Do we need to be employed? (1987)

From the January 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Unemployment, as a percentage of the working population, has not been so high since the war. It has risen to 12 per cent in recent months — a total of 3¼ million — discounting many thousands not registered at unemployment benefit offices and therefore not included in the available statistics. Unemployment is therefore certain to be one of the chief issues in the next election, since it concerns not only those at present out of work but also those who feel insecure in their present jobs and those at school and in other forms of education.

With this in mind, speakers at recent conferences — Conservative. Labour and Liberal/ SDP Alliance — have attempted to reassure their followers and prospective supporters that they take the problem very seriously and are able to do something about it.

Conference “solutions"

At their October conference the Conservatives promised an extension of job-training schemes and financial assistance for those wishing to start their own business — but wisely made no predictions as to the number of extra jobs likely to result.

The Alliance on the other hand propose reviving British manufacture, the sector worst affected by unemployment, by linking wages to productivity — and accept that a pay freeze might be necessary. They claim that their policies "could cut unemployment from more than three million to below two million in the lifetime of a Parliament" (The Times, 17 September 1986).

The Labour Party promise to reduce unemployment "by about one million in its first two years" by substantial state investment in the "infrastructure" — roads, sewers and other services — if elected to office (The Times, 30 September 1986). In fact both policies — wage restraint and public investment — have been tried before without stemming a rise in unemployment. In an impassioned speech to Labour's Conference. Roy Hattersley claimed that “Above all things, Labour is the party of jobs". Well, is it? The graph shows the rise in unemployment over two extended periods of Labour government. On the other hand, the reduction in local government spending achieved by the Conservative government has been accompanied by an unprecedented rise in unemployment.

Nor is unemployment a solely "British disease". The following table shows the estimated percentage unemployment in the working population in other advanced capitalist countries compared with 11.9 per cent in the UK (Dept, of Employment Gazette, July 1986).

The cause of unemployment

Unemployment is a world wide problem and what stands out so clearly in all the conference speeches is that there is never any real attempt to explain what causes it in the first place. After all, the above group of countries have the material resources to provide a comfortable living for all their inhabitants and the vast majority of their populations are only too anxious to work. So what stands in the way of full employment? To understand this we need to know something of the operation of a capitalist economy and its inherent contradictions.

In a capitalist society the means of production and distribution of goods and services are owned and controlled by a minority of the population, the capitalist class. Of the remainder, the majority are dependent for their livelihood on being employed by the capitalist class for wages — generally about sufficient for them to work efficiently and rear their families. Within this society goods and services are produced, not primarily for the benefit of those employed, but to realise a profit when sold on the national or overseas market. Normally, if sale at a profit cannot be achieved, production ceases and those engaged in production become unemployed.

Profit results from the fact that the wages paid to the working class represent a value far less than that of the goods and services produced. The "surplus value" is appropriated by their employers, the capitalist class — or the state on their behalf. Part of this surplus value may be reinvested or pass into the hands of landlords in the form of rent and part into the hands of bankers as interest on borrowed money. They in turn seek profitable areas of capital investment. Finally, part of the surplus value resulting from the employment of wage and salary workers is used, usually by the state, to maintain an efficient working class by expenditure on educational and health services and for the defence of the system from internal or external threats. All this is accepted by the political parties who will contest the next election, with only one exception — The Socialist Party.

Constant unemployment

But let us consider the inevitable results arising from the operation of such a system of production. We must first note that the wages system severely limits the purchasing power of the working class so that capitalists engaged in the production of consumer goods soon find themselves in competition, not only with fellow capitalists in their own country but also with those abroad. Capitalists engaged in other forms of production such as machinery, shipping, aircraft, armaments, likewise meet competition at home and abroad. The inevitable result is an attempt by all concerned to reduce expenditure on wages so that profit margins can be maintained while undercutting competitors.

Since the early days of capitalism, therefore, machinery has been introduced to make labour more productive and reduce the wage bill. Division of labour, the conveyor belt, automation. rationalised administration and computerisation have all followed. None of the four political parties, recently meeting in conference, opposes these production techniques. They are admired for "increasing productivity".

Periodic unemployment

Any graph showing unemployment levels will, over an extended period, display "humps" rising above what we have called "constant unemployment". These "humps" reflect major or minor crises in capitalist trade — called trade depressions — resulting sometimes in calamitous increases in unemployment world-wide.

Such a trade depression was experienced between 1930 and 1939 when there were approaching three million unemployed in this country, six millions in Germany and eleven millions in the USA. Once again workers are experiencing mounting unemployment the end of which no one can see. Against this background some of the remedies proposed by conference politicians are patently trivial — nor do they offer any explanation for economic disaster on such a monumental scale.

During the depression of the 1930s The Socialist Party explained its causes and we can do no better than quote from a pamphlet we published at the time:

  In their anxiety to obtain a surplus, the employers, when the markets are favourable, strain every nerve and fibre to increase their output. New machinery is laid down; fresh ‘hands' are taken on; overtime is worked. There is an expansion of trade such as occurred in the years up to 1929. Then, at the very height of the expansion, reaction sets in. Production in certain industries has outstripped demand; the markets are glutted and the warehouses full to bursting. Orders have fallen off and products have become unsaleable. Workers are discharged, and these, losing their purchasing power with the loss of their wages, affect other industries, and so the depression spreads (Socialism, August 1933).

Once again the product of human labour is inaccessible to those who have produced it and those who may need it. Governments are embarrassed by butter mountains, wine lakes and warehouses full of grain, which cannot be sold at a profit Workers in car factories try to repair their old cars at the weekend while the new ones they have produced fill the factory yard unsold. Such crises of over-production for the market are inevitable. Where capitalist countries compete with each other for the sale of their products, it follows that there can be no agreement about the amount each produces. Saturation and collapse of the market is unavoidable.

Localised unemployment

An individual nation may find its unemployment increased still further in either or both of the following circumstances:

• Where capital is exported for investment abroad in countries where wage rates are lower and the prospect of increased profits overcomes any latent patriotism.
• Countries arriving late on the scene of capitalist development often have the advantage of using the latest plant, machines, designs and methods without the cost of scrapping old equipment or the research costs of the new technology.

Both the above influences have affected industry in Britain and in part explain the pressure on British workers to curb pay increases as the cost of living continues to rise — or even accept a wage freeze.

Capitalism holds no solution

With the above understanding of the causes and scale of present-day unemployment, it should be clear that most of the palliatives offered by politicians are trivial and ineffective. Once more we claim that the only cure for unemployment is to change the economic system from capitalism to socialism in which, as suggested by the title of this article, we are no longer employed to produce profits for a minority section of the community but in which the production and distribution of wealth can be unfettered.

John Moore

The Communist Party: A Premature Obituary (1987)

From the January 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

The bad news is that the Communist Party is not yet dead; the good news is that all the signs are that it is on its way out. fatally wounded after years of tearing itself to pieces. Why the harsh words? The Communist Party has for over six decades existed as a monument to a gross distortion of socialist ideas. Rarely in history has a body of such a small size in relation to the overall population done so much to confuse workers about the vital issues of the day, to utilise the tactics of dishonesty and hypocrisy in the cause of giving workers a lead, to employ the rhetoric of liberation in defence of the most disgusting dictatorships. The Communist Party is an anti-communist party and has added nothing but difficulty to the work of real communists (or socialists: like Marx and Engels we use the words socialism and communism to mean the same thing) in the Socialist Party.

The Birth of British Leninism

In October 1917 the Bolshevik revolution in Russia shook the parties and sects of the Left in Britain — indeed, throughout Europe — more than any single event since the death of Marx. In 1871 Marxists had looked towards the Commune in Paris, not without a few illusions. and saw there the hope for socialism. Then in the 1880s all eyes were on Germany where a mass socialist movement seemed to be developing and doing so with the approval of Engels, the most eminent Marxist in the last years of the nineteenth century. As the present century commenced leftist hope was invested in the Second International. a collection of "socialist" organisations from throughout Europe and beyond to which even the Socialist Party of Great Britain, when it was formed in June 1904, sent delegates. But the Second International was a reformist body and the parties which constituted it fell into the rut of scheming to run capitalism, even going so far as to accept a resolution from Karl Kautsky which defended the idea of Ministers taking posts in capitalist governments. The Socialist Party of Great Britain saw the reformism of the Second International and, recognising that it was beyond repair, left it in accordance with revolutionary principle.

