News in Review: Wall Street slump (1962)

The News in Review column from the July 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Wall Street slump

Wall Street got the twitch last month and so did London and the Bourses on the Continent. The newspapers rushed out pictures of the panic in 1929 and then had to set their City Editors to work to explain why 1929 cannot after all happen again.

Everybody seemed to have forgotten that just before 1929 the financial experts were assuring us that the crash which was in fact just around the corner could never happen anyway. If this does not make the experts of 1929 look very impressive in retrospect, it must also teach us that the forecasts of all capitalism's economic experts are not worth very much.

Nowadays the experts are fond of pointing out the precautions which (they are confident) would prevent a runaway boom like the one which preceded the 1929 crash and therefore (they reason) would also prevent the crash itself.

This ignores the fact that slumps are not the result of an attack of jitters on the Stock Exchange; rather is it the other way round. Nineteen-twenty-nine was one of capitalism's classic crises and no amount of stock juggling could have averted it.

Nor should we assume that hotheaded speculation is dead. The Observer correspondent in New York reported that the “intellectuals" of Wall Street thought that: “By the end of last year the market had reached heights that brokers now, without blushing, describe as insane." and quoted one New York broker:

"The way some of (the big brokers) have been pushing over-priced stocks at naive investors is nothing short of criminal."

Perhaps a repeat of 1929 is not so impossible after all. For some of the experts were mystified by Wall Street’s 1962 twitch. The Guardian said: "The continuing retreat is puzzling commentators in that there seems to be no apparent reason for it. Mr. Walter Heller, President Kennedy's economic adviser, said there were no economic grounds for the condition of the market." Does this fill us with confidence that capitalism’s economists could not be taken unawares by a repeat of 1929? It does not.

Capitalism could have something up its sleeve, just as it had thirty-three years ago, to surprise the experts and impoverish the rest of us.

Liberal Party promises

Nobody can accuse the Tories of not being worried about the Liberal revival. Faced with the fact that some of the electorate undoubtedly find the Liberal Party attractive, the Conservatives have set out to prove that the very allure of Liberal policy lies in its irresponsibility.

This is being done in the time- honoured way of accusing the Liberals of pushing vote-catching policies without also mentioning that they would increase taxes to finance them. Mr. Iain Macleod has estimated that full application of the Liberal policy would put another eleven shillings on income tax. Most workers are convinced that they are the people who pay taxes: to them, the prospect of a standard income tax rate of 18/9d. in the pound must have seemed like black nightmare.

To back up his case. Mr. Macleod had his research boys dig out some choice examples of Liberal promise-mongering. He quoted Liberal policies for spending more on roads and education, for increasing pensions, repaying post-war credits and much more besides. The Liberals claimed that Macleod‘s quotes were taken out of context.

Yet in one way Macleod had a point, even if he did not know that he was making it. All capitalist political parties have to make a lot of attractive promises and boast that they can do things which they know are beyond their abilities. The Tories, for example, said in 1951 that they would stop prices rising.

Such promises can be effective vote-catchers. The one snag is that a party which is liable to be returned to power cannot make its promises too extravagant, because that would only make their betrayal that much more obvious. On the other hand, the more remote from power a party is, the more reckless its promises can be. The Liberals have little immediate prospect of becoming the government of British capitalism.

We may be sure that if the Liberal revival really gets under way their promises will become dimmer and more sober as the votes mount up. And if they ever get into power again most of the promises will disappear. Grimond and his men would run British capitalism in roughly the same way as the parties they now decry.

End of Eichmann?

No time was wasted, after the Israeli President bad written the quotation from the Bible across the petition for reprieve, in sending Adolf Eichmann to his death and scattering his ashes into the sea.

Why was Eichmann executed? For revenge? One man cannot adequately expiate the murder of six million people; a split-second execution is hardly revenge for the years of pitiless concentration camp horrors.

P

erhaps nearer the mark were those observers who think that the whole thing—the abduction, the trial, the execution—was meant to establish Israel as a political reality among the other capitalist nations. Political acts in themselves do have significance and for Israel to put to death the man who organised the extermination of the Jews is significant indeed.

Israel has asserted her power—even if, in terms of capitalist legality, she had little right—to bring the Jews' tormentors to book.

But what else has Israel done?

Perhaps she has made a martyr of the clerk-like Eichmann. Racial theories still live in capitalism's jungle; the execution of Eichmann could be the grain of sand around which they crystallise and flourish.

There is no easy explanation of the Eichmanns of the thirties and forties; Nazi Germany will remain a horrifying enigma for a long time to come. But we can say that part, at any rate, of the reason for the electoral success of the Nazis was the crisis of German capitalism after 1918 and the despair and cynicism which this bred in the minds of the German working class. In this mood, they would have supported anyone who sounded as if he had the answer to their problems. And Hitler, with his race mania, sounded like that to them.

Capitalism is always liable to convulsion and in any case it will never stop looking for scapegoats for its own shortcomings. This means that racial hatred is still with us and that even the madness of the Nazis need not be very far away.

The world may not have seen the last of its Adolf Eichmanns.

Coal profits

The nationalised coal mines made £28.7 million operating profit last year. If the Coal Board were a normal commercial company, said chairman Lord Robens when he announced these figures, it would be paying a dividend of 2½% from its profits.

But the coal mines are not, of course, a normal concern. The N.C.B. is liable to pay out on fixed interest stock and loans, which means that its dividend payments bear no relation to its working profit.

Last year the N.C.B’s interest payments came to £42.4 million, which turned its working profit into an accounting deficit of £13.7 million.

There are three things to be said about this.

Firstly, nationalising the coal mines was obviously a good move from the point of view of those who get the £42.4 million interest from a profit of only £28.7 million; much more than they would have got from Lord Robens' two-and-a-half per cent!

Secondly, the fact that millions of pounds profit is being wrung from the coal mines is proof—if anymore were needed—that nationalisation does not alter the capitalist nature of society. For profit, in private or state industry, can only come from the exploitation of workers in the industry.

Which brings us to the third, conclusive point. Many workers in this country were misled into supporting nationalisation because they thought it had something to do with common ownership. The figures which the National Coal Board has produced, and those which the other nationalised industries turn out year by year, show up that it was nothing of the kind.

World View: Learning the real lesson of Auschwitz (1995)

From the March 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fifty years ago saw the liberation of those who remained the victims of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. Its remembrance is important, but torturing ourselves with memories without learning from them can be next to useless.

The whining tones of the clerics of various unreasoning faiths urge us to remember the inhumanity that is within all of us. Every baby, say those who want to deliver us from "sin", is an embryonic Nazi. We reject such anti-human nonsense. Of course, humans are born with a capacity to behave co-operatively or callously and, depending upon environmental factors, can exhibit both characteristics. But humans are uniquely social animals, dependent upon one another for survival. To say that inhumane barbarity of the kind practised in the concentration camps is "within us all" is to say no more than that all humans can be driven to defy their social nature.

Stalinist Gulags

The gas chambers of Auschwitz, like the Stalinist gulags and countless other monuments to inhumanity, are not reflections of what humans naturally are, but of what we can become under certain historical circumstances. The lesson we must learn is not to repeat those circumstances.

There were no prisons, gas chambers. torture machines or genocidal experiments within the earliest tens of thousands of years of human history. We call these people primitives, but they were not Nazis or Stalinists. Faced with any army ready for the murderous task of battle they would have looked on with human incomprehension.

For most of human history there were no property relationships. There were no nations or states. Modern mass murder, be it organised warfare or organised ethnic killings, is a product of property society and the resulting ideologies of nationalism, racism and religious tribalism.

