The Death of the Welfare State (1996)

From the July 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Supporters of capitalism have always denied the need for a fundamental change on the grounds that the system can take care of the 
poor through state help and welfare, now the welfare state, the
 sacred cow of reformists everywhere, is being attacked 
from every direction

Labour and the Tories have, it seems, moved closer together than ever with respect to their attitudes to the welfare state. On 8 May the Guardian reported Labour’s Chris Smith, shadow social security secretary, saying:

"Surely it is time to get away from the sterile battle lines of public and private. . . The principle must surely be that the state acts as guarantor of all provision, the regulator of all provision and the administrator of some. ”

How they intend to guarantee those provisions that they don’t provide, which will presumably have to be provided by individuals for themselves through insurance, is not made clear; in fact not a lot is made clear. What is crystal clear, though, is that Labour has abandoned its commitment to the welfare state along with Clause Four; the to-and-fro of reform and counter-reform between the major parties, such as it was, is over.

This to-and-fro was never, of course, a simple external relation between the parties but has been just as much a part of their internal make-up since the Second World War. Labour introduced the NHS but also introduced prescription charges and charges for dental and optical treatment; the Tories under Macmillan expanded the council house building programme; the current cause of much argument and agonising within Labour—child benefit—was introduced by the Tories in 1945 before Labour took office that same year. The case of child benefit is perhaps particularly interesting and informative, given the possibility of the next Labour government abolishing it for 16-18 year olds.

Family Allowance, the immediate forerunner of child benefit, was agreed in principle in 1943 by the wartime coalition government, and introduced by the Conservative government of May-July 1945, gaining the royal assent on 16 June 1945. The Labour movement was split on the issue, with many trade unions opposed to this reform—but why? Wasn't it to benefit working-class families? In fact, it wasn’t, anything but, the capitalist establishment wanted to introduce this reform because they felt that capitalism in the UK couldn’t afford not to. In 1940, Eleanor Rathbone MP, chair of the Family Endowment Society, argued in favour of the introduction of Family Allowance, saying that a “man with a wife and family is much less likely to act (revolutionarily) than one who has given society no such hostage”. Family Allowance was to be an incentive for working-class men to have dependent families—which could then be effectively held hostage by the state should he question capitalist authority. The ruling class also favoured the introduction of this “benefit" on a more basic level; the unions, hardly revolutionary' themselves, would have been less inclined to oppose it otherwise. The Tory MP L.S. Amery, again arguing in favour of this reform (in the Times, 14 January' 1941), said that Family Allowance would “afford a logical basis upon which a stand could be made against all further wage increases”. It was thus seen as a method of keeping wage bills down.

Who benefits?

If Labour now want to abolish child benefit for 16-18 year olds, is it in order to correct past mistakes, to somehow pass on a real benefit to working people after all? No chance. While they haven’t said exactly what they would spend the money on, they have gestured vaguely in the direction of education; but whose education would it be spent on? Many working-class families have, over the years, come to rely on child benefit, particularly to help support children in further education. If child benefit is abolished for precisely those of the age to go into further education, how will the less well off working-class families be able to afford to keep them in education? The simple answer is, they won’t. The only options for many will be for 16 and 17 year olds to try for places in the already over-subscribed YTS system (adding further to the already massive pool of cheap labour for bosses), to directly enter the employment market with little or no chance of a job and no benefits, or to leave home and beg on the streets. What a marvellous range of choice capitalism offers.

There is another option of course, at least for those families with at least one wage-earner—to fight the employers for higher wages to compensate for the money lost. But if this was thought even vaguely likely, Labour would have been more reluctant to have considered this particular cut. The last thing they want is to encourage class conflict, particularly under their own administration; but the relative weakness of the trade union movement at the present time makes an immediate escalation of class struggle unlikely.. this doesn’t mean that it won’t happen; workers may find themselves forced to fight by sheer material circumstances. But the point is that the ruling class, at least in the West, is being forced to take back reforms that have been previously granted and supposedly reformist parties are being forced to institute and administer the process.

On the one hand, capital feels it can no longer afford reforms, on the other, it also feels that it must take past reforms away and to bolster itself at the direct expense of the working class because of the relative weakness of the trade union movement. This is happening right across the west, with the temporary' exception of France where the government keeps trying to cut back on the welfare state but where workers’ solidarity has so far forced them to back down. They will keep trying, though, because French capital is no more isolated or “sovereign” than anywhere else. In other parts of the world, such as the Far East, home of what western capitalists habitually refer to, with some envy, as “tiger” (“dynamic market”—note the use of this term in labour’s new Clause 4) economies, there have often never been any reforms, even basic democratic ones, to roll back, while countries such as Vietnam refer to themselves as socialist while they introduce some of the most vicious, exploitative capitalist economic structures in the world. Global capitalism is precisely that; nobody is insulated from pressures on profits, which under capitalism is where sovereignty always really lies.

The to-and-fro of reform and anti-reform has always been the pattern to some extent, but things appear to have reached a state where reform has effectively lost its impossible fight. Reformist parties such as Labour have almost entirely capitulated; they were never going to introduce socialism anyway, having only ever been at most state capitalist parties, but now they have given up entirely. A never-ending pissing into the face of a gale has left them wet and weary and has exhausted what emancipatory desire they might once have had. All their desires now are masturbatory and egotistical, focused on nothing more than the plaudits of high office that mask a basic sterility.

There are few more frightening, deadly or apt symbols of the failure of reformism than the world-wide rise of tuberculosis. The steady and virtually inevitable erosion of welfare reforms has caused the number of cases of TB to rise steadily in the west over the last few years after most people had thought it had been effectively eradicated. In other parts of the world, of course, it had never gone away in the first place. A recent article on TB in the Guardian Weekend (27 April) put this point quite succinctly. In the 1970s there was a general optimism in the west that TB was effectively gone for ever, thanks to vaccine research and improved living conditions. But only in the west:

“Admittedly, no one country ever wiped it out completely. And in the third world, things remained not much better than they hail always been. But, hell, they were free to buy our superdrugs weren't they? ”

Well, no, they weren’t. They couldn’t afford them. Profits, as ever, came first. As they do with HIV research, even while HIV is forming what the same article designated a “devil’s alliance” with TB, not that it’s on the increase again in west. Who is most at risk from TB? The poorest and weakest members of society of course, the elderly homeless and immigrants shoved into cramped and poverty-stricken living conditions. But as the welfare state is dismantled, it seems highly likely that TB will spread further, and it will spread first through the poorer sections of the working class. As the Guardian article

again puts it:

". . .  tuberculosis is universally recognised as the disease of poverty. And as such, it acts as a chillingly efficient barometer of the human physical condition. Today, that barometer has swung right off the scale throughout the third world, and at the same time it is beginning to rise in Britain and other advanced capitalist states. ”

Reformism has failed and how the reformist project is collapsing; as it does so, evils we thought were wiped out or at least under control, are coming back with increasing vengeance. TB is not just a disease, in the contemporary world it’s also a symptom of the failure of reformism within capitalism.

In the film Apocalypse Now, Captain Willard says of American hypocrisy in war: “We cut them in half with a machine gun and we give them a band-aid.” Reformism was always a similarly inadequate response to capitalism’s violence in the name of profit, trying to patch up the symptoms of the disease that capitalism itself is. Now, though, the ruling class can’t even afford to keep the first aid kit stocked up. It’s high time the rest of us realised the necessity of taking on and eradicating the disease itself.

Jonathan Clay

Letter: Socialists 'shying away'? (1996)

Letter to the Editors from the July 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists 'shying away'?