In 1914, when the capitalist gangsters of Europe commenced their infamous imperialist war, the so-called socialists of the misnamed International urged workers to support their respective masters' interests. The few principled socialists in Europe who opposed the war were isolated; in 1915 The Socialist Standard was the only journal in Britain to publish the anti-war statement of Maximovitch, a Bolshevik living in London later to become better known as Maxim Litvinoff, the Bolshevik Foreign Minister. In Britain the Socialist Party of Great Britain stood alone as the only party to unitedly oppose the war. In Russia the Bolsheviks were alone in stating the same opposition.

What was the condition of the British Left in 1917 when the news from Russia arrived? The first Marxist party in Britain was the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) (although it was arguably less "Marxist" than is often claimed) later to become the British Socialist Party (BSP). Its attitude to the war betrayed its lack of principles. Its main leaders, including H. M. Hyndman, supported British war chauvinism and went as far as to report anti-war activists to the police. In 1916 a minority left the BSP and formed the National Socialist Party, an organisation which combined the mouthing of Marxist dogmas with support for British imperialism. The remainder of the BSP refused to oppose the war outright but instead indulged in a futile campaign to urge the collapsed Second International to revive itself and call for peace in Europe. The other leftist party with claims to being Marxist was the Socialist Labour Party, which equivocated about its attitude to the war. Of course, the Labour Party and the ILP made peace-loving noises, but at the same time their leaders spoke and wrote in favour of conscription and Lansbury's Labour Leader refused to publish any anti-war articles.

These political parties were only one part of what was going on in the British Left in 1917. The years before the war had seen a rise in popularity for syndicalist theories which argued that political action was of no use to the working class and that capitalism could be brought down by means of concerted trade-union militancy, culminating in a revolutionary general strike. In the pre-war years several leftists — formerly rivals — sank their differences and formed rank and file shop stewards' committees. (See Bob Holton's British Syndicalism, 1900-14 for a reasonable account of this period). Without a doubt, the pre-war years was a period of intense union militancy and, without exaggerating, we might comment retrospectively that it was in many ways a period of increasing class-consciousness.

The whipped-up hysteria of war-time national chauvinism put a stop to that. When a spontaneous revolution broke out in Russia in February 1917 the British Left was unqualified in its support. In fact, the revolution led only to the formation of a capitalist provisional government which continued to support the war. In October the Bolsheviks seized power more as a result of popular contempt for the provisional government than mass support for Bolshevik policies, as was shown by the results of the election for the Constituent Assembly in 1918 when the Bolsheviks won fewer votes than the peasant reform party. Nevertheless, myths linger on when they are the cause of hope and in 1917 the British Left was united in its admiration for Lenin and his merry band of revolution-makers. For the syndicalists, the success of non-parliamentary Bolshevism proved the validity of their case; for the BSP and the SLP the success of Lenin meant that new tactics must be adopted in Britain. The Socialist Party of Great Britain stood alone — uncomfortably alone it must have been at the time — in declaring that the Bolshevik coup was not a socialist revolution, that all that could come out of it was a new form of capitalism.

In 1919 the Bolsheviks formed the Third International (the Comintern). In April it invited forty organisations throughout the world to affiliate, among which were the British ones — the BSP and the SLP. The Comintern was clear that a single Communist Party should be formed in each country. The first bid for the British franchise was made by Sylvia Pankhurst of the Workers' Socialist Federation. So eager was she to win the blessing of Lenin that she fed him with false information about the size of her group. But the Comintern was clear about the terms on which a British Communist Party must unite. Firstly, it must work with the BSP. This condition was probably the result of the fact that Rothstein, the Bolsheviks' man in London, was an Executive Committee member of the BSP and exaggerated its significance — for example, he claimed that it would take 10,000 members into the CP, a figure which we shall soon see to have been totally false. Secondly, the CP must affiliate to the Labour Party — an act of opportunism emphatically advocated by the unprincipled Lenin, despite the protestation of the SLPers like Jack Murphy and Willie Gallacher. Pankhurst's WSF refused to affiliate to Labour or support electoral politics of any kind and formed the Communist Party — British Section of the Third International, the party which has the distinction of being the first splinter group from the CP before it was even formed. The BSP majority accepted the Comintern's conditions and went into the CP. as did a substantial section of the SLP (the Communist Unity Group) and a few other bodies, including the syndicalist South Wales Socialist Society. The inaugural conference voted by a slim majority (100 to 85) in favour of affiliating to the Labour Party. The latter would not let them in and from that day to this (with a brief period when the CP accused the Labour Party of being fascists) the CP has persistently knocked at the door of the Broad Church and the Labourites have just as persistently slammed it in their face.

What sort of party was the CP. formed first in August 1920 and then again in January 1921? Firstly, it was hardly a mass party. At its formation it had 3,000 members, according to the official CP history written by James Klugmann and. according to that same history. one in three of those had left the CP by mid-1922, presumably tired of the initial Bolshevik adventurism. Tom Bell, who was around at the time, states in his history of the CP that the initial membership was under 2,500. So much for Rothstein's promise to Lenin that the BSP alone would bring 10,000 workers into the new party. The only Communist MP in those early days was Lieutenant-Colonel Cecil John L'Estrange Malone who was elected as a Liberal in 1918, but defected to the CP in 1919 after going on a trip to Russia. CP historians rarely report that their first MP was a Lieutenant-Colonel who was deeply patriotic. In Bethnal Green a Communist Mayor was elected — he looked lovely in his robes and chain — and two of the CP councillors. Edgar Lansbury and A. A. Watts, were so keen to serve the ratepayers (and win more votes) that they actually voted for a 10 per cent cut in Poor Relief and wage cuts for local authority workers. What party of the working class with a scrap of principle could allow Lieutenant-Colonels to sit for it in Parliament, Mayors to represent it and councillors to be elected only to make

poverty even worse for the working class?

Meanwhile the CP indulged in plenty of revolutionary talk — talk which belonged to centuries gone, to the age of Blanqui and Babeuf. They advocated armed insurrection. Harry Pollitt. the leader of the CP. declared that "only through armed insurrection can the workers gain power" (Manchester Guardian, 2 December 1929). The CP even went as far as to organise military training in Epping Forest, preparing the workers for "the moment". What led them to believe that workers who would not even vote for communism would die fighting for it was a matter of faith rather than logic. As Leninists, the CP rejected the view that the workers as a majority could understand and want socialism. Instead the poor fools must be led, offered reforms, and finally involved in a battle against the forces of the state which were bound to defeat them. The Socialist Party quite rightly viewed the new party with utter contempt and hostility.

The Party of Stalinism

The foul dictatorship of Stalin was not an aberration, as modern Trotskyists would like to believe. Stalinism followed Leninism like night follows day. Long before Stalin was omnipotent controller of Russian state capitalism the country had become a dictatorship. But under Stalin the sickness of the new regime — the dictatorship over the proletariat became clear for all to see. All, that is, but the Communist Parties of the world which turned a blind eye to the Stalinist reign of terror. When The Socialist Standard exposed the atrocities of the Moscow Trials we were accused of making up lies about "The Soviet Fatherland”. When our branch in West Ham invited the local CPers to debate, the reply came to say that The Socialist Party "have consistently poured vile slanders on Joseph Stalin and the Communist Party . .  . and are in short agents of Fascism in Great Britain. The CPGB refuses with disgust to deal with such renegades. We treat them as vipers to be destroyed". Indeed, this was no idle threat: CPers did attempt to smash up Socialist Party meetings, calling us fascists for pointing out the anti-working class nature of the fascistic regime in Russia. The purges in which hundreds of thousands of Russian workers were murdered began with the show trial of sixteen old Bolsheviks in August 1936. Such was the combination of gullibility and callousness of some CPers that one French Stalinist wrote a poem beginning with the verse:

We thank thee. Stalin!
Sixteen scoundrels.
Sixteen butchers of the Fatherland
Have been gathered to their ancestors! .  . .
Today the sky looks blue.
Thou hast repaid us for the sorrows of many years!
But why only sixteen?
Give us forty.
Give us hundreds.
Thousands . . .

