A word to the electors of Clapham Park (2026)

Party News from the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our manifesto for a local council by-election in Lambeth on 9 July.

You are being asked to vote in yet another election. The other parties will come to you with lists of promises: more housing, safer streets, better parks, protection for LGBTQ+ people. They will tell you that if you elect them to the council, they will manage capitalism a little more humanely.

We say: we have all heard these promises before. Labour, Lib Dem, Green, they have all sat in the council chamber. The housing crisis has deepened. Rents have soared. Our parks have been fenced off for private profit. And still they ask for your vote on the promise that this time it will be different.

The SOCIALIST PARTY does not make promises we cannot keep. We do not ask you to vote for us in order to administer capitalism more efficiently. We ask you to use your vote as a weapon of class consciousness, to register that you understand the root cause of every problem facing Clapham Park, and that the solution lies not in the council chamber but in the abolition of the wages system itself.

HOUSING: AGAINST PRIVATISATION, FOR THE COMMONS

Lambeth Council has spent decades selling off, demolishing, and privatising the housing stock that working people in Clapham Park depend upon. Council homes have been transferred to housing associations. Estates have been handed to developers under ‘regeneration’ schemes that mean demolition for tenants and luxury flats for investors. The Clapham Park Estate itself has seen the slow erosion of social housing, replaced by ‘mixed tenure’ developments where the ‘mix’ means that those with money and those without are segregated within the same postcode.

The other parties will tell you they will build more ‘affordable’ homes. But ‘affordable’ to whom? To the buy-to-let landlord? To the overseas investor with an empty flat? To the young professional on a six-figure salary? Affordable housing is a contradiction in terms under a system where land and property are commodities to be speculated upon.

The SOCIALIST PARTY has always maintained that housing problems cannot be solved by reform. Every reform, council housing, rent control, ‘right to buy’, has been absorbed, undermined or reversed by the logic of capital. As we argued in the Socialist Standard over a century ago, and as history has proven again and again: what is given by reformist legislation is taken back by economic necessity.

From a socialist perspective, we do not seek to ‘improve’ social housing as a transition to socialism. We recognise that the very form of the commodity, whether a council flat or a private apartment, must be abolished. Housing must cease to be an asset class and become a commons, a space for social engagement, collectively controlled and freely accessible. The ‘communalisation of housework’ demanded by feminist commons theorists is inseparable from the communalisation of housing itself.

Housing under capitalism means rent, mortgage debt, eviction, and ‘regeneration’ that regenerates profit for developers while displacing tenants. Council housing, housing associations, ‘affordable’ rents — all are attempts to manage this contradiction, and all have failed because they leave the wages system intact

Socialism means the common ownership of land and buildings. No rent. No landlords. No ‘property ladder.’ Shelter produced and distributed according to need, not according to ability to pay. This is not a policy to be voted through a council chamber. It is a necessary part of working-class revolution.

BROCKWELL PARK: ECOLOGY AGAINST ‘PARKSPLOITATION’

Brockwell Park is being destroyed before our eyes. Not by neglect, but by commercialisation. Lambeth Council has handed our park to Brockwell Live, a festival operator owned by the private equity firm KKR, managers of approximately £600 billion in assets, with average returns of 18-23 percent. KKR is accountable only to its shareholders. It has no interest in our park, our ecology, or our community.

The result? Up to 32 days of fenced-off, ticketed events. The ‘Great Wall’ erected across public land. Ancient trees damaged. Grasslands turned to mud. And for what? So that profits can be extracted from what was once free space for all, then funnelled through a Luxembourg holding company while Lambeth claims it needs the revenue to ‘subsidise’ the very community events it has now cancelled.

This is not mismanagement. This is capitalism functioning exactly as designed: the enclosure of the commons, the selling-off of things we all use, the subordination of our natural and social landscape to the imperative of profit.

The Green Party will tell you to vote for them to ‘protect’ the park. But ‘protection’ within capitalism means regulation, consultation, planning permission, a slower form of the same enclosure. The Labour Council, meanwhile, has been found by the High Court to have acted unlawfully and irrationally in its handling of these events. Yet they press on.

From a socialist standpoint, we reject the framework that says Brockwell Park must ‘pay for itself.’ Public space is not a revenue stream. Ecology is not a balance sheet. The SOCIALIST PARTY has long argued that capitalism treats the environment as a ‘free good’ to be exploited at no cost to capital. We say: the park belongs to the people who use it, not to the council that administers it, and certainly not to a private equity firm.

Brockwell Park under capitalism is being enclosed by KKR because every space is subject to the logic of the profit system. Labour has managed the park’s enclosure. The Greens would regulate it. Neither questions the system that requires it.

Only socialism can de-commodify public space. Only when production is for use, not profit, can a park be simply a park — trees, grass, birdsong, and the free association of human beings without ticket barriers, security fences, or ‘events strategies.’

LGBTQ SAFETY ON CLAPHAM HIGH STREET

Clapham High Street should be a space where LGBTQ people can move freely and safely. The recent history of violence, harassment, and hate crime in the area is real and must be addressed. But how it is addressed matters.

The other parties will tell you the answer is more police. More CCTV. More ‘hate crime’ legislation. More reporting mechanisms that funnel vulnerable people into the arms of the same criminal justice system that disproportionately arrests, harasses, and imprisons LGBTQ people especially trans people, and sex workers.

The SOCIALIST PARTY has always maintained that the police are not a neutral force. They are, as we have argued since 1904, part of the coercive wing of the capitalist state. Their function is not to protect the vulnerable but to protect property and the social order that produces vulnerability. The modern police force emerged to discipline the working class, break strikes, and enforce the property relations that create the conditions for violence in the first place. As we have consistently pointed out, the police do not prevent crime; they manage its distribution, channelling it away from the wealthy and toward the poor.

The ‘community policing’ advocated by some reformists is no solution. It merely extends the reach of surveillance and control into our neighbourhoods under a friendlier face. The abolition of state policing does not mean its replacement by ‘community policing;’ it means the abolition of the conditions that make policing ‘necessary.’

From a socialist perspective, safety is not produced by force but by different social relations. When housing is secure, when work is voluntary, when gender is not a source of economic precarity, when the ‘family’ is not the enforced unit of social reproduction, then the violence that policing claims to address withers away. The work of collectives like Cradle Community, developing transformative responses to harm that do not rely on coercive institutions, shows us what is possible. But these experiments remain trapped within capitalism, unable to address the structural roots of the violence they respond to.

Policing under capitalism is not a neutral service but the defence of property relations. The police do not prevent violence against LGBTQ people; they manage its distribution, channelling it toward the poor and the marginalised. ‘Community policing’ fulfils the same role, but with a friendlier face.

The socialist alternative is not a different kind of policing but the abolition of the conditions that make policing ‘necessary.’ This is not reform. This is revolution.

WHY WE STAND

THE SOCIALIST PARTY is often called ‘impossibilist.’ We accept the term. We were given it by reformists who thought socialism could be achieved piece by piece, reform by reform, compromise by compromise. Over 120 years, we have watched every such attempt fail or become diluted. The welfare state was built then partially dismantled. Council housing was built and sold off. The ‘right to work’ became the obligation to work for a pittance.

We do not stand for allegedly ‘possible’ improvements within capitalism. We stand for the so-called impossible: a world without wages, without landlords, without police, without states; a world where production is for use, not profit; where the means of life are held in common; where human need, not the accumulation of capital, governs society.

This is not a distant utopia to be achieved after a ‘transition period.’ It is not a programme to be implemented by a party or a state. It is the practical activity of working people abolishing for themselves the divisive and exploitative categories of wage, commodity, property, gender and race.

We do not ask you to vote for us in order to ‘represent’ you in the council chamber. We ask you to vote for us in order to register your rejection of the entire framework of capitalist politics. Every vote for the SOCIALIST PARTY is a vote for the common ownership of the means of life. It is a declaration that you understand that Clapham Park’s problems over housing, ecology, safety, dignity cannot be solved by better management of the same system that produces them.

THE ONLY WAY FORWARD

The other candidates will tell you they can make Lambeth ‘better.’ We tell you the truth: Lambeth cannot be made better while capitalism remains. The council, whatever its political colour, is an administrative body of a class state. It manages the affairs of capital in our locality. It cannot abolish the profit motive. It cannot communalise housing. It cannot de-commodify our parks. It cannot produce safety without force.

