The People's Democracy: Old nonsense from a new quarter (1970)

Pamphlet Review from the January 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the problems confronting the Socialist movement in its efforts to bring an understanding of Socialism to the working class is the number of organisations that spread confusion about the meaning of Socialism.

In Northern Ireland, for example, apart from the N.I. Labour Party, whose particular brand of “socialism” is the difference between a Development Commission and a Development Corporation —embellished, of course, with love of the Queen and the Constitution—and even, for a period, nebulous support of the infamous Special Powers Act—and the Communist Party whose conception of “socialism” is reflected in petty demands for reform and admiration for the brutal totalitarianism of their adopted state-capitalist motherland, we have a number of peculiar “socialist” and “socialist” organisations.

There is the political ignoramous Gerry Fitt and his personal political circus, ever ready to jump on on any bandwagon of prejudice or ignorance to milk a few working class votes. His party, the “Socialist” Republican Party, is a mere anti-Unionist group that pays lip service to the more vulgar ideas of the late James Connolly—insofar as those ideas are compatible with the prejudices of their Catholic supporters; indeed, they fearlessly avoid mention of any of Connolly’s statements attacking religion and its “sacred” institutions.

These organisations render considerable service to capitalism; they help to maintain the fog of working class ignorance on which capitalism depends for its continued existence and in that they confuse the workers as to the nature of the alternative which Socialism proposes.

The tragedy is that many of the sincere and enthusiastic workers who subscribe to the fallacious reasoning of these “socialist” organisations get so involved in their complex political fetishes, and its attendant vocabulary, that they become bitter opponents of Socialism — except as it relates to their ideas of “knocking the system” or promoting their pet reform.

In Northern Ireland we are now seeing the growing claims to Socialism of the Peoples Democracy and especially in a recent pamphlet Struggle in the North by one of the leaders of that organisation, Mike Farrell.

The Peoples Democracy is an organisation made up of all types of anti- Unionist, anti-establishment elements. Generally, they are young workers and students at varying levels of discontent with various facets of the system. Particularly, they are the political hot-gospelers of the different “leftist” creeds earnestly endeavouring to inject their various, and conflicting, ideas into the movement. The ideological umbrella of the movement is “action now” and the objective is a contradiction in terms known as a “Socialist Workers’ Republic”.

If we admitted to a degree of comparison in the forces that confuse the working class in its nebulous groping towards Socialism we should undoubtedly acknowledge that the PD is head and shoulders above the Labour parties, the ‘communists’ and the Fitt circus in their partial understanding of the situation and, indeed, we do recognise the courage and earnestness of purpose which the PD has shown in its opposition to the bigots and patriots at both ends of the Northern Ireland political spectrum.

Until a short time ago, when the organisation adopted the practice of having a card-carrying membership (at a disputed “suggested” fee of four shillings—later revoked), it was a loosely knit body. In these circumstances it was difficult to indict PD on the statements made by those claiming membership of that organisation with whom we have come in contact. The re-telling of faction struggles may be precocious and the revolutionary romantics may be for amusement only. We consider it fair, however, to discuss PD within the context of Farrell’s pamphlet which is an official PD publication. The pamphlet tells, accurately enough, the facts of the recent violence in Northern Ireland and advances the case for PD.

If we allow for the imposed brevity of a short pamphlet, Farrell’s analysis of the economic background to Partition and the use of religious bigotry as an instrument of policy by the political handmaidens of capitalism in Northern Ireland in 1912 and after — in their anxiety to preserve direct access to the British market—is correct in its essentials.

Perhaps his republicanism defeats a more penetrating analysis of the motives of the Southern capitalists and their political servants in side-tracking the working class of southern Ireland into a patriotic struggle. He simply tells us that "The Home Rulers were anxious to put tariffs on British imports coming into Ireland to facilitate the development of Irish industry”. He does not tell us that Sinn Fein were similarly anxious about the affairs of the rising native capitalists—a concern expressed thus by one of their leaders Griffith:

  No possibility would be left as far as (Sinn Fein) were concerned for a syndicate of unscrupulous English capitalists to crush out the home manufacturer and the home trader (The Sinn Fein Policy, 1917)

Nor does Mr. Farrell remind us that the “Irish industry” concerned was the concrete preserve of the southern capitalist class who owed nothing to their Northern counterparts in the matter of viciousness and contempt for the working class.

As in all national struggles, the working class were being used by the economically dominant class to win victories for their masters. True, the workers did not see the struggle in that light, indeed a few may, like Mr. Farrell and the PD, have subscribed to indefinite concepts of an equalitarian society, but because they lacked understanding of the nature of capitalism and the only alternative to that system, Socialism, they were easy prey for the chauvinistic smokescreen of those whose real purpose was their stake in the exploitation of the working class in southern Ireland.

Mr. Farrell agrees that the basis of discrimination is the economic system, capitalism. If this is so, and the World Socialist Party has continually advanced this view, if capitalism causes discrimination, is it not futile to lead the working class into a struggle against discrimination on the assumption that it can be ended within capitalism? Is it not dangerous folly to lead the workers into such a struggle, which inevitably means taking sides and creating the climate for fratricidal strife within the working class?

On the whole question of discrimination, however, Farrell is on shifting ground. Rightly he tells us that the privileges allegedly enjoyed by the Protestant workers are largely illusionary and the few examples that he gives devastates argument to the contrary. This is the line of approach which the WSP has continually put on the question of discrimination. Later, however, we find the pamphlet rebuking those “moderates” who ". . . fail to understand that by REMOVING discrimination in jobs and housing they are removing a buffer which has shielded the Protestant workers from the worst effects of the economic situation" (our emphasis). The error is repeated when we are told that the apparatus of discrimination is being dismantled—despite the fact that what Farrell admits to be its cause, the economic system, remains!

Long before October 1968 the WSP was arguing that discrimination in Northern Ireland was on class and not religious lines. We pointed out that Catholic members of the capitalist class had no problems in the matter of jobs and houses and that they enjoyed the same multiple voting rights as their Protestant counterparts. Protestant members of the working class, on the other hand, faced the same problems as their Catholic class brethren. True, some political flunkeys in the lower echelon of Unionism were ‘rewarded’ with a house or job which, because they were members of the working class they needed—the fact that their need, by some odious order of capitalist priorities, was less pressing than someone else is simply an indictment of the class system that makes such priorities necessary. The very limited extent of such “privilege” is amply demonstrated by Farrell’s striking examples of squalor and misery in the most vociferously “loyal” of all the Protestant areas. Thus, in the exclusively Protestant Shankill Road area of Belfast 96 per cent of the “homes” have no hot water, bath or wash-hand basin and have only an outside toilet. In the 83 per cent Protestant Ballymena Rural Council area 55 per cent of the houses have no toilet of any kind and 47 per cent no running water. We would venture to suggest that if similar statistics are available for other Protestant areas, such as Sandy Row and Ballymacarret, they would be equally evident of misery and squalor.

