Letter: E.P. Thompson and CND (1980)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

E.P. Thompson and CND

A well-known historical figure, with whom I am sure the Marxist historian E. P. Thompson is acquainted, once said that when history repeats itself the first time it is tragedy, but when it does so a second time it is farce. Thompson, in calling for a “campaign for a bomb-free Europe” (Guardian, 28.1.80), lecturing under the title “Protest and Survive” and supporting demonstrations against American Cruise Missiles in Britain, is attempting another farcical repetition of events, fated to follow the same path as did the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Bertrand Russell's Committee of 100.

We must ask ourselves if these utopian popular movements have helped to bring about nuclear disarmament, or even decelerated nuclear stockpiling. The answer must be “no”. Indeed, despite the existence of such groups, hideous wars have continued throughout the world, using not “the Bomb”, but the more conventional instruments of torture and disablement. Do Thompson and his followers wish to reenact past “peace” movements; to initiate yet another naive grass roots campaign?

Alas, it is the same old story. Thompson is seeking to eradicate one particular instrument of war, while ignoring the reason for such instruments; indeed, the very cause of war. Surely war is the inevitable outcome of individual nations striving to protect or extend their respective markets and spheres of influence, to the benefit of their economic and political rulers; that is, the product of capitalism and its inherent rivalries. The pressing need is to extirpate the cause of war, not its tools.

I am sure many would agree that E. P. Thompson is a very talented writer of history: learning its lessons, however, demands a different sort of talent.

Rob Bishop

Eccleshill

Bradford

Kings & Queens (2025)

Book Review from the July 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Unruly: A History of England’s Kings and Queens. By David Mitchell, Penguin, 2024

1066 And All That, published in book form in 1930, was a parody on how English history was taught in schools. One of the targets was a history of England as a record of kings and queens, their years of reign and their battles and wars. After the Second World War there was a concerted criticism of this approach from historians — EP Thompson in particular — who argued for a ‘history from below’. One consequence of this criticism was the creation of the GCSE history syllabus in the 1980s. This changed the emphasis from memorising the dates of kings and queens to ‘key skills’ such as empathy. Empathy was an attempt to encourage schoolchildren to imaginatively experience what it was like to live as others lived, such as being a child worker in the cotton factories of mid-nineteenth century Britain. It was controversial, didn’t last long, and the emphasis has shifted back in the other direction.

David Mitchell is a comedian, writer and actor. He has no use for empathy in the study of history. He claims that ‘it’s impossible for a child … to get their head round how different the lives of the people they’re trying to empathise with actually were’. No evidence is offered for ‘impossible’, not even an amusing anecdote of the sort which peppers this book. ‘I’m better with dates, to be honest’, he admits. Mitchell went to a private school, so he might not have done GCSE history. In a book with plenty of autobiographical detail, it’s curious that he doesn’t mention it. So what you do get are a lot of monarchs with a lot of dates and absolutely no history from below. ‘It’s like a soap opera,’ writes Mitchell, ‘It never fucking ends’. He doesn’t refer to Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, but Bennett has a student complaining that history is ‘one fucking thing after another’. This is what can happen when the subject matter lacks context.

If you are after the historical facts, there’s nothing here you can’t get from Wikipedia or Google. Apart from the jokes and one-liners such as his summary of Henry VIII — ‘He was a cunt’, there are some interesting factoids. For instance, according to the Domesday Book of 1086, ten percent of the population of England were slaves. By around 1200, after the Norman invasion, there weren’t any.

Lew Higgins

History writing (2008)

E. P. Thompson

Pamphlet Review from the January 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

All Knees and Elbows of Susceptibility and Refusal. Edited by Anthony Iles and Tom Roberts, 2007. 

 

The clumsy title comes from E. P. Thompson’s phrase to describe the difficulty of writing “history from below.” After the Second World War, a group of Communist Party historians including Thompson, Christopher Hill and Rodney Hilton set out to bring the experiences of the working class to the fore in the study of history. This was to some extent a reaction to structuralist and functionalist interpretations in which workers’ experiences and abilities to effect social change were down-played or ignored. The most famous example of “history from below” is EP Thompson’s classic The Making of the English Working Class, first published in 1963 and still worth reading. But Thompson’s concept of class is controversial in some quarters:

“If we stop history at any given point, then there are no classes but simply a multitude of individuals with a multitude of experiences. But if we watch these men over an adequate period of social change, we observe patterns in their relationships, their ideas, and their institutions. Class is defined by men as they live their own history, and in the end, this is its only definition.”

Some have seen this definition of class as being subjective, but Thompson must be right in saying that class is not simply an economic category but also an historical concept. The working class was not just the product of capitalist social relations or the industrial revolution: “The working class made itself as much as it was made,” wrote Thompson. Writing history from below means not invoking “iron laws” and ignoring the abilities of the working class to effect social change on the one hand, or getting lost in the detail and denying the importance of class on the other hand. This short pamphlet discusses these and other problems in writing history.

Lew Higgins

Marxist Historians (only) (2022)

Book Review from the December 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

The British Marxist Historians. By Harvey J. Kaye, Zed Books, 2022

This is an update to a book first published in 1984. It’s a study of an influential group of academic historians, but there are wider lessons to be learned. They were mainly active in the second half of the twentieth century. Kaye’s survey is mainly confined to the following writers and books.

Maurice Dobb in Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1946) wrote on the transition from feudalism to capitalism. For Dobb the ‘bourgeois revolution’ of the seventeenth century provided the necessary foundation for the later Industrial Revolution. Dobb emphasised the role of class struggle in this process.

Rodney Hilton focussed on feudalism and the English peasantry. For instance, in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 there emerged a ‘positive class consciousness’ which ‘was initiated from within peasant society.’ Hilton argued that ‘one of the most important if intangible legacies of mediaeval peasants to the modern world is the concept of a freeman, owing no obligation, not even deference, to an overlord’ (Bond Men Made Free, 1973).

Christopher Hill wrote extensively on the English Revolution of the seventeenth century, though probably his best work is Reformation to Industrial Revolution: A Social and Economic History of Britain, 1530-1780, (1969). The English Revolution was ‘the world turned upside down’. In Hill’s account: ‘Levellers called for political democracy, Diggers for communism, Ranters for free love. Others called in question the common law, the Bible, the existence of heaven and hell, God and the devil’ (John Bunyan and the English Revolution, 1979).

Eric Hobsbawm wrote on workers, peasants and world history. Industry and Empire (1969) is a commercially successful social and economic history of Britain from 1750 to the 1960s. His examination of the development of the modern world, what he called ‘the long nineteenth century’, is divided into three phases: The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848 (1962), The Age of Capital, 1848-1875, (1975), and The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (1987). These books probably made Hobsbawm Britain’s most famous ‘Marxist’ and historian.

E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) is one of the biggest selling non-fiction books in Britain. It is still widely used as a school and university textbook. His statement on the role of the historian was Thompson’s contribution to an understanding of class:

‘I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan . . . from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties.’

In William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (1955) Thompson defended what he called ‘Morrisian-Marxism’. According to Kaye, this is ‘a Marxism transformed by the concerns and values represented in the work of William Morris’. The Poverty of Theory (1978) is Thompson’s attack on the then growing popularity of interpreting Marxism as a form of structuralism.

Kaye pulls together a useful survey of some key Marxist historians and how they grappled with Marxism and history. The trouble was, and remains, their politics. Their collective contribution as historians has been called ‘history from the bottom up’, but their politics can be termed ‘politics from the top down’, and it calls into question their understanding of Marxism. All the above historians were at one time members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB).