Only the conscious, organised working class can do these things. Only when the majority of people understand their interest in the abolition of capitalism and act upon that understanding can we move beyond the endless cycle of reform and reaction.

Your vote for Anya Krycek is not a vote for a councillor. It is a vote for socialism. It is a declaration that you refuse to be bought off with promises of ‘affordable’ rents and ‘community’ policing. It is a recognition that the problems of Clapham Park are the problems of the world system and that their solution requires the revolutionary transformation of that system.

Letter: Sexual preferences and socialism (1986)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sexual preferences and socialism

Dear Editors.

I would like to congratulate Haringey District Council for deciding to promote a "homosexual and lesbian awareness" programme in the schools they are in charge of.

I am 19, gay, and when at school, it was a dirty word, known as being gay. This is because I lived in a 1920s Tory area of St. Anne's near Blackpool, where you are outcast if you are anything but middle class, own a house, two cars, have two children at private school and vote Conservative.

People like that don't realise times have changed, and that people today should be able to have confidence in their sexual orientation, and be able to be open in their sexual preferences.

All I can hope for is that Labour win the next election, so that these shackles can be broken, and gay people can be fairly treated in confidence.

"UNHAPPY SOCIALIST”

Reply:

The continuation of the profit-system depends on the uncritical social conformity of the majority. Great pains are taken, from an early stage in our lives, to discipline us into being "normal" and to treat abnormality with suspicion and often with contempt. As "Unhappy Socialist" observes, the sort of normal aspirations which we are conditioned to accept involve getting a house and a family and settling down, frequently to a routine of grin-and-bear it. This is largely a very modest and unimaginative way to have to endure your life but even this modest goal presents serious financial and domestic problems for most people who bite the boring bait.

The main type of normality which workers are encouraged to adopt is that which makes them good wage-slaves. Unquestioning obedience to authority, dull resignation to a class-divided society, a view of human nature as inherently selfish and the requirement to see present society as the final stage of historical development, are all part of the mental make-up of a "normal" person. Normality. though, is a permeating precept. As a result, all sorts of unorthodox people are herded together by conventional wisdom (conditioned ignorance) and branded as abnormal. Even if their ideas or conduct do not directly attack the class system, they are labelled with disapproval with varying degrees of contempt from "eccentric" to "subversive". Some groups may not threaten the existing structure of normality in a way that could be seen as dangerous to capitalism's basic needs but they are despised because they refuse to be bound by convention. Some of the vehement tirades against the itinerant hippies recently chased by the authorities from one county to another were examples of this. Some infringements of normality may not endanger the class system, but from the viewpoint of the ruling class (whose ideas are in n the main put by the mass media) assaults on conventional conduct are to be strongly discouraged.

Human beings are capable of enjoying a wide range of sexual behaviour. But the variety of sexual expression which is subtly promoted by the way we are socially conditioned is that which results in Mr Normal marrying Mrs Normal and. after working hard for someone else, settling down to produce two little normallettes who will be encouraged to grow up and repeat the same pattern of behaviour. The only social environment in which human sexual experience will be likely to develop freely, unconstrained by prejudice and poverty, is a genuinely classless society: socialism. Because of the prevalent and routine frustrations of everyday life for workers under capitalism and the limited creative pleasures open to most people, sex has become a rather frenetic and obsessional preoccupation with many people. The sexual part of our behaviour might well be less frenzied or important in a more imaginatively creative world. It will more certainly be beyond the realms of taboo and insecurity which it often occupies today. In any event, for as long as the majority permit the continuation of a social system which causes most people to live in poverty and insecurity, there will be the risk that one or other minority groups will become a victimised scapegoat for social problems.

The Labour Party stands only to continue to run the profit system. If it attained power as the government. it would do as it has done in its eight previous administrations and preside over chaos, poverty and discontent. As with any type of government. it would need to foster a certain sort of normality and however "progressive" its legislation. the problems of class-society would continue to arise. History demonstrates that "enlightened governments" which profess to make life comfortable for workers often, when their policies have failed to deliver the goods (as is necessarily the case), leave a trail of bitterly reactionary attitudes in their wake. Perhaps Neil Kinnock was perversely trying to avoid such a future problem by actually aiming to get power over workers on the very basis of having such views when he recently said:

I'm a father, and no matter how much I try to convince myself towards the course of enlightenment. 1 know damn well that, put to the test. I'm what people would call a reactionary (Everywoman, August 1986)

We shall not enjoy a properly liberated society while we are trapped in the social system which consigns the majority to lives of impoverishment, "normality" and alienation Instead of hoping for yet another Labour government to run capitalism, we urge our correspondent to become a socialist and act for a democratic society.

Editors.

Tiny Tips (2024)

The Tiny Tips column from the November 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘I cried deep inside of my heart’, said Nisa, now 32, recounting her first contract wedding. ‘Who wants to sleep with an old man? I did this purely for the money, so my parents can eat and my siblings can go to school.’ With her encouragement, her sister also became a contract bride, bringing in a dowry of $3,000 for her first marriage because she was a virgin. Nisa estimated that she herself has been in 20 contract marriages (‘Sex tourism in Indonesia sells itself as Islamic temporary marriage’.) 

(Los Angeles Times).

‘Interestingly, some of these people were supporters of the communist regime only a few years ago. There are of course others who are still convinced by CCP propaganda, who believe that China is the safest place in the world and that everywhere else is in chaos’, Cui adds. He attributes China’s economic development to “the hard work of the people” who are exploited by Party leaders. As an example of the lack of political rights, he cites the fact that the regime has taken away the freedom and wealth of nouveau riche figures like Xu Jiayin and Jack Ma. He cites the words of late Premier Li Keqiang, who made public in 2020 that some 600 million Chinese live on less than US$140 a month. 

(Equal Times)

As for national liberation, all one can say is that with friends like Hamas, Palestinians do not need enemies. Rather than freedom, the so-called ‘Islamic Resistance’ has nothing to offer them but poverty and bloodshed. Hamas’s position is crystal clear. ‘These are necessary sacrifices’, military commander Yahya Sinwar said of the mass. destruction in Gaza in a communication with fellow Hamas leaders in Doha, Qatar. 

(Daniel Lazere)

‘While Ukraine presses on with its incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, its troops are still losing precious ground along the country’s eastern front – a grim erosion that military commanders blame in part on poorly trained recruits drawn from a recent mobilization drive, as well as Russia’s clear superiority in ammunition and air power. “Some people don’t want to shoot. They see the enemy in the firing position in trenches but don’t open fire. … That is why our men are dying,” said a frustrated battalion commander in Ukraine’s 47th Brigade’. 

(Libcom)

Ahn Chang-ho, who opposes anti-discrimination laws, also rejects the theory of evolution and wants creationism lessons in schools. A former judge nominated to lead South Korea’s human rights body has sparked outrage with his comments against the LGBTQ community and the theory of evolution, with observers citing him as proof of the country’s flawed system for official appointments. Ahn Chang-ho, 67, is under scrutiny for his statements in parliament suggesting that homosexuality is a tool used by communists to incite revolution. 

(MSN)

In a healthy ecosystem, the various sets of animal … get along with each other without the need of any system of authority or dominance—indeed, without overriding structure or organization of any kind soever. 

(Counterpunch)

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

Editorial: Sodom and Gomorrah and the Rand. (1907)

Editorial from the January 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

Great consternation in London town. Conformity shocked. Nonconformity staggered. The national conscience stirred. The Oriental vices of compounded Asiatics have, under conditions of celibacy, broken out, and who’d have thought it, cries Conformity; and just what we expected, answers Nonconformity ; and—something shall and must be done affirms the national conscience ; and—leave it to us says the government ; we will do everything that should be done, on our honour as a government we will.

Such agitation ! Yet this grossly abhorent form of sexual excitement is bound to manifest itself where men are herded together under penal conditions and excluded from the society of their women folk. And this was quite well known both to the Conservatives who now protest that “they never did and hadn’t the slightest idea,” as well as to the Liberals who knew all the time don’t-you-know— and issued licenses for 16,000 more Chinese to be imported into the same conditions.

