An Open Letter to the Miners (1984)

From the July 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fellow workers, you are now involved in a great industrial conflict with your exploiters, the state. Like the teachers, nurses and railway workers, your union is confronted with a government which bows to the god of profit as it tramples on the needs and aspirations of those who produce all of society‘s goods and services. But you don’t have be a miner to appreciate our message since all those who depend on a wage salary or dole cheque in order to survive suffer, in varying degrees, the effects of the same callous social system.

This letter is not addressed to your leaders, although we hope that Arthur Scargill and his fellow elected officials will take the time to read it and respond. The socialist message is directed primarily at you, the workers who are not interviewed on television or driven from one picket line to the next in chauffeur-driven cars. You are the men who dig the coal and run the mines in from top to bottom; who belong to class which produces wealth but does not posses it. We address you for two reasons: firstly, because it is only by spreading ideas to the majority that we will ever achieve real social change – leaders can’t do it for us; and secondly, because socialists know that only when workers raise their political sights will they achieve a society capable of satisfying human needs.

We start from the assumption that your struggle against the state exploiters is part of the class war endemic to capitalism. As socialists, we recognise that the task before all workers is not to win this or that skirmish or gain a few concessions which the capitalist class can well afford; our objective in the class war is to win it. Back in 1905 this was the advice given by the Socialist Party of Great Britain to the railway workers – and it is bit as applicable today as it then:

  What the workers on the railways and in every other branch of industry have to recognise is that the utility of combination, economic and political, lies in the strength it gives to fight. What they have to understand is that they can only fight to the betterment of their own position at the expense and to the disadvantage of the class that employs them. What they have to appreciate if they object to being robbed of any part of the wealth they produce, is that they will not only have to place the capitalist class in the category of irreconcilable enemies, not only will they have to fight them as such always but they will have to beat them out of existence absolutely, before they can enter into the enjoyment of the full fruit of their labour
  . . . The workers on railways and elsewhere will have to understand that it is the possession of the land and tools of production and distribution that gives the capitalist his power. They will have to understand that the only way to break that power is to force him to relinquish his hold upon the means by which all the people live. And then they will … be prepared to work with us for the capture of the political machinery of the country as the necessary preliminary to the capture of all the machinery of wealth production.”. (Socialist Standard, May 1905)

In other words, no answer short of social revolution will do if the problems of the working class are to be abolished from the face of the earth.

Media prostitutes

Unfortunately, what the majority of workers know about the miners’ strike they have received from the media. In this strike, as ever, the whores of Fleet Street have used their limited imaginative talents to defend the position of their bosses: attacks on individuals are the familiar substitute for analysis of the issues involved. On television we are bombarded with images of picket-line violence. But why did the violence start? And why need workers picket in the first place? In answer to these questions there is hardly a whisper. Of course, insofar as the reports of workers persecuting those who disagree with them are not false or exaggerated, socialists condemn unreservedly the anti-working class intimidation of fellow miners. No useful purpose will be achieved by imposing the will of one group on another; persuasion is the key to united strength. One thing is for sure: the media will not be made widely available to you to state your case and call for support from fellow workers. The so-called free press is no more than a propaganda tool of the exploiting class.

The issues at stake

The strike was called because of NCB plans to close down a number of pits and make thousands of miners unemployed. The extent of the proposed cuts has been a matter of contention between the NCB and the NUM but, even in the unlikely event that MacGregor is telling the truth, the result will be longer dole queues and the devastation of a number of old mining communities. It is in response to these facts that miners have gone on strike. The NUM, in accordance with its conference policy, is demanding that no pits be closed. In examining that demand, we need to know why the NCB had made its proposals.

Clearly, the intention to destroy large areas of the coal industry is not a result of what is popularly called Thatcherism. Neither is it a whim of Ian MacGregor’s. The object of production under the present social system – capitalism – is not primarily to create wealth, but to make profits. The government has decided that there is not enough money to be made by exploiting miners in the old way and that they need to trim your jobs and communities to fit in with the demands of the market. Remember: the government does not run capitalism; it is the economic laws of the system which force the government to dance to the market’s tune. In demanding that pits be kept open, even though the government does not regard them as profitable enough, the NUM is effectively demanding that capitalism be run for the benefit of the workers. Of course, society should be run for the wealth producers, but under capitalism that can never happen.

The state capitalist non-alternative

It used to be believed by many workers – including plenty of miners – that the way to make capitalism run in the workers’ interest would be to take the means of wealth production and distribution from the private capitalists and place them in the hands of the state. It was argued that the government would run the mines for the miners and not the ruling class. As long ago as 1912, when nationalisation of the mines was being advocated by certain reformists, the South Wales miners’ Unofficial Reform Committee pointed out that

 Nationalisation of the mines . . . simply makes a National Trust, with all the force of the Government behind it, whose one concern will be to see that the industry is run in such a way as to pay the interest on the bonds with which the coal-owners are paid out, and to extract as much more profit as possible in order to relieve the taxation of other landlords and capitalists.” (The Miners’ Next Step)

On that point the Unofficial Committee was quite right. Nationalisation has amounted to nothing more than state-run exploitation of miners. If workers are to learn one lesson from the strike it must be that nationalisation is no answer. Of course, there are those smooth-tongued Labour opportunists who claim that if only the state was controlled by a Labour government it would all be different. Have they forgotten that Labour did run the state when the firemen, the NUPE workers and the dockers were out on strike? Have they forgotten that it was the Wilson government which initiated The Plan For Coal, which was based entirely on the assumption that the coal industry must make a profit? Fellow worker, as a member of the NUM, you are paying part of your wage into a political fund to send Labour administrators of capitalism to parliament. Is it not time that all union support for this anti-working class party was ended?

The international struggle

As all trade unionists learn through struggle, unity is strength. But unity is not just achieved on a national basis – capitalism is a worldwide social order and workers of all lands have a common interest in joining together against the common foe. One of the reasons the NCB can sit back and smile is that they are importing cheap Polish coal. In fact, coal imports from Poland over the last three months were five times higher than for the same period in 1983. The bosses are trying to break the strike by using workers from another part of the world, and in the bargain are buying cheaper coal because Polish miners receive lower wages.

Scargill has appealed to Jaruzelski, the unelected leader of the Polish police state, to stop coal imports to Britain. Jaruzelski, who needs the money to pay off Poland’s huge bank debts, has ignored Scargill’s plea. But why is Scargill appealing to the head of a state-capitalist dictatorship in the first place? Because the workers there have no independent unions to support the British miners’ struggle. When the Polish miners were organised in their own union, Solidarity, Scargill’s comment (published in the WRP’s newspaper, Newsline) was that they should stay in the government-controlled Unions. So, Solidarity has been smashed, the Polish workers are effectively non-unionised, the price of Polish miners’ labour-power is cheap and British coal importers are rubbing their greedy little hands.

The view that there is communism or socialism in Poland, Russia or any other nation must be rejected. Instead of workers in the so-called socialist countries fitting in with the needs of their state bosses, the struggle of workers must be international. Real unity means that if workers in Britain come out on strike we can bring with us the effective support of workers around the world. There can be no room for nationalist notions, including the policy of import controls, if we are to fight and win against the international ruling class.

The power of democracy

How dare the unelected editors of Fleet Street preach to the miners about democracy. And as for the NCB: who elected MacGregor to receive his fat salary for doing the dirty work of the profit system? A fact which is undeniable is that the vast majority of miners have supported the strike. As was mentioned in the Socialist Standard two months ago, we do not notice the media or the government insisting that, in the interests of democracy, all union members be balloted before a strike ends. Nonetheless, a combination of workers is only as strong as the understanding and commitment of those involved. Leaving the decisions to leaders – even to apparently militant ones – is no substitute for the democratic involvement by all members in all important union decisions. As the Unofficial Committee realised in 1912, leadership results in organisational weakness:

 Sheep cannot be said to have solidarity. In obedience to a shepherd, they will go up or down, backwards or forwards as they are driven by him and his dog. But they have no solidarity, for that means unity and loyalty. Unity and loyalty, not to an individual, or the policy of an individual, but to an interest and a policy which is understood and worked for by all. (The Miners’ Next Step)

Conscious unity — let the bosses try to defeat that!