Of course Unionist leaders, while publicly disavowing the practice, quietly nourish the notion among their Protestant supporters that they enjoy real privileges and when bodies like the Civil Rights Association and the PD approach the question on the same premise they merely help to concretise the fiction and, hence, the fears of Protestant members of the working class. Inevitably the struggle “against discrimination” becomes a sectarian-orientated clash between Catholic and Protestant workers on the relative claims of each for jobs and housing. So, in fact, the CRA and the PD, insofar as they equated religion to class, played the Unionist Party’s game and gave vicious teeth to the tiger of Unionist bigotry.

Farrell advances Lenin’s failed “imperialist” thesis and wrongly ascribes the plight of the workers in Ireland to British imperialism rather than capitalism.

Farrell pledges PD to support of the struggle for an Irish "Socialist Workers' Republic” without in any way indicating what is meant by “Socialist”. It could be that closer scrutiny of the meaning of the term is deliberately avoided in order to facilitate unity among the factions and potential factions within PD or, equally likely, it could be the misuse of the term to indicate national state capitalism. Whatever Farrell means by Socialist—and he insists that only “genuine Socialists” can win the Protestant workers—he appears to feel that the Catholic workers are closer to it than the Protestants. For example, in the struggle leading up to its achievement, he tells us:

  There is another way. Pressure must be maintained to make sure the reforms are implemented, but as they are, Catholic workers will realise that they are largely hollow and don’t solve the problems of unemployment and homeless families. At the same time Protestant workers must have it explained to them that the reason for the shortage is not the Catholics but the economic system (our emphasis)

Farrell tells us that there is “no point in trying to trick the Protestants” but surely the above not only exposes his notions on the relative proximity of Catholic and Protestant workers to what he deems to be Socialism but, also, that PD’s programme of immediate reforms are calculated to trick workers of all denominations and none. On the one hand, PD brings workers out on the streets in support of reforms; now they tell us the Catholics will “realise” these reforms are “hollow” and don’t affect their basic problems and Protestants will have it “explained” that the real problem is the economic system. Oh, the perils of “leadership”!

No reform could be more hollow than the solution of our problem proposed by the PD and Farrell and blessed by the holy name of the patron saint of Irish reformers, James Connolly. As we have noted, that solution is an Irish “Socialist” Workers’ Republic.

Capitalism is a world wide system in which the social labour of the world’s workers is harnessed to the profit-making activities of the capitalists through the medium of the wages-money system.

Socialism, the only alternative to capitalism, is a world-wide system which will avail of the wealth-producing techniques of social labour in order to produce the wealth required in a system of social distribution in terms of "from each in accordance with his mental or physical ability; to each in accordance with his needs”. Since social class is determined by the relationship in which people stand to the means of wealth production, and since in Socialism, all will stand in the same relation to these means, classes, including the working class, must obviously disappear—hence the expression “Socialist Workers’ Republic” is, as we say, a contradiction in terms. The sort of contradiction, indeed, that results from a lack of understanding not only of Socialism but of capitalism too.

It is not possible for one country alone to leap forward into Socialism in a capitalist world. Even if we follow the fanciful thinking of PD to the extent of allowing their hypothesis that the “Irish people” could organise “Irish” industry in the “National” interest, even if we don’t press the point that wage- labour and capital are two sides of the same relation, the absurdity of the proposition becomes immediately obvious. The “Socialist Workers’ Republic” would have to carry on production of commodities (wealth produced for sale and profit); that would require the import of raw materials from the capitalist world and would require the export of its produce to pay for such imports. Obviously, therefore, the mood of capitalism would have more control over its republicans.

Richard Montague

Saturdays evenings at No. 52 (1970)

Party News from the January 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

The cause of conflict (1970)

From the January 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ask that ubiquitous, approachable fellow the Man in the Street about the reasons for war and the chances are that his reply will be one of many variations on the same theme.

He will probably say that wars are caused by greed, or belligerence, or power-lust, or simply by mistakes. The common theme is that wars are fought for ideological reasons and that with better people, or better ideas, or better leaders, they need not happen.

This does no more than lead us to the next question: what is responsible for the people, the ideas, the leaders, the mistakes?

The 1914-18 war, for example, can hardly be called a surprise or a mistake because Europe had been preparing for it, openly and directly, for about forty years, and under all sorts of leaders.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries Germany was an expanding competitor to the established powers of Europe, who had already grabbed most of the markets and raw material sources known in the world.

Germany could expand in only one way — by force. That was the background to the arms race and the militarism of the early 20th century and to the great war which followed. The war of 1939-45 was a continuation of this same process, with the Nazis expressing the frenzied ambitions of the German ruling class.

The “peace” conferences after 1945 did not settle any disputes; they merely adjudicated and compromised between a multitude of opposing interests and so carved up the world that the stage was set—as it was in Indo-China and Korea—for the wars of the future.

There could really have been no other result. The world today—capitalist society—is based on the class ownership of the means of producing wealth. The world is divided into states and power blocs, the ruling classes of which are forced to dispute over access to markets, raw material fields, communications, etc.

That is why so many world powers stand guard over the oil of the Middle East, why the Suez Canal was once so sensitive a spot in world affairs, why the Russians and Chinese fought over the industry and communications around Vladivostock.

As long as capitalism lasts there will be a conflict of interests; in other words, war is caused by capitalism and cannot be avoided under that social system.

The tragedy of this is that the Man In the Street has no reason to go to war; his interests are not involved. Yet he is the one who does the fighting.

He does this because he can see no alternative, which brings us back to his replies to our original question. In fact, Socialism will abolish war because it will bring a community of interests; it will be a society without frontiers, without nations, without classes, without conflict.

The issue at Pinkville (1970)

From the January 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Whatever the incident at My Lai might have been, there is more to it than simply the question of whether it happened, and if it did who was responsible, and how many were killed as a result. More, even, than the Vietnam war itself; the massacre has caused the very concept of war—its motives, its morality, its justifications—to be questioned.

This is not the first time such questioning has happened, as anyone who knows about the murder of Dresden is aware. But at least it is hopeful, that the questioning takes place; if the Pinkvilles of capitalism were let pass without anyone trying to find the reasons why, the outlook for human society would be dark indeed.

The massacre is yet to be judicially proven but meanwhile the advance trial which is taking place in the newspapers, radio and television has allowed ample statement of both sides’ cases. The prosecution say that the killings were wholly unjustified, that if the men who are alleged to have actually fired the shots did so under orders, they should have disobeyed. This side says that soldiers should always show a proper restraint when they are in action, sparing as far as they can any wounded, or civilians, or prisoners they come across. These arguments are powered by strong emotions. It is difficult to imagine how even the most debauched war lover could justify what is said to have happened at Pinkville, and in the other incidents in Vietnam like the rape and murder of a young Vietnamese girl by an American patrol on Hill 192, in the same way as it was difficult to imagine any justification for Lidice.

