Sting in the Tail: The Numbers Game (1991)

The Sting in the Tail column from the February 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Numbers Game

Listen, John, I've just been reading the November / December issue of Labour Party News. It's full of Neil Kinnock and his pals on about the wonderful future they offer "our country" if they get in.

And they've got their own Premier Savings Account at "competitive rates of interest", a competition with a £10,000 tax-free prize, a Visa card, a lottery, and organic wines! Couldn't find a mention of socialism, but you can't have everything, can you?

They’ve got a lot of new members too; 140 here, 35 there, but the official "Recruiter of the Year" is a Nottingham youngster who roped in 200! It's easy, John, there's a membership form inside if you want to join: no conditions, no questions asked.

All this recruitment looks good — what's that you say? Labour's membership has dropped from 350,000 in 1980 to 288,000 now! Christ, that Nottingham youngster had better get his finger out, hadn't he?

Open Secrets

For fifty years groups of Leninists have been boring-from-within the Labour Party.

Because their own ideas have very little electoral support, they hope to gain influence in the Labour Party which they see as "the mass organisation of the working class".

There have been many such hopefuls down through the years of which "Militant" is only the best known. As would-be Bolsheviks they exist as "secret" groups but always there are the inevitable defectors to reveal all.

The latest group to be shopped is "Socialist Organiser" which, according to an ex-member, is:

. . . completely committed to remaining within the Labour Party, and will jump through each and every hoop the (Labour) NEC places before them to save themselves.

The Guardian (24 December)

These groups are an obstacle to Labour's chances of running British capitalism and are being rooted-out, but doubtless there will in the future be others willing to jump through endless hoops in pursuit of Lenin's useless and discredited ideas.

Princely Piffle

Prince Charles, authority on ecology and architecture, has been airing his views on

politics and economics.

Speaking on French TV he

. . . called for a balance between the ideals of capitalism and communism.

The Guardian (24 December)

What he meant by "communism" is, of course, what existed in Eastern Europe and which he described only last year as "one vast prison". What "ideals"of this system does he admire?

The Prince continued:

We need capitalism, but perhaps with a more human face. We need a system in which big capital becomes more and more Interested in local communities. . . and the developing countries.

As if capitalism will do this as an act of altruism and without taking profits into account!

This ignorance of capitalism's priorities is further revealed by his call for banks to lend to "gifted" young people to start their own businesses. Alas, the banks

. . . weren't in the slightest bit interested because young people had nothing to offer as guarantees.

We doubt if bank depositors would share the Prince's desire to see their savings lent without collateral.

Let's hope that HRH knows more about ecology and architecture than he does about politics and economics.

Keen as Mustard

During World War II over one thousand Australian servicemen were used as human guinea-pigs in experiments with mustard gas. Many of them had up to 95% of their skins burned and a top-secret film recorded the horrific details in glorious technicolor.

Were these men prisoners of the Japanese and the victims of a bestial atrocity? No, it was the Australian and British governments who conducted the experiments on them.

All this emerged in a BBC2 Horizon programme on January 14. The experiments were supposed to provide information for "defensive" purposes should Japan use mustard gas, but Horizon revealed that the Allies intended to use the gas on the Japanese: they decided on the atom bomb instead.

Probably the most shocking revelation for many who saw the programme was that the human guinea-pigs were all volunteers. One of the scientists involved in the experiments said that the men "knew what they were in for". This was only partly true because the call for volunteers made no mention of mustard gas, and the men certainly didn’t know there would be such long-term after-effects as leukemia and damage to internal organs.

There is nothing new in workers volunteering to perform capitalism's dangerous tasks. They are forever risking their health and lives in the service of their masters, and it is nothing new for them to be rewarded in cruel and inhuman fashion.

Gulf Reality

While TV commentators move toy tanks over sandy table tops and gush on about "pincer movements" like demented schoolboys: the realities of war are much more soberly summed up by one of the participants of the real war.

Here, for example, are the unexpurgated thoughts of Captain Ronald Thomas, from Stoke-on-Trent and A Squadron of the 16th /5th, as he watched his soldiers load their missiles for what might be the last hours of peace. "Yes, I'm frightened of dying. Everyone's thinking about it now." (A pause here.) "But you know, I'll be really pissed off if I didn't see my family again. I've got four kids. I’d be fucking angry if I was killed."

The Independent (15 January)

Anger is, of course, understandable but it is only anger based on knowledge of how capitalism leads to armed hostility that is of any use in combating the threat of war.

Reality Gulf

Now that hostilities have broken out in the Gulf, it is reassuring to learn that those with a hot line to the deity are showing a touching compassion.

Although Dr Robert Runcie and Cardinal Basil Hume acknowledge that It was sometimes necessary to resort to war, they said in a joint statement that they had emphasised to John Major "our concern that only the minimum force necessary to secure the UN objectives should be used, without inflicting indiscriminate damage on Iraq and its citizens."

They also urged the Prime Minister to safeguard sacred Muslim sites from attack in Iraq.

The Independent 15 January

When the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Roman Catholic Cardinal unite on joint statements, you can be sure you will get a dose of arrant nonsense. "Indiscriminate damage" is the nature of war. There are no rockets or bombs that select the guilty and spare the innocent.

However it is touching to that they are concerned about fellow divines in Iraq — no hiding out in the sacred sites!

Socialism on tape (1991)

From the February 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

From the above list, the following recordings are available on the SPGB website:

• Capitalism or Socialism? DEBATE between The Socialist Party (E. Hardy) and the Conservative Party (Arthur Johnston). (1983)
• 'Looking forward': The way ahead for Socialists. DEBATE between The Socialist Party (Steve Coleman) and Socialist Organiser (Simon Pottinger). (1983)
• Is Britain Worth Dying For? DEBATE between The Socialist Party and Lady Olga Maitland (Women and Families for Defence) (1984).
• After The Miners Strike — Which Way Forward For Socialists? DEBATE between The Socialist Party and Socialist Workers Party (speaker Colin Tipton) (1985).
• Did Lenin Distort Marx? DEBATE between The Socialist Party and Monty Johnstone (Communist Party. Marxism Today) (1982).
• The Crisis In Capitalism — What Is The Next Step? DEBATE between The Socialist Party (speaker Clifford Slapper) and Bill Etherington (General Secretary. Durham Mechanics NUM) (1986)
• The Politics of Rosa Luxemburg, Speaker Vic Vanni (1983)
• Marxian Economics And Capitalist Textbooks. Speaker Adam Buick. (1987)
• Marx's Conception Of Socialism. Speaker E. Hardy (1987)
• The Gulf Crisis — Another War for Oil. Central London rally with panel of speakers (1990).

Education Conference on Working-Class Culture (1986):

• Folk Music and Workers' History. Speaker: Sandy Easton
• Educating the Workers. Speaker: Brian Rubin
• Soap Operas and Working-Class Life. Speaker: Gary Slapper

Education Series on Marxian Economics. Speaker: E. Hardy (1980).