Fair-deal capitalism

What are the miners asking for? Insofar as the trade union fight is for wage defence, better working conditions, higher redundancy payments and keeping as many jobs as possible, hard negotiation backed up by democratic, militant trade unionism can achieve results. But let’s not kid ourselves –even if the NUM achieves what it seeks, the result will only have held back the capitalist butchery, not defeated the butchers. According to the SWP leaflet, Why You Should Support The Miners, “The first reason why we should support the miners is that they are fighting for jobs”. And what is a job, fellow worker, but wage slavery? Fighting to be exploited – to be dependent on a wage at the end of the week – having to sell your labour-power to the highest parasitical bidder. Is that really the most that workers can ask for?

Karl Marx – who gets an even worse write-up in the Daily Express than Arthur Scargill and therefore must be talking some sense – recognised that trade union action was necessary, but that it would not make capitalism a fit system in which I live. As he put it:

 Trades Unions work well as centres of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class that is to say the ultimate abolition of the wages system. (Value, Price and Profit)

As Marxists, we fight not for jobs but for emancipation from a system which turns useful work into wage slavery.

There will never be fair-deal capitalism. Workers can fight strikes from now until Prince William gets a job and there will still be a class-divided society, with the wealth-producing majority living in an economically inferior condition. Kinnock , if elected, would be no better than Thatcher, and Scargill’s rhetoric will, in the end do no more to shake the system than did Gormley’s in 1974. The fact to face up to is that there is a bigger battle to be won.

Capitalism the enemy

Your real enemy is the present system, which produces commodities to sell on the market with a view to profit. Have you ever sat down and thought about what sort of a society it is in which thousands of old workers face the prospect of dying from hypothermia next winter because they cannot afford to buy fuel? Last winter and the winter before that tens of thousand of workers perished in the cold; the market could not see them because it is blind to those without the money to attract its attention. It is sickening, is it not, that economic experts are worrying about how to cut coal production while members our own class are too poor to switch heater?

Capitalism, with its hideous contradiction of mass poverty amid the potential for plenty, is your real enemy. It persecutes you at every level, advertising itself as a world of plenty and then rewarding the wealth producers with deprivation. For too long workers have suffered under this rotten set-up, when the means are at hand to create a society of production for need in which we can all give according to in abilities and take according to our self-determined needs.

What can you do?

Socialism is more than simply a great idea; it is an obtainable alternative to the chaos of the system which puts profit before use. So, what can you do about achieving it? Well, you’ve made a start by reading this letter. If you like what it says, why not pass it on to your friends, workmates and relatives? If you agree with the socialist outlook, so might they. If you want to know more, go along to your local branch and discuss the case for socialism. The Socialist Party is very active throughout the country and we can assure you of a warm reception. If you want more socialist literature, please contact our Head Office.

At the time of writing it is not certain how the miners’ strike will end. Of one thing you and all other workers can be sure: when capital and wage labour are in open conflict, the Socialist Party takes the side of the robbed against the robbers. For it is only through the conscious solidarity of workers, that the system of legalised robbery will be compelled to make way for the reign of united humanity.

Steve Coleman

Letter: Blind faith in the broad church (1984)

Letter to the Editors from the July 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Comrades,

I am writing to you with regard to your opinions of the bankruptcy of the Labour Party as an organisation for radical change, and in particular of the articles "Crisis of the Left" (July) and “Labour in Pain” (August).

The choice before Labour is three-fold: Wilsonian pragmatism, with frontal attacks on working people, the welfare state and unions, all to retain power; revisionist radicalism, primarily attempting to reconcile Labour voters with socialism, not impose it on them; and fundamentalism, not diluting or changing our policies one bit. We have to be realistic in listening to voters' hopes, radical in articulating an alternative system to capitalism’s horrors, and resolute in meaning what we say and making people realise that we will not be blown off by capital, as in 1931, 1948. 1967 and 1976. A little bit of socialism time and time again is better than nothing, and is surely worthwhile in helping radical politics.

May I remind you that in the 1983 general election. Labour on a left reformist programme got 8½ million votes, the SPGB 85 votes, a slight difference. If the dirigisme socialism of Labour, blunted and mellowed by internal contradictions and compromises, is too extreme for voters, they aren't going to vote for a revolutionary Marxist party. Are they? Why not pause and think here; what makes you so sure that eventually the workers will turn to full-blooded socialism?

Ken Coates, in his excellent Socialists and the Labour Party (1973) asks many important questions to revolutionaries which have not been answered by you or theorists such as Miliband, Panitch and David Coates. In Coates' pamphlet, he states the obvious truism that any revolutionary mass party must duplicate “the best features of the old Labour Party . . ." This is for the reason that such a party must draw heavily on former Labour activists, who are at the moment consciously influencing Labour in a socialist direction. The revolutionary left misses the fact that Labour is a living, changing organism, not a monolithic block, and is very susceptible to rank and file activism.

Coates also commented:

Since the collapse of the Independent Labour Party, there has been no group of socialists capable of maintaining a full-scale political presence outside the Labour Party . . . (by which) . . . I mean the ability to secure the election of at least a handful of members of Parliament. . .

So far the history of modern British socialism has involved any group existing outside or independently of Labour and, thus the trade union movement, withering away; no matter whether it was a new revolutionary group as with the Socialist League, SPGB, CPGB. IMG or SWP. or a breakaway from the party—the SDF, ILP. National Labour (the MacDonaldites). Democratic Labour (the Tavernites) and the Scottish Labour Party. Labour, despite the disaster of the last election and its recent record of government, is the only credible representative of the progressive working class. The lessons of the 1880s, 1930s and 1960s, periods of radicalism, must be that the only feasible road to socialism in this country is through the Labour Party.

In “Labour in Pain” (August), you hit on a number of important points about the internal contradictions of the party and hypocrisies of the “Broad Church". Nationalisation of the top 25 companies as the IWC and Labour Conference want, or top 200 as Militant wants, is, as you say, irrelevant. Labour’s paranoid pursuit of public ownership has more to do with Gaitskell’s and Wilson’s opposition to it, than its merits. We have to realise that state control of industries does not alter the plight of workers. They remain wage slaves, no matter their income or material affluence, with no power over the factors of production which decide their lives. State control merely replaces the entrepreneur with the bureaucrat, the capitalist system for the servile state. Workers self-management, or to extend it beyond a narrow industrial front into all walks of life— citizens power, can alter the present undemocratic situation. Citizens power must be built on the ideas of guild socialism and the analysis of human nature and the stale provided by group theory. This must involve seeing the state as an obstacle to radical change, no matter how enlightened those in charge, and limiting its functions and roles. However, it has to be noted, sadly, that guild socialism has been neglected and forgotten about, seen as a throwback to the Medieval age with no pertinence to the industrial age.

The SPGB constitution says it stands for "the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth . . Does this glib phrase “common ownership" mean central planning and state control or "Stalinism plus parliamentary democracy or decentralisation and citizens power over capital? We have a right to know.

The SPGB does, on the other hand, say regularly, and in "Why we are hostile” (November), that all working-class people are "enslaved" and must be "emancipated", not by enlightened Fabian elitists, but the workers themselves. This is fundamentally true. R. H. Tawney in The Acquisitive Society (1921) said:

The workers cannot have it both ways. They must choose whether to assume the responsibility for industrial discipline and become free, or to repudiate it and continue to be serfs.

Workers initiatives, take-overs and local plans, rather than centrally decided blueprints, is the only sure way of avoiding the servile state.

You say that only people who are fully in agreement with the SPGB can join. Your inability to lower the SPGB from its high, puritanical and principled pedestal of fundamental, sacrosanct ideas is sad. Socialist parties desperately need a coherent. dynamic ideological anchor to prevent policies appearing as just a "shopping list" with no underlying philosophy, and to resist the claims of capital. Principles are only of use in relation to short-term policies. You seem to miss this.

