Attlee at eighty (1963)

Clement Attlee by 'Vicky'

From the February 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Clement Attlee — the mousey, insignificant Post Master General, who grew up to become the Prime Minister for whom the journalists' favourite adjectives were “ruthless” and “ waspish "—was eighty years old last month.

His birthday was greeted with the gushing eulogies which we have come to expect on such occasions. Nobody, it seems, is as popular as the politician who has ridden the strains of office to the extent that he has managed to reach old age. Then he can sit back and cast a weary, benevolent eye upon the men who are struggling with the problems which were once his own everyday burden—an eye perhaps a little sardonic, an eye which perhaps says in its smile that he thinks that he made a better mess of it all than those who are trying to run the show today. The strifes and upsets of his own days of power are forgotten. So are some of the more unpleasant memories of what it meant to be a prominent politician. Forgotten are the dirty jobs, the deceit and the repressions which he had to condone. It is all forgotten, in a rosy glow of congratulation. We have heard it all before and we are accustomed to it all.

We are accustomed, too, to the trumpets from the other side—to the eulogies from the men who call themselves his political opponents. Christopher Hollis, for example, who was Conservative M.P. for Devizes when Attlee was Prime Minister, filled up half a page of The Observer with his birthday praise for the ex-Labour leader. “Plenty To Be Proud About," cried Hollis, “. . . the English people unanimously offer him their congratulations . . . a public institution . . . a great Englishman.” All very cheerful and chummy. All proves that, however much the Tories may shout at the Labour Party—and the Labour Party shout back —across the floor of the House, under the skin they are all jolly good fellows, all pulling the same way. Pretty dashed English, in fact.

The Socialist Standard has something other than congratulations to offer Earl Attlee upon his reaching old age. And we do not praise any other Capitalist politician for any similar reason. We know that the praise, from friend and foe of the old man, only serves to bolster the “great leader” theory, to impress us with the idea that at the head of Capitalisms affairs there is a select band who have the touch of greatness and who safely hold our fortunes in their hands. It is part of the rules of the leadership game that the old, retired men are heaped with congratulations on every possible occasion, which is an indirect way of also congratulating the men who have taken their place and to imply that one day they, too, will be similarly revered. That is why Tories rush into print to wish Attlee well, Labourites to congratulate Churchill, and so on. They are all playing the same game.

The Socialist Standard prefers to remember what Capitalism means to the people of the world and that the Attlees and Churchills work themselves hard to try to maintain a social system which operates directly against the interests of the overwhelming majority of those people. We know that the leaders will lie and betray to protect the interests of their own national ruling class and that, if Capitalism demands it, they will have little trouble with their consciences in sending millions of workers to their deaths. That was how it was before Attlee became Prime Minister. That is how it is today. And that was how it was when he was at Number Ten.

Promises

We should not forget that the Labour Party came to power in 1945 on a promise to be different. They did not encourage anyone to believe that they would not improve upon the dismal Tory record of poverty and war which lay in such discredit in 1945. The war had destroyed some well established notions and to that extent the Labour government had a chance to start afresh. They had promised so much and the working class — or enough of them to elect a large majority of M.P.s — had believed them. In 1945 it was up to Attlee and his fellow leaders to deliver the goods. How did they make out?

Even before he became Prime Minister, Attlee knew of the existence of an atom bomb and had agreed that, if the Japanese did not surrender first, the new weapon should be used against them. He still thinks today that he was correct in this decision, although he pleads that at the time he did know of the genetic effects of the bomb and of its fantastic destructive power. One of the popular theories about Attlee (and about a few other politicians as well) is that, because he was a soldier in 1914/18, he is only too well acquainted with the horrors of war and can therefore be relied upon to work his hardest for a peaceful world. Like so many other similar theories, this one is quite worthless. When Capitalism needed it, Attlee could conveniently tuck away his memories and agree to the unleashing of the mass killer bomb, the most horrible weapon the world had ever seen, which made the trenches look like a kid’s firework display. And he could coldly justify his decision on military and strategic grounds.

Let us take the point further. If Attlee did not know, before the bomb was dropped, of its power and its genetic effects, what did he think about it after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when everyone realised that this was a weapon the like of which we had not seen before? Did he step back appalled? Did he regret his decision? Exactly the opposite. It was the Attlee government which set on foot the programme for the manufacture of a British nuclear bomb and of the missiles to carry it. Somewhere along the way, of course, this programme has gone awry and the independent nuclear force which the Labour government tried to establish for British Capitalism now relies heavily upon American resources. But that does not alter the fact that they tried to get it, and their record is the blacker for it. (From Washington came an ironical birthday present for Attlee—the decision to cancel the Skybolt missile, which was such a blow to the independent nuclear force which the Attlee government conceived.)

It was the Labour government, too, which took this country into the Korean war and there, if you like, is a typical example of Capitalism’s irony. For the decision to split Korea was arrived at at what were called the Peace Conferences after the war. Now if there is one thing Peace Conferences should be able to do is to make peace. But Capitalism simply does not work that way: “Peace” Conferences only draw out the battle line for the next war. That is what happened in Korea and in Berlin and other parts of the world. Some of these "peace" settlements have caused disputes which might have sparked off the third world war. Attlee pleads now that at the post war conferences the British negotiators got the best deal they could and that the trouble was all caused by the Russians. Yet one reason for having a Labour government, we were told, was that they were supposed to be able to deal with this sort of situation, that they were the men who could talk to the Russians in the language they understood, the men to bring peace to the world. But when it came to it they were as ready as any other government to involve themselves in the diplomacy and the intrigue—and in the end the bloodletting — which Capitalism demands.

There is nothing in the international record of his government for Earl Attlee to feel proud about.

The past

Neither is there anything for him to take pride in in the history of the Labour government at home. Can a party which always claimed to stand for the interests of the working class feel proud of breaking strikes among the men—the dockers and miners, for example—who in some part built their party for them? Can the party which promised prosperity take pride in the austerity, the wage freeze and the other restrictions which they imposed during their term? Can the party which fought against the Emergency Powers Act, when it was introduced as a Bill before the House of Commons, look back proudly upon the memory of themselves wielding the coercive powers of that very Act? All these things, and many more, were the work of the Attlee administration. There is nothing for the aged Earl to feel proud about in them.

Nobody should think, of course, that the record of the Labour government is exclusively Attlee’s responsibility, or that things would have been different with someone else as Prime Minister. No government has ever done any better than Labour did —no government, in other words, has been able to run Capitalism to the benefit of the working class, who are the mass of its people. The point about the Labour Party is that they promised—and they still promise—that they can run Capitalism in that way. And they call their sort of Capitalism Socialism.

Attlee himself did his job with an arid efficiency. In the Cabinet he was a model chairman. To his colleagues he was an aspere, ruthless boss. More than one minister lost his office with startling abruptness under the Attlee axe.  ". . . most of the people I had to get rid of." said Attlee later, “Took it very well." And to Harold Laski, then chairman of the Labour Party: ". . . the constant flow of speeches from and interviews with you are embarrassing . . . a period of silence on your part would be welcome. Yours ever, Clem.”