And so it goes on: a sick dedication to a sick ideology. And the tragedy was that, bad as the poetry was, thousands were killed. Although the Socialist Party had first predicted. and then exposed these dictatorial barbarities most workers did not differentiate between the true socialism advocated by the small party which was not taken in by the Stalinist myth and "Communism". Even today millions of workers react with hostility to what they fear as "communism" when they first encounter socialist propaganda.

If the CP's defence of the purges was not enough to convince the observer of its function as a border guard for Stalinist Russia the policy switches at the outbreak of the Second World War confirmed the party's role. First the CP would not specifically condemn fascism. arguing that all social-democratic parties were fascists. Then they changed policy, on orders from Moscow, and supported the "war against fascism". Later, when the Nazis signed their pact with Moscow, the CP opposed the war against Germany. Finally, when those unreliable old Nazis broke their treaty with Russia, orders came to support the war. This went as far as strike-breaking ("we mustn't disrupt the war effort") and urging workers to vote for any candidate fully committed to the war. including Tories in some areas. In fact, the war proved to be a good time for CP recruitment and after 1945 it had a brief period — the only one in its history — of being in with a minor chance of power within British capitalism. Why was this? Firstly, the war changed popular attitudes to Russia. During the war collections were taken for tanks for Russia, the achievements of "the great Red Army" were celebrated in columns of newspapers such as the Daily Telegraph, and Stalin — the "democratic ally" of Churchill and Roosevelt — had a good press. Many workers felt a sense of gratitude towards the Russian workers for their great efforts and suffering during the war and supporting the CP was a kind of pay-off. Secondly, reform was in the air in 1945 and workers were not prepared to be given petty crumbs after their years of wartime deprivation.

Alas, instead of rejecting crumbs altogether and opting for the abolition of the wages system, the movement was towards bigger crumbs and so it was that in 1945 the CP had two MPs elected. It was not only increased membership and minor electoral success that the CP gained in the post-war years. By far its most enduring gain at this time was in the trade unions — so much so that years later Ramelson, the Industrial Organiser of the CP, could boast that the party had a member — at least one but often more — on the EC of every trade union of significance affiliated to the TUC. Indeed, that remained the case until the early 1970s. The C.P played no small part in formulating TUC policy and in influencing certain elements in the Labour Party on matters relating to foreign policy. Without giving credence to myths about CND being a Moscow front, there is no doubt that several major CNDers are motivated by little more than Stalinist sympathies. The consequence of this has been to weaken public confidence in the so-called peace movement, with many workers concluding — not unreasonably — that those who are so vociferous in their condemnation of the NATO murder gang are conspicuously silent about the military atrocities of the Russian imperialists.

The Decline and Fall of the Communist Party

In 1948 the CP reached its peak membership. Since then it has been going down. The Trotskyist dissidents were the first to leave the sinking ship, with Reg Groves and the so-called Balham Group opting for Leninism minus Stalinism. The Revolutionary Communist Party of the late 1940s attracted a substantial number of ex-CPers who wanted the fantasy of a return to old Bolshevik methods but refused to face up to the inevitable consequences of Bolshevism. By 1950 the RCP had collapsed. Since then it would be fair to say that firstly, the Trotskyist movement has existed in Britain only as a fragmented and theoretically ultra-confused tendency and secondly, young leftists who would have previously opted for Stalinism and joined the CP. are tending to join the Trotskyist "vanguards". Parties like the SWP and WRP, as well as the Militant Tendency, have benefited greatly from the decline of CP credibility, while the Young Communist League is now virtually defunct merely a play area for the gullible kids of old CPers.

In 1956 Krushchev denounced Stalin. The psychological blow which this inflicted on British CPers was enormous. Imagine: here were many sincere, militant, class-minded workers who had fought in strikes, accepted unpopularity, expended energy in denying "lies" about "Comrade Stalin" and in trying to sustain the Stalinist myth in the face of what they had genuinely believed to be a conspiracy of distortion. They had been forced to change policies, to make unsubstantiated claims, to support a nation which, they were told, was "socialism in one country". And then along comes Krushchev not a minor official, but the successor to Joseph Stalin — and he confirms the truth of the anti-Stalinist case. What could be more disconcerting? One still encounters today ex-CPers whose bitterness over the revelations of that period has had a profound effect on their personalities: some of them are now Labour hacks, others are Tories as a response to being "conned by Communism", others are apathetic. This is the price to be paid in historical terms when so many people are taken in by so great a myth. Once Stalin was exposed other doubts set in and doubt is the one characteristic which cannot co-exist with dogma: once the dogmatic Stalinists began to question one part of Stalinism, other parts were open to question too.

In 1956 the workers of Hungary made moves against totalitarianism. It was not a socialist uprising, but it was motivated by a rejection of the power of the CP ruling class. The British CP's correspondent in Budapest reported the uprising, but the CP's Daily Worker refused to carry the story. So he resigned from the CP and published his account in a remarkable work of modem history (Hungarian Tragedy by Peter Fryer). About a third of the staff of The Daily Worker resigned. Large numbers of CPers resigned from the party in protest over the party's refusal to condemn the brutality of Russian imperialism against the Hungarian workers; others allowed their membership to lapse. In Scotland and South Wales CPers organised demonstrations calling for the resignations of the CP leaders. The Oxford University Communist Club met in 1956 and passed a resolution to dissolve itself. By 1960 the CP's membership was around half the 1948 figure. In 1968 the Russian tanks rolled into Prague and CPers who had been rejoicing about the increased radicalism of European students and young workers were told by The Daily Worker to condemn the Czech activists. After a row, the CP did murmur some disapproval about the Russian actions.

By the late 1960s the CP was beginning to split apart. Prominent theoreticians such as Monty Johnstone developed a position of supporting "socialism" in Russia with reservations. By the mid-1970s this line dominated the CPs in Italy and Spain and was labelled Eurocommunism. Efforts were made to move the CPs closer to the larger leftist reform parties and to throw out old Leninist notions like 'soviet rule' and the dictatorship of the proletariat'. The British CP decided that it was time to clean up its act. to make a few token attacks on Russia and to present itself as a respectable reformist party. In 1976 its policy statement, The British Road to Socialism, was re-written. For the old-guard Stalinists this was heretical behaviour. They attempted to oppose the new programme but found themselves in a minority in a party which had no tradition of listening to minorities. In 1977 the majority of the old Stalinists resigned and formed The New Communist Party — a rabidly pro-Russian outfit which is still going today. The NCP split was not the first: in the 1960s there had been a split over China, out of which came a couple of Maoist CPs but it was the 1977 split which spelt the beginning of the end for the CP.

The CP has spent most of its energy for nearly ten years fighting over how far it is prepared to depart from Stalinism. Its leadership is now in the hands of Eurocommunists; its newspaper, the Morning Star, which owes its daily existence to Russian subsidy, is opposed to the leadership line and in the hands of CPers whom the leadership has tried to expel from the party. Indeed, over forty have been thrown out. The old "theoretical" journal of the CP, Marxism Today, is now a trendy intellectual journal which has all but given up any attempt to present a Marxist outlook. Indeed, even the CP leaders are worried about its attitudes, pushing ideas such as the insignificance of class (gender, race and sexuality are what matter now) and the need for an anti-Thatcher alliance at the next election, perhaps including the SDP and some Tory Wets. As is so often the case in disputes both sides are right in what they say about the other. The Stalinists are right to point out that the MT crowd are clueless about Marxism and have abandoned even the notion of class-struggle politics. The MT trendies are right to state that the old Stalinists are a dead force and that nobody these days is going to be taken in by pro-Russian propaganda.

Meanwhile CP membership is down to 10,876 and of that figure only about one in four are in any way active. Both factions could join the Labour Party: the MT crowd could find a home in the new trendy sections of the London Labour Party where intellectual shallowness is the latest fashion, while the Stalinists could join the old pro-Russian fellow travellers who have been at home in Labour circles for years. Of course, neither side is likely to desert the CP en bloc and so what can be predicted is a period of intensified in-fighting until finally the CP consumes itself in its own fire. This obituary may be premature, but only just.

Socialists will shed no tears when the CP funeral does take place. Years ago CPers would ridicule The Socialist Party of Great Britain and tell us that our "pure and simple” case for socialism was destined for the dustbin of history. Our case has stood the test of time while it looks much more likely that the party which wasted workers' hopes predicting the imminent collapse of capitalism will itself soon collapse.