The SPGB is a valuable part of the British socialist movement. Labour, for all its faults, is socialist, though as you say in November, most Labourites "belong to a party which they imagine will one day exist . . ." However, if we keep trying, we socialists in and out of Labour can discard the stale heritage of labourism and state socialism. While Marx is still invaluable to analyse modern capitalism, particularly in the surplus theory of value and class critique of production, he cannot be dogmatically interpreted.

Dogmatism is not the answer for socialists. The SPGB should engage in an active, open and free debate with other socialists in the Labour, CPGB and other parties about the failure so far, future and road to British socialism, possibly in the Socialist Society. Any debate must be two-way, with no closed minds. We can learn from one another, sharing our experiences of capitalism and socialist action. You can give us some of your critiques and theories of capitalism, if we can give some, dare I suggest it, flexibility. Remember, together the left has enormous potential to win electoral support and change society. Divided, it has nothing. Despite our numerous differences, which are sincere and cannot be glossed over, we are on the same side—the mosaic of the socialist movement, facing a common enemy, not Thatcher or the Conservatives. but capitalism.

Gerry Hassan 

Dundee

Reply:

The Socialist Party is most willing to engage in "active, open and free debate" with those who call themselves socialists. Repeated efforts have been made to encourage the defenders of Left reformism to take the public platform and debate but, contrary to the impression given in the last paragraph of Mr. Hassan's letter, it is the dogmatism of the traditional left which has prevented them from accepting open debate with the Socialist Party. For example, the leader of Lambeth Council, Ted Knight, was asked recently to debate with us in his own borough and replied that there would be no point in such as event as the Labour Party is bigger than the Socialist Party; our Islington branch has written two lengthy letters to The Militant Tendency, challenging them to debate, but they replied in writing that public disagreement “between socialists” would be embarrassing. So, we would advise our correspondent to write to the Leftist parties and groups urging them to make contact with the Socialist Party; they will meet no dogmatic resistance to discuss ideas from us.

We are reminded that the Labour Party won 8½ million votes in the 1983 general election on the basis of a "reformist programme". What is a reformist programme, be it “left” or "right", but a plan to make capitalism run more efficiently from the point of view of the majority of people in society? That 8½ million workers were conned into believing that a Labour government could do this indicates two things: firstly, there are still plenty of deluded workers around: secondly, there are less workers being taken in by the Labour Party now than has been the case in electoral terms for half a century. The validity of Labour’s ideas is not to be judged by the number of votes they received (on that basis, we would be forced to conclude that the Tories and the Alliance are, between them, substantially more “correct" than Labour), but the extent to which they can be realistically applied as a means of solving social problems. Eight and a half million people voted for Labour’s commitment to the NATO military gang, to the continuation of the wages system, to the acceptance that there must still be poor people for whom the state will have to care. They were voting for capitalism. Our correspondent points to the 85 votes received by the socialist candidate and draws the conclusion that if most voters found Labour's programme "too extreme, they aren’t going to vote for a revolutionary Marxist party". The reason workers did not vote Labour is that they have tried it before and it is no more than another way of voting Tory. Workers did not vote for socialism because they have yet to be convinced that it is in their interests: if there had been no Labour confusion-mongers in Islington South during the last election, making promises to workers which could not be kept, there would have been more votes for socialism. The "workers will turn to full-blooded socialism” when they have had enough of capitalism and are ready to opt for a different way of organising society.

The labour illusion is well summed up by Mr. Hassan when he writes that "A little bit of socialism, time and time again is better than nothing . . .”. Socialism — a system based upon common ownership, democratic control and production solely for use — is the direct opposite of the capitalist system. It is no more possible to have "a little bit of socialism" within a world based on minority class monopoly of the means of wealth production and distribution than it would be to be a little bit pregnant. What the Labour Party’s "little bit” amounts to is a programme to reform capitalism and, as our correspondent rightly points out, these efforts have repeatedly been “blown off by capital". We are told that it is necessary to make people realise that capital will not interfere with Labour’s aims in future, but the Marxist critique of reformism is precisely that such hopes are illusory: if Labour is elected to run capitalism, as it sets out to be, it cannot but bow to the needs of profitability.

Calling in expert witness Coates damages rather than helps the case of our correspondent. What are "the best features of the old Labour Party"? Does he mean their support for two world wars or their racist immigration legislation or their strikebreaking record? Or does he mean their record of reformist promises, such as the promise of full employment made in Labour and the New Social Order or Bevan’s promise that there would be no housing problem in Britain after the Attlee government had served its term? If. by "the best features", they mean Keir Hardie’s statement in the Manifesto of the English Socialists that socialism will entail the abolition of the wages system, then we in the Socialist Party are duplicating the best features, whereas Coates and the rest of the Labourites have ignored the socialist tradition.

After the evidence from the star witness. it is a shame that our correspondent once again returns to the old dogmatic chant that history must go on repeating itself. Evidence points the other way: Labour’s traditional support is crumbling (maybe temporarily, hopefully for good) and workers are looking at alternatives. If “the only feasible road to socialism in this country is through the Labour Party", and if, after seven Labour governments, capitalism is still here, where is the evidence that the road is anything but a dead-end?

We are pleased to note that Mr. Hassan accepts the criticisms made by socialists of Labour and Militant's nationalisation (state capitalist) policies. Indeed, we do "have to realise that state control of industries does not alter the plight of workers” — as the miners will testify. It is a pity that our correspondent's clear recognition that state capitalism is not socialism is not applied to the equally non-socialist theory of "guild socialism", as advocated by reformists like G D H Cole in the distant past. The fallacy of “workers’ control” is based on the failure to recognise that where there is a working class — where wage labour exists as a social relationship to capital — the only result can be exploitative. "Guild socialism" presented a naive plan to decentralise and democratise capitalist exploitation. If it has been "neglected and forgotten about”, as our correspondent states, working-class knowledge will be none the poorer.

We are asked whether our Object implies central planning, Stalinism, or decentralised power over capital. It means none of those things. It would be ludicrous to envisage world socialism as a society run by a bureaucracy on a central plan: clearly, common ownership will require a democracy organised by the majority. We do not advocate Stalinism, and socialism means more than parliamentary democracy: our Object commits us to working for democratic control, that is, the making of decisions about society by its citizens on the basis of full information, as for control over capital, we can only reiterate that there will be no wage labour-capital relationship in socialist society and therefore citizens will no more have power over capital than they will over the banks, the police force or the torture chambers: these social features will not exist.

We are not proposing, then, any "centrally decided blueprints", but will leave it to the workers who establish socialism (who we hope will include us) to make the plans. We agree that most plans can be made locally but, under capitalism, "workers’ initiatives, take-overs and local plans" are constantly inhibited by the fetters of the profit system.

Mr. Hassan's comments about principles invite the Socialist Party to fall into the political pit which the Labour Party is stuck in. We are told that only allowing workers to join who agree with us is "puritanical" and "sad”. We say that letting racists, nationalists, religious cranks. Leninists, pro-NATO supporters, careerists and "Wilsonian pragmatists” into the Broad Church is not just sad. but pathetic; not principled, but disgustingly opportunist.

We are told that “principles are only of use in relation to short-term policies". We have a policy (which is neither short nor long-term, but as long as it takes us to achieve) which is to abolish capitalism and establish a world free of class division, exploitation, property relationships, poverty, war and wage slavery. Those aims are urgent and we are not going to be deterred in struggling resolutely for them by those who tell us to unite with the crumb-collectors of the Left.

How nice to be told that "The SPGB is a valuable part of the British socialist movement". We have been waiting eighty years to meet the other part, but have no illusions that we will find it in the Labour Party or any of the other organisations which seek to re-arrange capitalism. Indeed. “Dogmatism is not the answer for socialists" and that is why those who still hold on to the pathetic belief that Neil Kinnock and his fellow reformists will eradicate the nasty bits of capitalism ought to abandon the Labour Party and join a party which defines socialism with clarity, fights for the new system with enthusiasm and remains uncompromisingly hostile to the apologists for capitalist politics.