____________

Lust and Luxury.

Nor is the vice peculiarly Asiatic, as the distinguished gentlemen who make our laws and fill our newspapers for us would have us believe. It is not the special affliction of the heathen Chinee. It is far more widely practiced among the decadent whites of Western civilisation than our pastors and masters are prepared to admit. It is not unknown even in the most exalted circles of good old England. It is a flourishing product of that low moral caste, the accompaniment of unbridled luxury, which continually seeks the gratification of its sensual lusts and finds it only in the grossest of sensations.

The Chinese under normal conditions are a singularly moral people in a rather more ample sense than that word is usually used and their deterioration generally commences with their association with the capitalist method of more “advanced” nations. The faculties which they possess in a remarkable degree of absorbing new influences and assimilating new ideas may have resulted in those of them who have had the misfortune to be translated into the atmosphere of modern commercialism, acquiring the evil practices of their new conditions. But an argument of that sort is very much a two-edged weapon. The evils must have existed to be absorbed.

____________

Morality and Profits.

But all this apart, the consequences as we say, were well known and they were deliberately burked because Rand capitalism demanded cheap labour in order that large profits might be scooped. The Tory Party have the credit of introducing Coolie labour into South Africa. The Liberal Party got in largely by their outcry against conditions of “slavery under the British Flag.” Swearing they would never consent to the degradation of “the national honour” they consented. Swearing a new oath that they had never said the conditions under which the Chinese were being imported were conditions of slavery,—that the use of that phrase was a terminological inexactitude—they maintained a continuity of policy and were directly party to the intensification of the evil to the extent of nearly a score of thousands additional licenses. And now that by an unlucky chance the murder is out they are endeavouring to shuffle out of their responsibility by pointing the finger of contumely at the Tories and saying, I told you so.

____________

Cant and Humbug.

All of which, however, is simply part of the Party game. The central fact is that powerful capitalist interests demanded cheap Coolie labour and capitalist governments, Liberal and Tory, satisfied the demand. Now that the moral fester has broken and spurted its purification abroad it may happen that pressure of the “national conscience” deftly played upon by other capitalist influences may effect some alteration. But whether such alteration will be any less hypocritical than the grotesquely farcical steps which the Liberal Government took to relieve any “heathen Chinee” of the obligations of his contract, is a moot point to be determined by the quality and quantity of the opposition aroused by the—at present—suppressed Bucknill Report. But whatever happens one thing is sure—facilities for obtaining the necessary supply of cheap labour, white, black or yellow, for capitalist purposes, will always be given by capitalist governments, and although it may be possible to suppress some of the more repulsive manifestations of the workings of the profit monger, it will not be possible while capitalism lasts to clear out the cesspool of iniquity which is the profit monger’s inevitable accompaniment. Only by the eradication of Capitalism itself and the substitution for it of that system of Society connoted by the term Socialism will that be possible. The disease is directly traceable to the impoverishment and enslavement of the many and the riotous luxury of the few made possible by the private ownership of the means of wealth production. For Asiatic vices so-called as well as all the other unsavory products of the present system, Socialism alone is the remedy.

Prisoner’s Story (1955)

Book Review from the June 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the summer of 1953 Rupert Croft-Cooke, a novelist by profession, was arrested on a charge of homosexuality. A few months later he appeared before the Quarter Sessions at Lewes, was found guilty on some charges and not guilty on others, and sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment. Apart from a few days at Brixton he served out his sentence (actually six months, allowing for remission) in Wormwood Scrubs. His book, “The Verdict of You All,” is the story of his experiences there.

Rupert Croft-Cooke, to judge by the scraps of personal information scattered throughout his book, has not been too hardly dealt with by life. Well-educated, much-travelled, a lover of things good to eat and drink, he was living a well-ordered and comfortable existence in the Sussex countryside until he was rudely awakened one night by the village policeman and two detectives. These, after due observance of the usual legal ceremonial, took him off to the local police station, and from then on he found himself in a world he had hardly known existed. “The Verdict of You All” records his reactions to, and observations of, this world into which he was so suddenly and so rudely thrown, an alien world inhabited by beings he had heard about only through the crime stories of newspapers, a world a million miles removed from the bright and comfortable surroundings he had been accustomed to enjoy.

To those who cherish comforting delusions about the wonderful reforms that are supposed to have been wrought in our prisons, this book will come as a shock. The tale told by the author is of a penal system grim, drear, unimaginative, means, and degrading – to prisoner and keeper alike. It tells only of Wormwood Scrubs and Brixton the first a prison for first offenders serving sentences of six months and over, the second for men sentenced to less than six months. Only briefly and occasionally does he make mention of places such as Dartmoor, most notably on the occasion when some of its inmates were sent up the Scrubs to receive their annual visits from relatives unable to make the journey to Princetown. To the author these men conveyed

“by their very appearance and movements, dark horrors suffered, depths of evil and desperation, which the Star prisoners of Wormwood Scrubs had never known.”

Yet the picture he draws of even a Star prison like Wormwood Scrubs is frightening in its grimness; and of Brixton, which he thinks is much worse, he is vitriolic. This is his account of the sight that met him on his entry for the first time into Wormwood Scrubs:–

“A long interior street on each side of which are rows of identical cell doors. The floor of this street is of concrete, the doors are blank and painted a dull cream with formidable black bolts on each and a small eye-hole. The street is a hundred yards long, lit with naked not-too-powerful electric bulbs and running down to iron railings and a gated wall at the far end… There was, as we entered, complete silence in this grim and ugly street and it was hard to realise that behind each of the uniform doors was a man in a cell.”

There are four floors like this, each containing 80 cells. At the level of the first floor is stretched wire-netting to lessen the risk of suicide from those throwing themselves over from the upper floors, and also prevent injury from articles dropped intentionally from above. The author adds:–

“A prison ‘hall’ realises the hopes of its original architect for it is probably the ugliest structure ever conceived by man… From entry to discharge the prisoner never sees anything inanimate which is not positively ugly, and of living things there is nothing on which the eye can bear to dwell, except occasionally the faces of some fellow-prisoners.”

So much for Wormwood Scrubs. His description of Brixton is even more horrifying.

“It would be difficult to imagine and impossible to create a more rank and stagnant breeding-ground of evil than Brixton goal. Life at the Scrubs was not without a certain gloomy dignity; a prisoner could pass his days there with no affront to his manhood and the men he met were often rumbustious sinners with a tale to tell. Here everything was mean and degrading – the very appearance of the place was grimed…

“C Wing, in which most of the convicted men were herded, was a ‘hall’ about half the size of those in the Scrubs, but housed more prisoners, since they were crammed three to a cell. This leads to the most filthy pollution. Imagine an airless cell, scarcely large enough for one man, filled with the bunks, the bodies, the clothes and the chamber-pots of three. If it were an ordinary bedroom or a ship’s cabin it would be monstrously unhygienic, but when it is an almost windowless cell in which men are locked without respite from half-past five in the afternoon to seven o’clock the next morning it becomes foul and pestilential beyond all words…

“The whole place stank. The cells at night were pigsties and the effect of this gloom and neglect on the wretched prisoners was evident. Abject creatures, for the most part they made no attempt to keep their spirits up, or show any of the generous geniality of men suffering together, but grumbled and blasphemed in the filthiest terms, abandoning themselves to the atmosphere of shame and abomination which filled the place like a cold miasma.”

“The Verdict of You All” is a book of highly personal comment and description – one man’s account of his experiences in prison. His account may be true, it may be false, it may be a mixture of the two. Every reader must be his own judge of the category in which it should be placed. The author is a novelist, has naturally a good command of words, can tell his story well. Inevitably, there must lurk a suspicion that harbouring a feeling of injustice (he strenuously denies that he was guilty of the charges brought against him) he may tell the story too well. In spite of himself, indignation may get the better of judgment. Resentment may carry him beyond the limit of accuracy. Situations, conditions, may become over-coloured. In the last analysis, only those who have themselves been subjected to his experiences can confirm or deny his story.

This much, however, can be said: If it is, in fact, an essentially reliable and authentic account of life as it is actually lived in such prisons today, then it is a downright, uncompromising challenge to all the fine words that have been said about the reforms in our penal system. If it is but half true, it is a grim and sorry reflection on the efforts of those reformers who have laboured over the years to improve conditions in our prisons.

