous occasions in pre-capitalist times. Mohamet wrote the Koran, of course, well before capitalism evolved, about 1300 years ago in what is now Saudi Arabia and its ban on interest was designed to prevent the social structure of the then tribal society being undermined by debt-slavery.

Interest under capitalism is something different. It is a share in the profits extracted from the exploitation of wage-labour. The lender loans his money to an entrepreneur who invests it in production and who pays the interest out of the profits he makes. This means that under capitalism there is a limit to the rate of interest: it cannot be greater than the rate of profit.

Banks are specialised financial institutions which gather together money which people want to lend and pass it on to capitalists to invest in production. They realise their profits out of the difference between the rates of interest they pay their depositors and the rates of interest they charge their customers. Banks play an important intermediary role under capitalism and without them the accumulation of capital out of profits — which is the be-all and end-all of capitalism — would proceed, and would have proceeded, at a much slower pace.

Capitalism has only been going for about two hundred or so years but it has now spread all over the world, including Moslem countries. In such countries too it finds banks essential as financial intermediaries channelling money for productive investment; and of course banks, charging and taking interest, exist in all Moslem countries including both Khomeini’s Persia and Zia's Pakistan.

Moslem theologians have overcome this problem by interpreting the Koran’s ban on interest to apply only to the taking and paying of amounts of interest fixed in advance. From here on it is easy: the interest, both that paid to depositors and that charged to borrowers, comes to be called “a share in profits”. This is how the Amman correspondent of the Financial Times (21/3/79) describes the operation of the Jordan Islamic Bank:

  A depositor places his money in a savings account in an Islamic bank without being guaranteed any fixed return every year. Instead he is promised a share of the profits of the projects the bank is financing. When the bank lends money to finance a new industrial plant, the borrower does not pay a fixed interest rate every year, but rather promises to give the bank a share of the profits the plant generates after it starts production. If the plant makes a quick and large profit, the bank and the depositors share in the bonanza. If the plant makes only a small profit, they get less. The bank always maintains a reserve fund from which it will pay its depositors and shareholders a dividend during any particularly unprofitable years.

Another way out is, instead of demanding a share of the borrower’s profits, to charge him a “commission” or “fee” for arranging the loan.

Actually, this solution — of calling “interest” a “share in profits”— conforms very well with the nature of interest under capitalism which, as we saw, is precisely a share of profits — though it is another matter whether the foregoing of the administrative convenience of paying fixed interest just to respect the letter of the Koran is a rational banking practice.

What is interesting in this is the confirmation it brings of the materialist conception of history that the ideology of a particular society its morality, its religion,—is a reflection of its economic basis and changes as that basis does. As capitalism has come to Moslem countries so the Koran's ban on interest has been re-interpreted so as to fit in with the system's need for the financial intermediaries that are banks.

There is a precedent for this. The Bible too used to ban interest and this had to be changed when capitalism evolved in Christian countries. It seems, according to R.H.Tawney in his Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, that by the end of the Middle Ages the Christian theologians had reached exactly the same conclusions as today’s Moslem theologians — that anything goes except the giving and taking of payments fixed in advance (indeed there would seem to be one or two subtleties here that may not yet have occurred to the Ayatollah Khomeini):

   No man, again, may charge money for a loan. He may, of course, take the profits of partnership, provided that he takes the partner’s risks. He may buy a rent-charge; for the fruits of the earth are produced by nature, not wrung from man. He may demand compensation — interesse — if he is not repaid the principal at a time stipulated. He may ask payment corresponding to any loss he incurs or gain he foregoes. He may purchase an annuity, for the payment is contingent and speculative, not certain . . .What remained to the end unlawful was that which appears in modern economic text-books as ‘pure interest’ — interest as a fixed payment stipulated in advance for a loan of money or wares without risk to the lender. . .The essence of usury was that it was certain, and that, whether the borrower gained or lost, the usurer took his pound of flesh. Medieval opinion, which has no objection to rent or profits, provided that they are reasonable — for is not everyone in a small way a profit-maker? — has no mercy for the debenture holder. His crime is that he takes a payment for money which is fixed and certain, and such a payment is usury. (Pelican edition, pp 54-5).