The defence, which is by no means weak, disputes the story of a cold-blooded mass killing but perhaps betrays its own lack of confidence by pointing out that the fighting conditions in Vietnam are especially stressful, with the Americans having little quick means of distinguishing Vietcong soldiers from non-combatants. (A similar argument was used to excuse British soldiers’ trigger-happiness in Ireland about fifty years ago). Then the defence cites the provocation suffered by the platoon— the loss of a popular member in a booby trap, the sniper fire which greeted their approach to My Lai. Finally, there are the atrocities and murders by the Vietcong which, even when they have been sifted through all the usual modifying allowances, have clearly been ferocious.

In truth supporters of the war, whichever side they are on, fall in behind prosecution or defence according to their own allegiances. That is why, over Pinkville, it is the Vietcong supporters who are raging about the morality of war while the hawks in America try to avoid the issue. When the Vietcong atrocities are under the searchlight, the positions are reversed.

To make any sense in this confusion, it is necessary to recognise that there is a morality of war—a morality which quite simply justifies everything. A socially organised effort to kill and destroy cannot be gentle or humane. Once war is accepted then it follows that a Dresden, a Hiroshima, a Lidice, a Pinkville must also be accepted. Modern war has no non-combatants; the morale and well-being of the civilian population are as legitimate as targets as any military installation. Battle is a terrifying experience, in which human beings—those nice, clean-cut boys next door — are required to act like wild beasts. There can be no frontiers beyond which they are expected instead to act like sane, humane people.

Of more importance is the fact that support for war cannot be separated from support for capitalism. In a social system which has a basic affiliation to dispute, violence cannot be avoided. War, then, cannot be separated for whatever cause. Capitalism is a society of violence and the guilt for whatever happened at Pinkville extend a long, long way beyond a few soldiers.

Can you think? (1970)

From the January 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Inside capitalism lie the seeds of its own destruction — the working class, developing the consciousness which one day it will use to win political control, and large-scale highly productive industry and intensive agriculture, capable of providing for the needs of all mankind without distinction of race or sex. Because world capitalism is not ruled by a homogeneous, unified class but by many sectional interests forced into competition, these individual capitalists and individual states are compelled inescapably and sometimes reluctantly to develop the old, and introduce new, productive techniques (but also to inhibit their use by trying to ensure that only that which can be sold at a profit is produced) and to educate the working class to a correspondingly high technological level (but also to try to prevent it coming into contact with truly scientific ideas about the society which it now organises and maintains without the help of these parasitical owners).

Ideas such as: man has no instincts, either noble or savage. All his social behaviour is learned and socially conditioned.

The working class own almost nothing except their physical and mental energies. Certainly they have no country and so patriots (except the dead ones) suffer from delusions.

No god has ever been proved to have intervened in the affairs of man — but make-believe gods have been invoked to keep the serf at his plough, the king on his throne, the Ulster Unionist Party in office and the pope in his luxury palace.

Members of all ethnic groups — be they black, red, yellow, white or brown — have potentially the same intelligence. That these potentials are not realised is due to historical circumstances and environmental factors and not to biological differences.

Neither Russia nor any of its satellites, allies or former ‘fraternal states’ is controlled by the working class. Capitalists rule there and exploit wage slaves. Wherever wages are paid in exchange for labour-power a profit is being made, or the deal would not take place.

So-called overpopulation is only a problem because the prevailing social system cannot afford to feed the hungry.

For example, the Indian sub-continent, highly fertile in most parts as it is, with contemporary methods of agriculture could provide food enough to feed the whole world, not just Indians.

The race for the moon, like all other military-political-strategic ventures would be a long way from the top of the list of priorities in a sane and rational socialist world without money, prices and profits, where all goods would be free and all work would be entirely voluntary, where human beings would not be capital investments being kept as oiled and efficient soft machines by their weekly wage packets, but would be priceless co-participants in the conquest of human needs through the democratically controlled harnessing of science, industry and agriculture, the motive being freedom from want, freedom and time to pursue pleasing and satisfying activities instead of the monotonous and physically destroying enslavement to the hard machine in the service of their master—profit.

A hallucination? A dream world divorced from the objective realities? Do you still succumb to the human nature/original sin myth that is central to the apologetic ideology of capitalism, which justifies coercion, oppression, repression, moral codes (‘Thou Shalt Not’), exploitation, war, periodic crises, poverty and the existence of a class which produces nothing but consumes the best? Or do you still subscribe to the even hoarier view that resources are scarce and always will be scarce because they always have been scarce? How long is it since you took your head out of the sand and had a breather? The atmosphere will very soon be thick with socialist ideas. Not solely because of the efforts of our Party’s small membership but because others besides us are rational people faced with the general problems of the working class. If we have come to these conclusions from examining the world in which we live and the agents of change contained within it, then so can they. So can you.

Ideas spring out of the economic structure of society. They spell out Socialism a mile high. Freedom and plenty will not be the result of heaven-sent providence but of human effort, as everything in history has been. 

Michael Bradley

Immigration fallacies (1970)

From the January 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is an unfortunate fact that many workers in the Midlands and the South East of England are colour prejudiced. But this does explain why both Labour and the Tories are prepared to pander to racialism in order to get votes. Everybody knows about the campaign some Tories waged in the 1964 election. Widespread criticism caused the Tories to tone down their racialism but Labour learnt a lessen too: they made sure that before the next election they strengthened the Commonwealth Immigrants Act whose obvious purpose is to keep out as many so-called coloured immigrants as possible.

Most workers are opposed to immigration on practical grounds: they mistakenly believe that it is a threat to the living standards they have achieved by trade union and political action. Very few go for the fancy frills of racialism, the dangerous pseudo-scientific nonsense peddled by outfits like the National Front and the Union Movement. Of course a number of Tories too have attacked “race-mixing” on theoretical grounds: Enoch Powell and Duncan Sandys, exploiter of the Ghanian gold miners.

We are living in a capitalist society where a privileged class owns the means for producing wealth so that the rest of us have to work for them. We are called, appropriately enough, the working class. Capitalism is international (including state capitalist Russia) and so is the working class. As far as Socialists are concerned, all workers the world over are brothers. While the economic system is world-wide, for political purposes the world is divided by frontiers into artificial national states. As Socialists we don’t accept that these frontiers have any relevance. We don’t recognise them. Nor do most workers in search of jobs. For it stands to reason if you have no property and depend for a living on working you must go, if you can, where the jobs are. Since the war many jobs have been going in North America and Western Europe. So to these parts have come workers and impoverished peasants from the rest of the world. To the Common Market have come people from North Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East. To Britain have come people from India and the West Indies. Surely the point that these post-war migrations bring out is that capitalism is an international system and that the world is one economic unit.

