About the World Socialist Party (1969)

Editorial from the January 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

The World Socialist Party is an independent political organisation that has neither allegiance to, nor sympathy with, any other political party or group in this country. The WSP is affiliated with political organisations in other countries who share the same Socialist object.

The object is:

The establishment of a system of society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community.

We define the system of society proposed in our object as Socialism—a wageless, moneyless, classless society of production for use in which each member of society would contribute to the wealth of society in accordance with his mental or physical abilities and take from the wealth of society in accordance with his needs.

You may not agree that such a society is a feasible proposition. but, if you think about it for a moment, you will agree that if it were possible to establish such a system of socialist organisation the basic problems that we live with today under capitalism—problems like poverty, insecurity, slums, crime and war that arise naturally and inevitably out of the capitalist scheme of production for profit would cease to exist.

If, then, Socialism offers us an escape from the evils that afflict our society today the feasibility of the proposition merits sympathetic consideration. Perhaps instead of indulging in mental gymnastics to discern some possible stultifying factor it is worth the effort to consider the reasons why Man. who has transformed Nature’s jungle into a fertile, highly-organised, complex world and now looks beyond his planet to the moon, can make a system of social and economic sanity work.

Doubtless, already, the "human nature" argument has occurred to you: ". . . human nature, being what it is, Man could not live co-operatively in a society where he would not be forced to do this or that . . . the greedy people would take all . . . the lazy people would not work . . ." Most of us who are now Socialists used the same argument ourselves when first confronted with the case for Socialism, before realising that what we termed "human nature" was in fact human behaviour or human reaction to the social and economic environment, in our case the environment of capitalism.

We affirm that capitalism today has fulfilled its historic mission: it has opened the womb of social labour and developed the resources of society to a point where social distribution is possible now.

In order that a change, a change to Socialism, may be wrought it is necessary that a majority of the working class, armed with the knowledge of what Socialism involves and entails, should use the means at their disposal, the power of the vote—which they now dissipate in trying to make capitalism work—to consciously institute the change. Socialism, by its very nature, requires the conscious and knowledgeable participation of the majority from the outset. It cannot be brought about by minorities or "action groups" leading the way, no more than it can be introduced gradually by tinkering with reforms of capitalism.

Equal Rights for All? (1969)

From the January 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Demonstrations, counter-marches, official bans, theological hooliganism, brutality, Ministerial stupidity . , . such is the Northern Ireland scene as the crisis worsens and the old bigotries re-appear shaped in new viciousness.

While the situation offers little in the way of political dividends to official Unionism or Nationalism it creates a golden opportunity for many of the lesser political groupings to achieve their moment in the headlines or on the TV screens, adding their special flavour of support or opposition to the government’s policies.

It is too easy to achieve a following in the present crisis. In the heat of battle immediate and fickle political alliances may be achieved but, in the long run, such a struggle allows for few real conversions and when the violence recedes the real casualties will be the working class. Theirs will be the cracked heads, the prison sentences and, especially, will it be the working class who will remain splintered and fraught with bitterness that can only help to maintain the very system that creates the abuse of what has become popularly known as “civil rights”.

As to the actual issues involved, only the most bigoted could claim that there are no abuses of political democracy in Northern Ireland. These abuses—and we recognise that when applied to some of the laws and many of the practices in the Province the term “abuses” is an understatement!—have been adequately covered by opponents of the government and require no elaboration here.

In the main, the government is accused of following a path of religious discrimination in the matter of homes, jobs and local government franchise. The Civil Rights movement demands equality for all in these matters.

While it is true that in some areas religious discrimination is practised, it should also be added that it is simply as a device for the maintenance and covering-up of the real evil, class discrimination. To suggest otherwise is to imply that Protestant members of the working class are the beneficiaries of discrimination and that all sections of the Roman Catholic population are discriminated against. But Catholic members of the capitalist class are not needful of jobs, nor are their names to be found on local authority housing lists. They, with their Protestant class-brethren, enjoy the full benefits of their economically privileged position including the right of multiple property votes.

On the other hand, Protestant members of the working class endure the problems of their class like poverty, insecurity, slums and unemployment. The fact that some politicians promote their own political interests by pushing the interests of a Protestant instead of a Catholic for a “working class” dwelling may ease somewhat the immediate position of the Protestant worker, but it is only a drop in the bucket as far as solving the housing problem of Protestant workers is concerned. They face, with their Roman Catholic counterparts, the full fury of class discrimination in housing as in other matters.
Obviously when the Civil Rights organisation speaks of “equal rights for all’ they are assessing the relative needs of individual Protestant and Catholic members of the working class. Doubtless their quotable cases are accurate enough, but the pitiful needs of all must make any order of priority wholly odious. Again, does their claim for an end to discrimination mean that members of the working class should have the same rights and privileges as members of the capitalist class? Unfortunately, it does not, for the Civil Rights movement, like all other organisations that campaign against some evil feature of capitalism fails to understand the real nature of the problem. They will militate against capitalism's bombs, its slums, its rents, its wages, its religious or 'racial' prejudices; they will share common ground on some of the issues and dispute most of the others but they are ignorant of the fact that all these problems stem from a single cause, capitalism, and will only disappear with that system.

The latter-day history of Ireland’s politico-religious difficulties relate directly to the conflict of economic interest between the North’s well-entrenched capitalist class whose economic needs were best served by union with Britain and their fledgling class counterparts in the South whose economic interests could best be served by protection from British capitalism in a separate state. These are the people whose separate economic interests were served in the slogans “A Protestant Parliament for a Protestant People” and “Long Live the Irish Republic”. Theirs were the interests served by their respective political hacks, sincere and otherwise, who made “principles” out of economic expediency and weapons out of bigotry and hatred.

The fledgling capitalists of the South who bleated through Sinn Fein's policy statements about “Irish manufacturers being squeezed out by their more powerful English competitors” have succeeded in building their industries behind the tariff walls and import quotas of a separate state. Like their Northern Ireland counterparts they now stand on the threshold of big-league Common Market capitalism. Seldom now—and then, embarrassedly—do they hear the ghosts of yesterday's unwitting martyrs to their cause, but the seeds of hatred arid bigotry on which their respective causes thrived remain within the working class in Northern Ireland, thwarting the growth of what passes for democracy in capitalist society.

Capitalism is discrimination both political and economic. Even when its full range of “civil rights” have been achieved by the working class its problems remain—each finding its victims mainly among the working class. Indeed those sincere and idealistic people who carry on the struggle for “civil rights” do a disservice to freedom when they canalise the discontent of the working class into the safe stream of political reformism and assert, if only by implication, that working class problems will be either solved or basically eased by this or that reform.

Is the life of the Loyal Orange Protestant, employed and estate-dwelling, poverty-riddled and tick-paying, degraded and insecure—member of the working class—the measure of the reformer’s ambition for those now “discriminated against”? Is this his conception of freedom and the cause for which he encourages workers to face armed police thugs?

Even the reforms that the Civil Rights people advocate can only be achieved when they are understood and accepted by the vast majority of those who presently oppose them. Our local capitalists and their political flunkeys, the Unionist Party, do not now require bigotry and hatred to serve their economic interests and most of them would probably approve the full Civil Rights programme tomorrow if they were not prisoners of their own past; but they cannot pass an Act of Love. They cannot sweep away in one legislative brush the hatred and bigotry they so carefully husbanded only yesterday. In the last analysis, only a sustained campaign to clear away the political and religious garbage that the working class got from its leaders of yesterday can achieve the puny reforms demanded.