Steve Coleman

Between the Lines: The Yawn of Capitalist History (1987)

The Between the Lines column from the January 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Yawn of Capitalist History

"Politics" is boring. This might seem odd coming from a socialist, but the more TV presents what it calls "politics" the more this reviewer yawns. On Sundays we are treated to two consecutive hours of heavy political discussion: Weekend World (midday. ITV) and This Week, Next Week (1pm. BBC1). In these programmes the supposed "matters of the moment" are analysed, discussed and debated in a manner which leaves viewers who want to be informed believing that they are watching history in the making. Not so: they are in fact watching two hours of sterile political drivel of no importance whatsoever for the working class who constitute the overwhelming majority of society.

Take the programmes of Sunday, 30 November as an example. On Weekend World the Big Issue was Reagan's credibility as a leader after being caught flogging arms to terrorists. The forgettable, dull presenter rambled for a while about international consequences and whether this affair "could reach Watergate proportions" — whatever they are. Fleet Street hacks were called in and twenty-second bits of edited wisdom were shown: "This is the biggest political crisis of Reagan's Presidency" declared one of them. Who the hell cares whether it is the biggest or the smallest; what is it that the President is supposed to be credible at doing anyway? Six American political commentators participated in a studio discussion: "What do you have to say about what Mr Himmelfarb says?" asks the boring presenter. "He has a point, but I don’t go along with him all the way. I think big heads in the State Department will have to roll''. Let them roll. I thought to myself: let them rock, let them roll, let them do the hokey-cokey as far as I’m concerned. Are workers really supposed to care about how the bosses manage their deceit and allocate the seats on the Boards of National Governments?

Then on to This Week, Next Week which was all about Europe and NATO. A Tory Minister called Stanley — perhaps a cousin of Sid the Gas — was all in favour of more bombs — the only way to-preserve peace, don’t you know. Denzil Davies, the Labour man, said that Britain needs more bombs and the Tories were underspending on defence. (But not nuclear bombs, because they hurt people.) The Liberal speaking from a screen because he was in Bristol could not be heard at first, and then he could be heard but not understood. I think that he was saying something about a moderate approach to blowing up cities. A couple of Americans — again, on screens — said that more bombs are needed in Europe, and just to balance the programme there was a Minister who looked like he was sitting on an uncomfortable chair — on a screen from Hamburg — who favoured more bombs in Europe. None of them disagreed for a moment that war is on the agenda; none of them disagreed that more bombs, of one sort or another, were the way to achieve peace. This was "politics". Workers were invited to take sides. At 2pm it ended and the East Enders omnibus came on: Michelle had married Lofty. Into the land of make-believe we go; but where had we been for the previous two hours?

Boys in Black and Blue

Did you know that British police use unfed dogs to terrorise unconvicted prisoners? Or that they point guns through prison cell doors at men from whom they want confessions? Or that they beat up grown men until they scream? World In Action (8.30pm. ITV. 1 December 1986) presented a clear report on how the men convicted of the Birmingham pub bombing in 1974 were the victims of police brutality which would have been expected in Nazi Germany or modern South Africa. What was unusual about the programme and therefore worthy of note — was that the evidence given of these acts being committed by the police was offered by an ex-policeman, Tom Clark, who was on duty at the police station on the night that the men who are now serving life sentences for the bombing were allegedly forced to confess to a crime they did not commit.

In fact, this latest programme is one of a series which has demonstrated very forcefully the degree to which the state appears to have framed innocent workers in the early 1970s for IRA bombings which they had no part in. This shows three things: firstly, that the power of the state to arrest and imprison workers is always going to be open to abuse as long as there is a need to get someone behind bars as revenge for the crime; secondly. it shows how campaigns of indiscriminate violence against workers, such as those which the IRA and 1NLA have pursued, create a situation in which it is easy for the police to persecute workers who take no part in violent activity; thirdly, it demonstrates that the undemocratic, anti-working-class methods of dishing out "punishment" for which the IRA is notorious are amateur in comparison with the dirty tricks and covert brutality of the official state terrorists: the police. It is just possible that as a result of exposing the alleged framing of the men convicted for the Birmingham bombing a few innocent men will be released from prison. But how many will remain there and how secure does their remaining there make you feel?

Enlightenment and Dogma

The age which historians have come to call the "Enlightenment" — the mid-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — was marked above all by the abandonment of hitherto sacred dogmas. Religion came to be questioned and science permeated social thought with an obsessive determination to arrive at truths. In fact, as Engels was to demonstrate so well in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (a classic which has yet to be serialised on BBC2). the enlightened truths were only partial truths and that which was obscured was what was ideologically unpalatable to the capitalist class who appropriated science for their own ends.

Channel Four ran a four-week series, funded by a right-wing American foundation, called The New Enlightenment (8.30pm. C4. November/December 1986) with the purpose of expounding the "new" ideas of the so-called libertarian economists — the apostles of the illusory free market. But this was no account of enlightenment, even of a partial kind. This was dogma. The newly-enlightened followers of Hayek and his kind seek to perpetrate the myth that, left to itself without state interference, capitalism can adjust to meet the needs of the majority. Of course, there will still be deprivation and inequality and insecurity caused by wars and a lot else, but at least it will be "practical".

Socialism is rejected by the newly-enlightened dogmatists. But it was abundantly clear from the programmes that these defenders of capitalism are clueless — not enlightened — as to the meaning of socialism. Not once did these dogmatists use the term socialism without in fact describing state capitalism. One of the first principles of science concerns definition, but it clearly did not occur to Professor Minogue (presenter of the programmes) that in attacking the deficiencies of what he called socialism, he was in fact attacking a system of wages, profits, money, nations — capitalism. In saying that socialism offers no alternative these pro-capitalists are trying a victim who is not even allowed to appear in the dock and, worse still, is represented in the dock by a witness guilty of the same offence as the prosecutor.

The whole concept of "balance" is spurious and there is no reason why one-sided programmes should not be shown. Our objection is to one-sided programmes which distort that which they purport to be opposing. When socialists are given our chance to put out a four-part series on the case against capitalism and for socialism — and we will be a long time waiting for an invitation from the TV controllers — we shall make sure that we address the best arguments for capitalism, that we deal with the profit system as it is and not as we might wish to make it appear. Socialism does not exist, but as a theory it stands as a mighty threat to the dogmatic ideology of capitalism, a threat reflected in the fact that our opponents, when given a mass audience before which to discredit socialism, are forced onto the ground of distortion and linguistic trickery.

Steve Coleman

Observations: What's a terrorist? (1987)

The Observations Column from the January 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

What's a terrorist?

One person's terrorist is another's guerilla hero. When a bomb is planted in a street, or an aircraft hijacked, the leaders of the state on the receiving end are quick to denounce such acts as cowardly, indiscriminate attacks on innocent people. The media agree (while making money out of bloodthirsty sensationalism) and so do the courts:

 . . . if men plot and plan to kill indiscriminately, or to in any way endanger the lives of citizens, they can expect only the severest punishment from this court. If that bomb had gone off, untold damage would have been done to innocent citizens . . . (Old Bailey judge, recently sentencing an 1NLA bomber to life imprisonment).

But we should not allow politicians and the media and judiciary to obscure the facts. In the last war the German occupying forces were resisted by bands of partisans whose actions were not dissimilar to those of today's terrorist — very often indiscriminate destruction and killing. They were applauded by the allies as courageous freedom fighters, supported with arms and personnel.

Guerilla fighters regard themselves, as did the wartime partisans, as being at war — and war is an indiscriminate business. It permits no innocents: all of us — civilians, the sick, children — are legitimate targets. Much of the allied bomber offensive during the last war was directed, deliberately, at killing the maximum number of "innocent" civilians; it was. the planners said, an attack on the enemy morale. So which is worse — to plant a 30lb bomb in a street. like the man sentenced at the Old Bailey, or to drop a 1,000lb bomb on the street from an aircraft? If you get the answer right, you may be given a medal instead of a gaol sentence.

This is not to support, or to condone, workers killing each other in the disputes of the exploiting class in society. Workers have no interests at stake in capitalism's wars; in that sense they can be said to be innocents for whichever side wins they will remain in poverty and repression. Terrorists are to be condemned — like those in the forces opposing them — because they take part in capitalism's conflicts, not because they do so in any unusual or specially gruesome way.