After the suppression of the uprising in Hungary by the Russian military in 1956 all the above resigned from the CPGB – except Hobsbawm and Dobb. Hobsbawm remained in the CPGB until its break-up in 1991. As a cheerleader for the CPGB and the Russian empire, Hobsbawm defended the leading role of the party advocated by Lenin, and dismissed the view that the emancipation of the working class had to be the work of the working class itself – the cornerstone of any Marxian politics. Thompson later tried to justify his CPGB membership by claiming it was part of a ‘Popular Front’ against fascism. But he did not appreciate that his CPGB membership would lend legitimacy to Stalin’s reign of terror. His concern for the lives of ordinary workers did not extend to the working class in Russia, Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Later in life, after Thompson had joined the Labour Party, he rebuffed an approach by the Socialist Party to discuss ‘Morrisian-Marxism’.

Lew Higgins

Labour in pain (1983)

From the October 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Judging from his article in Tribune (19 August 1983) Conrad Jameson of the Kensington and Chelsea Labour Party is a very frustrated man. The article cries out with utter despair against a party which has betrayed thousands who placed their faith in it.

Conrad Jameson is staggered by the cynical policy somersaults which the Labour Party has performed since its overwhelming defeat in the election:

It’s hardly seven weeks since the election. Yet Neil Kinnock has already put us back into the Common Market, E. P. Thompson has already confessed that Denis Healey was right after all — stop Trident and Cruise for now but bargain about Polaris later on. Even the sweet-natured Michael Foot has already discovered that it is only the discount that makes the Tory policy of council house sales so wicked as the principle has always been good.

These are changes, mind, coming from Labour's Centre Left — and before the October Conference. When the strains of The Red Flag have died away will we not get still more? And if that is the case why should I bother my head about turning Right or Left?

The choice in the Labour leadership battle, according to Jameson, is between Hypocrisy and Opportunism:

There are two ways of moving Labour back to the middle. One is to move Rightwards but say you haven’t. For this tactic we need a first-class hypocrite, a leader who can march backwards even while claiming to make a forward change — and for that, no doubt about it, Kinnock fits the bill . . . Another way of moving Right is simply to move Right — and shut up and be quick about it. For this tactic we need a first-class opportunist . . . For that kind of swordsmanship we need Roy Hattersley.

It can be far from satisfying to be stuck in a political party which changes its policies because the voters don't like them and which picks its leaders on the basis of their hypocritical and opportunist credentials. But that is the party which Conrad Jameson says he belongs to, and who are we to disagree with him? Of course, he is not alone. Apart from the thousands who have abandoned the Labour Party in recent weeks, months and years, there are many who, like Conrad Jameson, carry on giving loyalty to the party which is as unprincipled when it loses as when it wins. One can sympathise with their attachment to the Labour Party: it is never easy to break away from one's traditional affiliations and make a new start. Hard though it may be, there are urgent reasons why Conrad Jameson and others who feel and think like him should start questioning the basic position of the Labour Party.

Facing facts, it has to be conceded by Jameson and others that the problems of the Labour Party are not simply problems of leadership. Even if Kinnock was anything but a hypocrite and Hattersley was transparently honest Labour would still be a party which aims to work within the capitalist system. It is Labour's refusal to examine the system rather than its symptoms which makes it a party of reformism, destined as long as it survives to play the futile game of trying to run the system of exploitation in the interest of the wage slaves who are exploited.

Consider the so-called Left wing policies which Labour is now in the process of throwing overboard in a desperate attempt to keep the sinking ship afloat. Membership of the Common Market; the Left want out, the Right wants to stay in. But what interest is it of the working class whether the British capitalists — our exploiters — join the European Big Business Club or stay out of it? The pretence that workers would be much better off one way or the other is one which sustains the myth that, given a few modifications, capitalism can be turned into the kind of society where all the manifestations of poverty can be eradicated. Yet any serious analysis of capitalism would show that poverty is not a consequence of one trading alliance rather than another, but is an inevitable effect of a system based on class division.

Under the capitalist system one class owns and controls the means of wealth production. but does not produce any wealth; the wealth producers are alienated from social power. The law of the market which is the fundamental principle of capitalism, is that needs can only be satisfied if it is profitable to the capitalists. The Labour Party advocates import controls, but these are economic policies belonging to a nationalistic outlook based on a confused analysis about “what's best for Britain” rather than what socialists should be advocating: what's best for the working class. The argument over nuclear missiles is, again, seen by the Labour Party in completely reformist terms. Instead of beginning by asking why wars take place in the modern world and concluding that war is unavoidable when there is constant competition over markets, raw materials and trade routes, the Labour Party has become involved in the business of advising the British capitalists — and those of the other NATO countries — as to the most humane way to fight a future war — using conventional rather than nuclear weapons

The capitalists are not interested in fighting humanely, but in killing cheaply and with the most efficient weaponry of destruction. If E.P. Thompson now agrees with Healey’s sordid compromise that is no doubt because he has realised that if Labour is ever to provide a credible government of capitalism it will have to defend and expand British capital without any moral scruples about nuclear weapons.

To the sincere Labour Party member, who joined up in order to make society more humane, affluent and secure, the “realities” which their leaders are forced to accept must be very hard to swallow. It is easier to shout names at Kinnock and Hattersley than to accept that the “realities” which these politicians are adapting to are inevitable if Labour is to bow to the needs of capitalism. This leaves Conrad Jameson and other frustrated Labourites with a choice: either they also adapt to the needs of the profit system and drop the stuff about nuclear disarmament and standing on the side of the poor — or they stop playing the capitalist game and move beyond the barriers of the Broad Church. Of course, you can try to have it both ways and accept the role of political martyrdom, as some Leftists like to do. by staying in the Labour Party and spending a lifetime crying out against the betrayals, urging Labour governments to pretend that they are running socialism when they are running capitalism, and waiting to be dealt with in one of the periodic party purges. The self-deceit of the Militant Tendency is a one way deception: they believe that they are playing a crucial role in radicalising the Labour Party, but the Labour leaders know that they are about as dangerous as a crowd of feminists infiltrating the Girl Guides.

Suppose that you choose to leave. The mass exodus of recent years shows that you will not be the first to have thought of the idea. Where to next? Obviously, nobody leaving the Labour Party because it is a pro-capitalist party is going to be attracted to the Tories or the Alliance. At one time the Communist Party seemed to be an alternative. If there is one useful lesson which workers in Britain do seem to have learned over the last few years it is that Russian state capitalism offers no preferable alternative to private capitalism. The Communist Party of 1983 is a shadow of its old self; a blundering, old hanger-on to the coat-tails of the Labour Party. What about the other Leftist groups? Essentially, they are simply advocating old Labour policies, usually formulated in the language of Lenin. The idea that nationalisation is a socialist measure is another that workers are increasingly less taken in by and Militant's demand for the nationalisation of the top two hundred companies is hardly likely to inspire more than a yawn from any worker who understands how the capitalist system operates.

Most ex-Labourites retire into a kind of cynical apathy. Ask them which party they support and they tell you how they used to support Labour — and would probably vote for them rather than the Tories — but basically the parties are all the same. It is surprising how many workers told us that when we were campaigning for the Socialist Party of Great Britain in the recent general election. Conrad Jameson could be in grave danger of falling into the pit of apathy. Given the state of his party, and the inevitable compromises which he will have to witness from his new leader, we can hardly blame him — and many like him — for looking towards the exit door of the Broad Church.

