Where Charity Begins & Why it Should End (1996)

From the January 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists refuse to support charities on the grounds that such organisations are merely trying to deal with the symptoms of capitalism rather than capitalism itself.

Socialists seldom win popularity contests in the current ideological climate. Take for example our opinions on the subject of charity: I believe that charity ought to be abolished. Am I unfeeling, uncaring, when confronted with the evidence of great misery and poverty in the world? Hardly, but I think I understand, as do other socialists, that misplaced caring within a capitalist system is as useful to the poor and dispossessed as no caring at all.

The word charity comes from the Latin caritas meaning love or affection, so we could assume that charity in its abstract sense was bound up with the loftiest feelings, but it was soon complicated by its link with morality and organised religion. Where Christianity was the theory, charity became the practice.

Socialists believe that poverty is unacceptable and unnecessary, whereas Christians tend to see poverty as acceptable, perhaps even a necessary tool in the moral teachings of the bible. Jesus could always lay a hand to someone wretched and needy in order to illustrate a point— rather like Princess Diana. Forget any fantasies of Christ as the first great communist—Christianity has sought to alleviate some suffering but never abolish poverty. Ultimately for it, the poor have one recourse . . . God will reward this world’s suffering in the next. Socialists dismiss this as ludicrous.

Guilty rich
Even removed from the clutches of Christianity, most of us would define charity as ‘the giving of help to those in need’, but socialists recognise that charity is used as a mask: a pretty face for many less lofty motivations. Most obviously charity is used to assuage rich guilt from the bourgeois straight-on up to the monarch: “Well, yes, they do cost us an awful lot of money, but look at all the good work they do for charity.” Are the ladies who lunch really so concerned about Ethiopian famine, or are they just looking to fill their filofaxes with good deeds? Is charity just a brilliant excuse for the idle rich to stay idle because they are too busy with “good work” to actually work?

It’s not just the rich who use charity as an excuse for other behaviours. Gone are the days of skulking into dark betting shops or poring over the football pools. Now when we want to gamble, we can buy an establishment-approved lottery ticket and say we are “making a charitable donation” to such “worthy causes” as plush velvet seats in a London opera house.

Surveys reveal that charitable donations are hardly proportional to income. Poorer people give a higher proportion of their income to charities than their better-off counterparts, a fact that offends my Robin Hood sensibilities. When it comes to using charities to pay for essential services, the poor pay the most, thus, like the lottery, charity is merely a regressive tax in sheep’s clothing.

So even if charity redistributes wealth in the wrong direction, doesn’t it still help those in acute need? No. Charities are at best, ineffective, at worst, downright harmful in addressing society’s needs.

First, they are ineffective, because they put the responsibility for dealing with some of our biggest problems in the hands of well-meaning but ill-equipped do-gooders. Thus, the government is very happy to relinquish this chore of providing essential services to charities eager to pick up the slack, charities who are accountable only to their trustees. The current government has made an art of such surrendering, and John Major even speaks of the widening role of charities with pride.

Because, as we are told, charities are doing us such a favour (and saving millions for the government—a dividend we never see) they are allowed to run their “businesses” as they see fit, with their own priorities, and in isolation from other organisations. Crucial tasks are left to well-meaning amateurs rather than well-rewarded professionals, a practice that undermines workers. Don’t get me wrong— I know that volunteerism is the basis of a truly socialist society, but that’s volunteerism across the board, not replacing a decently paid, well-trained builder by someone who likes to dabble with a hammer on the weekends when the squash court is booked.

Tin rattling
In the past charities used to top up services mostly provided by the government. Now charities are involved in every aspect of our lives and there is seemingly nothing we will not trust them to do. Ambulances used to be well-stocked, but now they are delivered bare to communities until a charity fills them with the most basic resuscitation equipment. Is it any wonder you are more likely to die of a heart attack in the poorer neighbourhoods?

The other day someone came to my door rattling a tin for life-saving gear for the neo-natal intensive care unit of the local NHS hospital. A worthy cause, I agreed, and one that should be publicly provided. Ah, yes, but you see the government won’t pay, the tin-rattler retorted. Why should they when they can count on you to collect the funds for them, I answered. Something is severely sick in a society that regards its children so lightly. Think of this the next time you are asked to get vouchers at Tesco’s for your local school’s computers, and just wait … next year you may collect vouchers from McDonald’s to buy your neighbourhood a police constable. It’s already happening in some places. Every pound you give to charity is a step in the wrong direction.

A car sticker slogan echoes in my head: “It will be a great day when our schools have all the money they need and the airforce has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.” The popularity of this slogan in America, further illustrates my point. Does the military ever have to resort to the effort- and resource- wasting tactic of a cake sale to fund its operations? Did anyone ever come to your door during the Gulf War rattling a tin for a new tank? What a preposterous notion! When the military wants a new toy, they draw a cheque from public funds, and we have little recourse to challenge them. The money is always there, so why isn’t the money there to fund schools and hospitals properly? Is there a sudden shortage of money, material, or human resources? Socialists know better.

Anyone with a whiff of understanding of socialist ideas, and anyone who has ever been a have-not under a capitalist regime, knows that “caring capitalism” is a contradiction in terms. Capitalism in order to maintain itself has to put profit and economic growth ahead of people’s needs. If in a time of “economic boom” profit and people’s needs coincide, then we are told to believe that this will always be the case, that capitalism brings the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Socialists see this feeble brainwashing technique a mile away. It insults our intelligence, as do the advertisements that tell us that world hunger will only stop when we all phone the 0800 number with our credit cards ready.

Glossy campaigns
Millions of pounds and thousands of working hours are spent every year devising glossy campaigns to part us from our charitable contributions. There is no way to ensure under capitalism that Cancer Research will fare better than Holidays for Hunting Hounds if the latter can pull more heartstrings with Saatchi & Saatchi on its side. When they run out of sympathy pleas, the agencies try hard-sell and harassment: “How many more babies will die before you pick up the phone?”

Charities are a poor way of dealing with society’s problems. Even the most efficiently run charity is grossly inefficient because of the nature of the beast. Charities respond to constant needs with inconsistent sources of income subject to the tides of a boom/bust economy and the public’s response to this year’s advertising campaign. Corners are cut as charities try desperately to balance their books. Charities look for quick-fix schemes that will impress contributors; long-term planning is an approach they can ill-afford. This is why, in the long run, charities are likely to damage more than help a worthy cause.

Charity is a means of economic oppression because it maintains an ideology that is directly in opposition to socialism. Charity reinforces so many misconceptions about society: that social change relies on us being nice and feeling generous with what little disposable income we have; and that the disadvantaged should wag their tails with gratitude every time the wealthy toss them a bone labelled “charity”.

Every charitable donation strengthens the notion that our basic needs –food, shelter, adequate medical care, basic education –are actually privileges. We have no right to expect our needs to be met, and we are meant to grovel like the degraded beggars we are when by accident we get what we need. We are conditioned to rightfully expect little of our ‘democratically elected’ governments. Capitalism and Charity have worked hand in hand to turn us into a world of few benefactors and millions of beggars. For those of you happy with the world as it is, by all means carry on dropping your change into the nearest charity box. But for those of you who seek solutions to our problems beyond the quick fix, rage against the charity machine.

Or better put in the words of Jack London, in The Iron Heel, his visionary novel of socialism:

  “I had become convinced as Ernest was when he sneered at charity as a poulticing of an ulcer. Remove the ulcer was his remedy; give to the worker his product; pension as soldiers those who grow honourably old in their toil, and there will be no need for charity. Convinced of this, I toiled with him at the revolution, and did not exhaust my energy in alleviating the social ills that continuously arose from the injustice of the system.”

Megan Miranda

Letters: Is "god" a Socialist? (1996)

Letters to the Editors from the January 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is "god" a Socialist?

Dear Editors,

Re your November editorial: “We only have one life: this one" and Adam Buick’s “we do know that it (the human mind and consciousness) can’t exist in the absence of a body that functions” in his Is-David-Icke-Serious? Same issue article.

First and foremost, if socialism is to be established, it's unreasonable and self-defeating to make unwelcome all those who believe in, or are open-minded about life after death, as these views alone are irrelevant.