Editors

Peace and plenty (1984)

From the July 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Wherever you look in the world today you will see suffering. Last year 15 million children died for lack of money to buy food. Poverty and insecurity face the great majority of the human race. Yet about one in twenty people escape this misery. They belong to an exclusive international club which is more accurately defined as the capitalist class. It is not an easy club to join: and its members are able to enjoy their wealth and power and privilege by persuading the rest of us to remain their obedient servants.

These people are the owners of all the companies, land, oil wells, finance houses. They make their profit by employing us as workers to create wealth for them in the processes of production and distribution. They pay us wages or salaries which can never provide more than second-rate, insecure living standards, and leave nothing to save or accumulate while they continually re-invest the wealth we create to accumulate more and more for themselves. This class division between employers and workers is the cause of an unceasing struggle over wages, hours, working conditions, living conditions. This is the class struggle.

But there is also a perpetual struggle among the capitalists themselves. The competition between companies for profits, leading to the conflict between nation states for colonies, markets, raw materials — like oil. copper and uranium and control of trade routes — like Suez or the Gulf of Oman — or territory — like Palestine or Afghanistan — military bases — like Cyprus or Gibraltar — all these keep war going all the time at one or more places in the world. They cause the deaths of millions of us in struggles where we have nothing to gain. As workers we have no stake in the power or property of any nation.

For this reason, nationalisation is of no value to workers. If any state nationalises an industry, this only means that it is now owned by the whole capitalist class of that nation — but not the workers. The state is now the employer and exploiter — with all the forces of law and order at its disposal. Nationalisation on a large scale has often been called socialism. It has nothing to do with socialism — it is state capitalism, such as exists in Russia.

Socialism means producing wealth solely and directly for free use by all. All the resources and machinery for producing wealth will be taken into the hands of the community as a whole, and work will be organised through voluntary co-operation, not the economic force of the wages system. Society's principle will be: "from each according to ability, to each according to need".

In a socialist world there will be no war because its cause will have been removed. The ownership of society’s means of living by a privileged minority will be ended. The governments and states by which they legalise and enforce their ownership and control will be abolished. The armed nations into which they formed themselves and us, with their frontiers, passports, tariffs and fortifications, will cease to have any use: and people will cease to think of themselves as Britons, Germans, Italians, Israelis. Palestinians. Iranians. Russians or Americans. They will live and work and travel where they wish.

Marx said, "the workers have no country". "Workers of the world, unite". And we ask you to unite with us in the socialist movement for the emancipation of humanity from the chains of capitalism. The Socialist Party of Great Britain alone stands opposed to the Labour Party and all other parties which seek to reform the profit system — and so protect and keep it. We work to spread information among workers about the way capitalism operates, and the way in which the majority can remove it by establishing a socialist world of production for need.

50 Years Ago: Socialists and Free Discussion (1984)

The 50 Years Ago column from the July 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

It may perhaps be of some use to point out to those who are following methods that kill free discussion, that they are following in the path of their predecessors in Italy and Germany, and provoking the ogre they fear. The starting-point of the Fascist career in Italy was the seizure of the Italian factories by the workers and the propaganda of violence by the Communists. Germany tells a similar tale. It may be added that the country that gave them the lesson was Russia, and one of the principal defenders of Russian violence Trotsky — is now wandering about seeking an asylum — a victim of the methods he advocated.

It is only by free and open discussion that the workers can grasp the essentials of their present condition of servitude and the way to abolish it. Until they have this knowledge it matters little which of the capitalist parties they support.

While we are on the subject of “freedom of speech" we cannot help being surprised to find what curious, not to say, suspicious friends, this “freedom" has. We see among them the numerous organs of capitalism, which steadfastly decline to allow the publication in their columns of a statement of the Socialist case.

(From an editorial, Reason or Violence, Socialist Standard July 1934.)

Supply and needs in socialism (1984)

From the July 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

If socialism had to be summed up in a single phrase we could say that it was conscious social control of all aspects of life, including the production and distribution of wealth. This is why Marx once spoke of real history only beginning with socialism, by which he meant that humans had until then been the victims of natural scarcity (low productivity imposing hard labour and material shortage on the bulk of the population) and, under capitalism, of blind economic forces beyond their control; pre-history would end with the end of capitalism as the establishment of socialism would precisely put social life under conscious human control; in socialism the human race would be carrying out their own desires and decisions.

What will give humans this freedom in socialism is the fact that all the Earth's resources. including the means for producing wealth, will have become the common heritage of the whole of humanity. Actually, this is just another way of saying that the world will belong to nobody; there will be neither property nor territorial rights over any part of the globe. Humanity will therefore be free to organise its social life in accordance with its wishes. To do this—to decide on and carry out its wishes—humanity will have to organise itself, inevitably democratically, since if decision-making were left to a permanent minority they would constitute a new owning class.

Socialism will be a society entirely geared to satisfying human needs. What human beings decide they want will be paramount; everything else will be subordinate to this aim. It is difficult for us. living in capitalist society where time-measured cost as reflected in accounting in monetary units is paramount, and where human energies are no more than a costed factor of production. to appreciate how enormous a change this will be. Today time is money and the economic pressure is to do everything as quickly as possible. In socialism not only will there be no money but time will no longer be so important. Men and women will be free to choose to take longer to produce something if, for instance, this slower production method gives the producers more pleasure, is less unpleasant or results in a product that is better for the health and the welfare of human beings.

This latter brings out again the whole point of socialism: to satisfy human wants and needs. In contrast to capitalism, human beings will no longer be the mere bearers of value-producing energy that most of us are today; satisfying their needs will be the sole determinant of production. This too represents an immense change as compared with today, where human needs are only catered for (“satisfied" would be the wrong word) as a means to the end of maintaining people as efficient wealth-producers. Under capitalism the qualitative and quantitative consumption of the majority of the population is restricted to more or less what is needed to maintain them in efficient working order.

Slowly changing wants 
When we have cleared up the mess left by capitalism—which will involve an immense increase in production to eliminate material want and misery throughout the world—socialism can be expected to become a stable, slow-changing society, in terms both of population size and of the wants and consumption habits of its members. This will considerably simplify the task of balancing production and consumption.

As the consumption habits would be stable, or only slowly changing, so would the distribution circuits. Everything would be running more or less smoothly from year to year: adjustments would be relatively easy since it would only be a question of adding something here or subtracting something there in the context of an already functioning system. Production can be expected to platform off (and eventually may even fall since goods will be well-made and so will last longer than today, so needing to be replaced less often). Nevertheless, it is still useful to outline how such a system of ensuring the satisfaction of the material needs of humans might function.

The material needs of human beings boil down basically to food, clothing and shelter. We will begin with food. Here, as with everything else in socialism, humans will have a free choice. Having made this proviso however, it is hard to sec the people of socialist society being satisfied with the Instant this and Quick that that is the staple diet of most people today. In fact most of the food available today in shops and supermarkets is likely to be rejected as substandard. If only for the sake of their health (quite apart from improved taste) people are going to demand more fresh fruit and vegetables and more free-range animal products.

If we imagine people living in much smaller urban communities than today we can also imagine this need being satisfied to the maximum extent possible locally, with each town/country area trying to be as self-sufficient in these products as it can. Some of course will be less successful in this than others, their excess needs having to be satisfied on an inter-regional basis in the same sort of way as we shall see could be applied for certain other consumer goods. As to the distribution of locally-produced food, no doubt the same sort of system could apply as was suggested by pre-industrial socialist writers like Thomas More and Gerrard Winstanley. The produce could simply be taken to stores from which people could take freely what they needed without buying and selling.