But why should members of the working class involve themselves in a campaign against some of capitalism’s lesser evils, a campaign rendered more difficult by capitalism’s built-in bias for the creation of sectional interests?

Even without the votes of the disenfranchised, even against the multiple votes of property, we have enough power now in the votes of the working class to banish capitalism and all its problems and establish a free society of production for use. What the working class lacks is an understanding of the alternative to capitalism, Socialism. This, like the puny demands of Civil Rights, can only be achieved by a sustained campaign among our fellow members of the working class. But why struggle for the apple when the same effort can bring us the orchard?

Richard Montague

The Computer, Karl Marx and the Battery Hens (1969)

From the January 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Here in the computer room there was some relief. On the other side of the door the clerks and typists grew steadily moister as the temperature in the vast office, trapped and intensified by great areas of glass, climbed into the nineties. Clerks and typists were only human beings; not too expensive to employ, able and willing to adapt themselves to discomfort. The computer was different. It was excessively expensive to hire and it could not adapt to great changes in temperature.

“The air conditioning in here's perfect,” said the guide. “It has to be or the box would simply pack up. When we put it in we even analysed the supervisor's pipe smoke to make sure we got everything rights temperature wise. Now if you'll just come this way we’ll show you an exercise in updating our product structure file. Very important; we're putting the entire material control and production planning onto computer and updating the file’s a part of it.”

Around the computer, flashing and pulsing, two young men worked fast, changing magnetic discs and tapes. Another went to a console and punched at a keyboard. After a time the concertinaed sheets of paper began to leap through their guides, printing faster than the eye could follow.

“PU07EX EXPEC PGM = BOMP
SYSPRINT DD SYSOUT = A
PMOIOO DD DSNAME = HO.PMOIOO, DISP = OLD 

The paper zipped through the machine until suddenly:

IEF 6041 INPUT STREAM DATA FLUSHED 

The man at the console frowned, tapped out a question on his keyboard and read off the computer’s answer. Then another.

“It’s a hard wait,” he said to the guide. “A hard wait,” he explained to the visitors, “means the box has stopped and right now we don't know why. It may be something wrong with the hardware—with the computer itself. More likely the software’s up the pole—someone’s fed it some rubbish. We don't like a hard wait because of the expense. This machine works in micro seconds and there are as many micro seconds in one second as there are seconds in three hundred hours.”

The guide's face did not lose its smile.

“That’s a real pity,” he said, “But I guess it’s life computer-wise. Never mind, there’s still lots we can see. The card punch room, now. Everything in this computer starts life as a punched card—a card with holes in it. We’ve got a special department through here where girls punch the holes on machines. Some of them—the girls I mean, not the machines—are pretty attractive. This way.”

The visitors left the computer room, with its three operators trying desperately to save as many micro seconds as they could, and filed into a large, windowless area. Here, under harsh lighting, sat row upon row of young girls, heads bent over clacking machines.

“This girl”, the guide stopped at one of the machines, “is punching cards which will feed an order for spare parts into the computer where it will be processed—credit checked, stocks adjusted, delivery sheets made out.”

There was no response from the girl. Her fingers blurred across the keyboard.

‘They’re on an incentive scheme,” said the guide, “They get paid a bonus for every depression of the keys above their daily quota. If they make mistakes they lose that number of depressions to the verifiers—the girls who check every hole that’s punched. The verifiers get a bonus for every mistake they find. This is a good system. It works."

One of the visitors asked the question which was running through most of their minds.

“How do the girls react to these conditions? They seem to be working at a hell of a pace—faster than anything I’ve ever seen anywhere else.”

“Well, there’s the bonus scheme,” smiled the guide, “And they’ve got all these indoor plants around to brighten up the place and they’re allowed to stop work completely for ten minutes every morning and afternoon for coffee or tea from the machines. In fact, when the computer really gets cracking we'll have most of the office staff in this place organised like this. These girls don’t seem to mind; they can think of something else while they work and really they don’t want very much else. Just look at their bags beside their machines; every one's reading the Mirror or Woman’s Own or Weekend.

“Oh—I nearly forgot. Every fifteen minutes we switch on some piped music. That had an effect on them. We vary the style and tempo with the time of day and the supervisor can also alter it according to how fast the work’s coming out. This is a nice, clean office and the girls like it. This way.”

As the visitors left the temple of the card punch room, where for every head bent in prayer for accuracy there was another praying for error, the music washed over and over them, smooth and sickly sweet. It was mid morning. The song was I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm.

That was probably an unlucky day for the computer; some of its work must go right because so far there have been no riots on the factory floor after some men have been paid twenty thousand pounds and others one and threepence. Perhaps, too, it is unfair to criticise the computer men for being so enthusiastic about their machines. Computers are capable of feats undreamt of only a short time ago and it is no new thing for workers to make a virtue out of the necessity of their inferior social standing and become dedicated to the particular job in which they are exploited.

The entire system of employment is one huge confidence trick in which, like all confidence tricks, the victim is deceived by promises of big gains in the future. How many times, for example, have we heard the promises about the benefits we are to get from intensified industry, advanced productive techniques, new scientific discoveries? Usually, the promises amount to little more than a recital of the abilities of a machine, leaving the listener to infer that these will automatically benefit him. For example, this was how Harold Wilson worked the computer confidence trick in his famous speech in the science debate at the Labour Party Conference in 1963:

  A modern computer in a fraction of a second can make calculations and can make decisions of judgement which all the mathematicians in Britain and America combined could not make by ordinary methods in the space of a year. You have computers at work now controlling a planned productive system of machine tools which have an impulse cycle of three millionths of a second. They do their calculations and take their decisions in a period of three millionths of a second. Yet already those machines are out of date. New mass controllers are in production now with a speed one thousand times as fast.

Wilson's audience, all over the country, duly inferred that under a Labour government there would be a golden age of science and technology in which the computer would be mother to us all. They now know the truth.

At the time, of course, they were so bemused by the speech that they overlooked certain facts. There is no evidence that they are any readier now to accept these facts, but it is always a good idea to spell them out. To begin with, computers are not installed because they are marvellous machines which can make light of a worker’s load. A firm will only get a computer if it is convinced that there is profit in doing so. This means that only the larger companies can afford to have their own machine—and that, having got it they must work it flat out, twenty four hours a day for every micro second possible. This does not make work any less monotonous or arduous—more often it has the opposite effect.

The reason so many firms have recently been convinced that computers are an economical proposition (and having once installed one a company is virtually compelled to keep in the game and to progress into each of its refinements) is to be found in the shortage of labour which has persistently affected British industry since the war. Apart from anything else, this shortage has often given the workers the edge in some important wage battle and has provoked the irritation of, for example, The Economist which is always advising the government of the day to ignore the economic facts and stand up to the unions.

That is one way in which the capitalist class might have approached their problem. Another was the way of Bank of England chief Leslie O'Brien, who thinks that higher unemployment is the answer. Another is the Labour government's way—an attempt at putting legal restraints upon wages. And yet another way is to increase mechanisation, by automating production lines, installing computers and so on.