Opinion polls have shown a majority think some sort of post- mortem survival likely, and there’s very strong evidence from Near Death Experiences (NDE) and mediumships.

Many cardiac-arrested patients have had NDEs, which, after resuscitation, have proved to be accurate accounts of events in hospitals etc. observed by detached “spirits” looking down upon their own physical bodies.

It can be argued that NDEs are "just" a psychic phenomenon associated with a dying brain, but they do show a perceptive consciousness can operate externally at the brink of death.

Furthermore, several sceptical and painstaking investigators of different mediums have been impressed and converted by considerable and precise spiritual information (some only knowable by those who “died").

Just because many people conclude souls may survive briefly, eternally, multi-incarnately etc. doesn’t mean they can’t see a better world for the living will come about through socialism. Such rationalists can readily see that capitalism must go if they’re not shut out.

Religions only grew because an afterlife has been a mystery for aeons, and their leaders are even now suing their claims on this enigma for their own personal. political and capitalistic advantages.

However, no system of faith has exclusive ownership of, or justifiable rule by reason of a hereafter whatsoever, since it would rightfully and equally belong to all (like the means of living while alive): so "god” can logically be seen as a universal coalescent synergy of spiritual entities. Or in other words, if it exists, god's a socialist!

Max Hess, 

Folkestone

Reply:
We have never said that those who believe in an afterlife can’t want socialism. They can, and we know of a number of examples. People can be inconsistent and hold contradictory views: basing one part of their views on what experience has confirmed but basing another part on unverified, and often unverifiable, beliefs, speculations and superstitions.

All we say is that such people are ineligible to join the Socialist Party (but they can be sympathisers), as we feel they would undermine our claim to have a case based on rational, logical argument from scientifically verified facts about history, capitalism, and human nature and behaviour.

It is on this last point in particular that such people fall. If it really was part of human nature to have a spirit that could exist in the absence of a body this would be a very important fact that would have enormous implications for explaining human behaviour. The fact that most people do believe this (or want to believe it) doesn't make any difference. There is no evidence for it. On the contrary, all the evidence goes the other way, confirming that human behaviour and thought, including thinking, can be explained in purely materialist terms.

So-called "Near-Death Experiences” and "Out-of-Body Experiences" don't prove that there is a spiritual life separate from the body since, in any event, they are linked to the existence of a functioning body. They are hallucinations, mental distortions, brought on by the brain being deprived for a short period of enough oxygen. It has been suggested that the particular form the hallucination takes—of floating out of the body, among other things—is due to the particular physiology of the human brain and to the way it organises and interprets the experience of the senses. (For one such explanation see the article by Susan Blackmore on "Near-Death Experiences: In or Out of the Body?" in the Fall 1991 issue of the Skeptical Inquirer.)

You can't be serious about mediums. We thought that it was common knowledge that they were either entertainers (whose tricks can be reproduced by other conjurers and illusionists who make no claims about really being in touch with the spirit of a dead person) or frauds (the list of those who have been exposed as such over the last hundred years is a long one). For the techniques employed to fish for and extract information from vulnerable persons and then re-presenting it to them as if it came from a spirit, see Chapter 4 of James Randi: Psychic Investigator (the book of the 1991 television series).

Finally, would "god” if it existed, be a socialist? Clearly not since, unless it is a useless abstraction incapable of influencing human affairs, it would have used that influence to have got humans to establish socialism long ago. But what do we find? That this "god" allows 14 million or so children under the age of 5 to die each year of starvation and starvation-related diseases. Some socialist!

Editors.

Pressure valve for the working class

Dear Editors,

I found Coleman's comments about the National Lottery (November Socialist Standard) particularly interesting, although I felt that he said far too little about the real objectives behind what is probably one of the most seductive capitalist ploys in history. Apart from the obvious fact that the National Lottery is designed to act as yet another pressure valve for the working class, I feel that its hidden agenda is of a far more sinister nature.

The simpering puppets of the Parliamentary Establishment are finding it increasingly difficult to hide the progressive degradation of British society. The ruling class has had to come to terms with the simple fact that laissez-faire capitalism cannot function without decimating whole sections of our community. The clutter of sleeping bags which fill the shop doorways of our major towns and cities are becoming an embarrassment to an exploitative system keen to conceal the inevitable consequences of its own soul-destroying policies.

In the last century, the capitalist class was able to postpone the full effects of social decay by throwing working class people into workhouses or by relying upon the well-meaning but futile efforts of Victorian philanthropists. The National Lottery is a similar ploy which has been implemented for precisely the same reason. By diverting the squandered revenue of the average gambler into specific charities the Tories can retain an essential facade of comparative normality, thus ensuring a continued acceptance (at least by a sympathetic minority) and managing to stave off the persistent threat of a Socialist alternative at the same time. Sadly, the National Lottery is not simply a "bit of fun”, it is a cynical and manipulative plot to deceive the increasingly credulous masses.

Christian McLean, 

Dover

The ability of capitalist authority

Dear Editors,

Your [November] Socialist Standard review of Charles Derrick’s book A Question of Judgement mentions the vital issue of the ability of capitalist authority, indeed of capitalism, to survive in the face of the withdrawal of the willing co-operation of a majority of class-conscious workers like, presumably, Derrick. My own experience in the army as another unwilling conscript of the 1945 Labour government, whilst not as varied as Derrick's, forced me to consider the effects on capitalism’s stability of even a small minority.

Having refused an order to accompany my unit to help break the London Dock strike of the winter of ’46, I was given military punishment. At this stage the barrack-room politicians of the Communist Party were solidly behind the Labour government in smashing the workers’ attempts to better their living standards, and as far as I know, mine was a one-man revolt. As such it received no publicity.

I had time to reflect on the effect that even a small number of such refusals could have had if made with the integrity and strength of socialist conviction and argument, and backed by a sound party statement. The publicity given by local and national newshounds anxious to embarrass the government, and possible questions in parliament could have pushed the issue of a socialist alternative, however distorted, and the resultant discussion in office, factory and pub would have been out of all proportion to the numbers of socialists involved.

Like everyone else, socialists behave in conformity with their convictions as far as possible. I believe that the effect on capitalism’s workability of a minority of even 5 percent of socialists behaving like Derrick in their various activities would be so profound, that the question of capitalism’s viability would confront the non-socialist majority as a critical issue demanding their political and ideological decision and commitment, at an earlier stage than the assumptions implied by majority action normally suppose.

Bill Robertson, 

Brighton

These Foolish Things: Work Till You Drop (1996)

The Scavenger column from the January 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Work till you drop

Britain is facing a new industrial epidemic. Office staff are working longer hours, but productivity is falling. Family life is also under threat from increased stress at work, with women coming off worse. Nearly three times as many women as men in white collar work are divorced or separated . . . Far from sitting back and driving their employees ever harder, those in management worked the longest hours of all. Among senior staff, 45 per cent of men worked 50 hours or more [per week].

(Jojo Moyes, Independent, 26 October.)

Encouraging effort

Staff at the electrical giant Comet were threatened with a hangman’s noose if they failed to reach sales targets. Three managers are facing a disciplinary hearing after the sick joke but they are not expected to be sacked. The incident happened at Comet’s store in Llansamlet, Swansea.

A group of sales staff were shown a noose dangling from the ceiling and a step ladder. Those who failed to meet that week’s quota for selling warranties were ordered to take a step up and told the ritual would continue in future weeks.

(East Anglian Daily Times, 19 October.)

This “shoot- ’em-up ” culture

[Phil Denne] designed Europe’s largest electronic warfare unit in Stanmore, Middlesex, where state-of-the-art computers simulate the anti-aircraft missiles and radar jamming devices RAF fighters face when screaming 50ft above enemy territory at Mach 1.

But now he is at the leading edge of the virtual reality, thrills-and-spills rides that, in the face of defence cuts, the military industrial establishment hopes will bolster dwindling income.

Denne says: “When the poker-faced top brass saw the simulated view they started ooh-ing and aah-ing, and I thought if people like this are getting excited then the general public will just love it.’’

(Financial Mail on Sunday, 22 October.)

Basic

The basic State pension in Britain is £58.85 a week or £3,060.20 a year against the national average wage of £17,488; just over one-sixth.