The ending of that letter is typical. Attlee covered all his comings and goings with a cloak of modesty. Whatever job he had to do for British Capitalism was always put through with a cold self-effacement, a deliberate avoidance of rhetoric. When he told the 1940 conference of the Labour Party that they had brought about the end of the Chamberlain government and had agreed to serve in the wartime coalition under Churchill, he did so in such bleak terms that Harold Laski said that he felt “as though the cook and kitchen maid have been telling us that they sacked the butler.” Attlee delights in making such important statements casually; it is one of the characteristics which his eulogisers love so well. Francis William’s book, A Prime Minister Remembers, is full of this sort of stuff: "It was quite obvious they (the Russians) were going to be troublesome . . . It (Berlin) was quite a danger. But it was a risk that had to be taken.” And so on. On the evening he became Prime Minister, he was driven to Buckingham Palace, not in a Rolls or even a Bentley, but in a small family car, with his wife as his chauffeur.

Shrewd

When we consider all this, and the fact that his job required him to be anything but self-effacing, we come upon one of the clues to Attlee’s rise to power. He was nothing if not an extremely shrewd administrator of Capitalism. For him. public modesty was a weapon, a badge, a trade mark, like Churchill’s cigars and V-sign. He could not carry off the flamboyant, capering politician. So he made a conceit out of modesty. Unusual, perhaps, but it worked.

Attlee got the top job. And when he had got it he did everything that British Capitalism required of him. Very often he had to do things which he must have known were directly against the interests and the safety of the very people who had raised him to power. But he never flinched. He did his job, in his dry, inflexible way, and British Capitalism ticked on.

If it is any consolation to him, let us say that he deserves the thanks and the congratulations which the organs of Capitalist opinion have heaped upon him.

Ivan.

Blogger's Note:

A couple of brief mentions of when Clement Attlee and the SPGB crossed paths.

“The Russian debacle is rather appalling but quite explicable. Lenin and Trotsky appear to me to be of the SPGB type or the wilder types of the SDP.” 

Clement Attlee in a letter to his brother Tom, 20 March 1918 (quoted in 'Clem Attlee. A Biography' by Francis Beckett, 2001).

"One journalist came hurrying to learn about the Party from a strange little incident at one of the Prime Minister’s press conferences. He had asked a question which, by coincidence, implied the Party’s argument against the Labour Party. Attlee had swung round angrily and said: ‘I know you — SPGB !’ The journalist had never heard of the SPGB before, but he could not wait to discover why Attlee had been so sensitive. Not all the Labour leaders took the Party quite so seriously, however. In 1946 Groves debated with Sir Waldron Smithers, and in the retiring-room before it began the old Conservative confided that Herbert Morrison had said to him: ‘Be careful of that bunch, Sir Waldron — they’re not real socialists, you know.’ Sir Waldron had taken the words to heart, but the Party members for once appreciated irony."

(From The Monument, the story of the Socialist Party of Great Britain by Robert Barltrop, 1975)

Finance and Industry: Trouble among the experts (1963)

The Finance and Industry column from the February 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Trouble among the experts

Regular readers of these columns will know that we do not have a very high opinion of economic experts. We have so often seen them proved wrong, so often seen them at a loss when really called upon to make a decision or commit themselves, so often seen them at sixes and sevens among themselves, so often seen them compelled to eat their pretentious and self-satisfied words, that we are no longer surprised whatever they do or say. Not the most appealing of their habits either is the way they shoot off on completely new tacks, contradicting all they have said before without the slightest hint of an apology or blush of shamefacedness. Yes, we must admit to a very jaundiced view of our economic pundits.

The latest example of what we mean is a report in the Observer recently about the investigations of a certain Mr. Little of Nuffield College, Oxford. Mr. Little is described in the same article as being one of the two or three most brilliant economists of his generation, so presumably his views are destined to carry some weight.

The most important of his observations is that it is "useless to try to predict the future earnings of a company from any single past earnings growth ratio, or from dividends, or from asset size." Which, if true, means that the whole paraphernalia of investment analysis, hitherto regarded as the last word in predicting the future fortunes of capitalist firms, falls to the ground. According to the Observer there are hundreds of economists, accountants, and actuaries all busily engaged on such analysis in London City offices, and there must be many more in the United Stales where the whole idea started. Apparently, if Mr. Little is to be believed, they have all been wasting their time.

His conclusions were so demoralising that a prominent stockbroking firm made its own investigation. Its report confirmed that made by Mr. Little. We are left wondering why it did not get around to making the discovery for itself without waiting for an outsider to do it.

Another fallacy knocked on the head is that much of the talk we have had to listen to about the virtues of good management is so much guff. According to Mr. Little, if by good management is meant “the ability to produce and maintain a higher return than the average,” then it hardly exists, and really bad management is equally rare. Our managers, it would seem, are in fact much of a muchness. Marks and Spencer for example is often quoted with admiration as a firm with top class management, but in reality it is hardly out of the ordinary. “Statistically speaking,” says Mr. Little, “ Marks and Spencer does not exist.”

We hope to report further in due course on the repercussions, if any, of Mr. Little’s revelations. No doubt our investment analysts will think of something to preserve and justify their existence.

Pump-priming

We reported last month on the Government’s efforts to stimulate Britain’s flagging economy and on the capitalists' un-enthusiastic response.

Mr. Maudling has now cut Bank Rate to 4 per cent. and brought down purchase tax on radios, television sets, and cosmetics to 25 per cent. in a further effort to prime the pump. Our capitalists still remain unimpressed.

What they are really waiting for is a clear indication that when they start investing in further plant there will be a nice big market ready to absorb their products. In the present economic mood, it will take more than Government pump-priming measures to get them round to that.

Top firms

The Observer recently published figures showing the hundred top British firms graded according to the amount of their net assets.

The table is too big to reproduce in full, but we show on this page the names of the top twenty as a useful record. They all have net assets of more than a £100 million. In case anyone wonders why Royal Dutch Shell does not appear it is because it is an international company.

Stan Hampson

Pan-African "Socialists" (1963)

From the February 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pan-African socialism, so-called, is essentially a creation of West Africa. But with the spread of education and the growth of communications in Africa these ideas have been absorbed also by Africans living in the East and the South of the continent. The main African political parties in these areas all claim to be Socialist. Frequently their leaders appear in London and ask the workers of Britain to support them in their struggle against imperialism. But nationalism is incompatible with Socialism and it is actually a barrier against the spread of Socialist ideas. On occasions it is even worse; for nationalism frequently hinders even the effective organisation of workers on the trade union field which is so essential under capitalism. Recent events in Central Africa well illustrate this point.

In Southern Rhodesia the Pan-Africanists whose political party, the Zimbabwe African Peoples' Union was recently outlawed, have provoked a split among the African workers. Previously there was only one organisation claiming to represent the African worker, the Southern Rhodesia Trade Union Congress (SRTUC), led by Reuben Jamela. However, Jamela betrayed a pro-Western leaning by maintaining, in defiance of Ghana, that the SRTUC should remain affiliated to the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). In addition, Jamela, although himself a nationalist, held that . . .

the declared position of Jamela's trade unionism is that the workers as workers must not be involved in politics and it has been argued by politicians and trade unionists that the two cannot mix: trade unionism must be for economical well-being of the working class, while politics is the game of both the worker and employer for political and social rights.