There is always, of course, the Socialist Party of Great Britain. We appreciate that Conrad Jameson may never have heard of us and we are doing all that is within our power to ensure that our existence is more widely known. If he has heard of us he may, like many other people, have all sorts of strange misunderstandings about what we stand for. We stand for one aim and one only: socialism. Of course, socialism means many things to many people, so let us define it clearly: “The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community". That object is printed on every piece of literature produced by the Socialist Party. No leader or caucus could divert us from our socialist aim because the Socialist Party has no leaders and allows no followers: admission to membership is on the basis that you know what you want and you know how to get it. The Socialist Party has a clear analysis of capitalism based largely, but not dogmatically, on the theories of Marx. It is our contention that socialism can only be established when a majority of workers, not just in Britain but throughout the world, understand and want a society of production for use and free access to wealth.

Talk to many people on the Left and in the Labour Party and they will admit to having a certain respect for the Socialist Party. Of course, they realise that a party without leaders is never going to get any followers and that a party which is not in the business of trying to make capitalism work will never make capitalism work. They stay where they are — some for power, others in hope, and others out of mental indolence. We urge members of the Labour Party like Conrad Jameson — men and women who are struggling to find a way out of the mess of reformist politics — to think hard about the case of the SPGB. Of course, there may be many disagreements to be discussed and it may be that ex-Labourites will find the unbending principles of the Socialist Party just as unacceptable as the lack of principles of the Labour Party. Unlike other political parties, membership of the SPGB involves more than filling in a form and paying a few quid. A party of principles can only retain its unity by only allowing in those who are fully with us. To the disillusioned, of whatever party they may be, the socialist message is clear: Take the trouble to consider the Socialist Party and its clear case for socialism; if you reject it, tell us why and perhaps we will be persuaded to reject it; if you agree, then the next move must be yours.

Steve Coleman

50 Years Ago: Old familiar faces (2008)

The 50 Years Ago column from the February 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Here it is, then: Universities and Left Review. Very well got up, good typography; indeed, the Abbey Press (the people who print it) are to be complimented on having a range of bold, large and display types almost sufficient to keep up with the editors’ delight in Names. The cover bears the contributors’ names (Isaac Deutscher, Claude Bourdet, Peter de Francia, E. P. Thompson, G. D. H. Cole, Joan Robinson, etc..) in massive black letters, their topics in small ones. ( . . . )

What purpose, then, does the Universities and Left Review serve? Pretentious, empty of ideas, its material picked from ideological dust-heaps, it has set out to make a splash—or, as the first editorial put it, to take a beachhead. Its avowed purpose is to publish discussion on “the common ground of a genuinely free and genuinely socialist society.” Its way, the editors say, is “to take socialism at full stretch — as relevant only in so far as it is relevant to the full scale of man’s activities.”

If that were true — “the full scale of man’s activities” — it really would be interesting. But, of course, it isn’t. Search the Universities and Left Review, and only in a line here and a phrase there will you find the working class mentioned. Professor Cole has a good word for them, and there is a little lofty patronage from David Marquand (“in the thirties, there had to be an effective mass movement for the intellectuals to join”) and E. P. Thompson (“the experience of rank-and-file political activity teaches us and keeps our ideas on the ground”). The names in the Universities and Left Review see themselves (bear witness, the articles on art, the cinema, architecture) as members of an élite: the General Staff on that beach-head, the upper crust of the “genuinely socialist society.” ( . . .)

Universities and Left Review seeks comment from the socialist viewpoint. It can be simply made. There is not a word concerning Socialism from beginning to end of the Universities and Left Review. Reformist claptrap, yes; pretentious verbiage, indeed; chatter about how things are for the intellectuals, above all. But of the interests of the working class, the great majority of mankind—not a whisper.

The most useful left-winger we ever saw was Tom Finney. The day he scored against the Arsenal—now, that was worth three-and-six.

(from article by Robert Coster, Socialist Standard, February 1958).

Avoiding World War 3 (1985)

From the May 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

We live in an epoch which will either be looked back on as a nightmare from which the human race had to escape, or will not be looked back on at all. Since the Second World War. not a single day has passed without there being a major war taking place somewhere in the world. Over twenty-five million people have died in these wars and each conflict has had its own individual history of human tragedy and suffering: Kenya, Vietnam, El Salvador, Sudan, Chad, Pakistan, Lebanon, Algeria, Nigeria, Ireland, the Falklands . . . the list seems endless. Most recently, in the Gulf War between Iraq and Iran, over a quarter of a million people have been slaughtered in four years.

We have witnessed the greatest increase in the forces of destruction ever: a single nuclear bomb can now release more explosive power in seconds than was released during the entire Second World War. World military spending has increased by twenty-seven per cent in real terms since 1972, to reach 620 billion dollars a year. This means that about one million dollars is being spent on the killing industry every minute. The amount spent on cancer research is less than one per cent of the 52 billion dollars spent annually on military research, while the British military research budget of £1.8 billion is sixteen times the budget of the Medical Research Council. The British government spends about £2 million an hour (£17 billion a year) on "defence" — in other words, the powers of destruction.

The mass suicide for which these weapons are designed has reared its ugly head several times in recent years. Take, for example, this report from the Observer (7 September 1980):

  Three times in less than a year NORAD (North American Air Defence Command) computers have detected a nuclear attack which was not actually taking place. On each occasion the crews of B52 nuclear bombers raced to their aircraft for take-off and the crews of intercontinental missiles began preliminary launch procedures.

For all of its talk about security through "deterrence", the government clearly does not trust its own propaganda; they have developed detailed plans about what will happen when, rather than if, war breaks out, Home Office Circular ES 1/81. quoted in Civil Defence Review 35/2.85/3. states that "for planning purposes, it should be assumed that there may be as little as seven days' warning of an attack and the basic essentials of plans should be capable of implementation in 48 hours". The East Anglia Regional Health Authority, meanwhile, have drawn up a plan for health services in time of war, including an 18-page appendix on herbal remedies for use in the absence of conventional drugs — juniper for cystitis, mistletoe for hypertension. The same report advises that for protection from fall-out we should wear home-made thick overalls or "heavy rubberised clothing" with "a plastic bag over the head with a hole for a medical or improvised gauze" to provide head protection (Guardian, 17 August 1981). This insulting rubbish is intended to give us some kind of reassurance about a future catastrophe which is on the cards.

On a less farcical note, we have the ominous tones of the government booklet, Protect and Survive:

 If a death occurs while you are confined in the fall-out room, place the body in another room and confine it as securely as possible. Attach an identification . . .

And, with the advice to end all advice, the Home Office Circular ES 8/1976. which was sent to the chief executives of Councils, but merits study by us all:

 When radiological conditions permitted movement, district and borough London controllers should assume that one of the priority tasks for their staff in areas where survivors were to continue residing, would be to collect and cremate or inter human remains in mass graves . . . once the initial clearance of corpses has been completed, there would be still a problem of several weeks, and perhaps months, of an above average rate of dying from disease and radiation effects. Nevertheless, a return to the pre-attack formalities should be the objective in the longer term.

(Quoted in E. P. Thompson, Protest and Survive, 1980)

The government, then, is anxious that, as soon as possible after an orgy of nuclear devastation. we should get back to the very formalities which would have led to such a tragedy in the first place. If we are going to avoid a Third World War, we must start by looking at the nature of those formalities. How is it that present-day society generates war as sure as night follows day?