• Labour Theory of Value.
• Crises and Depressions. (Part 2, Part 3.)
• Productivity.
• Rent, Interest and Profit.
• Marxist and Monetarist Theories of Inflation.
• Taxation and the Working Class.

Class War (1991)

From the February 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

What class you are in is defined by the position in which you stand with regard to the means of production. In capitalist society there are two basic classes: those who own and control the means of production and those who own no productive resources apart from their ability to work.

The working class in capitalist society is made up of all those who are obliged through economic necessity to sell their mental and physical energies for a wage or salary. If this is your position then you are a member of the working class. The job you do and the status it might have, the pay you receive and how you chose to spent it, are irrelevant as long as you are dependent on working for a wage or salary in order to live.

In Britain over 90 percent of the population are members of the working class. Of the rest only about 2-3 per cent are members of the exploiting, capitalist class who enjoy a privileged non-work income derived from the surplus value produced by the working class over and above what they are paid as wages and salaries.  The others are the self-employed—small shopkeepers, independent workers, professional people—whose income is derived from selling some service or other directly to the consumer rather than from selling their labour power to an employer. And many of these can be assimilated, in terms of income, to the ordinary worker.

What this means is that essentially we are living in a two-class society of capitalists and workers. But what about the "middle class”? The existence of such a middle class is one of the greatest myths of the twentieth century. In the last century, the term was used by the up-and-coming industrial section of the capitalist class in Britain to describe themselves; they were the class between the landed aristocracy (who at that time dominated political power) and the working class. Eventually, however, the middle class of industrial capitalists replaced the landed aristocracy as the ruling class and the two classes merged into the capitalist class we know today. In other words, the 19th century middle class became part of the upper class and disappeared as a “middle” class.

The term, however, lived on and came to be applied to civil servants, teachers and other such white-collar workers. But there was no justification for this, as such people were clearly workers just as much obliged by economic necessity to sell their ability to work as were factory workers, miners, engine drivers and dockers. The only difference was the type of job they were employed to do—and a certain amount of snobbery attached to it. .

It is not just the Daily Mail persists in believing that there is a middle class. So does the SWP which has come forward with a theory of the “new middle class”. This “class” is said to be composed of higher-grade white collar workers and to make up between 10 and 20 percent of the workforce (The Changing Working Class by SWP leaders Alex Callinicos and Chris Harman, p. 37). The reason given for excluding these people from the working class is that they exercise some degree of control over the use of the means of production and/or authority over other workers; in short, because they perform some managerial role.

To adopt this view is to abandon the relationship-to-the-means-of-production theory of class for one based on occupation. Socialists have always maintained that, as far as the actual production of wealth is concerned, the capitalist class are redundant. They play no part in production, which is run from top to bottom by hired workers of one sort or another. This means that all jobs, including those concerned with managing production and/or disciplining other members of the working class, are performed by members of the working class. To exclude from the working class workers with no productive resources of their own who are paid, among other things, to exercise authority of behalf of the employing class over other workers is to give more importance to the job done (occupation) than to the economic necessity  of having to sell labour power for a wage or salary which for Marxists is the defining feature of the working class.

Of course not everybody who receives an income in the form of a salary is necessarily a member of the working class. Some capitalists chose to manage their own businesses and pay themselves a “salary” for doing this. Although a part of this might correspond to the price of labour power (the part corresponding to what the capitalist would have to pay to hire a professional manager to do the same job), usually most of it is only a disguised way of distributing some of the surplus value at the expense of the other shareholders. What makes a salary-earner a member of the working class is not the mere receipt of a salary but being economically dependent on it for a living.

Having to work for an employer was not only how Marx defined the working class. It is also, and more importantly, the view of many workers who have never heard of Marx. When asked, as in a number of recent radio broadcasts, a surprising –and pleasing –number have replied that anyone who has to work for a living is a worker. Which makes them more sensible than both the Daily Mail and the SWP.

Adam Buick

The reason why . . . (1991)

From the February 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

"The reason why we will shortly have to go to war with Iraq is not to free Kuwait, though that is to be desired, or to defend Saudi Arabia, though that is important It is because President Saddam is a menace to vital Western interests in the Gulf, above all the free flow of oil at market prices, which is essential to the West's prosperity".

— Sunday Times, 12 August 1990.

What 'peace dividend'? (1991)

From the February 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many workers believe—or, until the Gulf crisis, believed—that with the end of the Cold War peace has broken out and that as a consequence the demand for war weapons has gone into a permanent decline, so that the money spent on them can be directed to improving living standards and the industries producing them converted to peaceful purposes.

Talk of this so-called “peace dividend" began following Gorbachov’s speech at the United Nations at the end of 1988, since when there has allegedly been “no enemy in Europe". Tom King, the Defence Secretary said as much in a statement to Parliament on 18 June last year justifying reductions in defence spending. Then in July, as part of the defence review, he announced the cancellation of an order for 33 Tornado aircraft for the RAF. British Aerospace responded by announcing a cut of 800 in their manning on Tornado assembly. This was followed up by the announcement in November of a "restructuring” involving a cut of about 20 per cent in staff and the closure of two large sites, in Kingston and Preston. Again the recent changes in eastern Europe were cited as a factor. The future of the European Fighter Aircraft (EFA), already hazy, has become more doubtful still following German reunification and the resulting reassessment of German military requirements.

Arms still in demand

This is not a new situation. The demand for arms fell temporarily after the Boer War and after both World Wars. In 1902 and 1918 workers lost their jobs as a result. There were also campaigns for diversification and the manufacture of alternative products at armament plants such as Woolwich Arsenal, which had little success despite some support from local councils and chambers of commerce. In 1945, while there was again a temporary slump in arms production, capitalism went into a boom phase which minimised the disruption. In none of these cases, however, had peace broken out. Indeed in 1945, following the defeat of the Axis powers, two new aggressive power blocs formed immediately and the demand for military equipment duly recovered.

This conflict—the Cold War—has now come to an end, at least temporarily. The main reason for this has been the need for Russia to take time out to give urgent attention to its ailing economy. But the basic cause of war, the struggle of competing capitalist rivals for raw materials, trade routes, markets and strategic areas, remains untouched. This may cause the Cold War blocs to re-form at some future date. Or future superpower conflicts may increasingly take the form of local wars on the Korean and Vietnam lines, as this in theory reduces the chances of a nuclear holocaust which would be an overkill even from the capitalist viewpoint. The danger of such a holocaust, however, will remain as long as capitalism does. None of these scenarios, needless to say, in any way remotely resembles peace.

The truth of this is underlined by the current Gulf crisis and the Iran-Iraq war which preceded it. This conflict is so brazenly a struggle for control of the world’s oil supplies as to be reminiscent of the period prior to World War 1, before so-called "communism” and fascism arose to be used to mask the true cause of capitalism’s wars. Indeed so clearly does this current conflict illustrate the truth that further comment would appear superfluous.