Dear Editors,

In May’s Socialist Standard Jonathan Clay writes that "evil” has social roots, rather than being some theologically explicable external force ("Dunblane—a Question of Evil?"). Let’s take "evil" as meaning acts of gross inhumanity, and let’s accept this as a sound argument. As capitalism becomes more effective in undermining our essential humanity as states and companies are increasingly free of restraint on their use of our lives for their purposes, then it seems that random acts of "evil" by individuals become more common.

This makes perfect sense to me, and finds an echo in Erich Fromm’s study of "evil"— Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. In this superb work, Fromm reasons that commercial and corporate life produces certain character types who have a tendency towards sadism as a solution to the draining away of meaning and human contact from their lives. It is a commonplace in psychology that such tendencies are more likely to be actively expressed if the person is subjected to pressure, and who can deny that modern capitalism produces an abundance of stress and pressure on everyone subjected to it?

I wonder, however whether Clay's picture might be incomplete in a vital areas of inquiry. There is a sense of omission here for me which feels important, and which is shared, to do Clay credit, by Fromm’s approach. The omission concerns our incomprehension of how antisocial pathology is actually formed in an individual character. Clay put it this way:

"The formation of an individual is on extremely complex, open-ended process which, even will all possible information about that individual at our disposal, can never be adequately grasped."

Is this so, I wonder? We as Socialists certainly feel that we can arrive at, at least, an "adequate” grasp of social mechanisms, in spite of their complexity and opacity. The fact is that there is a body of work available now which shines a good deal of light into the hitherto dark region of enquiry encompassed by the word "evil’’.

John Bowlby’s work on attachment and loss, in which he built upon insights gained through a study of hospitalised children, has given birth to whole field of investigation called Attachment Theory, which is proving fruitful in the understanding of antisocial behaviour and even acts of gross savagery. For example. it shows that violent rage stems from a disrupted attachment in infancy or early childhood, from a breakdown in a carer’s ability to provide a "secure base" for the child, for whatever reason, we are not talking about judgements here, but about explanations.

Experiments carried out by Ainsworth. Mary Main and others show that even among under-five's it is possible to prove a connection between the quality of attunement and boundary setting provided by a parent for an infant, and that infant's behaviour in an observed play setting. The better the connection the parents are able to offer the child, the more the child will play sociably and as an equal with its peers, whereas infants of parents who are neglectful will be disruptive and perhaps bullying. For an excellent overview, expanding and in my view deepening Fromm’s masterpiece, anyone interested might read Felicity De Zulueta's From Pain to Violence—The Traumatic Roots of Destructiveness (Whurr 1993).

Socialists tend to shy away from such work. They fear that it implies the abandonment of societal explanations for personal ones. We think what we hear is—"society isn’t sick— you are!" We are suspicious because we think such thinking is simply the blaming of the powerless for the abuse of the powerful. the shackling of working-class mothers with the responsibility for all the ills of the world.

This is not so. The understanding of the origins of pathology is not the same thing as judging. Under capitalism in many ways adequate parenting can become almost impossible.

Of course suspicion is healthy here. I’m not arguing for the shifting of responsibility from capitalists onto hard-pressed parents, but let us not turn our backs on new thinking which casts light on, not only gross crimes, but also the psychological mechanisms which help to produce our assent for abuse and exploitation.

I want to look at Jonathan Clay’s description of reality under capitalism for a moment He talks of: "Fragmentation, powerlessness. alienation, anxiety and despair, in a world which is chaotic beyond all our attempts at control."

This accurate description of how capitalist society can feel is also a beautiful and harrowing evocation of how it must feel to be a helpless neglected child. Such a child, as an adult, may well feel driven to inflict those unbearable emotions on others now less powerful than himself. Such logic does not excuse his behaviour, but it may well explain it.

All of the foregoing is not intended to blame the powerless or shift the spotlight off capitalist society, but with gaining a better understanding of abuse power, which is, surely, the essence of capitalism. Abusive power masquerading as its opposite.

Clay quotes Camus, saying “Children will still die unjustly, even in a perfect society." Well, maybe we as Socialists have more to offer in illuminating this problem than Jonathan Clay thinks, at least if we can be more open to, and less afraid of. the more intimate "people sciences". To paraphrase him— "Do we really want to understand less?"

Peter Rigg, 

Nelson, Lancs

Socialist Party Meetings (1996)

Party News from the June 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

The irrational in anarchism (1998)

Pamphlet Review from the May 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

A recent pamphlet traces a link between back-to-nature anarchists and far-right ideas. How true is this?

Flawed, fascinating and suggestive, Luther Blissett’s Anarchist Integralism: Aesthetics, Politics and the Apres-Garde is not quite “anarchism exposed”, as the back-cover blurb suggests, though it does attempt to trace some extreme right-wing and fascist tendencies in anarchism. The basic, somewhat more measured, position of the text is set out right from the start, on page three:

“While the majority of modernists and anarchists have never adhered to full blown mystical fascism, certain strands of anarchism embrace far-Right individualism, while yet others promote ideologies of integral nationalism.”

Blissett’s target is not anarchism as such (though he is quite sceptical about anarchism in general) so much as the Green Anarchist Network and, almost by the way, the journal Anarchist Studies; though there are salient points about anarchist anti-state fetishism along the way. It is pointed out, for example, that the state is not “the source of all social power”:

” . . . capitalist social relations are anchored in economic institutions which can and do function independently of the state. Capital reproduces itself not only within nation states but across nation states”.

Anarchist gurus

The strains of fascism, nationalism and racism that are apparently (and, to this reader at least, shockingly) found running through anarchism are represented in the first instance by anarchist gurus such as Bakunin (according to Blissett, a rabid anti-semite), Proudhon (an anti-semite and nationalist) and Kropotkin (an anti-semite, nationalist and anarcho-aristocrat). In terms of the anarchist grass-roots, Blissett points to those such as the “French and Italian syndicalists who became fascists”. The trouble is that the text, which includes plentiful, and fully referenced, quotations to support its contentions concerning Bakunin and the others, is not so adept at tracing such tendencies through to contemporary anarchism. There is a rather snide swipe at Noam Chomsky (who is on the editorial board of Anarchist Studies) for supporting free speech for fascists (his position being much the same on this issue as ours); there is reference to the support of anarcho-primitivists for fascist terrorism (more on this below); there is a connection made between anarchism and fascism via a joint link to modernist aesthetics.

In this last instance, far too much is taken as read and requires unpacking; the link between anarchism and aesthetics is not sufficiently explained or even established beyond stating that under capitalism power is aestheticised and that anarchism is structurally tied to capitalism. This is a sheer banality and the same could certainly be said about the movement for socialism, pre-revolution. Also, the notion of the aesthetic is too all-subsuming. Wide varieties and differences of aesthetic experience are collapsed under fairly crass generalisations, even within the more specific but still fairly wide rubric “modernism”.

It’s true that fascism, despite the hatred of the Nazis for modernist painting and sculpture, made extensive use of certain types of modernist design and architecture, and the Italian Futurists were early recruits to fascism, as were the poet Ezra Pound and the writer and artist Wyndham Lewis; but some modernist writers and artists such as James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso were anti-fascist, while some such as Lewis Grassic Gibbon proclaimed that they were socialists. And, as the poet and critic Drew Milne has pointed out in the modernist journal Parataxis, “the most important modernist manifesto is Marx’s Communist Manifesto“. Even then, a simple list of modernist for-and-against fascism over-simplifies matters. It can be argued that the very forms of modernist aesthetics necessarily subvert fascist ideologies, whatever the intentions and beliefs of the artist.

