Sting in the Tail: The bubble bursts (1995)

The Sting in the Tail column from the July 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

The bubble bursts

Bradley Stoke, near Bristol, is Europe’s largest private housing development where in 1988 people queued overnight to buy houses before they were even built.

After all, house prices were rocketing and this, along with mortgage tax relief, made buying a house seem like a sound investment, so buyers took out mortgages in the belief that they could always sell at a profit.

Then came the recession. People lost their jobs and tax relief was cut. Many homes were re-possessed and house prices tumbled. Bradley Stoke became the negative equity capital of Britain and residents renamed it “Sadly Broke”. On top of this, professor Doug Woods of the Manchester Business School predicts that house prices will stay depressed for another 20 years!

Of course, no one can be certain what any market will be like one year from now let alone 20, but what does look certain is that the agony will continue for many workers who, like those in Bradley Stoke, fell for the guff about "a property-owning democracy”.

Panel in a muddle

Remember the panel of “seven wise men” appointed by the Government in 1993 to advise it on the economy? And remember how one of them announced after their very first meeting that the other six hadn’t a clue about how the economy worked?

At their latest meeting the panel, now only six, deliberated over what the government should do about interest rates:

“Three of the Chancellor's six independent advisers believe he made a 'tactical error' in not raising rates this month. The three ‘wise men’ say the current 6.75 percent will have to rise. . . but two others oppose further rises and the sixth expect the cost of borrowing to fall. ” (Ceefax 23 May.)

Setting-up the panel was just a political stunt to reassure the public following the ERM debacle of 1993, so the government never had the slightest intention of paying any heed to what the panel would say, and it isn’t hard to see why.

Unhappy minority

A Mr Allen Hancock in the USA has been publishing a quarterly More Than Money since 1993. He is a compassionate man who produces this publication to comfort a forgotten minority of US society—the filthy rich.

Inheriting $500,000 in 1988 from his oil-rich grandfather, Mr Hancock found himself "feeling isolated, embarrassed and encumbered”. According to a recent Cornell University study, over the next 20 years $4,800 billion will be inherited in the USA and Mr Hancock is worried about the recipients.

“One third of that wealth will go to just one percent of the population, amongst whom the average will be some $1.6 million. That is going to create a lot of stress and even unhappiness, Mr Hancock argues. " (Times, 12 April.)

As the unhappy inheritors don’t seem liable to give away this money burden, don't you think a compassionate working class should abolish the stuff for them?

Elementary, My Dear Whitehouse

We are all familiar with the deductive methods of the fictitious Sherlock Holmes. Unfortunately modern detectives are not quite so logical.

In the Observer (21 May) there appeared a report of the career of a real live detective Paul Whitehouse, Chief Constable of Sussex. Mr Whitehouse is an unusual policeman. He and a contemporary were the first Cambridge graduates to enter the police for 20 years. He is also unusual in that he can make deductions based on facts, even if these are rather obvious to socialists without the benefits of a Cambridge education:

“I started in Hartlepool. I couldn't help but notice that crimes were mostly being committed by the poorer people, who lived in the poorest areas. That is an interesting starling point. "

His deductive powers are somewhat less than Holmesian though, for he obviously understands less about policing in capitalism than Alan Clark:

“Alan Clark (the former Defence Minister) would say that we are here as servants of the ruling class. I would say we are here as servants of the people. ”

A look in the future

Those wearing red rosettes were happily chanting “easy, easy” while those with the blue rosettes looked on in dismay. Rival fans at a football match? No, only Labour and Tory activists on TV after the recent local elections.

“A great night for Labour” chorused the pundits, but party leader Tony Blair warned his followers that the night could well be Labour's high point. It probably was. If Labour wins the next (general) election and takes on the task of administering British capitalism then what can we expect to see?

First, the initial euphoria will evaporate as the new government struggles in vain to provide the jobs, security, improved social services, benefits, etc. which the voters were led to expect.

Next, public anger and media hostility, now aimed at the Tories, will be turned on Labour. Its popularity will slump in the opinion polls, seats will be lost at by-elections, Labour councillors will be ousted in droves from town halls, and finally there will be exultant Tories and dismayed Labourites on TV after a future election.