Stan Hampson

Tiny Tips (2024)

The Tiny Tips column from the January 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

A bottle of Scotch whisky billed as ‘the most sought-after’ in the world sold Saturday for almost 2.2 million pounds ($2.7 million), an auction record for a bottle of wine or spirits.

[Link.]

We often assume that religious beliefs are no different in kind from ordinary factual beliefs—that believing in the existence of God or of supernatural entities that hear our prayers is akin to believing that May comes before June. Neil Van Leeuwen shows that, in fact, these two forms of belief are strikingly different. Our brains do not process religious beliefs like they do beliefs concerning mundane reality; instead, empirical findings show that religious beliefs function like the imaginings that guide make-believe play.

[Link.]

Margot Friedländer, the 102-year-old Holocaust survivor, recently offered a few important words during an appearance on one of Germany’s most-watched political talk shows. ‘There is no Christian blood, no Muslim blood, no Jewish blood,’ she said. ‘”It is all human blood. We are all equal.’ And further: ‘I believe there is something good in every person. Take the good and forget the bad. It’s so easy to be human.’ Perhaps Greta Thunberg should have a sit-down with Friedländer. It might be a good start for getting back on the right track.

[Link.]

‘Queers for Palestine’ attempts to meld LGBT advocacy with Palestinian liberation, a juxtaposition that has precipitated a whirlwind of criticism and ridicule, since LGBT rights scarcely exist within the Muslim world; and the Palestinian territories are no exception. The slogan has been widely satirized. Variations like ‘Chickens for KFC’ and ‘Blacks for the KKK’” highlight its proponents’ basic lack of awareness of just how incompatible the values of the Western left are with those of the Islamic right they so readily champion.

[Link.]

They Survived Hell – but for Some, They’re Only a Means of Production

We were shocked to discover that mere days after being rescued, the migrant workers were pressured to return to work, including through threats to withhold their passports and their salaries. In some cases, they were required to return to work in the Gaza Envelope – near the killing fields they had just escaped.

[Link.]

The Pacific Institute, which regularly updates its Water Conflict Chronology, reported that at least 228 water conflicts were recorded in 2022—an 87 percent increase over 2021—driven in large part by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Russian forces attacked water pipelines and supply systems in a number of Ukrainian cities after invading in February 2022, targeting water resources a total of 56 times since the war began .

[Link.]

A majority of American adults (72 percent) would not be willing to serve in the military were the U.S. to enter a major war, polling from Echelon Insights found, while public confidence in the armed forces also appears to be waning. It comes as all branches of the armed forces have struggled to meet their recruitment targets. Since 1987, the number of active-duty personnel has fallen by 39 percent.

[Link.]

Greasy Pole: Looking forward to 2004 – in 1904 (2004)

The Greasy Pole column from the September 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Almost nine years have passed since Oscar Wilde was sent to prison at the Old Bailey for the offence of sodomy. He and his friends were not alone in their disappointment at the sentence because the judge, before waving the famous dramatist down to the Court cells, gave voice to his frustration that he was restricted to a sentence of only two years hard labour which was, he snarled, “totally inadequate” for “the worst case I have ever tried . . . a circle of extensive corruption of the most hideous kind among young men”.

    

The judge did not bother himself that to criminalise homosexuality as “hideous corruption” is a symptom of capitalism’s inhumanity. Nor did he muse on the corruption that was partly responsible for Wilde being in the dock before him. The dismay among Wilde’s supporters at his sentence was aggravated by the well-founded suspicion that he had been sacrificed – arrested, charged, tried, sentenced – to divert attention from somebody  else. It was obvious that the beneficiary must have been someone the authorities were anxious to protect from exposure. Among what was then known as the uranian community it was an open secret that Lord Rosebery was as active a homosexual as Wilde. In fact the Marquess of Queensbury, who had obsessively persecuted Wilde in retaliation for his relationship with his son, had made it quite clear that if Wilde was not prosecuted he, Queensbury, would ruin Rosebery by denouncing him as another sodomite.

Suicidal

The nub of the problem was that Rosebery was not just a peer of the realm and therefore an aristocrat who was supposed nobly to set an example to the rest of us, but the Prime Minister in the Liberal government. Before Wilde’s trial the blackmailing pressure from Queensbury was so fierce that Rosebery – said to be brilliant, erratic and unpredictable but obviously also a mite fragile – was fearful and depressed to the point of being suicidal. Soon after Wilde was safely behind the cell door at Pentonville and Queensbury’s fire had been quenched, Rosebery’s health miraculously improved and, benefiting from the corruption endemic in capitalist politics, he could continue contentedly being Prime Minister along with his other distractions. It was his bad luck that he did not enjoy coincidental good health and high office for long because a month after Wilde’s trial the Liberal government was out of power.

    

There would not have been the same concerns about the man who – a couple of years ago – succeeded to the job of Prime Minister, once held so tenuously by Rosebery. Arthur Balfour is another with a reputation for unusual brilliance but he has never shown the slightest interest in attaching himself to a female or a male. So on that score, if not on others which should be of more interest to the working class, he is safe.  Balfour is known as an aloof, self-satisfied man who is more comfortable in discussion of remote philosophical and religious abstractions – the less relevant the better – than in confronting the real world of poverty, disease, international conflicts. At Cambridge he spent what was called a “scandalous” amount of time watching or playing tennis and industriously built a reputation for idleness and for intolerance of anything he assessed as ignorance – but which may have been the very reality which he protected himself from.

Contemptuous

To behave like that it helps to be an aristocrat with the proper blue-blooded connections. Balfour went to Eton, his father and his grandfather were Conservative MPs and, even more to the point, he was the nephew of the late Lord Salisbury, who succeeded to the Prime Ministership when Rosebery’s Liberal government was defeated in 1895. Some years before that Salisbury, while taking an avuncular lunch with Balfour, broached the subject of politics as a career for him along with watching tennis and taking part in pointless arguments. At the time it just so happened that there was a vacancy at Hertford, a parliamentary constituency where the selection of the MP was controlled by Salisbury because he owned the place. Balfour regards politics as a kind of amusing game – clearly overlooking the unamusing, devastating effect which political decisions can have on the lives of the useful, non-aristocratic, working people in society. He was sure he could fit in attending the Commons with his other strenuous activities so yes, he would give it a try. In due course he was elected as the Honourable Member for Hertford. Thus Balfour was another who has reason to be grateful for the power of political corruption.

    

That when it comes to the ruling class blood is thicker than water was demonstrated in 1878 when Salisbury, who was then Foreign Secretary, made Balfour his private secretary. In 1885 Balfour was elected as MP for East Manchester; a week spent among his supporters there he described as “loathsome but necessary”, which perhaps meant that he had to spend some time in the slums of Ancoats or Salford. This contemptuous attitude, which he usually managed to hide beneath a mask of elaborate courtesy, surfaced again when he sneered at the rising suburban and provincial Tories “with their vineries and pineries” and in his comment that an industrialist who had what he considered “civilised” tastes was “a rare avis”.  All of this has been ammunition for those critics of Balfour who see him as a pretend politician who makes elegant speeches which do not contribute much to the question at issue – not that it mattered if they did. It fits in with the impression that he is an MP simply because it was the thing for a blue-blooded Old Etonian to do.

Poverty

But in spite of his affected langour and detachment Balfour has handled some weighty ministries, so that not too many of his Conservative colleagues were offended when, as his uncle Salisbury ceased to be Prime Minister in 1902, Balfour moved smoothly into the job. It will not be the last time a politician has cloaked their rampant ambition beneath a show of disinterest. Edward VII had just been crowned and the South African War, with its nasty shocks for the British military, was at an end. In some senses it was an abrasive conjunction of events as the crowning of a new king encouraged some of the customarily stupid jingoism at a time when the Boer farmers had uncovered evidence suggestive that the global power of the British ruling class is in decline. On the Continent Germany is overtaking Britain, for example accounting for about 22 percent of world production of steel compared to Britain’s 15 percent. In manufacture the respective shares are 17 percent and 19 percent. How long will it be, before British capitalism regards Germany as a competitor too threatening to be assuaged by mere diplomacy?  We are told that the Entente Cordiale, settled in April this year, is an instrument for peace as it re-assures France that there is a buffer against the ambitions of Germany. Another way of putting this is that the treaty lays out some of the issues over which the next war will be fought.

