Marx, Co-operatives and Capitalism (2014)

Book Review from the January 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

The recent failure of the co-operative bank and its rescue by hedge funds seems an apt time to review Richard Wolff’s latest book, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism (Haymarket Books), which advocates co-operatives as the way towards economic democracy for the working class.   Wolff rejects the label ‘co-operative’, perhaps because of its historical baggage, and chooses another term, ‘workers self-directed enterprises’ (WSDEs), to describe what he advocates.  In practice, though, what Wolff advocates is indistinguishable from the historical aims of the co-operative movement to re-distribute profit amongst its members.  Wolff is also an open advocate for long-established co-operative projects such as Mondragon in Spain.  Wolff’s aims, though, run deeper than support for extending the popularity of co-operatives as presently understood.  What Wolff seeks to do in Democracy at Work is to redefine working-class co-operative production as socialism in action:

  ‘ . . . in a socialist economy, workers – who produce the surplus – themselves appropriate and distribute the surplus . . .  socialism and communism are differentiated from capitalism in terms of being non-exploitative, since the producers of surpluses also appropriate and distribute them.’ (p.105)

The case against regarding co-operatives as a definition of, or even a route to, socialism is best dealt with by quoting from Wolff’s recent book where he sets out how his workers self-directed firms may co-exist with other capitalist firms:

  ‘WSDEs and capitalist enterprises will . . .  manage their challenges and disappointments differently. Consider a WSDE troubled by the problem of falling revenues (because of lack of demand, technological backwardness, or shortage of inputs). That WSDE could well decide to lower individual wages and salaries and thereby enlarge the surplus available to solve the problem (via advertising, installing advanced equipment, securing new input sources, and so on). The workers who collectively lowered their individual wages would be the same workers who received and the used the enlarged surplus to solve the problem.  In contrast, workers in a capitalist enterprise would more likely resist such a solution since other people – the capitalists who exploit them – would receive and decide what to do with any extra surplus realized by lowering individual wages.  Distrust accumulated from conflicts and struggles between capitalists and workers would contribute to such a result.  Thus WSDEs and capitalist enterprises would likely find and implement different responses to similar enterprise problems.’

Wolff is, of course, describing the actions not of two different types of social organisation (one allegedly socialist and one capitalist) but of two models of capitalist firm.  The solutions to the problems faced by the different types of firm are not different solutions but the same solution.  The difference is that one in scenario the solution (cutting wages, increasing intensity of labour and mechanisation) is enforced by the workers as a collective employer on themselves and in the other scenario enforced by a single employer owner or board of directors.  

Wolff’s incredible suggestion is that capitalism run by the workers would avoid the conflict between an employing class and an employed class – the problem is cured, the conflict resolved, by the workers becoming their own employer.  It will be quite clear to anyone with a cursory acquaintance with the with the work of Karl Marx that Wolff’s cure for capitalism is quite different from anything that Marx worked for or that could reasonably be derived from his writings.  However, this is precisely what Wolff claims for his WSDEs – that they are derived from Marxian economic theory:

  ‘The alternative economic system that begins to emerge in Marx’s writings differs from capitalism in how it organises the production and distribution of the surplus. . . . [In WSDEs] it is the workers –and not a separate, small group of persons, as in capitalism – who play the key roles of appropriating and distributing the surpluses they generate in production. The producers and appropriators of the surplus are then identical…’ (p.105)

Here we must beware of  a Wolff in Marxian clothing as Wolff’s ‘surplus theory’ supplants Marxian analysis.  To prove the point let’s take a quick look at what Marx actually said about co-operatives in his own lifetime.  Marx was enthusiastic about the emergence of co-operatives and what they portended for capitalism.  Writing for the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA) in 1864, he wrote:

   ‘The value of these great social experiments cannot be overrated. By deed instead of by argument, they have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands . . .’

Again for the IWMA in 1866:

  ’We acknowledge the co-operative movement as one of the transforming forces of the present society based upon class antagonism. Its great merit is to practically show, that the present pauperising, and despotic system of the subordination of labour to capital can be superseded by the republican and beneficent system of the association of free and equal producers.’ 

In Volume 3 of Capital Marx argued of co-operatives that ‘the antithesis between capital and labour is overcome within them, if at first only by way of making the associated labourers into their own capitalist, i.e., by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labour.’

However, in each case Marx also described the limitations of co-operatives:

  ‘ . . . however . . .  excellent in principle and however useful in practice, co-operative labour, if kept within the narrow circle of the casual efforts of private workmen, will never be able to arrest the growth in geometrical progression of monopoly, to free the masses, nor even to perceptibly lighten the burden of their miseries. . . .  To save the industrious masses, co-operative labour ought to be developed to national dimensions, and, consequently, to be fostered by national means. Yet the lords of the land and the lords of capital will always use their political privileges for the defence and perpetuation of their economic monopolies. So far from promoting, they will continue to lay every possible impediment in the way of the emancipation of labour. . . . To conquer political power has, therefore, become the great duty of the working classes.’ (IWMA 1864) 

  ‘Restricted, however, to the dwarfish forms into which individual wages slaves can elaborate it by their private efforts, the co-operative system will never transform capitalist society. To convert social production into one large and harmonious system of free and co-operative labour, general social changes are wanted, changes of the general conditions of society, never to be realised save by the transfer of the organised forces of society, viz., the state power, from capitalists and landlords to the producers themselves.’ (IWMA 1866) 

  ‘The co-operative factories of the labourers themselves represent within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system’ (Capital, Vol.3)

So Marx was saying that workers taking control of their own productive work processes, of organising co-operatively in firms, appeared to be a positive reaction on the part of workers to private capitalism.  As such it was a source of growing confidence for the working class, proof that the historically progressive role of private capitalists had come to an end:

  ‘Co-operative factories furnish proof that the capitalist has become no less redundant as a functionary in production as he himself, looking down from his high perch, finds the big landowner redundant.’ (Capital, Vol. 3)

Of itself, though, co-operatives represented an accommodation of workers to capitalism and not a social transformation.  Through the experience of engaging in co-operative enterprises Marx believed that workers would come to realise their limitations as a force for social change and grasp the need for political action in order to socialise production generally.  From Marx’s viewpoint in the middle of the second half of the nineteenth-century this was probably a reasonable, if optimistic, assessment.  By the early twentieth-century, however, it was far clearer that co-operatives were not evolving into a revolutionary response to capitalism.  Instead they were being seen by some ex-Marxian socialists such as Eduard Bernstein as proof that capitalism was slowly evolving towards socialism from within, that revolutionary political action was not required. 

A hundred years ago these arguments took place around the debate in the labour movement as to whether reform or revolution was the way towards socialism.  Today we face similar arguments from Richard Wolff but from a different direction.  Between the early Marxian socialist movement and today occurred the state capitalist revolutions in Russia, China, Cuba and so on.  In rightly rejecting these state capitalist political models, radicals such as Wolff (influenced by post-modernism) have unfortunately felt the need to dispense with the materialist conception of history, arguing it to be irrevocably determinist.  However, rather than leaving Marx behind Wolff engages in the mystifying process of appropriating Marxian clothing for his co-operative strategy for social change.  If there is little enough merit in Wolff’s arguments in Democracy at Work for co-operatives as a route to meaningful economic democracy, they also lacks integrity in attempting to associate WSDEs with Marxian economics.

Colin Skelly

Satanic Mills (2014)

Book Review from the January 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Spindleopolis: Oldham in 1913. Alan Fowler and Terry Wyke, Oldham Council and Manchester Metropolitan University £3.95.