Patriotic unions

The current "crisis" in the arms industry (notice how any suggestion of peace leads to talk of a crisis!) will not prove lasting. That does not mean that the working class, through the trade unions, should not do all they can to minimise the effect of the present downturn. Just as pressure to defend real wage levels can succeed, because the cost to the capitalist of a strike may he greater than that of conceding, so for a similar reason redundancies may be reduced, by determined militant action, below the original figure demanded by the employers. Socialists fully support and participate in such efforts.

However, what we have been seeing from the trade unions goes far beyond this and is not acceptable from the socialist viewpoint. Basically it amounts to an attempt to reform capitalism in order, so they hope, to keep their members in employment. MP's are lobbied, the capitalist government is approached, searches are made for other possible sources of investment and if found support for them is asked for. The unions have even been demanding that the government revoke its cancellation of the Tornado order!

That is not to say that such attempts are doomed to failure. By and large, however, they come from an attitude in which fantastic and utterly useless remedies are being put forward, something that is not confined to armaments workers of course. Sometimes sections of the capitalist class lend some support if they see a prospect of profit, but it will of course be support on capitalist conditions, which cannot be of any real benefit to the working class.

We can see in such thinking a reflection of the attitude of the Labour Party to which the unions are unfortunately still wedded. The Labour Party is mainly composed of workers who believe that Labour politicians can run capitalism better than the capitalists. The example of Solidarity in Poland, originally a trade union, but which sprouted a political wing that now forms a government which is enforcing draconian austerity measures ought to serve as a warning to the super-reformist (and often super-patriotic) British trade unionists who are so numerous in the aircraft industry.

There can be no compromise with capitalism, and no matter how desperate the short-term situation may be, workers should not entertain such ideas. What may look on the surface to be just a compromise, will always prove in the end to have been surrender.

E. C. Edge

". . . Protect oil supplies by force."

From the February 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

KUWAIT "ONLY AREA WHERE WE MIGHT WISH TO INTERVENE TO PROTECT OIL SUPPLIES BY FORCE"

Protection of Kuwaiti oil was the United Kingdom's “irreducible interest” in the Gulf—to be defended by force of arms if necessary—according to confidential Whitehall policy papers released after 30-year closure yesterday.

Dick Beaumont, head of the Foreign Office Arabian Department, had written to Sir George Middleton, political resident in the Persian Gulf, on 29 January 1960, saying: “The irreducible interest of the United Kingdom in Kuwait is that ‘Kuwait shall remain an independent state having an oil policy conducted by a government independent of other Middle East producers’. A corollary of this is that Kuwaiti independence will not be preserved unless any government, which might wish to subvert or overthrow it. is convinced of Her Majesty’s Government’s willingness and ability to defend Kuwait by force of arms if necessary".

The previous November, senior defence and foreign policy planners had agreed that: “The only area where we might wish to intervene to protect (oil) supplies by force was Kuwait’’.

—Independent. 2 January 1990.

“Great Men” (1991)

From the February 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

The great ones of the earth

Approve, with smiles and bland salutes, the rage

And monstrous tyranny they have brought to birth.

The great ones of the earth

Are much concerned about the wars they wage,

And quite aware of what those wars are worth.

You Marshals, gilt and red,

You Ministers and Princes, and Great Men,

Why can’t you keep your mouthings for the dead?

Go round the simple Cemeteries; and then

Talk of our noble sacrifice and losses

To the wooden crosses.

— Siegfried Sassoon, The War Poems. 

Caught In The Act: Time for a change (1991)

The Caught In The Act Column from the February 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Time for a change

Who is Margaret Thatcher? It is necessary to ask the question because it seems she has disappeared. Only a few months ago she was the indestructible Iron Lady, terrifying her foes, doing all her minister's jobs herself and ruthlessly squashing out any of them who fell from her favour. But now she is hardly mentioned.

For example the Gulf Crisis simmered and burst into war without any stimulus from her; she might have been expected at least to make a speech about the wishes of the Kuwait people being paramount (provided, of course, the dictatorship there allowed the people's wishes to be known). British capitalism is sliding into another recession but she is not expected to launch into one of her searing damnations of the Moaning Minnies who refuse to acknowledge that millions unemployed and an unprecedented bankruptcy rate are actually signs of a booming economy.

When one of Thatcher's Ministers left — or was ejected from — her government it was usual for the Downing Street media manipulators to quickly spread the word that the ex-minister was not much loss or even that the government was better off without them. The more prominent the ex-minister and therefore the more threatening their absence — the more violent was the campaign to undermine their reputations.

So it was that the likes of Howe and Lawson were on the receiving end of particularly malicious stories. Of course we couldn't expect that Thatcher would now be treated like that — John Major is supposed to be a much nicer, much less obsessive personality. In fact a rather gentler and more subtle technique has been used. Thatcher's standing now was expressed by a Tory grassroots member in the Ribble constituency: "I'm grateful for all she did for the country", said this patient, malleable blockhead, "But it was time for a change".

But whatever the style employed the fact is that Thatcher is the victim of an exceptionally efficient demolition job. The Tories have a long history of these things, often plotted in some bastion of chivalry such as the Carlton Club or the discreet offices of City merchants.

When the knife was wielded it was done with due regard for the Tory reputation as the Gentleman's Party. For they are the most single-minded bunch of political operators, who thoroughly understand that politics is about getting power to keep capitalism running in their way, at whatever cost. In the business of fighting elections and disposing of leaders who damage their chances of winning they leave their opponents standing. Ask Douglas-Home. Or Ted Heath. Or Margaret Thatcher.

Labour in change

It is ironical that Thatcher may eventually be seen to have left more of a mark on the Labour Party than on their own side. As the Tories have shown that they could win enough votes from politically deranged workers to keep them in power for a long time, the Labour Party decided that their best hope of winning a general election lay in imitating the Tories as closely as possible. The new Labour policies have provoked anger and confusion among those grassroots members who joined the party under the mistaken impression that it took a principled stand for a basically different society.

Their anger is based on the recent policy statement Meet The Challenge, Make The Change, which openly accepted market forces and private industry and was aimed solely at winning the next election. But how much of a change is this from the Labour Party of the past?

In October 1964 the Labour President of the Board, Douglas Jay, assured a dinner of the International Chamber of Trade that "the new government starts with no prejudice or bias whatever against private business and industry". In May 1965 George Brown, who was then head of the Department of Economic Affairs, told a meeting of company directors and managers that "the profit motive has an ' important role to play as an incentive and test of efficiency". In April 1966 Harold Lever, who later became a Treasury minister, wrote "Labour and business are already moving towards a mutual understanding".

And what about Labour's leader then, Harold Wilson. How does he compare to Neil Kinnock? In September 1964 — just before Wilson won the election — Anthony Howard wrote that ". . . he has already transformed the Labour Party from being primarily an ideological movement into being an election-minded organisation". Lest you misunderstand — Howard was one of Wilson's admirers.

Disappointed Leader

It could be that Kinnock has misled himself enough to be disappointed, were he to learn that he has not really changed anything about the Labour Party. It is some years now since he was a rebellious, CND-marching, fiery left winger; he dropped all that to concentrate on the serious business of exploiting working class readiness to disregard their interests and to vote parties like Labour into power.

