Voice From The Back: Poisoned, not bombed (2000)

The Voice From The Back Column from the February 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Poisoned, not bombed 

For the first time, more people are leaving their homes because of environmental factors than because of war. The world now has 25 million environmental refugees, compared with 21 million war-related refugees. The crisis is largely the result of more than half of the world’s rivers drying up or becoming seriously polluted, according to a report from the World Commission on Water for the 21st Century. The Amazon and the Congo are the two healthiest of the world’s 500 major rivers—probably because they have few industrial centres near their banks, the commission suggests. It blames abuse of land and water resources and poor management by regional authorities for the problem. Guardian, Science, 2 December.

Asking dangerous questions 

The only way to judge the success of an agent of change would be to ask: is it affecting the human condition? Does the internet move food and supplies around the world to the people who need them? Does it relieve human suffering, make us more aware of political prisoners, change the plight of refugees? The role of computers as agents of change is to administer the planet properly, and help us figure out, for example, why farmers in some countries are paid to burn food while people in others starve to death. Or to co-ordinate human effort around the globe in a way that hasn’t been achieved before. Guardian online, 2 December.

Capitalist art 

It isn’t just the bitchiness which, judging by her book, is endemic in ballet. The pain is no joke either: like her fellow ballerinas, [Darcey] Bussell hates giving in to injury partly because ballet is such a short career, and will dance on if humanly possible, smiling through the pain . . . There is also the mental pressure. Criticism in ballet is unrelenting, intense emphasis is placed on the body, and at every stage girls are weeded out and dumped. No doubt this is why, as Bussell observes, “dancers are neurotically unsure of themselves”. Add to this the internecine competition for roles or just to retain a three-month contract, and you have a very nasty environment. But, as Bussell explains, “we can’t be too nice because it’s the rivalry that keeps us hungry and drives our careers”. Night & Day, 21 November.

Where can it go? 

“Capitalism is a force that moves, but it does not know where it is going.” Lionel Jospin, Prime Minister of France, Yorkshire Post, 20 November.

It goes this way 

As the world enters a new millennium, children are continuing to be killed and exposed to abuse in flagrant violation of their rights, according to the executive director of Unicef, Ms Carol Bellamy . . . Despite unprecedented wealth in the global economy, where currency markets exchange $1.5 trillion a day, more than 1.2 billion people struggle to survive on less than $1 a day and more than 600 million are children. Per capita income, adjusted for inflation, is lower today in 80 countries than it was a decade ago. Herald, 13 December.

So much for rights! 

A year after the UN approved a declaration to protect human rights activists, repression has increased throughout the world, according to findings published in Paris today. The Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders said more than 200 activists had been executed, tortured or arbitrarily arrested since the UN vote. But the picture was incomplete as nearly a dozen countries made it impossible for independent associations to operate, while a further 30 states systematically obstructed investigations. Guardian, 8 December.

Games 

America is taking the threat of terrorism at the Olympic Games in Sydney next year so seriously that a US navy battlegroup, with an aircraft carrier, destroyer and submarine will be on stand-by off the Australian coast throughout the games. They will be in international waters ready to respond to any attack with force, including biological and chemical warfare units. Times, 15 December.

Class war casualties 

Up to 55 cases of corporate manslaughter a year should be brought against companies and directors where employees have been killed in the workplace, according to new research. Gary Slapper, director of the law programme at the Open University, said the law needed to be changed and a tougher approach taken to fatal safety lapses in the workplace . . . “When a reckless company kills, the legal system usually just yawns and turns away. There is virtually no deterrent,” he said . . . Since 1965, 25,000 people have been killed at work or in major commercial disasters. Health and Safety Executive reports suggest that 70 percent of these deaths resulted from a management failure. Dr Slapper’s research also shows that 60 percent of deaths were attributable to economic factors, cutting corners to save money as opposed to simple ignorance about safety. Independent, 29 November.

Hard times 

The Duke of Westminster’s nine-year-old heir, the Earl Grosvenor, has been named on a High Court writ. The reason? The lad’s £1 billion inheritance. Thankfully, young Hugh is not about to be cut out of his father’s will. The move, says Jeremy Newsum, the chief executive of Grosvenor Estate Holdings, is “a bit of housekeeping”. This has been made necessary because of dramatic changes in the way the family’s assets, estimated at £1.75 billion, now have to be managed. Times, 15 December. 

Correct language (2000)

Book Review from the February 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Socialism and Communication: Reflections on language and left politics’. By Omar Swartz, (Avebury, 1999)

This short book, by an American self-styled communication professional, will prove both encouraging and frustrating to socialists. On the positive side, Swartz says a number of things that we say, or at least with which we don’t disagree. But on the negative side he says much that represents confusion about what socialism is as opposed to capitalism, much that is calculated to deter the growth of socialism rather than promote it.

The good news first. In the order in which they appear in the book, Swartz makes the following statements:

    * Socialism … can be usefully understood here as the system by which human beings—once their essential needs are taken care of—are motivated to work and create by considerations other than monetary profit.

    * The communist party cannot be hierarchical. It cannot be authoritarian.

    * The task of socialism is the battle against alienation.

    * Class conflict transcends racial or religious conflict, and is the root of all conflict.

    * The true socialist must reject the “beneficence” and “wisdom” of the so-called “vanguard parties”.

    * Socialism is about the abolition of all masters.

    * There are many different socialisms, some preferable to others.

    * [The communist party] cannot be anything more than a loose coalition of various leftist perspectives.

    * The left believes . . . that political decisions must be based on the active involvement of the people being governed.

    * In a very real sense, the world is crying out for a strong left leadership.

    * The choices before us are not between “socialism” and “capitalism’, but between better or worse forms of government and economics.

    * There is too much fragmentation and divisiveness in the ranks of the political left. This divisiveness must be transcended.

The basic trouble with Swartz’s position, and those who think like him, is that they are desperate to be part of a big movement, and are willing to sacrifice any long-term goals they may have for the sake of short-term expediency. The divisiveness that Swartz deplores is not between groups that share the same goal and differ only about how to achieve it. It is between a presently small group of convinced socialists who are organised to achieve their goal and a presently much larger group, some of whom pay lip service to the socialist movement and all of whom prevent the growth of that movement by supporting various reforms of capitalism.

Stan Parker

The Futility of Reformism (2000)

Book Review from the February 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Labour in Crisis – The Second Labour Government, 1929-31’. By Neil Riddell. (Manchester University Press)

The Labour Party, they used to say, was a broad church. Tony Blair, though he has sanctimoniousness in buckets, has spent much of the last five years trying to narrow it down a little. But he has not always found this easy. The strength of Riddell’s book is to show clearly just how much of a compromise the Labour Party always was.

First the facts of the second Labour government. It was elected as a minority in 1929 under the clouds of the impending crash. It imploded in 1931 amid squabbles over a cut in the dole, and after the desertion of Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald to form the National Government (a Tory-dominated coalition).

This much is well known. What Riddell does that is new is to trace relationships between different sections of the Labour movement (the part, that is, which constituted the Labour Party) as capitalism’s latest crisis left the politicians gasping. Except “relationships” isn’t always the right word. “Hatreds” might sometimes be better. Senior trade unionists (who Sidney Webb called “pigs”) and politicians came close to blows at least once. A broad church maybe, but saintly it was not.

What were the aims of different parts of the movement, which Riddell maintains never could have been reconciled? The TUC wanted a government answerable to them, committed to removing the anti-union laws passed after the general strike. MacDonald, of course, had no intention of giving it them.