German workers supported the Nazis in specific historical conditions which were exclusively connected with the property system of capitalism. Fascistic feelings were not “within them", but were responses to a world which they felt they could not control. Without capitalism there could be no Nazism, just as state capitalism lay the ground for Stalinist thuggery and butchery.

Today we see the same system causing the same effects. From Bosnia to Rwanda to East Timor literally hundreds of thousands of people have been murdered because workers have yet to learn the real lesson of Auschwitz.

If there is to be any hope out of the tragedy of the holocaust it will come when enough of us say not merely "Never Again", but organise consciously to ensure that the soil within which future death camps can be planned is removed from the landscape of our history.

Steve Coleman

Capitalism, war and atrocity (2003)

From the October 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

The various enquiries into the events leading up to the Iraq war keep showing up more of the dubious ways the government tried to get voters’ support for a war which was launched in defiance of their own international law and the United Nations. But however much Blair’s back is to the wall, he can (and does) always make the excuse that even if the actions of Britain and America are not justified in any other way, the regime of Saddam Hussein was so terrible that no one can be sorry that Bush and Blair sent their armies in and threw him out. Almost all wars can be justified by pointing out how bad the other side is. All capitalist governments do unpleasant things: that is the inescapable nature of capitalism. So whenever two capitalist powers go to war, each can make a strong case against the other, by alleging how shocked they are about all the repulsive things the enemy has done.

When hostility ripens into open warfare, each side’s ruling class does even more terrible things to the other side, destroying its towns and slaughtering its people. This gives both belligerent countries even more propaganda points to make. Before long, each side is claiming that it only started fighting in the first place because (in some miraculous way) it could see what barbarous actions its enemies were going to be guilty of in the war. In other words, the propaganda of each hostile country claims that it only went to war because of the atrocities committed during the war on the other side.

The truth, however, is exactly the opposite. It is not the atrocities which lead to war; it is the war which leads to the atrocities. What happens, over and over again, is that a government, reacting to the pressures inseparable from capitalist (and other private-property) societies, treats some of its citizens very badly. Then the government gets into a war against other states; only to realize that its previous ill-treatment of this or that minority has simply provided a ready-made fifth column for the enemy. In other words, if the enemy should make a successful attack on the home territory, there are many citizens of the home country who would almost certainly prefer the enemy to win, and therefore might well engage in sabotage or guerrilla attacks on the home forces. If the war begins to go badly, the government and its supporters become terrified that they will lose and will therefore be killed (either by the enemy or by knives in the back) or at least driven into poverty and exile: terrified of such an impending fate, they turn on those whom they have previously ill-treated, and murder them.

Armenian massacres

The massacre of the Armenians, in Turkey in 1915, came about in this way. The Armenians lived in eastern Anatolia, close to the Turkish centre of the Ottoman Empire, and often showed rebellious tendencies. There were demands for independence. In addition the Turks were Muslims, and the Armenians Christians, which gave an excuse for more villainy: nothing is so bad that religion will not make it worse. The Turks treated the “disloyal” Armenians very badly, to the extent of killing many thousands of them in the 1890s. Then in 1914 the first World War broke out, and Turkey joined in on the side of Germany.

The Russians advanced into eastern Anatolia, and were helped by many Armenians, wanting revenge against the Turks; and on top of that, numbers of British and Australian troops invaded Gallipoli, in north-western Turkey, in April 1915 (after a naval attack in February). With the country being invaded, the Armenians were obviously a danger to the Turkish authorities, and action was taken to nullify that danger. Many of the Armenian men were massacred, and the women and children were sent on forced marches to the deserts of what are now Syria and Iraq, robbed, raped, harassed and injured continuously, and most of them died. Estimates of the number who perished vary; the Armenians say 1,500,000 or more, the Turks say “only” 600,000. Many accounts of the massacre treat it in isolation, as if it was merely the result of Turkish (and Muslim) wickedness; in fact it started almost on the exact day in April 1915 that the Allies landed at Gallipoli. Presumably this separation of the two events is to maintain the fiction that the war was because of the atrocity, rather than that the atrocity was because of the war.

Second World War

Another horror of the same kind was what is now called the Holocaust. The Germans were treated very badly after the first World War. For many years they were execrated as pariahs who were solely responsible for the war; a continuing blockade caused much suffering, and the demand for “reparations” caused runaway inflation, so people who had worked hard for years to make small savings saw them reduced to nothing. The Nazi party gained popularity by offering someone else to blame: the Jews, who were in a minority in many countries, not having their own state, and who therefore were ideal scapegoats. Hitler was in power from 1933, and began the regular and open ill-treatment of the Jews; in 1935 the Nuremberg Laws made the German Jews second-class citizens, e.g. closing the professions to them.

Anti-semitism was not particularly frowned on in Britain at the time, and two years after the infamous Nuremberg Laws, in 1937, Churchill said that “he hoped Great Britain would have a man like Hitler in times of peril” (quoted in the Times obituary of Leni Riefenstahl, 11 September) . Besides that, Poland at the same time, under the anti-semitic regime of the dictator Pilsudski and his successor Smigly-Rydz, treated the Jews even worse (and even joined in Hitler’s dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1938); yet Britain actually declared war in 1939 in order (it claimed) to defend this totalitarian anti-semitic state. For some time Germany seemed to be winning the war, conquering much of Poland in 1939, then Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and France in 1940, and Greece and Yugoslavia in 1941; but in June 1941 Hitler invaded Russia, and after early successes, his armies became bogged down, at the same time as America entered the war in December 1941. It became clear that Germany was in for a long and potentially disastrous struggle against many powerful enemies, in which large numbers of Jews, not only in Germany but also in the conquered countries, particularly in Eastern Europe, would not surprisingly be hoping for a German defeat.

The next step could have been forecast: the Wannsee Conference (in Berlin) of leading Nazis, in January 1942, decided on the “Final Solution” – the murder of the entire Jewish people. Probably six million Jews perished, as well as the same number of other people whom the Nazis claimed to think were inferior. This monstrous crime, carried out in the years 1942-5, is now often given as the reason for Britain’s declaration of war in September 1939. In fact it was the other way round; the conflicting interests, arising inevitably out of capitalism, of a number of European and world powers, led to the war: and the war led to the atrocity.

The third case of this kind is of course Iraq. The various conflicts in which Iraq has been involved recently, arising from the inexorable conditions of capitalism, such as the desire of each particular country’s ruling class to make the most profits from oil, and its efforts to extend the territory over which it rules, have lasted for no less than twenty of the last twenty-three years. The war against Iran raged from 1980 to 1988. Then Saddam Hussein’s attempt to conquer Kuwait in 1991 led to the first Gulf War, which ended with the first President Bush leaving Saddam in power, for fear that his overthrow would lead to a much greater role in the Middle East for Iran, which the US regarded as a greater threat than Iraq. But the war and the deaths resumed in a slightly different form, by means of continuous air patrols over Iraq territory and by economic sanctions, which UNICEF thought had brought about the deaths of nearly half a million Iraqi children under five.

All these hostilities, including this second Gulf War of 1991 to 2003, however much they might be blamed on the then Iraqi leadership, resulted in those leaders having the same mindset which has been discussed above: the fear of disaster for their regime, and death for themselves. This frame of mind leads automatically to atrocious behaviour from rulers, and Saddam Hussein has been no exception: jailing opponents, a ubiquitous secret police, the torture and murder of suspects.