There are many dubious theories held about what wars are fought for. Politicians of various kinds will tell us that wars are fought for freedom, justice, democracy and so on. For most of us. however, our conditions of life have to be defended in a struggle which is far from the battlefields or weapons silos. Wars are not fought over the level of our wages, rents or mortgages. They are not fought over high political or theological principles. Wars in the modern world have a basically economic cause, which relates to the power of a minority in each of the states of the world. Much window-dressing is used to convince the cannon-fodder that our lives are being laid down for something more noble than the commercial interests of our bosses, or the sordid privileges of the Kremlin bureaucrats. But there are occasional moments in which we hear, from the horse's mouth, just how the interests of the small, property-owning class drag us all into the nightmare of modem warfare.

We live in a society in which we are bombarded from an early age with the idea of the nation. We are said to be "British". And yet, for most people in Britain, this just happens to be the place in which we sell our ability to work in order to survive. The amount most of us truly own could be fitted into the barrel of one gun. A newspaper advert for army officers states that "Your part will be to prepare for a war everyone prays will never happen . . .  it will be difficult to remember that you are still protecting your country and all you love most". It will indeed be difficult to remember that it is "your" country: according to government figures, the richest 3.2 per cent of people in Britain today possess 84 per cent of listed shares, 91 per cent of private companies, and 88 per cent of land. So much for the property- owning democracy.

The flag-waving of nationalism is not just childish pomp and pride. The countries for which we are asked to kill are not ours. Those who do have a stake in the nation are those who own it: the class of employers, landlords and investors referred to politely as "the business community". And what are they in conflict over? They are quarreling — at the conference table where possible, over the battlefield and our dead bodies where necessary — about the dividing of the spoils which are derived from the productive work of the majority. There are four main bones of contention between the various national groupings of capitalists.

Markets

Employers only receive profit if they sell the goods we have produced for them. In trying to sell goods, they are in competition with one another. States look after their local capitalists in this respect, by organising import controls and other ways of turning trade to the advantage of some capitalists at the expense of others. These moves are always backed up by force. In March 1939, the Conservative Minister of Overseas Trade, speaking not about opposing dictatorship or defending democracy, said: "We are not going to give up any markets to anyone. Great Britain is strong enough to fight for markets abroad". Similarly, the United Nations US Ambassador Andrew Young was quoted in 1977 as saying:

  My approach to Africa is in some ways like the Japanese approach to Asia, and my approach is not necessarily humanitarian. It is in the long range interest of access to resources and the creation of markets for American goods and services.

Raw Materials

Just as important to capitalists, in their pursuit of profit, is the need to gain and defend sources of minerals and other raw materials. This applied in the nineteenth-century Franco-Prussian wars over the coal and steel of Alsace-Lorraine, and inspired the British invasion of Afghanistan in 1897 as well as the Russian repeat performance of this some eighty-three years later. It is also a factor in the war between Iran and Iraq: the Majnoon Islands contain about seven billion barrels of oil. Speaking on ITV's Weekend World on 8 March 1981 in defence of the Rapid Deployment Force, the then Minister of Defence, John Nott, stated: "we have crucial minerals and in fact our oil supplies to defend". Needless to say, the majority of viewers had no mineral wealth at all to defend. Even more revealing was the following admission, made in 1963 by Kennedy’s Undersecretary of State. U. Alexis Johnson:

  What is the attraction that South-East Asia has exerted for centuries on the great powers flanking it on all sides? Why is it desirable, and why is it important? First, it provides a lush climate. fertile soil, rich natural resources, a relatively sparse population in most areas, and room to expand. The countries of South-East Asia produce rich exportable surpluses such as rice, rubber, tea, corn, tin, spices, oil and many others . . .

Territory

Thirdly, there is the constant struggle between the various states of the world, whether private- or state-capitalist, over the control of the earth itself, divided as it is into artificial fragments by national boundaries. Since the Second World War, for example, there has been an almost constant series of border disputes between India, China and Russia. This aspect of how the capitalist world system generates war was let slip in a speech made by Lady Olga Maitland of Women and Families for Defence when she was debating against the Socialist Party at Islington Central Library on 19 January 1984:

  Britain is a country which must show that we have the resolution to defend ourselves because we are a vital piece of real estate in Europe.

Trade Routes

Finally, in order to sell their goods and realise their profit, the capitalist class of the world have to be able to transport goods and materials freely. The Suez Canal crisis of 1956 in which Egypt was in conflict with Britain, France and Israel, was a conflict over a vital trade route. Similarly, in 1981 when the US Defence Secretary, Caspar Weinberger, was seeking to stress to the Japanese section of the ruling class the military obligations they owed to their American counterparts. he pointed out that "the USA helps to protect the vital sea lanes upon which Japan depends for its global trade" (Guardian, 29 April 1981).

What must we conclude from all of this evidence? These conflicts over the sources which yield profit are of no real concern to the working-class majority in society, to people who have to live on wages, salaries or the dole rather than on rent, interest or profit. It is the capitalist system of society, which exists throughout the world today, which causes war through its relentless and competitive drive for profit.

Of course, these economic factors leading to warfare have to operate through the agency of human consciousness, with all its complications. The many popular rationalisations of war suggest that religion or culture are leading us to the battlefield. These are often the concepts employed by governments to persuade individual workers to flock to a mass suicide, but they are not the root cause of the conflict. Having recognised that it is the system of production for profit which causes war. we have no option but to seek to replace it with a system of production for use. The capitalist class do not, in general, profit from war, but their system is beyond even their control. When the market dictates they invest in weapons to protect their investments, they have no choice but to follow where their share prices lead.

For this reason, movements like CND which hope to persuade governments of capitalism to operate this murderous system in a more gentle way, are doomed to failure. Indeed, the policy of gradual reduction of armaments has already degenerated into total compromise, as shown by the CND leaflet, Questions and Answers About Non-nuclear Defence. This advises a "non-provocative" conventional defence policy using "troops with interceptor aircraft and anti-aircraft missiles rather than long-range bombers" and giving "anti-tank missiles priority over tanks". So much for the "Peace" Movement. The Labour Defence Spokesman, Denzil Davies, has recently echoed this "peaceful" militarism, stating that the Labour Party is "totally committed to the defence of Britain" (Guardian, 7 August 1984).

Let those who have a material stake in British capital rise to its defence. For the rest of us — about ninety-five per cent of the population here — our interest lies in defending ourselves against the daily onslaught of capital, as represented by our bosses. The global time bomb we are sitting on can only be defused if it is put under the democratic control of the world community. The only true Peace Movement is one which stands for the abolition of all weapons, through the abolition of the social system which has made them necessary. We can talk seriously about the prospect of permanent world peace only on the basis of transforming social relationships. This is a practical proposition; to hope for the competition in the market place between rival gangs of robbers to be carried out without murder is an idle dream. At the moment we are human commodities, watching our lives being bought and sold on the labour market. But we can use the power of conscious co-operation to reverse the current trend towards a collective suicide. The only way to avoid war is to create a socialist society. Think about it. But not for too long.

Clifford Slapper

William Wilberforce was no saint (2007)

From the May 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

If you believe all the eulogies to him recently for pushing through the Act of Parliament 200 years ago banning slave trading in the British Empire you might be surprised that he’s not called Saint William. But for that he’d have to have been a Catholic whereas he was an evangelical Christian of the Anglican persuasion. He was a founder of a “Society for the Suppression of Vice and Encouragement of Religion” which specialised in prosecuting people for enjoying themselves on the Sabbath. He supported “the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate” as the natural order of things and preached to the poor that:

  “their more lowly path has been allotted to them by the hand of God; that it is their part faithfully to discharge its duties and contentedly to bear its inconveniences; that the present state of things is very short; that the objects, about which worldly men conflict so eagerly, are not worth the contest”.