Without in any way supporting Jamela, we must say that the arguments which he presents against the association of the trade unions with the nationalist parties are basically sound. After all, trade unions are primarily organised to protect the workers of a particular trade section, or of a group of more or less allied trades. People of varying political and religious views are united in trade unions on one issue alone: the recognition that collective action is more effective than individual action when dealing with employers. Politics within the trade union tends to destroy this unity. This is what has happened in Southern Rhodesia. The Pan-Africanists have broken away from the SRTUC and set up their own African TUC which is rapidly gaining support at the expense of the SRTUC and which, incidentally, has not been banned.

The particular party which it is suggested the unions support is, despite its Socialist pretensions, basically capitalist and nationalist. The nationalist case for turning the trade unions into little more than the labour wing of the nationalist party is based on an appeal to racial sentiment. “The absence of large African companies,” argues The People's Voice, “of African-owned mines and large factories—a natural consequence of colonial oppression—turns the African workers in an anti-imperialist direction. The European colonialist became the enemy of the African workers,” but the paper goes on to suggest that because of this the trade union struggle is against the “European rulers” just as is the African political movement and hence it is reasonable for them to unite.

But is the trade union struggle exclusively anti-European? Whatever may have been the position in West Africa, the idea that the European in Central Africa is merely a “monopolist” or a capitalist is as absurd as the notion that all Jews are financiers. First, there are over 80,000 European workers in Southern Rhodesia compared with 9,000 European employers and self-employed and, second, although nearly all the large businesses and factories are European or foreign owned, there are in actual fact more African businessmen than European. Nor the the Europeans the only people who have opposed African strikes. ZAPU’s allies in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland have done just this and worse.

In July this year the supreme council of the Northern Rhodesia African Mineworkers’ Union decided to call a strike for higher pay as they considered the copper mining companies' offer inadequate. Kenneth Kaunda's United National Independence Party decided that a strike at this time might harm their chances in the October general elections. UNIP therefore advised the workers to accept the offer and itself took steps to prevent the strike. During the weekend before the strike was due to begin leaflets were distributed calling on the workers not to strike. One such leaflet, signed by A. B. Mutemba, UNIP Kitwe, Kalulushi and Mufilira Regional Secretary, read:

Tell all our people that UNIP docs not agree to the strike call. This strike will spoil our forthcoming elections. We ask you all to report for work as usual. If you want a strike you will do so after October — not now. Anyone who strikes on Tuesday will be regarded as an enemy of the African cause (Northern News 9/7/62).

Other leaflets, later repudiated, accused the union leaders of organising the strike for their own selfish ends. As a result of these leaflets so much confusion was created that the union decided to call off the strike. At least this is one explanation, but the strike was called off after Kaunda had met the union leaders. Only later did it become known that one of these leaders, previously not known as a nationalist, had agreed to stand as a UNIP candidate in the elections. Whatever the reason, UNIP and the Companies won. This episode clearly shows the attitude of the Pan-Africanists towards the trade unions: they want to see the African workers organised in order to use them for their own ends.

The Malawi Congress Party, led by Our Great Ngwasi Kumuzu Banda (Ngwasi means '‘sage" but is probably better translated “fuehrer”), which rules Nyasaland has also clashed with the unions. No sooner had the MCP formed the government than it acted against some strikers, members of the Motor and Allied Workers Union, whose leaders had called a strike for higher pay. A Pan-Africanist writing later complained “what a burden it was for the new African Minister to start his duties by solving a strike problem," and went on:

In any event, the Malawi Congress Party condemned the strike and since then the destructive actions by this Union have been less apparent. (Daily News 22/6/62.)

Trade Unions

This turned out to be a little optimistic as the Motor and Allied Workers Union and the Commercial and General Workers’ Union continued their “irresponsible*’ and “destructive actions” of trying to improve their members’ working conditions and living standards; For their trouble the leaders of these unions were suspended from membership of the MCP and accused of “importing Trade Union ideas from America and Western Europe in this country.” This was judged incompatible with the principles and policy of the party. Which is a frank admission that the MCP is not in favour of allowing the workers to form genuine trade unions or of allowing them to strike.

Banda and his colleagues have continued to abuse and insult these union leaders whose only crime appears to be their belief that trade unions should be independent of Government. In August Dr. Banda referred to these trade unionists as “self seekers who are misleading the workers” and accused one of getting money from Europeans to “further his selfish ends.” Banda went on to say that his ruling Malawi Congress Party “will crush mercilessly anyone who allows himself to be used by imperialists and colonialists.”

Such is the way the Pan-Africanists treat the workers when once in power. With African businessmen it is a different matter. Far from saying that the African worker has no interests in common with these African property-owners the Pan-Africanists seek to win them for their cause. UNIP has a clause in its programme which reads: "to work and protect the interests of commercial traders and help them in their progressive business schemes." The Daily News (10/9/62) reported that at a ZAPU meeting “Mr. S. J. Ndebele ... urged African businessmen to rally behind ZAPU and sacrifice both money and time.” In addition the President of the African Farmers’ Union is also a well-known ZAPU member. Such is the confusion of Pan-African “Socialism” that it preaches the identity of interests between African worker and African capitalist and ignores the European worker. Indeed one of the smaller African nationalist parties in Southern Rhodesia which calls itself Socialist, the Pan-African Socialist Union, has denounced ZAPU as a “capitalist multi-racial organisation ” and one of its leaders is on record as having said: “I loathe European membership in a pure African nationalist organisation.” Pan-Africanism as a political creed has more in common with Fascism, insofar as it is a radical nationalist movement, than with Socialism and there are no grounds at all on which Socialists can support it.

It is not an accident that African nationalist parties, once in power, “crush mercilessly,” to use Banda’s own words, the workers’ independent trade unions. Even people with more regard for democracy than Banda or Nkrumah, people like Nyerere, who have taken in Western liberal ideas, are forced to pass laws restricting civil liberties and trade union freedoms. They do so because they have chosen to develop capitalism in their respective countries. Why this means they must attack the workers was recently well explained by a writer in Africa Today. “Independence,” he writes, “upset the conditions under which the African union movement had flourished. The state is African now, not European; the issue of patriotism can be, and is, turned against the unions if they oppose the government. The state is concerned with holding down labour costs in both private and public sectors. ... Governments dedicated to rapid economic development obviously must hold down, or reduce, real wages in order to raise capital.” So it is in Ghana and in Tanganyika; so it will be in Central Africa. It is for this reason that the right to strike is more often denied than granted in post-colonial Africa.

This in itself is a good enough reason why the workers of Britain should not listen to these glib nationalist leaders who come here asking for help — help to “crush mercilessly” the workers back home. Nor is there any hope for the workers of Africa in nationalism or racialism; Socialism remains the only hope for the workers of the world. But in Central Africa the workers of all races have yet to learn that the dividing line there, as elsewhere, is that of class not colour. White and non-White workers should stand together against White and non-White property owners. The sooner the workers realise this the better. Meanwhile the danger of racial clash remains.