Pseudo-mystical moronism

Regarding anarcho-primitivists, an article entitled “The Irrationalists”, which appeared in the Anarchist Lancaster Bomber # 7, is cited by Blissett. In this article, the author declares himself in favour of the “95 percent solution” in which a “Circle of Guilt (CoG) for what is happening” is proposed which includes virtually everybody:

“Activists adopting the 95 percent solution would have no difficulty over a subway sarin attack, city wide water supply contamination or a biological warfare attack on a fast food restaurant. Such activities see subway commuters or fast food customers as of no value and no loss to the moral universe.”

The article goes on to express support for (among other terrorists) the extreme right-wing and racist Oklahoma bombers. Such rhetoric reveals an astounding level of arrogance and pseudo-mystical moronism in claiming the authority for wholesale slaughter from some so-called “moral universe”. Morality is a human concept, and one heavily bound up with bourgeois ideology; the notion that it can be used first of all to set levels of so-called “guilt” (which is not the same as responsibility) for “what is happening” (whatever that may be—everything, presumably) and then as the reason for killing the greater part of humanity, is pathetic.

As for commuters and fast food customers being of no value—no value to what? To whom? To anarcho-primitivists or to the universe, possibly. If the latter, then in what sense can the universe be said to give a toss either way? And for that matter, what use are the anarcho-primitivists to an indifferent universe? If the former, then it needs to be asked whether or not the anarcho-primitivists are of any use to anybody else and, should the reply be negative, whether we might not just get rid of them, by the force of their own logic.

But does any of this make them fascist? Idiotics, certainly, and psychopathic quite possibly, but not necessarily fascist as such, despite their support for the Oklahoma bombers and the right-wing American militias. Such support can be seen as being a simple (in every sense) liking for extreme violence and general mayhem. There is, however, an ideological connection between anarcho-primitivism and fascism that Blissett apparently fails to recognise. This lies in what may best be described a nostalgia for a way of life (rural, close to the soil, “in tune” with nature, “innocent”) that never really existed. There is a hatred of the contemporary world (which we obviously recognise as being in a hell of a mess, but infinitely preferable to spending your life grubbing around in mud and shit for a few edible roots in the middle of a rainstorm) and a fear of the future—the only future these ideologies, whether anarcho-primitivists or fascist, can countenance is one which involves a childish attempt to flee into a mythical golden age that is located in the past.

For fascists or course, this nostalgia extends to the notion of the volk and the “purity” of the volk, an ideology which inevitably becomes tied up with racism and nationalism. This volkishness can also be found amongst the more extreme margins of the Green movement, including Green Anarchy and the anarcho-primitivists. Blisset is perhaps not overstating the matter too far when he refers to such groups as “eco-fascist”, even if he doesn’t entirely explain the reasons for doing so.

There are also a couple of mentions in this pamphlet for the Anarchist Communist Federation, one a perfectly correct but irrelevant (in this context) attack on one ACF writer for failing to understand Trotskyism, the other concerning the ACF’s links to Green Anarchist: “Anarcho-communists such as the ACF do themselves no favours by collaborating with far-Right reactionaries like Green Anarchist or looking to Bakunin for inspiration.”

Jonathan Clay

Dunblane — a question of evil? (1996)

From the May 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is impossible to imagine the horror that confronted those first on the scene of the Dunblane tragedy; little children lying dead along with their school teacher, with many more children injured. Difficult though it may be in such circumstances, it is surely necessary to look for what motivated Thomas Hamilton beyond the simplistic notion that he was merely 'evil'.

The violent death of a child is always a terrible thing; there is something particularly appalling, obscene, about it. The younger the child the worse it seems, the more upsetting, sickening, infuriating, even frightening. The difficulty comprehending such an action is what frightens, the murder of a young child plumbing the depths of depraved behaviour and inevitably raising an anguished "why?". A great many people are probably unable to answer this any more satisfyingly than the hospital chaplain, interviewed on television after the massacre in Dunblane, who said that people have free will and there is no other answer than that. Many other people will blame evil itself, using the terms as a metaphysical category, something more than a concept, something that acts, something that is a cause rather than effect. Socialists find both explanations unsatisfactory, but many of us will grope as blindly as anybody in the face of such horror, all words paling into insignificance as we try to imagine the absolute desolation of the bereaved, or the fear of the victims.

Such events always prompt reflections on the subject of evil. The Guardian (16 March) published a particularly thoughtful and interesting article on which it raised the question of evil as a question that is particularly disturbing for liberal ideology, an ideology to which the author, Henry Porter, obviously subscribes:

  "It seems almost implicit that what took hold of that school was a terrible extraneous force, and the only word we have for it is Ron Taylor’s [the headmaster of Dunblane Primary School] word— evil. That should satisfy us, but it goes against every liberal's instincts to acknowledge evil as a dynamic in human affairs. "

Evil as an explanation goes against “liberal instincts” because it suggests the impossibility of eradicating the problems that beset humanity by reforming them away. This is a political point, a philosophical point and an ethical or moral point. Evil as a metaphysical force is pre-Enlightenment; it is a religious concept that challenges everything that the liberal heirs to the Enlightenment believe. It is a concept that underwrites a certain reactionary defeatism; it is essentially conservative and it stands behind the belief that we should, in John Major’s phrase, “understand less and condemn more”. This phrase “understand less” can be read in more than one way, and still be revealing if we want to understand the political and social dynamics of this metaphysical concept of evil. Let’s put it this way: simply, do we really want to understand less? Is it good enough for the survivors and the bereaved in Dunblane, or for victims of apparently senseless violence at any time or in any place, past or future, to understand less? Continued mystification is never a satisfactory answer, is never any answer at all, and will never do anything to prevent such horrors happening again.

Let’s look again at the above quote from the Guardian. Evil is a “terrible extraneous force”, a “dynamic in human affairs”. Docs the word “evil” really necessarily imply these things? It may be a social dynamic in that people are prompted to react in certain ways, but the idea that it is a cause of death or that it is something that acts independently of everything else is, as stated, an essentially theological view. That is the real “dynamic” of metaphysical evil; it cuts off any possibility of understanding, it abdicates responsibility and at the same time denies the possibility of dealing with violence in any other way than with punitive and draconian judicial measures—which will finally have little or no effect in any case. Irrational and tragic acts of random violence continue to occur.

Liberals at a loss

Liberalism, on the other hand, cannot understand such irrational violence because it is blind to the idea that “nurture” extends beyond the private family. The formation of an individual is an extremely complex open-ended process which, even after that individual’s death, and even with all possible information about that individual at our disposal, can never be adequately grasped or “summed up”. We might never know what tiny, apparently insignificant detail of a person’s life provides the spur to violence. There are two things we do know, though. One is that the individual remains responsible for his or her actions; we should never be prepared to allow an individual to abdicate their own responsibility for what they do, except perhaps in cases of absolute and total madness. The second thing that we also know on the other hand is that the individual is formed in relation to the world in which they live, that “nurture” involves the whole of society and in so far as we are part of society we all bear some responsibility for what occurs within it.

It can be said that evil exists, in that evil acts occur, but is does not at all follows that evil exists as an independent metaphysical force. Those who hold religious viewpoints often state that religion is necessary for “knowing the difference between right anti wrong”, implying that the irreligious are in some way necessarily morally deficient. Those of us who reject the ideology of religion may find that questions of ethics and morality are often more complex than religions like to admit, and we may have some difficulty with “moral absolutes”; but socialism certainly has a very strong ethical dimension, and disbelief in higher supernatural powers of authority is often more severe in terms of ethical imperatives than religion. We have no recourse to concepts of grace or salvation. As Jean-Paul Sartre once put it (quoted in Adieux by Simone dc Beauvoir), without God “all evil is in itself irreparable” This leaves us with the necessary responsibility for understanding the sources of evil acts and attempting to deal with them.