With regard to the home, we enter the realm of speculation. Some writers like Cabet and Edward Bellamy have envisaged preparing—and eating— meals, washing clothes, cleaning and the like being done communally, pointing out the waste involved in each household preparing its own meals and doing its own washing. We have already seen that saving time won’t be a consideration in socialism if it conflicts with satisfying human needs in the best way possible, so this is not a very strong argument. But we can certainly expect that socialism, being a society which will give free range to the nature of humans as social beings, will see needs being satisfied in common much more than is the case today under capitalism, which has made the nuclear family the basic competitive unit in the rat-race society that it is. Anyway this is a question that can be left open without in any way affecting the case for socialism.

But, whatever the choice, houses will be built to conform to it and. in any event, whether cooking or washing are done individually or communally, the “consumer durables" required will be technically similar. The houses and communal buildings would be built locally with perhaps the participation of their future inhabitants, but there is no particular reason for every town/country area to be self-sufficient in the production of cookers, washing machines, fridges, and so on. This is something that could enter into a more complex distribution system than that which we have mentioned for locally-produced food products.

A question of stock control

The techniques for estimating wants exist already under capitalism, even though they are distorted to gauge not real wants but only profitable markets. But whatever the subject being investigated—real needs in socialism, restricted market demand in capitalism—the techniques remain the same: representative sample surveys as well as data on what has happened in the past, changing age-patterns, and so on. which are fed into computers.

The other aspect—ensuring that what people want is always available when and where they want it—is more complicated but once again this has been considerably eased by the coming of computers which are ideally suited for organising the dispatching of goods and stock control. The system we are about to describe is one that could be used to ensure that town/country communities will always be adequately supplied with what their inhabitants are likely to want in terms of non-locally produced food, materials to make shoes and clothes, consumer durables, furniture and other items of everyday use.

We will imagine all these goods to be available—for taking freely as and when needed of course—in stores which will be connected to a central computer. This will allow the dispatching centre (where we will assume this computer to be sited) to know at any time the exact state of the stock in all of the stores it covers. The computer would be programmed to indicate when the stock of any particular item fell below a certain level and to order further supplies of the item in question to be sent to the store in question. This could be co-ordinated, again by the computer, with other orders from other stores so as to work out a full load and itinerary for a lorry or train leaving the dispatching centre.

Such a system is not something that socialists have dreamed up. It already exists and is already used by some supermarket chains, as anyone in the trade will know and as is explained in an article on the mechanisation of work by Martin Ernst in the September 1982 special issue of the Scientific American. You may have noticed on many of the things you buy in supermarkets and grocery stores a space filled with thick and thin lines. These “bar codes", which are read by an electronic eye at the same time as you pass the cash desk, allow the good in question to be identified as well as who supplies it. The only difference between what happens now and what could happen in socialism would be that in socialism stocks would run down through people taking according to need, while under capitalism they run down through people buying according to what they can afford. Even under capitalism this computerised system is essentially a system of stock control (even if inevitably it is also used for identifying the price of a good and for profit calculation purposes).

So far we have only dealt with what might be called the retail side of the question. but it is possible to imagine the same sort of computerised system working at the "wholesale" level too, with the various dispatching centres we have mentioned in their turn being connected with the factories where the goods they supply are produced. Then we can imagine these factories being connected with the suppliers of their raw materials, and so on. Such a computer network. when perfected, could provide a system of adjusting supply to demand just as flexible as the advantages claimed for the free market by the defenders of capitalism, only the “demand” in question would be real human needs and not artificially restricted market demand.

It is perhaps worth pointing out that we are not envisaging the level of stocks of consumer goods throughout the whole world being controlled by a single huge computer, the sort of “Brain" that some science-fiction writers have thought up. Clearly there is no need for those concerned with, say, world copper production to know the state of the stock of copper wire in every distribution centre in the world! What we have in mind is a sort of hierarchy of computer networks going from those controlling stocks in the local distribution centres in a particular region through those controlling stocks in “wholesale" distribution centres right up to those controlling the production of raw- materials on the world scale.

Of course it would still be possible to organise the adjustment of supply to real needs even without today's electronic computers but this would be much more time-consuming. Most stock control—for that is what we are talking about rather than buying and selling—under capitalism is still not computerised and yet still works more or less efficiently as a means of adjusting supply to market demand. It is just that computers simplify the task immensely. This in fact is yet another example of every advance in science and technology making socialism ever more practicable.

We have been talking about the system once it has been set up and is in operation. Once this has been done it will function fairly smoothly, especially as demand is likely to be fairly stable. The big problem will be setting up the system, but the technology and human skills to do this already exist. This will be a challenge which we are sure computer workers, once socialism has been established, will be only too keen to take up with enthusiasm. Most of them would be using their skills to a socially useful end for the first time. Today, most computers are used in connection with money, while advances in telecommunications are prostituted either to relay share or commodity prices to stock exchanges and brokers throughout the world or for military purposes. The scope for combining computers and telecommunications in the service of satisfying human needs will be immense in socialism.

Pre-computer socialists like Cabet, Marx and Bellamy (and indeed earlier members of the Socialist Party) got it basically right when they saw the problem of adjusting supply to needs in a moneyless society as being essentially one of surveying and deciding wants and then organising the production and distribution of wealth accordingly. They realised that this was essentially a statistical exercise and one that could be done much more easily in a moneyless society than in an exchange economy like capitalism where, quite apart from the artificial restrictions imposed on the consumption of the majority, adjusting supply and demand is very much a hit-and-miss affair. Mistakes could occur in socialism but they would not have the disastrous effects they do under capitalism. As Marx pointed out, socialist society could deliberately choose to overproduce a little to constitute a reserve precisely to cater for underestimates (and natural disasters), and if demand was overestimated, then those producing the good in over-supply could . . . simply take a holiday and do something else for a while.

What we have described here is not something completely new thought up by socialists. It is something which already exists and which we are suggesting could be extended and adapted to serve human needs, instead of being prostituted in the service of profit and capital accumulation. After all, as we have always said, the material basis for socialism (of which the mechanism for adjusting supply to needs is one aspect) already exists, and has existed for some time; all that is lacking is the will to change society so as to be able to take full advantage of it.

Adam Buick

Is there life after Thatcher? (1984)

From the July 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ungrateful dole queues and Social Security claimants did not celebrate the news that Margaret Thatcher intends to be Prime Minister after the next general election. Will they really have to endure the sculpture of her hair and the nag of her voice for so long? Will she rule over their misery for ever? Or, if she ever does leave the scene, will there be very much left for her successor to take over?

With her huge parliamentary majority, Thatcher can afford to ignore such reservations. Under her leadership, she claims, something called Britain has found something called a new confidence and purpose and all sorts of desirable things arc going up—industrial output: the number of people in work: "personal income”; profits. These are obviously examples of manipulating statistics, viewing movements from a base figure which is convenient so that changes always seem to be as you want them. The allegedly upward movement in employment, for instance, has clearly not happened since Thatcher came to power although it may be possible to make it seem that something like it has occurred in very recent times. So the three million who have not been part of the increase in employment, those who are in work but subject to the downward pressure on wages which has followed large scale unemployment. and those who battle to survive on the meagre state allowances, will not be impressed by the figures. Neither will those who find it increasingly difficult to get prompt medical treatment or access to social services or who are aware that civil liberties are under a growing threat . . . Of course we are accustomed to Prime Ministers telling us that their period of office is one of progress into an enduring prosperity but beneath this specious rhetoric an odious reality festers.

There was rather more gratitude and celebration among the Tory grassroots, although it must be said that political awareness does not flourish in that particular piece of undergrowth. Thatcher is, after all, an unexpectedly effective vote-winner and her blatantly populist appeal to the more regressive impulses among the working class pleases the constituency workers who lick all those envelopes and trudge all those streets. The Prime Minister’s loyal parliamentary lieutenants also made the predictable noises of ecstatic expectation, perhaps spurred on by the unusually large number of cx-Cabinet ministers now lolling on the back benches as a result of disagreeing with the female fuhrer.