This last course—a classic way out for the capitalist class—has one great snag. Stepping up investment in constant capital tends to lower the rate of profit and unless there is some compensating return on the investment this can be a disastrous business. (A lot of the political history of Britain since 1945 can be explained in these terms—but that is another story). This means a more intense exploitation of the workers affected by the investment, a faster and more constant working of the machines, a pressure on production costs and a ruthless search for redundant workers.

So a firm which takes on a computer does not stop there. It must also build up a comprehensive Organisation and Methods department, whose job is to organise production and administration into a whole to fit in with the computer. The O & M workers will do the dirty work which was once done by managers; they reorganise, cut back, fire, and increase the work load of the people who are left on the payroll. And as they do this work they surround it with their own mystique—their own language, their own obeisance to the flashing god in the precisely controlled temperature, their own hard-skinned indifference to the fate of their fellow workers.

Karl Marx, who has been much criticised for pointing out that capitalism always increases the misery of the working class, once wrote that ". . .  if capital grows more rapidly, competition among the workers grows incomparably more rapidly.” And that, in a society which is incapable of usefully employing human abilities, is what the computers are all about. When it comes down to it, it means the scurrying operators trying to save the micro seconds. It means the clerks and the typists outside, waiting for the axe to fall. It means those girls in the punch card room, who sit through their days like battery hens—except that even the battery hens aren’t encouraged to fight each other for bonus rations.

Ivan

Money for Socialism (1969)

Party News from the January 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Once again, we ask you, our readers and supporters, to help us expand our Socialist activities by contributing what you can to our funds. The money you give us will be spent on bringing out this journal (which is heavily subsidized front Party funds), on hiring halls and and advertising meetings, on press publicity, on publishing pamphlets (we have two or three such as reprints of "Questions of the Day” and "The Socialist Party and War” in the pipeline) and leaflets on important events as they happen, on contesting elections and on the general expenses of running our party. This is a way in which, if you can do nothing else, you can play your part in the struggle for Socialism.

Please send your donation to Anne Waite, Treasurer, The Socialist Party, 52 Clapham High Street, London, S.W.4 All moneys will of course be gratefully acknowledged.

50 Years Ago: The Promised Peace (1969)

The 50 Years Ago column from the January 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Now it must be obvious that if Britain is to retain her gigantic navy other countries are going to provide themselves with instruments of defence. The American Naval Secretary soon showed this when he declared that “It was his firm conviction that if the Versailles Conference did not result in a general agreement to put an end to the naval construction the United States must bend its energies to the creation of incomparably the greatest Navy in the world. (Star 31.12.18.)

"If Germany had waited a single generation she would have had a commercial empire of the world.” Thus spoke President Wilson in Rome, January 3rd.

Strange, is it not, how our opponents and apologists for the war prove the correctness of our statements regarding the root cause of the conflict and belie their own beatitudes concerning the high ideals which have actuated the Allies.

Can it possibly be that they find, when the bill is finally presented, and shows ten million naval and military deaths alone, to say nothing of the millions of other deaths for which the war is responsible, that the old shallow bunkum of honour and the like is really too absurdly inadequate, and that it had better rely on the truth—that it was an economic war?

(From an unsigned Editorial "What will he do with it? in the Socialist Standard, January 1919).

Aid for the Starving Biafrans (1969)

From the January 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

  "The Ivory Coast is systematically destroying 100,000 tons of 1967-68 season coffee, according to official sources. This is to conform with the International Coffee Agreement and to ease financing of stocks that have become considerable, the sources say". —The Times, 30 November 1968.

What’s the Problem? (1969)

From the January 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

A familiar problem faces the Agricultural bosses of the European Common Market: too much food. This time it’s butter, a surplus of 350,000 tons. The annual cost of just storing it is equal to a third of its value, so the EEC are desperate to get rid of the stuff.

"In effect the butter surplus seems to be a problem almost beyond the wit of man to solve.” That is the conclusion of the Financial Times (30 October 1968).

One suggestion is to feed the butter back to the cows. This was seriously considered, but it has the drawback that the cows’ milk yield would zoom up further, causing an even bigger crisis.

An alternative idea is to put the stuff on the market at half its present price (at a cost to the Common Agricultural Fund of 500 million dollars) but even such a drastic cut wouldn’t increase sales enough.

Yet another proposal is to treat 27,500 tons so that it can’t be spread on bread, then sell it as something other than butter. That scheme would cost 43 million dollars (Guardian 19 October, 1968). The Agricultural Ministers have also considered selling the butter at cut prices to barracks, hospitals and boarding schools, or to food manufacturers for use instead of cooking fat.

Comments the Financial Times: 

  In the last analysis, these measures are merely palliatives because the Community seems faced with an inexorable surge in milk production. Output in France, with 10 million cows, is rising fastest of all. But per animal it still has a long way to go from the present 600 gallons per year to the level current in Holland of over 1,000 gallons a year. 

One likely course of action is that four million cows, out of the Common Market s total of 22 million, will be slaughtered.

Other diary products present a similar problem of superfluity. In September the Financial Times mentioned the "alarming increase” in UK skimmed milk stocks to 34,000 tons at the end of June 1968 compared with 20,000 in June 1967. This is a world problem, hitting the UK, the US, the EEC, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. As in the case of butter, it is especially aggravated by the heavily-subsidised farming interests in the Common Market. The Financial Times freely admitted that:

  there is not an overall surplus if the theoretical needs of the developing countries are taken into consideration.
  It is estimated that a daily ration of only 10 grammes of skimmed milk powder for populations suffering from severe protein deficiency would on today’s basis require more than 3m. tons of skimmed milk powder annually.
  The problem is that the surplus countries would have to supply the produce free and probably pay for the cost of distribution too— a less attractive economic proposition than selling even at very low rates or paying the cost of storage.
  The immediate outlook for skimmed milk producers is, therefore, a gloomy one. They can either encourage consumption at rock bottom prices, pay to give away vast quantities to developing countries in the form of food aid, or face the prospect of massive, and costly, stocks continuing to undermine world markets.
  In the long term, however, it should be remembered that it was not many years ago when there was an acute shortage of dairy produce. The wheel may well turn back sooner than expected, as the pressure of low prices eventually discourages output and encourages consumption.

The Common Market also has a problem with sugar: a million ton surplus of which 600,000 tons will have to be exported and the rest "denaturised.”

"Coffee Prophets Gloomy” was a recent 11 November Times headline. Sadly the Times explained the source of gloom: "There is too much coffee in London or on its way here, while manufacturers appear to have covered their requirements well into the new year. The painful erosion of prices is likely to continue.”

Last summer brought the usual complains of too much fruit from many parts of the world, France in particular. The Scotsman 16 August informed us that the fruit glut:

  has come to be something of an annual event in France, but it is an event which gets bigger and more worrying with every passing harvest.
  This year half a million tons of fruit and vegetables have already had to be destroyed and with a bumper apple harvest about to aggravate the crisis, the Government has just banned the sale of all but top-quality apples.
  Nobody benefits from the situation. The growers earn, for example 50 centimes (about 10d) for a kilogramme of peaches and make up their incomes with Government subsidy. The consumers in the towns pay three times or more what the growers get. And the taxpayers contribute to an agricultural subsidy which next year is going to cost France an extra £83 million.