Maintaining the old values

Suicide victim Harold Graham could not face the winter after electricity was cut off at his Wear Valley home, a friend told a Bishop Auckland inquest yesterday.

Mr Graham had confided in his neighbour Christopher Hume a few days before he hanged himself last week at his home in Front Street, Sunniside near Tow Law. 

(Northern Echo, 15 November.)

What democracy?

However, the government’s definition does not include the new wave of unelected quangos established in recent years, now responsible for over £50 billion of taxpayers’ money. New quangos, sometimes referred to as a “new magistracy”, include the district health authorities and education funding agencies run by government appointees, many of them overtly political. A Guardian investigation in 1993 established that, in a broad definition of quangos, by next year more than 7,700 public bodies would have been created, controlled partly or wholly by government appointees.

(Guardian, 30 November.)

The Scavenger

Right Royal Rubbish! (1996)

TV Review from the January 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. No more processions through the City of London, with gleaming carriages and cantering horses. No more sacred vows in majestic cathedrals for the watching millions to fawn over. No more glittering brides and gallant grooms. Just plenty of back-biting, acrimony and posturing— the Royal family has come down to earth with a thump and the TV cameras have been capturing every sordid and sensational moment.

The jewel in the crown—so to speak—of this ongoing farrago was undoubtedly the Panorama interview given by the Princess of Wales. Rarely in the history of television has such carefully scripted malevolence been purveyed by such an expert at manipulation. This in itself is not surprising as the lady in question had been trained by the masters of deception themselves—the royal family and their courtiers. Doe-eyed and self-important to the last, opinion polls show that Diana succeeded in gaining the sympathy of the majority of those whose lives were so empty that they watched this wretched performance. (TV reviewers are exempt from criticism, naturally, for risking an attack of biliousness in the course of professional duty.)

There is no denying that Diana has had a hard time—as hard times for parasitical prima donnas go—but what really sticks in the craw is the way in which all this is presented as if it is something of great concern to the rest of us in society who have problems enough of our own—as if, indeed, they really are "our" royal family which we could sell at auction or swap at Marks and Spencer if we wanted to. We're all human, but beyond that what have we got in common with them? Nothing worth mentioning is the true answer. Taking sides between these overprivileged squabblers plays into their hands—and remember. they are all at it, if you’ll pardon the expression—Charles had his own dreary feast of fun last year.

Another gin and tonic
When the squabbling dies down for a nano-second the TV corporations can be guaranteed to follow the lead of the tabloids into the never-never land of royal family irrelevance. The Queen Mother’s hip operation was a case in point. ITN did everything but film the operation and sponsor the surgical implements. When the old trout was admitted to her private suite they had cameras parked outside ready and waiting for live transmission of a brick wall, a plaque and a few windows. One sad specimen of humanity had turned up with a placard and flowers to wish her well, and as he was the only fool to make an appearance had an interview all to himself. ITN led with this story for what seemed like days on end, and still not once did it make the comparison between the treatment given to the Queen Mother and that which can be expected for most of the rest of the population i.e. private treatment and immediate access as opposed to state treatment and a nine-month waiting list. But, of course, they’re not biased.

The only relief in all this was that this time the Queen Mother was undergoing something different from having a fish bone removed from her gullet, which was a change indeed. So instead of the trout farmers and ENT specialists being wheeled into the studio to give interviews we were treated to expert analysis from bone specialists and psychologists majoring in post-operative stress disorder. Never let it be said that ITN do not know how to keep the public entertained.

Last but not least (at the time of going to press) was the history of the missing royal jewels given by the Queen to the Duchess of York for her services to foot fetishism. Judging by the look on his face, you would have thought they were Nicholas Owen’s own! What a catastrophe! Is nothing sacred these days? Never mind, another forty-eight hours’ hullabaloo was excavated from this rich scam by the troopers at the ITN news desk. So much so, it might be thought, that an even bigger catastrophe beset them when the jewels were actually found again.

What is the motivation behind ITN in all this? We can only wonder. Meanwhile, the Socialist Standard has a recommendation for them. If they really want to see how our beloved royal family cope with stress, let’s have a "fly-on-the-wall” documentary about them living in a tower block in Kirkby for a year on income support. Then they’d really have something to complain about.

Dave Perrin

Global Capitalism - The Facts (1996)

Party News from the January 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party Research Department has recently been considering how, as a movement, we can be more organised in our effort to get up-to-date facts to support our case against capitalism. Our new project aims to build upon the strong tradition of Socialist Party members and supporters conducting independent research into the many aspects of capitalist society and the case for socialism, firstly, we are starting a more systematic way of getting information and secondly we will present the results in regular reports. The reports could be used by socialists as a source of facts for leaflets, posters, letters to the press, articles, debates, etc.

We have prepared a research plan which includes some of the most important themes that are touched upon by the socialist analysis of capitalism. On each topic there is the potential to find recent statistics and examples to illustrate the socialist case. If you are interested in helping please write to the following address for more information.

Research Department, Socialist Party, 52 Clapham High Street, London SW4 7UN.

Power & Principle (1996)

From the January 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists have always argued that the Labour Party is nothing more than a vehicle for careerist politicians to achieve power — Blair and company have merely proved our assertion

It was probably the late Harold Wilson who made Labour’s naked thirst for political power so clearly obvious. In the succeeding years, as Labour leader followed Labour leader, the frustrated urge to become the political king of the castle has forced Labour leaders to abandon utterly any pretence of principle beyond that of achieving power. In Tony Blair, known to Tories as Tory Blair, Labour has achieved its contemptuous zenith.

Neil Kinnock, before he and his wife found rich rewards in European politics, always seemed somewhat troubled by the undignified and unprincipled thrust for political power. Unlike Blair, whose granny would be in decided danger if she stood between him and the realisation of his personal ambitions, Kinnock, stirred, perhaps, by the memory of working class sacrifice that had made the Labour Party, felt obliged to explain. Principle was, he said, useless without power.

In so far as he went, Kinnock spoke the truth—a truth, we must acknowledge, exemplified by the history of the Labour Party and the Socialist Party. The latter was born in 1904 and the former two years later, in 1906. But, whereas the Socialist Party was structured in strong democratic socialist principles the Labour Party came into existence as a coalition of interests, often conflicting interests, whose broad spectrum of principles were scattered to the wind when it first achieved political office in 1924.

But that is not the end of the story, nor does it fully illustrate the valid point Kinnock was making. In the years between, the Labour Party became a “broad church” whose various “wings” espoused those single issues which the Tories—and, sometimes, Labour itself—opposed. It became a party of government holding the reins of power on eight occasions since 1924.

Dismal future

On the other hand, the Socialist Party has remained small and without influence other than the respect it retains, even among its opponents, for its strong adherence to its socialist principles. Consistency, someone said, is a virtue for fools but that is consistency for consistency’s sake. In a situation where the three main parties, Tory, Labour and Liberal, each of which upholds the political and economic status quo, have conspired to ensure that only the case for capitalism is given a voice on the public media, the principled consistency of the Socialist Party is clearly justified not only by the logic of its case but by the unfolding absurdity of the Labour Party’s attempts to humanise capitalism.

Probably many of Labour’s troubled supporters—loyal only because of the utter ruthlessness of the Tories—would argue that adherence to socialist principles is a waste of time if there is no obvious indication that they are going to lead to winning the political power to implement those principles.

If that is the case then the working class, not only here but throughout the world, is confronted with a dismal future. The political vehicle on which they have in the past pinned their hopes for change and a better future, parties of reform such as Labour and Social Democratic parties, have been given power time after time and the outstanding memorial to their wielding of power is their utter failure to solve even one single problem of the working class.

When reform parties achieve political power, when they become the party of government, its members who make up the government have each a personal vested interest in remaining in office and that interest is reflected in the activities of their parliamentary' followers who, if they are to do their job in the terms in which they see that job, must aspire to political influence and promotion within the party. Effectively, the party and its members are in the business of politics, economically harnessed to maintaining their job in the same way as any other person who is dependent on a wage or salary.