In another part of the Conservative Party feelings were not unmixed. Those who see themselves as prospective occupants of Number Ten may become restless and rebellious if Thatcher hangs on so long that they miss their chance; like many of her predecessors, she has neglected to bring on any likely successor, as was the case with Eden and Churchill. Thatcher has also developed a knack of absenting herself when these aspirants are in trouble, as she did when Leon Brittan was wrestling with the siege at the Libyan Embassy. From the unlikely origins of a provincial grocer’s daughter, Thatcher has learned much about the dirty game of politics.

Much of the dismay which greeted Thatcher’s declaration was caused by her name being linked with unemployment, cuts in services, pit closures, attacks on the National Health Service and so on. People who think like that regard the present plight of British capitalism and the wretched poverty of millions of workers here as the results of a deliberate, unnecessary Tory policy, largely the personal inspiration of Thatcher herself. This too is a grass roots opinion and it is just as ill-informed and unhelpful as the ecstacy in the Tory constituencies.

The first thing to be said on this score is that Thatcher’s actions arc by no means unprecedented. In her anniversary statement, when she looked back on five years of Tory rule and forward to centuries more of it, she gave this warning to all workers who might think of struggling to protect their living standards against the government’s attacks: "A lot remains to be done . . . and every bit of industrial disruption just adds to the mountain we have to climb". Nearly twenty years ago, on 26 October 1964, Harold Wilson was saying the same sort of thing, in one of his regular hectoring appearances on TV: "The old fashioned restrictive practices have no place. We must get rid of monopoly practices, overmanning the job, costly demarcation arguments, and a temptation to indulge in wildcat strikes". Wilson was talking about an ".  . . extremely serious economic situation which the country is facing", and just as he was a precedent for Thatcher so there were precedents for him. In the twenties many staple industries, on which much of the fortunes of British capitalism rested, were in decline. Coal, iron and steel, shipbuilding and textiles were particularly hard hit by the rise of foreign competition and as they were in many cases concentrated in a few centres their decline caused severe hardship and depression also to be concentrated. Just as they are nowadays, areas like the Rhondda and the Tyne became wastelands of despair, relieved by occasional flashes of rebellion. It seemed then, as it is thought by some people now, that large segments of industry in Britain were being destroyed never to revive—and there was a popular tendency to blame this on the deliberate policy of a particularly callous government. The similarly popular remedy was to change the party in government to one which promised to be less callous—like one including Philip Snowden, Jimmy Thomas, Ramsay Macdonald . . .

Illustration by George Meddemmen.

Anyone who thought, and who now thinks, like that simply does not understand capitalism and its cycle of economic activity. The depression of the twenties was followed by a measure of recovery before the Great Crash and the intense misery of the thirties. The war saw another recovery and for some years a condition in which full employment was itself a problem to the capitalist class because of the strength it gave to the workers’ bargaining. A succession of governments, Labour as well as Conservative, grappled with the problem of holding wages back at a time when the pressure was for them to rise. They called their attempts at restriction by many names—a pay pause, stages one. two. three . . . : the social contract, and so on. They all amounted to the same thing: a government trying to do its job of running capitalism in the interest of the ruling class and against the interests of the working class.

The post-war boom, so long-lived, was beginning to falter just as the minority Labour government of 1974/9 came to office. After a brief honeymoon with their election manifesto, during which they bought off the miners’ strike which had given such anguish to Ted Heath, Labour got down to the affairs of the British capitalist class—which meant assaulting the workers' living standards. As the recession deepened Labour deserted the very Keynesian policies which, they had once so confidently argued, were the positive remedy to any slump:

   It was Denis Healey, not Geoffrey Howe, who first put monetarism on the agenda of British politics, and abandoned a Keynesian strategy. It was Healey, not Howe, who put prices and profits before public spending and jobs (Stuart Holland MP, Guardian 16 June 1980).

Keynesianism was not alone as a cherished principle to be rejected by that government. A party with its roots in the trade unions, and so to be expected to look favourably on union activities to improve workers' conditions, they fought the unions to the last day of their office. When that courageous and useful bunch of workers, the firemen, were forced into strike action in an effort to improve their meagre pay, it was the Labour government which contemptuously broke the strike with the use of blacklegging troops. When the hospital workers, another group of socially useful people, struggled for better pay and conditions, Labour ministers urged that blacklegging should be a normal, accepted practice:

    I assert very clearly that everyone has the right to work and everyone has the right to cross a picket line. It is not a sacred object and I hope they will do so (James Callaghan. House of Commons, 23 January 1979).

Of course the Labour government claimed that all of this—holding wages down, breaking strikes, cutting services—was all done to improve our lives although they could never satisfactorily explain just how this was to come about. It was all, they said, something to do with fighting inflation, by which they meant rising prices and the inexorable alternative was high unemployment, once described by Denis Healey as ". . . by far the biggest single cause of avoidable human misery and suffering’’ (House of Commons. 20 April 1972). At the time the Tories were in power so it was safe for Healey to anguish about human suffering but when his time as Chancellor ended unemployment had doubled, extending this avoidable misery to twice as many people as under the Tories. Healey had celebrated his accession to the Chancellorship with a threat to squeeze the rich until the pips squeaked but in the event the rich did rather less squeaking under Labour than under the Tories. During the Heath government the proportion of wealth owned by the top 1 per cent fell from 30 per cent to 22.5 per cent; under Labour it climbed, to 23.5 per cent in 1975, 24.9 per cent in 1976 and so on.

The reasonable conclusion from all this, comparing one period of capitalism to another, and government by one party to that of another, is that there is nothing of significance to choose between them. Capitalism in the early thirties under MacDonald is little different from capitalism in the early eighties under Thatcher. Anyone who thinks that things here are so bad that they should escape abroad must think again, for there is little to choose between capitalism in one country before another. In France, for example, the Mitterrand government, which was greeted by delirious left-wingers as the start of a socialist revolution, is now carrying out policies which are to all intents and purposes identical with those of the Giscard d’Estaing administration which it succeeded. Finance Minister Jacques Delors recently spelled out what Mitterrand "socialism" means: 

   The road to economic salvation can only follow a model which puts the accent on a drastic drop in inflation, maintenance of the buying power of our currency, and the ferocious search for competitiveness.

Delors’ austerity programme, according to the Guardian (4 May 1984) is being compared to those of Thatcher, Reagan and the former right wing Premier Raymond Barre. By the same token it could also be compared to those of Healey and of Labour Chancellors of the past—Cripps, Snowden, Gaitskcll.

None of this is coincidental. This present recession affects capitalism worldwide and politicians all over the world are trying to deal with it in the same futile, anti-working class way as their predecessors in office did. There have been slumps before and there will be again, for they are endemic to capitalism. The preferred remedies remain basically unchanged through time and space despite the fact that at no time and nowhere have they been effective. The only thing which changes is the political personalities who promote these remedies, and the succession of impoverished workers who obstinately support what the politicians represent in the face of the massive evidence that this is all a waste of effort.

The simple, clear conclusion to be drawn from this is that we must look for something more fundamental and enduring than the characters of politicians and their panicky responses if we are to understand capitalism and why it works as it does. A social system rooted in class ownership of the means of life is essentially anarchic; it cannot be controlled by economists or politicians; it must produce conflict and impoverishment for the mass of the people. That was what happened before Thatcher ever came squawking into her Grantham babyhood and it will be happening after she is gone to her grave.

So yes, there will be life after Thatcher—the life of capitalism. When she leaves office some other politicians will go through the same impotent deceptions and will be the object of a similar ill-informed adulation.

Ivan

Editorial: We can organise for socialism (1984)

Editorial from the July 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the miners came out on strike in 1972 they were given scanty chance of success for there were plentiful stocks of coal and competition from gas. oil and electricity was thought to have reduced the mines to the status of a dying industry. Who cared if the miners struck? The government were confident that they could simply sit it out.