To do this Kinnock must associate himself with, and defend, election programmes the attraction of which lies in their unrealistic claims to be able to solve capitalism’s problems and to reconcile essentially conflicting class interests.

In this Kinnock must upset his old friends, outraged by what they see as his change of course. In fact the real problem lies with them for Kinnock is following the inexorable route of a party which stands for a reformed capitalism and which must therefore compete for power over the system, cadging for votes with policies and promises which are as false and as cynical as they need be. This is as ruthless a business as the Tories getting rid of Thatcher; that is the nature of capitalist politics.

So it is not only incorrect to give Thatcher the blame — or the credit, depending on how you look at it — for Labour changing its policies and its style. It is also unfair: the Labour Party have always been as they are now only at times they are less effective in their campaign for capitalism. In any case, to be charitable to Thatcher: in the depths of anonymity of wherever she is, hasn't she got enough to answer for?

Ivan

Between the Lines: The Day War Broke Out (1991)

The Between the Lines column from the February 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard 

The Day War Broke Out

This was the most planned for war in history. The cameras were waiting in the desert, eager for the first fireworks display. CNN reporters locked themselves in their hotel room and described the bombing of Baghdad as it started, even poking their microphone out the window so that the viewers could hear the big bangs. This was televised warfare — murder by media.

When the bombing started (16 January) the TV reporters affected an air of surprise, as if the whole shooting match was out of the blue. Had they not spent five months previous to this telling the workers that such mass slaughter was inevitable and then that it would begin on the first night after 15 January?

The second night of the war saw the first Iraqi attack on Israel. CNN reported that it was a chemical missile attack. This misinformation was reported for over three hours. The CNN reporter in Jerusalem, asked to describe the attack, recalled hearing a huge explosion close to his office. It later turned out that there was no missile attack on Jerusalem.

The ITN reporter, trapped in his sealed room in Tel Aviv and reporting that there had been a chemical missile attack, was asked what Israeli TV was saying. He replied that he could not tell us because the TV messages were in Hebrew — the language of Israel. What qualifications do you need to be an ITV reporter? An Israeli journalist on the BBC was asked to tell the viewers how scared he felt. He replied that he was in his flat with his family whom he rarely managed to be with and that they were watching Monty Python on TV. Were they the only ones, we asked ourselves.

Agreement Time

We all know that there is little difference between capitalist politicians. In time of war the little turns into nothing.

On Question Time (BBC1, 10.10pm, 17 January) the two panels of politicians did nothing but tell each other how much they were on the same side. Hattersley, Labour’s deputy leader, praised Major for his war leadership; Clarke, the Tory Minister, said how pleasing it was to see all parties united in Britain's hour of need; Kaufman, Labour's Foreign Affairs man, was so eager to support the war that he sounded more like Thatcher than Major does; Ashdown, the Liberal leader, let it ^be known that he was the only party leader to have served in Kuwait as a'' marine. One woman in the audience heckled, saying that they were all boring politicians saying the same thing. The audience had a jolly good laugh — all good clean English fun.

Three days later the BBC issued an edict to all disc jockeys: no pro-peace records could be played while the war is on. Lennon’s Give Peace A Chance is now banned in British broadcasting. Playful heckling of capitalist politicians who have the whole of Question Time in which to spew out their vicious pro-war filth is permissible, but lyrics which might just change workers’ minds - No fear.

The Con that kills

Remember those cosy TV ads about joining the army and seeing the world? Didn’t they make you want to rush to the recruiting office and learn to be a chef? Those T.A. recruitment ads used to tell wage slaves how they could give up a few weekends and have fun playing "Bang, bang, you're dead" games.

There was even one newspaper ad which showed the Socialist Party platform in Hyde Park. London, and suggested that if you join the army you would be becoming a sort of special protector of free speech. What they did not tell you was about the chemical weapons, the sweltering desert heat, the body bags, the pointless murdering and being attacked all in the name of oil profits.

A war for their class

This war is being fought so that capitalists can stay rich. Every wage slave in uniform who dies, including the poor conscripts in the Iraqi killing force, will die in vain. It is a war, as all wars, about capitalist power - on this occasion, the power to own and control oil production.

Alas. Channel Four's Class By Class (Fridays. 8pm) did not have the first clue what class is about. The presenter, Ray Gosling, perpetuated the stale old fallacy that class is a matter of lifestyle.

A month earlier BBC's Forty Minutes was about prostitution in the King's Cross area of London. It was an unpretentious documentary which made no claim to offer any grand theory of class. A number of prostitute women were interviewed who made it abundantly clear that their reason for doing their dirty work was that they needed money — they were poor.

Also interviewed on the programme was a socialist, David Hines, who has written an excellent play about prostitution (it is called Bondage and is highly recommended). He explained that hookers were no different from taxi drivers — both had to sell themselves on the market to the first bidder. This is true of all workers: wage slavery is prostitution.

Having said that, there is prostitution and prostitution, and there is something more dignified about selling quick sexual thrills or taxi rides than spreading war propaganda.

                                                                                                                             Steve Coleman

Letter: Vote Labour? (1991)

Letter to the Editors from the February 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Vote Labour?

Dear Editors.

As a paid-up member of the Labour Party, I agree with “Anti-Capitalist", of Seaham. in regard to ending the capitalist system (Socialist Standard, December 1990), but I believe he is rather short-sighted in his view that without capitalism there would be no poll tax, rent, gas and electricity bills, etc, because unfortunately they are a necessity of life.

What is required to be controlled is the immorality and hypocrisy of this Tory government which makes the rich richer and at the same time—if there were no trade unions—would impose on the already low-paid working class families a 6½ percent wage rise, as they tried to impose on the NHS ambulance crews and failed.

So it is my honest working man’s belief, as one who worked from the age of 14 in 1939, who fought for his country from the age of 17 in 1943, that capitalism be legally controlled, the denationalised industries now in private hands be returned to public ownership, the profits from all the industries accounted for to ensure that the workers get a fair return coupled to productivity and inflation. Also that the government ensure that working class families have decent housing with all mod cons, and good bus services, shopping centres, sports facilities and entertainment facilities, decent hospitals, doctors’ surgeries.etc.

Isn’t this only what we deserve as the “factory fodder" in peace and the close combat “cannon fodder” during the wars every generation endures? That way we get a fair return for the hours we need to work to give us the pride in working for a living, a wage to pay for the necessities of life. gas. electricity, an acceptable rent and rates system based on the ability to pay. a decent education for our children.

We need a socialist Labour government to ensure that Britain returns to having a truly democratic government, which this lava-tory government can’t claim to be because it has sacked loyal British citizens at GCHO because those working class men were not prepared to surrender their democratic right to belong to an accredited trades union. That act of fascism was the first "goose-step” on British soil by a British government claiming to be democratic but creating the stench of nazism in England’s fresh and. so far, free air (until it gets privatised).