How long will it be before the Archangel Gabriel appears again to dictate an amendment to the Koran permitting fixed interest payments?

Adam Buick

Capitalism and democracy (1979)

From the December 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is a notion in certain circles that something called “democratic socialism” is a contradiction in terms, that state ownership and centralised planning is incompatible with freedom. Such an assertion is intended as a smart rap over the knuckles of left wing gurus such as Tony Benn or Eric Heffer who like to see themselves as “democratic socialists”. They confidently assert its vital difference from the stale and discredited “social democracy” of the Labour Party stick-in-the-muds; and yet argue that it offers a democratic “humanistic” alternative to the tyrannical political system of places like Russia whose economy is predominantly under state ownership.

Unfortunately for Benn, Heffer and the like, theirs is a herculean task. Not, one must hasten to add, in convincing critics of their ideological separateness from a socially acceptable “social democracy” (what would the establishment press do, without a Red Scare in the guise of harmless-looking Wedgie to provoke good old Col Twrphitt-Plunkett into bristling indignation over tea and the Telegraph?) No, the real problem for them is to persuade their critics and an electorate which provides them with the votes they want, that they are not the Red Scare they are made out to be (hence the stress on “democracy”). And, of course, they’re not: sheep in sheep’s clothing would be nearer the mark.

For one thing, the qualification “democratic” gives rise to the suspicion that those who make use of the phrase “democratic socialism” allow for the possibility of there being something called “undemocratic socialism”. If democracy is not a necessary concomitant of “socialism”, it then becomes possible to envisage a situation in which “democratic socialists” would choose “socialism” at the expense of “democracy”.

For another, critics of “democratic socialism” would say that full-blooded state ownership of the economy—the washed-out worthless ideal of “democratic socialists” obtains in decidedly undemocratic Russia. It sounds nice in theory, they would say, but look how it turns out in practice. For did not Lenin argue in 1918—not unlike our “democratic socialists” today—for a state that would be “democratic for the proletariat and propertyless in general and dictatorial against the bourgeoisie only” (section added to the 2nd edition of The State and Revolution). Further, is there not a significant correlation to be discovered if we look at the world around us, between dictatorial government and state involvement in the economy?

“Democratic socialists” would respond to this criticism by pointing out, with justification, that an undeveloped, predominantly feudal, economy such as existed in Russia in 1917, is an altogether different matter from that of an industrially advanced capitalist economy. They would locate in the backward nature of the chaotic, war-stricken economy of pre-revolution Russia the essential reason for the emergence of a new political dictatorship to replace that of the tsar and to preside over the birth-pangs of capitalism. Indeed, the liberalising tendencies that appear to go hand in hand with industrial development in all economics, state capitalist or private enterprise, would seem to support this argument. Expensive modern wage slaves, who produce and operate all the sophisticated machinery of modern industry to submit indefinitely to naked, brutal coercion.

Thus “democratic socialists” would reaffirm their faith in state capitalism, although many have wavered in it and some have renounced it altogether as in the fifties. Then, the emerging picture of the stalinist nightmare provoked first disbelief then waves of disillusionment. Nevertheless, the basic argument is still adhered to: state ownership does not present a threat to, but on the contrary is a necessary basis for the extension of political democracy. To quote Ramsay MacDonald:

  The nationalisation of production is just as necessary to democracy and is just as inevitable if democracy is to mature into fullness — as the nationalisation of the sovereign authority by the suppression of the personal right of kings to rule. (Socialism 1907.)

The justification for this belief was spelled out many years later by another Labour leader:

  Political democracy, moreover, in a regime of capitalism and great social inequality, is only half alive. Political forms are twisted by economic forces. Citizens legally equal, wield unequal power. Political democracy will only be fully alive when married to economic democracy in a society of equals. (Practical Socialism for Britain by Hugh Dalton, 1935.)

A left wing assumption is that nationalisation brings the “economic democracy” necessary for the full and vital functioning of political democracy. If ownership of property is the basis of power, the argument goes, then an extension of public ownership to encompass the entire “public” (“economic democracy”), must correspondingly result in an extension of political democracy itself.