Local Labour parties with union backing agreed with the TUC. The rest, always broke because of union resistance to pooled funds, just tried to stay afloat. Union-sponsored MPs generally went along with the TUC line too. Other MPs split, some supporting the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in its quest for “a living wage”. This was proposed first as a remedy for under-consumption, later as a “transitional demand” by which capitalism would be bankrupted. Some for a while were sympathetic to Mosley. Most could only hope that their seats would be safe when the fiasco ended.

Riddell devotes much space to what he calls “the intellectuals”. Looking at what they supported, now and later, this is surely to flatter them. Generally, they plumped for some sort of nationalisation as the way ahead.

Different again was MacDonald himself, a keen proponent of “the inevitability of gradualness”. He believed that meaningful change could come about through piecemeal reforms of capitalism. Snowden, his chancellor, was firmly committed to balanced budgets, free trade and the gold standard. Both craved respectability. (Sound familiar, anyone?).

No wonder R. H. Tawney could call their 1929 manifesto “a glittering forest of Christmas trees, with presents for everyone”. And it was undeliverable. As for the alternative, propagated in the pages of this paper then as now, there was not a whisper from anyone.

Disappointments were inevitable, and MacDonald’s non-spin doctored public relations only made things worse for him. What really knocked the apple from the tree though was capitalism’s slump. When the government did crash, it was spectacular.

The movement, of course, resolved that such a thing must never happen again. Webb went off to look for a different dream, and found it in the USSR. (Soviet Communism: a new civilisation? was published in 1935, but reprinted two years later without the question mark). Generally, the party took up a different brand of reformism in the 1930s and 1940s, looking ever more to nationalisation, finance controls and management by “experts” working through a benign state. “Gradualism” was too slow; and the next Labour government was quicker off the mark.

But what difference would it make? It wasn’t just MacDonald’s leadership which was found wanting in 1931. It was the whole idea that capitalism could be reformed into something kindly and user-friendly. It couldn’t and it can’t. Blair is the face of a Labour Party that accepts this basic truth.

Toby Crowe

Letters: Love on the Dole (2000)

Letters to the Editors from the February 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Love on the Dole

Dear Editors,

In his review (Socialist Standard, November) of Love on the Dole, Michael Gill alleges that the British Board of Film Censors would not allow the play to be filmed. The Board existed only to censor films once made but had no powers to prevent a film being made. In fact the film of Love on the Dole was made in 1941.

Denham Ford, 

Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex

Reply: 

You are quite right, the British Board of Film Censors has no power to prevent a film being made. However, since in practice all films shown in public places must have a certificate from the Board, it is regularly consulted by film makers before and whilst films are being made. You will find interesting details of how the process is managed, for instance, in the material for Open University Course A420, Cinema and Society: Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. It is very revealing.

And you are quite right that Love on the Dole was filmed in 1941. Ironically, the production company’s stated aim was “to show the public the true state of affairs which arose after the last war in the industrial areas and which must not be allowed to flourish when the immediate conflict is over”. So whilst, as we said in our review, the BBFC effectively “prevented this ‘very sordid story in very sordid surroundings’ from being filmed in the 1930s” (NT programme), when the Second World War began the same story was made in support of the war -Editors.

Pure chance?

Dear Editors,

I take it from your letter column (December) that you socialists are all firm believers in Dawkins’s blind watchmaker operating in evolution without any purpose at all.

That being so I wonder where you socialists draw the line between Darwin’s natural selection and human beings as producers of many civilisations in the past 6,000 years.

If human beings are a product of a blind mindless watchmaker surely you should accept this belief as being a miracle of nature even as much as the divine miracles that appear in the pages of the bible.

One could easily say that evolution from lifeless matter brought about by a blind watchmaker is a supreme miracle which one could also interpret as a miracle of matter.

As the bible is not the only book to look for miracles as evolution has plenty of them.

Nevertheless, Darwin did not explain the mutation in evolution which produced the consciousness of human beings who managed to produce civilisations.

Are we to believe civilisations are also a product of a blind watchmaker?

R. Smith, 

Dundee

Reply: 

No, human civilisations are not produced by the same blind, biological processes that led to the evolution of all the various species of life on Earth, extinct and extant, including homo sapiens. Once humans had been evolved (by the “blind watchmaker” process) then, thanks to their biologically evolved ability to think abstractly and make conscious, purposeful, decisions as well as their ability to extend their anatomy by means of tools, human evolution ceases to be biological and becomes social and cultural, reflecting the development of the tools humans make and use.

Because human action is always purposeful, an element of purpose is indeed involved in this type of evolution (but it is of course, human purpose, or rather the different purposes of different humans, not that of some supernatural, miracle-working being). However, humans do not have a complete free hand here. As one well-known 19th century materialist put it, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past” (Karl Marx). This means that the evolution of human societies is subject also to the working of objective, non-purposeful processes which can be found by study and research, but these are not at all the same as those that governed biological evolution.

And yes, the biological evolution of life, consciousness and the self-consciousness which humans alone possess can be explained without having recourse to the concept of “miracles”, i.e. the intervention of some supernatural being(s). We don’t yet know enough to state definitely how life first evolved, but we will get there eventually. For the present state of knowledge and study of this matter see the collection of articles in Skeptical Inquirer (Sep/Oct 1999) “Where Do We Come From? The Biology Of Life’s Origin”-Editors.

World solution

Dear Editors,

Whilst I do not have a problem with much of Simon Wigley’s “Open Letter to Reclaim The Streets” (Socialist Standard, January), I would be interested to understand how the statement: “we are glad to see the emergence of organisations attacking capitalism as a system rather than merely its particular evils” is compatible with Clause 7 of our party’s Declaration of Principles, namely: ” . . . the party seeking working class emancipation must be hostile to every other party”?

Simply being opposed to capitalism does not make a person or an organisation socialist i.e. one seeking working class emancipation.

Being a socialist surely implies agreement with:

• Our class and economic analysis of capitalism,
• The need to replace that social system by one based on the common ownership and the democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all society,
• The need to establish socialism through democratic political action, that is, by winning control of the state apparatus.

I see no evidence from Simon Wigley’s letter that the anarchist organisations he wishes us to welcome share the conclusions which make the Socialist Party contribution to political and economic thought so distinctive and clear.

Associating ourselves, albeit fairly critically, by expressing general words of support and identifying alleged common ground with non-socialist organisations can only create confusion amongst those we are trying to win to the socialist case and thus puts back the achievement of socialism itself.

Andrew C. Northall, 

Kettering, Northants

Reply: 

We never went that far, nor meant to. We were not seeking common ground with non-socialist organisations nor saying that people should join them but welcoming the fact that some people were moving towards identifying capitalism as the cause of problems they had previously sought to deal with on a single-issue basis, and urging them to take the next step and join us in the struggle for socialism as the only practicable alternative to capitalism.

“Recognition that the global capitalist system, based on the exploitation of people and the planet for the profit of a few, is at the very root of our social and ecological troubles” (as a leaflet for J18 put it) is, as you point out, not the equivalent of socialist understanding but it is a step—indeed, an indispensable step—towards it and the more widespread it is, the easier it must be for us to put our case across. So how can we as Socialists not welcome its emergence? And where else, if not amongst such people, are we to find “those we are trying to win to the socialist case”? -Editors.

Capitalism and the Internet (2): The Internet and Ideology (2000)

From the February 2000 of the Socialist Standard

Link 1

  The Internet is being hailed as a saviour by both capitalists and anti-capitalists alike. Rarely has any technology been so universally viewed as a holy grail by sworn mutual enemies. Who is right? Will it destroy capitalism or rejuvenate it?

At the Christopher Columbus school in Union City, New Jersey, a dustbin school with a dropout rate as high as its pass rate was low, an experiment was conducted in 1993. Each student was given a home PC and taught online, with both teacher and parent training to assist. The dropout rate fell to near zero, the daytime attendance rate rose to near perfect, and test scores rose 10 points higher than the NJ state average, in every subject. (http://www.gip.com).