We live in a capitalist “liberal democracy”; this is another reason why liberals find events such as Thomas Hamilton’s actions in Dunblane difficult to understand. After all of the liberal social reform of the last hundred years or so here was a man who, while obviously deeply disturbed, was also not strictly insane, and who committed such a terrible act of violence against the least powerful members of his community. Liberalism can find no answer for—is incapable of understanding—such an act in a liberal society. This tragedy issued a challenge to liberalism because unless liberal capitalism is at fault then there must be some force of evil that compelled Hamilton to murder. Liberalism finds both options unacceptable.

Individuals and society 
If we turn our attention to the little we know of Thomas Hamilton himself, we find that he conforms almost exactly to the classic profile of the mass murderer. He was a loner; he was paranoid, with the constant feeling that he was being persecuted; his relationship to children was such that, if he was not a paedophile, it at least involved the need to dominate and exercise power over them. He was desperate, in the strongest sense of the word; he was obviously in despair (the murder of children followed by suicide can only be accompanied by the kind of contempt for life that springs from despair). It does not require any leap of imagination to sec that all of these factors are linked to the failures of liberal capitalism, with its inevitable social fragmentation, alienation, powerlessness for the majority and feelings of anxiety or even despair that many feel at being apparently thrown into a world that is chaotic beyond all our attempts at control.

There was obviously more to it than this, and we shall never know exactly what additional factors drove Hamilton past a general dissatisfaction or unease into, first, the need to deny his own powerlessness by exercising an exploitative power over children, and finally the terrible and, yes, evil act of mass murder. But can anybody seriously believe that these events would definitely have occurred anyway, without the alienation, social fragmentation and chaos that are endemic in capitalist societies? In the final analysis, it must be recognised that there are no truly “evil” people in the sense of having been born that way—there is no metaphysical force of evil, there are only evil acts, and their genesis can be traced to the relationship between the individual and his or her society. Individuals are always responsible for their actions, but at the same time any crime, large or small, unless committed through an insanity that can be traced to a biological cause, is also an indictment of the society in which it is committed.

We cannot say that there would be no terrible tragedies in a socialist society. Albert Camus was exactly right when he wrote in The Rebel (a text that is otherwise in many ways philosophically questionable and politically confused) the following:

"children will still die unjustly even in a perfect society. Even by his greatest effort, man can only propose to diminish, arithmetically, the sufferings of the world. ”

One point, though, is that if such sufferings can be reduced, if only arithmetically, then we should obviously do so—but the reform of capitalism is incapable of this. The social problems that are necessarily implicated in evil acts such as occurred at Dunblane are the inevitable by-products of capitalism. The only solution that will reduce such problems to an appreciable extent is the revolutionary solution, which is to say the empowerment of ordinary people, the democratisation of society, the abolition of exploitation and oppression.

Jonathan Clay

Getting off Scott Free (1996)

From the April 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

  To Socialists, the publication of the 1800 page Scott Report ranks as one of the great non-events of recent times. All the Report really revealed is that British government ministers, notably Alan Clark, were doing what they're in office for — looking after the economic interests of the British capitalist class.

Certain Tory government ministers, even the whole Tory government, have, it seems, been both caught out and let off the hook—though perhaps temporarily. Amid reports in, for example, the Independent (17 February) and the Observer (18 February), suggesting that Lord Justice Richard Scott has been somehow “nobbled” by government ministers, “persuaded” to be gentle with them, the facts remain in the public domain; whatever insipid conclusions Scott has come to, everybody else can judge for themselves. It is even almost as though Scott might have intended that they should do so. Having apparently bowed to pressure, induced perhaps by invocations of old school ties or past favours, or even favours to come, it is as though he has washed his hands of the matter but, unable to square his conscience with letting corrupt liars and dissimulators off scot-free, he has left it to a vague and amorphous “public opinion” to sit in judgment in his place.

That government ministers lied to parliament, lied to “the public”, tried to keep important information out of the law courts, was all down to their fear of “public opinion”, fear of being found out and forced to resign or, worse, being voted out of office. That this should be the case brings out an interesting conjunction of the personal and the political—which the ministers concerned, along with their colleagues and supporters, have tried to erase. They have tried to hide the personal dimension under the political, claiming that they felt secrecy was necessary' to safeguard jobs in the armaments industry, while in fact they were more concerned with safeguarding their own careers and their own power, which brings us nicely to the crux of the issue at hand.

Ministerial responsibility
The whole issue of ministerial responsibility and ministerial deceit is one of personal ethics dressed up as politics. Like most contemporary' mainstream “politics” it is really soap opera, drawing everybody’s attention to particular characters and focusing on issues of individual hypocrisy or corruption (it’s not entirely fortuitous that Scott’s investigations have twice during February been dramatised on television). There's little doubt that many of the characters involved in this little drama were (and are) hypocritical and corrupt, or at least incompetent, but that’s not the point, it’s only the point focused on by both the Opposition parties and by the media. Politicians are by definition incapable of mastering events whatever their personal attributes may be; they have always been so to some extent under capitalism, forced to react to the markets and the requirements of profit and capital. These days they are even less able to control the system they support than they have been in the past, due to modern information technologies and the speed at which information can travel, allowing capital and the markets to evade and pre-empt their every' attempt at control. Politicians are, as the philosopher Jacques Derrida has put it, “structurally incompetent”; to paraphrase Derrida, while they present themselves as political actors they are no more than TV actors. And they know it; they are, therefore, not only structurally incompetent, they are also structurally hypocritical. This is not to say that those involved are not responsible; they support capitalism after all, quite apart from the fact that they are, in any case, personally corrupt liars and arrogant hypocrites. The point is that this should only be of marginal interest, instead of being, as it is, the main focus of attention.

There is a very serious political dimension here which actually sheds some light on the complex but indissoluble links between war and armaments and the very existence of capitalism itself. The concentration by the media on ministerial ethics specifically marginalises the fact that this issue is about the sale of armaments, about, by extension, war and death. Even when this is considered, media concern, as well as the concern of the Opposition parties, is focused on the fact that the armaments were being sold to Iraq. The demonisation of a particular national leader by the Western ruling class could, ironically, lead to the downfall of some of the very people who have encouraged this demonisation. This concern with Iraq, though, is still without any really serious point. Saddam Hussein is undoubtedly a tyrant; but so was Somoza of Nicaragua and Pinochet of Chile, to name only two, who were supported by the Western so-called “liberal democracies”. All this selective support and demonisation is itself simply a smokescreen for the way in which war and capitalism feed off each other, the fact that the gulf war was fought for economic reasons, the fact that all the major industrialised states produce and sell arms; that the arms trade is the height of modern capitalism.

Scarce material resources

War is largely a result of scarcity; however the causes of war are dressed up ideologically, war is a more-or-less direct result of the struggles of particular peoples for a greater share of scarce material resources, though down through history this has had less and less actual effect on the lives of ordinary people as the minority ruling classes have taken more of those resources for themselves. In pre-capitalist societies, though, there was at least a true scarcity which led inevitably to conflict. Under the capitalist mode of production on the other hand, scarcity is artificially created by the system itself even as it develops the productive potential for its eradication. Capitalism requires competition for its existence and competition requires scarcity ; and it should be noted that war itself is simply a form of competition on a particularly large and deadly scale. Scarcity and competition are vital to capitalism, and scarcity and competition are also the necessary pre-conditions for inevitable war.