The racialists claim that this migration to Britain has caused problems in housing, education, and the health services. Without denying that throwing people of different customs together in the economic jungle of capitalism can cause inconveniences, it is quite untrue that immigration can be said to be the cause of bad housing, cheap education and inadequate medical services. These problems existed long before the migrants came. They are problems for the working class everywhere and all the time. Besides, since the war more have left Britain for overseas than have come here. Immigrants are in the same position as the rest of us: propertyless, having to find an employer to live. They, too, are members of the working class.

In a Union Movement pamphlet Robert Row repeats a common argument of the racialists that is accepted by many workers. Migration, he says, has caused over-crowding in our big cities “with its attendant evils of taking houses which should be inhabited by the British who built them”. This is nonsense. Houses, even palaces and mansions, are all built by the working class but under capitalism workers are only allowed to live in the sort of house or they can afford. This charge of taking “British houses” might make sense if immigrants took the best. Yet all the evidence suggests that immigrants have to put up with the worst housing. The best houses go, of course, to the rich who get their money from exploiting workers, black and white.

Capitalism is the cause of working class problems. Under capitalism, how we live is restricted by the size of our wage packet or salary cheque. And the economic laws of capitalism ensure that we don’t get much more as the price of our energies than enough to keep us in efficient working order. This will be our lot as long as capitalism lasts. We will have to put up with, not the best that is available in housing, education, food and clothing, but with the cheap and second-rate.

These are problems that affect all workers, irrespective of so-called race or colour or nationality, whether they live in America, Britain, South Africa or India. They are problems which can only be solved by the joint action of workers everywhere to convert the means of production from the class property of a few into the common property of the whole community, through the establishment of Socialism with production solely for use, not profit.

Colour prejudice is just an idea (1970)

From the January 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anyone who ever gets involved in arguments with racists sooner or later runs up against their assumption—sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit—that their prejudices are based on an eternal, natural law. The assumption which follows this is that racism has an existence independent from other social factors and that, unlike other ideas, it came into being regardless of whatever else was happening in the world and will, therefore, remain regardless of whatever else happens. The importance of examining this theory is not so much to assess the value of the racists’ assumption but also to look at an example of the forces which operate for changes in society and in its ideas.

Let us begin with the simple statement that the Negro, who has suffered centuries of oppression in America, did not choose to go there in the first place. He was taken there—mostly by force. This transportation began at a time when manufacture was developing in North West Europe and a plantation economy taking root in the West Indies and the American South. The first Negroes were brought from Africa in 1510, to work the gold mines of what was then Hispaniolia. By the beginning of the 17th. century there were settlements all along the east coast of America, from Massachusetts to the West Indies.

These settlements represented one corner of a triangular trade, which supplied raw materials to another corner which was European industry. The third corner was Africa, where the Negro slaves were to be found. The sides of this triangle were the voyages between the corners— first the carriage of manufactures from Europe to be exchanged for African slaves who had been captured in tribal wars and raids; then carrying the slaves across to America to be traded for raw materials; and finally bringing the materials to Europe, to feed the appetites of the manufacturers there. At first the Negroes were treated in the same way as white indentured servants and were allowed to buy their freedom; they were not subjected to any race prejudice. It was the demands of the plantations, with crops depending on regular, disciplined tilling, which brought the pressure for outright slavery. Virginia, the first American colony to import Negroes, legalised slavery in 1617.

The side of the triangle representing the carriage of slaves from Africa to America was called the “middle voyage’’ and it was here that great cruelty was imposed and suffering endured — and vast profits made. It is possible now only to estimate the numbers who underwent the horrors of the middle voyage but a cautious figure would be 15 million, with a death rate of about 20 per cent. The central fact of this trade was that the slaves were not regarded as being any more sensitive than inanimate cargo. Thus they had to be packed into the holds of the slave ships as tightly as possible—one writer describes them as lying “like spoons”—and there could be no second thoughts about jettisoning them if disease broke out aboard, or if the ship ran into heavy weather. Those who survived the crossing were cleaned and oiled and polished for the auction.

Many great fortunes were made from the triangular trade. In 1789, the total trade of France amounted to £17 million of which San Domingo, with its slave economy, was responsible for £11 million. The bourgeoisie of Bordeaux and Marseilles, and the merchant capitalists of Manchester and Liverpool, owed most of their wealth—their big, comfortable houses, their carriages, their women—to the slave trade and all that it meant in human suffering and degradation.

There was of course a contradiction in the erection of an entire, and very important, economy on slavery at a time when the countries which were responsible for it were themselves developing the commodity production of capitalism, which needed free labour power. An attempt was made to resolve this contradiction by the simple expedient of classifying the Negro as an inherently inferior being. Thus American slavery could be distinguished from earlier forms, which were in harmony with the prevailing mode of wealth production, by its conscious dehumanising of the slave. Negro families were broken up either during or after the middle voyage ; the slaves were forbidden any education in reading or writing and they had no legal existence other than as the property of someone else. In 1857 the Dred Scott decision, which caused such an uproar, merely gave formal confirmation to something which had existed in fact for a very long time.

By that time the theories of racism, having taken something like three centuries of the slave trade to form themselves, began to emerge. Before then, the climate of opinion was such that the slave was regarded as outside the pale of humanity—without law, morals or religion. As each wretched shipment came in, religious divines rejoiced at all those souls saved from the moral depredations of paganism and idolatry. (At first any slaves who accepted conversion to Christianity automatically won their freedom. But by the end of the eighteenth century the Church had decided that there was after all nothing inconsistent in the converted Negro remaining a slave—and of course the slave owners agreed.) Dr. Cartwright, a professor at the University of Louisiana, diagnosed the slaves’ lack of interest in their work, and their tendency to run away, as mental diseases with impressive names—dyaesthesia and drapetomanie—for which the only cure was a whipping.

And not only the pro-slavers were affected. In 1765 Granville Sharp, who was later an abolitionist, intervened to save the life of a slave who had been flogged almost to death. At the time Sharp did not regard this incident as anything more than an act of private charity—certainly not as a condemnation of slavery. It is not surprising, that the whole thing eventually became rationalised into a theory, or perhaps a series of theories. In the early nineteenth century, for example, the “Teutonic Origin” theory—the idea that all worthwhile cultural achievements were the work of the peoples of North West Europe—took root, fostered by intellectual leaders like Bishop Stubbs of Oxford.

What this means is that any measures which, say, the American government now takes on civil rights must run up against opinions and prejudices which have become entrenched over centuries. These opinions have been responsible for some pretty dreadful episodes; for example the Tuskegee Institute documented 1,797 lynchings of Southern Negroes which took place between 1900 and 1964. This figure takes no account of the undocumented killings—the quiet murders with the body dumped in the river or the swamp and few people beyond the victim’s family marking their disappearance. More recently, between 1964 and 1967 over forty Negroes and whites have been murdered or lynched in Mississippi alone, without any effective action being taken against those responsible, although often their identity is general knowledge.