Though schooling is unlikely ever to be entirely online, for social reasons, the possibilities of education in general via the Internet are nevertheless enormous. Traditional education—in real time—relies on too many ingredients being present in the right order, amount and quality. Virtual schools can tailor classes to individuals to a far higher degree of precision. Night school does not have to be at night, or local, or regular, or in one place, or reliant on one teacher. Educators have literally a world of resources to draw upon, while self-educators have the best access to knowledge of any generation that has existed. The establishment of the global knowledge network which we are now seeing has been aptly described by Douglas Rushkoff as “the hard-wiring of the global brain” (Cyberia 1994). Education, once the province of the rich and jealously guarded by them, is being democratised at an unprecedented rate. And ideology cannot change without a change in education.

Education is also about debate, and the lack of a public domain or sphere in which to discuss ideas has been held to be a key factor in late 20th Century ideological stagnation (Habermas, Schneider, Rheingold, quoted in Alinta Thornton’s Masters thesis, University of Sydney, (Link). Now, however, Usenet, the global network of mailing lists and newsgroups, is becoming an organic encyclopaedia and coffee house which permits debate on every issue 24 hours a day. As the Romans had the Forum, so we have Usenet. It is the new theatre in the war of ideologies now heating up. Good ideas will spread there. Bad ones will die there. Usenet is where theorists become activists, and where activists learn their theory. Capitalist ideologues are going to have to work harder in future, for educated populations cannot be fobbed off with fairy tales. They start to expect things their forebears didn’t even imagine. They start to make demands.

The DD Digerati

The first demand is more democracy. Capitalism in its advanced form relies on a model of liberal democracy to get the best out of workers, but it has to take a chance on them asking for too much. Now, governments from Britain to Malaysia to Costa Rica are “enthusiastically” experimenting with virtual council meetings and online voting in an effort to keep abreast of the public expectation of more open government. That this enthusiasm is ambivalent is shown by the fact that many of these same governments are also trying to legislate controls into the Internet—unsuccessfully as it happens. The cybergeek contingent—the “digerati”—are excitedly lyricising about running society with Direct Democracy instead of representative government, which they somewhat naively imagine was a democratic expedient imposed by geographical and other practical limitations.

Astonishing technical advance

Nobody who comprehends the class struggle will believe for an instant that the rich will allow Direct Democracy—except where it can’t do any harm and where it might bore us stupid with trivial decision-making. However, the expectation of more democracy is an important and empowering development nonetheless, for it represents a line of convergence with socialist thinking and away from the leadership mentality which plagues radical thinking. When it becomes loud enough, it will be a sign that the working class is gaining a little self-respect at last.

The second demand is a new agenda. As the organisational ability of “wired” protesters is now increasingly on a par with that of governments, as we saw with J18 and N30 and may see again with Mayday 2000, a new sense of potency seems to be sweeping through the radical mind. We don’t have to take it lying down. Corporations are not invulnerable. Individuals can be held to account. Even an entire social system can be challenged, as disparate and sometimes frankly deluded single-issue activists coalesce under the gravitational pull of common experience into what may yet become an embryonic anti-capitalism movement. Instead of being a passive consumerist mass, we can learn to think of ourselves as a proactive team of individuals. The Internet is creating a climate of new possibilities that cuts away at the dead growth of apathy and spawns a new idea: the network consciousness, a concept of interactive, interlinked human nodes in a vast, decentralised and co-operative process, a foretaste of working class consciousness.

Custodes custodiamus

Schooled however in the old thinking, we might conclude that the state will take over the Internet and use it as a new and terrible weapon of control over the working class. Accepting that they have always won in the past, we can only imagine that they will always win in the future. Is there not now a CCTV camera on every street corner? Do they not have their satellites, listening stations and Cray computers monitoring every move, purchase and phone call we make? Well, they may do, and those dedicated to underground criminal or insurrectionary activities may indeed worry about this, but there is something here for the monitors to worry about too—we can also watch them.

The near-level playing field of the cybersociety means that whatever they can do to us, we can do right back to them. This mutual integrated surveillance is already taking place, as US state governors now find themselves and their domestic affairs interrogated by an international brigade, and the government of Mexico finds its attempts to quietly crush the Zapatistas constantly harried and hamstrung by the unwelcome attention of the global online community. Amateur video of Rodney King helping police with their enquiries started the LA riots, and protesters now typically tool up with camcorders, laptops and mobile phones. Anything one protester discovers, all soon know. Governments, like the burglars they are, hate to work in the spotlight, and now it isn’t only the news media which are directing the beams. This is a game we can all play. Quis custodes custodiat? Answer: we do.

Bomb damage

Much is made of government censorship, and governments can certainly close down any website they don’t like. But only temporarily. Just as the forerunner of the Internet, ARPANET, was devised by the military to route around bomb damage to any node, so the Internet can equally route around censorship damage. Besides, the Net is global, whereas governments are local, and what one government dislikes another will frequently allow or ignore. China, so keen to imprison radical Internet users, is nevertheless in a minority of one where censorship is concerned, and its control of internal information flows is haemorrhaging at a thousand different points.

Monitoring of users worldwide is easily countered by the rapid growth of “anonymiser” sites (e.g. www.anonymiser.com), which strip out your personal details and let you roam without fear of identification. Autocensorship software is notoriously unreliable and it is easily outmanoeuvred. Besides, the rich themselves are not keen on government control. A book called Friendly Spies quotes the IBM office in Paris as having done a set of experiments to demonstrate the fact that the code keys they were required to share with the French government were being used for industrial espionage purposes (quoted in GIP).

It may not be states we have to worry about. The omniscient state may be an obsolescent dinosaur in any case, as capitalism militantly embraces the ‘free’ market and multinationals grow so powerful that “an estimated one quarter of all world trade now consists of sales between subsidiaries of the same firm” (Alvin & Heidi Toffler, War and Anti-War, 1993).

  “The flow of information into or out of a nation can no longer be effectively controlled by the state; information is everywhere and accessible. To participate in the burgeoning economic benefits of world commerce means adopting practices that undermine state control . . .” (Carl Builder, Strategy analyst, RAND Corporation).

Riccardo Petrella, a former science and technology director at the European Commission, predicts the collapse of the nation state and the rise of a ‘hi-tech archipelago’ of city-states in conjunction with multinational companies, while Warren Christopher, former US Secretary of State, predicts “5000 countries rather than the hundred-plus we have now” and George Yao, Singapore deputy PM, foresees the disintegration of China into hundreds of city-states. (Quoted in Toffler).

Today, cutting edge; tomorrow, garbage

Were this to occur, it must be a disaster for fascist ideology, since it gives the nationalists just what they think they want, and lets them choke on it. People might fight for the right to be called Basques, Latvians or Chechens, but it is hard to imagine them fighting over Coke or Pepsi in the same way. In any case, war is likely to become increasingly hard to justify when the global working class is just that, global. Much of the hate propaganda necessary to stoke public sympathy for a war will be impossible to foist on an internationalised class which works together, online, every day of the week.

The String Vest of Secrecy

Even secrecy is on the wane in the future, if one believes the former science adviser to President Reagan, G. A. Keyworth. Pointing to the fact that traditional intelligence gathering has been on the monumental scale (the US Government produced 6.3 million classified documents in 1992 alone) and involves a huge industry of chaff sorting and “analysis paralysis”, he says: “The price of protecting information is so high that classification becomes a handicap”. Meanwhile Robert Steele of US Intelligence, a critic of the secrecy industry, says: “The hidden costs of secrecy are so immense they often outweigh the benefits by a wide margin.”