Capitalism is a brutal society, which sets worker against worker and cynically manipulates and exploits the emotional responses which inevitably follow. The real struggle is to replace this society with one based on communal interests. That struggle cannot be carried on with guns and bombs for it is about workers' ideas and they are the authentic key to human progress.


That’s bloody life

That bloody woman! Always on the TV. That bloody hair and that bloody patronising voice! No, not Margaret Thatcher for a change, this time it's Esther Rantzen. taking time out from presenting phallic carrots on That's Life, to introduce the latest in a long line of social concern slots from Crimewatch UK to Drugwatch and now Childwatch. What's next after that? Dolewatch? Or with the cold winter months on us Grannywatch? Or for a real hit in the ratings how about Blind-Puppy Watch? But we have something to tell Esther if she is intending dealing with any more of capitalism's problems — there are only 365 days in the year.

Mind you it's a shrewd move, because not only is it good in the ratings but the raw material for the shows will never disappear; no one will get bored and turn over.

But while Childwatch brought the problem of child abuse into the limelight (at least until the ratings fall) the reasons, or much of them, remain in the shade. A small item in the trial of Andrew Neill, the father of Tyra Henry went unnoticed:

• before her death, the father of the little girl was suspected of abusing her. and so was ordered to live elsewhere and have no contact with either mother or child;
• the mother was cut off after being unable to pay an electricity bill;
• with no real option, mother and child were forced by simple economics to move in with the father.

A few months later the little girl was dead, one victim of a complex but common chain of events that starts at the balance sheet and ends in blood.

Capitalism throws people together with the force of economics, into a family. It bonds them with the need for respectability, and calls it the natural basis of society.

Andrew Neill is now serving a life sentence. He can see his bars and he can beat his prison walls in frustration. Outside, we've only got each other to knock about.

Brian Gardner

Without comment (1987)

From the January 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

  "A proposal to take 7.5 million acres of cereal land in the EEC out of production to reduce the community's mountain of surplus grain will be made today by Mr Michael Jopling. the Minister for Agriculture.
  Under the plan, which Mr Jopling will put to agriculture ministers from 12 EEC member states at a conference at Ambleside, Lake District, cereal farmers will be compensated for taking their land out of production: up to £80 an acre if the land lies fallow. less if alternative crops are grown.
  Mr Jopling, the current president of the EEC Council, and his officials have estimated that it will cost £800 million a year initially.
  The British Government has already circulated a discussion document outlining the scheme to take land out of cereals production. either permanently or for a minimum term of perhaps five years
  Although so-called "set aside" schemes have been widely discussed, and have been tried in a somewhat different form in the United States, this is the first time that a British Government, and probably any EEC government has officially signalled that it is prepared to consider paying farmers not to produce.
  The discussion paper estimates that if three million hectares of cereal land were converted, half to fallow and half to producing alternative crops, the cost would be £800 million a year.
  But against that would be set the savings on the cost of buying and storing surpluses which could amount to £6.250 million over five years.
  In terms of unit cost, it would be more economic to pay about £50 a tonne on hypothetical yields from poorer land to keep it fallow, than to buy grain at £112 a tonne and store it for perhaps the whole period of the scheme."

(The Times, 29 September 1986)

50 Years Ago: Lloyd George on his "War to End War" (1987)

The 50 Years Ago column from the January 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

  “The whole surface of the ground consisted of nothing but a series of overlapping shell craters, half full of yellow, slimy water. Through falling into these ponds hundreds upon hundreds of unwounded men lost their lives by drowning. 

"Hundreds of thousands of British troops fought through the slough . . .  slept in mud-holes. When they squelched along, they were shot down into the slush; if wounded they were drowned in the slime; but the survivors still crept and dragged onward for 4 months, with their rifles choked with Flemish ooze . . . A tragedy of heroic endurance enacted in mud, and the British Press rang with praises of . . . the Commander-in-Chief!" 

A "highly placed officer from H.Q." on his first visit to the battle front burst into tears and cried; "Good God. did we really send men to fight in that?" — Lloyd George, War Memoirs, pp. 2208-11.

[From an article "What newspapers did not tell", Socialist Standard. January 1937.]

Promises (1987)

From the January 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Anyone's better than that bloody woman", is a phrase that is often heard. It will be used a lot more in the coming months with the prospect of a general election, where Thatcher's Conservative party will be seeking another five-year term to run British capitalism. The argument behind the disgust is that the Tories are largely responsible for the many problems people in this country are facing, and that, despite the many inadequacies of Labour and the Alliance, anything has to be an improvement on Thatcher.

All shades of political opinion will be asking people to cast negative' votes. Most of the so-called left-wing parties will be urging you to vote Labour — supposedly the mass party of the working-class' — despite the fact that they spend much of their time criticising the Labour Party. Some people in the Communist Party will call for a broad anti-Thatcher alliance, seeing Thatcherism as a new, worse form of Tory rule. The tactical voters, people who vote for someone they disagree with to keep out someone they dislike even more, will be out in force.

The argument works the other way as well. Thatcher and Tebbit will be issuing stern warnings about how the opposition will ruin the economy and leave the nation defenceless. Disillusioned Tory voters will be warned not to vote for the Alliance and let Labour in by the back door. The scare stories the government put out will be designed to focus attention away from their own numerous shortcomings.

Life for most people in the last seven-and-a-half years of Conservative rule has certainly been no bed of roses. Before she was elected in 1979. Thatcher made a big deal about the doubling of unemployment under the last Labour government. Pictures were distributed of a long queue outside a dole office with the caption. "Labour Isn't Working". The bitter irony is that unemployment hasn't doubled under the Tories — it's trebled. The frustration and anger people feel at the humiliation of the dole queue can only intensify when the government apparently shows no concern for their plight. The poverty of existing on a giro can only feel worse when ministers show righteous indignation at the supposed large number of social security scroungers.

More recently the Tories have been worried that their uncaring image may be losing them votes. Lord Young, the (un)employment secretary, has been told to make the right kind of noises about caring, and to present the various cheap labour schemes, like YTS. as being indicative of the government's concern. This real social security scrounger is obviously in a position and of the right social background to sympathise with someone getting £30 a week supplementary benefit.

The Thatcher government has made cuts in health and education and the number of new houses being built has been drastically reduced, despite the fact that thousands of people are homeless and thousands of building workers are unemployed. In view of the poverty workers endure, these cuts seem callous, although welfare can never eliminate the basic impoverishment of working-class life in capitalism

The Tories have passed several laws designed to weaken the trade unions. They have made it harder for workers to go on strike, and made the unions open to court action if they don't follow certain procedures for striking. They have also 'toughened up' the law and eroded many of the civil liberties that people 'enjoyed'.

Thatcher's 'Iron Lady' image, her projection as a strong leader, also worries many people, who fear her enthusiasm for nuclear weapons. Her support for the American bombing of Libya last year plus the Falklands War makes her seem a dangerous warmonger. She and her government are certainly maintaining the long tradition of conservatism by endorsing the slaughter of millions of workers in the interests of British capitalism.

The Conservatives have shown once again that they stand for the dominance of the privileged few, the small number of people who effectively own and control this country. It may seem tempting to vote for some other party just to get them out — until you consider the alternatives.

The main alternative is the Labour Party. Many people still see them as the party of the working people, a party out for a fairer society which will tackle the problems mentioned above. A brief look at what the Labour Party does when it is in power shows that they are no different to the Tories.

The Labour Party makes a great noise about the evils of unemployment and how it is going to get people back to work. At the 1983 election they claimed that they would cut the dole queues to under a million in five years. However, this was seen to be too wild and extravagant, so they now claim they will reduce unemployment by one million in two years. However, every previous Labour government has left office with a higher level of unemployment than it faced when it entered office. The claim that Labour is the party to tackle unemployment is a lie. The level may rise or fall but it is beyond the power of any government to affect it significantly.

Despite its current opposition to the cuts in services the last Labour government also introduced drastic cuts in the health and social services and in education. It was also willing to impose wage restraint and break strikes, hardly the actions of a party anxious to redistribute wealth and create a fairer society. Its current concern with tackling poverty can also be seen for the lie that it is.

It is important to contrast what Labour (or any other party) say when they are in opposition, hunting for votes, and when they are in power, having to act in the only way they can. in the interests of capital. The most obnoxious and deadly contradiction between what Labour says and does is in the sphere of war and peace.