Saddam Hussein has been just as bad as many other rulers across the world (including many with whom Britain and America are allied). But for Blair now to claim that he went to war because of this behaviour is putting the cart before the horse with a vengeance. The horrendous regime of Saddam Hussein was a by-product of the two Gulf Wars of 1991-2003, not the other way round. If you want to have done with barbarous dictators like Saddam Hussein, it’s a waste of time to go to war: others will spring up everywhere. Get rid of capitalism, the fertile soil which produces endless numbers of dictators and atrocities.

Alwyn Edgar

Causes of Nazi anti-Semitism (2001)

Book Review from the September 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anti-Semitism & National Socialism. By Moishe Postone (Chronos Publications.)

It may seem odd that the release of an essay on the historical material causes of Nazi anti-Semitism could be timely; but this re-issue of Moishe Postone’s 1986 essay certainly is.

Postone’s effort is to locate the material causes of Nazi anti-Semitism neither in simple irrationalism or racism, nor in functionalist terms of fascism as the ally of big capital. Instead he locates the cause through Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism: that relations between people appears as relations between things.

While the commodity hides real social relations, it also carries its own inherent contradiction between use-value and exchange-value. That is the physical objects of capitalism are also accompanied by an abstract monetary content. Postone postulates that the core of Nazi thinking lay in a Romantic favouring of the physical object over the abstracted monetary content, i.e. favouring use-value and physicality over exchange-value and ideas. This approach is flawed in as much as it still sees the concrete commodity in place of the social relationship that lies behind it, i.e. it continues to accept the basis of capitalism whilst rejecting only a part of it, the money side.

Postone contends that this can account for the fact that despite their anti-Modern tendencies, the Nazis could still favour and employ advanced technology, most horrifically in the attempted industrial destruction of a group of people. Having found the Jews as a convenient focal point for their anxieties regarding the abstraction of commodities under capitalism (Jews being themselves world-wide and seemingly apart from the communities in which they live). Thus, the Holocaust comes to be figured as an attempt to render the abstract Jew physical, firstly by slave labour, and then the stripping of their material worldly possessions, before the final annihilation of their “abstract” content through the industrial gas chambers.

This pamphlet is timely in that it relates Nazi ideology both to capitalism, and to a wider form of seeming anti-capitalism (such as the British Labour movement) which has historically counterposed industrial capital to finance capital. Indeed, this process is going on today in terms of the street anti-capitalist movement, with its opposition to the WTO and the World Bank, counterposing globalisation to a concrete localised (possibly national) capitalism.

Whilst Jews are no longer functioning as a convenient focus for this fetish, this breed of thought remains damaging and potentially dangerous. This pamphlet demonstrates the imperative for getting across a clear understanding of what capitalism is, and using that as a means to combat it, rather than attacking surfaces.

Although written in difficult and academic language, Postone has managed to get a very powerful argument across in this remarkable short essay.

Pik Smeet

News in Review: Collapse at The Summit (1960)

The News in Review column from the July 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

Collapse at The Summit

The assembling of the Big Four for the Summit meeting in Paris contained all the essentials for great tragi-comedy, except the happy ending. Summit meetings may yet replace the circus as “the greatest show on earth.” Publicity arrangements on a world scale preceded the actual meeting for some years. The “ Summit ” has dominated the headlines of the world’s press. Millions of words have poured out from lengthy articles under banner headlines, speculating on the date and interpreting the significance of statements made by politicians and Government officials. And so at last three thousand journalists congregated in Paris to report the discussions of four individuals who, it is said, between them can and will adjust the barometer of world tension. With the stage set and the audience breathless, the principal actors took the stage. The so-called “main problems” of disarmament, Berlin and the continued division of Germany were now, it was said, to be seriously tackled. But unfortunately the final curtain came down on the overture. By the old. process of mutual abuse, charge and counter-charge, the meeting quickly degenerated. Suddenly nothing had happened.

There will never be anything so futile in the tackling of social problems as the holding of summit meetings. Such meetings only serve to increase the personal prestige of the politicians who attend them and persuade ordinary working people that honest attempts are being made to stem the threat of war. From any government's point of view, there is nothing that a summit meeting could accomplish that the regularised channels of diplomacy could not accomplish equally as well. All such conferences, even where politicians do succeed in getting together, entirely by-pass the everyday problems of working people. Their whole scope and function is irrelevant to the real and pressing issues of modern society, issues that the working class itself must come to grips with.

Turkey

When Menderes, the Turkish Prime Minister, survived the air disaster at Gatwick, he was acclaimed by the faithful as a saint and a prophet. From the recent events in Turkey, it would appear that the legend is taking some hard knocks. For more than ten years this dictator has used every known method to maintain power. He is himself a big landowner in the west of Turkey — an area in which indescribable poverty is the lot of the Anatolian peasants. We can wonder how is it that the dictatorial regime has survived for ten years. Part of the answer is that the majority of Turks, who are still attached to the Muslim faith worshipped Menderes because of his religious fervour. One interpretation of the cause of the crisis was that it was the work of a small clique inflamed by grudges and ambition. Menderes himself blamed “a handful of youths exploited by certain groups for their selfish political aims.”

Crises are not caused by the evil machinations of individuals; they have their root cause in the way a society is organised. The importance of Turkey in world politics rests partly on the control of the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus. Astronomical amounts of American dollars have been spent in building up Turkey as another “Western bastion of democracy”! Half the Turkish budget is devoted to defence. These measures, coupled with large agricultural credits, have produced the inevitable economic crises which are part and parcel of the capitalist system everywhere. The new Head of State, General Gursel, is described as a Turkish Neguib in search of a Nasser. He has announced that it would be for the next Government to decide whether to put Menderes and his Cabinet on trial. Whatever the outcome, the Turkish working class can look forward to another round of capitalist intrigue and unfulfilled promises.

Eichmann

The news that Adolf Eichmann, a former Gestapo chief, has been captured by Israeli agents, was splashed across the front pages with all the gusto of editors recognizing the sales power of cheap sensationalism. A man-hunt successfully concluded after 15 years, with the quarry a miserable survivor of the Nazi regime, is the sort of titbit that the profit-seeking press can dress up to satisfy the appetites of those who seek cheap thrills in their reading.

To Socialists, the capture of Eichmann in itself is of no importance. The inhumanities which man indicts upon man are not the actions of people who were born monsters, but rather the consequence of inhuman policies and doctrines which a monstrous system conditions human beings into accepting as answers to its economic and political problems. Eichmann was a product of German capitalism which made a scapegoat of the Jews for the failure of Germany to win the 1914-18 war and for the mass unemployment which followed. The massacre of the six million attributed to him was not the work of one “evil genius.” History cannot be so simply explained. But there is significance in the fact that Eichmann is to be given a mockery of a “trial.” What a perversion of the name justice it is which allows the victors in the 1939-45 bloodbath, in which mass murder was committed by both sides, to condemn the leaders of the conquered for the same crimes they perpetrated themselves.

Red Blood

The South African Government has recently published regulations to come into force on 1st September under which “white” and “non-white” blood will be segregated to ensure that as far as possible whites and non-whites will receive blood from white and non-white donors respectively. This segregation of blood has in fact been in practice in South Africa for some years, although blood plasma imported from America was not segregated. The exponents of apartheid claim that the Africans are biologically different to the whites in being “ inherently backward ” and it seems that they think Africans’ blood is different too. Blood from human beings cannot, of course, be identified as to the colour of skin of its donor, but only by its various groupings, A, O, Rhesus, etc. Some biologists have even stated that the blood of some types of gorilla and human beings is interchangeable. This new regulation is another example of the blind prejudice of the South African Government in its policy of apartheid.