Obviously the pressures this puts on the individual member of parliament and on political parties is not conducive to the nourishment of principles. This is not to suggest that every member of parliament is devoid of principle but it does mean that, when there is a conflict between continuing in power and standing by a principle, the greater “principle” of power retention comes into play.

Continued betrayal

Kinnock’s contention that, without power, principle is politically impotent is perfectly right but the achievement of power in conditions in which principles—if they exist, in the first place— have to be jettisoned in the face of the inevitable consequences of power is perhaps even more overwhelming for—as we have seen with Labour, continual betrayal emaciates and endangers even those principles to which the party and its members falsely lay claim.

Given the undemocratic set-up that prevails between the media—especially the powerful electronic media—and the main political parties which effectively imposes a ban on ideas that challenge capitalism, the false claims made by those parties thwarts democracy. Unfortunately, such is the flagrant dishonesty that exists in capitalist politics that most people will find difficulty in countenancing that claim. But the same people will readily accept the need for legislation such as the Sale of Goods Act to protect the public from false claims made by either manufacturers or retailers of even comparatively inexpensive or trivial items. Yet the political parties can inveigle people into parting with their votes—and the democratic determination of their future—on the basis of promises that can be thrown in the wastepaper basket immediately following an election.

Such are the direct consequences but the results are even more destructive of democratic practice. In the ease of Labour and its various Left supporters, the exploitation of supposed socialist principle to achieve political power has not only grossly deceived the working class but has proven vitally protective of capitalism in that it offers an image of “socialism” as something which is vitally flawed in practice. Not only has Labour—and, indeed, the Left generally—perverted the nature of Socialism, but they have been as assiduous as the Tories—and the Right generally—in ensuring that real socialists are not afforded the opportunity to challenge their misrepresentation on the electronic soapbox.

Kinnock’s assertion that principle without power is useless is equally valid when stated in reverse: power without principle is not only useless, as the history of Labour governments shows, it is worse since it is destructive of the principles it pretends to have.

Historical proof

Where, we might ask, does this leave the Socialist Party? Our principles are based on the logic of our socialist theory; on the knowledge that human society has developed to the point where the potential exists to provide for the material needs of every human being on the planet; on the assumption that, faced with the ultimate reality of capitalism’s failure to solve the ghastly problems that it creates, human beings will take into their common ownership the means of life; that common ownership, and the abolition of all the wasteful activities that capitalism makes necessary, will permit society to function on the basis of free labour in the production of goods and services and free access to the fruits of that production.

That is the socialist proposition, the root of our socialist principles and the Socialist Party does not seek power for itself to enthrone those principles. We seek to promote and spread a knowledge of Socialism and whether the majority that ultimately takes the required political action to bring about Socialism uses the Socialist Party or some other political vehicle to take power from the political agents of capitalism and establish Socialism is of no consequence to us. Our task will be completed with the achievement of Socialism; politics will disappear as government over people gives way to a straightforward democratic administration of social production and distribution.

The important thing is the historical proof that the record of reformist political parties gives to socialists: capitalism cannot be made to function in the interests of the great majority of people, the working class, who are the real wealth producers. However long it takes for that truth to percolate the consciousness of the working class, for that period we will suffer the social problems that have been the identification marks of capitalism since its inception.

Conversely, until that consciousness begins to take root, the Socialist Party will retain its principles and seek its purpose in the dissemination of those principles.

Richard Montague

Sting in the Tail: Missing the point (1996)

The Sting in the Tail column from the January 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Missing the point

Paul Foot of the SWP, writing in the Guardian (20 November) bemoaned the closure by a Labour council of a day centre in Newcastle.

This had him recalling past arguments with Labour Party members in which they “scorned the luxuries of Utopian socialist visions” (presumably the SWP’s ease) and “boasted of their practical down-to-earth ‘municipal socialism’”, and asked:

  “Where are those arguments now? What is the point of joining the Labour Party if Labour councils are forced to cut the services which their predecessors provided to assist the people who vote Labour? ”

True enough, but by the same token shouldn’t Paul Foot be asking himself what is the point of him and the rest of the SWP urging workers to vole for the Labour Party at every election?


Blacker than black

The Advertising Standards Authority is the in-house watchdog of British advertising. It is supposed to ensure that advertising meets the criteria of honesty, legality and decency. Like most things associated with advertising it is a complete con-trick.

Hunter Marsden, a high-rolling American ad-man who works for the giant J. Walter Thompson agency, is reported in the Observer (5 November) on the present level of duplicity in world-wide advertising as saying:

  "Superiority claims are delicately stitched together by legal wordmeisters, aided by a hairy menagerie of weasel words, mouse type and squirrelly logic."

In other words, to paraphrase Disraeli, “there arc three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and advertising”.


No change there

The conference of the Scottish Young Conservatives in November threw up the usual quota of reactionary spoutings. For example, guest speaker Leslie Sharp, Chief Constable of Strathclyde "delighted the Tory faithful in Edinburgh with a robust attack on the link between poverty and crime, coupled with a strong defence of stiffer prison sentences” (Herald, 27 November).

And conference chairman Murray Roxburgh was loudly cheered by delegates when he blamed the strike by Scottish postal workers who were resisting the imposition of worsened conditions, on “lefty scum” (Teletext, 27 November). Roxburgh insisted that “management must have the right to manage”, meaning that workers must meekly accept whatever bosses throw at them.

However, the Herald also noted that:

   "Not so long ago, this event would have been big enough to take over a large hotel for an entire weekend. On Saturday, barely 70 gathered in a conference room at Murrayfield Stadium in Edinburgh. ”

The conference also showed that although the SYC’s numbers have diminished, their obnoxious outlook certainly has not.


“Middle-class” nonsense

What a lot of daft and contradictory definitions there are of the so-called “middle class”.

In Britain many politicians and academics would have us believe that this middle class is getting bigger and bigger and even constitutes the majority of the population, but in America, Republican congressman F.K. Heineman of North Carolina takes a very different view:

   “When I see someone who is making anywhere from $300,000 to $750,000 a year, that’s middle class,' said Mr Heine man, a former New York City police officer and Raleigh police chief. ‘When I see anyone above that, that’s upper middle class’” (New York Times, 29 October).

The story reveals that the US Census Bureau has just released figures showing that only 5 percent of American households earn more than $109,821 a year, so the percentage earning from $300,000 to $750,000 must be even less.

Going by Heineman’s definition, the American middle class, far from getting bigger, is practically non-existent.


Dear Brutus

In the desperate competition for customers, banks and building societies spend millions of pounds on advertising, marketing gimmicks and giveaways. The Abbey National, though, has surely scraped the bottom of the barrel in its latest gimmick. It is offering a booklet “Your Astrological Guide to a Secure Future”.

It is written by Jonathan Cainer, described as “Britain’s most authoritative astrologer”. This is akin to descriptions like “most pregnant virgin” or “wisest idiot”.

Presumably the Abbey National are only being humorous in this latest gimmick, but given the “success” of predicting the market by the various “experts”, who is to say Cainer will be less accurate?

To understand how capitalism operates workers would be better advised to consult Marx’s Capital than squinting at the stars. As usual. Shakespeare had a helpful couple of lines to say on the subject:

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings. ”

Robert Owen turns in his grave (1996)

From the January 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Readers who feel that the socialist message tends to be swamped by a sea of frenzied capitalist merchandising may have felt a little more optimistic about the situation when the Co-operative Bank announced the arrival of the Robert Owen Visa Credit Card, which was to be “Free for Life”.

“Free for Life” because, the Co-operative Bank explained in their introductory leaflet: “We do, after all have a reputation for innovation.”

This was exciting news; something “Free”, and “for Life”, hardly believable in a capitalist economy.

Did this herald the arrival of a new era in the banking industry? Was some fundamental feature of the current UK banking and credit industry about to be swept away by a credit card which operated in accordance with some innovative idea that the socialist pioneer Robert Owen had advocated in the early 19th century'?

Well, hardly, because a study of the accompanying literature tells us that, although this “innovative” credit card may be “Free for Life”, it attracts a staggering interest rate of 32.5 percent on all cash advances under £100, and a rate of 29.8 percent on over-the-counter purchases.