A century ago Oldham, with a population of 150,000, was the world’s leading town for the spinning of cotton, with 10 percent of all the cotton spindles in existence. There were also thousands of looms for weaving, and large factories that produced textile machinery, such as Platt Brothers. The townscape was dominated by smoke from the chimneys of the coal-fired mills, though the more recent ones were powered by electricity.

The mills were very profitable, most paying an annual dividend of eight percent. The mill-owners, of course, lived in more scenic surroundings away from the noise and smoke and the pavements made dangerous and unpleasant from the habit of public spitting. Oldham apparently had a reputation as a prosperous town (which can only mean in comparative terms). Children worked full-time from 14 years, and from 12 they split their time between work and school. Many married women worked in the mills, and it was only the combined wages of parents and children that kept workers’ heads above water.

Housing was often expensive and overcrowded, but home-ownership was surprisingly widespread, with about one house in three owned or being bought by its occupants. An enlightening aside is that workers’ houses were increasingly being built with front doors that contained letter boxes. Holidays were mainly the annual ‘wakes week’, usually featuring a stay in Blackpool.

Workers organised themselves in unions such as the Oldham Spinners. Politically, the town veered between supporting Liberals and Conservatives (Winston Churchill was MP 1900-06). Sadly, the major event of 1913 for many residents was the visit of the king and queen in July.

The First World War disrupted the cotton trade, and enabled Japan and other countries to take over the markets once served by Oldham and other Lancashire towns. The cotton industry gradually declined, mills were closed, and Fred Dibnah found a kind of fame demolishing their chimneys on TV.

This booklet was prepared to accompany an exhibition ‘When Cotton was King’ at Gallery Oldham. It includes some superb contemporary cartoons by Sam Fitton from the Cotton Factory Times. 

Paul Bennett

Material World: Myth of Peaceful Buddhism (2014)

The Material World Column from the January 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many have a soft spot for Buddhism as a religion and it frequently escapes criticism. After all, it is a religion where the belief in gods is not a necessary pre-requisite. The popular conception is that all Buddhists are peaceful, simply by virtue of the fact that they call themselves Buddhists. Nothing could be further from the truth. States where Buddhism is the dominant tradition have engaged in many wars and other conflicts over the past centuries. And Buddhist monks have a long tradition of supporting kings and warlords in their conflicts. Particularly in south-east Asia, Buddhism has been the religion allegedly followed by many feudal rulers, in the form of an hierarchical organised religion. Buddhism holds a certain amount of political influence in Myanmar (Burma), Thailand and Sri Lanka.

Buddhists are just like people of other faiths: subject to desire, anger, and ignorance. Buddhism differs only in that it offers the promise of freedom from desire, anger and ignorance to those who seriously practise. Many so-called Buddhists do not engage in serious practice. The thing about these ‘peaceful religions’ is often a product of the Western imagination, the idea of these far-off people living these incredibly peaceful and wise lives.

Buddhism certainly has much within its precepts about pacifism but as with the Christian crusaders or Islamist militants violence has been justified in the name of a higher good. Buddhist rulers and monks have been no exception. Any religion sooner or later enters into a pact with state power. Buddhist monks looked to kings for support, patronage and order and kings looked to monks to provide the popular legitimacy that only they confer. When Buddhism has become an established religion and a theocracy you have as brutal a feudal despotism as any other, for instance, the monastic version of Buddhism practiced in Tibet, Lamaism. Until recently the Dalai Lama was in effect head of state, not simply a religious leader. This often led to political rather than theological disputes with other leading religious Lamas.

Buddhist nation states have historically sought to use Buddhist doctrine to justify war. The links between Zen Buddhism and samurai warrior culture were partly responsible for the collusion of Zen and Japanese militarism in the 1930s and 1940s. For several years Japanese jingoism seized Zen, and its teachings were twisted and corrupted to excuse killing. Zen institutions not only supported Japanese military aggression but raised money to manufacture war planes and weapons.

Tamils are Hindus and they constitute a majority in Northern Sri Lanka. The Sinhalese are Buddhist and have been perfectly willing to exercise ruthless violence against Tamils. In the Sri Lankan civil war hard-line monks were at the vanguard of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism, which viewed the Hindu Tamils and Sri Lanka’s smaller Muslim population as outsiders. They joined the government with their own party, the Jathika Hela Urumaya or National Heritage Party. The monks used their new power to argue vociferously against any self-determination for the Tamils in the north, opposing even the more limited measure of autonomy. In religious terms they justified the suppression of the Tamils on the grounds that a fracture in the nation state is a tear in the sacred fabric of a land which represents the well-spring of their belief. Roads have been renamed after Buddhist monks. While many Hindu temples and Christian churches were destroyed in the war, new Buddhist stupas and statues are being built.

In Rakhine State, Myanmar there has been civil strife between Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims whom the Burmese government views not as citizens but as illegal immigrants and therefore affords little protection,  and this has led to a refugee crisis as the Rohingya flee from pogroms inspired and led by Buddhist monks. Dr. Muang Zarni, a Burmese human rights activist and research fellow at the London School of Economics has described the 969 movement as a neo-Nazi Buddhist organisation. 969 stands for three things: the 9 stands for the special attributes of Buddha, the founder of the religion; the 6 stands for attributes of his teachings of dharma; and finally, the last 9 stands for special characteristics or attributes of the clergy (LINK.).

Buddhism can easily be used to support reactionary politics. The conflict between Buddhists and Muslims is often over land and nationalism. Buddhism is neither better nor worse than any other organised religions in its role as an agent of social control.

ALJO

50 Years Ago: Death of a President (2014)

The 50 Years Ago column from the January 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who would have dreamt, on the morning of that fateful November day, that within a matter of hours, the thirty-fifth U.S. President, John F. Kennedy, would be dead, as well as his assassin and a Texas policeman? Yet this was the news which burst upon an astounded world, and sent all the capitalist politicians into huddles.

Kennedy’s death was a tragedy for his family and friends, but at times like these it is as well to get the whole business into some sort of perspective and try to dispel some of the concentrated nonsense to which we have been subjected since the event. It was The Observer for December 1st which said that the shot which killed Kennedy ‘. . . must change the course of the world.’ But this is really just another repetition of the ‘great men make history’ theory, and has precious little evidence to support it.

The more sensible remark was that overheard between two young men in a London street the following morning. ‘Assassinations don’t really make a lot of difference,’ said one. ‘Things go on pretty much the same as before.’ Probably he was not a Socialist, but he certainly hit the nail on the head, for this is precisely what the newspapers were hastening to tell us a few days later. President Johnson would continue the Kennedy policies, said Richard Scott in The Guardian of November 28th. He could have added (but of course he didn’t) that these would as usual be a reflection of the needs of contemporary American capitalism. They were ably expounded by the new President thus:

‘. . . the unswerving support of the United Nations . . . the honourable and determined execution of our commitments to our allies . . . the maintenance of military strength second to none . . . the defence of the strength and stability of the dollar . . . the expansion of our foreign trade . . . our programme of assistance and cooperation in Asia and Africa. . . ’

There have been two Democrats and one Republican at the White House since Roosevelt and any one of them could have uttered those words. For American capitalism has become a giant in world affairs; its days of isolationism are well and truly over.

(from The Passing Show, Socialist Standard, January 1964)

Tribal Politics in Africa (2014)

From the January 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

In Africa every political leader that comes into power starts to consolidate himself  through stamping out political turncoats and the opposition. This easily gives rise to ethnic suspicions. Thus politicians take advantage of ethnic and tribal prejudices in order to win a political following. This is what took place in Kenya when Odinga lost the  elections to Uhuru Kenyatta. The Luos and Kikuyu tribes started to butcher each other.