In other words, pie in the sky when you die. And

 “Remember that we are all fallen creatures, born in sin, and naturally depraved. Christianity recognizes no innocence or goodness of heart” (both quoted by E. P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class).

A nasty piece of work, then. But there’s worse. He was a King-and-Country Tory who encouraged mobs to burn effigies of Tom Paine and other “Jacobins”, i.e., sympathisers with the democratic pretensions of the French Revolution. He was also instrumental in the passing of the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 under which the Tolpuddle Martyrs were later sentenced to transportation to Botany Bay.

A. L. Morton says of him in A People’s History of England:

  “When the industrial discontent was crossed with political Jacobinism the ruling class was terrified into more drastic action, and the result was the Combination Laws of 1799 and 1800. These laws were the work of Pitt and his sanctimonious friend Wilberforce, whose well known sympathy for the negro slave never prevented him from being the foremost apologist and champion of every act of tyranny in England, from the employment of Oliver the Spy or illegal detention of poor prisoners in Cold Bath Fields gaol to the Peterloo massacre and the suspension of habeas corpus”.

Yes, he was opposed to chattel slavery. From a capitalist point of view, this was an outmoded and inefficient method of labour exploitation. They wanted the only form of slavery to be wage slavery. To which Wilberforce had no objection whatsoever.

(from the Socialist Party’s blogsite at socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/)

Workers’ education (2014)

Book Review from the May 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The Poor Stockinger, the Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott’, by Luke Fowler. Contributors Tom Steele and Owen Hatherley; published by Film and Video Umbrella, The Hepworth Wakefield and Wolverhampton Art Gallery, 2013, 80 pages, £7.50

This short booklet accompanies Luke Fowler’s film of the historian EP Thompson as a champion of workers’ education. The booklet contains the essay ‘EP Thompson, the WEA and Radical Workers’ Education in Yorkshire’ by Tom Steele. Steele’s essay covers ‘The WEA and University Education for Workers and George Thompson – Rebellion in Yorkshire’. The WEA had its origin in 1903 as the Association to Promote the Higher Education of Working Men set up by Albert Mansbridge.

Steele writes about an important figure in WEA history, a George Thompson (no relation to EP), a carpenter and WEA Yorkshire District Secretary from 1914-45 who was supported by Arthur Greenwood, Labour Party politician who would later hold Cabinet positions in MacDonald’s and Attlee’s Labour governments. George Thompson believed ‘the aim of workers’ education should be to enable the student to raise not rise out of his class. The education he received was not intended for personal advancement but as trust for the good of others, and workers’ education was not to de-class the student but to deepen his understanding of class solidarity’ (JFC Harrison). However in Steele’s essay we can see the reformism of the WEA. The WEA Yorkshire District Commemoration Souvenir (1935) by Arthur Greenwood ‘could list no fewer than 350 past and present members of WEA classes currently holding public office, from the parish council to the House of Commons.’ Steele confirms that ‘the function of trade union education was to prepare organised labour for a role in government.’

It is with grim irony that ‘the more open form of class-sensitive cultural studies’ such as Culture and Society (1958) by Raymond Williams, The Uses of Literacy (1957) by Richard Hoggart, and The Making of the English Working Class (1962) by EP Thompson appeared at ‘the pivotal historical moment when Thompson’s digging into the historical origins of the working-class, and making a compelling narrative of its world-historical success in becoming a ‘class for itself’, tragically occurs just when working-class self-belief seems to be waning, and the WEA nationally had all but given up on the working-class.’

It is instructive to recall George Thompson who wrote in A Socialist’s View of the WEA: ‘Workers will only achieve emancipation when they are capable of thinking out issues for themselves and have the capacity and sufficient tolerance to achieve the ends collectively.’

Steve Clayton

The Leftovers (1967)

Pamphlet Review from the July 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Words are cheap. Any organisation can label itself socialist. What is more difficult is to develop a body of socialist theory and to stick to it. Over sixty years we have seen many left-wing movements, from the Labour party onwards, group themselves around different political programmes. Superficially some of them seemed to differ only in tiny details from the Socialist Party of Great Britain. But these ‘details’ were always sufficient to confirm our opposition to all other political parties. Without exception our hostility has been justified. There is not one of them which has not ended up supporting capitalism. The first and second world wars especially were acid tests which separated the revolutionary Socialist party from the rest.

In other words, the old cliché about the ‘unity of theory and practice’ holds true. A party is only as good as its theoretical platform. It Is because of this that the Socialist party was able to correctly analyse the prospects of both Labour and Communist parties years before either had established themselves as the undisputed government in any country. From the start we attacked these movements for their capitalist policies and predicted that they would administer capitalism in the only way possible—against the interests of the working class.

So when we examine the New Left May Day Manifesto it is not just a case of abstract intellectual analysis. The answer to whether the New Left is socialist—or capitalist-orientated will be in this pamphlet. If they are socialists, we will unite with them; if not, it is our job to expose them. How do they measure up?

The first thing to point out is that it has taken most of the people who signed the manifesto many years to see through the Labour party. And even now they cannot really grasp why Labour has failed so monotonously. Their bewilderment comes through on every line:

We are faced with something alien and thwarting: a manipulative politics, often openly aggressive and cynical, which has taken our meanings and changed them, taken our causes and used them; which seems our creation, yet now stands against us, as the agent of the priorities of money and power.

For all that, they have at least now reached the stage of identifying Labour with what they call the new or managed capitalism. They are also moaning about some of the harsher injustices arising from private property—hitting cut at the chronic poverty which haunts the working class and at the vast concentrations of wealth in the hands of a tiny minority. Scattered throughout the text are odd sentences which show that they have got some inkling of what the problem facing working men and women is. For example,

At the centre of capitalism is the power of a minority, through ownership and control, to direct the energies of all other members of the society.

There is, of course, nothing very novel about all this. Generations of reformers have voiced similar complaints about capitalism and have dignified their futile efforts to humanise it by dubbing them ‘socialism’. The New Left is no exception; in fact, they claim that this manifesto is the work of “a group of socialist workers, writers and teachers” and they even chance their arm at defining socialism. The result is ludicrous—a useless definition, painstakingly obscure and obviously designed so that it can mean all things to all the various quaint brands of Leftists:

We define socialism as a humanism: a recognition of the social reality of man in all his activities, and of the consequent struggle for the direction of this reality by and for ordinary men and women. ,

As the pamphlet progresses a few more facts about this ‘socialism’ are carelessly let slip. On pages 3 and 4, for example, it becomes clear that wages and profits will be just as concrete “social realities” as will “man in all his activities” in this ‘new’ social system. Also they think in strictly national terms: “It would make an important difference, in the balance of power in the world, if we could make a socialist Britain . . .” But it is only after ploughing through twenty seven pages of close print that we finally discover just what form this humanistic socialism takes—Russia, we find, is a “socialist state”.

Just like the Labour party, then, the New Left has not even begun to understand what a system of social ownership and democratic control entails. Yet it might still be argued that it represents a step forward from Labour—or rather a step back, to the pioneer days when Labour leaders were supposed to have their honest, if hopelessly confused, principles. But, if the people who signed the manifesto are anything to go by, the New Left’s talent for compromise is every bit as polished as Harold Wilson’s. Their attitude to wars makes this clear enough.