However, as if to justify this the Cooperative Bank application form informs us that Robert Owen “attempted to create a New Social System among the people This was an attempt that the Co-operative Bank doesn’t take too seriously, as they state on the form that applicants for this new card must be: “Over 25, own their own home, and earn more than £15,000 a year.”

Disenchanted readers who feel that they may now be disqualified from the pleasures to be derived from the possession of a Robert Owen credit card, may be beginning to wonder just what Robert Owen’s New Social System was really all about.

Well, unfortunately for the Co-operative Bank the “New Social System” that Robert Owen hoped to establish not only had no plans for interest rates of 32.5 percent, or banks for that matter, but money itself would in his words, “become useless, unsought for, and will be forever abandoned” (New Moral World, 1842, Part 5).

He goes on to emphasise his hostility towards the use of money, stating that in his new social system “there will, be no money, the cause now of so much oppression and injustice"; and continues his attack on money saying “it is an artificial medium which enables some few to become enormously rich, at the expense of the many, dooming masses of them to the lowest stages of poverty, and degradation, those who produce the real wealth suffering the latter, while those who make the artificial wealth, or money from paper, gold, silver, or copper, enjoy all the advantages at present desirable for real wealth, which they obtain for their artificial wealth”.

“In a rational society, "Robert Owen continues, “money will be abandoned, and full justice will be done to everyone, and everyone will act justly to everyone else ” (Part 5, The New Moral World).

As well as his dislike for the money system Robert Owen held strong views about private property. Again, in the Book of the New Moral World, he states that private property “is now the sole cause of poverty, and its endless crimes, and miseries, over the world, and in principal it is, as unjust as it is unwise in practice”, and “will never exist in a future society”. He goes on to add in his 12th Law for a future “Rational System of Society” that when people are living in harmony together “there shall be no useless private property”.

Robert Owen wrote The Book of The New Moral World in the 1830s, and his other books and speeches played an influential part in the development of socialist thought in the 19th century. He died in 1858 and is buried in Newtown, in Powys, Wales. Quite what he would have felt about a credit card being named in his memory when he made his views on money perfectly clear is not hard to imagine, but unfortunately when you are dead there is not a lot you can do about it.

Stuart Schofield

Greasy Pole: No More Mister Nice Guy (1996)

The Greasy Pole column from the January 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Like watching the sun rise, inch by inch, beyond a distant hill the idea is beginning to dawn that John Major is not, after all, the Very Nice Man he was once supposed to be. Not the simple, relaxed chap you’re pleased to have a chat with over the garden fence or a pint with at the local. Not the concerned family man with the homely wife and the nice kids who do well at school and who are always polite and respectful.

When Major first got the job of Prime Minister, after the men in grey suits had done their duty over Thatcher, it soon became apparent that his background was so obscured as to defeat the most penetrative of media hacks. We were told he came from Brixton, in those innocent days before it gained a reputation for hyperactive police and hyper-reactive rioters. He went to grammar school locally and then failed to become a London Transport bus conductor, which did not seem to have affected his later career at a bank, where he mysteriously scaled the promotion ladder. This must have stood him in good stead when he began to claw his way up the greasy pole of politics, from the local Young Conservatives to MP, to junior minister to Foreign Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Prime Minister.

This was highly unsatisfactory to all those frantically excavating hacks. They could not exhume anything like a scandal about Major, except for still-born stories about a long past relationship with an older woman and a non-existent extramarital affair. Meanwhile Major made soothing declarations about the desire to build a classless society and to lead a nation at ease with itself. A bewildered population began to ask itself whether it could be true: were we about to be governed by a Very Nice Man?

Well, Major himself has answered that question, with evidence that he is as ruthless a political operator as he needs to be. He may lack some of the skills required for this—for example he has not mastered Harold Wilson's knack of never completely leaving all his boats burned—but he is trying hard. Any problem which attracts publicity is explained away as if the past sixteen years had been spent under some other party in government. If necessary ministers who get in trouble are sacked, after an initial period when Major ritually declares they have his complete support.

Poll Tax debacle
This would have been a shock only to those who had failed to appreciate the steely edge of Major's ambition. For example, when Thatcher was confronted with the ominous result of the first leadership ballot in 1990 she turned to the two most powerful people in her cabinet—Douglas Hurd at the Foreign Office and Major at the Exchequer—for support in the second ballot. Hurd agreed, according to Thatcher, "at once and with good grace”. But Major was different. This was the man clearly chosen byThatcher as her eventual successor; it might even be said that he owed it all to her. How did he respond to her, in her hour of need?

  “I asked John to second my nomination. There was a moment's silence. The hesitation was palpable . . . Then he said that if that was what I wanted, yes. Later, when urging my supporters to vote for John for the leadership, I made play of the fact that he did not hesitate. But both of us knew otherwise" (The Downing Street Years).

There are other examples of Major’s careful duplicity. As Financial Secretary to the Treasury and later as Chancellor of the Exchequer he was closely identified with the Poll Tax. From the outset this was a very unpopular measure; multitudes of workers saw it as a blatant attack on their incomes and they showed how they felt with their votes.

It was only when Thatcher had gone and the fact that the Poll Tax was a monumental vote-loser became obvious to all but the most stubborn or stupid of Tories that Major changed his line. During his campaign for the Conservative leadership—and this was partly to undermine Heseltine’s appeal—he promised to review the tax, which really meant to abolish it. It was as if he had never supported it in the first place, just as if the whole mess was someone else’s fault.

Lucky Lamont
That was how it was again over the issue of sterling and the Exchange Rate Mechanism. Again, Major was a supporter of this policy, arguing that it would result in lower interest rates, a stable exchange rate for sterling—and so a big political advantage for the Tories.

Well it didn’t turn out like that and it all came to an end on that September day when interest rates were raised three times within a few hours and the Chancellor of the Exchequer wearily told the assembled media in Downing Street that sterling had been withdrawn from the ERM.

This withdrawal was, apparently, in order to achieve the very conditions which membership of the ERM was to bring in the first place. It was such an abject collapse of a policy that it might even have persuaded some politician—the Chancellor, the Prime Minister—to confess their impotence to control capitalism and fall on their political sword. What happened was that Norman Lamont, who was Major’s choice as Chancellor, took all the blame. He it was who stood mumbling into the microphone in Downing Street and he, some time later, who was sacked by Major. Again, it was almost as if the policies had nothing to do with Major. Not surprisingly, Lamont now sulks on the back benches, sniping at Major’s Teflon-coated image.

So far Major has got away with such breathtaking betrayals of what he claimed were his principles. If the day comes when he is finally, unavoidably, exposed as yet another political trickster we may be sure that we shall be encouraged to believe it matters whether our leaders are nice or nasty. We will be told we can really have a classless society, at ease with itself, if only we have a nice, unassuming, sensible person in charge at Number Ten. When that happens we should remember the cynical, disreputable history of capitalism of which John Major is a part.

Ivan

The Material and the Tangible (1996)

Theatre Review from the January 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Park by Botho Strauss. The Pit Theatre, Barbican Complex.

The engine of modern capitalism is commodity production. Goods are produced and services made available because it is profitable to do so. “Things” are a potential source of profit with the result that capitalism elevates the material and the tangible to positions of exclusive supremacy. That which is measurable and which has currency in dollars, marks and pounds, etc. is—by definition—more important than attributes and experiences which are not so quantifiable.

Capitalism is disconcerted by beauty, truth, dignity, generosity of spirit and so on, because these are intangible and elusive. You may have to pay ten pounds to buy a record of a Mozart symphony and perhaps a million times that amount for a landscape paining by Renoir, but in neither case does the cost reflect the beauty sublimed in the experience of listening to the music or looking at the painting. On the contrary it is the scarcity of the two artefacts which is crucial. If only one record of a Mozart symphony was available but several million paintings by Renoir existed, we would expect the prices of the record and the paintings to reflect these facts. Capitalist economics might now make the record a million times more expensive than any one of the paintings. To paraphrase Marx: in capitalist society their price is related to scarcity and not to intrinsic value.