This also took place in Zimbabwe when Joshua Nkomo lost to Robert Mugabe in 1979 –  Nkomo invited the Ndebeli to rise against the Shona – there was violence in Matebeleland and hundreds of civilians were killed.

Under the leadership of Dr. Kenneth Kaunda, the slogan ‘Zambia One Nation’ came to emphasise unity between tribes. Political reputations based on tribal loyalties did not exist under UNIP. Dr. Kaunda preached tribal balancing by appointing cabinet ministers from majority tribes – there was always a Lozi and Tonga as prime minister.

If there was any semblance to tribalism in Zambia under UNIP it only came from the Lozi royal establishment that had grievances with the Barotse government of 1964. The British Crown had given the protectorate to Barotseland in 1889 – but that lapsed when the governor of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland Sir Evelyn Horn handed over self government to Dr. Kaunda in 1964.

Kaunda emulated the ‘communist’ bloc and played a part in sponsoring the political rebels agitating for political independence in Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia, Mozambique and South Africa. The incidence of military coups in West Africa – in Ghana and Nigeria both civilian governments were overthrown – made Kaunda promulgate a one-party state in 1973. He became commander-in-chief of the Zambian armed forces, and virtual dictator.

Kaunda threw himself wholeheartedly into the liberation struggle taking place in southern Africa and on this count alone his political reputation rests. The onset of a trade inflation in Western and Eastern countries from 1980 onwards posed economic problems in African countries – in Zambia queues for essential commodities and fuel became a recurring feature.

The promulgation of Perestroika by Gorbachev in Russia led to the fall of ‘communism’ (state capitalism) in eastern Europe and Africa. This gave rise to demands for political pluralism in Zambia, Malawi and Zimbabwe. It took the intervention of Tanzanian soldiers to evict the dictator Idi Amin from Uganda. President Mobutu was made to flee Kinshasa when the Rwandan army used the Banyamulenge to attack his army. Kaunda himself was voted out of office in 1991.

The one-party states there were ended but replaced by tribal-based politics.

Kephas Mulenga

Keeping the Faith (2014)

The Halo Halo! column from the January 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

A large dose of gullibility and desperation must be needed before reasonable adults become hooked on the opium of the people. But once they are, a regular diet of religious hogwash is also required it seems, to keep them in a state of faith-fuelled stupor.

One website that doles this out by the bucketful is The Christian Post. Typical articles currently on offer complain of an ‘attack’ by the media when they dare to ask questions like ‘Can we trust the bible?’ or make programmes questioning ‘the true story of Christmas’ etc. This is exactly what the media ought to be doing you may think, but the true believer disagrees. After all, if God had intended us to think for ourselves he wouldn’t have sent Jesus would he?

There are also handy hints such as ‘How to overcome Impulsive Behaviours’. But instead of the righteous ‘plenty of fresh air, cold baths and healthy exercise’ advice you might expect, the Christian Post assures such sufferers that God ‘takes our sin and gives us his righteousness’, but ‘we have to study the word and spend time with God so he can do this work in our soul’.

‘How does God juggle so many prayers?’ asks another, apparently serious, article to dispel any lingering doubts its followers may have. ‘God has millions of prayers coming before him at any given moment’ it assures us. ‘How in the world does he hear each one and answer them all?’

Well, ignoring the fact that if even a single prayer were answered it would be hailed as a miracle, how indeed? This question must have crossed the mind and been worked out by most reasonably bright nine year-olds. The answer though for Christian Post readers, who are apparently not bright nine year-olds, is ‘Allow this fact to blow your mind: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day’.

These efforts to justify the big religious lie are not just childish stories or unscientific mythology; they are totally meaningless garbage, and an insult to adult intelligence. ‘Religion with the drains blocked’ as someone once put it.

It’s not just Christianity that has to come up with a constant flow of hogwash to keep the faithful in awe of course, and no list of religious absurdities would be complete without something from Islam. Here’s a few uncovered by a Cairo university committee, set up to study the fatwas issued by the Muslim Brotherhood and reported in India Today (28 Nov 2013).

When a woman goes swimming, as the word for sea is masculine, when the water touches the woman’s private parts, she becomes an ‘adulteress’ and should be punished.

Another prohibited women from eating certain vegetables or even touching cucumbers or bananas.

One directed women to turn off the air conditioning at home in the absence of their husbands as it could indicate to a neighbour that the woman was at home alone, allowing them to commit adultery with her.

And another decreed that a couple’s marriage would be annulled if they had sex with no clothes on.

Allah makes other religions look almost sensible doesn’t he?

NW

Letter: Russell Brand (2014)

"Did someone say my name?"

Letter to the Editors from the January 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

Let me declare an interest right away . . . I don’t like Russell Brand.  I was switched off his style of humour (?) when he publicly aimed it at Andrew Sachs on live radio!   That aside, I read your article about his views on socialism with some interest, although I confess not as much interest as I would have if it had been written by Frank, the mechanic in my local garage.

Why is Russell Brand’s opinion so important that it warrants a four page spread in the Socialist Standard?  Is it not because he is a ‘celebrity’?  And what is a celebrity if not a product of the very system Brand rails against? I agree with his railing …but I find it hard to take advice on changing to a socialist society from a celebrity who makes a great deal of money by acting and conning the rest of the world that he is important.  It’s a bit like Bono and Bob Geldof telling us all that we have to ‘live more simply so that others might simply live’, while they swan around the world in jet planes living the ‘life of Reilly’!

Sorry, I don’t buy Russell Brand sniping from the sidelines while taking full advantage of the very system he is decrying.   I’d sooner take a lesson from Frank my local mechanic.  He’s no celebrity, but he certainly knows a thing or two about life for a real worker.

Russell Brand is famous for being controversial in order to maintain his position in the public spotlight, and I think his conversion to the cause of socialism is just another stunt aimed at bolstering his public persona.

Ian McRae, 

Dundee

Reply:

Surely the main point is that Brand is (despite what people may think of him otherwise) using his celebrity to question the system, and that’s why we’ve highlighted it. Unlike perhaps the cases of Bono, Sting, etc who didn’t really challenge the system at all, but became friends with the politicians instead – Editors

What is History? (2014)

From the January 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism, Historians and the New History Syllabus in the National Curriculum

In February 2013 the National Curriculum Consultation Document was published and capitalist ideologue and Tory Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove made a statement to the House of Commons about the new history syllabus: 'in history there is a clear narrative of British progress with a proper emphasis on heroes and heroines from our past' (Daily Telegraph 7 February).

Earlier at the 2008 and 2010 Tory Party Conferences Gove had complained that 'our children are either taught to put Britain in the dock or they remain in ignorance of our island story, education has been undermined by left wing ideologues, the under-appreciated tragedy of our time has been the sundering of our society from its past and the current approach we have to history denies children the opportunity to hear our island story. This trashing of our past has to stop' (Guardian 30 September 2008, Daily Telegraph 5 October 2010).

When the Tory-Lib Dem coalition government came to power in May 2010, Gove invited historian Niall Ferguson to advise on the development of a new history syllabus for the National Curriculum, 'history as a connected narrative' (Daily Telegraph 30 December 2012). Later in 2010 at the Tory Party Conference Gove announced historian Simon Schama as the new 'History Czar' to ensure pupils learn Britain's 'Island Story', and review the curriculum. Schama responded 'without this renewed sense of our common story, we will be a poorer and weaker Britain' (Guardian 5 October 2010).