Socialist Unity — Is there any choice? (1995)

From the July 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

This article and the one on the following two pages should be
 read together since the first expresses some views which are 
countered in the second. Peter Nielsen is a former Labour
 parliamentary candidate.

"All it takes to do away with the ills of capitalism is a politically aware and motivated working class which wants and understands socialism." So said the Cover Feature, “What makes you angry?”, in the July 1992 edition of Socialist Standard. All? In a political environment where the word “socialism” is applied with such disregard for its real meaning, “understanding” it is no easy matter for people whose general political awareness is shaped by the capitalist agenda on which all mass media discussion takes place.

The experience of the working class of so-called “socialism” has not been a happy one. “Socialists” of many hues have come and gone this century world-wide, their promise unfulfilled through subversion and betrayal. In Britain, all the achievements of previous Labour governments have been partly or wholly destroyed since 1979. Cowed by Thatcher, seduced by an establishment which it has never repudiated anyway, and betrayed by its leaders. Labour now seeks an electoral mandate to govern the same old rotten system under Tony Blair declaring itself “a socialist party”. Coupled with the slavering triumphalism of the capitalists that “socialism is dead” following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, ordinary people are understandably lost in a maze of meanings. Worse still, the disowning of socialism by the Labour Party in recent years has only reinforced the capitalists in their propaganda that socialism is associated with hopeless idealism, incompetence and failure. The fact that the chronic economic and administrative incompetence of the nomenclatura of Soviet state capitalism caused it to collapse in chaos and defeat only adds to the scepticism of working class people. In their eyes, through their mass media, all systems end up with people at the top looking after themselves.

If socialism is to advance and not continue to be scandalised by vested interests who patronisingly describe it as a good idea which will never work in practice because of “human greed”, the task of socialists is not only to expose the ills of capitalism, but also to meet the challenge of cynicism and hopelessness so successfully nurtured by decades of Tory propaganda and Labour betrayal. Socialists need more than a definition of socialism. They need a language of socialism which expresses the rights and moral standards by which human beings must live to survive in peace, freedom and with justice. It must be capable of being articulated in a consistent way and of being recognised each time it is spoken.

The language of socialism must be the language of the ethical. It must not waver from principle. The concept of human rights must be total. It must not only concern itself with freedom from victimisation, false imprisonment, torture and execution. If anything, such acts are sanitised by being on the human rights agenda rather than in the sphere of criminality where they belong. Human rights must extend to the fields of economics, housing, health, education and the environment and they must be applied universally. The redistribution of wealth and the democratisation of industry must not be a mere policy option for socialists seeking votes in elections but must be taken for granted as an inevitable consequence of supporting socialism. Socialism should be synonymous with the highest standards of life. Human rights in the social and economic spheres demand the elimination of poverty, unemployment, homelessness and alienation. They also demand the highest levels of performance and professionalism in all work by each other for each other.

No conflict

There should be no conflict between the good of the individual and the good of the community. The two are inseparable. Individuals benefit from communities organised to provide the best in public services, and communities benefit from free and fulfilled individuals realising their full potential be they highly gifted or severely handicapped. The full realisation of the potential in all human beings is the ultimate guarantee of the best society that can be conceived. Th waste of one human being through neglect and exploitation denies others the fruits of their endeavour.

Such general tenets are not, as cynics would have it, the utopian beliefs of idealists and dreamers. They command wide support according to the ICM State of the Nation polls published annually in the Guardian newspaper. For years, they have shown big majorities who regard unemployment more serious than inflation, who think that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor, who oppose privatisations, who regard environmental protection as more important than producing “cheap” goods, and who prefer better public services to lower taxes. Substantial minorities still oppose Britain's nuclear weapons and support more trade union involvement in industry and the economy. There is an even split between those who believe that more socialist planning would be the best way to solve Britain's economic problems and those who did not.

These views are some way from being those of “a politically aware and motivated working class which wants and understands socialism”, but that is not the point. Given that such opinions are expressed in the context of the capitalist agenda by people who have rarely or ever been exposed to a true socialist alternative and whose most recent encounter with commentaries on socialism was intended to consign socialism as variously “unworkable”, “failed”, “discredited” and “dead”, they must be regarded as remarkable. They should tell us that all the political parties represented in Parliament, including the Labour Party, should speak for less than half of the people and that there is a huge political void waiting to be occupied by advocates of socialism.