What value can be attached to a Mozart symphony, a Renoir painting, the exhilaration of a sunny day in May, a mother’s love, a teacher’s power to enthuse, the integrity and conviction of a stunning piece of acting, the sense of being a respected member of a team, congeniality, generosity and fraternity? Capitalist economics has nothing to say about such matters. It is as though they were part of another world—a nether world remote from the “real” world of buying and selling and the market. Because they are not the subject of commodity exchange they are—in capitalism’s terms— capricious and unimportant, insubstantial and trivial. Yet for most people they are the essence of what makes life worthwhile.

I was reminded of such matters by Botho Strauss’s play The Park, which is loosely based on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. The Park is an enigmatic, often confusing, play. It is made the more inscrutable because Strauss also makes reference to a Greek mythology and the story of Pasephae who, like Titania in A Midsummer’s Night's Dream, falls in love with an animal, and then (unlike Titania) she and her half-man/ half-bull offspring, the Minotaur, are hidden by her enraged husband in the Labyrinth. Perhaps Strauss is drawing deliberate parallels and for this reason the story is also labyrinthine? But whatever, it would certainly help people who are unfamiliar with Shakespeare’s play if they read a digest of the story before viewing Strauss’s play.

Oberon and Titania appear in The Park as flashers: Shakespeare’s lovers are a pair of ill-matched, mean-minded bourgeois couple; Puck is a latter-day artist intent on making a killing: the fairies are homeless punks, and the mechanicals rapacious businessmen. But if the story line is enigmatic, it is very clear what Strauss is saying. A society obsessed with markets, with buying and selling, with profits before all else, transforms humankind, and in doing turns potentially creative, altruistic and sociable people into materialistic monsters.

C. Wright Mills, the American sociologist, suggested that a key question to ask about any society is: "What varieties of men and women now prevail in this society and this period? . . .  In what ways are they selected and formed, liberated and repressed, made sensitive and blunted?" (C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination). In this dense, complex, often funny and always interesting play it is very clear what kind of people Strauss sees as being "formed" in western capitalist society and. by implication, the revolutionary potential that exists for a different kind of society people by different kinds of human beings. The Park is exhilaratingly staged in the enveloping intimacy of The Pit. If the last few minutes are especially inscrutable the play is presented with such great skill and panache that these last moments did not spoil what for me was a splendidly iconoclastic evening.

Michael Gill

Not a Private Matter (1996)

Pamphlet Review from the January 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Foundations of Modern Humanism by William Mcllroy (Sheffield Humanist Society. £1.)

The Socialist Party doesn’t take the position that religion is a private matter, beyond rational criticism. All religions have something to say about how we should live our lives on this earth and, when looked at dispassionately, what they do say is thoroughly objectionable. Of course not all religions say exactly the same thing. They can be viewed as a spectrum: at the one end there are religions such as Taoism which are more philosophies of life than religion proper. Moving through the spectrum we find numerous religions, each offering salvation only through their God, and at the other end we find the three main religions of the twentieth century: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

In Britain the most important of the specifically atheist organisations is, and has been for over a century, the National Secular Society. Its monthly journal. the Freethinker, is the best of its type and well worth reading for the ammunition it provides against religious superstition. Bill Mcllroy was for many years its editor and is the author of this pithy pamphlet He shows how, as a general rule, religion upholds the existing state of affairs. For instance, take this little ditty penned by a bishop's wife:

"The rich man in his castle
The poor man at his gate
God made them, high or lowly
And order’d their estate"

His explanation of the foundations of modern humanism, as a rejection of religious beliefs, is a history of the doings of liberal reformers. The writings of Thomas Paine is the most obvious example (although Paine himself was not an atheist). As is usual in this sort of account there is no mention of the socialist argument against religion. But it is from Marx that we have the most useful way of looking at religion—as a narcotic growing out of the material circumstances of life. For humanists, criticism of religion is a process towards the eventual triumph of reason. But they ignore the material conditions which give rise to superstition:

     "Consequently, in his worship of the ‘idea' the bourgeois freethinker is, like the Christian, attributing miraculous powers to the figments of men's brains" (Socialism and Religion, Socialist Party pamphlet, 1911).

On the new basis of material security and social co-operation, provided by socialism, individuals can gain a sense of meaning in their lives, with hope for a future free from the dead hand of religious belief. Rather than being abolished, religion can be expected to (as Engels said about something else) “wither away”.

Lew Higgins

50 Years Ago: The Nationalisation of Mining Royalties (1996)

The 50 Years Ago column from the January 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Another Great Labour Party Victory
“Six property owners have been paid more than £1,000,000 each by the State for the coal which lies beneath their estates. The long campaign to nationalise these coal royalties ended yesterday with the report of the Coal Commissioners . . .  At the time of the Sankey Commission . . . the most extensive royalty' owners . . .  were the Duke of Northumberland, the Marquis of Bute, Lord Tredegar, the Duke of Hamilton and the Earl of Ellesmere.” “In addition to the four unnamed owners who got more than a million, six received from £500,000 to £1,000,000 each and twenty-eight between £250,000 and £499,000. More than 11,000 claimants had less than £1,000 each. More than 2,400 go nothing.” —(Daily Express, October 31st, 1945.)

Which shows that nationalisation with compensation does not even change the personnel—the individual relationships of the capitalist class.

Nationalisation without compensation would still not be in the “public service”; it would merely transfer ownership from its previous owners to the investors in Government (State) Bonds.

[Article by “Horatio” in January 1946 Socialist Standard]

Now here isn't the news . . . (1996)

From the January 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Under the above title, John Madeley writes in the Observer (26 November):

"If 100 jumbo jets crashed tomorrow, killing all on board, the world would be united in mourning, but every day, around 35,000 people die of hunger-related diseases, almost without mention. This year, global production of grain is expected to reach 1.9 billion tons. Evenly distributed, that would give every man, woman and child about a kilo a day. But food is not fairly shared; it goes to those who can afford it or have the means to grow it 'While the poor go hungry, £1.5 million is spent every minute of every day on armaments,’ says Margaret Lynch, director of War on Want 'Most countries listed here [Somalia, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Central African Republic, Sierra Leone, Haiti, Rwanda, Malawi], generate more profit for the arms industry than they ever receive in aid.' Nearly 40 percent of the hungry are Africans, 20 percent are Asians, and seven out of 10 are female."

The fact is that food, like everything else in our present system of society, is not produced because people need it, or are starving, but to make a profit. Moreover, farmers throughout the world are, and have been for most of this century, paid or subsidised either not to produce food, or even to destroy that which has already been produced, if governments or groups of governments such as the European Union, consider it more profitable in the short or long run to do so.

Unlike John Madeley, socialists do not advocate the even distribution of, say, grain or any other foodstuff. Such a proposal is quite utopian and impracticable. Our objective is a society wherein the land and all the productive forces are commonly owned and democratically administered by and in the interests of humanity as a whole; and where food, and all other things necessary for life, are produced solely for the satisfaction of people’s self-determined needs. Agrarian reform, handouts by charities and the like, such as War on Want, are sadly futile and doomed to failure. Only a clean sweep, a completely revolutionary change of society, will solve the problem of world hunger—and the sooner the better. 

Peter E. Newell

At the mercy of global capitalism (1996)

From the January 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Workers in developing countries, even those with vast natural resources such as Brazil, face a future of insecurity, destitution and repression. There is simply no way out within the capitalist order. For them, the establishment of Socialism really is a matter of life and death.

Brazil originated as a slave society. The Portuguese who ruled it from the sixteenth century saw its natural resources—brazil wood, sugar and gold— as the basis for massive fortunes. But the native inhabitants, who mostly lived as hunter-gatherers, were unwilling to work for pitiful wages in appalling conditions. The solution was to enslave the native peoples, and slave-hunting itself became a profitable business. When even this failed to produce a large and reliable enough workforce, slaves were imported from Africa—they had the advantage of immunity to European diseases in addition to their working abilities. As many as three-and-a-half-million slaves were shipped from Africa to Brazil, making this an important, if often neglected, aspect of the slave trade.

By the time Brazil achieved independence from Portugal in 1822, coffee was becoming the biggest export. Independence served the interests of the Brazilian ruling class, who were no longer tied to trading through Portugal, but made little if any difference to the lives of ordinary people. As elsewhere, slavery ceased to be the best method for extracting surplus labour, and by 1888, when slavery was abolished in Brazil, Brazilian peasants and new immigrants from southern Europe were working as wage labourers. Besides coffee, there was a boom in rubber production in the north-cast of the country in the second half of the nineteenth century, but this ended when rubber plants were smuggled out to south-east Asia and vast rubber plantations set up there.