Tourists passing through the fruit-growing country of the Vaucluse and the Gard had to drive over piles of peaches tipped onto the roads by the lorryload. Fruit-growers handed them free gifts of the unsaleable fruit together with tracts which stated: "We can no longer put up with this destruction, while you, the purchasers cannot buy at reasonable prices and while there are people suffering from hunger.” 

Overproduction hit grape growers too. Excess grapes were dumped into rivers, abandoned at the roadside and sometimes thrown by frustrated farmers at Government buildings. The farmers are reported to have claimed: "it is more a problem of marketing than producing." But it's doubtful whether they realised the full significance of those words.

David Ramsay Steele

The Review Column: Another Crisis (1969)

The Review Column from the January 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Another Crisis

Ever since the Labour government came to power they have mounted a continual campaign to persuade the British working class that their belts must be tightened because the pound sterling is under attack by international currency speculators.

At the same time Labour ministers, not reluctant to dabble in nationalism, have contrasted the sickliness of the pound with the indecent health of other currencies like the franc and the deutsch- mark.

When the latest currency crisis broke the official story had to be rearranged. Now it was the franc and the mark which were under pressure; new arguments had to be used to explain away the latest round of restrictions.

In the process, Roy Jenkins joined the list of Labour Chancellors whose catch- phrased promises have*been exposed. Only a year ago, Jenkins was talking about “two years’ hard slog” to see us through. Now, as James Callaghan snidely indicated, the two years have been extended indefinitely.

Jenkins was applying measures which have already failed. They have failed while he has been Chancellor, they failed when Callaghan held the job and they failed under the Tories who were at the Exchequer before October 1964. The problems of British capitalism, in other words, are long term and fundamental, not to be cured or even affected by short term tinkering with taxes, exchange rates and the like.

Long term, too, are workers’ problems. Soon after Jenkins' cuts the House of Lords discussed poverty—no mean feat, since most of them have had no personal experience of it. Lord Beaumont, for example, told us that one person in every ten in this country falls into what he called “the general poverty bracket”.

Problems like that are not caused by currency difficulties, nor by an imbalance in a country’s trade. Poverty is an inescapable curse of capitalism and to eradicate its needs a fundamental change in society. That may be some way off but we can start by discrediting the politicians and their persistent, futile efforts to manage capitalism.

Powell Again 

Nobody should have been surprised at Enoch Powell’s second outburst on immigration. He was bound to try to repeat the success of his Birmingham speech in another, equally well timed and stage- managed.

This time the opposition were readier for him and within a few hours the counter attack had started. Powell had changed his figures on the predicted level of immigration; he had refused the chance to speak on the subject in the Commons a few days before; his evidence was dishonestly selective.

Of course most of this was true but it ignored one vital fact Powell was not addressing the Archbishop of Canterbury, nor workers in race relations, nor his fellow politicians.

He was playing the old trick of speaking over the heads of his opponents, to the people with the votes. He was stimulating the smouldering racialism of the Midlands and of places like Brixton and Southall.

In these places the frustrations and restrictions of working class life are acute and have in some cases seem to have been accentuated by the arrival of the immigrants who, because they are so easily identifiable, make the perfect scapegoat for a demagogue.

Powell is bidding for power and, having chosen his path, he will probably stick to it. His Eastbourne speech must surely be followed by others, in the same evil vein.

At the moment, he is having no perceptible success; the working class show no sign of voting for an openly racist party. But if conditions change — if Labour’s unemployed pool should grow any larger — the resentments which now smoulder could burst into fire.

The workers, unaware of their class standing and interests, bewildered by the continual crisis of capitalism, disillusioned at their leaders' failures, are inflammable material. The threat is always there. Had Enoch Powell never been born, some other politician would be doing the same work, blowing on the embers of panic and prejudice.

Biafra Tragedy

The pitiful victims of Nigeria’s civil war are the latest in a long line, preceded by such as Palestine, Algeria, Korea, Vietnam . . .

One estimate is that about one million children alone will die each month in Biafra unless they are evacuated or given proper food and medical attention.

The civil war has roused compassion all over the world and to many people, concerned at the death and suffering, the situation is full of perplexing questions.

Why won’t the Nigerian Federal government, as an act of simple humanity, allow food and medical supplies into the surrounded and shrinking Ibo land?

Why does the Labour government, which assured us that moral grounds caused them to prevent the sale of arms to South Africa, not take a similar stand over Nigeria, and stop sending weapons to the Federal forces?

Why can’t both sides simply call off the war?

These questions, and many others, are valid enough, except that they all assume capitalist states are guided by concern for human welfare.

When we realise that this is not so— that capitalist governments act as the property interests of their ruling class demand—the questions are not so perplexing.

The civil war in Nigeria, for example, is partly a struggle to flatten the tribal structure which was a part of the old society and to replace it with a national unity which is so essential for a modern developing capitalist state.

This is a ruthless struggle. Everyone is in the firing line; the Nigerian government are deliberately starving children because such tactics are an accepted and necessary part of modern war. The British government, for example, did it in both world wars.

It is futile, then, to wring our hands over Biafra. War is an inescapable part of capitalism and it cannot be removed by charity, no matter how sincere. The killing will not stop and Biafra will not be the last great tragedy.

What Happened in France Last May (1969)

Book Reviews from the January 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Obsolete Communism: The Left-wing Alternative. by Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit. (Andre Deutsch. 25s.)

France: The Struggle Goes On by Tony Cliff and Ian Birchall. (International Socialism Special. 2s. 6d.)

French Revolution 1968. by Patrick Seale and Maureen McConville. (Penguin. 6s.)

Mai 1968: La Brèche. by Morin. Lefort and Coudray. (Fayard, 10 Frs.)

La Révolution Trahie de 1968. by Andre Barjonet. (John Dldier.)

Daniel Cohn-Bendit is just an ordinary anarcho-syndicalist. In their hastily-written book he and his brother advance the old theory that the direct action of a militant minority can expose the repressive nature of the state and spark off a general strike that will lead to the overthrow of capitalism. They explain the failure of last year’s French strike by the fact that in the last week of May when the government was at its weakest the crowds after trying to burn the Paris stock exchange did not go on to take the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of the Interior, but were dissuaded from doing so by, among others, trotskyist leaders. If they had done this, the claim is, and the workers in the factories had restarted production under their own control the revolution would have succeeded.

This is a simple, and not very plausible, explanation. The real reason capitalism was not overthrown was because the vast majority of French workers were not in favour of this. True, they were greatly discontented with rising prices, lagging wages, unemployment, long hours, harsh discipline, but they were not socialist. So, whatever the outcome of the strike it could not have been the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of Socialism. There never was any revolutionary situation and the attempt by anarchists and trotskyists to turn the general strike to defend living standards and working conditions into an insurrection against capitalism was doomed to fail. Its main result has been to strengthen the hand of the Gaullist government.

This book (whose French title Leftism: A Remedy for the Senile Disorder of Communism is a clever play on a title of one of Lenin’s pamphlets, obviously considered too subtle by the publishers) is in four parts. The first has some sound stuff on universities as capitalist institutions geared to turning out a managerial élite to run capitalist industry. The second is the usual anarchist attack on the state and praise for direct action and the general strike. The third is an exposé of the dirty, anti-working class role of the French Communist Party (PCF) from the thirties onward. The fourth—obviously aimed at those who fought side-by-side with Cohn-Bendit on the barricades—is an attack on the Bolshevik theory of the vanguard party. Cohn-Bendit and his brother show quite clearly how Lenin and Trotsky, by means of a policy of state capitalism, began the repression of the Russian workers which Stalin continued so brutally.