During what passes for peace under capitalism both socialists and reformers agitate against war but, as we mentioned before, the outbreak of hostilities inevitably sees the Socialist party standing alone in its call for international working class solidarity. Predictably enough, the New Left has some brave slogans:

Socialists have traditionally seen war, in the twentieth century, as the conflict of rival imperialisms; for colonies, for trade, for spheres of influence.

It also has some blindingly original solutions for exorcising armed conflicts from capitalism:

In Europe we must press for disengagement between East and West in the political sphere (whether in the form of nuclear-free zones and a European Security Pact, or in piecemeal initiatives by individual nations), and for active association in economic, cultural, social and educational spheres. Negotiations to enter the European Economic Community should be judged by their relation to this more important objective.

New Left May Day Manifesto signatories.

But obviously this is for the shop window. When the shooting starts, there is no nonsense about socialist principles or proletarian brotherhood. To give a few examples, Arnold Wesker—who signed the manifesto—was fervently campaigning for Israel last month during the Middle East conflict. (To be fair to him we should, perhaps, point out that he advocated the peculiar combination of “Israel and peace”.) Another signatory, Anthony Arblaster, was writing about “how Nasser helped Egypt”, while Michael Barratt Brown (“I am not particularly pro-Arab”) gave “every support to a United Nations cordon around Israel”. Clearly, as with its definition of socialism, the New Left caters for all shades of opinion—bar the socialist.

Finally, the New Left is hooked on reforms. The manifesto refers to “the separate campaigns in which we have all been active” and, under a mysterious heading of "Successes and Failures of the Left”, lists some of the recent ones:

In 1951, against massive rearmament and cuts in social services: in 1956, against aggression at Suez; in 1961 and again in 1966. against the wage freeze; since 1965, against British support for the United States’ war in Vietnam.

Perhaps they could point out which of these were its "successes”.

How do socialists look at the New Left, then? “None of this is surprising. It is exactly what one would expect new capitalist politics to be — changes of techniques to maintain older priorities.” This passage, taken from the manifesto, neatly sums up this rag-bag of discredited ideas. The ‘‘group of socialist workers, writers and teachers” turns out to be nothing but a collection of bewildered, Labour party dissidents. Illusions wrecked and hopes shattered, they now want to build another platform of reforms from which they can operate in the traditional Leftist manner—as the uneasy conscience of the capitalist class.

John Crump

Has CND learnt nothing? (1980)

From the August 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

The eminent historian, Professor E. P. Thompson, is not a very foolish man, although the eminent Catholic preacher, Monsignor Bruce Kent, undoubtedly is. Yet both of them have combined their energies to lead the re-enactment of what must be the most pious and futile reformist campaign of the twentieth century: the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. At its peak, in the mid-sixties, 100,000 marchers could be rallied by CND to express their opposition to nuclear arms. The result of the marching and the songs of protest and the moral cries for peace had all the potency of Canute before the waves: governments went on stockpiling arms of ever-increasing ferocity in their effort to expand and protect their areas of capitalist domination.

Leading Labour politicians were among the ranks of CND in the sixties, but what became of their pacifist sentimentalities when in office? The Labour Party, just like their Tory rivals, is forced to run the squalid military operations of the system it presides over when in power. While in opposition, opportunists like Joan Lestor and Michael Foot commit the next Labour government to all kinds of futile, but vote-catching reforms: they promise to remove Cruise missiles and to spend no more than at present on nuclear bombs. Even if the hypocrites break with tradition and do what they have promised, the world will be no closer to peace and security. Opposition to certain kinds of militarism is not enough. The widespread loss of civilian lives at Dresden in 1945 was no less atrocious because it was carried out by “conventional”, rather than nuclear, warfare; the military threat in Ireland is not diffused because only bricks and bullets are commonly used; all wars are damaging to the health and safety of the working class, whether they are based upon nuclear warheads or bows and arrows. Instead of attempting to eradicate militarism, CND merely seek to limit it.

The pleas of workers to their governments to stop nuclear armaments failed on the last occasion and they will fail this time. In 1960 the first issue of the journal, International Socialism claimed

The Campaign (for Nuclear Disarmament) has been successful in two ways. It has been outstanding in that, year by year, it has brought more people into the anti-Bomb protest, doing today what the slump did between the two World Wars in the matter of baptising (sic) a new generation with political realities. Less successfully but of at least equal importance, it has edged, be it ever so cautiously and suspiciously, towards the centre of alternative power in our Bomb-ridden society.

Naive idealism of this sort was harshly exposed in the years to come. For the Aldermarston marchers of the sixties strode on to the complacent reformism of the Labour Party, the pro-Russian unilateralism of the Communist Party, the adventurism of anarchism, the sentimentality of “flower power”, or mere cynical respectability. Most of the participants in CND learned little about what causes war: they did not go on to challenge the centre of social power (or even know where it was); they did not stop a single working class life from being lost in a war. Indeed, many of those whose moral pacifism took them into CND in the early sixties found themselves supporting one of the armies in the Vietnam war a few years later. There are currently 5,000 paid-up members of CND (Guardian, 23.6.80) and recruitment may be expected to rise rapidly in the months ahead. The recruits will generally be quite sincere workers whose attitude to socialism is that it sounds like a good idea, but that it is hopelessly Utopian. But their hope for a capitalist system without war is the real Utopia and as Karl Marx wisely observed in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, when historical events happen twice they happen “the first time as tragedy and the second as farce.”

A leading player in the CND farce Act II will be the Communist Party, the historical role of which has been to defend the turns and somersaults in Kremlin foreign policy. In 1945, when atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Communist parties of Europe unequivocally condoned that mass destruction of working class life as a means of defeating one of the national adversaries of Russia. L'Unita, the paper of the Italian CP, observed at the time, in an article entitled In The Service Of Civilisation,

The news that an atomic bomb was dropped by the American Air Force has made an enormous impression throughout the whole world, and has been received on all sides with a sense of panic and condemnation. This shows, it seems to us, a curious psychological perversion and a doctrinaire obedience to a form of abstract humanitarianism.

Earlier in 1945 The Daily Worker, paper of the British CP, was blatantly suggesting that

The employment of the new weapon on a substantial scale should expedite the surrender of Japan. Valuable lives in the Allied nations will have been saved by the new discovery.

No member of the Communist Party is entitled to cry in moral indignation about the callous murder of millions of Japanese workers in 1945, for their party had been the cynical advocates of such action.

It was only after 1945 that the CP changed its mind about the Bomb, but not because of any “abstract humanitarianism”. The reason was that once the Cold War commenced, the echoers of the Kremlin feared American superiority in military technology. Fear of Russian disadvantage in a war against America is why the Communist Party of Great Britain supported CND and the policy of unilateral disarmament. Those who oppose war have a duty to expose the grotesque expenditure of resources on arms by the Warsaw Pact no less than NATO.

Even some members of the CP have recently been forced to take up a more critical attitude towards Russian state capitalism. But such occasional criticism (however mild) has alienated many of the hard-line CP Stalinists, who split from the party in 1978 to form the New Communist Party. This new party is also pledged to support the revived CND, although one detects from their pamphlet, Anti-Sovietism—How To Tight It And Why, that their concern for disarmament is somewhat one-sided. The pamphlet tells us that the urgent task of the world working class is to defend the USSR from attack (p. 3), that the Russian tanks which invaded the streets of Prague in 1968 were merely intended to defeat “counterrevolutionary attempts to turn back the clock and reinstate capitalism” (p. 6) and that Russian workers “will never be drawn irresponsibly into war, or used as pawns in the interests of imperialism” (p. 11). The NCP is just the pro-Russian equivalent of the Tory party; all patriots, be they of the Left, Right or Centre, are betrayers of the working class interest.