In addition, widespread, persistent segregation exists, in spite of the many Bills which have been passed to outlaw it. Sometimes this segregation is open, as it is in the schools of the Deep South, eight out of nine of which are still segregated. Sometimes it is a more subtle, de facto segregation, in which the whites simply move out of a district and leave it, with its schools, to the Negroes. The effect of this in Washington, D.C. is that in nearly all district schools black pupils are in a majority of over 95 per cent.

Herding any depressed group into a particular section of a city brings its own problems and tensions. In the case of the Negroes in America, these are accentuated when coloured workers from the South, thrown out of work by the increased use of mechanised farming methods and pesticides, migrate into that section. This produces the classic immigration situation, of desperate people pouring into an area already run down, an area of crumbling buildings which house rats and lice along with the people and where rack renters and other exploiters can take rich pickings.

There is a short, evocative word to describe these areas. Ghettoes. Officially, their names are, for example, Watts in Los Angeles and Harlem in New York. It is no cause for surprise, that they are breeding grounds for all manner of social disorders; in Harlem in 1964 the juvenile delinquency rate was twice that for the city as a whole, the proportion of drug addicts about ten times, the incidence of venereal disease in the under-21s six times.

Yet the very existence of the ghettoes, and the ways in which the Negroes protest—by riots, burnings, Black Power cells—are all taken by the racists as evidence to boost their conviction that Negroes are sub-human and therefore deserve nothing better than confinement in more ghettoes, and subjection to more prejudice and fiercer suppression. This racism is self-perpetuating, feeds upon its own appetite—and all in the conviction that it is an eternal and immutable truth.

And that really is the key to it. Contrary to what the racists think, racism as much as any other idea is a product of the prevailing economic conditions in society. Which means that, like other ideas which in their day were just as reactionary, just as powerful, it must change, and die, as conditions outside it require.

Ivan

The case for Socialism (1970)

From the January 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

We suffer unemployment because we live today under a form of social organisation known as capitalism.

Capitalism divides the human family into two parts: one, a small minority class, claims title to all the resources of the earth — this group is known as the capitalists; the other class in our society, the overwhelming majority of the population, are known, appropriately enough, as the working class.

Since the capitalists claim ownership of all the resources of the earth, either as individuals, private or public companies or through the agency of the State, the workers are obliged in order to live to sell to the owning class the only thing they (the workers) possess, their mental or physical skills. These they sell in return for wages or salaries, which enables them to buy back from the capitalists a portion of the things they have produced.

The sole reason for producing goods under capitalism is to ensure directly or indirectly, for the capitalists, profit. Human needs are of secondary importance. This is true of all the capitalist countries of the world today. It is true of the “western” nations under “private” capitalism and it is equally true of the eastern ‘communist’ countries under state-capitalism.

When, because of the mad economics of capitalism, it becomes impossible for the capitalists to find markets for all their produce then production is slowed down or stopped and workers are left to the tender mercies of the “dole”.

We affirm, that only in Socialism is a lasting solution to the problem of unemployment to be found.

Socialism is a form of social organisation wherein the convention governing the production and distribution of all wealth will be the satisfaction of human needs. All the resources of the earth will be the property of mankind as a whole and people will apply their skills and energies to these resources in order to produce the things society needs. Under such circumstances an abundance of all the things we need could be produced and it will not be necessary to find markets in which goods can be sold — for as all (save the young, the aged and infirm) will have engaged in the job of production, so all will take from the abundant wealth available. Money, a measurement of wealth and means of exchange under capitalism, will, in Socialism, be rendered superfluous, hence the humiliation of the wages system, with all the other ugly features of class slavery, will disappear, leaving the simple principle of socialist organisation: from each in accordance with his ability; to each in accordance with his needs.

You will readily see that in such a society there could be no problem of unemployment. The human family would produce more than sufficient to satisfy the needs of its every member and the fact that too much of a particular thing was being produced would simply mean that we would re-direct our activities or enjoy more leisure.

Is such a society economically possible? Of course it is! When you consider the organised waste that the ending of the money-system alone will bring you begin to appreciate the great possibilities that lie before us. Think of all the useless functionaries connected with capitalism and essential to that system: we have the capitalists themselves, and their lackeys and flunkeys . . . armies of salesmen, touts, tickmen and agents of all descriptions . . . brokers, bankers, clerks and advertising “specialists” . . . policemen, jailers and prisoners — to give point to the commandments of the system . . . soldiers, sailors and airmen, to fight capitalism’s wars — and, of course, the vast array of civilian brains and brawn necessary to the appetite of the war-machines, not to speak of the loss of human life and energy associated with “civilisation’s” wars. Very little mental exercise will show that we could fill many pages with lists of functionaries necessary only to the maintenence of capitalism.

With Socialism all these useless functions will come to an end and the people concerned can begin to make a real contribution to the happiness of themselves and all mankind.

There can be no doubt that freed from the restrictions and organised waste of capitalism the peoples of the world have it within their power to produce their needs, thus opening the door to a full and happy life for all humanity. The question remains, how can the change to Socialism be accomplished?

Capitalism could not continue to exist without the willingness and assistance of the majority of the people whose role in that society is that of wage-slaves. Even more so will Socialism require the participation of its people but, by the very nature of Socialism such support and participation must be conscious. Only the unqualified and conscious support and participation of the majority of the world’s workers can bring about Socialism. The socialist objective will mean freedom as Man has never before known it; it represents the beginning of the highest form of social organisation that mankind can achieve, hence it demands of those who institute it a knowledge of what it is and how it will function.

Accordingly, the task of the World Socialist Party and its Companion Parties overseas, is to use all the means at our disposal to bring about mass Socialist understanding; to build up an organised majority of conscious Socialists to the end of gaining control of the state power and converting this from the agent of capitalist exploitation into an instrument of Socialist emancipation.

Simply stated. Socialism will come about when the majority of the workers of the world realise that they are the people who equip and run capitalism in the interests of their masters and undertake the task of changing the economic foundations of society in such a way as will facilitate the functioning of society in the interests of all, irrespective of race or sex.

Socialism is only as far off as the willingness of the workers to accept capitalism and attempt its reform leaves it. We cannot over-emphasise the fact that there is no bar to Socialism now but the lack of socialist knowledge prevailing among the working class.

It is not usual for a political party to ask you to think and to ply you with something really worth thinking about. It is the practice to assure you that the party has your problem in hand and that “Mr. So-and-So”, a “born leader of men” will collect your vote and put matters right. We hasten to assure you that we have no “leaders of men” in our ranks; we are an organisation of working men and women tormented by the problems and humiliations of capitalism and eager to enlist your support to banish that system from the earth.

— From a pamphlet on Unemployment issued by the World Socialist Party of Ireland.

Do races exist? (1970)

From the January 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

In biology the word race is used as a synonym for sub-species which is a sub-division of a species. So biologists talk about races of plants and other animals besides Man. Applied to mankind, a race would be a sub-division of the species homo sapiens. It is worth emphasising here that all human beings are members of the same animal species. All men and women, whatever their different physical characteristics, are members of one vast human family. We really are, as the saying goes, brothers and sisters under the skin.