This should be essential reading for trotskyists like Cliff and Birchall who still defend the Bolshevik coup and minority dictatorship and call for a centralised and disciplined party. Their pamphlet is not really worth reading as all the facts, and a few common sense observations, can be had by reading the much better-written Penguin Special, despite its misleading title.

Morin, Lefort and Coudray are also basically syndicalists but of a less orthodox kind. Capitalism, they say, has changed into “techno-bureaucratic society” (Morin), “bourgeois-bureaucratic society" (Lefort) or “bureaucratic capitalism” (Coudray) in which the conflict is no longer between the property-owners and the propertyless but between the controllers and the controlled. The main features of this society are bureaucracy and hierarchy: those at the top know best so those at the bottom must obey. The revolutionary students, they say, in challenging this set-up in the universities have pointed the way for the rest of society. Because of the key-role played by the technical and professional groups today their discontent has revolutionary potential. They and their trainees, the students, not the industrial workers, are the force for Socialism.

Since it is an old anarchist myth that the class struggle has always been between rulers and ruled rather than producers and non-producers, it is not surprising to find the three fall back on the syndicalist tradition. Morin is clearly carried away by the whole affair. He talks enthusiastically about the students’ actions as a return to “original communism, purged of all Stalinism, marxism-leninism and bolshevism” which will lead to what Coudray calls the grève gestionnaire (a significant change from the old syndicalist grève expropriate, reflecting the shift of emphasis from ownership to control).

Barjonet’s pamphlet is interesting in that for over twenty years he was head of the Communist trade union centre’s (CGT) research department, a post he resigned in May in protest against the cowardly attitude of the CGT and PCF. He felt (mistakenly, we might add) that a potential socialist revolution was betrayed by the failure of the PCF to act even to overthrow the Gaullist regime. let alone capitalism.

Barjonet traces the defects of the PCF back to Lenin. Leninist practice has always been to try to lead the workers by placing attractive slogans before them. But this merely allots them a passive role and inevitably leads to the Leninist vanguard thinking that it always knows best. “Marxism-Leninism”, says Barjonet and we couldn’t agree more, “has been an historic misfortune for the international working class". He calls for a return to Marx who clearly understood that the workers themselves, not any leaders, must play the creative role in the socialist revolution and that working class organisations must be thoroughly democratic.

The three books from France show an encouraging rejection of and contempt for Bolshevism. We can only hope that this is the beginning of its demise in western Europe where it has had such a pernicious effect on working class thinking. If the May events have helped this they will have done something.

Adam Buick

Student Unrest (1969)

From the January 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

An LSE student comments on recent unrest there

In America, France, Czechoslovakia, Japan — practically wherever you care to look in the world you can find evidence of student unrest.

The universal nature of student complaint is not surprising in view of the increasingly rapid development of international capitalism which confronts students all over the world with basically the same problems.

But it is not only the student who recognises the situation. As Sir Eric Ashby has said:

The paradigm for a graduate 40 years ago was the conventional man, ready to take responsibility for preserving a set of values which he felt no need to question, deferring to his elders because they were older, not because they were wiser; obedient to principles, constitutions, traditions. That sort of young man cannot cope with the flux of the modem world. The contemporary paradigm is a man educated for insecurity, who can innovate, improvise, solve problems with no precedent. [1]     

This is the core of the student problem. The education system does not provide an adequate preparation for life in the late twentieth century. Students, having no power to change the situation, agitate for representation on various committee and boards to participate in the organisation of education.

Into this pool of unrest others delve, using the dissatisfaction within the colleges to promote causes other than internal re-organisation. The recent developments at the London School of Economics illustrate this point.

General dissatisfaction at the LSE led to the appointment of a Committee on the Machinery of Government of the School in March 1967. In July 1967 five students joined the Committee. No action resulted from the two reports which emanated and in consequence student unrest and agitation continued, to obtain greater student participation in the government of the LSE. Now any group within the school seeking support has only to tie its action with the fight for internal democracy to obtain considerable backing.

The occupation of the LSE over the week end of 24-27 October aimed to support the pro-NLF march and demonstration of 27 October by providing opportunity for discussion and as a first aid base. The student organisers were under some pressure to connect occupation with Vietnam. Their answer fully substantiates the argument above about how to win support.

  If the Director's position is accepted, free speech, free assembly, and staff-student control of their community go right out of the window. We cannot accept this.
 A few days ago the student left was accused of being unable to make the connection between Vietnam and the occupation. By now, it is clear to all that the Director has drawn the connection for us. [2]

In fact the conflict in Vietnam is between rival capitalist groups for control of an area which is strategically important and of potentially economic significance as a source of production and a market for commodities. Not one drop of working class blood should be shed for either side.

The conflict in the colleges and universities is a totally different situation. Forty years ago the graduate was largely recruited from the capitalist class and could easily accept the situation outlined by Sir Eric Ashby. To-day in Britain the majority of graduates are working class. For many students, of all shades of political opinion, education is totally unrelated to their needs. The student left, for example, complains of the limitation of discussion within the classroom and lecture hall of the major issues of the day. [3] It recognises that the governors of the colleges are people with industrial, commercial and political interest in maintaining society as it is. [2] It shouts for student and workers control. [4] The occupation is seen in the light of a factory take-over. It merely needs time to gain strength and such take-overs will cease to be temporary and become permanent.

History has shown us the fallacy of this argument and action. In the political sense the police are the muscles of the government, When workers heads are cracked by truncheons it is the echo of their vote for the continuation of capitalism. Any occupation of college or factory will be permitted grudgingly as long as it is not destructive or restrictive of other capitalist activities. If removal of the occupiers becomes necessary to the capitalist class, and dividing the workers by offers such as differential wage awards is not possible, then workers, including students, will be ejected by force. The muscle men, that is the police and if necessary the armed forces, will physically evict occupiers on government orders.

The majority of students fail to recognise that the class division of society is reflected in the class organisation of education. It cannot be otherwise in capitalist society. No society educates for its own destruction. Capitalist education can only aim to promote its own development—to produce managers, scientists, technologists, skilled and unskilled workers who are complacent and pliable. Capitalist education cannot be critical of the wage-labour and capital relationship. It must concern itself with the preservation of private property and the promotion of commodity production, the basis of capitalist society.

If students want full and free participation in education it can only be obtained in one way: by removing the class basis of society and establishing Socialism. But they must recognise that Socialism cannot be established piecemeal by isolated attacks, which never succeed, on aspects of capitalism; or by occupying colleges and factories. Demonstrations against war or for lower rents or the occupation of buildings, do not advance the spread of socialist knowledge one iota. In fact they confuse the issue by suggesting that there are solutions within capitalism to its own endemic diseases. War, Want, and Insecurity in all their facets.

Ken Knight

 

Notes

[1] L.S.E. Magazine No. 35, June 1968, quoting The Illustrated London News 16.3.68.

[2] L.S.E. Ad-Hoc Occupation Committee leaflet: OCCUPATION: THE BROADER ISSUES 25.10.68.

[3] L.S.E. Ad-Hoc Committee for Occupation leaflet: THE OCCUPATION - WHY? about 23 or 24.10.68.