Curiously, laissez faire apologists attack egalitarianism precisely because they feel a “society of equals” would

   “. . . require a political system in which the state is able to hold in check those social and occupational groups, which by virtue of their skills or education . . . might otherwise attempt to stake share of society’s rewards. The most effective way of holding such groups in check is by denying them the right to organise politically” from Class Inequality and Political Order 1972 by Frank Parkin, quoted in The Free Nation 16 February - 1 March.

Further, they see in state capitalism not the extension, but the abolition of property ownership as far as the “public” is concerned: which calls into question the nature of “property ownership”. Tory MP Stephen Hastings summed up what he saw as the consequences of this, in a diatribe under the heading “Time to unite against Marxism” in the Daily Telegraph some years ago. His argument, stated simply, was that “democracy only has meaning if it is based on individual liberty” and “liberty can only exist if it is rooted in the concept of property and the rule of law” and that should “Marxism” — by which he meant state capitalism — prevail, this would result in the erosion of liberty and therefore democracy. But since when have the “concept of property and the rule of law” been exorcised from the domain of state capitalist dictatorships? If they have, then perhaps Hastings would care to provide some explanation to account for — and to comfort — some poor wretch of a Russian worker up before the law for stealing “public” property which he might have been forgiven for thinking he was entitled to as a member of the “public”? The “rule of law” is a product of property relationships and its application implies the existence of a property set-up which it seeks to protect.

The fact is that both the left and its laissez faire critics are wrong. Nationalisation no more entails the extension of property ownership to the public than it does the elimination of property relationships. For a start there are just too many uncomfortable facts which neither viewpoint can account for, such as the immense inequality of power and income in all state capitalist regimes. Tins could not exist if nationalisation brought about “economic democracy" or abolished property ownership. Such inequality makes the Free Nation view that egalitarianism gives rise to dictatorship completely irrelevant as an explanation for state capitalist dictatorship.

State property is effectively the collective private property of a small minority who, through their control of the state, exercise ownership and control of the economy. If dictatorial government is a tendency in state capitalism this may be due partly to the fact that access to the “commanding heights” of the economy depends on political criteria — the Party has the say in the selection of top state officials. It is is hardly surprising, then, that this arrangement should tend to reinforce political conformity and stifle dissent.

But this cannot be explained by the absence of class or property relations in places like Russia; on the contrary, it is precisely because of class division in society that the possibility for political dictatorship arises in the first place. As Marx put it, with the end of class division that will come with the establishment of socialism, “there will be no more political power properly so called, since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society” (The Poverty of Philosophy). No political power means no government, liberal or dictatorial.

In a recent lecture, Professor F. A. Hayek remarked:

  If a free society is to continue to exist, no monopoly can be allowed to use physical force to maintain its position and to threaten to deprive the public of essential services others are capable and willing of rendering. (The Listener 17 August 1978.)

In thus attacking trade unions, Hayek inadvertently provided a description of capitalism which is based on a class monopoly of the means of production backed up by the armed might of the state. It is by Hayek’s own yardstick an unfree, undemocratic society. Despite the fact that the workers produce all the wealth in society they have very little, if any, say in the process of producing this wealth because they do not own the means of production. When the profit motive dictates that the public should be deprived of essential services which workers are capable and willing of rendering, as is the case in capitalism’s periodic slumps, what better evidence can there be of the way in which capitalism undemocratically places the interests of the few before the interests and wishes of the majority?

In contrast, the entire community will own the means of production in a socialist society, with the necessary consequence that the process of production will be democratically organised by and in the interests of society as a whole. This will not be the sham democracy of the people electing governments to run society against their interests, but direct, democratic control by people over the conditions of their existence.

And the phrase “common ownership” is not used here as a shibboleth or empty slogan after a leftist fashion. It means precisely what it says — that everyone will own all the means of production and will therefore have unrestricted, free access to the fruits of production and all the information necessary for the fullest democratic discussion and participation in decision-making. Next to this, what more is there to be said for the “democracy” of the marketplace; if pound notes spent are votes cast, then the great majority everywhere languish under the iron heel of minority dictatorship.