There is one light at the end of this dark gory Tory tunnel and it is this. The millions of good honest working class families, of all political persuasions, who thought that they could afford to vote Conservative because of the false promises of Margaret H. (for "Hypocrite" not “Hilda") Thatcher's dreams have found that these turned into nightmares. Inflation, mortgage interest rates, freezing of family allowances, and—most disgusting of all— the freezing of the old age pensioners’ £10 Xmas gift, plus additional charges for eye tests, dental checks, transport costs to get to work, and the effects of the poll tax making the rich even richer and working class families poorer—all the above have taught the working class young lads and lasses a very hard lesson: that the Tories, as they have always done, only look after their own. the fat cat families.

This is why at the next General Election all those who thought they could afford to vote Conservative and did so to their ever-lasting regret (yes, they were the ones who voted the Tories into power) will be the ones to vote them out. out. out.

George Ellis 

Timperley, Cheshire

Reply:

You are probably right. Hundreds of thousands of workers will be voting Labour at the next General Election for the reasons you give. Since the Tories really have done all the things you list, we can understand why no worker with the slightest inkling of class consciousness would even consider voting Tory. But is that a reason for voting Labour?

It might be if it was governments that caused the problems and miseries that workers face under capitalism. But they don't: governments merely preside over the capitalist system while it works in the only way it can. as a profit-making system in the interests of the profit-takers and against those of the wage and salary workers.They have to carry out what the continuing profitable operation of the system demands.

Changing the government doesn’t change this. All this does is to change the individuals who make up the government. Different individuals can of course have different attitudes and we freely acknowledge that Labour politicians, for various reasons, don’t have the same desire to make the rich richer and to bash the working class as theirTory counterparts. But what counts in the end is not what government ministers may or may not want to do, but what they will be forced to do as administrators of the capitalist system.

Capitalism forces all governments, including Labour ones, to dance to its tune. Have we not seen Labour governments cut benefits, freeze wages, impose health charges, break strikes and preside over the rich getting richer and unemployment going up? There is no reason to suppose that a Kinnock government would be any different. No government of capitalism can give workers the sort of "fair" deal you outline—and make no mistake about it: a Kinnock government, like all previous Labour governments will be a government of capitalism. A "socialist Labour government" is an absurd contradiction in terms, but this is not even what Kinnock is promising as he has openly proclaimed that the aim of the next Labour government will merely be to try to make the market economy—capitalism—work better than the Tories.

Since it is capitalism that is the cause of working class problems, to solve them what is required is not a change of government but a change of economic and social system— from one based on class property and the profit motive to one based on common ownership, democratic control and production for use: and. yes. this will mean that electricity, gas and housing will be provided, like everything else, as free public services.

Editors.

Letter: Right of reply (1991)

Letter to the Editors from the February 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Right of reply

Dear Editors,

I refer to the review of my book Althusser and Feminism by SC (Socialist Standard, December 1990) which. I am sad to say, contains more by way of gratuitous insult than serious critique.

I would like to point out that the first three chapters of the book were largely written whilst I was a member of the SPGB (as it was then known) and when the writings of Louis Althusser were having a profound effect on many people on what those outside the Socialist Party call "the left”. Althusser, a prominent member of the PCF in the Sixties, set out to "revise" Marx’s historical materialism in such a way as to make it compatible with the occurrence of a "revolution" in Russia in 1917, but incompatible with the rise of "Stalinism". His "non-economistic" (as it became known) reading of historical materialism struck a cord with many radicals, feminists and members of the working class in France and England in the Seventies. I set out, from an SPGB perspective, to counter Althusser’s claims to have remained true the "spirit" of Marx's thinking. I argue in the book:

(a) that Althusser's "structuralist” re-reading of Marx is incompatible with some central tenets of this theory;

(b) that his "non-economistic" interpretation of historical materialism does not conform even to the spirit of Marx’s writings; and

(c) that his view of human needs is misguided.

I then go on to consider the implications of Althusser’s thought for an outlook on feminism that is inspired by my reading of Marx’s historical materialism.

SC’s insulting claim:

it is a pity that philosophers who want to offer abstruse language and cleverly-formulated abstract propositions as signs of their own brightness do not stick to writing about Aristotle or Descartes.

implies a philistinism about theoretical readings of Marx that will do little to advance the cause of the Socialist Party. Political activity, as Marx was well aware, takes place in the theoretical domain as well as on the streets and the soap boxes. Theoreticians are members of the working class.

There are only two— extremely minor—points of substance made in SC’s review:

1. that I refer, mistakenly, on page 35 of my book to “the working classes”; and
2. that the back cover refers to Foucault but the book does not.

The first point is my mistake and it should be corrected. As for the second, if SC read the back cover—the publishers’ blurb—properly, he (for I know it is he) would realise that the publishers are describing a school of thought, and no claim is made that all members of that school are dealt with in the book.

I write at such length because, despite my non-membership, I am broadly sympathetic to much of the case of the Socialist Party, and I am sad to see that two of the reasons for my resignation in the early Eighties—a certain arrogant philistinism about theory and an insulting manner of expressing this philistinism; and an antipathy towards feminism—seem to be manifested in this review.

Alison Assiter 

London, WC2

Reply:

Readers interested in the development of our theoretical position on feminism should study our tape “What Socialists Can Learn from Feminist Theory” (price £3) and the chapter on “What’s Wrong With Feminist Theory” in our pamphlet Women and Socialism” (price 55p), both available from our Head Office.

Editors.

Blogger's Note:

I have to say it: that is a rather underwhelming response from the Editorial Committee. Actually, rather dismissive, if truth be told. The reviewer, 'SC', was Steve Coleman, and Alison Assiter wrote under the name 'Alison Waters' when she was a member of the SPGB.

Remember Panama? (1991)

Book Review from the February 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Panama: Made in the USA. By John Weeks and Phil Goodman. Latin America Bureau. £4.99.

This is a timely reminder of President Bush’s hypocrisy in denouncing Saddam Hussein for “violating international law” with his invasion of Kuwait. The previous such violation had occurred in December 1989—when Bush ordered 24,000 US troops to invade Panama, capture its dictator and install a friendly puppet regime.

Panama, in fact, has in common with Kuwait the fact of being artificially created by an imperialist power in pursuit of its economic and strategic interests. Just as Kuwait was set up by Britain in 1899, so Panama was created by the US in 1903 as a breakaway from Colombia to provide a client state that would allow it to build—and then completely control—the Panama Canal. Ever since, as described in this booklet, the US has done what it liked there.

Blogger's Note:

An unsigned book review - which is annoying - but there's an outside chance it was written by Philip Bentley, who was known to review books published by the Latin American Bureau. 

The total spending chart (see above) appeared directly below the review in the original Standard, so I'm presuming it was in some way connected to the book review. 'Presuming' is a bit of a stretch. 

50 Years Ago: The Suppression of the Communists (1991)

The 50 Years Ago column from the February 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

More recently (Daily Worker, March 30th, 1939) they were appealing by personal letter to Churchill, Sinclair and Attlee to get together to overthrow the Chamberlain Government and form a Government of their own in order "to save the country in the rapidly deepening crisis." It may well be said that they got the war they wanted (and then soon ceased to want it when Russia decided to be friends with Hitler) and got the Government they asked for and now it has got them.