Adam Buick

50 Years Ago: The Age of Oil (1963)

The 50 Years Ago column from the February 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

The oil age is coming. Year books, financial journals, the sharks of Throgmorton Street, together with the rest of the interested, “far seeing" exploiters and worshippers of the golden calf, are eagerly discussing the possibilities of oil as a motive force, and how much more profit they can grab by its use.

It behoves the working class to consider the question also, because it is they who are going to suffer, as usual, from what would be a boon and a blessing to all were the toilers sufficiently enlightened and determined to make it such.

The Diesel engine has already proved itself capable of propelling ocean-going steamers, and will doubtless be in general use in the near future. Look at this: “ The engine room staff of the Selandia consists of eight men and two boys. No firemen required. No boilers needed. No loading with bunker coal for the voyage”.

How our masters must rub their hands with delight when they think of the saving of wages, extra cargo space, cheaper ships, and many other advantages. How the thoughtful fireman must curse when his job disappears, and the boilermaker when he reads: “No boilers required”. How joyous the coal-porter must feel when, instead of fifty men employed in coaling a ship, he sees the engineer turn on the oil cock and fill his tanks in a few hours! Oh! the unspeakable happiness of the lightermen and railwaymen at the thought of not having to transport any more dirty coal to the docks! What joy dwells in the heart of the miner as he thinks of the near future when oil competes fiercely with coal, and thousands of him are saved the trouble of squabbling over the “abnormal places”, having gained the displaced wage-slave's normal place—the gutter.

From the Socialist Standard
, February 1913

A Conservative’s view of Russia (1963)

From the February 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

" 'Under God and the Tsar' ran the old saying, 'all men are equal'. In Imperial Russia there was no old-established aristocracy, no bourgeoisie, nothing in short that you could call a proper ruling class. The same was even true under Stalin. But now, forty years on, under Stalin’s successors, a ruling class is fast emerging—a class of capable, ambitious men and women who are ready, indeed determined, to play their proper part in affairs and to have their proper share of the rewards. Such, in England, one imagines, must have been the behaviour of the new upstart aristocracy under the Tudors, and again two or three hundred years later of the suddenly enriched scions of the Industrial Revolution.

“With Victorian England in particular there are many parallels to be drawn. There is the same rapid industrialization with all its attendant sacrifices, human and otherwise, the same sudden economic expansion. the same emergence of a new, confident. self-assertive class, the same earnestness, the same will to power, the same belief in progress, the same sense of their country’s imperial destiny, the same agreeable, absolute certainty that they are right. It is even possible to carry the parallel further. Like their Victorian counterparts the new Soviet aristocracy are priggish, prudish, inclined to be pompous, rigidly attached to their own vested interests and rigidly conservative in their ideas and in their profound reverence for the Establishment in all its manifestations. Even their tastes are the same: they like pictures and statues that are easily comprehensible. They like rich solid food and rich solid ornate decorations and furnishings.

“But, the reader will say, are not these worthy people all Communist? Do they not all believe in world revolution? Of course they do. They are Communists just as the Victorians were Christians. They attend Communist Party meetings and lectures in Marxism-Leninism at regular intervals in exactly the same way as the Victorians attended Church on Sunday. They believe in world revolution just as implicitly as the Victorians believed in the Second Coming. And they apply the principles of Marxism in their private lives to just the same extent as the Victorians applied the principles of the Sermon on the Mount in theirs. Neither more nor less.”

(Taken from Back to Bokhara by Fitzroy MacLean, Four Square Books 3/6. Sir Fitzroy MacLean, Conservative M.P. for Bute and North Ayrshire, formerly in the Diplomatic Service, including service in Moscow, revisited Russia in 1958. This short book is his very readable description and interpretation of the changes he found).

Semi-enlightened Bishop (1963)

From the February 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is not often that Socialists can quote, even with a degree of approval, the comments of prelates. Usually their function is to tell us that this is the best of all possible worlds and, in between, to bless various weapons as being on the side of God and Good (as against the weapons of the Godless, Evil, and the Other Side). However, the Bishop of Pontefract, reported in The Guardian of 9th January, has recently made some thoughtful and thought-provoking remarks on our present social system.

He thinks that wild-cat strikes, gambling, drinking and various other symptoms of a lower moral condition are the result of feelings of helplessness and boredom, the reaction to the increasingly impersonal administration of affairs of State and industry. He accuses leaders of Church and State of failing to give a satisfying purpose for living. Citing centre-less new housing estates, the rat-race of examinations and status symbol degrees, the Bomb, and the increasing number of suicides, he comes to the conclusion, not very epoch-making we must admit, that there is something wrong with society if it imposes this kind of strain on people. The remarks were mainly concerned with the unhappy lot of industrial workers, but we know that their once more fortunate fellow workers in offices are subject to the same strain and problems and are no less bored as office routine becomes more and more broken down into one-function fragments.

After his comments on the ills of present society, the Bishop lapses into the woolly conclusions that worship of the Golden Calf is responsible for all this misery and that while poverty is heH, the hunt for money diminishes compassion and mercy.

It would, of course, be too much to expect a Bishop to draw a really solid conclusion from his views, but perhaps we can do this for him. Substituting for “the Golden Calf,” the “Profit Motive” or production for profit, not for use, and using this as our yardstick when looking at all that is anti-social going on around us today, we see that preaching and hand-wringing will get us nowhere, just as it has got all would-be reformers nowhere. 

Only a complete change in the basis of society can abolish the very material Hell that capitalism has brought us to. It may be too much to expect of the Bishop, but when his flock begin to work for a new social system on earth rather than pie in the sky, and all the flocks throughout the world do the same, Man will at last achieve a world worthy of his skill and intelligence.

S. Goodman

The Working Class (1963)

From the February 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

In these days when in many parts of the world the working class is in the process of becoming a fully-fledged section of society, it is well to review the class nature of capitalism and note some of the lessons.

As the very existence of the class struggle is widely denied even in the Labour movement itself, we had best begin by defining, or rather explaining, our terms.

The term “working-class” is used by many people who have never seriously considered what it means. Some, like the so-called Communist party, use it to mean industrial and manual workers. They do not think of doctors, teachers, scientists, authors and other “professional” people, as members of the working-class. What is even more tragic is that most people in these groups do not appreciate their class position. What in fact determines class is not the kind of work that is engaged in, but the fact of having to work at all.

From this it will be seen that the teacher or the doctor is in the same basic position as the bricklayer or road sweeper. The question is not “Do you wear a white shirt or oily overalls,” but “Have you any means of livelihood apart, from working.” If the office, bank, school, or laboratory you work in does not belong to you and if rent, interest or profit does not come your way, you can call your wage a salary till the cows come home, but you are a member of the working-class.

The fact that the factories, offices, and the whole apparatus for producing and distributing wealth belong to a parasite minority is not the invention of the wicked socialist imagination. The reverse is the case. The Socialist is a product of class society, but a very special product with a unique purpose.