[4] L.S.E. Socialist Society leaflet: WHERE NOW FOR THE STUDENT MOVEMENT? about 28 or 29.10.68.

Revolution in France (1969)

Book Review from the January 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marxism in Modern France by George Lichtheim. Columbia UP 20s.

France has provided many of the names well-known in the social democratic and anarchist movements: Saint-Simon. Proudhoun, Blanqui, Guesde, Jaurès, Sorel. Before the first world war the antics of reformists like Jaurès made the workers suspicious of parliamentary politics, a suspicion which expressed itself as Syndicalism, the view that the workers could only project their interests by direct action and the general strike leading to a regime of industrial unions.

After the war the bulk of the syndicalist workers backed the newly-formed Communist Party as they believed that Russia really was a soviet union and, of course, Leninism, with its conspiratorial vanguards and armed uprisings, fitted in well with the views of Blanqui. Today the Communist Party is a mass party, essentially reformist, but with a pseudo-revolutionary ideology. Its militants, however, are still influenced by syndicalism; hence their support for occupying the factories in 1968 as well as 1936.

Marx held that Socialism would be the outcome of the class struggle between the workers and the capitalists which would end with the workers winning political power and using it to convert the means of production into the common property of society as a whole. This view was inherited, in grossly distorted forms, by the Communists (PCF) and the Social Democrats (SFIO)who both saw themselves as expressions of the workers’ class struggle for Socialism.

In recent years they have had to face a crisis of theory: workers no longer seem interested in appeals to class and talk of revolution. Some have concluded that industrial workers are now played out as a revolutionary force and that Marx was wrong. The SFIO, characteristically, turned instead to the technocrats interested in extending state control, while the PCF always held in effect that the vanguard party, rather than the workers, would establish “socialism” (read “state capitalism”).

Lichtheim’s book, republished recently as a paperback, discusses both these views and those of their critics in what is a useful guide to French political thought.

Adam Buick

Putting the Boot in (1969)

Book Review from the January 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Politics of Harold Wilson by Paul Foot. (Penguin, 6s.)

As any exponent of unarmed combat knows, the time to kick your man is when he is down. Now that Harold Wilson is on the floor, we can see many of those who once worshipped him falling over themselves to put the boot in. For these new enemies of Wilson, and for all students of Labour trickery, impotence and confusion, Paul Foot has provided after dedicated research, a lot of useful ammunition. This is a much needed antidote to the sycophantic "biographies" which we have been fed with up to now.

The Prime Minister is not the only person to get hurt in this book. For example, what about this, from Michael Foot on the front page of Tribune on 22 February 1963:

(Wilson has)  . . . a coherence of ideas, a readiness to follow unorthodox courses, a respect for democracy . . . above all a deep and genuine love of the Labour movement.

Or this, from the arch enemy of the prices and incomes policy, ASTMS general secretary Clive Jenkins after the 1963 TUC:

"Mr. Harold Wilson is opposed to wage restraint."

Of course there was no excuse for this. Neither of these men is politically blind and the facts on Wilson were available, not only from socialists. One great merit of Foot's book is that it shows how Wilson is not, as the left wing would like to think, a good man gone wrong. From the first he was concerned only with power over British capitalism; he knew the system could be run only in the interests of the ruling class and never imagined it being any other way. No wonder the Daily Express (20 August 1949) thought that "Mr. Harold Wilson is a good man".

Wilson's hold over his party was based on his ability to win elections, a fact of which he has never been slow to remind them. His tactics were simple; for example, as he himself put it, he would hold up the banner of nationalisation but lead the Labour Party away from it. In this way he avoided the public rows which characterised the period of Hugh Gaitskell's leadership while he was busily following the same policies as Gaitskell.

When he is writing of these times Foot is at his best, exposing Wilson's support of the Vietminh:

A settlement in Asia is imperiled by the lunatic fringe in the American Senate who want a holy crusade against Communism. Not a man, not a gun must be sent from Britain to aid French imperialism in Indo-China. (Daily Telegraph, 3 May 1954.)

showing up his monotonous repetition of the same empty phrases and his Baldwin-like use of a flood of monosyllables. The later stuff, on Wilson at Number Ten, loses some of its grip and this is not wholly because we are so near to the flounderings of 1964-68.

Now Foot is forced into a constructive examination of Labour in power, to give positive reasons for their failure and to set down his answers. And here confusion reigns, of which this is typical:

What is required is not a new leadership but a new socialist politics, with roots deep down in the Labour rank and file.

No suggestion, in other words, that Labour's failure came from the basic cause that they are a party which sets out to organise conscious socialists for a new society. Foot's remedies, he hints, are in workers' control and he gives, in a footnote, an approving pat on the head to the French rioters who this summer did no more than make sure De Gaulle came back into power with an increased majority.

All of this—the bitter recrimination, the lack of an alternative—are reminiscent of John Scanlon's merciless exposure of the vanity and buffoonery of the Labour leaders in 1924 and 1929. For many of us who came into socialist politics just as the Attlee government were taking power, books like Pillar of Cloud were required reading. For anyone with any doubts left on Labour's ability to control capitalism, or on whether it is even honest—or for anyone who simply wants to build up a library of failure—The Politics of Harold Wilson can be recommended, to take its place alongside Scanlon's works.

Ivan

Socialism, Atheism or Religion? (1969)

From the January 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists are hostile to all religions. Yet there is a difference between the socialist attitude towards religion and that of the secularist or atheist. The secularist tends to treat religion simply as a set of beliefs which he seeks to demolish by rational and logical criticism. To the socialist this seems a pointless exercise (as pointless as religion itself). Like the atheist we think that religion is irrational and unscientific, but we also think that the important thing is not simply to subject it to abstract criticism but to attempt to show why it arose and what its role in society is. To do this we apply the materialist conception of history.

Essentially the materialist conception of history suggests that any historical period is to be understood by the way in which men set about satisfying their needs at that time – in other words by the mode of production in operation. It also goes further than this and suggest that the superstructure of society (that is its culture, its conception of legality, its religious and scientific ideas and so on) is rooted in the mode of production. It follows, of course, that in a period of social revolution, when one mode of production is being replaced by another (feudalism by capitalism, for example) there will be a correspondingly massive upheaval in men’s ideas and in the ways in which they interpret the world. It is in this sort of way that marxists explain a phenomenon such as the Reformation. We point out that the protestant ethic is brilliantly adapted to the needs of the rising capitalist class, in the same way that the ideology of the catholic church formed one of the mainstays of feudal society. Thus Reformation and catholic backlash represented the struggle between feudalism and capitalism being fought out on the battlefield of ideas, with religious interpretation and dogma as the weapons.

Socialists avoid taking up absolute or, as you might say,  suprahistorical positions. We do not argue that religion has always been reactionary. Over long periods it did represent a progressive force and it was even a reasonable way of interpreting the world – given the level of man’s knowledge at that time.

If we apply this approach to the present day, we must try to look at religion in terms of the social function it fulfils. We have outlined the role played by catholicism under feudal conditions and set protestantism against its background of developing capitalism, but what can be said of religion in relation to the modern working class? It is a supreme irrelevance – to the average working man or woman in the highly industrialised countries religion has about as much relevance as the phlogiston theory. Of course, this has not always been the case – even under capitalism. When Marx was writing a hundred years ago it was quite reasonable for him to refer to religious ideas as “the opium of the people”. At that time the majority of the working class, such as it was, was still riddled with religion and socialists did have the job on their hands of exposing these superstitions. This was especially necessary because organised religion was an unashamed and blatant defender of privilege and private property, as was shown by the attacks of the Popes of the time and other church dignitaries on the mild reforms which the social democratic parties were campaigning for.