Socialists oppose all war

It is a creditable boast that the Socialist Party of Great Britain is the sole political organisation in this country to have consistently opposed every war thrown up by capitalism. This is not because we are moral pacifists, but because as Marxist materialists we ask one question about all wars: In whose interest are we being asked to fight? In the wars of the profit system, we are urged — often compelled by law — to risk death and mutilation in a battle between rival capitalist interests over the ownership and control of raw materials, markets and strategic locations. As the working class does not stand to gain from the expansion of their masters' power, the one policy for class conscious workers is to refuse to fight in any capitalist war. The socialist objective goes beyond the negative refusal to fight: we stand for the removal of the root cause of war—the system of capitalism which is the cause of all modern social problems.

Socialists share the fears expressed by many members of CND that sophisticated means of killing may be used to wipe out whole sections of the human race. Who can think without fear of the

 

fact that the British government — a relatively small military power — is currently spending £1.3 million an hour on so-called defence? Who can read the HMSO Civil Defence leaflet, Protect and Survive, and feel anything but hatred for a “civilisation” which can soberly contemplate such brutal destruction? In the section of the leaflet entitled Challenge to Survival we are informed that

Everything within a certain distance of a nuclear explosion will be totally destroyed. Even people living outside the area will be in danger from heat and blast and fall-out.

As for the “lucky” survivors:

After a nuclear attack there will be a short period before fall-out starts to descend. Go around the house and put out any small fires. If anyone’s clothing catches fire, lay them on the floor and roll them in a blanket . . .  If a death occurs while you are confined in the Fall-Out room, place the body in another room and confine it as securely as possible. Attach an identification.

Those workers who join CND want a future without nuclear fall-out. But they are hopelessly wrong if they believe that CND or any other peace campaign will avert the threat which they fear. The fight against warfare can only be practical if linked to the democratic political fight for a new social order in which the means of living are owned and controlled by the whole community. To die for capitalism would be tragic; to live in the belief that capitalism can be humanised is pathetic; to organise for socialism is our only hope.

Steve Coleman

New Left (2011)

Book Review from the September 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Crisis of Theory: EP Thompson, the New Left and Postwar British Politics. By Scott Hamilton, Manchester University Press, 2011

Many socialists would count EP Thompson's books among the best socialist books ever written, particularly William Morris: From Romantic To Revolutionary (1955), The Making of the English Working Class (1963) and The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (1978). Thompson's own politics however are less admirable. He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1942 and was an active member until 1956 when he resigned as a result of the Russian military invasion of Hungary and Khrushchev’s 'secret speech' which denounced Stalin. To a significant extent, the rest of Thompson's political career can be seen as distancing himself from Stalinism. He later tried to justify his CP membership by claiming it was part of a 'Popular Front' against fascism. But Thompson did not appreciate that his CP membership would lend legitimacy to Stalin's reign of terror. His concern for the lives of ordinary workers did not extend to the Russian working class.

William Morris: From Romantic To Revolutionary showed that Morris was a revolutionary Marxist. This book was written and published while Thompson was in the CP and in it he claims that Morris's ideas were being realised in Stalin's Russia. In the Second Edition of 1977 this claim is removed. The Making of the English Working Class won huge critical acclaim and it is still widely used as a textbook. Thompson's book is an account of the formation of class consciousness, and in his 1980 Preface he argued that 'in the years between 1780 and 1832 most English working people came to feel an identity of interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs'. Some critics had complained that Thompson's analysis of class is too subjective and this forms a major theme of his The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays. Among Thompson's targets was the 'Stalinism in theory' of Louis Althusser. For Althusser history was 'a process without a subject' in which specific circumstances determined human behaviour. For Thompson, on the other hand, the class struggle was the motor of history and so therefore he wrote about the experiences and consciousness of the working class.

Thompson was one of the self-appointed intellectuals who founded the New Left Review in 1960, and it is still published bi-monthly. It was conceived as the journal of the New Left who were opposed to Stalinism and Labour Party 'revisionism' (an open acceptance of capitalism). After an initial surge in interest provided by their work in Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, most of the New Left found their ideological home in the Labour Party. Thompson was involved with the Labour Party in the 1960s and re-joined in 1978. By the early 1980s CND was resurgent and Thompson was its main spokesperson, and he harangued large public meetings on the 'logic of exterminism'. He thought the superpowers were dragging the world towards an inevitable nuclear annihilation, a fatalistic way of thinking he once would have denounced as 'Stalinist'. Thompson died in 1993 but, as Hamilton shows, his books live on.

Lew Higgins

Old Familiar Faces (1958)

From the February 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

They're at it again! Take hold of yourself. Who? The lotus-flowers. The teeny-weenies with long hair. Gaiety Girls. Seventhday Adventists? No, no. Worse. The tea-shoppe Jacobins. Good Lord! You don't mean —? Listen and I'll whisper. Well I never! Left-wing intellectuals. A magazine, eh? I bet they mention Colin Wilson and Kingsley Amis a lot of times. Lots of long words. Funny bits about Marx. Professor Deutscher. And you'll never guess who else. Not—not him? Professor Cole it is. Here, take it away. February's filldyke month, isn't it? Expensive way of filling dykes, at three-and-six a time.

Here it is, then: Universities and Left Review. Very well got up, good typography; indeed, the Abbey Press (the people who print it) are to be complimented on having a range of bold, large and display types almost sufficient to keep up with the editors' delight in Names. The cover bears the contributors' names (Isaac Deutscher, Claude Bourdet, Peter de Francia, E. P. Thompson, G. D. H. Cole, Joan Robinson, etc.) in massive black letters, their topics in small ones. The first page has the editor's names in large heavy type, underlined, across the top; there are the contributors' names in not-so-large heavy type, and the titles in type so small that myopic left-wing intellectuals presumably have to guess them.

Page three lists the names (in capitals) and achievements of the editors and contributors. Universities attended, articles accepted by the New Statesman; books published, masterpieces, intended, all four editors are writing theses on, respectively, The Novels of Henry James, Charles Dickens, the dockers of London, Bristol and Liverpool, and "the theory of alienation, from Hegel to the Existentialists." Even the Business Manager's name (in caps.), and a piece to show that he, too—"scholar of Magdalen College, Oxford," it says. Is it a Freudian urge that makes one want to write naughty additions to this portentous list? How about "Cigarettes by Nosegay-Rizla"? Ah, no—too non-U: Abdulla it must be. "Underwear by St. Michael" might do, though. Quick, turn over before the temptation takes us. But no, no! not more names, more capitals . . . 

However, there are still the articles. After all, they have trumpets and spotlights and "My lords, ladies and gentlemen" before a prize-fight, but sooner or later the boxers, left alone, must come out fighting; and tonight there are reputed champions in the ring. Did we not pay three and sixpence to come in? Alas, the bigger they are the flatter they fall. The spryest of the lot, in fact, is Professor Cole, because he was wise enough to bring his own opponent: an old guy he cobbled together years ago ("tarted-up," of course, to quote one of Mr. Amis's most charming expressions) called "What Marx Really Meant," at which Professor Cole throws haymakers until his seconds lead him away, breathing heavily but unmarked.