For the first few decades of the present century, Brazil continued to be run as an export economy, dependent on the lion's share of the world coffee market. Imports were mainly of consumer goods for the rich, and machines. Brazilian industry was inefficient, protected from competition behind high tariff barriers. But the slump of the 1930s drastically reduced the world demand for coffee, and produced a crisis in Brazil's economy. A series of dictatorships and military governments failed to make a success of the policy of import-substituting industrialisation introduced into Brazil, as into much of Latin America, after 1945.

In the 1960s and 1970s, however, Brazil experienced annual growth rates of 10 percent, making it now the world's eighth largest economy (in terms of GDP). Coffee remains the main export, but fruit and some industrial products are also important. For a handful of rich capitalists and land-owners, things have worked out very well, but for the mass of ordinary Brazilians all this economic “progress" is a myth.

The expansion of manufacturing has led to an enormous increase in urban population, and vast shanty towns (favelas) have grown up around the main Brazilian cities. These offer few facilities of any kind, and are massively overcrowded, with over a million people living in favelas in Sao Paulo alone. In the whole country, one-third of houses have no piped water, and according to one report 80 percent of those going to casualty departments in public hospitals are suffering from illnesses caused by poor sanitary conditions. Under-five mortality rates are getting worse, certainly in some areas. Over 30 million people (one-fifth of the population) suffer from chronic malnutrition, while the richest one percent get 14 percent of the national income.

Child labour

While the rich enjoy their exclusive beaches and Swiss bank accounts, the overwhelming majority of the population live in fear and squalor. Violence and terrorism abound, directed especially against street children in the big cities and favelas. Child labour is rife, and perhaps half-a-million girls and women are forced to work as prostitutes. And despite its formal abolition over a century ago, slavery still exists, with thousands of workers in debt to their bosses and unable to leave their jobs on pain of death. This is particularly common in the Amazon, where workers are transported to clear the forest and make way for multinational-owned plantations.

For centuries, in fact, Amazonia has been seen as ripe for exploitation, whether by the Portuguese colonists, the Brazilian rulers or capitalists from abroad. Earlier this century, Henry Ford spent millions in an unsuccessful attempt to start a giant rubber plantation there. Besides logging—thus helping to destroy the rainforest—one of the current preoccupations of the government is of the Amazon as a source of hydroelectric power, with vast dams under construction or on the drawing- board. This devastates the lives of those who dwell in the forest, including the few remaining Indian bands. Resistance is met by violence and repression—the murder of rubber-tapper Chico Mendes in 1988 is only the best-known example.

Brazil has always been at the mercy of global capitalism and the interests of those who run it, and no Brazilian government has been able to administer the system in the way that it wants. The foreign debt is now a staggering $150 billion; interest payments were suspended [in] 1982 when it was little more than half this amount. Attempts to gain some control over the country’s helter-skelter economy, with inflation sometimes beating 2,000 percent a year, have included two introductions of new currencies, the latest in 1994. But nothing helps. Earlier this year, import tariffs were hiked on a range of "luxury" goods, including cars and televisions, to try and reduce the trade deficit—not that this tariff increase affects the vast majority of the population, who are in no position to afford such items.

Of course such a system has not run without resistance. Many slaves escaped over the decades and created slave sanctuaries, while the great Cabanagem rebellion in the 1830s showed that the rulers could not have everything their own way. Exploitation of the Amazon has led to much resistance to loggers and dam-builders, while workers have struck in a number of industries after the latest currency reform led to lower wages. In May this year troops seized control of government oil refineries in a conflict with striking oil-workers. Cardoso, the new president, recently vetoed an increase in the minimum wage: at £58 a month, this remains well below what is needed to support a family. Cardoso tried to set a good example by taking a 25 percent wage cut himself, but then his own salary, at £7,000 a month, is a little higher than the minimum.

Paul Bennett

They say, we say (1996)

The 'A Word In Your Ear' column from the January 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Advertised on some carriages of the London Underground is a new spoof book called More Politically Correct Bedtime Stories. The assumption behind the joke, intended to arouse howls of tittering derision from dopey dupes of the tabloid press, is that the world has gone totally mad because these days people are generally a little more careful than they used to be about using language which is insensitively offensive. The term "political correctness" was not invented by blacks who objected to being called niggers and wogs, women who found rape jokes unfunny or disabled people who were uneasy at the use of the term spastic as a slogan of playground abuse. It was invented by sour and miserable types, angered by the fact that they are losing the battle for the control of popular language. So, who are these bores who persist in this tedious campaign of whining against what they, and nobody else, call "political correctness"?

Firstly, there are those within the political elite who for decades have assumed that language, like everything else on the earth, belongs to them. They have traditionally believed that they effectively owned words; do they not even call it the Queen's English? (Who wants their children growing up speaking with the stilted, pompous aloofness of that parasitic relic?) These arrogant monopolists of speech have been quite happy for many years to twist language into their own politically poisonous notion of "correctness". So, for the indiscriminate murder of war read "defence" and for kicking workers out of their homes read "repossession" and for throwing workers out of jobs read "rationalisation" and for beating up strikers read "public order" and for pauperism read "negative equity". These are the liars and frauds of language who propagandise endlessly to us about "the markets wanting lower wages" and "the markets being unhappy unless welfare expenditure is cut", when the "markets" is in fact simply the politically correct code word for them and their class interests. As they have twisted language, so they have done their best to liquidate those words which are a threat to them. So, in early 1991 Andrew Neil, the Murdoch messenger boy, announced on the radio that nobody but a lunatic would ever use the word socialism again. They do their best to discredit terms like class, and try to suggest that concepts like racism and sexism are mere figments of the fevered imaginations of people who think they are being oppressed.

Then there are the dead and the dying, largely readers of the Express or Mail, whose resentment against all change takes the form of a more-to-be-pitied-than-condemned conservative neurosis. "We always used to call poofters queers when I was a boy — why should we lose a perfectly good word like gay so that they can have it?" This is a linguistic siege mentality, the reaction of the frightened, mean-minded and disorientated who had no sooner got used to the awful idea of women having the vote than now they must psychologically adjust to traditionally disrespected workers being treated, at least on the cheapest level of language, without offence if not with respect.

Then there are the committed bigots. These are to be distinguished from the first group: the political elite whose possession of language was not a product of intended malice, but of ideological delusion. The bigots are people who take the view that there is something harmless about hate-speech. They think that jokes about smelly Asians and mean Scots and thick Irishmen and all women wanting to be raped by pot-bellied lager-louts are either good harmless fun or, if not, the kind of harmful fun which is perfectly harmless to them because the objects of their verbal hatred have difficulty in defending themselves. What has happened — not everywhere, not fast enough, and not always in the most appropriate way — is that defenders of hate-speak are being discomforted by a society made up increasingly of younger people who, confused as they are about lots of things (including the system which exploits them), are no longer happy for hatred against whole groups to be part of their daily vocabulary. Where Baden-Powell taught boys to speak of "nig-nogs" and to fear girls, there is now a movement the other way. This is not to say that there are not still plenty of young dummies who prefer to subscribe to the legacy of verbal insensitivity of their stupid parents or of Bernard Manning videos, but these are a declining and increasingly conspicuous, embarrassing number.

The decline of verbal division within the working class is clearly an irritant to certain people. Smug little public schoolboys who believe that language is what you learn at Eton and that wage slaves who are afraid to say "fuck" but happy to say "nuke" are the best kind, are simply bad losers. The unsuccessful campaign against what they call political correctness is no more than the sulk of the oppressors (so much more pleasing to observe than the sigh of the oppressed).

But we socialists won't mince our words: we don't say that these captains of industry will in the course of the constitutional process meet with a hearty challenge — we say: Watch out you thieving parasites because it won't only be the language you've arrogantly stolen, but the world you've thieved, which is going to be taken away from you, leaving you somewhat revolutionary-challenged. 