Robin Cox

50 Years Ago: Socialism and Money (1979)

The 50 Years Ago column from the December 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Then he goes on to tell us that Marxians and Marx “approve a gold standard” . . .   He refrains from giving any specific quotation . . . to justify his assertion. He does not quote such a passage because no such passage exists. The statement is completely false. Marx did not, and socialists do not approve the gold standard or any other currency system. Socialism means a system of society in which goods are produced for the use of the members of society, not for the profit of a privileged class. There will, under socialism, be no buying and selling, and therefore no need for any currency system, on a gold basis, or of any other kind. That is socialism and that is what we work for.

(From “Socialism and the Gold Standard” reply to a correspondent, Socialist Standard December 1929)

Festival of fools (1979)

From the December 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Christmas: the anniversary of the birth of a legendary con-man who tyrannised the ignorant believers of the ancient Middle East by threatening that “He that believeth not shall be damned”. (Mark xvi, 16.) And the ignorant believers of our time, the alleged Age of Science, flock to the churches to prove their stupidity and moral purity. Priests bless the working class and tell us that we are saved. Nobody knows more about saving than the wage slaves, for they are the ones who are forced to store away and put aside their negligible share of wealth so that on at least a few days of the year they and their families can forget that they are workers.

On Christmas day the working class may eat, drink, watch television and give each other presents almost as if the world was theirs. Men, normally appendages to commodity-producing machines, are allowed to spend time with their families. Laughter is permitted without the guilt of ‘timewasting’. Song and dance and games are there to be enjoyed. Is it only the most naive child who dares to ask why it can’t be Christmas every day?

No, there are others. The capitalist investors in the large department stores, selling rubbish to a class of bargain-consumers, would be happy to see profits reach the December peak every month. The advertising companies, there to persuade us to need what only financial sacrifice can buy, would not mind a year-long dose of Christmas money-wasting for the working class. The TV companies, with their annual tasteless mixture of Morecambe and Wise and Christ and Queen would readily churn out their glittering propaganda every day of the year. The Bishops and the other philosophical phonies rejoice in this yearly suspension of disbelief. Christmas, for the few who exploit and commercialise the lives of the many, is a worthwhile investment.

Of course, for the small minority of men and women who own and control the means of wealth production and distribution it might as well be Christmas every day. They are the class who have no need to work. They eat the best food, wear the best clothes, drive the best cars and live in the best houses. They do so because the working class give them a present every day and week and month of the year. We give them surplus value: more than the amount of values paid to us in the form of wages and salaries. The exploitation of the wealth producers is the source of the profit of the parasite class. The workers produce; the parasites grow rich. For capitalists, every day can be Christmas.

But it is not quite the same. Because on most days of the year their social inferiors are not to be found living it up at home. If the working class did that—if we were to become permanently idle like the socially superior class— there would be no one to run the factories, go down the mines, drive the buses and trains, farm the land and work in the schools and hospitals. Without work production would stop. Yet without working the owners of the means of production live in luxury. What a useful present we give them. And in return they give us a few days off for Christmas.

What a miserable time Christmas is for those too poor to enjoy it. The children whose parents’ poverty denies them access to the gifts seen on television. The homeless, the starving, those employed to fight wars. In a world which can potentially provide for three times the food needs of the present population, while millions die of malnutrition, recipes for plum pudding and mince pies are a sick joke. When bombs kill workers in a struggle for a market that another capitalist gang wants to add to its collection it is an insult to tell us that Jesus Christ died for our sins.

The image of Christ, who in all probability never existed, represents the twin idiocies of superstition and morality. Both serve to enslave the working class; superstition because it leads people to believe in the scientifically unprovable and morality because it reinforces the values of the profit system in the name of Human Nature. Pious and simple souls tell us that we ought to return to celebrating Christmas as a Christian festival. We remind them that to celebrate their Christianity is to proclaim the philosophy of the socially and scientifically ignorant.

If Father Christmas was a socialist he would drop Socialist Standards down the chimneys of the exploited instead of record tokens and toy guns. He would tell people that they could be free every day to enjoy themselves and co-operate and show goodwill. In a world without the obstacles of class division and production for profit people will no longer be forced to look forward to a single happy and satisfying day. On December 26 there will be another three hundred and sixty-four days to Christmas. Or it could be socialism every day.