    

At home the work of Rowntree and Booth has illuminated the fact that the workers who cheered the coronation of the new king often did so from the depths of poverty. Booth’s study of the people in the East End of London found about 30 percent of them living below what he set as a ‘poverty line’. These are people whose means are barely sufficient for a decent independent life or, even worse, are actually insufficient for that life. Rowntree’s report on the people of York came to much the same conclusion; nearly ten percent of the people were found to be in ‘primary poverty’, with means insufficient to maintain merely physical efficiency, and another 18 percent are in the slightly more manageable ‘secondary poverty’. Unemployment, which is an aggravating factor in poverty, stands at ten percent of the working population.  These problems, with the suffering they cause to the class who produce everything but own nothing of any consequence, are the very stuff of capitalism and Balfour, for all his supposed effortless intellectualism, has been powerless to affect them.

    

How long will capitalism endure? If it is still here in a hundred years, what will the socialists of the year 2004 look back on? They will review a century in which millions will have died in wars or through hunger or avoidable diseases. A century in which the contrasts of riches and impoverishment remain as stark as ever. Whatever progress will be made in the technologies of communication and production will have gone to further enrich the ruling class while merely reshaping the poverty of the workers. And all of this will have been governed by political leaders notable in history for only their corruption, deceit and impotence.

Ivan

Tiny Tips (2023)

The Tiny Tips column from the September 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

A video has captured the dramatic moment a £300,000 Roll-Royce was hoisted up to a penthouse on request of a billionaire in China. The luxurious Rolls-Royce Ghost was sent up to the 44th floor of a high-rise building after the wealthy businessman decided he wanted his car parked on his balcony (tinyurl.com/3ytvh63e).

#    #    #    #

Eswatini heads to the polls soon, with elections scheduled for September. But there’s nothing remotely democratic in prospect. The country remains ruled by King Mswati III, Africa’s last absolute monarch, who presides over Eswatini with an iron fist. Mswati dissolved parliament on 11 July, confident there’s little chance of people who disagree with him winning (tinyurl.com/msbaae72).

#    #    #    #

‘Legislative protections remain weak across the continent,’ the researchers who collated the results of the survey said in a response to questions. In ‘Somalia, Somaliland, Mauritania and Northern Nigeria homosexuality can be punishable by death,’ they said (tinyurl.com/4buzjv55).

#    #    #    #

Disadvantaged Britons are dying 10 years sooner than their wealthier compatriots – victims of what’s become known as the ‘shit life syndrome’ – a life marked by poor living conditions, disease and addiction. The documentary profiles people who have a job but can still afford nothing – from Blackpool in the west, to Ashton-under-Lyne and Cumbria, on the border with Scotland (tinyurl.com/3scyx5a6).

#    #    #    #

A Labour government in the UK under Starmer will bring no significant changes in economic or foreign policy and will make no difference whatsoever to the lives of working class people (tinyurl.com/4hw9pey3).

#    #    #    #

When I spoke to Cohen [co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream], the group’s primary donor, according to Fritz, he echoed the ad’s key points, saying U.S. arms manufacturers saw NATO’s expansion as a ‘financial bonanza.’ ‘In the end, money won,’ he said with a resigned tone. ’And today, not only are they providing weapons to all the new NATO countries, but they’re providing weapons to Ukraine.’ I told Cohen I could understand his opposition to the war and follow his critique of U.S. foreign policy, but I couldn’t grasp how he could take a position that put him in the same corner as a government that is bombing civilians. He refused to be drawn in. ‘I’m not supporting Russia, I’m not supporting Ukraine,’ he said. ‘I’m supporting negotiations to end the war instead of providing more weapons to continue the war’ (tinyurl.com/2p827284).

#    #    #    #

The federal minimum wage in the United States would be $42 an hour today if it rose at the same pace as Wall Street bonuses in recent decades. But it hasn’t. Monday marks 14 years since the last federal minimum wage increase—the longest stretch without a boost since the late 1930s, when the national wage floor was first established. Since 2009, the federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 an hour, pay that’s currently not liveable in any state in the US (tinyurl.com/35jebfkm).

#    #    #    #

The implication of Kennedy’s statement is that the [Covid-19] disease is a biological weapon created by Chinese researchers and Jewish American scientists to kill Christians (bit.ly/44PAouB).

The Law and Homosexuality (1966)

From the May 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

With the election out of the way, Wolfenden ― or rather his famous report ― may get back into the news again. This document, presented to Parliament in September 1957 after more than three years of painstaking work, called forth at that time a mixed public response of support and violent opposition. The government of the time fairly quickly implemented the committee’s main recommendations on prostitution (incidentally with a resultant increase in call-girls and a more highly organised poncing system), but did not make any move concerning the law on male homosexuality.

Public opinion was against any change, said Home Secretary R. A. Butler in the Commons debate of November 26th, 1958, as if capitalist politicians are not capable of trying to ignore public opinion when they think it will serve their purposes to do so. It is just conceivable that homosexuality could have become an election issue in 1959 but the greater likelihood is that for one reason or another the majority of the government did not favour change, and so the matter was dropped. However, one effect of Wolfenden since then has been to bring this controversial question more into the forum of public discussion ― press, radio and TV ― which has continued on and off ever since.

In May last year, Lord Arran managed to get a second reading in the Lords for his Bill to make private homosexual acts between consenting male adults no longer a criminal offence. But a similar measure introduced into the Commons a fortnight later by Labour MP Leo Abse was defeated, the opposition to it having been led by that self styled guardian of our moral welfare and champion of intolerance Sir Cyril Osborne, Tory MP for Louth. However, not long before the election, a Bill on the same lines was sponsored by the Tory Humphrey Berkeley and managed to survive a second reading.

It seems in fact that parliamentary opinion is turning in favour of changing a law which has not had the intended effect and has, by the very nature of its provisions, proved just about unworkable. And after all, there is nothing which brings capitalist legality into contempt more than an unworkable law. As the Lord Chancellor, Lord Gardiner, said on the matter:

“As a lawyer, I am prejudiced because I do not like law which cannot be enforced and we cannot ever enforce laws about what people do by consent in private. Those who are caught are the unlucky few.” (Guardian 13.5.65.)

The present set up had its origins in 1885, when during the committee stage of the Criminal Law (Amendment) Bill, The Liberal MP Labouchère moved his notorious clause creating the new offence between males, whether or not adult, consenting or in private, and by a stroke of the Parliamentary pen, made the lot of the male homosexual less tolerable than it had been for many years. Labouchère’s clause was passed without debate, and became section 11 of the new Act, providing punishments which were savage even by Capitalism’s standards. The maximum penalties still range from a £5 fine for “Bye Law indecencies” to life imprisonment for buggery.

No wonder that furtiveness and secrecy entered the homosexuals life in greater measure ― and there was a still uglier aspect rearing its head. In the storm of controversy that followed the publication of the new regulations, one judge called them “the blackmailer’s charter”, a name which has stuck and which seems to have been justified by subsequent events. Moreover, the dubious conduct of the police in securing some of their convictions has been a source of fierce contention among lawyers ever since. Only in May last year, Montgomery Hyde was citing recent examples of this in a series of articles in The People.

Not always the same attitude towards homosexuality has prevailed. Aymer Roberts says: “As we turn the pages of history we discern alternately the acceptance and admiration of homosexuality and then later its attempted suppression” (Forbidden Freedom). In feudal Britain, there were times when, along with fornication and adultery, sexual inversion was punishable by the most painful death. Indeed, as late as the seventeenth century, Lord Castlehaven was beheaded for it on Tower Hill. Such was the fear expressed through Christian dogma and supported by the church, of any practice which was thought to be a threat to the marriage institution.

The number of male homosexuals in Britain is not precisely known; estimates have varied between 500,000 and one million. But whatever the number, there is no doubt that for many the strain of trying to live within a set of general social rules ― not just the law ― which aim at their rejection, is very great. As Dr. Eustace Chesser has pointed out:

“The sense of guilt and nervous strain felt by many homosexuals today is due largely to social disapproval . . . Public opinion can be as punitive as the law.” (Live and Let Live.)