In the event the miners won, partly by the tactic of sending pickets in strength to places which were not on strike but which were vital to industry, like power stations. In face of this threatened disruption the government capitulated; after the Wilberforce Enquiry the miners got a substantial pay rise. But inevitably that victory brought a reaction, for no government would happily concede so much industrial muscle to any group of workers. One reaction has been the industrial relations legislation which has outlawed picketing except in small numbers and then only at the pickets' own place of work. Of course the miners, realising that to conform to these laws would devitalise any strike, have tried to carry on much as before. On the other hand the government are determined that there shall never be another 1972; that is why the police have been out in such force during the miners' strike and why they have asserted the law with such vigour and with such disregard for legality.

The effect of this has been to place picketing squarely in the public eye and to make the picket, according to the political views of the person concerned, either a hero or a crazy, militant saboteur. Where do socialists stand on this issue?

A strike is the workers' weapon of last resort, with the unusual characteristic that it cannot be used without damaging the user. Just like other weapons, a strike has better chances of success if it is applied with maximum force; the most hopeful strike is one which is solidly unanimous. The implication in this is that such a strike follows a free, democratic decision with the strikers fully informed on what is at stake and sure that there is no other way of winning their point.

The function of a picket is to persuade workers against trying to work during a strike — against trying to blackleg — but in fact this often goes beyond mere discussion as the strikers mount a physical blockade of places of work so that nothing and nobody may move in or out of them. The present law is framed to prevent that happening and to reduce the "persuasion" to the most innocuous of discussion. Small wonder that the miners, with their long history of struggle, find the law such a frustration.

But it is necessary to ask why significant numbers of workers have to be persuaded to join a strike. Workers, after all. know what poverty is; they are familiar with the regular struggle to stretch a pay packet over the mortgage or the rent. food, clothes and travel, let alone such "luxuries" as a holiday. They know also that the employer does not easily concede a pay claim; indeed in present conditions the employers are likely to resist from the first to the last ditch. So why, in the face of this knowledge, should workers need to be persuaded to struggle to protect or to improve their living standards?

The importance of that question lies in the fact that, as we have said, the most effective strike is one supported by the total workforce, in a democratic decision taken with full information. Union leaders sometimes imply that they would welcome this but in reality they would almost certainly find it pretty difficult to deal with for it implies a level of consciousness higher than anything to be observed at present. Class conscious workers are few and far between at the moment; they are aware that capitalism is a society of two classes, defined by the way they get their living, and that these two classes are in continual, unavoidable conflict. While capitalism lasts this conflict will be over the division of wealth: the end of it will be the last stage in struggle — the dispossession of the capitalists and the transformation of the means of life into the property of the human community. It also implies a knowledge that class conscious, democratic workers have no use for leaders to formulate and hand down decisions to them — and. as history teaches, so often to betray the interests they are supposed to represent. But even a strike by such workers would still be a defensive act over the division of wealth: whatever its outcome it would leave capitalism intact.

This prospect is less dismal than it may seem, for such a strike would be evidence of the development of a mass movement asking some fundamentally important questions about society. Even if the strikers won, their class consciousness would forbid them to be satisfied with some relatively paltry wage rise when they could have the world, free of the problems of capitalism. Democratic and class conscious organisation on the industrial field is unlikely to take place unless there was also the same type of development on the political field, where the act of abolishing capitalism must take place. Workers who have seen through capitalism so that they appreciated the need to organise a strike of maximum power would also have grasped the urgency of political action to end capitalism and would be separately organised for that as well.

As the revolution draws near, socialists will be everywhere, running all sorts of organisations from a basis of democratic class consciousness. The majority of the world's people will be demanding, not the defensive restrictions of industrial action, but the acquisitive freedoms of an entire social takeover. They will organise the revolution for socialism because they will know that nothing less will do.

Socialism will be a classless society, free of all the conflicts and repressions of capitalism. Trade unions, as one expression of a class divided society, will not exist. In socialism human beings will co-operate in a massive communal effort for the common good. It will be a world of abundance, with free access to its wealth. People will read in their histories of these dark days of class conflict and poverty and they will wonder why, for so long, their forebears seemed to prefer to live like warring beasts rather than flourish like human beings.

Greenham reconsidered (1984)

From the July 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

The women at Greenham Common have surprised cynics by their determination not to give in to any attempts to remove them. They have come to be admired by many as a symbol of peace in the shadow of a military base, a courageous flicker of human feeling, around the perimeter of a wire fence enclosing some of the most barbaric weapons of destruction.

Sincerity and determination are not always very useful things in themselves. It depends what aim they are turned towards. Thatcher is sincerely determined to run British capitalism without any concession to workers’ demands or to easing misery and discontent. The women of the peace camps, on the other hand, have the far more worthy aim of opposing a collective human suicide. Who could disagree with this? But having arrived at a general aim, such as disarming the world and ending war. it is then necessary to decide what is the best way of achieving it.

The multi-lateralists, who believe that the best way to achieve peace is to prepare for war, claim that “deterrence” has worked. True, there has not been a global nuclear holocaust yet, but this of course does not prove that there will never be. The multi-lateralists always fail to mention that since 1945 not a single day has passed without a major war between two or more nations being fought somewhere in the world. Millions of people have died in those wars. Even during the past four years, in the Iraq-Iran war alone, nearly half a million people have been killed. With its smug faith in arms negotiations and treaties which have gone on for many years and produced no reduction in arms at all, the theory of multi-lateralism is not just conservative, it is insane. It regards the wars of the world as the unavoidable outcome of a mysterious disease called “human nature” and wants to see the game of human annihilation played to the rules of cricket or croquet.

Sadly, the often quoted, unilateralist “alternative” to all this is not as different as CND would have us believe. Still thinking within the rigid framework of capitalist society, divided as it is into competing nations, the unilateralists want the British ruling class to show their true colours, play the gentleman, and agree to defend their profits, their markets and lucrative trade routes with more moderate, “conventional” weapons of destruction. For example. a CND leaflet called Questions And Answers About Non-Nuclear Defence asks the question: "Could Britain defend itself without nuclear weapons?” and gives the answer: "Yes . . . There are various options available for a real defence policy”, suggesting that Britain could "take up new ideas about purely defensive military policies and weapons using new technologies”. It would be interesting to know just how peaceful and harmless defensive militarism would be; as for new technologies, there is of course a great deal of research being carried out into “non-nuclear defence" using nerve gas and other chemical and biological weapons.

The problem, then, with the popular alternative to the multi-lateralist bomb squad, is that CND accepts the international rivalry of capitalism which produces war as surely as night follows day. They embody the same nationalism which is used to persuade workers to go periodically to settle their employers' trade wars on the battlefield. CND have issued a statement complaining about the government's acceptance of a second assignment of cruise missiles . . . on the day after British women have been rounded up for peacefully protesting against cruise missiles" and a woman from the peace camp. Lyn Jones, was quoted as saying ". . . the British people do not want these cruise missiles" (Guardian, 6 April 1984). As long as workers believe that there is such a thing as “the British people", who don't want cruise missiles, "the American people", who, presumably, according to Lyn Jones, can keep "their" cruise missiles. and “the Russians", who have got "their" SS-20s. then we will remain cannon fodder. The workers of the world have no country: a mortgage, a rent-book, a UB40. these things look the same everywhere even if their labels are different, and they produce the same misery. Ninety per cent of the people of the world share a global common interest, economically and socially. It is the ten per cent who invest in our labour, in whose interest it has been to divide the planet into areas of control called "nations".

What, then, of the women at Greenham? They have had the support of CND, but their protest was not organised by that body. They have failed to prevent the arrival of cruise missiles. They have failed to prevent cruise being made operational. . What has their presence at Greenham achieved? There are two things they claim to have achieved. Firstly, to increase public awareness of the real horror of the nuclear threat and the urgent need to do something about it. Second, to build up strong bonds of solidarity and confidence among those who seek peace, and between women in particular. In other words, to create an alternative culture, in which the values of present-day society, of violence and aggression, are rejected and people are instead creative and care for one another.