War itself, in its turn, creates further massive conditions of scarcity through the damage it inflicts and the consequent need to rebuild. The arms themselves are also obviously a paradigm of material scarcity; they can only be used once and require immediate replacement. The armaments market is highly competitive and there is an enormous amount of money to be made; whichever way you look at it, there is always a lot of money to be made from war, which is why, beneath all the moral platitudes, capitalism loves it. It has nothing to do with which party is in office; Labour supported the Americans in Vietnam and the recent Australian Labor government supplied and supported the raping, torturing aggressors in East Timor. Particular governments, in the final analysis, are neither here nor there. Capitalism itself produces greed, corruption and war through the artificial production of scarcity and the exploitation for its own ends of the absurd quasi-mystical ideologies of nationalism. The only way to end war and the manufacture of arms is to end capitalism, world-wide; to abolish the profit system and abolish states and borders. The only really worthwhile use of parliaments is to bring a democratic end, once-and-for-all, to the system that makes them otherwise no more then TV studios for tedious and absurdly repetitive “dramas”.

Jonathan Clay

Letters: Just dealing with one of the effects (1996)

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

Just dealing with one of the effects

Dear Editors,

In his recent article ("Class, Micropolitics and Solidarity", October Socialist Standard), Jonathan Clay talks about the action in which four of us disarmed a Hawk attack plane destined for Indonesia. He states that this action was "inspired, but ultimately doomed”, and says that no doubt we realised this all along. I object most strongly to what was one of the most successful anti-arms trade actions ever being dismissed as "doomed”. Nine months after we disarmed that particular plane, it is still in England. It was due to be sent months ago to a counter-insurgency squadron in Indonesia from where it would have been used against civilians in East Timor. The many East Timorese who have written to thank us for our action certainly don’t think it was doomed.

Jonathan Clay goes on to say that our action was undertaken to publicise the situation in East Timor, and that the jury ignored the law in acquitting us. Had he taken the slighted trouble to get his facts right, he would have found that we had a defence in law—that of using reasonable force to prevent crime, a defence under the Criminal Law Act 1967. We did not undertake this action as a publicity stunt—who would risk ten years in prison for publicity? The judge allowed our defence to be put to the jury, who acquitted us on that basis. To suggest that the jury ignored the law is insulting to them and does nothing to help people understand that this kind of action can in certain circumstances be legal. I wonder what actions Jonathan Clay has undertaken to uphold justice and international law—or is he just an armchair activist whose only contribution is to make ill-founded criticisms of other people’s actions?

Andrea Needham, 

Seeds of Hope—East Timor Ploughshares

Reply:

When we said that your action was “ultimately doomed" we meant that it would fail to prevent the Indonesian military getting their attack planes in the end (that's what ultimately means). The most that you could achieve was what you did achieve—to delay delivery and to gain publicity for your cause. We assumed you realised this but if you really expected to stop delivery altogether we misjudged your level of understanding of existing political realities.

Are you holier than us? Probably, but then we don’t share your belief in the efficacy of the law to improve things. In fact, for us, the law is a reflection of private property and profit-motivated society and exists to uphold it. But it is precisely this society—capitalism—with its built-in competitive struggle between states for sources of raw materials, investment outlets, trade routes, markets and strategic positions to control these, which is the root cause of situations like that in East Timor.

Such situations will go on occurring, in some part of the world, as long as capitalism continues to exist. What are you doing to speed the end of capitalism? Or are you just a single-issue activist concentrating exclusively on trying to deal with just one of its many nefarious effects?

Editors

A good thing

Dear Editors,

Jonathan Clay’s article. "Class, Micropolitics and Solidarity" in October’s Socialist Standard was a very welcome and timely one in that it warned against taking a dismissive attitude to defensive class struggle.

Only working class solidarity can get rid of capitalism and achieve world socialism and any expression of such solidarity is a good thing, whether at work, in communities fighting to protect their local environment, or in the various getting-togethers to resist the bosses' latest laws. At least it shows that people will never roll over and die, as the ruling class so dearly wants us to. Obviously none of the above will do much at present to bring about a free society because the required mass class consciousness isn’t there.

However, now more than ever, people involved in defensive struggles are likely to approach the only conclusion there is: that the money system as a whole is the problem. Attacks on the working class are getting more savage by the day, every way of running capitalism has been tried and discredited and there is widespread rejection of the parties of capitalism (including the lefties and their sorry antics). Life itself is an education and the Socialist Party exists to spread the socialist case as widely as possible.

Socialists are all for working class solidarity, but are "under no illusions" that it is mass solidarity for the abolition of capitalism that is so desperately needed.

Ben Malcolm, 

Cardiff

Trade Unions and the Labour Party (1996)

From the February 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Labour Party leaders are so desperate to win the next general election that they have virtually banned any mention of trade unions. If Labour does win the election they are in for a nasty shock — and so are the trade unionists who helped them to power!

There was recently a postal workers’ strike in Scotland. An unofficial strike. What the word “unofficial” might mean was never entirely certain, since union officials were very much involved in negotiations for the strike’s resolution. It would seem to mean that the workers acted of their own accord, possibly spontaneously though not necessarily without consulting, or rather asking the permission of, their “leaders”.

One tiling was obvious; part of the significance of this word “unofficial” lay in the union officials’ “official” disapproval of the workers’ actions Seemingly facing both ways at once, union officials continued to represent the workers, but with a certain embarrassment and even bad temper. This disapproval might have two possible causes; the feeling that the workers had themselves in some way usurped the hierarchical prerogatives of the leadership and the officials, or (more likely) fear of the embarrassment that might be caused to the Trade Union movement’s “parliamentary representatives”, the Labour Party, with a general election coming up in the next year or so.

As everybody knows, because the media continually tell us, the Labour Party is “in the pocket of the unions”. The unions pay Labour’s bills, the unions have 50 percent of the votes at the Labour Party conference, the unions sponsor individual MPs. It is obvious, “he who pays the piper calls the tune”; but who actually pays who? Do the unions pay labour for its support, or does the Labour Party buy industrial peace by promises of “faimess”, “workers’ rights”, “union rights” and the rest? It seems a mutually beneficial relationship, all very cosy and enough to have the bosses howling with rage.

B-team

The bosses, though, don't actually howl. The Tories howl occasionally, as do the press, in a fairly anodyne, stagy sort of way, especially as elections approach. The bosses worry, they worry about this relationship. They worry at this relationship, they’re not sure whether to believe in it or not. However much Tony Blair tries to convince them that he is their natural and greatest friend, they worry about the unions. In fact, Blair is right, he is a great friend and ally of the bosses, as is the Labour Party as a whole. In a general sense labour is the employers’ ally as the B- team of UK capitalism, helping keep the lid on dissent in this country when the Tories foul things up so much as to become a liability.

In a related way, Labour helps the bosses by being a regulating, calming influence on the unions, whether in or out of office. In office, they tell trade unionists not to cause trouble or kick up a fuss, be good or you’ll upset our great progressive project from which you will benefit. Be nice boys and girls or we won’t be able to give you the presents we’ve promised. Out of office they say much the same thing, with the added incentive that patience brings its rewards—’’wait till we come to power and you’ll get justice”; which carries like a parasite in its hair the warning: “if you won’t be good we won’t get power and you’ll get nothing”.

“You’ll get nothing if you don’t calm down and shut up.” Does this sound like a relationship of equals? Mutual benefit?

The union movement is treated like an errant child by the Labour Party, and not only that but a poor and disadvantaged child offered the occasional scraps from the Big House (of Commons). The working class is a charity case; the Labour Party a patrician “charitable organisation”.