Obviously human beings do differ one from another in their physical characteristics and so, for purposes of scientific investigation, can be classified into groups based on those characteristics which are common to a number of them. Some biologists call these groups races. Others prefer to avoid this word altogether, on the grounds that its constant misuse in politics has made it unsuitable as a precise, scientific term; they want to use some other term like ethnic group.

Given, then, that there is nothing wrong in principle with classifying mankind into sub-groups on the basis of common characteristics, the problem arises of how many such groups there should be. Or, if you believe in using the term, how many races are there? This is a question on which biologists are not agreed, never have been agreed and never will be agreed. There are two reasons for this.

First, dividing mankind into sub-groups is a matter of scientific convenience so as to understand better Man as part of the animal kingdom. There are thus grounds for proper disagreement as to which system of classification is the most useful. Indeed, as knowledge advances, one system may become outmoded and need to be replaced with another.

Second, the same human beings can be included in different groups depending on which physical characteristics you use to define the group—for instance skin colour, or hair, or bone structure, or blood group.

This second point brings out once again the essential unity of mankind from the point of view of biology, and shows that in the course of Man’s existence on this earth as a separate species there has already been considerable intermixing of people with different characteristics. Indeed, this intermixing has been such that it is utter nonsense to talk of “pure races”.

The plain fact of the matter is that it is now quite impossible to draw hard and fast lines between groups of human beings. Any lines biologists feel they must draw are necessarily imprecise and always changing.

Racists argue that the groups into which they classify mankind not only have distinct physical characteristics but also differ in intellectual capacity. There are, according to the racist, superior and inferior races.

But what are the facts? Despite repeated attempts to get such evidence, nobody has been able to show any innate connection between a person’s intellectual ability (which in any event is not just a matter of biology since the mind is a product of society too) and some physical feature like the colour of his skin. The full range of intellectual ability seems to exist in all the groups into which biologists have ever divided mankind. Experience has shown that members of all these groups are capable of absorbing modern culture—reading, writing, operating machines and so on—in a comparatively short period of time. The difference which now exist between human beings as far as their level of civilisation is concerned are not the result of different natures but the result of living and having lived in different environments. There are no superior or inferior races.

What the study of human differences brings out is, oddly enough, not how different human beings are but how alike they are. It points to the conclusion that there is really only one race: THE HUMAN RACE.

Adam Buick

Confusion Confounded (1970)

Pamphlet Review from the January 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Whatever happened to our Wages? Norman Atkinson M.P. (Tribune Publications. 1s.)

Norman Atkinson, Labour M.P. for Tottenham, argues three main propositions—that wages since 1938 have barely kept pace with prices and have actually fallen behind in some industries; that this is because all the governments, Labour and Tory, have pursued wrong policies; and that this can be remedied in future if they take his advice.

The information he offers adds little to what is generally known and where it attempts to go further it is based on arguments which will not bear examination. His explanation of why things went wrong is absurd and his remedies useless. Nevertheless, the pamphlet has its importance because it is typical of the emptiness of the case made by so called 'left wing' Labour M.P.s.

Like many back-bench M.P.s who got into Parliament on the Labour bandwagon and hope to do so again, Atkinson wants to dissociate himself from some of his government's unpopular measures, notably its incomes policy. This calls for some delicate weaving between saying that Labour Government is useless to the workers and defending it because he wants it to be returned again.

He won't go along with workers who think that it does not matter whether the government is Tory or Labour, yet he admits that policies on prices and incomes "have been consistent over twenty years" i.e. from Labour to Tory and back again to Labour. (He presents a nice balance for the last four years of Tory government and the first four years of Labour government—wages under Wilson fared "marginally better" than under the Tories, but the Tories when they tried to keep wages down "apologised like gentlemen", quite unlike "wind and brass George Brown".)

His summary on wages and prices as the following piece of double talks: -

  It will be evident from the following Tables that some wage earners have suffered a drop from their 1938 living standards whilst others have made little or no progress, but this is not to deny that the quality of life has improved immensely. Of course it has!

So the quantity is down but the quality is immensely better; whatever that may mean.

He dodges blaming the government directly, by saying that the wrong policies of Labour and Tory governments have not been due to the intention of keeping wages down but resulted from the governments having been bamboozled by the officials at the Treasury, whose thinking is "tipped slightly in favour of capital."

He offers no explanation whatever why the governments which appoint high Treasury officials have to take from them advice which the governments think is unsound.

His other bugbear is "the City" as distinct from the manufacturing capitalists, yet it is noticeable that among his examples of inadequate wages he includes Fords. The founder of Fords shared Atkinson's adverse view of bankers but how exactly did the City prevent Fords from paying higher wages?

On the wages-prices issue it has been generally accepted that on average workers earnings have, since 1938, got appreciably ahead of average prices but with some industries failing to keep pace, and with wide variations of price increase for different groups of workers.

Atkinson argues that the official index figures of average price and rent increases between 1938 and 1968, an increase of 270 per cent, is an understatement because the amount people spend on alcohol and tobacco is more than they care to admit to Ministry officials (and to their wives). It was the Ministry which drew the attention to this. What Atkinson has failed to do is to assess the likely amount of this understatement. If the amount spent on these items were twice as large as the amount admitted it would raise the 270 per cent to something in the region of 280 per cent. Mr. Atkinson however, produces a figure of 371 per cent as the amount that "can perhaps be considered the rise in the cost of living of a family of two adults and one child earning average wages".

He does this by taking as his figure for rent and rates one household in the London Borough of Haringey and assuming that an expenditure of £4.8.6 on rent, representing 23 per cent of the family's total weekly expenditure is typical. This is quite out of line with the Ministry's average figures for the country as a whole and he makes no attempt to show that the information collected by the Ministry in their periodical inquiries is wrong. The Ministry of course, as its figures are national averages, takes into account low-rented areas of the country and a proportion of controlled rents.

When it comes to remedies Atkinson produces only some old specifics which have all been tried without success. They are "import selectivity", which presumably means restrictions on imports; "domestic price repression" (maximum prices) and productivity bargaining, plus one other obscure passage which says that "we must campaign on both fronts and thus strengthen the Labour Party's industrial base". Charitably interpreted, this would appear to mean that the workers should first elect a Labour government and strike against its policies.

For a century or more capitalists and economists dreamed of a paradise in which booms went smoothly for ever. Socialists, with facts on their side, maintained that capitalism does not and cannot operate in that way. Atkinson clearly has not lost his faith in capitalism.

Edgar Hardcastle

The Socialist Party and the Common Market (1970)

From the January 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party of Great Britain is neither for nor against Britain's entry into Europe. We stand for world Socialism and regard the Common Market issue as irrelevant from a working class point of view.

Britain's joining the Common Market would amount to little more than a re-arrangement of tariff barriers. Which is a matter of no concern to workers, but of great concern to capitalists since it could affect their profits.