Steele and others argue for an open system, with very little secrecy. It is surprising what is already in the public domain. Larry Seaquist of US Naval Intelligence reports that they get more useful information from one Internet PC than all their private and highly secret SPARC workstations put together. There are already few things which are really secret, even if we might wish they were. An underground nuclear cookbook called Basement Nukes prompts Michael Golay, professor of nuclear engineering at MIT, to say: “What’s classified today is how to build a good weapon, not how to build a weapon.” In a wider sense, the Internet will by its nature militate against the holding of secrets, for risk-free disclosure is a button-press away for any individual and information sharing has long been the accepted mode of transaction online. The global brain, one might say, will steadily illuminate its own dark areas. Capitalist ideology, insofar as it depends on secrecy, is due for a hammering.

Paddy Shannon

(Next month: we continue the discussion of the impact of the Internet on capitalist ideology.)

Link to part 3

GLITCH 

As if to prove that computer technology is not infallible, in Part I of this series the first two paragraphs on page 9 of the January Socialist Standard , were garbled as a result of the unexplained introduction of material from another article. The garbled passage should have read:

Yet talk of “boxes” is itself an obsolescent concept, as Xerox have perfected “e-paper” (Observer, 22 August) and research continues towards wristwatch computers and even brain implants, giving rise to talk of “synthetic telepathy” in the more distant future. And as science revolutionises the Internet, so the Internet is revolutionising science. With the spatial decoupling of the scientist from the task, the so-called “collaboratory” is born, enabling multiple users to share a singe physical resource, enhanced productivity with no travel time, and participation by experimenters in multiple, geographically-distributed projects.

Our apologies to readers and the writers—Editors. 

A disaster waiting to happen (2000)

From the February 2000 of the Socialist Standard 

When the global economic crisis hit, first, the Pacific Rim countries and, later, Latin America and elsewhere, just over a couple of years ago, Venezuela was, as we noted (Socialist Standard, October 1998), particularly vulnerable. It had been economically and politically unstable for at least two decades, and corruption was rife (see Socialist Standard, September 1999).

In February last year, Hugo Chavez, the former paratrooper who had led a failed military coup d’état seven years previously, was elected president; and in August, he and his left-wing coalition won an overwhelming victory (but on a 53 percent turnout) in the elections to the National Assembly. He had proposed a complete rewriting of the constitution, the draft of which went before the new assembly, and was passed on 16 December.

According to his mainly right-wing critics, President Chavez has become a virtual dictator. He has increased, against the general trend worldwide, state intervention and control of the economy, reduced civilian control of the armed forces, and has probably secured the presidency for himself until 2012. He says that he needs such powers in order to “root out corruption” which, of course, he blames on previous governments. And, said Chavez, he would solve Venezuela’s economic ills. Nevertheless, between February last year, when he became president, and the beginning of December, unemployment had increased by a massive 700,000.

On polling day, last August, there was heavy rainfall throughout much of Venezuela, causing a number of landslides, 37 deaths, and the destruction of up to 2,000 homes. But worse was to come.

Beginning around 10 December, almost a year’s average rain fell, outside the usual rainy season, in five days. Torrential rain continued for another five days. The worse affected area was the tiny Vargas state bordering the Caribbean Sea in the north-west of Venezuela. Much of the country is flat; but there are hills and mountains, such as Mount Avila, inland and parallel to the coast, from Guacara in the west to the east of Caracas, the capital.

By 15 December, huge amounts of mud as well as large rocks and boulders began to slide down towards the coast. The soils, have, moreover, suffered constant erosion over the years; and when the natural dykes broke rivers formed, sending floods of muddy water onto the low-lying areas. Large swathes of the northern coast were swept into the sea. One of the towns to be worse hit was Carmen de Uria. It only had dirt roads; and it straddled what had been a small river, which had no proper embankment. After 10 days of rain, the river overflowed, cascading through many homes. Shortly after, Carmen de Uria was entirely buried under mud.

Floods like these claimed 100,000 lives in Venezuela

“It was,” said Piero Feliziani, an Italian geologists, “a holocaust waiting to happen.” But it need not have caused so much death, destruction and misery, even if it was a “natural” disaster. (The Archbishop of Caracas said that the rains “were divine retribution” for President Chavez’s radical policies!)

The basic cause, however, was the rapid development of a commodity-producing, capitalist, market economy from the early 1950s. According to Michael McCaughan in the Observer:

  “Venezuela, like neighbouring Colombia and Peru, was a largely rural society with strong family community ties until the fifties, when civil unrest and depressed crop prices forced millions into misery belts around the cities, where they piled high in precarious dwellings” (26 December).

For decades, there has been rapid, uncontrolled, unregulated immigration from the rural areas of extreme poverty to, and around, Caracas and other cities seeking employment, first, in the expanding oil industry and, then, in tourism. Indeed Venezuela’s weak economy depends almost entirely on oil and tourism for its foreign revenue. Vargas state has 500,000 workers who service the tourist industry, or commute each day to Caracas from the shanty towns and ranchos in the hills surrounding the capital. “Corrupt politicians and planners” turned a blind eye to such developments, where up to 350,000 workers existed, often without electricity, running water or main drainage.

This urban overpopulation is, according to Luisa Romero, an investment broker based in New York, “one more effect of the globalised economy”. It has also resulted in the death, disappearance and loss of habitation of hundreds of thousands of workers. Indeed, at the time of writing these lines, the numbers are not known, and may never be known, but have been estimated at more than 450,000, then times the number killed in Venezuela’s previous catastrophe, the earthquake of 1812.

Surely, if nothing else, the events and disaster in Venezuela at the end of 1999 demonstrate the need to replace capitalism by a new, democratic society of production, not of profit, but of use and the satisfaction of people’s needs; a socialist society of common ownership of natural resources (including Venezuela’s oil reserves if still required) and the means of production.

Peter E. Newell

Putin raises nuclear stakes (2000)

From the February 2000 of the Socialist Standard 

In December’s Socialist Standard, we commented on the decision by the US Senate not to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the promise by the more hawkish Republicans to scupper the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty which outlawed “Star Wars” defence programmes, and suggested that such steps, at the dawn of a new millennium dampened any hopes the more optimistic workers held for the 21st century.

We did not have to wait long for further confirmation of the troubled century that awaits us. Two weeks into the new millennium, the Guardian reported on Moscow’s newly published security strategy doctrine which aims to raise the nuclear stakes by lowering the threshold at which Russia can resort to the use of nuclear weapons:

“Mr Yeltsin’s strategy, decreed in December 1997, declared that nuclear weapons could only be used ‘in the case of a threat to the very existence of the Russian Federation as a sovereign state’. The new document states that the use of nuclear weapons is necessary ‘to repel armed aggression if all other means of resolving a crisis situation have been exhausted or turn out to be ineffective’ “(14 January).

At the peak of the Cold War, the former Soviet Union had a force of 5 million under arms and was an acknowledged superpower. Since 1989, it has seen its armed forces shrink to almost a fifth of that number and has suffered humiliation after humiliation—the withdraw from Afghanistan in 1989 and the first botched war in Chechnya, for instance. As well as morale in the armed forces being low, their combat readiness, according to Putin himself, is in a critical condition, with training and maintenance reported as being grossly inadequate. While a contingent of 300 Russian soldiers serving in Kosovo as part of the peace keeping force have been returned home because of alleged drunkenness, drug-taking and a general inadequateness, the higher ranks are becoming notorious for their infighting, with the defence minister constantly arguing with his generals.

With the above in mind, one can well see the method in Putin’s madness. He has after all the job of protecting the interests of Russia’s capitalist elite with faulty tools. Moreover, he is faced with the stark realisation that he exists in a unipolar world increasingly dominated by the US. Putin’s attempt to make the world once again bipolar can also be seen a response to NATO’s New Strategic Concept which, like Putin’s proposals in his 21 page document, suggests the early recourse to the use of nuclear weapons.