So tortuous are the ways of the Communists that it is by no means impossible (the contents of the Daily Worker in recent weeks rather suggest this) that for some obscure reason they now no longer wanted the immunity from prosecution they sought last year by setting up a board of "influential persons" to run the Daily Worker but wanted to be suppressed.

All the same the S.P.G.B. is opposed to suppression of opinion. In our view the way to counter any kind of propaganda, and in the long the only way, is to meet it in the open in unfettered discussion. We are entitled to add that we practise what we preach and have always thrown open our platform to our opponents.

[From an article "The Suppression of the 'Daily Worker' ", Socialist Standard, February 1941.]

Socialist Party Meetings (1991)

 Party News from the February 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Propaganda from Iraq (1991)

From the February 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

  Last year we received, via the Iraq Embassy in London, the following circular letter signed "Comrade Latif Nasayyif Jassim, Member of the Regional Leadership of the Arab Ba'th Socialist Party. Baghdad. Iraq". Jassim is also the Iraqi Minister of Information.

The Foreign Relations Bureau of the Regional Leadership of the Arab Ba'th Socialist Party is pleased and honoured to extend its warmest greetings of friendship and solidarity, reaffirm its keenness to maintain our relations with you on the basis of our common principles, and present to you herewith a copy of the documented historical and legal paper recently published on the question of the relationship between Kuwait and Iraq.

The paper also offers a political review of the conspiratorial role played by the former Sheiks of Kuwait, in collaboration with the United States of America, in order to destroy the economy of Iraq, undermine its national security and impoverish its people to the benefit of imperialist and zionist interests.

We are confident that these facts will help you to understand the background of the events taking place in the Arab Gulf region and to follow their developments. We stress our categorical rejection of the USNATO invasion of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, along with our conviction of the ability of the Arab Nation to settle Arab problems without foreign intervention and on the basis of the initiative of H.E. President Saddam Hussein announced on 12 August 1990. We also reiterate our resolve to resist the military alliances with which Washington plans to fetter the Arab Nation in order to ensure its absolute hegemony over our oil and free will.

Comrades and Friends,

We call upon you to denounce the inhuman economic boycott and blockade aiming at starving our people, depriving us of our medical needs and our children of their milk.

We also call upon you to expose war mongers and aggressors, and to uphold the peace option as a means to resolve all problems in the Middle East on basis of uniform criteria and principles.

Our reply:

We are fully prepared to denounce all war-mongers in the area: Bush. Mitterrand, the unlamented Thatcher—and His Excellency President Saddam Hussein. As the Gulf Crisis reaches its flashpoint, we of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and our companion parties overseas, constituting the Movement for World Socialism, reaffirm our unequivocal opposition to all the belligerents, be they major powers defending the interests of their capitalists or despotic oil-producing states anxious to extend or maintain their arbitrarily-established frontiers and to raise the price of their oil on the world market.

We wish to make it absolutely clear that we have no “common principles” with the so-called Arab Ba’th “Socialist" Party find that they are no “comrades and friends" of ours. We have never had any relations with them and never will have. No doubt they have mistakenly assumed that we form part of the rag-bag of trotskyist and maoist organisations like the SWP. RCP, WRP. etc, etc which have taken up a pro-Iraq position in the Gulf conflict.

The Arab Ba’th “Socialist” Party is no more socialist than was Hitler's “National Socialist German Workers Party” in whose tradition of aggressive and totalitarian nationalism it is to be placed. As the governing party in Iraq and, under a rival faction, in Syria its record in both countries has been one of oppression, torture, assassination and mass murder. And its doctrine that all Arabs form a single nation with a common interest is mistaken and divisive. Like all cultural and language groups, the Arabs are divided into two classes with antagonistic interests: workers and their exploiters and rulers. Those who are workers form part of the world working class, not of some mythical “Arab Nation".

Regrettably, the notion of a unified Arab nation-state, however illusory, still holds great sway throughout much of the Arab world. It is to this public that Baathist propaganda is addressed, in the hope that they will see Iraq’s tyrant in a Napoleonic role challenging the no longer divine rights of the billionaire oil sheiks to rule and benefit from their statelets set up and protected by the Western powers.

Naturally, as Socialists, we have no sympathy whatsoever for the oil sheiks but, equally, we hold that national entities, actual or envisaged, offer no solution to the problems of the working class majority anywhere in the world.

While the horrors of war are about to be unleashed yet again, we re-iterate even more urgently our call for the World Working Class to take conscious democratic action for the creation of a world without markets, frontiers or classes in which the oil of the Middle East will belong, together with all other productive resources, not to this or that “nation" but to all the people of the world in common—a world free, at last, from the wars that result from the competitive struggle for profits that is built-in to the capitalist system.

Schooled for capitalism (1991)

From the February 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

When our first daughter was eighteen months, there came through the post some pictures to colour, some stickers and a mobile. “Congratulations! You’ve won a FREE Rupert Funpack in our competition”, said the accompanying blurb. Which was news to me because I didn’t even know we had entered. You thought Rupert Bear was a creation with a taste for natty scarves and a propensity to talk in rhyme? Wrong. Rupert has become an investment adviser. Rupert has diversified into Unit Trusts.

The sales pitch is aimed at the emotional underbelly of the anxious parents who, being unaware of socialism, still realise that there is never something for nothing in capitalism. The investment can easily grow into the kind of money they’re going to need when it’s their turn to face the world, wheedles Rupert. Think of the cost of a car. the deposit on a house, think of all the money your child is going to need when they reach adulthood. How can you refuse an offer couched in those terms? Easy. Investigate socialism, a society based upon production for use, not profit.

But we’re still living in a capitalist society. Capitalists arc determined to keep it that way. A little indoctrination goes a long way. Especially when your child enters the laughingly-called education system. In May 1990, a guidance document on education for economic and industrial understanding was published by the National Curriculum Council. It outlined ways in which the government wanted to see schools introduce pupils to greater economic understanding and awareness. It gave examples of how pupils might be taught to develop an interest in commerce and the economy and learn how to handle their own finances. It suggested that seven-year-olds learn about money through tackling simple maths problems. John MacGregor, the then Education Secretary, said:

We have been encouraging too many of our brightest youngsters to go into non-profit-making activities. I think it is important that more of them understand that we live in a competitive world, including the need to make a profit by meeting customers' requirements.

The Education Secretary was obviously ignorant of the fact that profits derive from the economic exploitation of the majority by a minority ruling class. Or was he?

The enterprise education unit at Durham University is also doing its bit to instil free market values into children. With financial backing of £200,000, given by Marks & Spencer, the Durham University Business School has devised a scheme to teach children as young as five how to become “classroom capitalists”. They are to be encouraged to run their own business and enterprises. The scheme intends to show five- to eleven-year-olds, by the use of comic-strip instruction books, how to make a business plan and how to borrow money from a bank. Durham University’s David Absalom, denying that the scheme would brainwash children into Thatcherite thinking, said

"It’s not political. We hope the children will become more enterprising and have more confidence in their ability to communicate. negotiate and work with other people”. There has been an increase in the number of sightings of flying pigs in the Durham area recently.