Many notions have been advanced as to what history and society are all about, but to understand society as a living changing social structure, it is necessary to look to the breaking up of men into antagonistic classes, and to the process of exploitation. All of the institutions of state, law, administration and all private wealth and privilege throughout written history up to present times, rest upon a surplus of wealth being created by a class of toilers and appropriated by a class of non-working owners. The material interests of each class of owners have been, and remain, completely opposed to the interests of the property-less mass they exploit.

The state as the executive committee of the ruling class is the seat of political power. The institutions of wealth and privilege are legalised and enforced through this political power. The way to ownership of the means of production lies, for workers and capitalists alike, through political power.

On the question of material interests it can be seen why Karl Marx is so feared, hated and abused by the capitalist class.

The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production—antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism, but of one arising from conditions surrounding the life of individuals in society; at the same time the productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the material conditions for the solution of that antagonism.

(Critique of Political Economy)

To get rid of the antagonistic relations of production means, getting rid of capitalism. This is what it meant to Marx and Engels, and this is what it means to the Socialist Party of Great Britain. How could the head-fixing experts of T.V., radio, press, pulpit, treat Marx fairly when Marxism says the system of wage-labour, profits and privilege must go? Yet, the idea of abolishing wages, and producing for use, must be grasped by the working class before the terrible problems with which the world is faced, are to be removed. The present system of production for profit is a brake on any rational progress.

Most workers are so accustomed to working for wages that to talk of a world without wages is frightening to them. What they fail to realise is that when the factories, mines, railways, etc., belong to all mankind in common, the fruits of our labour will be freely available without having to meet the demand of the price tag. Wages, far from being a blessing which we could not do without, represent the debasement of humanity and the divorce of the producers from the means of production.

The wage system takes away from the workers what they produce, and creates a situation in which money becomes the sole end of human endeavour. The worker is reduced to a creature who seeks a wage packet. What he makes, how he makes it, and what becomes of it, is of no importance to him. The fact that a great deal of wealth today is shoddy and inferior is hardly noticed. If he could get more wages digging holes and filling them in again he would be counted silly not to take the job. The capitalist, on the other hand, has no interest in being the owner of thousands of washing-machines or pairs of shoes. His only interest in production is to get as much profit out of it as possible. If one line fails he will try another. Socialism will restore the use motive to everything that is produced. People will then have a direct interest and say in what is produced and how the process is conducted.

The working class have trodden many false paths and taken up many unsound ideas in the course of their history. When sections of organised workers engage in sound action by striking for improved wages or conditions, they receive the almost unanimous condemnation of the Press. This should indicate to them that such action is in their interest. Industrial action on its own is however very limited and has its best chance of success in boom time when the employers need us most. At best, a strike can win the day on a wage issue, but the capitalists still remain in their privileged position as owners of the means of production.

The trade unions have long been subject to much misuse by careerists and job hunters, also on the other hand, many sincere workers have devoted themselves to the task of winning concessions through trade union action. The real strength of trade unions rests on the growing class-consciousness of their members. If the workers understand their class interest they would be able to struggle much more effectively and could not be duped by the double talk of their leaders. The whole record of leadership has been  a very painful one for the working class. Many workers in the “Communist” and Labour Parties, despite disillusionment in the past, still waste their efforts looking for the right leaders. Against all past experience, the idea persists that leaders can do something about the effects of capitalism. In fact, the situation produces and controls the leaders—not the other way around.

Leadership involves the acceptance of an “enlightened” few by an ignorant mass. It is essentially a sheep and dog relationship, except that in this case the dogs do not know where they are going either. Perhaps one of the most famous of all leaders was Lenin, who held:

. . . that the Soviet Socialist Democracy is in no way inconsistent with the rule and dictatorship of one person; that the will of a class is at times best realised by a dictator, who sometimes will accomplish more by himself and is frequently more needed.

For our part we have always argued that the workers must think for themselves and can only take sound action when they understand the society they live in.

The reformist parties are lost before they start, partly because of the ignorance of their adherents and partly because their policies involve them in retaining capitalism while trying to lighten the problems of that system. In this the parties of the so-called “ left” share the fate of the so-called “ right.” The record of their activities reveals some strange alliances and compromises. Liberals have helped the Labour Party; Tories have been helped by “Communists”; the Liberal, Labour, Conservative and “Communist” parties have worked together in war time. Nazis and “Communists ” have made pacts of peace and friendship and all of them are prepared at aU times to promise anything that will win votes. All this seems strange until it is realised that the economic dictates of Capitalism, control them all. What is strange is that despite their black records the working class continue to support them.

All of these things, leadership, reformism and political ignorance, interlock and form a sinister pattern. Inevitably political parties which do not seek support to abolish capitalism find themselves immersed in its sordidness. Hypocrisy becomes their stock in trade. They ail support war.

They all have to talk the language of nationalism, and stimulate and appeal to nationalist feelings. In this country this means they must all be very British and concerned with the good of the nation. The idea has to be continually sold lo the workers that they have a national identity and that their interests are at one with the ruling class. Those African and Far Eastern countries which are new to the capitalist fold have been quick to learn from the example of their older rivals.

While Socialists work for an end to national divisions and the introduction of a world community democratically administered and co-operating to produce wealth for the free use of all, Lenin wanted the proletariat to "decisively and actively support the National movements for the liberation of oppressed and dependent nations."

This cry of “National Independence" is still echoed by various dupes of capitalism today, including the “Communist" Party. It has found fruit in the coming lo power of home-grown oppressors with the workers being used as a bulwark against their own class interest.

In making this very brief survey many things to which workers devoted their energies, have been left out in order to pay attention to the main points which have a direct bearing on working class activities today. What turn events will take next depends on how rapidly the workers of the world can learn from their experience and the lessons of the past. One thing is certain, for as long as Capitalism continues, poverty, insecurity and wars will remain our constant nightmare.

In 1905 the Manifesto of the Socialist Party of Great Britain was first published. On page 25 of the sixth edition, it said:

“In all human actions material interests rule, and therefore the dominant class can only be concerned in upholding wage slavery and increasing their power over the workers. The working class, on the other hand, are driven by their material interest, to struggle for the possession of the means of living. To the working class history has committed the mission of transforming society from capitalism to Socialism. A glance over past history shows that every class that emancipated itself had to commence with the capture of the political machinery, that is, with the power of government. It is therefore, necessary for the workers to organise a political party having for its object the capture of political power.

This political party of the workers can only be a Socialist party, because Socialism alone is based on the facts of working class existence.”

Harry Baldwin

News in Review: Sir William (1963)

The News in Review column from the February 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sir William

Nobody who has troubled to keep an eye on the trade union movement will have fainted with surprise at the news that the New Year Honours List brought a knighthood to William Carron.

Carron, president of the Amalgamated Engineering Union (motto, carved impressively on the presidential chair, “Be United And Industrious”), is the latest in a lengthening line of trade union knights, preceded by such as Tom O’Brien of NATKE and Tom Williamson (now a life peer) of NUGMW.

One thing these men have in common. They are all what is known as “moderate” trade union leaders. And “moderate” is another of the euphemisms beloved of the Capitalist press.