That the world’s leaders are still prepared to carry their nuclear logic into another century, that they are continually prepared to wipe out millions of their fellow humans to further the interests of a minority at the end of a century that witnessed the deaths of 220 million in conflict, should shatter any illusions we have that this century will proceed on a different course to the one we have stepped out of. While we contemplate the wars, the conflicts and the horrors our masters have in store for us this coming century, it is also important to remember that we as a class hold the power to prevent the same from coming about.

We are not ruled by force or coercion, but by consent. The Putins and Clintons of this world can only do the things they do because we vote them in, thus legitimising their actions, however detrimental they may be to our interests. War and conflict and all the terrors we dare to imagine only come to pass because we refuse to join together as a class to express our class interests. Once we recognise that as a class we have shared basic needs and desires, suffering the same privations because of our less privileged position in the relations of production, and unite in defiance of that minority intent on maintaining the status quo and its nuclear insanity, we need never fear the horror of war again.

While you muse on the aforementioned, remember the argument is not that complicated. This is your world as much as anybody’s and requires your active involvement to protect it. Are you for socialism or against it? Don’t take too long to make up your mind—we may not have that much time.

John Bissett

Greasy Pole: Nothing New Millennium (2000)

The Greasy Pole column from the February 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

If there was a sense of relief when the twenty-first century finally dawned it must have been partly because we would no longer have to endure those comments about society which unfailingly began with the words: “With the approach of the Millennium”. It seemed that any plans to do anything about the crisis in the NHS, or about making rail travel safer, or reducing pollution, were given an added urgency because we were approaching a new century. By the year 2000 we had to get it right.

This was irritating enough, especially as those making the comments were usually trying to impress us with the historical sweep of their intellects. It might have been hoped, that the first of January would have brought some relief, the nonsense would have stopped and we would be back in what is called normality, when social problems and deficiencies are described in more commonplace terms, without any added significance by the turning of another page in the calendar. But it was not to be. The celebratory fireworks had hardly died away when we were being assailed with comments which began with such words as “Now that we have entered the new Millennium . . .”

Perhaps enough people were deceived by this into thinking that the arbitrary process of passing from one year to another—or in this case one century to another—would really affect how the world is organised so that the new millennium would bring evidence that people were becoming safer, healthier, more optimistic about their future. If so, they were critically deluded. They would have forgotten that we are treated to the same kind of nonsense every December, when the first seconds of a new year are a time to assume that the next twelve months will be better than the last when reality encourages the conclusion that if anything they will be worse.

Harold Wilson 

We have been here before. As the year 1969 drew to a close the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson made several references to the approach of the 1970s, rather in the same style as all those hopes and plans for the 21st century. The Seventies, Wilson assured us, would be better than the previous decade. He was, in fact, in difficulties because by then his government, which had been elected on the promise to oversee the blossoming of a great new age in which technological advance and planning would solve problems like poverty, disease and poor education, had been largely discredited. Such was the disillusion among his supporters that at one stage it was reasonable to speculate on whether the Labour Party was about to disintegrate. Wilson was desperate; by encouraging us to look forward to a new decade of the Seventies he hoped to deter us from inconvenient memories of the Sixties.

Well of course it did not work out as he had hoped. The Labour government staggered from one crisis to the next. Soon after the dawn of the new decade they were ousted from power, then a few years later returned in the wake of Heath’s calamitous three-day week. By then the much vaunted technological revolution had faded into the disreputable history of politicians’ promises. It was replaced by Labour’s assurance that its special relationship with the unions could smooth the way for their policy of forcing down our living standards which, by some mysterious process, would make us all better off. A few of the party’s more deranged supporters believed this but a lot of them did not—particularly those trade unionists who got fed up with the constant struggle to prevent their standards declining and defended themselves with the strikes which were later damned as the Winter of Discontent. This was followed by glorious spring for the Tories, as Thatcher romped into power, consigning the Labour Party and all its blather about a new decade into the wilderness for almost twenty years.

NHS

And what about now, with a New Labour government and its promises of a new society with new values, new priorities, new achievements . . .? Well there is nothing new about the NHS being in crisis, with nurses and doctors worked into the ground and sick people having to wait for months just to be examined so that they can be allowed onto another waiting list. There is nothing new about this deplorable experience existing at the same time as the rapid and effective treatment available to anyone who has the kind of money needed to pay for a team of the best doctors and a stay in the most exclusive hospitals. There is nothing new in the situation recently summarised by Alistair Darling, whose job as Social Services Secretary is supposed to make him responsible for alleviating poverty: “. . . a child can still be born poor, live poor, die poor”. He did not also say that a child in another class will be born rich, live rich, die rich.

What about other ministers? How are they grappling with the problems of the new millennium? Well Home Secretary Jack Straw plans to prove how tough he is on crime by threatening the legal rights of people charged with minor thefts while he protects the welfare of General Pinochet, who is not one of those youths washing your windscreen at traffic lights without you asking for it but a man who, as dictator of Chile, oversaw the murder of thousands of people there. Straw has bent the rules on admissible immigrants to allow Mike Tyson into this country although he should be disqualified by reason of his prison sentences for rape and assault. The reason for Straw’s generosity was clear: Tyson was due to fight here and if anything was allowed to stop that happening a lot of money would be lost, particularly by the fight promoters and the owners of the TV rights, who are such close buddies of Tony Blair.

Sheffield Wednesday

And as Straw was engaged in grabbing the headlines for his battles for his version of a better life for us all in the 21st century he was in competition with Sheffield’s Labour MPs, among them Education Secretary David Blunkett. Since his days as leader of Sheffield City Council Blunkett has undergone something of a change. He is no longer the challenging left-winger but a man who wants to hound out teachers who display any human frailty in overcoming the difficulties of teaching kids whose extreme impoverishment has extended into their conduct in the classroom. Blunkett has begun the new century by showing that his zeal for sacking people will not stop at schools. With the other MPs, he has demanded the head of the manager of Sheffield Wednesday because the team are stuck at the bottom of the Premiership. Blunkett is pitiless to the idea that, after all, some team has to come last and it does not seem to have occurred to him, that campaigning against a football manager is hardly revolutionary activity for an ex-firebrand of the left.

Nothing new about poverty then, nor about avoidable sickness. Nothing new about class-related degrees of access to wealth. Nothing new about capitalism and how it degrades and represses the very people who are useful and productive while it nurtures its parasites. Nothing new about Labour ministers trying to hide their impotence in smoke screens of deceit.

Ivan

Is Britain being abolished? (2000)

Book Review from the February 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The Abolition of Britain’. By Peter Hitchens. (Quarter Books)

It certainly is according to rabid right-wing Daily Express columnist Peter Hitchens. Hitchens, who is critical of Mrs Thatcher and regards Michael Portillo as being too liberal, has set out his stall in a book which argues that the post-war period (especially since the 60s) has seen the gradual erosion of everything that once characterised Britain as a great independent Empire nation.

According to Hitchens, Britain’s political, economic and social institutions have been taken over by “cultural revolutionaries” whose clear aim has been the abolition of Britain by stealth. This has resulted in some of the following: the decline of religion, morality and family life; the ruination of a perfectly good education system with comprehensive schooling; the legalisation of homosexuality and the rise of permissive sexual practice, and the abolition of corporal and capital punishment. Underpinning all of the above has been the general decline in respect for authority and patriotism. For Hitchens, this has led to a Britain which is no longer at ease with itself and one which has closed its eyes to its own history which is held in contempt.