Misdirected Energy

On May 21st, sixteen cannibals were sentenced to death in Wewak, New Guinea, for killing, cooking and eating three men, and kidnapping eight women. After lecturing the men, who spent most of the time dozing on the courtroom floor, the judge said that because the raid was a “social and economic one with the dual purpose of providing wives and flesh,” he would make strong recommendations for mercy, and suggested a training programme for the convicted men. In prison they will no doubt be put through a rigorous rehabilitation programme. They will be lectured on the error of their ways and taught how to conform to the moral standards of modern civilisation. Perhaps they might even become so civilised they may be allowed to join the army and do the capitalists’ dirty work for them. Queens Regulations will not, of course, permit them to consume their victims, but they will be able to kill with the approval of the law, the blessing of the church, and if they do really well, they may even become national heroes.

Wyatt Sees the Light

Everything happens finally, if only one can wait long enough for it. This is one reflection that springs to mind after the attack made by Mr. Woodrow Wyatt, right-wing Labour M.P., on the big unions’ block vote as undemocratic. This has been obvious for years, of course — to all except Mr. Wyatt and his right- wing Labour friends. No complaint was ever heard from them about the block vote, so long as the big unions with doglike devotion regularly swung all their millions of votes behind the Labour leadership. But now that the man who wields the block vote of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, Mr. Frank Cousins, has clashed with Mr. Gaitskell over defence policy, a great light has broken in on Mr. Wyatt’s mind. With cries of astonishment, he announces as a new discovery what everyone else had been pointing out for years. Still, one must be grateful that Mr. Wyatt has seen the obvious, even at this late stage.

But Mr. Wyatt's revelations only extend so far as Mr. Cousins. Not a word has come from him about the second largest of the giant unions, whose leader, Sir Thomas Williamson, is a supporter of Mr. Gaitskell, and who recalled the annual conference of his union because they had voted the wrong way the first time. But we must wait. If Sir Thomas is replaced by a leader who disagrees with Mr. Gaitskell, Mr. Wyatt may discover another “arrogant bully with a block vote” (which is the way he now describes Mr. Cousins).

As for the left-wing of the Labour Party, who have been denouncing the block vote of the unions throughout the time it was automatically used against them, they have become strangely silent. The block vote used against them, and the block vote used by Mr. Cousins in their favour, are apparently two quite different things. How circumstances alter cases, even to the extent of turning democracy into bullying, or bullying into democracy!

Voice From The Back: Class War (1998)

The Voice From The Back Column from the June 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Class War

War may be hell, but so is work. Managers now double their chances of a heart attack a week after they fire an employee. For the first time, according to a report in the journal Circulation, significant events at work have been tied to heart attacks “In order to negotiate with employees, we treat them as opponents,” says Dr Joseph Loizzo of New York’s Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. “It’s the kind of thing that happens in warfare, in combat . . .” “These things take a toll,” says Loizzo, who recommends such de-stressing techniques as yoga, meditation and prayer. An even easier solution: Hire your own hatchet man. Financial Mail on Sunday, 19 April.

Creating superhumans

“My fear with genetic engineering very simply is one of the things I try to bring out in my book [Remaking Eden, Weidenfeld, £20]: that it won’t be available to everybody. It will cause greater social injustice. That’s my real fear,” he [Lee Silver] says. “I don’t think it is going to be used terribly: I think it is going to be used to prevent disease. The problem is—in the US—that it is going to be controlled by the market-place. And I am very cynical about the market-place. That’s my fear about genetic engineering. It is so powerful, it is so good, it will only be available to those who have money.” Guardian online, 16 April.

Big Brother

The existence of Echelon was officially acknowledged for the first time two months ago in a report, Assessing the Technologies of Political Control, commissioned by the European parliament’s Civil Liberties Commission. It stated “Within Europe, all e-mail, telephone and fax communications are routinely intercepted by the US National Security Agency, transferring all target information from the European mainland via the strategic hub of London, then by satellite to Fort Meade in Maryland via the crucial hub at Menwith Hill, Yorkshire. Financial Mail on Sunday, 1 March.

Alarm

Clergy are to be offered a new device for their protection—a crucifix with an integral alarm. Avon Silversmiths plans to launch the product, which costs £169, at the annual National Christian Resources Exhibition next month. One tug is said to be enough to activate the device. Times, 13 April.

Unite for work

A salesman’s damages award has been doubled to £320,000 because a road accident made him a “better person” and he lost the aggression necessary for his job. Charles Cornell suffered serious brain injuries in the accident on the M11 in Essex in 1991 which left him with a “a more pleasant personality”, Lord Justice Stuart Smith said in the Court of Appeal. Although friends and relatives thought the change was for the better, his less aggressive manner robbed him of his thrusting nature and he was now unemployable in a reputable sales force. Evening Mail, 21 March.

Global capital diplomacy

The Multilateral Agreement on Investment, which will ease rules for global capital flow, has been in negotiations since late 1995. Its advocates argue it will promote investment flows that help promote economic growth and technology transfers, and so enable poor countries to catch up with rich ones. To its enemies, it is a charter for multinational companies to observe minimum environmental or labour standards, while giving them the right to sue governments who harm their interests. Guardian online, 16 April.

God embraces Mammon

Canon Raymond Rodger, personal assistant to the Right Rev Robert Hardy, Bishop of Lincoln, and who has helped to set up the first masters degree in church management at Lincoln, said the notion of the Cross becoming a brand image was useful. “It is our job to extract the best that successful corporations have to offer and use it in our context,” he said. “We have to think in terms of exceeding customer delight. What we have to offer is the glory of God, and we have got to give the very best service to our customers in terms of added value and value for money that we can. Our product is quite simply allowing people to come closer to God.” Times, 13 April.

Our society of hatred

When the Nazis invaded in 1941, the Jewish population of Lithuania—the home of their community for 600 years—numbered about 250,000. Four years alter, 200,000 had been murdered in cold blood by Nazi Einsatzkommandos, assisted by numerous and, by some accounts, enthusiastic Lithuanian auxiliaries. Almost all were foully killed within 10 weeks of the Nazi blitzkrieg. The remnant who survived were kept alive as “work jews”, escaped, or were hidden by all too few “righteous gentiles”. The Lithuanian and Latvian Jewish Communities, we learn, “had more of their people killed in the Holocaust, proportionally, than any others in Europe.” Guardian, 16 April (Review of Heshel’s Kingdom by Dan Jacobson).

Don’t tell them!

Powerful American business interests want to stop British supermarkets telling consumers which products contain genetically engineered ingredients . . . US commodity firms are threatening to complain to the World Trade Organisation in Geneva, claiming that labelling by European companies is an obstacle to free trade. Financial Mail on Sunday, 19 April.

Letter: Socialists and War (2011)

Letter to the Editors from the May 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists and War

Dear Editors

The SPGB has opposed all wars. To date my view is that every war the UK has been involved in since WW2 has been unjust. With hindsight do you still stand by your position in the knowledge of what the Nazis did in the holocaust? I’m not trying to catch you out as I find the party interesting but I would just like to know your views on this and whether you think it is ever right to intervene if it is to prevent genocide. Or does it not prevent it?

Simon O’Connor, (by email)

Reply: 

Our policy regarding the wars that capitalism inevitably generates is one of opposition on the grounds that in the modern world wars are fought to defend “vital” capitalist interests – access to sources of raw materials and markets; and to defend strategic points and trade routes. Because we are propertyless members of society we workers have no such interests. It’s not a question of “justice” (and what a weasel word that can be!); it’s not a question of “democracy”; it’s a question of class interest.