It means a trade union leader who can be relied upon to angrily denounce unofficial strikes. It means the sort of leader who suffers the wage restrictions of a Labour government and who co-operates in drives for greater efficiency and productivity. A man who thinks that it is a good idea for the unions to be represented on the National Economic Development Council and other such bodies, which are designed to promote co-operation between the workers and the employers. It means a man who does his best to ignore the fact that there is a class struggle in Capitalist society.

But this is not what trade unions are there for. The unions should concern themselves with protecting and advancing the interests of their members. They should be struggling for higher pay, shorter hours, better working conditions, and so on. But where do honours come into all this?

Honours are reserved for the people who have served Capitalism in some way or other; they are the establishment’s mark of appreciation.

It is a bitter commentary on the standing of the trade unions today, and on the standard of consciousness of their members, that the men at the top are so often coming to wear a coronet or some other bauble to show that Capitalism has looked upon them and found them good.

Hailsham and Unemployment 

Lord Hailsham, the government’s odd-job man, has won himself a reputation of being a showy, energetic politician. How, then, to describe his appointment as the man to look into the unemployment problem in the North-East?

Was this Action? Or just another odd job?

Certainly there was nothing new about the idea. The 1929 Labour government had not one but three ministers looking after their unemployment problem. At least one of these was showy and at least one other was energetic. But the unemployment figures still kept on going up.

Why only the North-East? True, unemployment is relatively high there; but so it is in Scotland and Wales. Whatever claims the government might make about the North-East being different, the fact is that, as a problem of Capitalism, unemployment is the same in one area as it is in another.

Does Mr. Macmillan have a soft spot for the North-East? He told the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce ". . . human needs are as great in the North-East, in Scotland or Merseyside, and even in Birmingham. They are the boys who fought and died and suffered and as long as I have anything to do with the conduct of affairs I shall regard them as of the highest priority . . .  I felt that the appointment of a senior active member of the government . . .  was needed and I believe it will be received with pleasure in that locality 1 know and love so well.” (Macmillan was M.P. for Stockton-on-Tees until 1945, when Stockton showed that it did not love him well enough to send him back to Westminster.)

But apart from Macmillan’s sob stuff, no government cures unemployment because it loves the workers. Indeed, no government cures unemployment at all, because it is something which wrapped up with the basic nature of Capitalism, coming and going as economic conditions dictate.

No politician has ever been able to control these conditions. That is why Hailsham must prove no better than the men who have tackled the problem before him. He can find out how much unemployment there is in the North-East. He can discover that unemployment hurts. He may even realise the basic reason for it. But as far as he is concerned that will not be for publication.


Escape from the Dole

Short of war itself, the best recruiting sergeant has always been poverty. In the thirties, the prospect of endless waiting in the dole queues drove thousands of workers into the armed forces. Even the army canteen seemed like a slap-up West End restaurant after months of bread and marge and tea.

Those were the days when for every man accepted there were half-a-dozen turned away. Years of poverty and malnutrition had left large numbers of youths unable to pass the medical, so much so that even the Tory government became alarmed that there might not be enough efficient cannon fodder for the next holocaust.

Things have been different since 1945. Capitalist “prosperity” has left the services begging for recruits. Pay has had to be raised and conditions improved, but even so the response has been poor. Until now.

Now British capitalism is not doing so well. There is pressure on wages, a harder line against the unions and, most threatening of all, the return of unemployment and the dole queues.

What a sudden change this has caused! Only a little while ago we were hearing tales of the sumptuous married quarters being provided to encourage wives to persuade their husbands to join up. Now we are told that there have been so many applications that the authorities have decided to refuse almost all married volunteers.

Recruiting on Tees-side is apparently up 33 per cent, in Manchester 32 per cent, in Preston 40 per cent. Northern Ireland has also had “a good year” and Western Command recruitment has increased by a fifth.

Yet another grim development to remind us of those “bad old days" that were supposed to have gone for ever.

Skybolt

The Tories care. Many of them have clung to an independent British nuclear force as a sign that this country is not quite finished as a world power. Skybolt was meant to keep this force going until 1970, which will be some years after the Soviet defences are expected to render useless the missiles currently in service with the R.A.F.

The backbench Defence Committee of Conservative M.P.s. were especially glum at this latest blow to their ancient illusions. Macmillan and Thorneycroft had to do a lot of explaining to them.

The Labour Party cares. Gleefully, their spokesmen leapt upon what they love to call the “Tory mess" over what they like to call “defence." (Who, or what, was Skybolt supposed to defend?) Labour should have been as glum as the Tories. They were the party which started the British nuclear force, including the bombs which they grumble about, when the Tory government tests them.

In fact, all the Capitalist parties care about Skybolt. They all had some sort of policy on it, which they coughed up m the shape of advice for the government.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain does not care about the Skybolt row. We do not care whether Capitalism fights its wars with missiles which come from the air and hit the ground or from the sea and hit the air or from anywhere to hit anywhere else.

We think it is quite horrible that intelligent men and women should spend their time, all over the world, in thinking up nightmares like nuclear bombs and missiles. We think it is ridiculous that other grown up people should solemnly argue about which missile is the cheapest or the fastest or the most destructive. We think it is even more ridiculous that these people should be admired by the majority of workers as wise, good men.

We know that the best thing that could happen would be for the world working class to abolish Capitalists, with all its weapons and leaders.

Who cares about that? We do.


Medical Research

The medical profession are having a tough time in cracking the problem of replacing a diseased kidney with one which has been taken from another person. Up to the present, they have had very little success with this operation, and what they have had has been mainly confined to grafts between identical twins or other very close relatives.

If the doctors could solve this one, it would mean that a lot of people who are now condemned to die would be saved, because a diseased kidney can be a killer.

Research into the problem is going on all the time, in particular at the Hammersmith Hospital in London, where the work has been supported by a government grant. Then last month there came the news that this grant would run out in April and. that it was not likely to be renewed.

Dr. David Spencer, who was involved some months ago in a dramatic and unsuccessful kidney operation, made a public appeal for funds and soon got the money he had asked for.

And how much was this? A hundred million? Well, no. One million, then? Wrong again. A measly thirty thousand pounds. But apparently the government had decided that they just could not afford this amount.

Is the Exchequer broke, then? How much, say, do they spend each year on armaments? Thirty thousand? Well, no. Hundred million, then? Wrong again. A whacking great £1,709,000,000.

There are plenty of people, all of them supporters of Capitalism, who can get indignant about this. But it is most illogical of them to do so.

Because it is typical of Capitalism's priorities that, when the queue forms for the allocation of society’s resources, death and destruction should be somewhere up front and human health and safety somewhere near the back.

Socialism could, and would, get things in their right order. That is something which should be driven home to anybody who would rather beat disease than build a hydrogen bomb.

Trade Unions and the Cost of Living (1963)

From the February 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

If workers were slaves or horses and consequently were fed and housed by their owners they would have grievous hardship to put up with but would not have to trouble about the cost to their owners of providing fodder and stables: that would be the owners’ worry.

The slaves’ troubles would centre round the fact that they were being worked to the limit for the benefit of the owners. As workers are not owned but are “free,” they have the same basic grievance as did the slaves, but in addition they have to worry about their wages and the cost of living and about keeping a job. So for a century or more the trade unions, and other bodies claiming to speak for the workers have, alongside the job of struggling with the employers over wages, occupied themselves with the statistical problems of measuring movements of wages and movements of prices.