Conservative historians

Schama is well known for his 1989 book Citizens; A Chronicle of the French Revolution where he defines the 'Revolution' by the Reign of Terror. Historian Eric Hobsbawm described the book as a political denunciation of the revolution, a continuation of a traditional conservative view of the revolution started by Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, and continued in Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities. Gove called Edmund Burke 'the greatest Conservative ever' at the 2008 Tory Conference (Daily Telegraph 30 September 2008).

Niall Ferguson is a conservative historian who cites as influences Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. His 2011 six-part Channel Four TV series Civilization: Is the West History? is a hymn to Western capitalism, global free trade and bourgeois liberalism. Ferguson identifies the 'six killer apps' of competition, science, rule of law, medicine, consumerism and the work ethic as keys to the dominance of western capitalism. Hobsbawm has called Ferguson an excellent historian but a 'nostalgist for Empire'. He is also a historian of financial capitalism having written The House of Rothschild and a biography of a merchant banker High Financier: The Lives and Times of Siegmund Warburg. His magnum opus on finance must be the publication in November 2008 of The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World which unfortunately for Ferguson was overtaken by the events of September 2008 when Lehman Brothers collapsed and the resulting global financial crisis. In this book Ferguson penned a hymn to global financial capitalism whereas we agree with Marx that 'money is the universal whore, the universal pimp of men and peoples'.

The Department of Education stated that 'our approach to the history curriculum has been supported by some of the country's most eminent historians' (Guardian 13 May). But the new history syllabus was immediately criticised by the President of the Royal Historical Society, the Historical Association, the Higher Education group History UK, and senior members of the British Academy.

The overall aim of the new history syllabus is 'a knowledge of Britain's past, and our place in the world helps us to understand the challenges of our time' with supporting aims to be to 'know and understand the story of these islands; how the British people shaped this nation and how Britain influenced the world'. The syllabus will attempt to cover the Palaeolithic era to the fall of the Berlin Wall in seven years. Even at Key Stage 1, ages 5 to 7 years, children are expected to understand terms such as 'civilisation', 'parliament', 'monarchy', 'democracy', and the 'concept of nation and of a nation's history' (Department for Education: National Curriculum Consultation 7 February).

At Key Stage 2, ages 7 to 11 years children will be taught 'the essential chronology of British history sequentially' from the Stone Age to the 1688 bourgeois 'Glorious Revolution'. This is history as a story, chronology, narrative, dates, events which makes Henry Ford comment 'history is bunk and just one damn thing after another' quite apt. Professor Jackie Eales, President of the Historical Society said 'intellectually, it is exactly what 1066 and All That was designed to lampoon. It is a trawl through history, one damn thing after another, in a very superficial way. It's a very old fashioned curriculum' (Guardian 16 February).

One of the recommendations of the 1999 Macpherson Report was a 'National Curriculum aimed at valuing cultural diversity and preventing racism' but in April 2013 History teacher Katherine Edwards pointed out that 'the new curriculum is very likely to alienate and disengage children and young people, especially those of black and Asian origin. Black and Asian people are excluded completely from the primary history curriculum and, apart from the token inclusions of Equiano and Seacole they only feature as slaves in the secondary curriculum until the arrival of the Windrush generation' (Guardian 19 April). Later in June children's laureate Malorie Blackman added 'if children are not taught about black historical figures along with heroes such as Lord Nelson, they might be turned off school altogether' (Guardian 4 June). In fact Olaudah Equiano, freed African slave who campaigned for abolition of the slave trade and Mary Seacole, Creole nurse in the Crimean War, were only introduced into the National Curriculum in 2007 but it was announced in 2012 they were to be dropped in the new syllabus. This prompted Operation Black Vote to gather 35,000 signatures on a petition to Gove, and American Democrat Reverend Jesse Jackson to write a letter to the Times. Gove conceded and Equiano and Seacole stayed in the new syllabus. But Martin Luther King and the US Civil Rights movement have been dropped from the curriculum.

As for the role of women in history there are no women at all mentioned in the Key Stage 2 syllabus except for two Tudor queens. In Key Stage 3, ages 11 to 14 years, Mary Seacole, George Eliot and Annie Besant are grouped under the heading 'The Changing Role of Women'.

China is not included in the curriculum but is only mentioned as a loser to Britain as a result of gunboat diplomacy, although the OECD stated in March 2013: 'from a long-range perspective, China has now overtaken the Euro area and is on course to become the world’s largest economy around 2016, after allowing for price differences' (forbes.com 23 March).

‘Great Man’ Theory

The syllabus focuses on kings, queens, and the lives of great men which is part of the bourgeois 'Great Man Theory of History' which has its origin in Thomas Carlyle's 1840 book On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1840) where he writes that 'the history of the world is but the biography of great men'.

Do 'Great Men' impose themselves on history? Marx wrote in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon: 'Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past'. It appears that Napoleon Bonaparte perceived this truth when he wrote in exile 'I found all the elements ready at hand to found an empire. If I had not come probably someone would have done like me. A man is but a man, but often he can do much; often he is a tinderbox in the midst of inflammable matter, his power is nothing if circumstances and public sentiment do not favour him' (The Mind of Napoleon: A Selection from His Written and Spoken Words edited and translated by J. Christopher Herold. Columbia University Press: New York. 1955).

Peter Mandler, Cambridge professor of Modern Cultural History said of the new syllabus 'we need to know the history of family life, economic development, class formation, not just a list of prime ministers, admirals and treaties. And when the curriculum talks about the rise and fall of Empires it still only means the Roman Empire' (Guardian 16 February 2013).

History from below

The antidote to bourgeois 'Great Men' history is 'History from below' (the term coined by historian George Lefebvre) which is people's history, the history of the working class, everyday history or even micro-history. A good example of 'history from below' is The Crowd in the French Revolution by George Rudé where he points out that 'those who took to the streets were ordinary, sober citizens, not half-crazed animals, not criminals' in contrast to Carlyle, Dickens and Schama.

E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class is a sweeping people's history of the English proletariat but his book Whigs and hunters: The origin of the Black Act is a great example of micro-history. Following the collapse of the 'South Sea bubble' in 1720 there was an economic downturn and groups of poachers appeared in forests in Berkshire and Hampshire stealing deer from the aristocracy. The Whig government responded with an Act in 1723 which introduced the death penalty for over fifty offences. The Act would not be repealed until 1823. The Act can be seen as an example of 'bloody legislation' against the working class. In 1688 there were fifty capital offences on the statute book but by 1800 there were 220 capital offences mainly concerned with the defence of property. Between 1770 and 1830 35,000 death sentences were handed out with 7,000 executed.

At present capitalist ideologists are engaging in a type of 'historical revisionism' in relation to the First World War. In The Great War was a Just War published in History Today in August 2013, Gary Sheffield writes 'Britain’s First World War was a war of national survival, a defensive conflict fought at huge cost against an aggressive enemy bent on achieving hegemony in Europe. If the allies had lost, it would have meant the end of liberal democracy on mainland Europe'.

Prime Minister David Cameron's speech in October 2012 at the Imperial War Museum announced that there would be commemorative events to mark the First World War. These would include the outbreak of war, the naval battle of Jutland, Churchill's disastrous Gallipoli campaign, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the Battle of Passchendaele, and the Armistice.

The Socialist Standard of November 1914 pointed out that the Sunday Chronicle of 30 August 1914 had identified that it was a capitalist war when they wrote 'the men in the trenches are fighting on behalf of the manufacturer, the mill owner, and the shopkeeper'. In August 1919 the Socialist Standard concluded that 'while competition between capitalist groups for routes, markets, and control of raw materials exists, the cause of war remains'.