Needless to say, with the arrival of Tony Blair and New Labour on 1 May 1997 the final nail in Britain’s coffin was hammered home:

  “1st May 1997 really was the start of a new era. The new Prime Minister’s triumphal progress to Buckingham palace and Downing Street was filmed from the air by sycophantic broadcasters as if a dull cortege of motor cars were a rebel army finally emerging from the sierras to occupy a conquered city.”

And we are all aware of what has subsequently followed. Devolution for Wales and Scotland, House of Lords reform and of course plans to join the single European currency and merge Britain into a federal European super-state. For Hitchens, all this is tantamount to treachery.

For socialists, Hitchens’s entire concept of “Britain” is wrong. All capitalist societies are divided along class lines—capitalist and worker—therefore any talk of “nation” or patriotism is palpable nonsense. Capitalists and workers do not share a common identity nor do they share any interests in common.

Given this, it would be easy to dismiss Hitchens’s views as the ramblings of a mad reactionary “golden-age” theorist who presupposes that the 1950s represented the last bastions of a perfect society. Hitchens, however, has identified certain negative trends in society but has drawn the wrong, reactionary conclusions.

The real materialist backdrop to Hitchens’s entire argument is Britain’s comparative economic decline as a world power and the profound social and political changes that this has undoubtedly brought about. However, Britain’s decline started way before the second world war (as far back as at least the latter part of the 19th century) so there is a historical qualification to Hitchens’s argument. His basic error lies in his uncritical support for Britain’s imperial past whilst at the same time condemning Britain’s rivals for having similar ambitions. His understanding of the nature of capitalism is clearly inadequate.

Clearly there is much wrong with modern society but it is not the result of the so-called “Liberal Revolution” of the 1960s. It is due to the decline of capitalism and the subsequent social havoc which has been created. Of course, Hitchens is really on a Christian/moral crusade against homosexuality and the rise of sexual freedoms which has threatened the sanctity of the traditional nuclear family as society’s cornerstone.

It may be argued that Hitchens’s obsession with morality is a cover for the increasing gap between rich and poor with the obvious social consequences: poverty, frustration, alienation, family breakdown and violence. However, Hitchens is slightly more sophisticated than this. He decries not only both main political parties for presiding over Britain’s moral downfall but also the legacy of Thatcher:

  “The apparent rebirth of Conservatism in 1979 was a false dawn because the Thatcherite movement was not interested in morals or culture. It believed mainly in the cleansing power of the market, which has much to be said for it but which has no answers to many fundamental questions—and which cannot operate properly unless honesty and stability are enforced through both ethics and law. Worse, the Thatcher government unwittingly helped to destroy many of the things Conservatism once stood for. In eighteen years of power, an immense time, the Thatcher-Major government was unable to reverse a single part of the cultural revolution, not least because it barely tried, and did not understand it.”

There is always a certain irony when a staunch defender of capitalism starts to invoke a moral code for human behaviour but in a way it is quite refreshing. At the very least, Hitchens believes that humans are capable of behaving decently (although some of Hitchens’s views can hardly be described as decent). However, he is likely to be disappointed because a social system based upon production-for-profit instead of production-for-need is almost by definition anti-social and amoral.

Dave Flynn

50 Years Ago: Fifty Years Mark-Time (2000)

The 50 Years Ago column from the February 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. Francis Williams, one-time Editor of the Daily Herald, has written a history of the Labour Party. “Fifty Years’ March, The Rise of the Labour Party”, published by Odhams Press, Ltd. We suspect that Mr. Williams wrote with a distemper brush. He has certainly given the Labour Party an unblemished white-washing. The main theme of this history is summed up by Mr. Attlee in the foreword to the book. He says:-

  “It is a story very characteristic of Britain, showing the triumph of reasonableness and practicability over doctrinaire impossibilism.”

(. . .) One thing the author does make clear, although possibly without intending to do so. That is, that the founders of the Labour Party wanted to build a Political Party with a substantial numerical strength and they were quite prepared to sacrifice their respective “Socialist” principles at the altar of a large membership. He tells that most of the prominent early workers in the Labour Party were far-seeing enough to build an organisation with numerical and financial strength and a firm foundation of mass support. He proceeds to show us throughout the pages of the book, how the so called Socialists of the Labour Party have had to compromise, twist, wriggle, turn, betray and mis-lead the non-Socialist mass support in order to hold it together. And after studying that sort of thing for years, seeing the struggle between the mass support and the leadership, the desertions, the betrayals, the collapses, and the failure to prevent the evils of capitalism, Mr. Williams still thinks that the Labour Party is a Socialist Party. He still has not learned that the strength of a working-class Party lies not just in its numbers but in its understanding of its objective and its determination to achieve it.

(From an article by W. Waters, Socialist Standard, February 1950)

Tory chickens come home to roost (2000)

Book Review from the February 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Explaining Labour's Landslide. By Robert Worcester & Roger Mortimore. Politico's.

Opinion polling has been a feature of British political life since 1938. (57 percent of people were satisfied with Neville Chamberlain's performance as Prime Minister). By the last general election, however, the pollsters were on trial as never before. They had, horror of horrors, got the result of the 1992 election wrong.

In the end, their predictions of Labour's victory in May 1997 turned out to be creditably close to the mark. The Tories lost 177 seats. Labour won its highest ever number of MPs, and had a majority of 179. Worcester, who founded the MORI agency in 1969 and has been closely involved with political polling ever since, and Mortimore tell the story of that election through the data the polls provided.

The Tories were doomed long before the campaign began, they argue, because of problems almost entirely of their own making. To any socialist, this is deeply uninteresting stuff. The high point of this part of the book, as it was of the campaign, is the man the Tories paid to dress up as a chicken and follow Blair around. Which of them talked more sense is still hotly debated.

And yet, this is not a boring book. It argues strongly from a position of hard facts supplied by the polls that bias in the press does swing votes. During the 1979 election, two thirds of Sun readers didn't know its political allegiance. (Its front page on polling day consisted of two words: "VOTE TORY"). By 1997, "the print media did . . . have significant influence on the voting behaviour of their readers". In this case at least, greater political awareness seems to be a handicap.

The authors are suitably cutting about the cynical and meaningless astrological "predictions" spouted by several papers. The Express, for example, claimed that "a Tory victory is written in the stars . . . Tony Blair is doomed due to the poor positioning of something called the planet Rahu". Shelley von Strunckel in the Evening Standard was cleverer, taking a whole page to hint at a hung parliament without actually committing herself to anything at all. This under the headline "Forget polls, the result is in the stars".

Most interesting for socialists though, is the section What is public opinion? Clearly for anyone concerned to see a huge shift in human consciousness, this is an important area. The book gives much food for thought. "Public opinion", it maintains, comprises three things. There are "opinions: the ripples on the surface of the public's consciousness, shallow and easily changed; attitudes: the currents below the surface . . . and values: the deep tides of public mood, slow to change, but powerful". Political convictions generally (we are told) come from this third element. To dump our upbringing for capitalism frequently entails a shift in these deep values. It is possible, as the existence of the membership of the World Socialist Movement proves. But it may not always be easy.

The book of course was not written to give us ideas about how to speed up this process of human change. But what is the alternative? A man dressed as a chicken, pecking at the heels of another man who would soon be sending bombers round the world to serve British capital's interests. Pathetic, maybe; but nine out of ten people think it was childish too—the chicken bit, at least.

Toby Crowe

New Labour: forward to the past (2000)

From the February 2000 of the Socialist Standard 

Blair has claimed that this century the battle will not be between capitalism and socialism but between the forces of progress and conservatism. But his concept of a non-socialist party of progress is a throw-back to the 19th century.