Most of Britain's biggest firms have long been convinced that joining the Common Market would allow them to make more profits. This is why the parties that most directly serve their interests, the Labour Party and the Tory Party are also in favour of entry. It is the task of these parties to work out policies that benefit capitalist industry in Britain and then to trick workers into backing these policies. Thus we are about to be subjected yet again to intense pro-Market propaganda in the press and on the radio and television.

Some British capitalists, with investments mainly in farming and what used to be the British Empire, are opposed to entry as they reckon it would threaten their profits. Their direct political expression is through sections of the Tory Party but their anti-Market campaign is helped, no doubt inadvertently, by a section of the Labour Party, the National Front and the so-called Communist Party.

It is because we know that the Common Market debate involves only the interests of these two sections of the British capitalist class and that, as we say in our declaration of principles, "the interest of the working class is diametrically opposed to the interests of all sections of the master class", that we refuse to take sides and warn workers not to be taken in by the political spokesmen of either section.

We repeat now what we said when this red herring first appeared in 1961:

"Whether the British government goes in or not, British workers should be looking to promote their own Socialist working class unity with workers everywhere, not just in Western Europe" (Socialist Standard, January 1962).

50 Years Ago: Socialist Ideas and Empty Phrases (1970)

The 50 Years Ago column from the January 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

There are some people who have neither the patience to acquire knowledge nor the self-control to follow the only course (slow though it may be) open to the class-conscious worker. Those to whom the writer alludes are the emotional, red-flag-waving individuals.

People of this type have cut a figure in past movements and exist in profusion to day. They Live in the limelight, mouthing all sorts of handy phrases — in fact empty phrases echoing from empty heads largely constitute their stock-in-trade and take the place of ideas and knowledge.

The phrase-wizards, with an inflated estimate of their own puny accomplishments, flourish in all the pseudo working-class parties of the present. They strive to play upon emotion and attract a large following by voicing their particular pet phrases and hazy notions, hurrying a bewildered group of supporters along with them to some misty land of promise — they don't know exactly where.

In the Chartist Movement in England the 'revolutionary' raved and ranted, gained applause — and the movement suddenly collapsed. The inexorable laws of capitalism ground the Chartist Movement to powder, and swept the popular leaders' away.

About twenty years ago the IWW was ushered in with a great flourish of trumpets, and all the would-be 'revolutionists' hurried to the front, panting with excitement and gasping their fervid and frenzied phrases. The real facts of the situation, however, and the unsurmountable obstacles to 'taking and holding the means of production' through so called industrial action (or inaction) soon shattered the movement into warring fragments.

At the present moment we have the same bogey and crowd-gathering business cropping up again. The new catch-cry is 'government by the Soviets' and again all the phrase-mongers and 'revolutionaries' are to the fore. Again they are trying to force the pace by appeals to emotion. But unfortunately for those soft-hearted, soft headed and excited hurricanes neither fine phrases nor good intentions will take the place of knowledge. Appeals to emotion may bring a bloody shambles, but they cannot bring Socialism . . . another disillusionment is in store, and 'all power to the Soviets' will run its course and collapse as all similar schemes have done before.

(From an article 'Phrase Magic' by G. McClatchie. Socialist Standard, January 1920.)

Obituary: Comrade R. Milbourne (1970)

Obituary from the January 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

We regret to have to report the recent death of Comrade R. Milbourne at the age of 69 years. He was the son of a very early member of the party, the late Comrade Alley.

He was known to Party members as early as 1919 but his work took him to Turkey for several years and it was not until soon after his return to this country that he joined the party in 1931 along with his brother.

He then worked for Air France and his knowledge of French was put to good use in translations for the party and in publicity. For many years he worked indefatigably on publicity for the Party and in getting the Socialist Standard and pamphlets on display in Public Libraries. He also wrote for the Socialist Standard.

In later years, owing to domestic difficulties, he was less able to attend Head Office but he never lost his lively interest in Party activities. Latterly he was a member of West London Branch.

Letter: The Irish Border question (1970)

Letter to the Editors from the January 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Sir,

We note your “challenge” to the Irish Communist Organisation (Socialist Standard, October) to deny that “the removal of ‘the Border’ will not remove one social evil from which the working class suffer”. Presumably not even the Socialist Party of Great Britain can deny that the working class movement in Ireland is riddled with religious sectarianism, and that the extent of this sectarianism, (the likes of which is not to be found in any other section of the working class in Europe) is due to the influence of Partition politics. Without going any deeper into the question, it is clear that the ending of Partition and its politics will also bring to an end the influence of those politics on the working class movement, especially the religious sectarianism which has paralysed the working class political movement during the past half century. The ending of religious sectarianism will certainly be the ending of a “social evil from which the working class suffer.” Even a child should be able to see that for himself.

You maintain that the ICO pamphlet on Partition “is the kind of analysis we ourselves have made for years”. The reviewer twice refers to the Border as “just a tarriff barrier”. That is certainly not the kind of analysis made by the ICO. We have shown that the uneven development of capitalism is the basis of Partition. The tarriff barrier is the economic essence of the Border. But the ICO has never, in the SPGB manner, tried to reduce the social and political superstructure to the economic base. The economy is not the superstructure, though it determines the development of the superstructure. Religious sectarianism has nothing to do with tarriff barriers as such. If the Border is “just a tarriff barrier” its social effects are unaccounted for. There have been many tarriff barriers in the world which did not have the effect of riddling the workers behind them with religious sectarianism. (And it should be noted that religious sectarianism began to to intensify in Ireland when it was rapidly dying away throughout Europe). With the absurd notion that the economy is its superstructure, and that therefore the Partition which had the effect of drowning working class politics in religious sectarianism was “irrelevant” to the working class, it is not surprising that the “World Socialist Party of Ireland” has been a non-starter in the working class movement. The “irrelevant” Partition politics of the bourgeoisie have exercised a massive negative influence on the working class. but we have noticed that that the WSPI has [not] exercised any social influence, negative or positive! As we said before, it is the Socialist Party of Great Britain, and not the Partition, which is irrelevant, and a matter of no concern, to the working class of Ireland.

Yours,

G. Golden,

Irish Communist Organisation,

London, N.19.

Reply:

The basis of Mr. Golden’s argument would seem to be that since Partition is the cause of religious sectarianism in Northern Ireland the removal of the Border would mean the end also of sectarianism.

We suggest he has got things the wrong way round: it was rather the success of the big capitalists of North East Ireland in stirring up anti-Catholic prejudices amongst their Protestant workers that gave them the mass support needed to force the British government to exclude Ulster from Home Rule. Religion was deliberately introduced into politics in order to serve the economic interests of the employers there. Had they not been able to win mass support (to the extent of obtaining pledges to take up arms if need be) for their opposition to Home Rule, then there would probably have been no Border. Sectarianism, serving the interests of a section of the Irish capitalist class, could thus be said to have given rise to the Border.

The removal of the Border would not in itself end sectarianism; indeed it might make it worse since many Protestant workers would still resist this change in their rulers with violence.