The rest of them are unmarked, too, in a way. Hold them up to the light: not a stain—not a shadow, nor a trace, of an original idea or a thought which has not been raked out from the rag-bag of the nineteen-thirties. Not a stain, and shining pink. Here is E. P. Thompson, arguing whether it was right or not to have fought in Spain; the Art Critic writing-up artists who "represent a menace to the very foundations of the bourgeois idea of art"; the town-planners working-out nattier, more aseptic hutches for the working class. Here is the windy, outmoded vogue-language of left-wingers a generation ago: "significant," "chauvinist," "reactionary" and the rest.

Do they realize it, one wonders? Does any of them know that it's all past tense, that the Universities and Left Review is a dodo-house? Vol. I, No. 1. Spring 1957: but for this, one would be back with the Left News, the Federation of Progressive Societies and Individuals, or The Controversialist. Perhaps they don't realize it after all: one contributor actually writes of "a new social type in this country—the intellectual." Perhaps Claude Bourdet really thinks he has something new and unprecedented when he writes:

"The rehabilitation of the French left, then, depends upon a converging action of the Socialist Left still fighting in the Socialist Party, the democratic Communist opposition fighting inside the Communist Party, the left wing Mendesiste Radicals, along with the 'new left.' Under this four-fold influence the distant prospect is the reconstruction . . . of a strong united workers' Party, mingling Christian and traditional liberal influences with a dominant Marxist one."

The star performer, however, is Professor Deutscher. Professor Deutscher writes on "Russia in Transition" in No.1. Does Professor Deutscher say anything, in fifteen thousand words? Professor Deutscher does not. The sharpest intellect could find no quarrel with Professor Deutscher's conclusions, because there are none. Every statement is hedged with "may," "seem," "perhaps" and "should it arise." It is an extended version of one of Professor Deutscher's television interviews where some news-reader almost visibly touching his forelock, seeks enlightenment:

"'Please tell the viewers, Professor, just what is happening in Russia now.'
"'Well, you see, Lenin is reputed to have said to Trotsky just before the Russian Revolution . . . '
"'Thank you, Professor. And what do you think will happen in Russia?'
"'Well, Stalin was a dictator, you know. And Trotsky said to Bogdanov . . . And, of course, there were Nichaev and Lenin's grandmother . . .'
Thank you very much, Professor. Have you a final prophecy to leave with us?'
"I think Trotsky may have been right. On the other hand, Lunacharsky may have been right. Who knows? Somebody must be right.'
"'Very grateful to you, Professor. Well, viewers, I'm sure we are all, etc.'."

There is an expectancy throughout it all that suddenly Mr. Spike Milligan's face will peer over somebody's shoulder, crooning adenoidally. It is, in fact, very much like the evening paper's football forecasts, where all results except the stone certs are predicted in such phrases as "Anything can happen." And when anything has happened, the expert remains, of course, an expert. 

What purpose, then, does the Universities and Left Review serve? Pretentious, empty of ideas, its material picked from ideological dust-heaps, it has set out to make a splash—or, as the first editorial put it, to take a beachhead. Its avowed purpose is to publish discussion on "the common ground of a genuinely free and genuinely socialist society." Its way, the editors say, is "to take socialism at full stretch—as relevant only in so far as it is relevant to the full scale of man's activities."

If that were true—"the full scale of man's activities"—it really would be interesting. But, of course, it isn't. Search the Universities and Left Review, and only in a line here and a phrase there will you find the working class mentioned. Professor Cole has a good word for them, and there is a little lofty patronage from David Marquand ("in the thirties, there had to be an effective mass movement for the intellectuals to join") and E. P. Thompson ("the experience of rank-and-file political activity enriches us and keeps our ideas on the ground"). The names in the Universities and Left Review see themselves (bear witness, the articles on art, the cinema, architecture) as members of an élite: the General Staff on that beach-head the upper crust of the "genuinely socialist society."

This is the oldest, weariest idea of all. Its resurgence just now is probably more important to the "intellectuals" than ever before, however. The present-day world has very little use for them: a young man with a First in English Literature or a prize for philosophy is himself something of an archaism when the whole structure of education is being changed to produce physicists, technologists and other atom-age men. Unless the University men can succeed as writers or get into commercial television, their doom is schoolteaching or Government offices.

Some of them, aware of the situation, have responded angrily: the Angry Young Man is a useless young man whose abilities and ideals the world won't venerate any more. For others, there is another way to take: if the ruling class doesn't want them then the working class shall have them as its guides and philosophers, if not exactly friends. That in itself might not be so bad if the "intellectuals" were thereby realizing that they had an identity with the working class. Universities and Left Review shows nothing of the kind, however. The only affinity shown is in the advertisement for The Observer inside the cover, making the position sadly clear: U cries out to U.

Universities and Left Review seeks comment from the socialist viewpoint. It can be simply made. There is not a word concerning Socialism from beginning to end of the Universities and Left Review. Reformist claptrap, yes; pretentious verbiage, indeed; chatter about how things are for the intellectuals, above all. But of the interests of the working class, the great majority of mankind—not a whisper.

The most useful left-winger we ever saw was Tom Finney. The day he scored against the Arsenal—now, that was worth three-and-six.

Robert Coster

Tom Paine and Today (2012)

From the September 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tom Paine is still invoked today from Obama to some in the Occupy Movement.

In his inauguration speech in 2009, President Obama quoted from Paine's patriotic rallying call The  Crisis, and during his election campaign he quoted from Paine's Common Sense which advocated American independence. In 2012, Obama presented Bob Dylan with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1963 Dylan received the Tom Paine Award for his work in the Civil Rights movement. Later, Dylan wrote As I Went Out One Morning referencing Paine. Paine proposed the abolition of slavery in his African Slavery in America, authored the proposal's preamble for the Pennsylvania Assembly which abolished slavery in 1780 and later supported the Haitian Black Jacobins.

Paine's book Rights of Man laid the foundations for bourgeois liberalism: freedom of property, commercial enterprise (a kindred spirit was Adam Smith), limited government, reduced taxation, advancement based on merit, productivity and industriousness. The bourgeoisie were a revolutionary class; the severed heads of Charles I and Louis XVI are testament.  Paine attacked the “chivalric nonsense” of monarchy and aristocracy for: its privilege and hierarchy, based on heredity; its corrupt government; taxation; wars; and its stifling of economic innovation.

EP Thompson called Rights of Man “the foundation text of the English Working Class movement” although it was in Agrarian Justice that Paine pushed bourgeois radicalism to its limits. He believed that poverty was caused by 'bad' government, and proposed welfare provision to be paid for by progressive taxation on landed property.  He also believed that the dismantling of the war machine would bring savings which could go to the “hordes of miserable poor” and thereby reduce taxation on the bourgeois class. Paine did see that the accumulation of property in the hands of a few would cause poverty, but he was a bourgeois liberal and believed: “That property will ever be unequal is certain”.

Marx saw the “rights of men to property” espoused by Paine and adopted in the USA as “not based on the union of man with man but on the separation of man from man”, and that the Rights of Man did not go beyond egoistic man: “it is not man who appears as a species-being; on the contrary, species-life, society, appears as a framework extraneous to the individual”.

Today, Paine's bourgeois liberalism would be offended by the existence of monarchy, and the aristocracy still in government. The Prime Minister is related to the Queen and is a descendent of William IV, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer is an ‘Anglo-Irish Ascendancy’ aristocrat.

Steve Clayton