At the Labour Conference last October Tony Blair delivered a messianic oration. He spoke with great fervour about the fact that he and his party are on the side of progress, identifying the progressives as a vast political movement of high-minded and fair people, who believe in the future, and against the dread-hooded minions of conservatism. Or, as Peter Sellers, put it, that we must go onward in a forwards direction to the future, because time waits for no man, and onwards is the way forward to the place in which we will one day arrive. Or some such.

Blair declared that the Labour Party had thrown aside Ideology, but would stay true to its values. Quite how he thinks values and ideology are dissociable is anyone's guess, specifically since he uses ideology in its meaning as a system of ideas or creed, which is exactly what one should have thought values would mean. Then again, political speeches are not about logical intellectual rigour, nor about clarity or sense. Blair was pulling the biggest ideological dodge in the book (one much beloved by pre-Thatcher Tories) that he is being pragmatic and free from ideology doing what is "objectively" right for the national interest, while his opponents are blinded by their ideological commitments. What matters is not the substance of what is being said, but the appearance. No-one wants to think of themselves as an unreasoning fanatic, which is what ideologue is code for, nor would they wish to vote for one.

Tony Blair also deployed other, simple, logical fallacies in order to try to bolster his political position. Most notably, he baldly deployed the logical fallacy of bifurcation: the presentation of a false set of options, an exclusive either/or option when that isn't necessarily the case. In this instance he has been trying to portray the choice as being solely between a Labour government (of nice sensible progressive types) and a Tory government (full of evil lunatics who drink babies' blood, etc), insisting that the only choice for people who dislike Tory rule is to vote Labour and join his movement of lukewarm progressives.

Lukewarm progressives

Progress does have a warm, fuzzy feel to it, though. The feel of things becoming better, of rational people making sensible decisions, without being shackled by tradition or history. Progress, also, is indissolubly linked to the mindset of the industrial revolution, and the ideas that it spawned about an ever-upward increase in wealth and quality of life. Such ideas were closely linked with the Radical movement of the 19th century; and Blair and his cohorts have repeatedly linked themselves in with that 19th century Radicalism. Gordon Brown styled the labourites as "Credible Radicals", and Blair repeated the word in his speech unto inanity. Indeed, Blair stated that the 20th century had been dominated by the Tories, precisely because the Labour Party had split the moderate-progressive bloc that existed in the Liberal Party of the 19th century.

Blair seems to feel a great affinity for the 19th century radicals. A curious attitude for a moderniser to be trying to resurrect a political movement that died over 100 years ago. For much of the 19th century, Radicalism was closely linked with "middle-class" political agitation, and took place very much in the shadow of the French Revolution. Within the Liberal Party, formed officially in 1859, the Radicals were drawn from the commercial classes, with Richard Cobden and John Bright, of the famous Anti-Corn Law League, among its free-trade luminaries. At certain points of the century Radicalism had some popular support, but there was always a distinct split between its necessarily well-heeled parliamentary leaders (MPs, being unpaid, needed to have substantial private incomes) and its supporters on the ground. By the late 19th century, the Radical formed a distinct camp within the broader movement of Liberalism, and early socialists held out hopes of those Radicals coming over to their side.

The maximum programme of the Radicals was one of political reform: enlargement of the franchise, abolition of the House of Lords, the rule of law and contract, and the abolition of trade protection. The Radicals were largely committed to the market, and laissez-faire capitalism, and their programme was largely about freeing up the power of capital to exploit labour without the old social-restrictions imposed by feudal power and, as with Tony Blair, they deployed a bifurcating argument of the middle and working classes uniting against the aristocracy. Indeed, the Liberals under Gladstone (the idol of Roy Jenkins, the ideological soul-mate of Tony Blair)—who was the political leader most instrumental in bringing about the nearest thing to laissez-faire to Britain—were a disparate group, often only united in their opposition to Toryism.

What is noticeable about their programme is that it bears more than a little resemblance to that of Thatcherism—as do the values and programme set forth by Gordon Brown fighting monopolies (what greater monopoly than a nationalised industry?), fighting fraud and rip-offs, protecting people from unscrupulous bankers; in effect: trying to make the market work properly. Blair is, then right that this is entirely in keeping with the history of the Labour Party.

Branding of identical products

The clear reason for Blair's risible sophistry is that the Labour Party has become concerned that people do not feel an attachment to it. Labour are worried about the next election. The false choice of Tories or Labour is a way to try to fool voters into trooping into the ballot booths to give assent to spinach over cabbage. When there is little discernible difference over policy, then the politicians have to appeal to feeling, and attitude: we cut welfare out of "tough love", they cut welfare to be mean and spiteful. It's like the differences in branding between two almost identical soft-drinks.

The Labour politicians are worried that they may have to work hard to win the next election despite the contemptible and patronising sophistry applied by spin doctors; as the Labour Party has been stung by the low turn-out in recent elections. Their pretence that the voters are just too satisfied with them to vote holds no water—satisfied voters turned out in the 70s percent range in the fifties and sixties at by-elections.

It's clear that the reason voters are not turning out is because they think it's pointless. This is an inherent flaw of representative democracy: voters are infrequently called upon to cast a vote, which seems to be far removed from any action or result; there is no immediate reward for the vote. The voters thus feel, correctly, that their influence is slight. Traditionally this was overcome by political parties being closely attached to identifiable social groups, with the members of these groups being able to feel a part of the ongoing political process. The party represented, in one way or another, the aspirations of that group; thus they would turn out to vote with a strong feeling of involvement.

Once the political structure is unable, as now, to accommodate any semblance of reforms so as to be able to give any vent to the aspirations of more dispossessed sections of society, then politicians can no longer rely on that sort of support. They have to resort to trying to scare the electorate into supporting them, into fooling them into voting for them. They know that to keep the system functioning, they have to persuade people to turn up, and give their support for it. That is the politicians' job; since they cannot actually make or change events, they have to work hard to pretend that they can. Their function is to win and maintain public confidence. At the end of the day they are merely actors, and our modern media-driven politics could be easily called a thespocracy, rule by actors.

This is also the reasoning behind Labour's new-found devotion to local mayors: a single person contest, wherein the personality of the candidate will be all important, and which will be more of a media event. It's about trying to return public interest to a system where there are no significant policy differences.

Moderate party of obstruction

We need only look across the Atlantic to Canada or America, where the Liberals (or Democrats) did not suffer the same collapse in the 20th century as their counterparts in Britain, where they have held power for proportionately more of the century than Labour has managed, to see that no real gain is to be made by building the grand-movement of progress. Rather, such a force would be solely a pretty bulwark by which the current corrupt system is defended, a Great Moderate Party of Obstruction, to appeal to rational people who want to see change, and direct them off into the hopeless quagmire of personality politics.

So long as the press continue to look into whether Tony wants to block Ken, or how Gordon and Tony might be having a tiff, or whether Peter Mandelson has been brought back too soon, they continue to ignore the desperation of poverty, the wanton and authoritarian cruelty of the government, and ignore the unspoken iron-rule of the dogma of capital.

There is, though, hope to be drawn from Blair modernising the country back to the 1890s. It shows the real face of the Labour Party, how it is still, how it has always been: how many Labour governments have called for partnership from the unions, or have seen making the market work as the way to improve people's lives? All of them, only now this one is dropping the façade of socialism—leftists no longer have any justification whatsoever for asking us to follow these insulating sophists. Labourites who think themselves to be socialists have had their illusions thrown back in their faces with a rude wake-up call. 

                                                                                                                                                  Pik Smeet                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

The birth of Labourism (2000)

From the February 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the Labour Party was founded it did not even claim to stand for Socialism, but only for the election of trade union and pro-trade union MPs to Parliament to press for reforms within capitalism.