Today it is different. In Britain today religion is only an insignificant weapon in the hands of the ruling class; after all, who takes any notice of what the Archbishop of Canterbury or Cardinal Heenan has to say? But this does not mean that we can afford to compromise our principles by admitting christians and others to the Socialist Party. It ought to be clear from what we have said above that Socialism does not just represent a new and more just society which is therefore worth struggling for. If that were our approach we would be just another bunch of utopians. Socialism instead represents an integrated philosophical system, and analysis of capitalism and previous social orders which serves as a guide to revolutionary activity to liberate the working class. The person who finds Socialism attractive merely because, as a new social system, it appeals to his moral sense, who thinks in terms of “good” and “bad” or applies similar standards to capitalism, is likely to be led up all sorts of garden paths by his unhistorical and unscientific approach.

Another reason why we cannot afford to lower our guard towards religion is that not all countries have reached the level of Britain. In Ireland, Spain, parts of South America and so on religion is still very much a weapon wielded by the present ruling class (despite the odd guerilla priest) . And since we are world socialists and do not just restrict our vision to Britain, we must actively confront religion in these areas – as far as we can. So the fight continues on two fronts, to replace religion and atheism by socialist understanding.

John Crump

Rosa Luxemburg and the Collapse of Capitalism (1969)

From the January 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fifty years ago on 6th January began the hopeless Spartakist rising against the Social Democrat government of Germany. It led to the brutal murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, two well-known and courageous opponents of the first world slaughter. Luxemburg, as an opponent of both reformism and Bolshevism who understood the worldwide and democratic nature of socialism, had views on many subjects near to those of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. However, there were certain basic differences between our views and hers. The following article discusses one of them: the collapse of capitalism.

(1) Rosa Luxemburg was murdered on January 15 1919. Her head was first smashed in with the butt of a soldier's rifle and she was then dumped in the Landwehr Canal. With her death, the uprising of the Spartakus Bund in Berlin collapsed—as it had been doomed to do all along. In fact, the real tragedy of this affair was not its brutality but the waste of it all. Why had Luxemburg allowed herself to become involved in such a useless adventure in the first place?

The only adequate explanation seems to lay in her conviction that capitalism had been driven to an impasse, that its internal contradictions had brought it to the point of breaking down. Speaking to the founding congress of the Communist Party of Germany on 3Oth December 1918, she had outlined her analysis of the current situation:

"I need hardly say that no serious thinker has ever been inclined to fix upon a definite date for the collapse of capitalism; but after the failures of 1848, the day for that collapse seemed to lie in the distant future. We are now in a position to cast up the account, and we are able to see that the time has really been short in comparison with that occupied by the sequence of class struggles throughout history... what has the war left of bourgeois society beyond a gigantic rubbish heap? Formally, of course, all the means of production and most of the instruments of power, practically all the decisive instruments of power, are still in the hands of the dominant classes. We are under no illusions here. But what our rulers will be able to achieve with the powers they possess, over and above frantic attempts to re-establish their system of spoliation through blood and slaughter, will be nothing more than chaos. Matters have reached such a pitch that today mankind is faced with two alternatives: it may perish amid chaos, or it may find salvation in socialism …. Socialism is inevitable, not merely because the proletarians are no longer willing to live under the conditions imposed by the capitalist class, but, further, because if the proletariat fail to fulfil its duties as a class, if it fails to realise socialism, we shall crash down together to a common doom."

This was not a new idea, which Rosa Luxemburg had suddenly come up with in 1918. The implication that at some time capitalism would almost mechanically collapse had run like a thread through her writings over the previous twenty years. At the time of the revisionist controversy, she had used this as one of her main weapons against Bernstein and his supporters. Bernstein had written in Neue Zeit that "with the growing development of society a complete and almost general collapse of the present system of production becomes more and more improbable because capitalist development increases on the one hand the capacity of adaptation and, on the other—that is at the same time—the differentiation of industry." The development of the credit system, of employers' organisations, improved means of communication and information services were all tending to stabilise capitalism suggested Bernstein. Quite apart from his other heresies, Luxemburg was especially indignant about this because it seemed to her that the revisionists were undermining one of the "fundamental supports of scientific socialism". Hitting back in her Reform or Revolution (1899), she put what she took to be the orthodox position:

"Socialist theory up to now declared that the point of departure for a transformation to socialism would be a general and catastrophic crisis…. The fundamental idea consists of the affirmation that capitalism, as a result of its own inner contradictions moves toward a point when it will be unbalanced, when it will simply become impossible . . . Bernstein began his revision of the Social Democracy by abandoning the theory of capitalist collapse. The latter, however, is the corner stone of scientific socialism. Rejecting it, Bernstein also rejects the whole doctrine of socialism . . . Without the collapse of capitalism the expropriation of the capitalist class is impossible."

It ought to be mentioned that Luxemburg is here overstating her case, since Bernstein was not disputing the theory that the capitalist system could collapse but merely suggesting that in practice this possibility had been eliminated by the modifications which capitalism had undergone. However the failure of a major crisis to develop during the years before the First World War served to make the left wing of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) more adamant than ever that capitalism's breakdown was on the way. This was one of the main points which Luxemburg set out to demonstrate in her principal theoretical work—the Accumulation of Capital—written in 1912. Here she argued that capital was undermining its own ability to accumulate by its inevitable tendency to eliminate the peasantry in the advanced countries and by also destroying the pre-capitalist economies of the colonies. Capital is ruthless in its drive to achieve this end, says Luxemburg. but at the same time it is producing an 'economic impasse', since capitalism is "the first mode of economy which is unable to exist by itself, which needs other economic system as a medium and soil."

Although it strives to become universal, and, indeed, on account of this its tendency, it must break down — because it is immanently incapable of a universal form of production. In its living history it is a contradiction in itself, and its movement of accumulation provides a solution to the conflict and aggravates it at the same time. At a certain stage of development there will be no other way out than the application of socialist principles.

In stressing Luxernburg's emphasis on 'collapse' we must be careful not to attribute too crude a theory to her. Of course, she also pointed out that the working class had a positive role to play in this process and even suggested that the workers might be able to seize power before the actual breakdown stage had been reached. But, while recognising this, it is even more important not to underestimate the grip which this idea had on her. Luxemburg was a woman of immense experience in the German and Polish social-democratic movements and was also one of the foremost Marxist scholars of her day. Her intransigence had even won her the admiration of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. She was altogether superior to the romantic and volatile Liebknecht and yet when it came to the crunch, she was as confused as him in her estimate of the situation. A week before her death she was writing: "The masses are ready to support any revolutionary action, to go through fire and water for Socialism." This, of course, was patent nonsense. The working class in Germany had no clear idea of what Socialism was or how it could be achieved. Not only was there no chance of overthrowing capitalism, but even the limited aim of unseating the government was hopeless—as J. P. Nettl in his sympathetic biography records:

"It was clear probably by the evening of the 6th (January 1919) certainly by the morning of the 7th that there was no chance of overturning the government, and troops were known to be moving steadily into Berlin."