So the homosexual, it seems, has a difference which rapidly becomes a social handicap, but he is forced to wage a long and not altogether successful battle for society’s acceptance. Hence the mental conflicts, the nervous breakdowns, and sometimes the suicides.

Probably that is why the condition has been thought of as an illness ― two separate states have been confused and placed under one heading, but Wolfenden has rejected such a view, as have many leading medicos. According to Dr. Neustattor for instance, “It is not an illness or a disease . . . but simply a variation.” (Albany Trust Winter Talks, 1962-63). So if it can’t be called an illness, it is hardly a question of “curing” it neither has punishment stamped it out. Hence the proposal once more to bring English law into line with that of other countries, and as far as adults are concerned anyway, leave them well alone.

Nor should we forget that times have changed considerably since Labouchère’s days. It is not without significance that the reformers are anxious to convince people of the usefulness ― potential or otherwise ― of the homosexual to capitalist industry.

“It should not be beyond our capabilities to devise some method of control which will enable each homosexual to lead … a more useful life, and this in the final analysis must be a benefit to the whole community. (Albany Trust Winter Talks. 1962-63.)”

“A substantial minority of men in every class of society, being made free from fear of the criminal law, would be better able to play a constructive part in the life of the community. (Pamphlet by The Homosexual Law Reform Society.)

And of course, this is one of the salient propaganda features of the movement for reform of the law. The reformers want to fit the homosexual into existing society without additional stigma; they do not aim at a basic change in society itself.

The same criticism can be made of all such movements, wherever they are. In his book ‘The Homosexual Revolution’, R. E. L. Masters says that the homosexuals in U.S.A. have managed to start official organisations to voice their grievances and demands for law reform, the main associations being Daughters of Bilitas for women, and The Mattachine Society for men. He alleges that the problems of blackmail, police persecution and harassment, etc., are much greater there than in Britain, which may be the reason for the rise of these more vociferous protective clubs. He gives a list of “the movement’s” demands, which apart from the fact that some people might think them too sweeping, are all aimed at making the homosexual acceptable as a citizen of capitalist society. The very first of these is a plea that “the homosexual, male or female, should be permitted like any other citizen, to serve his or her country as a member of any branch of its armed forces.” (The present U.S. law forbids this.) A doubtful privilege indeed ― losing your life on a battlefield as a result of the very struggles you have waged to make it worth ― living.

When the law is eventually changed, then, a minority will be released from the shadow of vindictive penalties (although only in one provision of Wolfenden is this so; his proposal for the under twenty-ones is that the penalties be retained and in some cases even increased), but this will not be the end of the homosexual’s problems. Apart from the backlog of fear, ignorance and prejudice which will impinge on his life still, the legal change will at most be an offer to absorb him, so to speak, more easily into the present set up. Which will mean, if he is a worker (and most homosexuals certainly are), that the grey day-to-day existence and struggles to make a living will still be there.

Eddie Critchfield

TV Review: ‘The Eleven o’clock Show’ (2000)

TV Review from the March 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

No Rest For the Wicked?

Channel Four has just welcomed back its flagship nightly satirical review ‘The Eleven o’clock Show’ for another series, though whether the fact that it appears at almost any time in the late night schedules is part of the joke or not is anybody’s guess. This is the show that launched Ali G, the black “homeboy” from Staines who is played by a Jewish white man, and who endlessly employs a stilted Afro-Caribbean patois in his toe-curling interviews with politicians and academics who are singled out precisely because of their ignorance of the idiom.

There has been a debate of sorts in the press over recent weeks about Ali G, specifically over whether he is a racist creation of the actor who portrays him, Sacha Cohen. Whatever else he might be though, Ali G is no Black and White Minstrel. His dialogue is carefully scripted and intended as a comic caricature of a certain strata of British youth subculture where phrases like “wicked”, “posse” and Ali G’s ubiquitous “keep it real!” are trotted out as a substitute for joined-up conversation. That pompous authority figures with little or no conception of modern life and culture can be made to look foolish by their inevitable attempts to take Ali G’s moronic posturing at face value are the nub of the joke, none more so than the Irish republican leader who was asked by Ali G “Why are people always dissin’ da RAC?” and who then tried to answer the question.

What seems to be confusing to some of Ali G’s critics on the left is that his conversation is sprinkled with outrageous and politically incorrect language. But this is where the joke really hits the mark—whether Ali G’s interviewees will go along with his ignorant comments on the grounds that they do not wish to seem “unhip” or whether they will actually confront him—and if so, how. Many of course do not understand his questions and are in no position to form a rounded opinion. Fewer still seem to understand the various sexual references sprinkled throughout his speech, though Tony Benn did on one occasion memorably chastise him for his sexism—including his references to his girlfriends “me bitches”—and with some humour too.

By and large Ali G is well scripted and nicely performed, though unfortunately one suspects that his fame is spreading that fast that he will have no unsuspecting victims left before long willing to be interviewed. He has his own show coming up soon on Channel Four which will be worth looking out for as a follow-up to his Christmas special last year.

Send in the clowns

Now that Ali G has departed, ‘The Eleven o’clock Show‘ is left exposed and bereft. More than ever it now appears to be little more than a post-modern version of ‘Not the Nine o’clock News’, written by the politically ignorant and driven on by a desire to replace humour with shock-value in the hope that at that time of night no-one will notice the difference. A typical example of its approach surfaced—if that is the right word—in its first show back. Sitting behind presenters Daisy Donovan and Iain Lee was an electronic scoreboard labelled “The Dr Shipman Snuff-o-meter”, the score on which rose ever upward as the show progressed. But as the score increased, the tastelessness of the programme’s makers shot up exponentially.

Would Daisy Donovan and Iain Lee, it is tempting to ask, have willingly sat in front of this “joke” scoreboard if their own parents or grandparents had been among those murdered by Shipman? Hopefully not, though they might care to remember the effect this sight would have had on the many in precisely that position, and then feel suitably ashamed. Frankly, better than this could have been expected from a dysfunctional five year old.

It is also curious to note that the programme which spawned the controversial Ali G seems to have attracted few press comments about the little streak of homophobia which is evident in most editions. Perhaps this is because most TV critics still find jokes about Michael Portillo funny regardless of whether they really are or not.

That The Eleven O’clock Show lets itself down in this way is disappointing because it is certainly not all bad and there are occasional rays of sunshine which break through the fog. However, its makers must learn that no truly great comedy programme ever made it on the back of shock-value alone and Daisy Donovan and Iain Lee should note that they do not have quite as much to appear self-satisfied about as their demeanour would suggest. Well observed, original humour and characterisation is needed, and lots of it. Unfortunately, without Ali G ‘The Eleven o’clock Show’ can appear as naked as the emperor with no clothes and, for the most part, just as unsightly.

Dave Perrin

Trotwatching (2000)

Book Review from the March 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Adherents of Permanent Revolution: A History of the Fourth (Trotskyist) International’. By Barry Lee Woolley (University Press of America, 1999)

With the decline in the fortunes of the left-wing of capitalism’s political apparatus, books about the organisations of the radical left – once commonplace – are now much rarer. Here Barry Lee Woolley charts the rise and fall of the Fourth International in a largely narrative account of the coalescence of the Trotskyist movement at the International’s foundation in 1938 through its various sclerotic episodes in the post-war period until the mid-1970s.

Though much of it is well researched, this is an unusual work for a number of reasons. For one thing, it is rather US-centric, focusing overmuch on the role of the US Socialist Workers Party in the Fourth International. As Woolley is a former member of the American SWP and still has a great number of contacts in the US Trotskyist movement, this is perhaps understandable; whatever, Woolley certainly provides a good genealogical chart of the US Trotskyist movement and is able to calculate that in America alone three new Trotskyist parties have arisen on average per year.