Steve Coleman

From the horse’s mouth (1979)

A Short Story from the December 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

I often wonder why those two-legged creatures slavishly toil their lives away in factories, mines, shops, offices, and fields in order to make their masters rich. What reward do they get? The poor wretches at British Leyland have now voted about throwing 25,000 of their fellows on the scrapheap; while British Leyland are to donate to Captain Mark Philips and Princess Anne £18.000 a year, the loan of £5.000, the free use of a Land-Rover and horsebox, as a sponsorship of their equestrian hobby.

Of course, as Major General Jack Reynolds of the British Equestrian Federation points out: “The sponsorship is done in such a way that the person himself doesn’t financially benefit by one penny. The money goes to the horses.” He thought that £3,000 a year was “about right” for the cost of maintaining a horse, which shows how partial these capitalists are to us of the equine species compared to their workers. Many humans labour hard and long all week to receive a take-home pay of less than £3,000 a year to keep not only themselves but also their families. And a worker put out to grass after a lifetime of faithful toil receives only £23.30 a week to keep body and soul together. Indeed, it is incredible how many of this ingenious, inventive, adaptable, hard-working class live, breed and die under conditions no self respecting horse would tolerate without kicking hard and often.

We horses do not wear ourselves out with work. We have valets and grooms to rub us down, brush and comb us, exercise us, clear up our excrement and place fresh bedding in our warm, dry stables. A veterinary surgeon is on hand for our slightest wheeze or limp. When we parade in public we require ten or twenty thousand men and women to stack themselves up on uncomfortable seats and admire our feats of running and jumping. The most illustrious who wish to mount us must first fawn and fondle or else we buck and rear. If one of us carries a royal rump and there is a call of nature—then nature calls! It is said a forebear of mine at Ascot—and my pedigree is more certain than many an heir to a capitalist fortune or the scion of a noble family—launched a kick at a crowned monarch because he did not like the looks of her head. Her royal majesty, who adores horses, murmured an apology and withdrew.

Shame on you biped workers for meekly producing wealth and luxury for the capitalists when you could take control of the means of living and work instead for yourselves and each other! Surely this would be preferable to an existence where you are valued as less than a horse?

. . .  as told to Alice Kerr

Obituary: Harry Clements (1979)

Obituary from the December 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Members will be saddened to hear of the death, in late September, of Harry Clements at the age of 76.

Harry joined the SPGB in 1947 and was a member of the old Fulham Branch, later transforming to West London (formerly Ealing) Branch. He had a friendly, out-going personality which he used to advantage to put over his deeply held socialist views. His work as a plumber enabled him to meet a cross-section of the working class and he took every opportunity which this gave him to get his ideas across; he was also a keen member of the Fulham Bowling Club and there were many animated discussions in the club-room started by Harry’s outspoken comments on capitalist society and the socialist alternative.

Our sympathy is extended to his wife Lill (as she was affectionately known to Harry’s friends) who joined him in the social functions of the Branch.

H.E.

Running Commentary: Capitalism Condemned (1979)

The Running Commentary Column from the December 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism Condemned 

The objections to capitalist politicians is not that they are dishonest (though they usually are) nor that they are incompetent (though this is the norm) nor that they are a particularly nasty sub-species (though on the whole they are). The objection is simply that they claim to be able to run capitalism in the interests, of the majority, but they can’t, haven’t, don't and won’t.

Evidence floods in of the palpable fact that this society works in the interests of a small minority and that problems of the majority are, by and large, left intact.


Poverty

The Supplementary Benefits Commission defines poverty as a standard of living so low that it cuts people off from normal community life; people are not warm enough, not fed enough and do not have sufficient clothing to appear in the street without embarrassment. It must be remembered that poverty is not an absolute concept but a level relative to what can be expected at any particular time. But even by capitalism's standards (which are low enough) poverty still stalks the working class in the form of depressed living conditions.

The Supplementary Benefits Commission’s report for 1978 issued in October stated that the amount paid in supplementary benefits was insufficient to keep the people who depend on it out of the Commission’s definitions of poverty. As to how many people in this country are in this position one can turn to the report of the Low Pay Unit, also issued in October. This claimed that one family in eight were living below the bare official minimum. These people will not have gained anything from the so called tax cuts introduced by the soak-the-poor Tory budget. The Low Pay Unit expects that one effect of the budget will be to plunge a further 10,000 families below the official poverty line.