It is hard to think of any activity into which so much effort has gone with so little result. From a working class standpoint it has been almost totally misconceived and misdirected, though, of course, the masses of information, the wage indexes and price indexes, have been useful to governments and employers.

In the trade unions it started with the optimistic belief that if employers would not give wage increases under threat or actuality of a strike they might do so if presented with information about the high or rising cost of living. It was soon found that the employers were not moved by this argument whereupon the social reformers came forward with their notion that in such circumstances the government would intervene from a sense of social obligation, and compel the employers to give way.

This did seem to produce some limited result in that the better organised employers supported government legislation to enforce minimum wages for workers in some of the worst paid trades (the “sweated” trades and agriculture, for example). But the employers and the government were not thereby committing themselves to the principle that all workers were to be guaranteed a job at a reasonable standard of living and safeguarded against the effects of rising prices.

The bigger employers were protecting themselves against the competition of low-priced goods produced by the “sweaters,” and they and the government both had a long-term interest, industrial and military, in preventing the creation of masses of underfed and physically sub-standard workers. For the employers as a whole and for the government the paramount interest has always been the necessity of making profit and keeping the profit-system functioning as smoothly as maybe: which means that their paramount interest has always been, not in pushing wages up but in preventing them from rising to the point that profit is endangered.

No government has ever abandoned this and the Conservative Selwyn Lloyd’s efforts to impose a “wage-pause” in the face of rising prices only echoed the wage-restraint policy of the post-war Labour government. What then is the use of quoting the official retail price index to show that prices are rising, against a Selwyn Lloyd or a Stafford Cripps, who both declared in their day that it was government policy to prevent wages from rising notwithstanding the rise of the cost of living?

Against this background of the real world of Capitalism, the world of profit seeking, exploitation and class struggle, the question of the statistical accuracy of the government’s retail price index can be seen in its proper perspective, but even in this narrow field trade union effort has been often based on misconception. A sixpenny pamphlet, The New Cost of Living Index, published by the Labour Research Department, may help to dispel some of the misunderstandings.

In the last half century hundreds of trade union conference resolutions have been passed demanding a more accurate index and specifically urging the government to make the index more accurate by including items of expenditure in it that were earlier excluded. Many of the resolutions rested on the fallacious belief that making the index cover more items (e.g., by bringing into it motor cars, TV sets, refrigerators, Terylene garments, dog and cat foods, etc., etc.) has the effect of raising the index figure. But the index is not a measure of total cost of a lot of articles but a measure of the average percentage price change month by month; bringing in more articles has no effect whatever on the index figure at the point when they are brought in. If, after being brought in, the new items rise in price, that will help to raise the index, but if they fall in price, that will lower the index.

If all prices always moved in the same direction and by the same percentage an index based on only one article would be just as accurate as one based on hundreds of separate articles. But as prices do not move together and an average has to be taken of all the separate movements, it is necessary for statistical accuracy that the right importance (“weight”) should be given to each item. In the original index of half a century ago foods were given a “weight” of 60 out of a 100. This meant that if food prices as a whole rose by 10 per cent, and all other prices remained unchanged the index would rise by 6 per cent. In the present index food is given a weight of only about 30 in a 100, so that if food now went up by 10 per cent, and other prices remained unchanged the index would go up by only about 3 per cent.

The L.R.D. pamphlet explains these technicalities in some detail and argues that some items are inaccurately weighted (alcoholic drinks, tobacco, and housing). It also recognises that though in the past few years this has operated mainly to make the index lower than it otherwise would be, it could operate the other way. The overweighting of tobacco, which for long helped to depress the index because tobacco prices rose comparatively little, more recently had the opposite effect because tobacco prices rose sharply. Which brings us to a defect in the approach of the pamphlet. It has a subtitle which asks, is the index “fair,” and maintains that accuracy is an important question to the workers. So far as the index as such has any effect in determining the level of wages, which is at most very little, the workers, of course, do not want it to be “fair” and accurate; they want it to be inaccurate in one direction only. Between the wars when as its critics pointed out the index heavily overweighted food, those workers, including civil servants, who had wage agreements related to the index had reason to be pleased, for as long as food prices were rising faster than other prices, because this made the index figure “inaccurately” high. They ceased to like it when food prices slumped and their pay went down with them.

There are, however, trivialities by comparison with the real issues facing the working class: their need to use trade union organisation as far as it can be used, to push up wages regardless of cost of living index figures, and beyond this, the task of replacing Capitalism by Socialism which will involve the ending of wages and prices, and the cost of living index.

Edgar Hardcastle

Editorial: What comes first? (1963)

Editorial from the February 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

To put it mildly, life under capitalism is an unpleasant business. Apart from the dominating problems, there are the lesser irritations which also go into the balance against the private property system.

There are, for example, the constant admonitions to us, from government, church, press and so on, to conform to the morality of capitalism. For the workers, this means an uncomplaining acceptance of the system. It means to work hard and soberly and to keep capitalism's laws. A man who ignored these precepts to the extent of neglecting his sick and hungry children in favour of a career of destruction and violence would not only find the finger of the law upon him. He would also be an outcast because he had offended against capitalism’s morality. We can all imagine—in fact we have all seen—the treatment the popular press would give to such a man. We have all seen the emotional headlines and the carefully horrible photographs, all designed to make the man seem a human monster.

Very well. A man like that would certainly be an extremely objectionable person, one with whom it is impossible to feel much sympathy. What, then, are we to say of a social system which acts just like that man? How does capitalism itself live up to its own morality?

Violence and destruction? The British government is now spending £1,709 million a year on its armed forces and their weapons. The United States, with its greater power and its heavier international commitments, is spending at the rate of £17,648 million a year on the same things, over £5,357 million of it on nuclear weapons.

Now what about capitalism’s sick and hungry children? All around us there is evidence that plenty of such children literally do exist, hanging on to life by their fingernails. We have just come through the Christmas period, a regular feature of which is the mass of appeals from all sorts of charities whose declared object is to feed and to help distressed children. We have seen the pitiful pictures of the wasted little bodies, near-skeletons with swollen bellies and desperate eyes. The people who organise these charities are undoubtedly sincere and are involved in a problem which is quick to move any human being.

These are not the only things which capitalism neglects. We have recently heard that the research unit at Hammersmith Hospital, which has been doing such valuable work in the field of kidney grafting, has had its future threatened by lack of funds. Nor is Hammersmith Hospital the only research centre suffering in this way. Mr. James Callaghan, the Labour Party Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, has said that he has heard of another “vitally important medical research unit which is living from hand to mouth.” Mr. Callaghan, of course, was gratefully wielding a stick upon the Tory government. Things were no better when Labour was in power.

There is one thing which all these charities and research teams need and which, within capitalism, might go a long way to assure their future. Money. Why don’t they have it? Because the capitalist class knows that its interests demand that it lavishes enormous sums upon making the means to kill and terrorise humans, even while the organisations which at any rate try to help humans are forced to penny pinch and to rely on charily.