In capitalist society the working class are educated to identify their interest with the interests of the capitalist class and identify with the nation state not with our interests as a class. As socialists we believe 'the working class have no fatherland'.

As well as commemorating the First World War, the capitalist state  has also allocated £1 million to restore the battlefield of Waterloo in Belgium ready for the 200th  anniversary in June 2015. There is even talk of commemorating the 600th  anniversary of the battle of Agincourt. All this is done to bolster nationalism and ensure that the working class identify with capitalist history.

The new History Syllabus in the National Curriculum demonstrates the truth of what Marx and Engels wrote in The German Ideology: 'The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force'.

Steve Clayton

No, it can't (2014)

Book Review from the January 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Can Income Redistribution Rescue Capitalism? By Andrew Kliman, Marxist-Humanist Initiative, 2013, $8 plus postage from mhi@marxisthumanistinititiative.org

Subtitled ‘Monthly Review’s Factual & Theoretical Myths’ most of this pamphlet deals with the theoretical and statistical errors used by the USA's dominant left-wing journal in explaining the latest capitalist economic crisis. The Monthly Review attributes the crisis to rising income inequality, with the clear implication that income redistribution can rescue capitalism, though it is doubtful that Monthly Review would admit to that implication. Underpinning Monthly Review’s explanation is an underconsumptionist theory of capitalist economic crisis, and this is Kliman's main target. Underconsumption theory argues, basically, that crises are caused by a lack of effective demand.

Kliman shows that in Marx’s crisis theory crises result from the normal functioning of capitalism and are inevitable under it. Underconsumption theory, on the other hand, typically implies that something has gone wrong and can be remedied. Kliman also challenges the popular notion of the alleged success of the ‘neoliberal’ assault on the working class, the supposed decline in workers’ share of output, and their allegedly stagnating wages. He provides evidence that this notion ignores the substantial growth in the incomes of older, female, and more highly-educated working people. The evidence Kliman cites is mainly drawn from the USA but the point generally still stands. The history of capitalism shows that it is not inconsistent with rising living standards for the working class, and the 100 years prior to the 1970s saw consistently rising real wages in the USA and elsewhere but still with regular crises.

Kliman maintains that undue concern over inequality can divert attention from major economic problems like mass unemployment, people losing their homes, and poverty. And what about the fact, he says, which dominates most people’s lives, that they are forced to do what bosses tell them to do, day after day, year after year––or else starve? 'Why is there so little outrage about this', writes Kliman, 'or even concern about it?' The criticism here is mainly directed at the 2011 Occupy movement which generally focused less on these concrete problems and more on the abstraction 'rising inequality'. Some may find this line of argument controversial, while for others it will be a breath of fresh air. It should be noted that, contrary to popular belief, Marx did not condemn capitalism for its inequality (rising or not), nor did he frame his arguments for socialism in terms of material equality. For revolutionary socialists, claims Kliman, the interests of the working class and the interests of the system are fundamentally opposed and 'this is the primary reason why they maintain that revolutionary transformation of society is needed' (Kliman's emphasis).

Included in this pamphlet are selections from Kliman's book The Failure of Capitalist Production (2011) where underconsumptionist theory is examined in detail. It is sometimes suggested that Marx held to an underconsumptionist position with this statement: 'The ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses'. However, capitalist production is production for the market with a view to sale and profit, not directly for human needs. It is profitability, or the lack of it, which creates the possibility of an economic crisis. And this possibility, argues Marx, is 'no more than the possibility. For the development of this possibility into a reality a whole series of conditions is required' (emphasis added). As Kliman points out, there is no suggestion here that crises are the result of persistently inadequate demand. Kliman is worried about the political implications of underconsumptionist theory because 'underconsumptionism implies that a more equitable distribution of income will make capitalism work better'. This is a fallacy all socialists oppose.

Lew Higgins

Cooking the Books: Co-ops Again (2014)

The Cooking the Books column from the January 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Despite the capture of the Co-operative Bank by hedge funds and the exposure as hypocrisy of its claim to be more ‘ethical’ than other banks, there are still those who stubbornly argue think that co-operative enterprises could be a viable alternative to capitalism. Supporters of capitalism, however, have a more realistic view of co-operatives and what they can and cannot do within capitalism.

One of the arguments put forward in favour of co-operatives is their democratic management structure. They certainly are more democratic than any normal capitalist enterprise which are anything but this. The moment an employee enters the doors of the office or the gates of the factory where they work they cease to be ‘free citizens’ with a right to vote and become subjects who have to carry out the orders of the unelected managers who are running the business on behalf of its owners.

Under capitalism, however, not being undemocratic is a handicap for an enterprise. Even a nominally democratic structure hinders the emergence of the type of ruthless top executive needed to engage in the struggle with rivals with any chance of success.

This was spelled out clearly in an editorial in the business section of the  Daily Telegraph (20 November) commenting on the Co-operative Bank and the Co-operative Group generally:

‘Its democratic structure, with a Byzantine relationship between area committees, regional boards and the group board, was held up as a paragon of virtue. It was, as has been proved, a recipe for disaster … It is difficult to imagine any corporation of this magnitude being governed by archaic governance standards more suited to a village charity than an organisation with its sites on major expansion.’

Like it or not, it’s true. The sort of decisions that the top executives of an enterprise engaged in the competitive struggle for profits have to take are impeded if they are subject to any degree of democratic control. A democratically-run enterprise just wouldn’t survive in the capitalist jungle. If you want to compete with the other beasts in the jungle you’ve got to behave like one of them.

This has been candidly recognised by the president of the much-touted Mondragón co-operative group (one of whose flagship enterprises has since gone under), Txemia Gisasola, when he told Miles Johnson the Financial Times (21 March):

‘We receive visitors from many companies and many countries, and some come here with a magical idea of what Mondragón is. This is not magic. We are in this market, competing in the capitalist world, and the only difference is how we do things and why we do things. We have to be competitive, we have to be efficient, we have to have quality in our products and give satisfaction to our clients, and we have to be profitable. In that sense we are no different from anyone else.’

This does mean that there is no place at all for co-operatives within capitalism. There are some niches for a few of them, but they can never spread to take over the whole economy as their more romantic supporters envisage. As the Times put it (18 June), ‘co-operatives are a model for a few companies, but not for an entire economy.’ Co-operatives are in fact not at all an alternative to capitalism, just one form of capitalist enterprise and a not very efficient one at that.

Nationalism and Destruction in the Balkans (2014)

Film Review from the January 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

We review a recent film about the break-up of Yugoslavia.

'The Weight of Chains', a documentary written and directed by Boris Malagurski (2010)

‘Who in their right mind would actually want to be a colony? ‘So begins The Weight of Chains, a documentary written and directed by Boris Malagurski (2010) which argues that the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s was orchestrated by Western powers in furtherance of imperial ambitions. Director Boris Malagurski, hailed by the Belgrade press as the ‘Serbian Michael Moore’, claims his film ‘takes a critical look at the role that the US, NATO and the EU played in the tragic breakup of a once-peaceful and prosperous European state’.

The film is narrated by Malagurski himself and begins with a whirlwind history of Yugoslavia: the country was first established as a kingdom in 1918, and encompassed people of various religions and ethnicities, including Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, Muslim Bosnians (all of Slavic extraction), as well as sizeable Hungarian and Albanian minorities. The country was reorganised as a federation of six national republics in 1943, the Titoist ruling party opting for an economic model which mixed state and private ownership of capital. By the 1970s Yugoslavia came to enjoy levels of social and economic prosperity which rivalled even many of its avowedly capitalist neighbours.