Steve Coleman

Ecology & Socialism (1996)

From the January 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

According to a recent pamphlet the only reaction socialists have ever had to green issues is to jump on the bandwagon of popular concern for the environment for our own ends. This article is the first of our two-part reply.

There is a yawning chasm between a politics of ecology and that of all major traditions of socialist theory and practice. This is the case both at the level of values — anthropocentrism versus an Earth-centred ethics — and of policy — especially limits-to-growth versus expansionism.

So writes Sandy Irvine in a recent polemical pamphlet Red Sails in the Sunset - An Ecopolitical critique of the Socialist Inheritance.Published by the Campaign for Political Ecology, a conservative-minded group that has broken away from the Green Party on the grounds that it has become too left-wing by advocating social improvements that the Earth can't afford. Irvine is also editor of a magazine called Real World, a title chosen to convey that all those who think in terms of improving people's standard of living, whether by reform or by revolution, are hopeless Utopians because the Earth can't sustain this; in the real world only sacrifices, cuts and belt-tightening are on the agenda.

Socialism and Socialism
Irvine has his definition of socialism: "what was said and done by the majority of those who have called themselves socialists ". That's a possible definition, but in that case we're not socialists since in Britain the majority of those who have called themselves socialists have been supporters and members either of the Labour Party or of the Communist Party and the various Trotskyist groups. For these people socialism has meant state ownership (nationalisation) and/or state intervention, what we would call state capitalism, and it is essentially against these policies as a way of solving the current ecological crisis that Irvine is arguing. Since we have never advocated or supported nationalisation and state control we would appear not to be involved. However, Irvine specifically lumps us in with the rest of them since "for a taste of British socialist politics" he specifically recommends people to read the Socialist Standard — we can agree with that of course — alongside, among others, Socialist Worker, Militant, New Left Review, Marxism Today (a bit difficult, since it no longer exists) and Living Marxism. He also mentions that he once debated against us.

Naturally, we object to being lumped in with these advocates of state capitalism, but Irvine attempts to deal with this objection in advance by saying that "there always will be, of course, those whose response to any criticism of socialist theory or practice, is the mantra 'but that's not true socialism '. At this point, words become meaningless ".

We do indeed say "but that's not true socialism" since, in our view, socialism does have a definite logical and historical meaning. But this doesn't mean that words become meaningless. The word "socialism" rather becomes meaningless if everyone who calls themself a socialist is accepted as being a socialist. Irvine doesn't quite go that far, but only argues that socialism is whatever a majority of those call themselves socialists have stood for. But he can't have it both ways: he can't include us in his criticism of socialism when we are not part of that majority.

Maybe the definition of socialism we adhere to has become (thanks largely to the 70-year period of rule of Leninist State capitalism in Russia) a minority one, but up until the first world war it was probably the majority view: that socialism is a system of society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production, where the state and government over people will give way to democratic self-administration and where the money-market-profit economy, will give way to production solely and directly to satisfy human needs without buying and selling. They certainly had differences about how to get there but this was what Marx, Engels, Kropotkin, William Morris, Bebel, Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and even Lenin and Stalin (before 1917) and Keir Hardie (some of the time) meant by the term.

Irvine is mistaken in another of his references to us. One of his points is that those who call themselves socialists have had three types of reaction to the issue of environmental destruction: (1) disinterest (continuing to shout "the right to work", "no cuts", and "kick out the Tories"); (2) opportunistic exploitation (jumping on the bandwagon started by the Greens) and (3) denunciation of environmentalists (for being Not-In-My-Backyarders and people with a comfortable standard of living who urge poorer people not to increase their consumption, etc.).

To illustrate the second type of reaction he writes in a footnote:

"After the success of the Greens in the 1989 Euroelections, there was a sudden flurry of meetings up and down the country with titles like 'Environmental Crisis —the Socialist Answer'. I took part in one such debate with the Socialist Party of Great Britain in Newcastle at that time."

The facts are otherwise. The debate took place on 1 June 1987, the title was "Green Revolution or Socialist Revolution?", and we had our own candidate standing against, among others, the Green Party in Newcastle in the 1989 Euro-elections. In any event, someone who, like Irvine, was a Trotskyist in the 1960s and 70s (as he himself reveals) and a Green in the 1980s and 90s is not in any position to lecture others about swaying with the wind or following the herd.

Who's a bandwagoner?
Long before environmentalism began to become a big issue in the 1960s, members of the Socialist Party had been aware of the problems of pollution. One reason for this is that we are materialists and recognise that humans are material beings who depend entirely for their survival on what they get from their material environment, particularly food. Without being so simplistic as those 19th century German materialists who declared "man ist wass man isst", ("one is what one eats") and who attempted to explain human behaviour in terms of what people ate — of course, it is social factors that are the most important ones involved in human behaviour — many Socialist Party members realised that what you ate was bound to have some effect on your health, and so were concerned about the chemical pollution of food. Many became vegetarians or food reformers of one kind or another. One (Horace Jarvis) wrote a book Food Faking Exposed that was published in 1958.

When the writings on ecology of the American anarcho-communist (and another ex-Trotskyist) Murray Bookchin became easily available in Britain in the late 1960s, we immediately recognised the importance of what he was saying. He then wrote under the name of Lewis Herber (we had already noticed his article "The Problem of Chemicals in Food" that appeared in 1952 in the Contemporary Issues, a magazine produced by some former German Trotskyists who had come to reject Leninism). Two of his articles, "Ecology and Revolutionary Thought" and "Towards A Liberatory Technology", both written in 1965 (but not published in Britain until 1966 and 1967 respectively) circulated amongst Socialist Party members with the second being commented on favourably (both are included in Bookchin's book Post-Scarcity Anarchism).

Here was someone who was expressing much of what we thought ourselves about the matter. That not only was pollution and environmental destruction caused by the profit system but also that it was the science of ecology that explained the processes by which pollution and environmental destruction resulted from releasing waste substances into the rest of nature at a rate and in amounts that it could not cope with; that science and technology, far from causing the problem, provided the knowledge and techniques that could be used to solve it given the right social framework; and, last but not least, that this framework was a less centralised society that produced to meet human needs not for profit, which could only be done in a stateless, moneyless communist society. Naturally, Bookchin being an anarchist, we had major disagreements with how he envisaged the establishment of such a society. (He wrote another article, criticising the vanguardists, called "Listen Marxist!", but which should have been called "Listen Leninist!". Our reply, "Listen Anarchist!", appeared in the March 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard.)

In June 1971 we published an article "Ecology: the First Decade" which ended:

Why does pollution occur? A small amount is due to ignorance or miscalculation. A small amount is unavoidable given present technology and population. But the immense majority is due to the economic network. People pollute because it is in their economic interests to do so.

It is sometimes claimed, though, that the problem arises from a wrong attitude to nature. This has some truth, though it will not do as a complete explanation. The attitude to nature, and the economic system, are interlinked. The present growth of ecological awareness is full of hope, for it encourages a mentality which considers total processes rather than isolated fragments.

So, if we jumped on any bandwagon (which we didn't), it would have to have been at the very latest towards the end of the 1960s — well before the Ecology Party (now the Green Party) was formed in 1973 and at a time when Irvine himself was going around shouting "no cuts" and "kick out the Tories" and even "Labour to power on a socialist programme."

Ecology is a science — the study of the inter-relations between living organisms and between them and their non-living environment — and, as we pointed out in the 1971 quote above, one that emphasises treating the subject matter as a whole and recognising the interdependence and
interconnectedness of the various parts as well as the fact of continuous change. This approach is in fact the best approach for all fields of scientific study. It is known to socialists as the dialectical approach and, as ecology happens to emphasise this more than some other sciences, this was an additional reason as to why it appealed to socialists when knowledge about ecology became more widespread in the 1960s.

But ecology is a science and not a political doctrine. This was why the original name of the Green Party — the Ecology Party — was absurd. They might just as validly, and only slightly less ridiculously, have called themselves the Chemistry Party or the Biology Party. It was also rather arrogant, in claiming that the science of ecology gave exclusive backing to their policies, which after all were only reformist policies to be applied within the profit system (more anti-pollution laws and investment, and other legislative and tax changes).

Adam Buick

(Next month we conclude our reply to Irvine's criticisms.)