We recognise that Marx and Engels had during their lifetime advocated the use of war as a defensive measure against autocratic and reactionary regimes. Their somewhat romantic view of war ignored the technical developments taking place in the field of armaments. By the turn of the century war had become immensely more destructive. It had ceased to be something remote – it had become “total war” waged on civilians because every worker engaged on the production of mechanised war was now in the front line and everything had to serve war. The destruction of life and property in modern war means that war has become an essentially different thing.

It was in the light of these changes that we adopted the view that war is not an instrument that can be used by socialists or supported by socialists and that democracy could not be defended by fighting. This was the position we adopted in WW2 just as we had done in WW1.Whatever the outcome of wars world capitalism would remain essentially unchanged. It would still be riven by international rivalries in which national, racial and religious hatreds could be stoked up when the need arose.

In any case democracy in itself cannot solve a single problem of the working class. Democracy for the working class can only be consolidated and extended to the extent that the working class adopts a socialist standpoint. To renounce socialism so that democracy may be defended, means ultimately the renunciation of both socialism and democracy.

Whether we would have decided differently in possible pre-knowledge of the mass murder of European Jews is too speculative a question to be answered definitively—the “ifs” of history are as fascinating as they are futile. That war had its roots in international rivalry. In particular the struggle by two “late arrivals” on the world stage—Germany and Japan—to obtain political and economic position and influence more in line with their economic power and to replace the existing world order with one more advantageous to their national interests. Which would have justified continued opposition to the war.

The full extent of Nazi persecution did not become clear until the war was well under way and the information was not available to the general public at the time. In any case, there is an ongoing debate as to whether the mass murder of the Jews of Europe had been intended all along or whether it was in a great part brought on by wartime circumstances and was a by-product of war rather than a settled war aim. The question is not as clear cut as is often believed. In any case Nazi race hate in Europe does not explain the outbreak of war in the Pacific in 1941.

What is clear then is that World War Two was not fought to save Jews from the massacre as this did not get fully under way until some time in 1942. Even when it was clear that something unprecedented was happening to Jews, the Allies failed to mount any significant rescue operations when these became possible. Their political and military calculation was that not to help the Jews was to help defeat Hitler; killing the Jews meant Germany diverting troops and resources from the front line, thus contributing to an Allied victory. According to Paul Johnson in his 1988 A History of the Jews,  “. . . the Holocaust was one of the factors which were losing Hitler the war. The British and American led governments knew this.” – Editors.

Proper Gander: ‘The Detail Which Moves You Is The Same Detail That Lets You Know It’s True’ (2020)

The Proper Gander Column from the April 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

As David Baddiel says in his recent documentary, what happened to the Jews under the Nazis is unbelievable in the sense that it’s difficult to grasp that people actually carried it out. Millions of Jews, along with Slavs, Roma, disabled people and gay men, were murdered by the Nazi regime during the Second World War. Despite the overwhelming evidence, some people think that this is literally unbelievable, a mindset which Confronting Holocaust Denial With David Baddiel (BBC2) explores.

Baddiel’s Jewish mother and grandparents escaped Germany in 1939, but his extended family who couldn’t get away were killed. He says that through them, he feels the history of what happened deeply and personally. His documentary starts by looking at the origins of Holocaust denial in actions taken during the war. The Nazis destroyed some evidence of the death camps, not just documents but also victims’ bodies, which were callously broken down with acids before the bones were ground up for fertiliser. Baddiel is understandably shocked to hear this, and also unsure why the Nazis tried to cover up something they thought was ‘glorious’. Some idiots have latched onto gaps in evidence as ‘proof’ that the atrocities didn’t take place. The British state’s actions also helped subsequent deniers. The Ministry of Information withheld details about what was happening, as shown in a 1941 memo to propagandists which claimed that people would be more likely to support the war if the Nazis were known to be targeting ‘indisputably innocent victims’. Jewish people weren’t seen as innocent enough by the state, and so their deaths were downplayed. This shows a deep-rooted anti-Semitism, as it implies Jews aren’t worth as much as other people and that they brought it on themselves. Ignoring that Jews were the main targets continued to the end of the war. When the camps were liberated in 1945, many British newsreels didn’t mention that most of the victims were Jewish. Later, when West Germany became an ally against the USSR during the Cold War, what had happened became an embarrassment. Baddiel says ‘an eerie silence fell over the memory of the Holocaust’.

It wasn’t until the 1960s when awareness of the slaughter spread wider, with news reports of Nazis on trial and published accounts from survivors. Baddiel visits Rachel Levy, now aged 89, and who was a teenager living in Czechoslovakia when she and her family were taken to Auschwitz. She was separated from her mother and siblings, who she never saw again, and was later marched to Belsen, where she found her aunt dying. It’s hard to comprehend something so appalling as what Rachel Levy lived through. But, as Baddiel tells us, ‘the detail which moves you is the same detail that lets you know it’s true. And therefore to say that it’s not true is obscene’.

Paradoxically, as awareness of what happened grew, so did its denial. This came through twisted pamphlets and books produced by ‘revisionist historians’ like Ernst Zündel and David Irving, both of whom ended up in court. Zündel was jailed several times in Canada for publishing literature likely to incite hatred, while Irving filed a libel suit against historian Deborah Lipstadt, who refuted his views in her 1993 book Denying The Holocaust: The Growing Assault On Truth And Memory.

As the case was filed in Britain, where the law places the burden of proof on the defendant, Lipstadt was in the odd position of having to prove it happened in order to counter Irving’s warped argument that he can’t be a Holocaust-denier if it didn’t take place. He was defeated and landed with a £2 million bill. When deniers’ views aren’t resting on fake history they use ‘nerdy, geeky science’ to focus on specifics such as the ventilation of gas chambers to claim that they couldn’t have worked. These days, pamphlets and books have largely been replaced by websites and social media as the deniers’ main outlets.

Baddiel accepts that to understand Holocaust-denial he should meet a denier, so he travels to Ireland to visit Dermot Mulqueen. His pathetic reasons for rejecting that the mass murders took place include saying that nothing sinister could have happened in Auschwitz because it had a swimming pool and that there couldn’t have been enough ovens to burn everyone as an oven can only fit one person. He even comes out with a song, out of tune and out of tune with reality. Misfits like Mulqueen shouldn’t be dismissed as irrelevant, though, as Holocaust denial is on a trajectory which led to the killings in America at Charlottesville in Virginia, the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C and the Pittsburgh synagogue, among others.

Worryingly, as many as one in six people worldwide believe that what happened has been exaggerated or never happened. In the UK, six per cent of people have these views, while the proportion is as high as 82 per cent in the West Bank and Gaza. There, this is largely because of beliefs that Jews have overstated what happened in order to win Israel and reparations. Elsewhere, Holocaust-denial comes about for different reasons. In Eastern Europe, anti-Semitism and far-right views in general are part of nationalists’ attempts to distance themselves from previous Soviet influence. In Western Europe and America, anti-Semitism is often linked with conspiracy theories that Jews secretly run the world, although how they have managed this if they’re ‘subhuman’ is another of those logic-defying examples of doublethink which anti-Semites manage.