The historical background thus set, Malagurski pinpoints the beginning of Yugoslavia’s decline to the early 1980s, when it took out an IMF loan to shore up its waning economy. Around the same time, Ronald Reagan issued a secret memo, National Security Decision Directive 133, which committed the US to widen its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe by aggressively promoting Western-style market capitalism in Yugoslavia. US-sponsored NGOs promptly began funding Yugoslavian opposition groups, journalists, free-market economists, and trade union activists. By the late 1980s, this ideological groundwork had paved the way for ‘privatisation through liquidation’: US-guided Yugoslavian bankers and legislators started implementing monetary and economic reforms which triggered the bankruptcy of thousands of state-run firms. This, explains Malagurski, deepened the state’s massive debt and led to runaway inflation and unemployment, cuts to welfare spending, and tension between the subnational governments. Foreign speculators snapped up failed companies at rock-bottom prices, and the federal government, cut off from further foreign credit, was forced to accede to American demands for ‘free’ multiparty elections in the constituent republics.

Lured by the promise of Western favour and financing for their individual republics, regional politicians sowed the seeds of ethnic discord; these in turn were eagerly cultivated by the impoverished workers who were searching desperately for someone to blame for their sudden misfortune. Malagurski aptly shows how the ensuing nationalist secessions brought their leaders into open and often very bloody military conflict over land and resources.

If any of this sounds familiar, it should – long-term readers of the Standard will recognise this part of Malagurski’s analysis of the Yugoslavian breakup and ensuing wars as much the same one we have always presented. Like Malagurski, socialists eschew the ‘ancient hatreds’ theory which holds that interethnic hostility is biologically innate and genocidal violence preordained. Instead, we observe how a faction of the ruling elite, when confronted with rivals to its privileged position as owners and controllers, is compelled to enlist masses of the working class to defend that position. One way of rallying this support is to seize upon some unimportant characteristic – say, religion, language, or ethnicity – which the workers share with the ruling faction, but not with the workers of the rival faction. By exaggerating such differences and ignoring or obscuring the more important commonalities, leaders convince the workers that they share a common interest with their masters, and to happily march off to war in support of it.

By this point in the film, therefore, Malagurski has set things up wonderfully for a scathing indictment of nationalism, irredentism, and capitalist warmongering. Unfortunately, this indictment never comes: as it turns out, Malagurski is just another nationalist, albeit one pining for the ‘good old days’ of pre-breakup Yugoslavia (which, rather tellingly, he himself is far too young to remember). While he correctly surmises that the new ‘Bosnian’, ‘Kosovar’ and other national identities are largely artificial distinctions, invented or overinflated by their respective governments in order to win the support of their electorate and of foreign powers, he ignores the fact that the same was true of the even more artificial ‘Yugoslav’ national identity they supplanted.

In support of its pan-Yugoslav agenda, the film devotes considerable screen time to documenting how the political and economic leaders of the newly independent states enriched themselves at the expense of the common people. Malagurski explains how they did this by cutting back social programmes, skimming foreign investment funds, and selling off entire domestic industries to foreign concerns. But what he fails to establish is how any of this could have been prevented had Yugoslavia remained united, nor why foreign private ownership of industry is any worse for the workers than local private ownership. Russia, for example, emerged from the USSR with a strong national identity and a much greater proportion of its industry in local hands, though its workers also experienced widespread poverty and massive social cutbacks. Of course, even Titoist Yugoslavia was never the paragon of social and economic equality Malagurski seems to think it was. The Yugoslavian nomenklatura may have avoided the conspicuous consumption typical of Western capitalists, but it remained a privileged ruling class which was just as keen to enrich itself through exploitation of its workers.

Many of the film’s flimsier claims and arguments can be explained as the work of a naïve but well-meaning patriot, but others cannot be so innocently excused. For example, Malagurski outright denies that the ethnic minorities in Serbia were oppressed, conveniently omitting any mention of the mass protests and general strikes that led to the revocation of their political autonomy in the late 1980s. In another segment, he paints Bosnian president Alija Izetbegović as a rabid jihadist, quoting from a thirty-year old Islamist manifesto which the man had long since repudiated. Most controversially, he presents the infamous Srebrenica massacre as a ‘stage-managed’ ploy by the Bosnians and Americans to justify NATO military intervention against Serbia. Whatever the plausibility of this theory, it’s particularly distasteful how Malagurski trivialises the village’s civilian death toll as ‘no larger than the number of Serbs killed’ in the surrounding area, without any pretence of distinguishing between combatant and non-combatant deaths.

Given this it is not hard to see why Malagurski’s detractors accuse him of being a pro-Serb whitewasher and historical revisionist. Are they correct?  With so many of the post-breakup events still under active historical and criminal investigation, it’s hard to say for sure. But at least one thing about Malagurski is clear: for all the effort he spends exposing and decrying the dishonest propagandising which fuelled the Yugoslavian implosion, he certainly has no qualms employing many of the same tricks when it suits his own agenda. Whatever that agenda may be, the conclusion is that he has a very low estimation of the intelligence of his audience.

What About the Roma? (2014)

From the January 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

If you believe UKIP by the time you read this millions of Romanians and Bulgarians will have arrived in Britain, many of them Roma. This is nonsense of course, but who are the Roma?.

Nazi genocide was not limited to the Jewish population. An estimated 800,000 Roma were murdered in Nazi-occupied Europe, an episode that has come to be known in the Romani language as the Porraimos (the ‘devouring’), or Romani holocaust. When Hitler started his ethnic cleansing of the gypsies he inherited elaborate discriminatory legislation specifically designed to keep the gypsies away. Germany had anti-gypsy laws since the end of the 19th century. During the early days of Nazism, existing anti-gypsy measures were strengthened and led to mass sterilisation and murder.

The history of the Roma (more commonly called gypsies) in Europe is a tragic one. Migrating from northern India to Europe in the eleventh century, most Roma live today in eastern and central Europe, particularly in Romania and Bulgaria, with many large communities in other European countries. In the parts of the Ottoman Empire today located in modern-day Romania, they have endured persecution and enslavement at the hands of landowners and clergy since the Middle Ages, being emancipated from slavery only in the mid-nineteenth century. The Romanian author Mircea Cartarescu described a life of misery:

’For centuries they could be bought and sold, families were torn apart, children taken from their mothers, women separated from their men. The young women were generally raped by their owners and the 'flock of crows', as they were called, was the target of general contempt and discrimination. One of the voivodes, or provincial governors, used to have them climb trees and then shot them down with arrows. He called it crow-hunting. Tied to one place and kept like animals, the gypsies multiplied more quickly in the Romanian principalities than anywhere else in Europe. Therefore we only have ourselves to blame for creating the gypsy problem. It is our historical guilt... We are appalled when other countries perceive us as a nation of criminals, but we see the gypsies in exactly the same way.’

After the Second World War in ’communist’ eastern Europe, the state set about targeting Roma, with social policies aimed to settle them forcibly and to eradicate ’anti-social traits’. Despite efforts to socially engineer their assimilation, the vast majority of Roma remained marginalised and discriminated against by both state and society. Anti-Roma racism across Europe has remained rampant. In many countries, segregation in schooling and housing is still a fact of life, social attitudes towards Roma are poisonous and pogroms are not unknown. Negative social attitudes and disastrous state policies toward the Roma has resulted in the reinforcement of the very conditions that contribute to their continued marginalisation, including low literacy levels, poverty, poor housing, poor health and low life expectancy. Throughout Europe reports of violence against the Roma have increased significantly, particularly in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, where extremist and openly racist groups and political parties are gaining in popularity.