The status quo

Emphasising other areas, such as law and order, nationalism and responsibility to society—capitalist society— reinforces the acceptance by the individual of an economically exploitative social system. Education for Citizenship, a draft report prepared for the National Curriculum Council, suggests that from the age of five children should be taught to be active citizens. It says a fundamental requirement placed upon all citizens in a civilized society is the need to acknowledge and accept the rule of law.

The success of the type of tactics employed on the young and impressionable is evinced by the results of a survey carried out for industry at the end of 1989. A survey of attitudes amongst 16- to 24-year-olds found that they were rejecting idealism, looking after number one. and turning against minority groups. A third of those surveyed were racist, a half were homophobic and ninety-four per cent thought that hard work was the key to success. (Young Britain: A Survey of Youth Culture in Transition). These findings, no doubt, give quiet satisfaction to the ruling class who can consider the money it costs them to train the working class and instil acceptance of the status quo into them well spent.

But the cost of training future generations of workers has to come from the total share of the surplus value expropriated from the working class by the ruling class. So why do the working class any favours? A study conducted by government education inspectors at the end of 1989 found that primary schools are increasingly relying on money from parents for a reasonable stock of school books. At the beginning of 1990, MacGregor ruled that schools could charge pupils rent for classroom lockers and parking space in bicycle sheds.

As my daughters reach their teens in the twenty-first century, what can they look forward to? They may come out of the "educational” system with a few certificates and the opportunity to encumber themselves with a loan to fund their passage through university. Perhaps they will think that continued training will result in their getting a "good job". What aspirations for their lives may they have? Well-paid wage slavery? Marriage? House owned by building society? Children? Will they still unconditionally accept a social system that limits their potential to experience the fullest possibilities of emotional, personal and social growth with its reduction of all human experience to a cash nexus? Will their continuing exposure to the prevailing ideas in society, those of the capitalist class. have turned them into homophobic, racist, right-wing, sullen youngsters?

Enough is enough

Capitalism is an anarchic market system—it lurches from boom to crisis with the regularity of the sun rising every morning. It is unnecessary for this generation or the next, or the next, to wait until life has become so intolerable under capitalism that the majority decide enough is enough and look for the alternative. By then it may be too late. By then there may not be a society or planet left to change. The alternative exists now. All that is standing in the way of a transition to a social system based upon production for use, not profit, is a lack of understanding of capitalism, and of a determination and political will on the part of a majority of the worldwide working class to alter the insane society in which we live, capitalism, for a sane one. socialism. It's not enough simply to create another life. That life has to have a future. Which future would you rather have for your children, capitalism or socialism?

Dave Coggan

War games (1991)

Book Review from the February 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Playing Them False: A Study of Children's Toys, Games and Puzzles. By Bob Dixon. Trentham Books. £11.95.

From earliest age children’s toys are clearly divided into boys’ and girls’: the boys’ miniturising outdoor pursuits, construction and “manly” activities while the girls’ are based on the kitchen and domestic activities.

Adventure kits for boys as young as three are intended to "make little men out of boys” with gear appropriate to various aggressive roles. Take you pick from, among others, the Para Kit. Assault Kit or Tank Commander. Speaking of tanks. Bromley Council in 1981 purchased for its playgrounds fighter plane and tank climbing frames; on the latter there's a gun which you can fire in the turret.

The first toy soldiers, made of flat tin, were produced in Nuremberg in 1775 and Germany remained the main producer and exporter until the late nineteenth century. By 1893 hollow-casting had been developed in Britain, making the toys cheaper and more widely available. During the 1914-18 war a printed rag-doll soldier called Tommy Atkins became so popular that filename was adopted for British foot soldiers. During the 1930’s khaki-dressed dolls were on sale. Their sophisticated descendant, Action Man, is described in the trade magazine Toys International as “a fully mobile moulded plastic toy for boys which could be equipped for every phase of military service".

IPC have, since 1975. published a comic Battle (now called Battle Action Force). If you grow up thinking that war is a game it will be easier to persuade you to participate in the real thing when you grow up; the war games entered into by certain groups of adults are evidence of this. Even "peaceful" boys’ dolls such as Star Wars. Masters of the Universe. Power Lords or the latest Turtles craze, stress the desirability of toughness, domination and strength. Books, games. T-Shirts and even cakes and yoghurts promote these toys and keep tills ringing.

As children grow older the process continues with games promoting wars. These arc considered OK as long as they don’t get too near home. When they do, there is an outcry— Waddington’s Bomb Disposal and Mayfair's War in the Falklands in this country are examples. Avalon Mill’s USA game about the Arab/Israeli conflict was fine when it came out but. with the present US involvement in the Gulf, would be condemned today.

Board games became popular in Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century and, until the twentieth, were mainly concerned with improving morals and teaching children their "correct" place in life (including the superiority of the male and the subject position of women). The suggestion that poverty is caused by laziness often propounded by these games is mouthed with equal hypocrisy by politicians today. Monopoly and Rat Race are about the "desirable" goal for workers under capitalism—the need to succeed when entering the labour market. Role playing and simulated business games arc encouraged in schools and are often sponsored by interested parties such as the Financial Times or banks.

Eva Goodman

The first casuality (1991)

From the February 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Shouting has turned into shooting and war fever is being whipped up into a national delirium. The producers of the poisonous propaganda are out to infect the minds of the millions with the required hatred. War thrives on hatred: it does not just kill young men and tear off their skins with ever more disgusting weapons; war attacks the minds of those who remain alive and the warmongers seek to convert us into murder-loving monsters.

    The propaganda of war calls upon humans to sacrifice that which is at the centre of our humanity: our ability to think critically and intelligently, to co-operate, to be social. In war the sight of a dead enemy must inspire pleasure; the ruins of a devastated Dresden or an annihilated Nagasaki are propaganda coups. We hear pathetic little men in dirty raincoats talking about “nuking Baghdad" and office boys in suits munching their sandwiches and speaking of “taking out Saddam". What has happened to them?

It was Churchill who said that in war truth is the first casualty. And so the deadly deceits are blasted from the BBC, oozing out of every obscene headline of the tabloids. Remember the story of the six Iraqi helicopter crews who defected just before 15 January? Front-page headlines, first item on the news—a complete fabrication invented by Saudi propaganda agents and now admitted. The weekend before the UN “deadline" (handy term that, dead-line) the British press, radio and TV signed a censorship agreement to suppress war news when so required by the government. Days before that the government issued its first D-Notice of the war (later exposed by the Irish Times) to suppress news about the computer with military secrets which had been stolen. In wartime we will be told what they want us to hear, and told again and again what they want us to repeat.

On Christmas day the Queen came on to disrupt whatever retreat from hard times we might have enjoyed. After the mince pies it was time for some warmongering, so she droned on about the awfulness of big nations invading small ones. So now we knew: imperial conquest is a bad thing and that, unlike Ceaucescu, there will be no knighthood for Saddam Hussein. But— well, excuse me your Royal Highness— how exactly was it that the British Empire came about?