The Labour Party claims that it is the party of peace, and has promised to get rid of nuclear weapons and rely on conventional forces. These so-called conventional weapons have been used in wars where millions have been killed, wars which the Labour Party supported. They are prepared, just like the Tories, to use armed might to protect the interests of capitalism, the usual reason why wars are fought.

Apart from the rhetoric there is no real difference between Labour and the Tories. The argument that you should vote for one rather than the other is untenable. The Liberal/SDP alliance claim to be a real alternative, or at least they try to present themselves as a nice bunch of people, much more decent than the rotten old parties. The leaders of the SDP were senior ministers in the last Labour government. a regime they only now find convenient to criticise. Their objection to the other parties cannot be very deeply felt as they are continually going on about the conditions necessary for entering into a coalition with them in a 'hung' parliament (where there is no overall majority, not the more attractive meaning).

The Liberals can present themselves as political virgins, uncorrupted by power. They have not been in office since the days when Lloyd George was Prime Minister and thousands of troops were being sent to their deaths in the trenches of World War One. From 1977-79 they kept the last Labour government in power. David Steel said they were doing it to prevent the worst excesses of Labour. These excesses obviously did not include the wage cuts imposed and the strikes broken by troops in this period.

Whether the politicians seeking your votes are really committed to changing things for the better, or whether they are just power-hungry careerists is really irrelevant. Once they get into power they have to administer the system in the only way it can be run — against the interests of the vast majority, the working-class. Capitalism is a system of society where the means of life are owned by a small minority, and the majority of people have to work for them in return for a wage or a salary. This basic class division means that workers have only a limited access to society's wealth, that their needs must constantly be denied in the interests of profit.

Attempts to work within the system to make things fairer, to reform away the problems people have, ignore this harsh reality. A society based on the exploitation of the majority can never work in the interests of that majority, no matter how caring or well-meaning the reformers might be. Unemployment, poverty, bad housing and all these other problems are inevitable in this system.

The fact that the main parties work within these limitations results in the narrow, limited political debate that currently prevails. So we are confronted with arguments about the level of unemployment, but not why — in a world of potential abundance — people are poor as a result of class division; and arguments about how best to defend a country, not why workers should be prepared to lay down their lives defending their masters' interests.

The only real alternative is the Socialist alternative, a world of common ownership and democratic control, where everything on and in the earth is used solely to satisfy human needs, where people take control of their own lives. Arguments about 'doing something now', about choosing the lesser of the evils on offer, serve only to delay the achievement of Socialism, to prolong the life of this miserable society.

To achieve Socialism, workers must understand and desire it. and reject the insulting nonsense put out by these other parties. We must decide to work and vote for something really worth having, and not get lost in the muddy waters of capitalist politics, sifting through the shit for something worth voting for. At the next election, you will, as always, be faced with two alternatives: voting for Capitalism or Socialism. Make your choice!

Ian Ratcliffe

Out of the mouths of . . . (1987)

From the January 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

  Doesn't it all begin to seem a little silly One moment these two great nations are deadly enemies, then they are all pally . . . and all the time the media pour out endless pictures of two tired old men in heavy overcoats. How many of these summits have there been now? Has there been any change in the insane level of armaments . . .  is the world a safer place to live in because of these summits?
   It is to the mutual benefit of both America and Russia to make sure that nothing changes. No one asked me if I wanted to be represented by dear old Ron. . . .  leaders of the free world' and 'socialist world'. As if they were really in any kind of conflict. Basically they need each other. So after a few days of Ronnie and Mikhail shaking hands and kissing each other on the cheeks they send home a few of the spies that they both know exist in order to stop the ice melting completely. They have to keep the game going. There are too many forces on both sides with powerful vested interests in ensuring that everything remains the same. . . .
  powerful Californian scientists and industrialists who are going to make sure that nothing really changes and no real agreement is reached. That is where real power is.
   History will see the two great power blocks coming closer and closer together to squeeze the rest of the world over dwindling economic resources. That is the true logic of the situation and the rest is just a game.

You could be excused for thinking that these are extracts from a letter to the Socialist Standard. In fact they are taken from "Summit for Nothing ", the editorial of About Town (10 November 1986), one of the weeklies distributed free at bus stops and tube stations. Their content consists of approximately 90 per cent job advertisements, with the remaining pages filled with fashion and film reviews, job features and What's On.

Usually I don't even bother to open the paper, so you can imagine my surprise on reading this evidence for our contention that socialist ideas will evolve out of the capitalist environment. Mind you, "evolve" is the relevant word because, after such a promising start, the end of the article shows an incomplete understanding of the workings of the system. The final sentence "Next time they play at having a summit, I just hope they do it in private" shows that Robert Elms objection is to the play-acting of the figureheads rather than a wish to do away with the system of whose economic basis he is aware.

Eva Goodman

Running Commentary: Beating the wife (1987)

The Running Commentary column from the January 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Beating the wife

It seems that domestic violence or wife beating is to become a priority concern for the Metropolitan Police. Hitherto they have not been noted for their sympathy towards the plight of women who approach them because they are being abused by their husbands. Generally they prefer "not to get involved" in disputes involving domestic violence — tacit endorsement, in fact, of the sanctity of the family and a husband's "right" to do what he likes with "his property" especially when the wife has, in the judgement of the police, contributed to the incident by causing aggravation to her husband through nagging.

Now there are demands for a change in the law to enable the police to bring prosecutions against husbands who beat up their wives. Up till now the woman herself had to prosecute the husband and, understandably, many women were reluctant or even scared to press charges. So is the new attitude on the part of the Met. an indication of a new, more enlightened attitude towards women?

Not if these remarks by Walter Easey, police advisor to the Association of London Labour Authorities, are anything to go by. He said: “It has been a puzzle why there has not been more movement in the past. Wife battering is often an indicator of serious problems with drinking or drugs". In other words it fits into an overall pattern of deviant behaviour which might be of more interest to the police than wife beating. But wife beating is also an indication of serious social and sexual problems that are not confined to a small minority of deviants but are typical of a sick society. And neither changes in the law and policing policy, nor more prosecutions against men who beat up their wives will cure it.

Look at it this way, Sid

As is well known to everyone who cooks on a gas stove, privatisation is now the name of the game. Another might be How to Win The Next Election. For the Tories are obviously hoping that every applicant for shares in concerns like British Gas will believe the publicity which tells them that they can be a capitalist for £150. The Tories hope that this will be enough to so change their ideas about class society that they will stop voting for capitalism to be run by the Labour Party and start voting for it to be run by the Tories.

Of course if the shares' price goes up anyone who has bought them will be able to make some profit by selling them quickly; whatever they make will probably come in handy to pay the next gas bill or to clear up some other debt. That is how the working class live. On the other hand investment — the sinking of capital into an industry, buying land, materials, machinery, buildings, labour power in order to make profit — is the exclusive function of the capitalist class. They monopolise the means of wealth production and distribution and their position allows them to exploit the workers whose labour power they buy.

The workers live by the sale of their labour power and their position is unchanged by temporary and insignificant variations in their income. Having money in the bank, winning a few pounds in the betting shop, selling some shares for more than they cost, all help to stretch the pay packet for a few workers but do not lessen their reliance on it. None of this changes how we get our living, our class position under capitalism, where our economic interests lie. It does not. in other words, remove the need to get up in the morning and go to work, to submit ourselves to the exploitation process.

Meanwhile, it is worth asking one important, but neglected, question. British Gas was a nationalised concern and we have always been told that nationalisation was public ownership — ownership by us. How then can we buy something which we already own? The answer is simple and also neglected. We didn't own it in the first place. Nationalisation. with its claim to give us all a stake in industry, was as much a confidence trick as privatisation is now.

Surely even Sid is not so daft that he can't see that?

Crime going up

Although its practitioners never produce any figures of profit or loss, crime is still, amid the recession, a growth industry. For England and Wales, 1985 was a boom year for crime: more offences were committed than ever before. The figure recorded by the police — 3.6 million offences — was a three per cent rise on 1984.