Basic rational arguments, along with photographs, film footage or interviews with survivors should be enough to silence Holocaust deniers, but this doesn’t seem to work. Their minds can somehow shut out evidence and accommodate what to anyone else are obvious contradictions. Deniers can’t think clearly because they have been stunted by a narrow, exclusionary view of identity. Anti-Semitism, nationalism, racism, homophobia and any other kind of prejudice comes from creating and emphasising differences between people which ignore our common humanity. It’s not easy, though, to extend common humanity to include Nazis or Holocaust deniers…

Mike Foster

Holocaust as soap opera (1978)

T.V. Review from the December 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

The word ‘Holocaust’, on many lips since the BBC’s screening of a sick, sickly and sickening soap opera of that name, means literally a sacrifice in which the whole victim is burnt, but has come to mean the mass destruction of life.

In common use, it refers to many events in history and several in the last hundred years—such as the genocide of the Australians and Tasmanians, of the North and South American natives (the latter is still in progress); the First World War; the slaughter of Russians under Stalin; the bombing of Dresden, of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Vietnam but has become attached to the killing and cremation of millions of European Jews by the Nazis.

This appalling event was given the Peyton Place treatment by the NBC Production. A romantic drama straight out of Woman’s Own took place against a background of concentration camps, gas chambers and torture but the victims, after several years of this, were unmarked, well-dressed, clean shaven, with smart uniforms and hairstyles, not a bruise or a louse to be seen. Such sanitised violence is in a longstanding Hollywood tradition. The Cops and Robbers trash shoved down our faces night after night also portrays fighting without wounds (a man is knocked out with a bottle, gets up. shakes his head, unscathed; a big shoot-out ends with a joke at a celebration party).

Holocaust was guilty of sentimentalising savagery in this way. The idea that violence is ok if done by ‘our side’ was put across; for example, by the unsubtle Zionist propaganda at the end — the football playing hero was given charge of a group of boys to mould them into the right material to raise hell in Palestine.

The motive behind making the film was clear; the proceeds are not expected to go to the still suffering survivors, or to the refugees of Palestine and Lebanon. It was a cynical exploitation of human suffering for gain but its one effect has been to revive memories of the Second World War.

That war and other atrocious crimes against humanity should never be allowed to fade from memory as evidence of what happens under capitalism. There are those who say that these wars and massacres are distant history; that it is time to forgive and forget: that those organisations — the political parties, power blocs, capitalist gangs—who encouraged the slaughter and who are still in power, should not be blamed for what happened a long time ago.

They encourage short memories in the working class. They support a system in which an individual who steals an apple has it on his record for years, but the instigators of the killing, maiming and starvation of tens of millions have their slate wiped clean. Such is the “justice” of capitalism.

The Germans and Japanese, once fiends to be destroyed, are now portrayed as hardworking, honest folk the Briton should emulate in their eager production of surplus value. Tommy, the Salt of the Earth, has now become lazy scum again (until the next time). The corollary of this rehabilitation of the Germans—the guilt of the Allies— is played down however.

There was a Nazi slush fund for the Chamberlain faction of the Tory Party, while Churchill was being oiled by the Czechs. Sections of the capitalist mass media tried to suppress knowledge of Nazi atrocities until they became useful for propaganda. The ‘Victims of Yalta’ were forcibly sent to death and slave camps: Eastern Europe and the Balkans were carved into portions of “influence” by the victorious Allies; and the Poles and Czechs, whose ‘freedom’ was the pretext of the war, were allotted to the Russians.

One of the lies put out by Holocaust was that Nazism was opposed to capitalism. That was what the National Socialists said. The National Front use the same lies today. In fact, Fascism was just another way of running capitalism. It can be brought in if the working class can be hoodwinked into surrendering democratic principles.

The emaciated people, the prisoners, the torture, the war, the waste, the arrogance and wanton extravagance of the privileged class are still a reality, not a celluloid nightmare and will remain so until the workers awake from the trance in which they are bound. For what is it but a trance, induced by the capitalist mind-benders, which disposes them to have pins stuck in them, to part with their time and energy, to have their lifeblood drained, the flesh stripped from their bodies, to be burned alive, to be sacrificed on the altar of Capital, to succumb to successive holocausts, when they are numbered by the hundred million and are the producers of everything of use on the earth?

F.W.S.

Why Waldheim? (1988)

From the April 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

So, according to available evidence, Kurt Waldheim did not actually commit any atrocities, but he lied. He tried to hide the fact that he knew about them, and the witch-hunters who had wanted a burning are having to concentrate their energies on trying to get at least a banishment.

It is perhaps little known that a higher percentage of the Austrian population voluntarily joined the Nazi Party than even in Germany and it is not surprising therefore that an attack on Waldheim's Nazi past is considered by many there to be an attack on themselves. A result, which could easily therefore be foreseen of this belated attempt to bring him to "justice", is that latent anti-Semitism has been aroused and is making itself heard and felt to the discomfiture of Jews who either survived in, or have since returned to, Austria.

The question which no-one seems to ask is "Why Waldheim?" The Allies reinstated many in the German judiciary and civil service into jobs held during the Nazi regime; indeed evidence has been forthcoming from time to time that even some who had participated in concentration camp atrocities are holding responsible positions in Germany and are generally held in high esteem. It is safe to assume that, as so well expressed recently by one of Britiain's eminent public persons, they too are "economical with the truth” about their past.

The western powers who are aiding and abetting Wiesenthal's Nazi hunting are obviously also suffering a loss of memory. Perhaps they should be reminded of Tom Power's The Paperclip Conspiracy (Michael Joseph. £14.95), published as recently as 1987. This well documented book, the contents of which no-one has refuted, tell how all the Allies, shortly after the end of the second World War. went through the files of Nazi doctors and scientists. Those considered useful, however notorious their past, were marked with a paperclip. New personalities, even new nationalities, and false papers were prepared to enable them to start serving their new masters. Ardent Nazis were denazified — on paper — and given American citizenship. Among these was a doctor who had experimented on inmates in Dachau concentration camp. Their findings shaped American Air-Sea rescue operations and helped to put American men into space. Among the many pictures in the book is one of these doctors in laughing conversation with John Glenn, America's first space hero. The Nazi team who pioneered the fastest submarines were taken, en bloc, to Barrow-in-Furness by the British Admiralty; Nazi aviation experts similarly went to Farnborough. They, and those who brought them to their new homes, may safely be assumed to be hiding their past and identity.

So the question remains "Why Waldheim?" Was it a trade-off to ensure Wiesenthal's silence about others more useful, or embarrassing, to western leaders; the head on a platter of a prominent public person who, however, is easily expendable to those who are doing the backdoor bargaining? If so, the foreseeable consequences for Jews living in Austria and possibly elsewhere have been completely disregarded not only by those who offered up Waldheim as sacrifice but even more so by the self-appointed avenger. That depth of cynicism would be difficult to equal, even by the double standards of so-called morality we have become used to under capitalism.

Eva Goodman

50 Years Ago: 1943—The War and the Workers (1993)

The 50 Years Ago column in the February 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

The press of this country publishes reports of the wholesale extermination of Jews in Poland. We are not able to say to what extent these reports are true. The atrocity story played its propaganda part in the last war. and it is no doubt doing a similar duty in this. But bearing the record of Nazism in mind lends substance to some of these reports. The persecution of Jews as well as other minorities is inevitable in lesser or greater degree under class society. The prejudices of race, nationality, or religion is the outcome of ignorance, exploited by rulers and fanned into flames of persecution to suit their ends. In registering protests against the persecution of minorities, no ruling class can do so with clean hands. It will be a world-wide Socialist movement that will finally put an end to all persecution, including the persecution of class by class. 

From an article by "S. R.", Socialist Standard, February 1943.