Obviously there are still disputes and strikes, whether Labour are in or out of office. In 1945 there was the dockers’ strike, in which the Labour government, the most radical government this country has ever seen, threatened the workers with the sack if they didn’t return to work. There was an acrimonious dispute over the Labour government’s union-bashing policies in its document In Place of Strife (an unfortunate title if ever there was one) in 1969. Then, of course, a decade later, there was the still infamous “winter of discontent”. These are just three occasions when unions came into direct conflict with Labour governments. Obviously there have been many more over the same period when workers have been forced to confront their employers, whether private or State.

There are two main points to be made here though; firstly, that whatever the intentions of those involved, a Labour government is a government of the capitalist system and will be forced by that system to act against the interests of working class people. Secondly, whether the government is Labour or Tory, and whatever else may be the case, under capitalism there is still always the irreparable faultline between the workers and the bosses, between the creators of wealth and the owners of wealth. As long as there is capitalism there will be class struggle, and the unions are still the most effective vehicles for working class people to organise for themselves in that struggle to defend what meagre benefits have already been gained and win what can be won. For themselves. Not for the realisation of the dreams of power for Tony Blair and his mates.

Break the link

The long-term, and finally the only real, interest of working-class people is no longer to be working class—i.e., for there to be no working, or any other, class at all. In other words, to replace capitalism with socialism; but that is not strictly the business of trade unions but of the, or a, Socialist Party—in other words, of the whole working class organised politically. In the meantime, however, it should be clear that the short-term interests of workers generally and organised labour in particular are damaged by the link between the unions and the Labour Party.

The unions continually rely on the Labour Party to represent their interests only to find that a Labour government always finally represents the interests of capital, while all the time their misguided faith encourages the unions, particularly the leaders, to tread softly, keep their heads down and wait for handouts. The trade unions were founded on the realisation that, to advance their interests even slightly, workers must organise collectively for themselves and act for themselves to force concessions from employers and the representatives of capital. Largely because of their links with the Labour Party, they are fast becoming little more than purveyors of insurance policies, cut-price holidays and empty rhetoric.

Over the summer of 1995, there were accusations of Stalinism thrown at the Labour leadership. Such accusations were not entirely inapposite, though perhaps the accusers didn’t have in mind quite the same things socialists have. What we have in mind is the way in which Labour both uses and ignores the working class, taking the support of workers for granted and subordinating their needs to those of the party (or should that be “Party”?). Subordinating the unions and the union members’ interests to their own, denying the existence of class struggle and trying to replace it with the struggle of the Parliamentary Labour Party for power; there is a great deal of common ground between Leninism and Labourism in their attitudes towards working class people and trade unions. It’s high time the unions realised they are getting the poor end of a bad deal. Instead of relying on handouts from the leaders of just another capitalist party, the unions should regain the initiative and fight once more for themselves and for each other. They should cut their losses and, once and for all, cut all their links with Labour.

Jonathan Clay

The Strange Death of European Social Democracy (1997)

Pamphlet Review from the March 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Political Economy of Social Democracy: The Swedish Collapse, The Danish Mystery, The British Mirage and the German Dilemma by Stuart Wilks-Heeg (South Bank European Papers)

Capitalism is a global system, and has become more so than ever over the last twenty years. This fairly straightforward axiom is just one important factor lying behind the failure of Social Democratic reformism not only to deliver on its pseudo-socialist promises, but also its failure to even manage capitalism successfully on its own terms.

The Social Democratic failure is often couched in terms of a collapse of electoral support, but Stuart Wilks-Heeg argues in this pamphlet that "the primary challenge facing Social Democrats is one of political economy, not one of electoral decline." In fact, one of the points made most clearly in this pamphlet is that electoral support for the Social Democratic parties has not collapsed but, rather, has begun to fluctuate, often quite wildly, after a thirty-year post-war period of fairly steady ascendancy. Possible reasons for this are put forward in the pamphlet.

The one that Wilks-Heeg spends most space analysing is the collapse of Fordism, both as a method for the mass-production of consumer goods and as an ideological system that included Keynesian economics as one of its components and relied for its smooth operation on what Wilks-Heeg calls a ‘‘class compromise”, this consisting basically of a trade-off between higher wages and higher productivity. This, he says, was the basis for Social Democratic political economy.

Wilks-Heeg seems to be under some misapprehensions surrounding this point. He states, for example, that this class compromise succeeded in “combining productivity growth, full employment, labour peace, welfare state expansion, steady wage growth and greater social equality”. Much of this is no doubt true—except, crucially, “greater social equality”. A rise in wages does not mean an erosion of inequality, particularly when profits rise at a similar or higher rate, a factor represented here by "productivity growth". While workers certainly did become "better off”, inequalities, including those of power, remained more-or-less the same, the capitalists remaining in charge, workers remaining wage-slaves.

The "success" of Western Social Democracy was largely illusory and certainly very limited as, even in its own terms, it was based on a "class compromise" that was in its turn largely a product of Western capitalism's ability to keep ahead in global capitalist competition and of the absence of severe economic crisis. When the economies of other nations and blocs, particularly in the Middle and the Far East, began to technologically "catch up", and when global profit rates fell Western economic stability evaporated along with its hegemony and took the Social Democratic mirage with it.

The shift in international economic/power relations made a qualitative change in Western methods of production necessary, as Wilks-Heeg states:

  "Today, in an era of globalisation, rapid technological change and dramatically enhanced competition, capital has sought greater flexibility and deregulation . . . Inevitably, these changes have disrupted the terms of the class compromise. In order to survive, capital has had to break from traditional relationships with labour and pressured governments to facilitate flexibility and de-regulation."

In other words, class struggle in the West has gone from a relatively muted affair into a state of open warfare, with the ruling class very much on the attack. In the face of this attack the Social Democrat reformists have simply capitulated, being openly and fully on the side of capital and Union leaders have by-and-large gone with them, apparently regarding themselves (in a time dishonoured neo-Stalinist manner) as simply the industrial wing of the Social Democratic parties, trying to keep the workers in line to facilitate electoral victories for their political masters.

This pamphlet contains much that we would not agree with but, on the whole, Wilks-Heeg presents a very pertinent and interesting analysis of the present state of reformist politics. Sadly, he continues to try and think of ways to rejuvenate reformism, failing to draw the obvious conclusion that social reform is by-and-large a failure and social revolution is both necessary and desirable.

Jonathan Clay

Advertising and Art (1997)

From the September 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is advertising art? Whatever it is, it's the nearest thing under capitalism to creative adornment of public spaces, even if it reflects capitalism's buying and selling ethos.

Advertising "is" pornography. When we say that advertising is pornography we are not in any way making a moral point. We’re making a point about the etymology of the word.

According to the Oxford Concise Dictionary, the word "pornography" derives from the Greek word pornographos, itself deriving from the words porne and grapho, "prostitute” and "write" respectively. Prostituted writing. Or, as it is often colloquially translated (and so generalising it a little more), "whore art". As the word is most commonly used, pornography obviously relates the notion of prostitution to sexuality. But it could also be interpreted as simply denoting the sale or hiring out of a person’s body (including, of course, the brain), by themselves, "willingly" for material reward. Under this definition, any worker could be described as a prostitute and the prostitute becomes just another kind of worker. It is, in fact, only for historical reasons, both ideological and material, that a special, moralistic, case is made of sexuality and therefore that prostitutes receive special (or any) approbation.