Sectarianism can only be removed, as we pointed out in the Socialist Standard in January last year, by “a sustained campaign to clear away the political and religious garbage that the working class got from its leaders of yesterday”. We went on to ask, however, “why struggle for the apple when the same effort can bring us the orchard?”

Sectarianism is not only a barrier to working class unity for Socialism, but it is also a barrier to those who want the workers’ support for an ordinary reformist party or for an all-Ireland republic. In fact it has now even become an embarrassment to those capitalists, international and local, who have considerable investments in Northern Ireland.

The World Socialist Party is thus not the only organisation campaigns, against sectarianism. This is why it important to ask what will replace it. We would not regard a change to normal non-sectarian capitalist politics (of the British or Irish variety) as much an advance. Our task of spreading socialist understanding in place of political confusion would still remain.

The I.C.O. may be opposed to sectarianism but it is not seeking to replace it with socialist understanding. Rather, with its Anti-Partition stance it is lining itself up with Irish nationalism, The ideology of that section of the Irish capitalist class that was opposed to Union with Britain. Indeed the I.C.O can be seen as basically an Irish nationalist organisation merely using the few socialist phrases that have survived mauling at the hands of their men. Lenin, Stalin and Mao.

We confess that we are not sure what point Mr. Golden is trying to make in the second part of his letter — unless he is again putting the cart before the horse and arguing that Partition is the cause of sectarianism. We will leave the matter for our readers to try and work out for themselves.

Editorial Committee

Enoch Powell exposed (1970)

Book Review from the January 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Rise of Enoch Powell, by Paul Foot. Penguin 4s.

Enoch Powell is a hypocrite and an opportunist as Paul Foot shows in this short book.

Powell entered politics after the war as a Tory Imperialist who opposed giving India independence and even suggested how it might be reconquered. But the mid-fifties, however, he had abandoned these illusions and was a Conservative Cabinet Minister. During this period the late Sir Cyril Osborne began his ranting and raving about coloured immigration leading to a "coffee-coloured" Britain. Powell, on the other hand, said nothing controversial on this issue. Foot can find no speech of his against coloured immigration or integration till 1964. In fact Powell was Minister of Health for three years and, as Foot points out:

During Powell's régime at the Ministry of Health, Health Service recruitment drives for doctors and nurses in the West Indies and from India and Pakistan were not slowed down in anyway.

What led Powell to change his mind and make a series of sensational racialist speeches in 1968 and 1969? Foot suggests that it was sheer opportunism. The Tory victory at Smethwick in the 1964 election had shown that colour prejudice was a vote-winner. Powell, says Foot, resolved to exploit this in a bid to become leader of the Tory party.

At one time Powell could have been regarded with some respect because of the frank way he spoke out against futile attempts to reform capitalism. Capitalism, his message went, runs on profits and Governments should recognise this. Socialists, of course, agree that capitalism runs on profits and have always said that any Government, be it Labour or Tory, would be forced to recognise this in its policies.

This is where Powell is shown up as a hypocrite. Foot quotes some of Powell's many speeches in favour of the "free movement of labour". In the Sunday Telegraph of 3rd May, 1964 he asked:

Instead of trying to reverse economic trends, might it not be better to reinforce them by helping and encouraging the man who needs a job to move to the place where someone is anxious to employ him?

Powell often argued that it was foolish to try to stop the drift to the South East. As if the same economic trends which brought workers from Ireland, Scotland and the North to London and the Midlands did not also bring workers from the West Indies and India!

What is worrying is not so much what Powell thinks but that millions of workers follow him on the colour issue. The task of Socialists remains to point out that colour doesn't matter and that workers have no country.

Adam Buick

War and people (1970)

Book Review from the January 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

The People's War by Angus Calder, Jonathan Cape, 65s.

It is some time now, since the re-assessment of the 1939/45 war got under way. Many Allied "successes" have been shown up as failures. sometimes as grisly reminders of the cold-blooded slaughters of 1914/1918; the reputation of the war leaders, at the time unassailable, has been badly damaged. Even Churchill has been demoted to a human being—and a not very effective one at that.

Angus Calder was born during the war, so he has to rely on something more than memory for his account of it. But those who can remember will find themselves reliving their experiences when they read his book. They might also have feelings about realising that events they can recall so well—evacuation, air raids, rationing, war propaganda—are not fit subjects for the historian.

This book is aptly titled; 1939/45 was a people's war because the entire population was in it, indeed, almost under fire, from the start. When it came, it did not prove as terrifying as the government had promised and the total devastation which in the Thirties had been almost universally forecast was simply not a possibility. Even in the German cities like Hamburg and Dresden, which took terrible batterings from air, recovery was quickly organised. Indeed, one of the big miscalculations of the Allied death accountants was their over-estimation of the effects of air attacks on the German population. 

Angus Calder does a good exposure job on the many things which while the war was on the official propaganda machine could not admit. The machine had to cover up the facts on evacuation, the devastating effects of kids from the big city slums being dumped onto country villages and, in some cases, stately homes whose owners were shocked to find the extent of the duty which England that day expected them to do. Oliver Lyttelton, who became a leading member of Churchill's government, was stuck with 31 evacuees and wrote about them: "I had little dreamt that English children could be so completely ignorant of the simplest rules of hygiene, and that they would regard the floors and carpets as suitable places upon which to relieve themselves."

Then of course there were the plain lies—of British losses always being a fraction of the German, of fantastic victories against huge odds being won by innate superiority. perhaps the most famous of these lies was the claim that the RAF had destroyed 185 German aircraft on August 15, 1940 but which was in fact only 75 for the loss of 34 British fighters.

Another great hush-up was the scandal of the Tubes, when Londoners, in panic at the increasing severity of the Blitz and at the inadequacy of their shelters, took over the Underground stations. At first this was against official opposition but the movement proved irresistible and as the government gave way and the people poured each night onto the stations conditions in them became terrible, with nothing—bedding, sanitation—organised to receive them. Perhaps we can smile now at the way the propaganda machine persuaded people to forget this sort of hardship—how they got them running savings weeks, giving up their aluminium pots to be turned into aircraft, eating carrots to help them see better in the blackout.

Angus Calder has one very interesting section on the small band who refused to fight, contrasting the treatment received by the conscientious objectors in the 1914/18 war to that of 1939/45. In the Second War the government—and Churchill himself—went out of their way to denounce victimisation and even allowed prominent pacifists to lecture the troops. Which was, of course, an exceedingly wise policy because, apart from anything else, it drew much of the war opponents' sting and prevented the objectors being raised into martyrdom.

Yes, it was a people's war and the people themselves believed it to be. So towards the end we were fed with super promises about what the people were going to get out of victory and Beveridge became a popular hero. It was left to the Attlee government to show up the reality, that the people get the capitalism they deserve or deserve the capitalism they get. Angus Calder's book is a smoothly written, comprehensive history of those days.

Ivan