Rather less understandable than all this is his current political orientation which seems to owe less to the political God Trotsky than the Christian Lord Almighty worshipped by the evangelicals in the American Bible Belt. This is evidenced in his peculiar obsession with ‘morals’ in general and male homosexuality in particular, the growth of which he claims was largely responsible for changing the outlook of the world Trotskyist movement in the 1960s:

“[a] change in recruitment patterns transformed the predominantly burly worker cadres of the early Trotskyist movement into the predominantly petty bourgeois, college-recruited, effeminate cadres of the world Trotskyist movement at the time of the tenth World Congress . . . [The Socialist Workers Party] even participated in the building of mass marches around the issue of special legal privileges for sodomites.”

Woolley would certainly appear to have an unhealthy preoccupation with this topic, with one chapter even having the bizarre, incomprehensible by-line “Socialist Sodomites and Sorcery”. Perhaps Woolley is living testament to the charge that membership of Trotskyist sects buggers up the brain.

Despite the large amount of time that has clearly gone into producing this generally well-referenced work, there are a number of factual errors too. The account of the British Trotskyist movement is good if only partial, but there really is no excuse for Woolley referring to British Trotskyist leader Tony Cliff as Ygael Gluckstadt when he is correctly mentioned elsewhere as Ygael Gluckstein. There are many other similar errors, so much so that they eventually become annoying.

Woolley is shortly to produce another volume, this time on the history of the American Trotskyist movement. For his sake and ours let’s hope he gets in contact with a good therapist before then, preferably one that can also give him a hand with his proof-reading.

Dave Perrin

Greasy Pole: Gays and capitalism (1998)

The Greasy Pole column from the December 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Among the demands of campaigners for homosexual equality is that there should be an end to the discrimination towards gays and lesbians in the armed forces. Everyone, whatever their sexuality, should be treated equally in their military training, the opportunity to join “elite” units and their chances of promotion. And they should be encouraged to kill other people just as efficiently and ruthlessly as any other soldier, sailor or air person. Welcome to the world of “equality”.

We can spend a lot of time considering the nature of prejudice against homosexuals and how deeply this might be rooted in the bigots’ anxieties about their own sexuality. In the case of the armed forces, with their emphasis on disciplined, uniform devotion to the task of wiping out other human beings, it is no surprise that the prejudice should be particularly strong and cruel. But, typically of a prejudice, it is not a theory supported by any evidence; the assumption that military gays have to be confined to work in the cookhouse because they couldn’t be trusted in the frontline has no basis in reality. In the First World War, for example, soldiers like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon were homosexuals who were as reckless of their own safety in carrying out their grisly “duties” as the most bloodthirsty commander could have wished.

Decorated

Owen went back to the trenches from the hospital where he had been treated for—but not apparently cured of—shell shock and concussion. At the front he wrote of how exhilarating it was “baffling the machine guns with quick bounds from cover to cover”. In the final weeks of the war he was out in the leading units breaking through the German lines and he was decorated for it—until he was killed a little before Armistice Day. Sassoon’s exploits in battle were so impressive that he earned himself the sobriquet of Mad Jack. After one particularly reckless episode he too was decorated. He then developed some doubts about the war but then became reconciled enough to go back to the Front.

So there is absolutely no reason for the armed forces to have any qualms about filling their ranks with a mixture of heterosexuals and homosexuals in the confidence that they will all work together in a disciplined employment of the latest weapon technology to destroy as much of the “enemy” as possible. This is all in the best interests of the British ruling class; capitalism depends on the support of its people, in peace and war, boom and slump, whatever other differences they may have. We have recently seen how this principle applies to the governments of capitalism and to what is significant about their operation.

There is no reason to believe that Members of Parliament—no matter what image of themselves they project—are any different in terms of their sexual preferences from the people they are supposed to represent. So we can assume that there are proportionately as many homosexuals in the Commons as in the world outside (although there are persistent rumours that there are rather more). But for various reasons it was considered politically advisable to disguise this fact and there was a powerful, united effort to do this.

Rumours

Tom Driberg, for example, was a Labour MP elected in 1945 whose sexual exploits—at a time when homosexual activity was illegal—were renowned for what might be called their reckless audacity. But Driberg was never exposed, even when he had landed himself in a police station, facing a criminal charge. On the other side of the House the Tory MP Harvey Proctor mixed his homosexuality with a nastier type of racism but he was protected until one of his associates blew his cover. When he had to leave Parliament his friends continued to stand by him, helping him out with loans to open a clothing shop. There were persistent, lurid rumours about more than one prominent member of Thatcher’s cabinets—in one case it was said that his withdrawal from the brightest of the limelight was enforced by a frantic police interest in his activities.

By the time we got round to Ron Davies, Peter Mandelson and Nick Brown the situation had changed. Perhaps it was because the fact had finally sunk in, that the law had been reformed some years ago. Perhaps it was because one or two MPs—most prominently Chris Smith—openly announced that they are gay and that this would not prevent them doing their job as administrators of capitalism. Whatever it was, the steam had clearly gone out of the whole thing so that even the Sun could point out that Mandelson’s sexuality is irrelevant to his performance as a minister—especially one who has to have an opinion on Rupert Murdoch’s bid to buy Manchester United. In the Sunday Times of 15 November the Tory shadow chancellor, Francis Maude—whose gay brother died in 1993 of Aids—gave the view of ” . . . a classic, buttoned-up, middle class Brit”. Did he disapprove of his brother’s activities?

“It always seemed to me a bit pointless to disapprove of homosexuality. It’s like disapproving of rain.”

Outed

What are we to think, when the Let-It-All-Hang-Out Sun agrees with a buttoned-up Tory like Francis Maude? Perhaps times have changed enough to put the issue of sexuality into its proper place, so that the millions of people who buy the Sun and the millions who support the parties of Francis Maude and Peter Mandelson no longer think it is relevant to how they vote. One thing which is absolutely clear in the history of capitalism is that the personal characteristics, preferences and sexuality of its leaders have no bearing on how they run the system. The notion that personalities affect politics is part of the deception which persuades people that capitalism is not a society which must operate against their interests.

It is time that all politicians were outed. It is time to winkle them out of the closet in which they conceal the fact that they stand for a social system which can’t help but produce a mountain of human misery—of fear, destruction, neglect, disease . . . It is time for the workers to think in terms, not just of the “liberation” of a group of us but of our whole class.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: These You have Loved (1997)

The Greasy Pole column from the June 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Among the Tories who were forced by the voters to spend more time with their families was the egregious David Evans, once the MP for Welwyn Hatfield. Evans made himself famous for his robust views on crime, race, gender and other such issues. This did not seem to damage him until, shortly before the election, what he had thought was a cosy private chat to some sixth-formers was recorded and publicised. This showed Evans in his true colours; a crass denunciation of his Labour opponent as a single mother with a "bastard" child was mixed with some bigoted nonsense about crime and skin colour and an insistence that the Birmingham Six were not only guilty of the offences they had been jailed for but had also probably killed a great many more people while they were about it. Then, for good measure. Evans sneered at fellow Tory MP—a minister no less—as "dead from the neck up”.

The bigotry and arrogance of this speech illustrated pretty accurately what a lot of voters had begun to dislike and fear about the Tories and about the prospect of giving them a fifth term in power. What would people like Evans get up to if they ever got the idea in their heads that, no matter how they behaved, they would never lose their seats? It was all put into words by—as you might expect—Richard Littlejohn, who prides himself as being the voice the man-in-the-saloon-bar where, apparently, the true heart of Britain is supposed to beat. According to Littlejohn there was no need for anyone, apart from a few feeble trendies in places like Islington, to get upset at what Evans had said because the man had merely spoken the truth—like the good, solid, staunch Englishman he is he had said a few things which most other people thought but were afraid to put into words.

Reunion

Of course if Littlejohn had got it right it would be advisable to keep clear of all saloon bars in future because they are obviously crawling with the most appalling bores and half-wits imaginable. But what are we to make of the reaction to Evans of his then colleagues in the Commons, typified by Edwina Currie, who coyly told us that while she may disagree with this views she—and other MPs—loved Evans to bits? (Currie is another ex-MP, although in her case she will be spending more time with her pens and paper or her word processor or whatever she uses to churn out those trashy novels.) The voters in Welwyn Hatfield gave the answer, when they replaced Evans with the woman whose unmarried motherhood was such a worry to him in an 11-percent swing. We can only hope that Evans will now be too busy running his cleaning company to bother us with any more of his insane, pernicious drivel.