Hired writers
Artists are also, of course, workers (at least until, if they’re very lucky, they amass enough wealth so as to be able to work just for their own pleasure), as are "creatives" in advertising firms. This is quite an important point as regards the question of differences and similarities between advertising and art. The artist does not "create" from nothing, and nor does he or she proceed from some "divine" inspiration, as much of the dominant ideology of art would continue to have us believe. The artist is rather a worker producing art out of various raw materials, including previously existing systems of meaning, and in specific historical and social, which is to say material, conditions. It might also be said that artists are experimenters in the general area of culture and concepts, akin to philosophers and scientists. This is not to say that the artist doesn’t have special abilities, honed over a long period, that it would be difficult or impossible for the rest of us to mimic; but then so does a surgeon, an engineer or a skilled plasterer. And, most pertinently in this context, so most certainly does an advertising creative. But what is also important for our context, and for differentiating art from advertising, is the analogy between art and science, the concept of art as an experimental process, that requires the exercise of the imagination to transcend the simple given fact of the pre-existing materials.

It seems possible to argue that advertising, in the context of contemporary capitalism, actually is art, and a very popular art at that. Our cities might well "look pretty dead" if all adverts were to be suddenly removed. Many adverts are clever, amusing, even at times beautiful. The Marlboro adverts of a couple of years ago, for example, featuring black and white photographs of American landscapes and cityscapes, splashed with a touch of red to signify the brand (when allied to the health warning across the base of the image, utilised to signify the product), were considered by many to have a certain beauty that we might call "artistic”. Adverts also quite often make use of the most sophisticated techniques of modernist art, both in still images and in television or cinema advertising; this is, of course, quite interesting in itself given the popular comprehension, and even hostility, that they are often subject to when they are labelled "art”. This is connected to a certain ideological élitism, and an ideological reverence, that continues to surround artistic appreciation, tending to incite an anti-art backlash from those who are, culturally or educationally, largely excluded (supposedly) from such appreciation.

There are, in fact, those working in advertising, such as Tony Kaye, who produced the surrealist television adverts for Pirelli tyres, who have explicitly claimed artistic status for their work. There are also people working in fields that are recognised as “authentic" art who have previously worked in advertising. Salman Rushdie, for example, worked as writer for an advertising agency and came up with the cream cake slogan "naughty but nice", while Alan Parker, who has directed films such as The Commitments and Mississippi Burning, recently said in an interview with Jeremy Isaacs that he always considered advertising to be a "new art form" when he worked in the industry. Even when advertising was less sophisticated than at present there were well known instances of “cross-over" between art and advertising, such as W.H. Auden’s writing and reciting the text for the Post Office’s Night Mail advert in the 1930s, or further back, the art-nouveau posters of the late nineteenth century, the most celebrated of which were Toulose-Lautrec’s posters for Parisian nightclubs such as the Moulin Rouge. On the other hand art, in its turn, often makes use of materials and forms more usually associated with advertising, the Pop Art produced by Andy Warhol and others being the most obvious example.

So it seems advertising may have a certain aesthetic interest or artistic value; what then, if any, are the differences between art and advertising?

Caught up in the market

Both advertising and art are caught up in capitalist markets to some extent. This is an obvious fact given the fact that we are all necessarily caught up in the capitalist system whether we like it or not. But given this, and for all that the boundaries between art and advertising are blurred or semi-erased, there are at least two important differences.

Firstly, advertising is always and necessarily produced for the sake of the market, while art is, at least on occasion if not for the most part (the extent is debatable), produced before the explicit intervention of the market.

Secondly, advertising sets in place an ossification of concepts, promoting clichés of thought, perception and even aesthetics that are essentially ideologically (and so politically) conservative. It is even used, in fact, to implicitly encourage and promote commodity fetishism.

We are now approaching the sense in which advertising can be said to be pornography; the second difference outlined above is in a sense a consequence of the first. Where art is produced and then (the artist hopes) sold, advertising is sold and then produced, an important point since it means that the advert must conform to capitalist requirements in itself. Art, on the other hand, is not necessarily affected by such requirements, even though the individual artist may be tempted for the sake of relative financial security to tailor his or her work to them. If they do so, though, the work produced may often be the poorer for it, as the many examples of great art that has been unappreciated by the markets of its time (such as the work of Van Gogh or Stravinsky) would seem to indicate. What would have been the results if they had simply churned out what the markets were demanding?

Turning briefly to the cultural and aesthetic policies of Stalinism, we can see that the so-called "Socialist Realism” (which was neither socialist or particularly realistic, in that such works primarily presented fantasies of the Stalinist “utopia”) produced according to state diktat largely amounted to simple advertising for the state (the same applies to Fascist art) and its ideologies. We can see in this context how Leninist state capitalism is precisely that, with the state not only acting as the principal market (though a market nonetheless) for art but also dictating, on pain of the destruction of work and texts or even the imposition of judicial penalties on artists, exactly what that art must be, in both form and content.

In a truly socialist world, the freedom of the artist would be promoted rather than diminished by the abolition of both the market and the state. Not only would those who would in any case work in the areas of art find their freedom increased, but the absolute redundancy of the entire advertising industry would release the enormous wealth of talent currently tied up there. As for whether or not advertising "adds to the action" in our cities, there seems little doubt that it does—but in a socialist society advertising could be replaced by art of the highest standards, with local people deciding democratically which art is placed in which public spaces. On the other hand, galleries could continue to provide space for those works that might be unappreciated by the majority in their own time but which are of possible long-term historical, aesthetic and cultural worth. As in perhaps every other area of human existence, the end of the reign of capital and the capitalists would see the beginning of the reign of freedom and the consequent burgeoning of invention, imagination and creativity.

Jonathan Clay

Class, Micropolitics & Solidarity (1996)

From the October 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists recognise that workers who are involved in reform campaigns are, at least, trying to gain some control over their lives.

What do we find if we examine, quickly, the present state of class struggle in this little corner of world capitalism known as Britain?

Looking first at what we might call the traditional areas of organised conflict, trade union activity, there has been something of a flurry of activity over the last couple of months with tube strikes and postal strikes particularly in the news. This has fairly predictably led to the government threatening more repression and further curbs on union powers, to the point of considering an outright ban on strikes in "essential services", though such a ban may be rendered impossible by the difficulty of defining what is or is not an essential service.

These disputes drag on as management, more used these days to little overt resistance from workers, continue to try to impose their will on hostile workforces. Simultaneously, the unions are stung to greater efforts of resistance not only by the hostile interference of both the Tory government and the Labour so-called opposition.

Of course, these remain relatively minor disputes and the reactions of the two major parties represent the efforts of the capitalist state to stamp out what it thinks are the dying embers of workers' resistance. It is possible that such efforts by the state might actually cause sparks to ignite further flare-ups of open conflict; what's certainly the case is that they can never succeed in entirely extinguishing class struggle because the capitalist system itself continually produces both fuel and ignition.

What of other manifestations of conflict? What of the so-called "micropolitical" struggles—Newbury, Wexports, the "land is ours" campaign and the like?

As far as the major parties are concerned, the future has been abandoned. Mainstream politics, with Labour and the Tories drawing so close together, has nothing to offer but more of the same, world without end—unless of course things simply get worse. This political sclerosis and ideological entropy means that all the political energy has migrated elsewhere, out of parliamentarianism and into either charities or loosely-organised protest actions, both areas being primarily defensive.

There are many people including many of those involved in such struggles, who will question the relevance of class to these protests and actions. They are, after all, specifically "micropolitical", single-issue campaigns, concerned it would seem, purely and simply with specific, very localised outcomes.

Newbury bypass protesters, for example, would probably consider the notion that their campaign to stop a road from being built (and save a rare snail) had a class aspect as absurd. But then, why should we assume that a struggle must necessarily be self-conscious? The class struggle is, in fact, an inevitable feature of the capitalist system, whether those involved are conscious of it or not, being the result of irreducible conflicts of material interest under capitalism.