The Labour Party is claiming that it was formed a hundred years ago this month. Actually it did not come into existence until after the 1906 General Election when a separate parliamentary group, with its own officers and whips, was constituted.

What happened a hundred years ago, at a meeting in London on 27 February 1900, was the establishment of the Labour Representation Committee. This was a body, made up of representatives of a number of trade unions and of three political bodies (the Independent Labour Party, the Social Democratic Federation, and the Fabian Society), with the aim of securing "Labour" representation in the House of Commons so that a parliamentary "Labour Party" could be formed.

The meeting had been called by the TUC as a result of a resolution carried at its congress the previous September. It was an expression of what Lenin (right, for once) called "trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers and strive to compel the government to pass labour legislation, etc" (Lenin's mistake was to argue that, left to themselves, workers could not evolve beyond such a trade union consciousness.)

Various motions were put before the conference, the one which was carried being:

"That this Conference is in favour of establishing a distinct Labour Group in Parliament who shall have their own whips and agree upon their policy, which must embrace a readiness to co-operate with any party which, for the time being, may be engaged in promoting legislation in the direct interest of labour, and be equally ready to associate themselves with any party in opposing measures having an opposite tendency . . . "

The SDF, which was an organisation which sought to model itself on the continental Social Democratic parties which were committed to the class struggle, socialism and Marxism (and of which most Socialists in Britain were then still members), tried to commit the new organisation to socialism and the class struggle, but not even Keir Hardie's ILP supported them. In fact, Hardie always explicitly repudiated the class struggle.

The LRC didn't even pretend to stand for Socialism. The conference was chaired by a trade unionist who was also a Liberal MP, W. C. Steadman, and many of the trade unionists involved were Liberals. According to the official Conference report, one of the delegates to the Conference, John Ward, from Newcastle, declared that "they wanted to get their feet on the floor of the House of Commons, and would not be particular how they did it", which has remained Labour policy to this day.

The LRC faced its first test later that year in the General Election in October. Only two of the candidates it endorsed were elected, Keir Hardie and a Liberal trade unionist, Richard Bell, not enough to constitute a parliamentary Labour Party. This had to wait till after the next General Election in 1906.

At the 1901 LRC conference the SDF again tried to commit the organisation to only supporting candidates who agreed (in the words of an ILP resolution) with "the creation of an Industrial Commonwealth founded upon the common ownership and democratic control of land and capital and the substitution of co-operative production for use in the place of the present method of competitive production for profit" and (the SDF's addendum) who "recognise the class war as the basis of all working-class political action".

Due to a procedural manoeuvre this was not even voted on, and at its own conference that year the SDF decided to withdraw from the LRC. The report of the discussion in the SDF paper Justice (10 August 1901) brings out the arguments for and against and also that those who within a few years were to break away to form the Socialist Labour Party in Scotland and the SPGB in London supported the Executive Council on this issue against the more reformist members of the SDF (Yates was to be a founder member of the SLP in 1903 and Fitzgerald of the SPGB in 1904):

The following resolution was moved by H. Quelch on behalf of the Executive Council:

"That this Conference of the SDF decides to withdraw from the Labour Representation Committee."
He said that when we joined this Committee we hoped the trade unionists as a body would also join, and that we could do something to bring them along our way. But the bulk of the trade unions had not joined. He wished to make it quite clear there was no antagonism between us and trade unions. It was simply that we were on different lines. It would be a mistake to antagonise the unions.
Lewis (Blackburn) seconded.
Deasey (Accrington) thought it foolish to withdraw. We should stay and endeavour to permeate and capture the trade unions. J. Hunter Watts was against withdrawing, but thought our members should remain and hold a watching brief. Steer (Battersea) said the SDF had urged the working class to use the vote and he thought we should take part in the political organisation and have a say in the matter.
J. Fitzgerald (Central) on the contrary thought we might be dragged back by the trade unions. We could do more effective work when not entangled with them. W. Gee, L. E. Quelch, J.J. Kidd, Lewis and McGlasson continued the discussion.
G. Yates said they in Scotland had joined a committee formed three years ago, and they found themselves tied to a party which could preach any nostrum that came along. Our proposals were systematically voted down and intrigued off the programme. It was an experiment and they now ought to withdraw.
Leggo (Plymouth) and Lloyd having spoken, the resolution was carried by 54 to 14.

Since the leadership of the SDF (and it was a leadership) was not against the principle of independent Labour (as opposed to purely Socialist) representation it may seem strange that they should have recommended withdrawal. However, they felt that the LRC was turning out to be another front for obtaining trade union support for the Liberal Party and so was not genuinely independent Labour representation.

Although, twenty years later, the Labour Party did become independent—organisationally, if not in terms of ideas and perspectives—of the Liberals and in fact eventually came to replace them as the Tories' alternate, at the time there was a great deal of truth in this, as the 1906 General Election was to show. This resulted in the return of 29 MPs endorsed by the LRC who constituted themselves into the parliamentary Labour Party. However, most of these were elected with the help of the Liberals. At that time many constituencies returned two members, so each elector there had two votes. As emerged later, Ramsay MacDonald, who was the Secretary of the LRC, had secretly negotiated a deal with Herbert Gladstone, the Liberals' National Agent, under which in a number of these two-member constituencies there would be one Liberal and one Labour candidate and that each would recommend their supporters to give their second vote to the other

Even the ILP candidates running under the auspices of the LRC went along with this deal. "In several cases", commented the Socialist Standard (March 1906) in a detailed analysis of the votes, "they contested double-member constituencies, and not only got in by Liberal votes, but made arrangements with the Liberals to work and vote together". One example given was that of MacDonald himself (an ILP member) who was elected for Leicester along with a Liberal. He obtained 14,693 votes, of which 13,999 were split with the Liberals, 260 with the Tories and 426 were "plumpers" (i.e., only voted for him).

In Parliament the Labour MPs generally voted with the Liberal government. It was only after the first World War that the Labour Party became more ambitious and began to think of developing from a mere parliamentary pressure group for the unions into a party that could take over the government of British capitalism, replacing the Liberals as Tweedledum to the Tories' Tweedledee.

In 1919 Labour adopted a new constitution allowing individuals to join directly instead of via a trade union or an affiliated political group and adopting the famous Clause IV as its ultimate aim, so committing itself to "socialism" (in reality, full-scale nationalisation or state capitalism). The Socialist Standard of the time (May 1918) was not impressed and set out a criticism of Labourism that has stood the test of time:

"The new constitution of the Labour Party does not make that party any more of a working-class party in the real sense than it has been heretofore. As has frequently been pointed out in these columns, its policy is, for the following reasons, opposed to the best interests of the working class, and calculated to hinder their emancipation.
(1) The Labour Party is not a Socialist party, and consequently is not concerned with the abolition of capitalism and wage-slavery.
(2) The time and energy of the Labour Party are spent in advocating and pleading for reforms, which cannot materially improve conditions for the working class, but which confuse the minds of the workers, leading them to expect benefits they never obtain, thus causing disappointment, disgust, and apathy.
(3) The avowed aim of the Labour Party is to get members into Parliament, in the belief that those members can legislate in the interest of the working class, whereas they are powerless to do so because they are dependent upon a capitalist party for constituencies in which to run their candidates, and the electorate of such constituencies merely vote them in because they stand for a Liberal programme and policy.
(4) By claiming to have a Socialist objective the Labour Party perpetuate the false notion that Socialism will be established, not as the result of an organised and conscious effort of the working class, but by a series of political reforms concurred in by the capitalist class.
(5) The Labour Party deny the class struggle: the antagonism between the working class and the capitalist class. Recognition of this antagonism is, quite obviously, the fundamental principle which forms the basis of a genuine working-class, or Socialist party."

Adam Buick