There are an estimated million Roma in Hungary, making up one tenth of the population. During the Communist Party rule, social policies encouraged large families and those with three children or more were virtually guaranteed an unconditional mortgage loan. Such financial incentives allowed many Roma to build their own homes. But since the collapse of the former state capitalist system, Hungarians receive less than 50 dollars per child and with the slow Hungarian economy, many Roma are struggling to find work and feed their large families. The previous ’Communist’ regime refused to regard the gypsies as a minority, but as a social problem - undisciplined proletarians who needed to be forced into the same mould as the rest. They were accordingly given poor-quality worker housing with those very cheap mortgages, and obliged to toil, like everybody else. The regime didn't want them to get more education because they needed cheap unskilled labour. But when that system abruptly collapsed in 1989 the Communists' uneconomic factories and plants closed down. It was the unskilled workers at the bottom – the Roma in particular – who were left high and dry. Roma unemployment shot up from 15 percent to 85 percent in two years.

In the absence of work there was now welfare. Milking the system became a survival strategy. A Roma family would live off welfare, which arrives on the fifth of the month. By the money would run out, so they would run up credit at the local shop, and the men of the family would get a few days' casual work, building walls, fixing roofs, in the neighbourhood. But with the financial crisis, credit stopped and people stopped spending money and the work dried up. For the Roma the economic crisis has driven them to the wall, perhaps a bit more than for the rest of us. With increasing poverty amongst the Roma in Eastern Europe, it is hardly surprising that families travel to other countries in order to find work.

Throughout their history the Roma have had good reason to be mistrustful of authorities, and have survived at the absolute margins of society. Europe's roughly 10 million Roma remain the poorest of the poor, often migrating abroad in search of work. In several eastern European countries there is a war against the Roma. There are marches against them. Self-proclaimed vigilantes bully and threaten them. Walls are built around the sections of town where they live. Their houses are set on fire. They are forced out of their homes and sometimes brutally murdered. Almost everywhere, the authorities have stood aside. In 1993, after three Roma in the Romanian village of Hadareni were lynched with the involvement of the police, the government, in its official explanation, expressed understanding for the ’anger of the villagers’.

These and events since has prompted tens of thousands of them, primarily from Romania and Bulgaria, to head west. Roma refugees have come to Italy, France, UK, and to Germany. In the western European countries they work for a couple of euros an hour doing cleaning, construction, or they beg. Some steal. For many, it is more than they could have ever imagined in their home countries. Those who fight for Roma rights make the argument that those who head to the West are as much political refugees as they are economic ones.

The Roma suffer threefold prejudice in the UK. Firstly because they are gypsies, secondly because they are often asylum seekers or refugees and thirdly because many are Romanian. The Roma are easy scapegoats. They're at the bottom of society and have no effective political lobby. In 2012 the European Parliament had only one member of Roma origin. 90,000 to 120,000 Roma are estimated to be in the UK, a fraction of the one million gypsies who live in France and Germany. Next year, the quotas which let EU countries limit the number of Bulgarian and Romanian migrants crossing their borders will be lifted. Britain wants to deter them from crossing the Channel and is financing an anti-migrant ad campaign in those countries. Suspicions have been raised that what the UK Government really fears – but dares not say publicly – is the mass migration of Roma.

It is not difficult to believe that the government's very public stance against eastern European (aka Roma) immigration is fuelled largely by a desire to appeal to the populist vote and is a demagogic tactic aimed at seducing the far right. Each year we are reminded by the government of the day to remember the Jewish Holocaust, yet the Roma Devouring stays forgotten. August the 2nd is the Roma Holocaust Memorial Day, marking the start of the liquidation by the Nazis of the ’gypsy’ camp at Auschwitz. The silence of British politicians was deafening. Our rulers have a long history of camouflaging the failures of capitalism, particularly in times of economic slump, by seeking out scapegoats.

ALJO

Mixed Media: 'Nothing But a Man' (2014)

Film Review from the January 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nothing But a Man (dir. Michael Roemer)

Nothing But a Man, a 'lost' black 1960s American film was recently screened at the National Film Theatre on the South Bank in London. It won the San Giorgio Prize at the 1964 Venice Film Festival then disappeared although it was released in 16mm format and found a black audience when it was shown in churches and schools. It was re-released in the USA in 1993 when the US National Film Registry at the Library of Congress selected the film for preservation as 'culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant'.              

Nothing But a Man was made by white New York liberal Jews, the director and writer was the German Jewish Michael Roemer who had fled the Nazis, and the producer, cinematographer and co-writer Robert M Young. Roemer and Young with the help of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) travelled to the South for three months to research the script for Nothing But a Man.

Nothing But a Man was filmed in the Summer of 1963 on a budget of $230,000 around Atlantic City and Cape May in New Jersey although set in Alabama which was out of the question as a film location. This was the time of the civil rights movement, and Alabama Governor George Wallace’s support for 'segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever', and the existence of 'Jim Crow Laws' (mandated de jure racial segregation) in the South. Everyone on the film crew was paid $100 per week, the crew and cast took the day off to march on Washington DC with Martin Luther King Jr.

Nothing But a Man tells of the relationship and rather sweet courtship between Duff, a railroad worker and Josie, a schoolteacher and daughter of a preacher against a background of economic, social and institutional racism and deals with the discrimination, lack of jobs for blacks, and poverty in American society. Duff is played by Ivan Dixon later in the TV series Hogan's Heroes, and Josie by jazz singer Abbey Lincoln who sang on Max Roach's We Insist! Freedom Now Suite 1960 civil rights jazz album. The film is notable for its Motown soundtrack of Smokey Robinson, Mary Wells, Martha and the Vandellas, and Little Stevie Wonder.

Nothing But a Man is a pioneering drama about African-American life, 'one of the most sensitive films about black life ever made in this country' (Washington Post 10 July 1993), and an early portrait of black pride and anger. Duff says ‘They can reach right inside you with their white hands and turn you on and off'. The film was Malcolm X's favourite and was endorsed by the Nation of Islam newspaper Muhammad Speaks. The film is emotionally powerful with its portrait of Duff's embittered alcoholic father who was maimed at work in a sawmill, Duff's attacks on Josie's preacher father as a 'white man's nigger, you been stoopin' for so long you don't know how to stand up. You're only half a man', and the heart aches with lines like 'It's not gonna be easy but everything's gonna be alright' and 'I feel so free inside'.

Nothing But a Man has a naturalistic and neo-realist style that is in stark contrast to the Hollywood liberal middle-America films about African-Americans such as Lilies of the Field, and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? It can be compared to the cinéma vérité of Fred Hampton's Chicago Black Panther Party in Medium Cool by Haskell Wexler and the Paul Schrader film Blue Collar about Detroit car workers which starred Yaphet Kotto who was also in Nothing But a Man.

Nothing But a Man is set in the period of Bob Dylan's The Times They Are a-Changin', but how much did life change for African-Americans in American capitalist society with the Civil Rights, Voting Rights and Fair Housing Acts?

In 2010 law professor and civil rights activist Michelle Alexander wrote in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness that there are more African American men in prison than were slaves before the start of the Civil War. 846,000 black men were in prison comprising 40 percent of the total when African Americans comprise 13.6 percent of the U.S. Population. More African American men were disenfranchised due to felony convictions in 2004 than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.