While the immediate aim of those at Newbury may be "simply" to stop the construction of a road for ecological reasons, it should be recognised that this does not in itself mean that important issues of class are excluded from the entire structure of the conflict that is involved. There is a very important question of power at issue here, which is always a vitally important element of class relations. Class and capitalism are inevitably involved, so these issues are not really "micro" at all but actually have global, social and economic implications. 

Whatever else may be involved, the conflict over the Newbury bypass is one in which working-class people are struggling for some degree of democratic control over their environment, which inevitably brings them into conflict with the state and with capitalist big business.

Of course, it needs to be recognised that most struggles such as these are doomed to failure in the long term, and that when they are successful, they will lead only to further struggles ad infinitum, as long as the capitalist system itself continues to exist; as long as, that is, working people don't actually have real democratic control over our own lives. These struggles are (as in trade-unionism) defensive, as they react to impositions and the diktats passed down from the capitalists and their public lieutenants in the state, even though they also express a desire for something more, something better than what there already is. Part of the problem is that this desire is left vague, ethereal, relatively inarticulate, and the energy released by it is frittered away in specific short-term, defensive struggles, often without even recognising connections between them, or with apparently different but ultimately related and overlapping struggles such as those involving unions or tenants groups.

Solidarity

A recent example of an inspired, but ultimately doomed (as those involved will have no doubt realised all along), "micropolitical" action involved four women entering a British Aerospace factory in order to disarm military aircraft bound for Indonesia. These women, from the anti-war group Ploughshares, undertook this action as a protest against Indonesian state terrorism in East Timor, where it is assumed the planes were to be used against the civilian population (or against East Timorese rebels—although, if reports are to believed, that does in fact mean pretty much the entire population).

What is particularly interesting, and heartening, about this event is the strong element of solidarity involved. First of all, and most obviously, there is the solidarity of the women with the East Timorese people against the (Indonesian) state and big business (and not just British Aerospace—Indonesian aggression, and Australian support for it, is driven, surprise surprise, by economics, specifically by the existence of oil in the Timor Sea). Presumably the action was undertaken in order to publicise the situation in East Timor and therefore the women were expecting to be arrested and convicted of "criminal damage"; to that extent they will consider their action to have been relatively successfully.

What will have made it still more successful for them is the fact that they were actually acquitted by a jury on 30 July, despite having admitted their actions, simply arguing that they were ethically justified. This brings us to the second example of solidarity—that of the working people in the jury who decided that the women were indeed justified in their actions.

By the letter of the law, it seems apparent that these four women should surely have been convicted; they had broken the law. But, while we should hold no illusions concerning the jury's motives in acquitting them, i.e., there seems no reason to think that it was specifically done with this in mind, their act of solidarity threw the whole notion of legality into question.

Working-class solidarity can go beyond legality; there is little enough such solidarity around at the moment, and it is understandable, if, for example, threats by the state against union rights make the union movement somewhat nervous, but it must also be recognised that the union leaders seems to have forgotten that such a thing as solidarity is even possible. But it is absolutely vital; whatever the laws says, class solidarity can make the law unworkable anyway.

The laws of the state are made workable only by the active consent of its "subjects", the working class, and can therefore be made unworkable by the withdrawal of that consent. This is an absolutely basic lesson to be drawn from the history of the trade-union movement; if the relatively class-conscious workers hadn't been willing to break the law, and back each other up, in the first place, there would be no unions today. This is a lesson that trade unionists, even more than those involved in "micropolitics" (who seem to have at least some consciousness of it) have to re-learn today so that they can regroup, grow once more as an effective force within capitalism, and defend themselves and the immediate interests of working people more effectively.

That said, there is an air of expectancy among the unions at the moment, an expectancy that flies in the face of all the evidence, that Labour will somehow "put things right" if it wins the next election, that they will "set things straight" for the union movement and the working class. But the Labour Party feels little or no solidarity with working people in struggle, and things will anyway always be twisted for workers under capitalism.

As socialists have reiterated time and time again, workers need to stop putting their faith in reformism; capitalism will never, can never, be reformed in our interest. The real interest of the working class will only be served by the abolition of class altogether, along with capitalism in all its forms and will all its iniquitous effects. But also, until the majority of people come to see this and do it, those workers who are drawn into struggle should also realise that reformist appeals to the laws of the capitalist state are irrelevant and solidarity is supremely important. And who knows? Maybe such recognition of a basic commonality of interest could lead more people to realise that those interests are absolutely opposed to the interests of capitalism itself.

Jonathan Clay

An inevitable result of vanguardism (1996)

Book Review from the January 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Grey Granite by Lewis Grassic Gibbon (Canongate Press) 

The novel Grey Granite, the third volume of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's trilogy A Scots Quair, is a text that fits rather snugly within the canon of twentieth-century literary modernism, even though it is rarely to be found on a university syllabus, at least outside Scotland. 

 The plot primarily involves Chris Colquohoun and her son Ewan Tavendale, making a "new life" for themselves after moving to the industrial city of Duncairn from the country. While Chris works in a boarding house, Ewan goes to work at Gowans, the local steel works. The general relationships between these and other characters are obviously one of the main elements of the plot, but these relationships and the other events presented in the text are heavily coloured, if not determined, by Ewan's movement from an apparently self-reliant and individualist conception of his "self" to a more collective and class-conscious position. From an encounter (and argument) with an English socialist school teacher (who is largely, it seems, inspired by William Morris), Ewan comes first to an objective and rational recognition of a collective working-class interest which then develops through sympathy and empathy into a deeper subjective and emotional recognition of his shared experience with, and inclusion in, the working class. It is important to recognise that this movement from an exclusive individualist conception of his self to an inclusive class-conscious conception of self does not entail any loss of individuality. Rather it is in some sense a dialectical process in which the individual ego is lifted up, surpassed and preserved in the intersubjective collectively. 

Later, though, Ewan's individuality, preserved in the initial movement into class-consciousness, suffers some loss on his entry into and identification with the Communist Party, after which everything else is subordinated to their interests and aims. Part of the reason for this is the Communist Party's own identification of itself as "the working class" - that is, they substitute themselves for the class they see themselves as representing. This is, of course, an inevitable result of their vanguardism. Placing themselves in a position of leadership over the workers they then come to substitute themselves for the workers. As such, while ostensibly working for the overthrow of a hierarchical capitalist system, they come to institute a new hierarchy (quite apart from the fact that they would only bring about state capitalism rather than socialism if they succeeded in their aims); instead of serving the interests of the workers, they use the workers to serve the interest of the Party. This means that the workers remain in a subservient, subaltern position in relation to the Communists even while apparently struggling to free themselves from all hierarchical domination. 

Structurally, any vanguardist party, whatever its explicit intentions, is doomed to repeat this process, so betraying the revolutionary project it espouses. All this is made abundantly clear within the novel, in episodes in which the Communists lie to the workers in order to try and manipulate them for the Party's own ends as well as in the clearly-stated attitude of Jim Trease, a Communist leader: "For it's you and me are the working class, not the poor Bulgars gone back to Gowans." 

This is a novel with plenty to interest socialists, as should be clear from the above. It provides ample illustration of the hopelessness of the ideologies and strategies of both Labourist and Leninist parties and, by implication at least, of the necessity for the working class to organise and educate themselves for socialism, without leaders or hierarchies and against the constant capitulations and and political myopia that are the necessary results of reformism. I must finally state, though, that this is not simply a historical document or a political treatise. It is a wonderful example of literary modernism offering as much aesthetic pleasure as it does anything else, with great believable characters, full of human ambiguity, and a use of language that is simultaneously down to earth and poetic. 

Jonathan Clay