Some of the biggest increase was in sexual offences, statistics for which are notoriously prey to subjective influences. Rape, for example, went up by 29 per cent but this did not mean that nearly a third more women were being raped in 1985, rather that some changes in police practice resulted in more of the cases which were reported to them being recorded as rape. (What did these "changes" amount to? Presumably some women once came to the police station after being raped only to find the incident regarded as something less horrible).

The same might be said for some of the figures for violence against the person, some people, in some circumstances, would not dream of going to the police after being assaulted whereas other people would; all manner of factors can influence the decision either way.

But whatever allowance we make, however the statistics are weighted, it seems clear that the social disfigurement which is crime continues to flourish. This is happening after more than seven years of a Tory government who assured us. when they came back to power in 1979, that they had the answer to the problem. It was, apparently, a matter of more police — higher pay for them — and tougher punishment for the criminals — short, sharp shocks for the youngsters, longer stretches behind bars for the adults. Well there are more police but they are clearing up proportionately less crime now than when the Tories came to power — 35 per cent in 1985 as against 42 per cent in 1978.

Is there, then, no answer to crime? (we are referring, of course, to the illegal sort, not the offences which the capitalist system constantly commits on the majority of the human race and which are legally sanctioned as essential to this society's stability). Reformers, including those who want hanging and flogging, treat the problem in isolation from the social situation which gives rise to it. This is a society of private property and property is not just possession: it is also the denial of possession to others who, in some circumstances, will try to penetrate that denial through force or subterfuge. Poverty and all it means — stress, hunger, slums, a sub-standard existence — breeds frustration, and relief is often seen in terms of "get-rich-quick". The worker on the factory production line dreams of winning the pools; the criminal of the big, once-for-all, haul.

Whatever the Tories, or any government, may do will not affect the cause of crime. For that we must look a long way beyond the promises, if we are to have a society of harmony, a world safe to be alive in.

Obituary: Walter Atkinson (1987)

Obituary from the January 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

When I was told of the death of Walter Atkinson I asked myself the question — should I rush up to Manchester? Or should I stay behind and sell literature, write letters and do the other mundane jobs that have to be done for socialism? I knew what Walter would have said, so I stayed behind.

Walter Atkinson died at the age of 81 after a lifetime devoted, often at great personal cost, in fighting the social system which creates today's ills. For many years he was well known in Manchester as a member of the National Secular Society. However it is as a socialist that I remember him. He joined the Socialist Party, influenced by Moses Baritz. Arthur Mertons and other active SPGBers, in the late 1940s. He soon became a prominent figure on the Party platform — indoors and outdoors — at Platt Fields, the bombed site in Deansgate, in fact anywhere where the workers would listen to the socialist case. Members will remember him speaking at a Conference rally. His voice was heard in the pubs and on Kinder Scout when Manchester Branch took a weekend off to walk the Pennine Way.

Walter was no mean poet either. His poem, written at the time of the Hiroshima bombing, appeared in the winter edition of the World Socialist Journal 1985-6. which gave him immense pleasure.

Walter will be remembered and missed by his family, friends and comrades.

Margaret Hopwood

While ere I live, I still will hurl my shaft
Of what I may possess of intellectual light.
Against the power and ignorance that bars the way
To freedom of the common needs of life,
And holds back the dawning of that brighter day
When man shall cease at last from social strife.
Despair not. . . But let us carry on.
And by our efforts help the cause along.
Remains the movement after we have gone.
Its object sure, its principles still strong.

(Extract from For Socialism August 2 1948).

Confusions of the Left (1987)

Book Review from the January 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anthony Wright. Socialisms: Theories and Practices. Oxford University Press (Oxford. New York, 1986).

The title of this work is significant for the author argues that there must be a rejection of a single "correct" meaning of the term socialism for many interpretations are possible. Wright claims that those who deny the pluralistic perspective have embarked on a course which is "illegitimate, its basis flawed, its consequences damaging". However, far from clarifying the meaning of socialism, this book merely adds to the general confusion associated with the term.

It would appear, according to Wright's argument, that any claim to be "socialist" would be "legitimate". However, he argues that in Britain there is no political party with a "Marxist basis” (thus excluding discussion of the Socialist Party), and concentrates instead on the 1LP and the Fabians which he sees as the main school of "reformist socialism" in Britain.

Wright sees the Russian revolution as a turning point which led to Marxism becoming "Marxism-Leninism, with few prepared to quarrel about the hyphen”. Yet the term, Marxism-Leninism, simply adds to the general confusion since politically it has no meaning, or at least not for those with any understanding of the politics of either Marx or Lenin. Wright's insistence that Russia proved that there could be different interpretations of socialism depending on the social conditions, seems to assume that socialism can be anything at all. In fact, Russia, since the revolution, rather than establishing socialism, has seen the development of capitalism - state capitalism - with the state as owner rather than private individuals. Lenin himself referred to state capitalism in the context of Russia and Wright might have done well to have read Lenin more closely.

According to Wright "the world is full of socialisms" and the plethora of definitions he presents us with is certainly confusing. Because the author rejects the idea of a single “true" socialism, or socialist tradition, he can therefore include discussion of many strands of left-wing thought which call themselves socialist.

Wright has a tendency to slip into cliche at the expense of argument. So, for example, he claims that Lenin was "socialist of the deed and not of the book" and. having provided a thumb-nail sketch of Marx, writes him off as having left "a profoundly ambiguous legacy". Similarly the 1945 Labour government is described as a "vindication of the viability of a democratic socialist strategy" an observation that is merely stated, not argued for.

Wright argues that history has shown that the working class has abnegated its responsibility for establishing socialism and that this has now become the function of the "party”. And here we can see clearly Wright's affiliation to Leninism rather than Marxism. But new confusions soon occur. Wright does not think that racial, ethnic, religious and sexual conflicts have a class basis. As a result he says that the need is now to build a "socialist movement of persuasion and reform capable of making a wide appeal to people of different social classes". Thus in addition to the plethora of "socialisms", we now have a plethora of social classes. Of feminism he writes

It is a major achievement of feminism not merely to have identified the limited stereotype of socialism's traditional actor (male, manual, muscular) but to have identified the limited character of the wage-labour-capital relationship that underpinned it. Feminism has extended and enriched the definition of the socialist project, from "work" to "life", and has extended the range of possible socialist actors in the process, (p. 115)

But such an attitude expresses the limitations of the "socialisms" that Wright discusses, rather than the limitation of socialism as such. The Socialist Party has always had a concern not just with "work" but also with "life". And while we recognise that there are certain problems experienced by women in capitalism, those problems cannot be separated from the context of the class society in which they occur. Also, to focus on the particular problems of one section of the working class at the expense of the common problems experienced by all workers may result in divisive antagonisms between workers.

Wright dismisses Marxism with the self-contradictory statement that "every Marxist state is a dictatorship" and opts instead for what he calls "welfare capitalism" claiming that it can deliver what socialists have traditionally stood for, if the capitalist system is milked for what can be got out of it. But to adopt such a strategy would amount to accepting the crumbs of capitalism instead of seizing the banquet for socialism.

Socialisms: Theories and Practices ought to be retitled "Confusions of the Left: Claims and Counterclaims". There is a tendency for ever more absurd statements to be made such as: "there is a whole range of Marxisms". This is only true if we accept uncritically the claims of those who profess to be Marxists, or indeed socialists.

Wright concludes by observing that those who refuse to acknowledge "credible socialism" or socialism of a "realistic" kind, have not learned from "political and economic experience". Of course this begs the question of how we are to interpret that experience and what lessons are to be learnt from history. Socialism is more than moral outcry in an uncaring world, as Wright assumes. He argues that both socialism and capitalism are compatible with despotism but only capitalism has been capable of providing democracy and political freedom. This leads him to opt for a "third way between state socialism and welfare capitalism” a solution which is as unrealistic as Wright obviously feels socialism to be.

This book is yet another attempt to undermine socialism. It pretends to be offering "realism" but in fact is little more than an avowal of capitalism and an apologia for the Left.

Philip Bentley

Pollution and poison (1987)

Book Review from the January 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Poisoned Womb. 1986. John Elkington. (Pelican Books. 255pp. £3.95).

This book sets out to describe the dangers to health and, in particular, the health of future generations that drugs, radiation, pollution and pesticides pose as a result of the increasing use of toxic substances which damage reproductive capabilities or cause mutations.

The author, a prolific writer on environmental problems, has collected an impressive amount of evidence to illustrate the ecological disasters which have occurred because of the need to make a profit under capitalism.