The black and white working class need to realise that they create the world's wealth and that their interests are in common irrespective of race and when the united black and white working class recognise this they can solve their problems by abolishing capitalism.

Steve Clayton

Comical revolution (2014)

Book Review from the January 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Revolution Will Be Hilarious. By Adam Krause, New Compass Press, 2013

The cover of Adam Krause's book features the unlikely combination of Lenin and Groucho Marx. Groucho would be uncomfortable with being in such proximity to Lenin whose regime announced 'without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds, let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood'. Groucho observed about capitalism 'the secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.'

Krause opens his book with a scene from Woody Allen's film Stardust Memories but the more appropriate film would be Annie Hall where Allen places comedy in the service of the radical left:

'Allison: I'm in the midst of doing my thesis on Political Commitment in Twentieth Century Literature. Alvy: You're New York, Jewish, left-wing, liberal, intellectual, Central Park West, Brandeis University, socialist summer camps, the father with the Ben Shahn drawings, strike-oriented. Allison: That was wonderful. I love being reduced to a cultural stereotype. Alvy: Right, I'm a bigot, I know, but for the left.'

George Carlin and Bill Hicks have used their comedy to question the way we live and posit an alternative to capitalism. Carlin's lines like 'that's why they call it the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it' and Bill Hicks's statement 'It's not that I disagree with Bush's economic policy or his foreign policy, it's that I believe he was a child of Satan sent here to destroy the planet Earth' contribute to developing class consciousness.

Krause cites the role of the Fool in Shakespeare's King Lear as a character that can speak the truth to authority without fear of reprisal. A different Shakespearian reference could be the role of 'working class' characters in Henry IV Part 1 such as Poins, Bardolph, and Peto who 'hang out' with Falstaff and Prince Hal (the future Henry V) in taverns drinking, whoring, and engaging in tomfoolery and even robbery. Here, the class boundaries are blurred in a revelry of youthful rebellion paid homage to in Gus Van Sant's film My Own Private Idaho.

Krause cites Emma Goldman's popular misquote 'If I can't dance, I don't want to be in your revolution' although it is never clear from Krause's book what this 'revolution' is. Krause does not mention socialism although he refers to William Morris's novel News from Nowhere. Krause's 'three favourite Marxists' Groucho, Harpo and Chico hilariously send-up militarism and nationalism in the film Duck Soup which is also used in Woody Allen's film Hannah and Her Sisters as motivation for a character to carry on with life.

Socialists expect the aftermath of 'revolution' to be as Guy Debord writes in Theses on the Paris Commune: 'the Commune was the biggest festival of the nineteenth century'. Krause concludes that 'the revolution will be hilarious. Seriously' but during his book he forgets EB White's advice 'humour can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind'.

Steve Clayton

Greasy Pole: Catching The Eye (2014)

The Greasy Pole Column from the January 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

How many compulsive viewers of Prime Minister's Questions have noticed that there is one MP who is always firmly in the same seat behind David Cameron (perhaps he gets there early to reserve it) and does not take part in the racket of bellows and sneers which signal that the Honourable Members are representing their constituents? Then after each question, before the Prime Minister has had time even to consult the 'briefing' which is painstakingly composed to tell him how to respond to, or avoid, each question, this Member gets to his feet and stays there until the next one is asked when he again stands up, then sits down ...until PMQs comes to an end. The procedure for this event is that backbenchers who have missed out in the ballot to ask a question may try for a supplementary by standing to 'catch the eye' of the Speaker. Is this what motivates this Member? Or are his trousers too tight? Does he suffer from cramp? Is he trying to get a clearer view of Balls and Miliband?

Eton

The Conservative Party Member of Parliament for South West Bedfordshire is Andrew Edmund Armstrong Selous, who went to Eton (although his response to a Guardian survey of his educational background was that he would 'prefer not to reveal' that detail) then Oxford for a degree in Industry and Trade so that he was ready to become a director of the family firm and an insurance underwriter. From that it was almost natural to try for a place in Parliament but first Selous had to prove himself at an unconquerable Labour seat such as Sunderland North where in 1997 his vote was 6,370 while the Labour incumbent got 26,067. In 2001 he won South West Bedfordshire; his majority was a mere 776 but those were hard times for the Tories, with Tony Blair and his street-corner grin and verbiage seemingly threatening us with Labour rule into the foreseeable future.

Sleep-Outs

In opposition Selous spent some time as a Whip until in 2006 he connected himself to a wider horizon as Shadow Minister for Work and Pensions and then, when Cameron ushered in his rag-bag of a Coalition, a 'proper' job nearer the sharp end of power as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Iain Duncan Smith. That was when IDS had been transmogrified into a kind of crusader against the scourge of poverty with an ambition to re-adjust the entire 'benefits' system so as to present it as a lasting remedy to that granitic problem. In tune with this fantasy Selous burrowed into local organisations such as the Conservative Christian Fellowship, the South Bedfordshire Community Family Trust, Leighton Buzzard Parkinson's Disease Society. He is reported to have 'taken part' – although exactly what this demanded of him is not clear – in annual sponsored sleep-outs to publicise the fact that there are some people who are too poor to have somewhere to sleep. For one such charity – Watford New Hope – he did not sleep out but did some time in the dry and warmth of their workshop where wood and furniture are re-cycled.

RBS

Whatever motive may have driven Selous in his persistent efforts to catch the Speaker's eye it cannot have been an urge to give to the Commons a usefully critical view of what property society does to its people. A typical example of his stifling attitudes is that he supported the British attack on Iraq on the inadequate, quickly discredited, argument that Blair's old friend and Attorney General Lord Goldsmith had '. . . clearly advised the Government that the military campaign in Iraq is clearly legal'. He is listed as being strongly supportive of the replacement for the mass-destroyer Trident submarine (one of which is said to be able to kill and lay waste on the scale of the entire bomb loads dropped in the last war). In calmer waters he opposes equal rights for gay people and was against the ban on hunting. In June he spoke up for the Royal Bank of Scotland, so recently a prime example of the profit motive rampant. Selous now thinks that the RBS '...has gone from a bad bank under the last government to a normal bank now and it has actually made a profit of over £800 million in the first three months of this year'. What he did not say was that this bank, as part of being 'normal', is now planning to re-commence paying dividends but also imposing a fresh programme of 'savings' which will entail the sacking of thousands of employees who will thus be forced to face some of the most demanding aspects of their reliance on surviving through the sale of their labour power – and therefore on IDS and what may remain of his ministry's 'benefits'.

Lean English

If Selous was looking for a blast of national publicity to help his career it recently arrived, although in an unintended way. And when it did it illustrated that there are limits to his charitable urges. In June George Osborne held forth to the Commons on the potentially rich theme of immigrants who are also benefit claimants, saying that it was a 'reasonable requirement that anyone on benefits would have a basic grasp of English... From now on, if claimants don't speak English, they will have to attend language courses until they do'. Selous was quick join in this but his contribution was deficient in one crucial respect. He tweeted that he would '...strongly support the loss of benefits unless claimants lean English'. The mis-spelling was greeted by a flood of derisive responses, typical of which was 'Were did you lean to rite so good?' which compelled a panicky Selous to delete the tweet. The episode served to emphasise the assessment of him by politics.co.uk under The Worst MP On Twitter that his stuff is 'meaningless, regurgitated of the highest order...no real engagement with constituents...never actually speaks to them...' If Selous does ever succeed in catching the Speaker's eye it is very unlikely that he will grasp the opportunity to offer anything original or penetrative. It would be in his interests if, when the other Members are in full cry, he were to duck down behind the seats in the Commons rather than expose himself.

Ivan