If he has time he may be able to arrange the occasional reunion with other ex-MPs whose views are so similar to his. If so. at the top of his list should be Terry Dicks, who was not actually defeated at the general election because he did not give the voters the chance. Dicks won Hayes and Harlington in 1983, when the Labour Party was riven by the defection of their MP to the SDP. In 1987 Dicks increased his majority but in 1992 he held on by the skin of his teeth, with only 53 votes keeping him in Parliament. Over the years Dicks clearly took a realistic view of his chances of re-election if of very little else—and decided to look for a constituency with a safer majority. Perhaps he hoped to find one with larger, noisier, saloon bars because some of his stated views made David Evans look like a wet. But it was not to be; Dicks hawked his candidature around but he was too unsavoury for even the Tories and he had to observe the election from the sidelines—while his old seat at Hayes and Harlington showed how shrewd he had been to look elsewhere by putting up a Labour majority of over 14.000.

Eccentrics

What was is that had made Dicks so unattractive, not just to the voters of Hayes and Harlington but to selection committees in his own party? Could it have been those opinions which he perhaps assumed would be so welcome in the saloon bars with the approval spreading out. like ripples in the water? There was everything to be said, he thought, for flogging or hanging people convicted of appropriate crimes. Anyone travelling from Scotland to support the Scottish team in an international at Wembley was a "pig". Homosexual people were perverts who could be deterred by sprays (of what?) or red-hot pokers (we shall not elaborate on that particular proposed penal reform). Having heard all that no-one would be surprised that Dicks viewed black people as generally bone idle and so was not in favour of the relaxation of immigration controls.

It’s not on record whether Dicks was also "loved to bits" by his fellow legislators. He is not. however, the only worrying eccentric who no longer has a voice in the details of applying the demands of British capitalism to the working class. Olga Maitland, who bit the dust at Sutton and Cheam. was once considered the doyenne of gossip columnists; she was unwise enough to debate with the Socialist Party and unintentionally had the audience rolling in the aisles by ranting about something called “Tommy grit”. Marcus Fox lorded it as chairman of the 1922 Committee and did his best to convince us that he was not a real person but a character from one of J. B. Priestley's more mordant accounts of past life in small Yorkshire towns. William Waldegrave, ex-Etonian and Fellow of All Souls, was deeply involved in the Arms-to-Iraq scandal and the question of whether lies had been told to Parliament about it and whether the prosecution of the Churchill Matrix management quite fitted in with what brainy, wealthy aristocrats should regard as unwavering British justice. And Waldegrave never really answered the questions, except with carefully crafted evasions.

Carnival

On 2 May there was a strange, almost carnival atmosphere about. People were actually celebrating the election of a Labour government, as if getting rid of people like Evans and Dicks was going to make capitalism an easier, more humane society. There is no evidence in the records of past Labour governments to encourage such optimism. There have been corrupt, eccentric and extremist politicians in the past as well as more rational and so-called moderate ones. It is no time to hate our leaders nor to love them but to hate capitalism and all it does to human beings and to trust ourselves to do what is needed to end it all. 

Ivan

The soul of Oscar Wilde (2021)

From the June 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

I had often seen Oscar Wilde described as a socialist for his essay ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’, but I’d never read it. So when it was published in a recent selection of Wilde’s works (Oscar Wilde. In Praise of Disobedience, edited by Neil Bartlett, Verso, 2020), this seemed to me an opportunity to fill that gap. I was more familiar with the works Wilde is much more famous for – his plays (e.g. The Importance of Being Earnest), his poetry (e.g. The Ballad of Reading Gaol), and his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and of course with his spectacular fall from grace when he was imprisoned for sodomy in an age that criminalised homosexuality and brought the writer to poverty and exile before he died in 1900 at the age of 46.

In a beautifully written introduction to this collection, the editor describes ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ as ‘the writing of a man who knew all about being wounded, worried, maimed, and in danger’. And there’s no doubt that this is a tormented piece of writing. Its main theme is the quest for better social circumstances in which artists and all people can express their being freely and openly and without fear of outraging existing norms or incurring interdiction or punishment. But, given the essay’s title, I was rather surprised that a good deal of it is not specifically about socialism or indeed about any kind of politics at all. As much as anything else it’s about the role of art in human society and in particular the position of artists in Wilde’s time and the problems they faced. The connection of this to socialism is that, in what Wilde sees as a socialist society, artists would not have to abide by the strictures and constraints imposed on them in his own society. So we can agree with the editor of this volume that what we have here, at one level at least, is ‘an aesthetics of radicalism’.

But what is the ‘socialism’ of the title that Wilde sees as being necessary and through which man’s true ‘soul’ would be capable of free expression? In many ways it does seem strikingly close to the Socialist Party’s version of socialism – a world of common ownership, voluntary cooperation and free access – summed up as follows early in the essay: ‘Socialism, Communism, or whatever one chooses to call it, by converting private property into public wealth, and substituting cooperation for competition, will restore society to its proper condition of thoroughly healthy organism, and ensure the material well-being of each member of the community.’ There is much else along these lines – from ‘the proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible’, to ‘it is only in voluntary associations that man is fine’, to ‘the true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is’, and ‘when private property is abolished there will be no necessity for crime, no demand for it; it will cease to exist’. On issues like authority and human nature too, Wilde is strikingly ‘modern’ in his thought: ‘All authority is quite degrading (…) It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised’ (…) ‘The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes’.

But Wilde also has another axe to grind, one which at first sight may seem to run contrary to the vision he initially outlines. He tells us, repeatedly, that he prizes above all what he calls ‘individualism’. In a different context this could of course appear a way of describing the ‘every man for himself’ ethic which is at the heart of capitalist society. But Wilde sees ‘individualism’ not as the war of each person against the other, but rather a way of realising and releasing human energies in each individual to allow them to fulfil their personal potential in building a free cooperative society, a society in which ‘every man must be left quite free to choose his own work’. In Wilde’s view ‘private property has set up an Individualism that is false’, crushing true individualism, which for him is not egotism, since ‘the egotist is he who makes claims upon others, and the Individualist will not desire to do that’. But, he goes on, ‘when man has realised Individualism, he will also realise sympathy and exercise it freely and spontaneously’. And his exaltation of individualism ends on the most exalted of notes: ‘With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy, Individualism. No one will waste his life in accumulating things and the symbols for things’.

This is Wilde’s vision, but what of the means to achieve it? As the editor of this collection quite rightly points out, ‘the thing (…) that will surprise a modern reader most – given its title – is that it proposes no political or politicised action of any kind’. In other words, it contains no prescriptions on how the ‘adjustments’ to the society Wilde advocates would take place. So though he seems to be advocating socialism in the Socialist Party’s terms, he does not follow the Socialist Party’s proposal to achieve it, i.e. through political action via the spreading of socialist consciousness followed by democratic action through the ballot box. But though Wilde proposes no specific means of achieving socialism, he does make clear that he is not looking for the ‘socialism’ of state control (‘It is clear, then, that no Authoritarian Socialism will do.’). And so of course in adopting such a position, Wilde would not have found favour with many of the so-called ‘socialists’ of his day, for example the Fabians, who advocated state legislation to change social conditions. It must be said, however, that there is some residual attachment to the state in Wilde’s thinking, perhaps stemming from the same kind of failure of the imagination to be found in many of today’s ‘anti-capitalists’, a failure to imagine radically enough. In Wilde’s socialism, the state still does seem to have an existence, not apparently as a governing body, but, as he puts it, ’a voluntary association that will organise labour, and be the manufacturer and distributor of necessary commodities’. But, there again, this may be a question of terminology and what Wilde is describing is socialist organisation under another name.

So, what was my impression on reading this much-mentioned work for the first time? Was I enthused about Wilde’s vision of socialism or was I disappointed? Definitely more the first than the second and, especially given the time at which the work was written and the circumstances of that time, I would want to forgive certain flights of fancy by the author (for example something of an attachment to Christianity or at least to the figure of Christ), a tendency towards sweeping statements (part of what the editor describes as Wilde’s ‘firework display of opinion’) and the occasions on which he does not seem to entirely share the vision of a socialist world and how to achieve it of other socialists of his day (e.g. Marx or William Morris), a vision which continues to be entirely relevant today.

Howard Moss