Running Commentary: Concentration camp art (1980)

The Running Commentary Column from the March 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Concentration camp art

Culture lovers and those looking for sound investments from which to pay the next gas bill will have found the Art Sales columns of the Daily Telegraph of 6 February interesting reading. Their correspondent was reporting the forthcoming sale at auction of a collection of concentration camp money, including notes issued at Dachau, Auschwitz, Buchenwald and the “show camp” Theresienstadt. Believed to be the best of its kind, with 1944 Auschwitz creations expected to fetch a top price of £875 each, the collection included an exquisite example of the yellow cloth "Jud” badge which Jews were forced to wear. Noticeably absent were the unique specimens of lampshade design of the period, although this does not appear to have deterred potential buyers. The lot was purchased by the auctioneers, Stanley Gibbons, at the knock-down price of £20,000.

What could more accurately reflect the spirit and values of contemporary capitalism than this? Who said that art (whatever that is) is dead?

Iron-Curtain gold

One of the prime beneficiaries of the recent rise in gold prices has been the Soviet Union. Not only is the Russian ruling class moving in militarily on a grand scale, but they are also engaging in some pretty big extracting. Their gold mine at Muruntau in the south west is now the biggest in the world and despite their halving in volume, sales of gold to the West totalled 2,500 million dollars last year. The rise in price means that less Russian gold is required to pay for much needed technology and grain, and it increases their ability to intervene in the world market to the detriment of, in particular, American currency. The Americans fear that the Russians, now the second biggest source of physical gold in the west, will become increasingly capable of using their gold in a play against the dollar. Perhaps Chinese “communist” gold production, presently third in the world league, will expand to support the “imperialist” dollar.

The same cannot be said of Russian sugar beet production, which suffered a severe setback last year. The harvest dropped from 93 million to 76 million tonnes, compelling them to make substantial purchases from the west. This shortfall is one of the underlying factors in the continuing strength of the commodity on the world market, which in turn may be one reason the world’s most famous soft drink will never be quite the same again. Coca-Cola of America recently announced its decision to cut its sugar consumption by 50% by using corn syrup.

Could all this be part of a vast conspiracy by the American Government and Coca-Cola to prevent the dollar further depreciating in value? One theory bandied about in leftist circles is that the Americans are attempting to keep the dollar price from falling by reducing the corrosive content of Coca- Cola, which will in turn lessen the need for gold fillings in teeth. This will have the effect of maintaining the value of gold and propping up the dollar. Well, not really. Speculation in gold is not a result of conspiracy, but flows directly from the inherently anarchical nature of capitalist production. Governments have no control over the workings of the economic system and can only respond to trends as they become apparent. Karl Marx explained the present panic buying of gold more than 100 years ago in Capital (Vol. Ill, p. 673): “As soon as credit is shaken and this always appears of necessity in the cycles of modern industry-all the real wealth is to be actually and suddenly transformed into money; into gold and silver, a crazy demand which, however, necessarily grows out of the system itself.

Apocalypse soon

While by far the best defence against nuclear missiles is not to be there when they go off, this happy situation is not always possible to guarantee. It will come as no surprise, then, to learn that the British government, in the face of increasing international tension, has laid elaborate plans for your survival should a holocaust turn up. The only qualification is membership of the Civil Service hierarchy or of the Royal Family (on either side). Your chances outside these ranks are roughly the same as those of escaping unhurt after being struck by lightning—unless you can get to Switzerland quick.

Swiss Civil Defence is not of the impromptu sandbag variety. As one of their protection Service officials reassuringly put it (Daily Telegraph, 6 February): “We cannot afford to be as slipshod about survival as you are in Britain”. (Well, thank goodness we can afford to be; I was worried for a minute.) The Swiss ruling class, hardly naive when it comes to investment, has contributed three-quarters of the cost of the provision of underground fallout shelters for the entire population. Not only are these now compulsory they have 4½ million of them, all air conditioned—but the first of a planned 22 underground emergency hospitals capable of treating 450 victims was recently opened in Geneva. Close behind the Swiss come the Russians, whose every day-time industrial shift has a vast underground bunker within a few feet. In Britain the government contributes nothing to the cost of fallout shelters (in line with the philosophy that we must “stand on our own two feet”), and even charges VAT on the handful constructed for those rich enough to afford them.

Those of us who have, up to now, been “slipshod about survival” appear to have limited choice: either join the Swiss capitalist class (difficult): marry Prince Charles (more difficult still): or join the daunting struggle for a society in which the causes of war—nuclear and conventional—will have ceased to exist. Those who dismiss as utopian the socialist solution to capitalism’s greatest horror story should reflect upon the history of failure to curb capitalist armaments production. It is not socialists who are remote from reality but those who seek to eliminate the worst effects of the capitalist system while continuing to support it. We will not argue for more shelters, but for an end to the obscenity of capitalism itself. This can only be achieved by workers realising their class position and uniting to end their exploitation. Let Lord Denning try ruling against that.

Melvin Tenner

1943—The War and the Workers (1943)

From the February 1943 issue of the Socialist Standard

In September, 1939, the Government of this country proclaimed its intention of planning for a “three years war." Alas, for the planners—and the planned—for war like other evils of our times, is generated by a social order which, below its veneer of method and organisation, is rent by the most explosive contradiction in all history, social production versus class-ownership in the means of life. Therefore, the “orderly" and “efficient" minds of statesmen and leaders cannot prevent disorder; the magnitude of productive forces is mocked by hunger and want. The capitalist Social Order is exposed always as Social Anarchy.

During the last months of the old year the war has extended its deadly grip along the northern shores of Africa; thousands of its native population will now experience the effect of total war. From these shores the Allies hope to bring to naught all of Hitler's schemes to secure himself from attack in the West. The dictator of Italy, for years preening himself and fooling his people with insane talk about the “glory and exhilaration" of war, now has his chance of convincing the duped victims whilst the full blast of war is turned upon them

In connection with this Allied expedition an incident has occurred which has given rise to much criticism and speculation. By a most remarkable coincidence the Allied Armada set out on its journey at the same time that Admiral Darlan (shortly to fall victim to the assassin's bullet) had chosen to visit the French possessions of Morocco and Algiers. The Admiral had until recently been second in command to Marshal Detain, and in this position vehemently proclaimed hostility to the Allies, especially Britain, and urged fuller collaboration with the Nazi regime. After press reports that Darlan had been taken prisoner, the news that he was in fact acting as host to the Allies was no doubt a shock. The enemy had become a friend—overnight. The Fascist had changed to a Democrat!

On the Russian Front the German armies are meeting the fate which overtook their predecessors in France during the last war. Stalingrad appears to have become another Verdun; the rubble and ruins of the city on the Volga must now be drenched by the blood of hundreds of thousands. Thus the “intuition" of the Fuhrer finds its fulfilment. The hold which Hitler seems to have on the youth of Germany is a riddle to many workers of other countries. But the solution is not difficult. The great depression which began in Germany in 1920 and put more than seven million workers on the dole gave Hitler his opportunity. “Work and Living Space" sound attractive slogans to workers, especially the young, when wedged in queues at the Labour Exchange.

However, the German people are not alone in being misled so easily. Their credulous behaviour can be paralleled by workers everywhere.