Infertility, miscarriages and congenital diseases have always occurred and the interplay of factors causing them make it difficult to prove that individual substances are harmful. But as the author points out, in the USA in the late 1950s about 2 per cent of newborn babies had some physical, mental or learning defect compared with about 4 per cent today (p. 18) and research carried out at Florida State University showed that by the late 1980s some 20 per cent of American males could be functionally sterile, compared with only 0.5 per cent in 1938. when scientifically sound sperm counts began, (p.48)

The different methods used in the analyses of pollutants and contaminants and the problems and limitations of the tests employed are described in interesting, though sometimes technical, detail in chapter one.

Chemical poisoning is not a new problem however. The ancient Romans suffered from lead poisoning due to the extensive use of lead drinking vessels and Napoleon suffered a number of symptoms as a result of arsenical contamination of the wallpaper in his room at St. Helena.

Multinational firms have, in many instances, ignored safety regulations, falsified research records of dangerous substances and been socially irresponsible in the search for increased profits. At least 5,000 children were born with deformities of the limbs by 1961 because their mothers had taken the drug thalidomide during pregnancy. The drug had been distributed by Distillers under the trade name of Distival in spite of the fact that Dr. George Somers, Distillers' pharmacologist, found in 1959 that a liquid preparation of thalidomide was definitely toxic. He tried to get Distillers to publish his findings but the company chose to keep them secret, (p. 101)

In 1976 the James river in Virginia had to be closed because of contamination from the manufacture of the insecticide Kepone by Life Science Products. Workers at the plant were found to be working in an environment where Kepone dust was several centimetres deep, and a number of workers suffered from severe headaches and tremors and some were found to be sterile. An investigation showed that a pollution control system had not been implemented because it would have affected profitability

Ciga-Geigy deliberately sprayed unprotected children with the insecticide Galecron to see how much of the insecticide was excreted, (p.232)

It is claimed that the damage can cause to reproductive systems has led to discrimination against women in the workplace. In 1979 five women opted for sterilisation to keep their jobs with Cyanamid Corporation. USA. The resulting controversy, although acrimonious, was by no means new: at the beginning of this century women were banned from working in the heavy lead-using trades in Britain because of research carried out at Guy's Medical School. The fact that lead may have been equally toxic to the fertile male worker was not considered and it is consistent with capitalism's priorities that it is more profitable to exclude certain categories of workers than make industrial processes safer.

Under capitalism profits can be made from any misfortune:

The Xytex Corporation . . . is aiming to publish a thriving market in human sperm: it sends out frozen sperm by mail order to doctors carrying out artificial insemination, supplying catalogues listing donors with details of their ethnic origin, height, weight, hair and eye colour, skin colour and blood group, (p.64)

John Elkington has provided many examples of the way in which the drive for profits harms workers' health without drawing clear political conclusions and the book ends rather lamely by stating more people are concerned with environmental issues. Even when political statements are made:

Such problems cut right across political frontiers, as it forcefully illustrated by recent experiences in Siberia. The rapid development of the region's natural resources has resulted in soaring birth defects and worker-mortality rates, (p.20)

Elkington misses the point that problems in the state-capitalist countries are caused by their integration into the capitalist system. Although this book provides a lot of useful information it does not offer a solution to the present system. Readers looking for a socialist alternative to capitalism's nightmare will have to look elsewhere.

Carl Pinel

Brent (1987)

From the January 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Education — or rather schooling, for very little education takes place in schools despite the sincere efforts made by many teachers — is under attack once again from the media. This time the target is multi-cultural education in the London Borough of Brent. Recently, Brent advertised for a large number of teachers to be involved in setting up the Development Programme for Race Equality in Schools. Every school in Brent will have a senior member of staff responsible for implementing the programme. The project is funded by a Section II grant provided by the Home Office to areas with a large population of workers from the Commonwealth.

The tabloids eagerly published the news, giving readers the impression that their children's minds would soon be in the hands of Orwellian Thought Police, nicknamed Commissars. They also suggested that this would lead to a further decline in educational standards, particularly where white children are concerned. The so-called hard Left of the Labour council in Brent were blamed. The newspapers failed to note that events in Brent were in fact initiated by the previous Conservative council. They also failed to mention that these "commissars" are not very different from many teachers in other local authorities who work in the field of multi-cultural education.

Brent Council has only set a precedent in that it is using Section II money on a larger scale and in a more tightly organised manner. It is doing this to meet the recommendations recently put forward by several government reports on the effects of racism on the educational achievements of black children. Governments publish such reports on aspects of schooling at regular intervals to suggest that they take the subject of education seriously.

The media continually presents multi-cultural education as being a threat to both the education system and to society in general. Nothing could be further from the truth. Multi-cultural education is certainly not revolutionary in its aims and objectives. It is an educational reform that has developed in Britain over the past 20 years in response to the needs of Commonwealth immigrants who came to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. But what is it attempting to reform? Education in a capitalist society is not worthy of the name. It is merely schooling. Achievement is not measured in terms of the personal development of each individual through his or her lifetime. It is instead measured in terms of success or failure at public examinations. This success or failure determines the young worker's future value on the job market. A school is, at best, a kind of factory which produces workers to meet the needs of capitalist society. But this is only a secondary function. Primarily schools are places where the energy and enthusiasm for learning of large numbers of young people are frustrated.

By the mid 1960s it was becoming clear that some kind of special English language teaching provision was needed if children of black and Asian Commonwealth immigrants were to succeed and compete as equals with white children in the British school system and later on the labour market. This resulted in the establishment of Section II funding directly from the Home Office in 1966. This is still the main source of funding for multi-cultural education. The Section II regulations reflect the origins of multi cultural education and have not changed for 20 years. Local authorities applying for the grant need to show that they have a large population of Commonwealth immigrants whose language and customs differ greatly from those of the rest of the community. They need to show that this population has proportionately greater needs than the rest of the community. This means that a school in an area with a mainly white population cannot claim the grant. Workers whose salaries are funded by Section II have to be individually and directly accountable to the Home Office. For example, Section II teachers are asked at regular intervals to send details of their pupils and the level of their needs.

In the late 1960s it was simply assumed that once the Commonwealth immigrants had acquired full command of the English language and were fully assimilated into British culture, the problem would disappear. The problem did not disappear — it got worse. Research into the education system showed that a disproportionate number of West Indian children were failing in the school system. Black and Asian workers continued to suffer discrimination in the labour market and in fact in all other walks of life. This was accompanied by the focussing of white discontent into the growth of the National Front and other violent fascist organisations. It was becoming clear that merely providing language classes for people who by now were no longer immigrants but established members of the community was not the solution. If schools were to continue to function effectively, both black and white discontent must be contained.

It was recognised that black achievement within the school system would continue to be low as long as schools presented a narrow curriculum based only on the culture of white Britain. The culture and history of black workers was either ignored or presented as inferior. This had a detrimental effect on the self-esteem and confidence of young black pupils which, in turn, affected their achievement at school. Britain was becoming a multi-cultural society, it was argued, and the nature of that society must be presented in the school curriculum. This would also challenge the racism of young white people. Of course, from time to time this results in the kind of right-wing backlash recently demonstrated by the press response to Brent. Meanwhile some black people view the reforms as merely superficial — a propaganda exercise aimed more at containing their discontent than with eradicating racism.

Multi-cultural education continues to miss several important facts about schools. Firstly, it is not only black children who fail at school. A significant number of children fail to pass any exams. Secondly, all school subjects, whether they take into account a child's cultural background or not. are forced down reluctant throats and so are hardly likely to be educative. In spite of the efforts of inspired teachers committed to education, at school children learn only how to accept oppression and how to compete rather than co-operate with their fellow human beings.

But the struggle to reform the school system continues and is growing more organised, as recent events in Brent show. Yet it is no more enlightened. However, it would be wrong to present a completely bleak view of multi-cultural education. It has stimulated much interest and research into language and culture. Information on African, Caribbean and Asian literature and history is increasingly accessible. There are also growing numbers of teachers who are opposed to racism and to giving all children access to a meaningful education. However, their energies are sadly misdirected in institutions where education rarely takes place. It is only when they challenge the existence of schools and the social system that produces such institutions that an atmosphere will be created where meaningful education can take place.

Kerima Mohideen