Not that the answer is to support the charities. Those people who support capitalism and complain about its inevitable problems are as illogical as the man who drinks a bottle of whisky and then complains when inevitably he cannot walk straight.

The real solution to this is for the world working class to establish Socialism. This will be a world without armed forces and all that goes with them, without money and all that that entails, without the need for charities. It will be a world in which human interests are Number One Priority, in which the only motive for human activity will be human benefit.

Branch News (1963)

From the February 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Despite the extreme wintry weather, Glasgow Branch have held five successful indoor lectures, this really reflects on the consistent work done by all the members. Fourteen members attended these meetings regularly, average audience 27, collections and literature over £8. After much correspondence with the Bellshill Constituency Labour Party, the Branch is optimistic that agreeable terms can be arranged for a debate sometime in February. The "advance guard" has already started the literature sales drive in North Kelvin in anticipation of the election (local) in May. It is hoped that the Cosmo cinema can be booked for the May Day Rally. There is no doubt that over the Border our Comrades are really consistently working hard for the Party in its work to spread Socialist propaganda.

We are happy to report that on the occasion of our comrade Lawrence's visit to his father in Vienna he met many friends and comrades of the Party and in order to mark the occasion they sent a contribution of £6 to the Party in London. We should like to thank our comrades in Vienna—R. Pechinger, Franz Klas, E. Schuster, Fran Draschinsky and R. Frank for the generous thought and we assure them that their contribution will be used in the best possible manner. We should also like to congratulate them on the work they are doing under quite difficult conditions.

It is with regret that we learn of the death of Fred Clarke of Burton-on-Trent, brother of Charley Clarke who died recently. We extend our sincere sympathy to his brother, J. Clarke who will, we know, continue his good work for the cause of Socialism.

Branches have planned well ahead for propaganda meetings, and 1963 should prove even more successful than last year, when provincial and London branches held regular series of indoor and outdoor propaganda meetings.

Ealing Branch continued its winter programme of films and lectures with two film shows during January. Attendance was good considering the weather. There was also a good response from branch members to Paddington branch's invitation to their lecture on the Common Market at which Comrade Hardy was the speaker. This was the first of the inter-Branch meetings, arranged jointly between Paddington, Bloomsbury and Ealing, and it was very successful.

Members are asked to make special note of the two lectures being held this month—on the 8th and 22nd—at 8 p.m. prompt.

Note. The Socialist Standard is regularly on sale at A. Rowe's newsagents shop at 30 High Street, Woolwich, S.E.18.

Will the following members please contact the Central Branch Secretary as soon as possible as correspondence sent to them has been returned by the post office—S. Killingbeck (Leamington), A. Thomas (Botley, Oxford), A. W. Kent (Aylesbury).

Phyllis Howard

The Passing Show: The Aucas (1963)

The Passing Show column from the February 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some years ago five men, missionaries of a small Christian sect, went to try and convert to their own beliefs the Auca people, a small tribe living in a remote part of Ecuador. Since the white man has consistently destroyed the Indian way of life and taken the Indians' land from them throughout South America, it was perhaps not surprising that a rumour spread that these five strangers were cannibals, who had come to kill and eat the Aucas; the Aucas, as a result, killed them all.

Elisabeth Elliot, the widow of one of the men, was also a missionary among the Quichua Indian, and after her hus­band's death she became acquainted with two Auca women. Later. very bravely, she went with these women and with her own young daughter to live with the Auca tribe for a year. She has now written a book about her experiences. The Savage My Kinsman (Hodder and Stougbton, 37s. 6d.).

She was, she says, "immediately impressed with the Aucas' dignity and simplicity." They were ".. an exceptionally robust tribe. I found no diseases among them except one or two uncertain cases of malaria, and the common cold. There were none of the 'children's diseases' of civilization: mumps, measles, chicken-pox, whooping-cough, scarlet fever. I treated some infected sores, but the Indians had a remarkable resistance to these and seemed to recover equally well without treatment of any kind." The women grow crops of manioc and plantain, and the men spend most of the day hunting; with the animals and fish they catch they support "their wives, sisters, in-laws, and any widows who happen to be living with them or next door." The Aucas, moreover, "had no use for money or anything else which might have served as a trade item."

WITHOUT CHARGE 

The Auca has his own ideas of behaviour, says the author:

. . .  he shares his one small monkey with the widow next door. Be does not greet a friend or bid him good-bye, but he entertains without charge any guest who happens to drop in, even if he is a Quichua Indian whom he has never seen before. He does not wear clothing, but he has a strict code of modesty and is totally free from preoccupation with the human body, and all the absurd inhibitions this involves.
The Aucas, being so few in number, are a close-knit group, but there is no central authority of any kind. Every man is his own boss. The only social unit is the family, although there seems to be no marriage ceremony as such. 

The firm belief of civilized man, in fact, that all savages have a "chief" who is a kind of dictator (a misconception based on a misunderstanding of the role of the war-leader who emerges when tribes fight each other) was as usual found to be false.

The author tells us more about the Aucas' social customs (and she cannot have been prejudiced in their favour):

During my entire visit, I never saw the slightest friction between a husband and wife. Only rarely did I hear an Auca criticize another behind his back . . .  Malicious gossip was rare among the savages. In fact, many of our civilized sins were conspicuous by their absence. I noticed almost no vanity or personal pride, no covetousness or avarice. Intoxication was unknown. The men were not lazy, or selfish with the spoils of their hunting.
In short, I had to face the fact that socially I had nothing whatever to offer the Aucas.

NO PRAYER

It is, incidentally, interesting to record the author's conclusion that "the Auca has, so far as I know, no form of religion. He knows nothing of prayer, sacrifice, worship or placating evil spirits, although he believes in their existence." So much for another cherished belief of civilized man, that all savages are caught in an implacable web of religious beliefs and observances. Apparently if anyone is caught in the web, it is civilized man.

A FLEABITE 

The Aucas are still clearly living in a society of primitive Communism, or something very close to it, right into this modern era. We were all living in this kind of society up to perhaps five or, at the most, seven thousand years ago, and in some parts of the world even now private property has not yet been able to impose itself. Man has been on this earth 500 thousand years (the latest theories would extend this time to something like one and three-quarter million years) and throughout that time he has lived in a primitive Communist society—up to this very moment in remote areas: even in the most 'civilized' parts of the world the length of time man has suffered under private property systems is a mere fleabite compared to the vast ages that went before.

And still we are told that Socialism or Communism, a system of common ownership or of no ownership at all, is somehow 'against human nature'! If anything is against 'human nature,' (whatever that may be), it is clearly private property.

A NEW SOCIETY 

No one, of course, wants to return to primitive Communism, even if that were possible. The Aucas, for example, sometimes become involved in warfare, and lose men killed in fighting. (Although civilized men, who are now openly planning to destroy each other's cities, perhaps have not much ground to criticize them on that score.) But Socialists do want to go forward to a new society; in which all the good points of primitive Communism (the absence of 'civilized sins,' the comradeship and cooperation, the abolition of 'central authorities"—­in short, the much greater happiness and contentment) can be combined with the material comforts which Capitalism has produced. And nothing prevents us going forward to that society except that the mass of the working class have never realized that it is possible.

Alwyn Edgar