With a straight face the leaders of Western imperial conquest shed crocodile tears in response to a leader who has had the temerity to ape them. When East Timor was invaded and annexed by Indonesia there was not a murmur of disapproval from the US government because, as its former UN ambassador, Daniel Moynihan, explains in his memoirs “the United States wished things to turn out as they did and worked to bring this about”.

Super-thugs

The Hitleresque proportions of Saddam Hussein have been built up to the point where his name makes workers spit. To be sure, Saddam is a lout and those who armed him (including Britain) have created a super thug in the Middle East. But Hitler caricatures are facile—that is why they make good propaganda. What is the difference between Saddam of Iraq and Assad of Syria? Answer: the latter is now a Western ally and so must be courted, even to the extent of dropping the claim that Syrian-backed killers brought down the plane at Lockerbie—the new culprit is Iraq-backing Libya.

Saddam is presented as the personification of evil, and now that evil has a face and voice it can be shown in the media as the personal enemy of each and every worker. Reds under the beds? No. no. Gorby is “our ally” (even if he does preside over his very own Saddam Hussein game in Lithuania); these days you must watch out for Ba’aths in the bathroom. And if Saddam is Evil made flesh, those who even talk to him are devil-worshippers. So, when Heath went there the London Evening Standard joined the screams of abuse against him with a cartoon in which he carried a placard with a picture of Saddam.

For legalised murder to be supported every card must be played, including the religious joker. God has expressed his support for the West. On 11 January the Archbishop of Canterbury told the BBC that in Christian terms a war to free Kuwait from Iraqi control was justifiable. Asked whether god favoured “our boys” going into Iraq and finishing the job, the man of cant was less certain. God afraid to take a stand? He must have joined the Labour Party. As the mad Christian bishops bless Western bombs, the mad mullahs bless the lethal killing devices of the other side. At a Muslim Congress a lunatic jumped up and told Saddam that he was the new prophet. In the Pentagon there is much talk of profits too, as they look at the map of the oil wells for which men will die to ensure supplies of cheap oil.

Over a third of the US forces in the Gulf are black. They are drawn from the poorest American wage slaves. They have no profits to look forward to if they come home with a limb missing. They are being fed with a sickly diet of propaganda about how they are defending what is morally good. If they were asked to die to make oil billionaires safer in their class affluence and privilege how many of them would fight? Iraqi radio is aiming a propaganda service at the Western troops, telling them that their wives at home are being screwed by film stars. In Aldershot there are several army wives who wish you could believe what you hear on the wireless. A Western propaganda effort against Iraq is also under way. The workers are being urged to overthrow Saddam. Overthrow the tyrant they should, but not in order to install a Western puppet dictator in Iraq of the sort they have in Saudi Arabia and had in Kuwait.

Propaganda of hate

The good news is that it is getting tougher for the con-men. The workers are not so easily duped. In 1914 workers were demonstrating in the streets calling for war. In 1939 the myth that Churchill was a defender of world democracy—later aided by the “democrat” Stalin—was all too easily believed. In 1991 the poison is swallowed less willingly. Even on the eve of war a poll showed that less than half of the British people favoured a war after the UN deadline expired and 43 percent were positively against war. In the USA a population exhausted by post-Vietnam angst are not the same suckers who rallied behind the invasion of Vietnam in the belief that war is an extension of a John Wayne movie. Vast numbers of Americans are opposed to dying for oil and profits.

The propaganda of division and hate is only as loud as the case for working-class solidarity and the unity of the human family is unheard. In the USA there were 23,000 murders last year—more people than have been killed in Ireland over the last twenty years. In the first day of 1991 there were eight murders in New York City alone. The poverty of material conditions and lifestyle which give rise to this are the real enemy for American workers to fight rather than conscripted Iraqi kids who do not know what they are doing. The British wage slaves in uniform should think of their grandparents living on the pittance of a pension, think of the slum-like council estates on which their families are forced to dwell, think of the one in four British people living below the poverty line, amongst which are probably some of their friends, and ask themselves who their real enemies are: a selected foreign dictator or the capitalists who live well by trampling on their needs?

Beyond the sound of desert battles and the deranged screeching of a trigger-happy media there is a bigger war to be fought—a war which begins in mental realisation and develops into mass, democratic organisation. It is a war between Profit and Need in which the only victory can be for the freedom of humankind to live in peace and dignity and the first casualty must be the lies that make weak men strong and the many weak.

Steve Coleman

Editorial: Capitalism unleashes war (1991)

Editorial from the February 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

So capitalism has again unleashed the horrors of war. The Socialist attitude is clear. Wars are never justified from a working class point of view. They are fought by capitalist states over sources of raw materials, trade routes, markets and investments. None of these are issues of concern to wage and salary workers, the majority in society.

The present war in is a particularly blatant example of the sort of issue wars are fought over under capitalism. What is at stake for both sides is quite clearly control over oil supplies and trade routes. Everybody knows this, and the propaganda machines of the Western powers are having great difficulty in portraying it as a war for "democracy" and "our way of life". With the official war aim being to restore the filthy-rich Al Sabah dynasty to rule over and exploit the the people in the puppet-state of Kuwait and with mediaeval and religious fundamentalist Saudi Arabia where women are not even allowed to drive cars as the main local ally, this is hardly surprising.

Iraq is being attacked, under the flag of convenience of the United Nations, because its emergence as a strong regional power with expansionist ambitions represents a threat to Western domination of the area and a challenge to the security and free flow of Western oil supplies "at market prices".

This gives the Iraqi ruling class a propaganda advantage. They can truthfully present the war as one waged by Western powers to protect and further their imperialist interests. But Iraqi workers should not be fooled. They are members of the international working class who have been conscripted by a particularly brutal local ruling class to fight for its interest in having a secure trade outlet to the sea and in building itself up as the dominant regional power. Issues, once again, that are not ones of concern to them as wage and salary workers. Iraqi workers, like those of the Western countries and their local allies, will be dying for interests which are not theirs.

The outbreak of any war is an unmitigated disaster for the working class. It is the workers who are hired or conscripted to do the fighting, the destroying, the killing - and the dying. It is workers and their families who suffer from the bombings, the destruction, the restrictions, the famines and the epidemics that accompany all wars. War brings nothing but suffering and misery.

This is why, as Socialists representing the working class interest, we are opposed to all wars. always. We are not prepared to support under any circumstances the killing and maiming of our fellow workers in the pursuit of capitalist profits. Ideally, from the point of view of the working class within capitalism, it would have been better if the capitalists had settled this conflict peacefully and, now that the war has started, it should stop immediately. Unfortunately this can only be wishful thinking. Capitalism does not work that way. War will always be a policy option invoked by capitalist states from time to time.

We denounce the war as yet another example of the barbarous nature of the capitalist system and call upon our fellow workers in all countries to unite even more urgently to bring the war-causing capitalist system to a speedy end by establishing in its place a world socialist society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the Earth's resources by all the people of the Earth.