Luxemburg, then, had mistaken the economic dislocation following Germany's defeat for the 'collapse' of the capitalist system and since to her the choice seemed one of a desperate gamble for Socialism or else "crashing down to a common doom" she staked her life on the former.

(2) What distinguished Rosa Luxemburg from the other leaders of the Second International was not her emphasis on the theory that capitalism would 'collapse' but rather, her exceptional courage which caused her to pursue her ideas at whatever he risk to herself. In fact, over the years, most prominent leaders of the social-democratic parties had at various times expounded the view that capitalism would crash down in some form of immense economic crisis.

Kautsky, as the principal theoretician of the German Social Democratic Party, deserves special attention in this respect. When the SPD congress adopted a new programme at Erfurt in 1891 this was taken as a model for the other parties of the Second International and Kautsky's commentary on, and elaboration of, this document in Das Erfurter Program (1892) was accepted as one of the classic texts of social democracy. Here he predicted a very grim and uncertain future for world capitalism. The general tendencies he saw, or thought he saw, were a steady rise in the reserve army of the unemployed, a "constant increase in chronic over-production", and a virtually complete saturation of the markets. He conceded the point which Bernstein was later to make, that the credit system is a means of developing capitalist production but remarked that it also causes the ground on which the capitalists stand to "vibrate ever more strongly". His conclusion was that:

"…in short, the moment seems to be near, when the market for European industry not only becomes incapable of expansion but begins to contract. But that would spell the bankruptcy of the entire capitalist society."

By and large, Kautsky stuck to this position—and the revisionist controversy forced him to go even further. For example, in his Krisentheorien (Neut Zeit, 1901-2), he rejected the suggestions of Bernstein and Tugan-Barnovsky that capitalism's periods of depression were becoming milder and maintained instead that they were becoming sharper and more prolonged. Again, he predicted that a period of chronic stagnation was approaching. Only much later was he to put forward a more sophisticated view. In The High Cost of Living (Kerr edition 1914), he admitted that his earlier predictions of chronic overproduction had been wrong. Here he puts far greater stress on the role of the working class in the overthrowing of capitalism, although he still thinks that the business cycle is of vital importance. During boom periods, says Kautsky, the working class is best able to organise itself, but high wages and full employment make it less revolutionary. The subsequent crisis and slump increase the misery of the workers and this gives rise to an upsurge in class consciousness. This alternation of boom and slump would alternately organise and revolutionise the workers, each time leaving them better equipped to establish Socialism, and in the end, the working class would be "compelled to cause the overthrow of the capitalist system on pain of its own destruction."

A particularly crude variant of the collapse' theory is that based on the idea of under consumption—that is, the concept that since the workers' wages are insufficient to buy up all the commodities which they alone produce, this will eventually cause capitalist production to seize up. Although this train of thought suffers from the obvious weakness of completely overlooking the role of the capitalist class as consumers, it was widely accepted among the parties of the Second International. Bogdanov, the principal economist in the Russian social-democratic parties, referred in his Short Course of Economic Science to the 'relative shrinking of the market for articles of consumption' which would set in motion "the conditions which lead to the destruction of the whole system of capitalist production" and Ernest Untermann of the Socialist' Party of America in his Marxian Economics makes the same point:

"the keeping of wages at the lowest level of subsistence threatens periodically to wreck the entire capitalist system, because the working people are the principal consumers, and they cannot begin to absorb the immense quantity of goods made by them."

Hyndman of the Social Democratic Federation was another leader who continually exaggerated the impact of crises. Echoing Kautsky, he predicted that they would "follow one another at ever-shortening distances" and that they would "last longer each time that they come". He also shared the general belief in their magical properties, maintaining that if the workers failed to take conscious action to substitute "organised co-operation for anarchical competition" then this would be achieved anyway ("unconsciously and forcibly") by the commercial crisis and its aftermath.

One could go on indefinitely quoting such examples but perhaps it is more important to spotlight those who criticised the theory of collapse. Louis Boudin in his Theoretical System of Karl Marx more than once pointed out that the "cataclysmic conception of the breakdown of capitalism is not part of the Marxian theory" and that the "theory of a final catastrophe which has been much exploited by Marx-critics is the result of their woeful ignorance of the Marxian philosophy". But, despite this, there are references to capitalism breaking down elsewhere in Boudin's book and presumably inconsistencies are due to the fact that he wrote it as a series of articles for the International Socialist Review over a relatively long period. Apart from Boudin, however, there were two distinct tendencies which consistently opposed the collapse theory.

Revisionists such as Bernstein, Otto Bauer and Hilferding did so because, in this way, they sought to justify and strengthen the reformist tendencies within the social-democratic parties. This accounts for the gusto with which Bauer and Hilferding (and Pannekoek—but for different reasons) attempted to refute the arguments in Luxemburg's Accumulation of Capital. To them it seemed that if it could be demonstrated that capitalism would not break down, then this would he ample justification for abandoning revolution altogether and for simply concentrating on modifying the harsher injustices of capitalist society. Of course, they did not put it as blatantly as this and still clung to the face-saving formula that gradually the expropriators would be expropriated But, arguing theoretically, they were quite prepared to suggest that capitalism could maintain itself indefinetly by adopting what today we would call a state-capitalist form. Thus Otto Bauer wrote in his Finance Capital (Der Kampf. June 1910):

"The entire capitalistic society would be consciously controlled by a single tribunal, by which the extent of production in all departments would be determined, and by, which by means of a scale of prices, the product of labour would be divided between the cartel magnates on the one hand, and the whole mass of the other members of society on the other, The anarchy of production at present prevailing would thus be brought to an end: we should have a consciously regulated society in an antagonistic form."

The most coherent opposition to the theory of capitalist collapse, however, came from the Socialist Party of Great Britain. This is not to imply that in the period before the First World War our early members disregarded the importance of the crises in capitalist production altogether. On the contrary, they were naturally influenced by social-democratic ideas and as result tended to exaggerate the repercussions of the crisis more than we would today. But, despite this, the Socialist Party was clearly distinguished from all shades of social democrats by its emphasis on socialist understanding as the critical factor in any potentially revolutionary situation. Certainly, some statements appearing in the Socialist Standard had mechanistic undertones:

"The revolutionary forces at work within the capitalist society must eventually evolve to the point of upheaval. The result will be the downfall of capitalism and the consequent exhaustion of the forces which have destroyed it. Having accomplished its mission, revolution disappears and the new system starts to grow, not from a revolutionary base, but from an evolutionary base." (June 1907).

and these provoked one correspondent into writing that "the whole of your teaching may, in fact be summed up a 'Preach economic consideration as the sole factor in social development, and wait until the crash comes!' " But the editorial committee made our position quite clear in its reply to this critics:

"It is inevitable that economic development will bring things to a crisis, but whether from out: of this crisis will arise the Socialist Commonwealth depends upon whether sufficient of the working-class have been made Socialists, and have been class consciously organised. Obviously, then, to, ´wait until the crash comes' may be the policy of reform pedlars, but is decidedly not the policy of THE SOCIALIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN."

In other words, even conceding that a crisis might be the most opportune moment for stripping the capitalist class of its wealth and instituting Socialism, the Socialist Party hammered home the simple point which it has since never failed to stress—that there can be no Socialism without a majority of the working class understanding what needs to be done and prepared to take decisive action to establish the new society.

John Crump