It is much harder to measure what success has been had in relation to these two secondary aims. Even before Greenham, there was a growing awareness for many years of the threat of nuclear war, as the number of nuclear weapons in the world spiralled. But spreading information about the nature of a threat to millions of lives cannot be separated from ideas about how that threat is to be dealt with. The Greenham Common women have opposed the idea of working-class political organisation, men and women together, to dispossess the world's capitalist class of their ownership of the means of life. Instead, there has been a tendency to sneer at such ideas and to favour spontaneous acts of peacefulness within a society rooted in property and violence, with the control of the state left in the hands of the agents of capital.

This brings us to the second aim, of promoting an alternative culture of co-operation. Like the Welsh hippy communes of the sixties, this is an idealist and utopian hope that a world-wide system of competition and profit can be escaped from, without the political and democratic action of a socialist majority. The Greenham women have been divided as to what place, if any, men are to have in this alternative culture. Only a minority fell for the dangerous biological determinism, which says that it is men who are genetically programmed for violence and women for peace. Most of the women a Greenham are united, though, in the feeling that men have been conditioned into aggression and violence and should therefore generally be excluded from the birth of this new culture of peace.

This is just the kind of irrational judgement which justifies war. Was it not women who waved white feathers at the men [who] would not fight in the 1914-18 war, to taunt them for their refusal to kill for "our country"? Was it not women who proudly kissed their sons and husbands into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean in the Falklands war? The fact is both women and men are taught, in different ways, to support the capitalist system the world over. This conditioning will only be destroyed by men and women workers joining together to face a common enemy, rather than allowing conflicts between workers to blind them to what is really happening. What makes men flock like sheep to their death in wars is not really strength or aggression but the most pathetic weakness. After all, militarism is based on the strict obeying of orders, which is hardly a model of self-assertion.

These two aims, then, of alerting public awareness and building a counter-culture of peaceful solidarity have not been at all successful in removing the threat of annihilation from the human race. But, in any case, these were not the original aims of the Peace Camp: the object of preventing the arrival and preparation for use of cruise missiles has failed miserably, and is being gradually forgotten. Any movement must be judged, in the end, by the success or failure of its strategy. By that standard. Greenham has been a total fiasco. It would be patronising in the extreme for us to continue any longer to pat them on the head, and admire their sincerity. If their strategy for getting rid of nuclear weapons is not effective, then to encourage the continuation of that strategy is nothing less than collective suicide.

Unfortunately, as with CND in general, there is a smug self-righteousness about the women at Greenham, which treats all criticism of their policy with the same pious smirk. Having been branded by the media as the "Peace Women" they seem to feel that anyone who dares to question their approach must be a warmonger, defending male attitudes of aggression and oppressive forms of political organisation. Perhaps they don’t know, or don't care, that socialists alone have opposed every single war this century, not just before they began, but during and after them too, even where this meant incarceration in prison for many of our members during both World Wars. We do not sneer at the opposition to war of millions of our fellow workers. But how is this opposition to be turned into a practical movement, which will be effective in ending all war?

The Greenham Common and other peace camps have degenerated into tourist attractions, because they present no real threat to the forces of mass destruction around which they are gathered. The weapons of war will only be dismantled when the cause of war the way society is presently organised — is removed. Nothing short of a social revolution will prevent humanity staggering from one mass grave to another

Clifford Slapper

SWP: recruiting sergeant for fascism (1984)

From the July 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1977 the fascist National Front received 119,000 votes in London. They were talking about becoming "the third major party" and silly little men in Nazi uniforms were dreaming of re-enacting the Third Reich while skinheads roamed the streets believing that racist violence was being legitimised through the ballot box. At the time the Socialist Party did the only thing politically conscious workers can do: exposed the dogmas of the NF as dangerous illusions which are part of the sick ideology of capitalism.

By the early 1980s the NF was a spent force. Its various leaders were busy stabbing each other in the backs; the neo-Nazis were squabbling among themselves as to who would play Hitler when the big day came, and Fuehrer-in-waiting Tyndall left to form his own tin-pot outfit. Most of the thugs who had provided the muscle behind the fascist re-emergence in the late 1970s either joined the British Movement (the party for those who fail the entrance exam into the NF) or fell back into political apathy. By 1983 the NF vote had dropped to a mere 17,000 in the whole of London—102,000 less than six years earlier. Martin Webster, the one-time tactical commander of the party, is in the process of taking the NF leadership to court because they have expelled him and he does not want to go. In short, at the beginning of 1984 the NF was falling to pieces.

Two years ago the Front sent Patrick Harrington, their student organiser, to recruit members within the North London Polytechnic, where he was supposedly studying philosophy. Clearly, he was not there for the scholarship, as he did not even take the trouble to sign up as a member of the library. His aim was to recruit members to the NF. As democrats, we can no more object to the spreading of overtly racist views than we can to the expression of other anti-socialist ideas. Needless to say, that is not the view of fascists.

The Socialist Workers' Party does not aim to recruit members by talking to them about socialism. Their theoretical whizz-kid, Alex Callinicos has referred to such activity as "abstract propagandism" and accused the Socialist Party of this alleged tactical error (see "Politics or Abstract Propagandism?" International Socialism, Winter 1981). According to the SWP, the movement for "socialism” (a term about which they are not clear) must be built up by winning workers to the cause on the basis of single issues. The SWP prides itself on its "tactics". So, when it was discovered that an NF recruiter was at work in the North London Poly, the self-appointed vanguard saw an ideal opportunity to do some recruiting for themselves.

Now, one point must be made clear: the fear of students—especially blacks—that Harrington was in the poly to compile hit-lists of those expressing views unacceptable to the fascists is quite probably justified. The NF in Islington, where the polytechnic is based, have a reputation for intimidating their enemies: arson attacks on anti-racists have taken place; socialists selling this journal in Chapel Street market have been intimidated; and not very long ago a woman working in The Other Bookshop in Islington was attacked by fascists and suffered a fractured skull. Without doubt, the NF does compile hit-lists and activists like Harrington are potentially dangerous. But the fact is, there is no evidence that Harrington recruited a single member into the NF during his two years at PNL or that any hit-lists were compiled.

The SWP were not prepared to be confused by the facts. They saw Harrington as an "issue" around which they could recruit members. So, a mass picket was organised to prevent Harrington from entering the polytechnic building and after a few days they organised an occcupation. This was precisely the publicity Harrington and his dwindling party were looking for. He was presented by the media as the persecuted underdog; the NF was able to raise the issue of “civil liberties” which it clearly does not believe in granting to others; and, worst of all, the concept of “socialist activity" was linked to the suppression of free speech. No wonder the press were eager to give publicity to the SWP's antics.

The National Front has been given a new lease of life as a result of the undemocratic. adventurist, anti-socialist tactics of the SWP and their foolish allies. When students are shown on the television waving placards stating "FASCISTS DON'T DESERVE AN EDUCATION" we have one answer: fascists, along with all other politically ignorant workers who support the continuation of capitalism, need to be educated. If the battle is fought in the arena of working-class ideas the fascists will be defeated utterly. By adopting the methods of fascism to fight fascism the SWP distort and damage the name of socialism.

Socialists will continue to present the case for a society without nations and without classes. We will not involve ourselves in the tactical manoeuvres of the infantile Left, who are opposed to the task of winning workers to socialism by open and democratic means.

Ironically, the National Front and the Trotskyist Left are united on many issues. Both want to nationalise the banks; both support import controls; both want to pull out of the EEC. both want American military bases off “British soil"; both believe in "smashing opponents". Both will get occasional boosts in their membership campaigns as a result of publicity from momentary campaigns, but they are destined to remain insignificant because they arc pro-capitalist political factions which do not suit the current needs of capitalism. Neither the pure state capitalism of the Left nor the corporatism of the fascists arc likely to ever be adopted by the capitalist class.

The end result of the SWP's tactical brilliance is that Harrington is still attending the polytechnic—students who tried to have him expelled feel defeated because they acted too soon, before there was evidence to remove him—and the local NF has received some useful publicity and. in all probability, an increase in membership. And the SWP lecture us about tactics!

Steve Coleman