In this country, where the “economic blizzard" arrived a year later, in 1930, it brought to power a “National" Government, sponsored by Labour leaders, on the claim that it would “get the wheels of industry turning again." Both Hitler and the National Government kept their promise to the unemployed. Hitler's agents tout for labour in every nook and cranny of Europe, filling German factories with labour-power from the defeated countries, while the “pure- blooded Aryan" is given the privilege of dying on the snowy wastes at the Eastern Front. The British worker, in piping times of peace, often reduced to demanding “work or maintenance," earns himself a line or imprisonment now for being absent from his work. Thus the social status of the proletariat is clearly defined. It is capitalist society's beast of burden, to be coaxed or bullied as required.

One of the strangest features of the present conflict is a fact elicited recently m the House of Commons. The Bank of International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, is, as its name denotes, a clearing-house for international financial transactions, its motto for war-time appears to be: “Business as usual." Around its table, apparently oblivious to the conflict surrounding them, sat the representatives of Britain and Germany, discussing matters of pounds, shillings and pence with the sworn enemy, the “forces of evil," whilst their respective governments go about the task of organising mutual slaughter, it may be merely a sidelight on the war, but it shows to what extent capitalism has developed ties between the ruling factions. So strong, that even war cannot break them completely. What a lesson for nationalist-minded workers!

At the same time, the press of this country publishes reports of wholesale extermination of Jews in Poland. We are not able to say to what extent these reports are true. The atrocity story played its propaganda part in the last war, and it is no doubt doing a similar duty in this. But bearing the record of Nazism in mind lends substance to some of these reports. The persecution of Jews as well as other minorities is inevitable in lesser or greater degree under class society. The prejudices of race, nationality, or religion is the outcome of ignorance, exploited by rulers and fanned into flames of persecution to suit their ends. In registering protests against the persecution of minorities, no ruling class can do so with clean hands. It will be a worldwide Socialist movement that will finally put an end to all persecution, including the persecution of class by class. Least of all can we accept the claim of the Pope, who in a special message (reported in the Evening Standard of December 24, 1942) said:—

Those who aim at building a new world must fight for the right of free choice of government and free choice of religion.

This is merely another example of ruling class hypocrisy. The Pope and the organisation of which he is the head, the Roman Catholic Church, have made a deal, at one time or another, with the dictators in Spain, Italy and Germany. Besides, they have their own unenviable record of persecution. Now that His Holiness sees a possibility of the fall of these dictators, he changes his Christmas prayers, so that we find him pronouncing : -

The Church has condemned Marxist Socialism and still condemns it. On the other hand, the Church cannot ignore it or approve that workers should be deprived of all their rights.

But the problem remains: Where is the better world to come from? A world free from wars and poverty? The dignitaries of religion can no more provide the solution than could the politicians of capitalism with whom they are allied. It is precisely the doctrine of Marxist Socialism that alone points the way.

The workers of the world must organise to make the means of life the common property of all mankind. To provide for the needs of all and the profit of none. 

Sid Rubin

Editorial: Eichmann: Who is Responsible? (1960)

Editorial from the July 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is impossible to condemn too strongly the terrible brutality of the killing of millions of people, Jews and others, of which Adolf Eichmann is accused. The majority of people have reacted to the press reports with a demand for his punishment. Learning of Eichmann's deeds, they take the short-sighted view that to deal with him as an individual is enough. But Eichmann is the end product of a vast process; he arose from the inhuman conditions of capitalist society. The very people who condemn him are content to leave those conditions untouched.

The working class, not only in Nazi Germany but in post-war Germany—and throughout the world—blindly support capitalism. None of them can escape responsibility for the consequences. For the power wielded by the rulers of world capitalism is a reflection of the political ignorance of the working class everywhere. It is absurd to blame one man, when he is only the instrument of a policy supported by millions. 

After a war, the defeated leaders are vilified, some imprisoned and others executed. The victorious leaders are enshrined as heroes. It is fortunate for the leaders of the 1939-45 Allies that no cloak-and-dagger men are hunting for them. They, too, are responsible for terrible slaughter. President Truman gave the orders for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Churchill, Attlee and Stalin supported this atrocity. In Hiroshima alone, 80,000 people were incinerated in a flash and hundreds more have since died—and are still dying—from various causes. Thousands of Germans were killed in the bombing of Hamburg and in the destruction of Dresden.

These are the vicious conditions which make possible the race hater and the mass exterminator. Although tens of millions of people have been butchered in the last two great wars, the world is not safe. The fear of war is still with us. Nowadays, many nations have vast armaments poised in readiness to exterminate each other. How many future Eichmann's wait to stalk upon the scene?

If only workers would find out why all this madness takes place! War is caused by the struggles between national capitalist Powers over markets and economic resources. This can only be cured by the abolition of capitalism. As long as workers support this system, so will they be vulnerable to the racial theorist who, on nationalist grounds, gets support for his programme of mass murder. The dictators of yesterday, and the dictators and leaders of today, with their frightening military machines, only reflect the preparedness of their workers to ignore the bloodshed of two world wars and still to die for capitalism.

It is futile to punish an individual whilst ignoring the vicious conditions which made him possible. Eichmann was involved in some terrible things—but the exterminations which he so methodically organised are only a part of the greatest atrocity of all—the capitalist system of society. As the movement for a classless world—for Socialism—takes root and spreads, so will the possibility of inhuman murderers like Adolf Eichmann decline and die.

Editorial: 6 Million (2006)

Editorial from the January 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Let 2005 rest then, as a monument. A gravestone for the 6 million children the Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates died in the hideous torture of starvation and starvation related disease that year. The FAO report, released on 22 November, also informs us that malnourishment also contributes to holding back educational attainment and brings about a cycle of poverty and death. This in a world where we are embarrassed by riches of food and farmers are paid to let fields fall fallow.

The figure 6 million is highly evocative – the same number as the usual estimate of Jews that were murdered in The Holocaust – possibly the most heinous act of mass murder in history as these millions were gunned down in pits or gassed in specially built camps for the extermination of a whole people. A crime of such infamy that its like has never been known and to this day in many parts of the world – as renowned liar David Irving is finding to his cost in Austria – it is considered a crime to deny that it happened.

What historians can and do dispute, though, is the extent to which The Holocaust was planned out in advance – whether Hitler always intended for the mass murder of Jews or whether slaughter grew out of local pragmatic responses to dealing with local populations in conquered territories. The so-called Intentionalist versus Functionalist accounts of The Holocaust.

The debate is complex – and probably irresolvable now. What is, perhaps, clear, is that the Functionalist case is somehow more horrifying. It would be comforting to human minds to know that a handful of monsters dreamed up and guided the mass-murder from their bunker – but it is more dreadful to conceive of low-level local officials going about their business : Item 5 – Merits of Gas over Bullets for extermination. Literally getting rid of some inconvenient people.

Perhaps, though, in future years, people will look back on the functionalist holocaust of our times – sit agog as they hear of committees sitting down to make policies knowing they will lead to millions of preventable human deaths because they can't, won't, daren't raise the lives of these people above holy private property, the sovereignty of nation states or even God.

The autogenicide of the human race is why 6 million must die each year and why 850 million must live undernourished.

We will be as equally deserving of opprobrium as those who stood by and let the Holocaust happen if we do not act as soon as we may to end this preventable waste. If we lend our voices or our votes to political parties that put trade, business, capital and property before the rational good of distribution according to needs, we are contributing as culpably as the lowliest corporal genocide.

We urgently need to build a worldwide movement to bring a speedy halt to the carnage. The easy thing – the functionalist thing – is to go on supporting parties that offer small, possiblist solutions within the current system. But the right thing to do, the necessary thing, is to demand the impossible and turn the whole system over. Let's make 2006 the monument to the beginning of the end of a murderous system.