The former director of the Low Pay Unit, Frank Field, (now a Labour MP) estimated that if a realistic level for the poverty line is taken, 14 million people in this country are living in poverty (Guardian 1/10/79). What Field does not explain is what he is doing as a Labour MP if he condemns the system the Labour Party has run and is so keen to perpetuate. But Frank’s unfrankness here is only the norm for an MP.

But perhaps the most interesting survey of poverty to emerge in October (for some reason a good month for reports) was Peter Townsend’s massive book Poverty in the United Kingdom. This provides a wealth of statistical evidence about poverty under British capitalism. In effect, it refutes the claims of politicians that they have solved the poverty problem. The Observer commented that this book, together with the Supplementary Benefit Commission’s report, ". . .  remind us that Britain, 35 years after the end of the war, retains a shameful sub-culture of poverty, striking almost arbitrarily at the old . . .  large families, widows, the disabled, one-parent families and others.” (28/10/79.) Such facile comment is remarkable. When the Observer refers to the old, the large families and widows, it should have made it clear that it was referring to one class only. Old, widowed, disabled, large familied capitalists do not come within the scope of the poverty problem. Perhaps the word “others” is supposed to mean about ninety per cent of the population?


The Joys of Work

Meanwhile most workers still have to work. The conditions in which they do so vary from the despair of the mind-bending repetitive manual and clerical jobs to the outright appalling — those that are likely directly to cause an early death. Take some of the recent grisly revelations on asbestosis. A government advisory committee on asbestos also reported in October. It appears that as early as 1906 the government knew that asbestos was a killer. The link between asbestos and lung cancer was discovered in 1930. The link with other forms of cancer was made clear in 1964. No government cared much about it. Now after three years the government committee has recommended new standards which will be an improvement; if they are adopted, instead of one worker in ten in the industry contracting (and painfully dying from) asbestosis, only one worker in twenty will do so. What progress. And there is a good old-fashioned conspiracy by the rich and powerful asbestos industry to keep back the truth about the dangers of asbestosis. Meantime asbestos continues to be used and people who work with it (in particular the laggers-people who lag pipes) die young, in agony.

The Guardian (24/10/79) reports on one man who, never having been warned of the dangers, worked as a lagger from 1946 to 1958. At the age of 41 he was told he had the disease. At the age of 44 he was almost paralysed. Now he lives as a cripple: in constant pain, he is unable even to climb the stairs to his bed.

There is no cure, only the inevitable agonising death. And just to add insult to the injury, the invalidity pension for that man, his wife and four children is £54.70 a week. Not only does capitalism maim you, it then lets you continue what’s left of your existence in wretchedness.


Year of the Child

As the Year of the Child comes to an end, we may well ask is there a better future for children? On the whole things look worse than ever. Amnesty International’s Prisoner of Conscience Report, also issued in October, reminds us that children throughout the world are being tortured and murdered. Ethiopia—5000 young people slaughtered in 1977/78; Central African Empire—100 children battered to death under the megalomaniac Bokassa; Chile—children tortured in front of parents to extract confessions and information from them; Russia—children wrenched from their parents who have committed “crimes” such as distributing private essays. The International Labour Office published a report (Observer 4/10/79) showing that more than 52 million children in the world under the age of 15 worked for a living—although child labour is prohibited by law. Most of these figures are made up from children in countries where poverty is rife and either children work to the detriment of their physical and mental well being or face starvation. The report, which contains horrifying case-studies from Mexico, Peru, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Thailand, Italy, Argentina and Greece, draws the hard conclusion that “child labour cannot be prohibited by law”.

The Amnesty and ILO reports only skim the surface. And as these lines are written children are dying like flies of starvation in Kampuchea. Reports on numbers vary, but even the most conservative estimate is chilling. In the meantime, British, American, Russian, Kampuchean and other politicians argue about the “best” way to send in the food—an argument which is heavily concerned with their respective standing as powers in world capitalism.

Ronnie Warrington