Political void

The crunch is, how is it to be occupied? Who will occupy it? The Lahour Party has abandoned it if it ever occupied it at all. Socialist thinkers and activists are scattered across a profusion of parties and organisations which collectively represent a common rejection of capitalism and its wars, its environmental vandalism, its poverty, starvation, homelessness, unemployment and racism, and its ambition for the usurious enslavement of all humanity. How many more decades will it take socialists to work through their differences towards a socialist consensus? Is there no synthesis of socialism, democracy, peace, freedom and justice to which we can all subscribe?

If objectives can be broadly agreed, then two steps towards unity will have been made possible: A united critique of capitalism and a united vision of what should replace it. There only remains agreement about the process of achieving it. That will be difficult and will require the putting to pasture of some sacred cows on the left. It will be an iconoclastic endeavour, not against socialist sentiment but against long and dearly held convictions about the “only” way to defeat capitalism in a left culture in which there are many “only” ways including insurrection, revolution, entryism, the ballot box and just waiting around until the system grows rotten, collapses and dies.

The achievement of socialism is the responsibility of all who take up the cause irrespective of which organisation, if any, they identify with. Socialism is no longer a luxury which can occupy our intellects in interminable arguments about strategies for achieving it to the exclusion of events unfolding around us. Socialism has become an urgent necessity. To hand over the world's economy to the business élites to exploit for profit, by collusion or by default, is a recipe for social and environmental disaster. If socialism is denied for lack of the will to unite, it will amount to a criminal act of passive surrender to the capitalists and to betrayal of the working class. It is not just about filling a vacuum left by the Labour Party’s rightward shifts. It is also about a vacuum in the understanding of people who have never thought about politics, who are dissatisfied but don’t know what with, some of who may even vote for the Tories without being sure why. That requires that socialists organise to demand the attention given to the capitalist parties in the media, on the stump and on the street. Socialists must speak the language of socialism which the people understand. Above all, they must reach the people, confronting the capitalist agenda issue-by-issue, blow-for-blow.

United Left

Demanding attention requires presence. Presence comes from the status conferred by the strength of a united socialist front which cannot be dismissed as “marginal” or “extreme”. The capitalists may control the media through the ownership of its assets but they do not own the right of communication and dialogue between peoples any more than they own the rain in spite of their efforts to privatise it. Their monopoly of the use of the media and of the agenda should not be surrendered by default. As long as these powerful levers remain in their hands, the capitalists retain the ability to contain everything a divided Left can throw at them A united Left could not be denied, especially if it scored enough points under the capitalists' own rules of access to the media, namely by the election of MPs and councillors.

The point is not to sign up to the traditions of British politics and the institutions of the establishment which sustains them. It is to give united public expression to the socialist cause in a form which is familiar to people and which can reach people in an age of mass telecommunications which demands presence and status to justify participation. Virtue is not enough. A show of strength is needed, strength in numbers which demands attention and can show that socialism is not a scattered body of non-conformist belief but a philosophy which is the true reflection of the natural state of human society. To a rising generation which has known no other political environment than that which exists today, and to who this century’s two World Wars and the Cold War exist only in history’ books, the arguments for socialism must address the world as it is today. Not the “modern” world of Tony Blair which accepts a limited democratic influence over the forces of international capitalism, but the modern world whose awesome problems of inequality and environmental plunder and destruction can only be solved by co-operation through assent, inseparably by socialism and democracy.

The capitalists are rampant in the wake of the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the ascendancy of the so-called New World Order. If they are to be challenged, it must be done before it is too late. Socialists bear that responsibility. United we stand, divided we fall. After all, if professing socialists can’t get their act together, how will the people ever be persuaded “to want and understand socialism”?

Peter Nielsen

Blogger's Note:

Here's an obituary for Peter Nielsen which dates from 2018, and which gives more background on his political and personal life.

Is there a better alternative? (1995)

From the July 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Since its formation the Socialist Party has argued that it is
 essential for the working class to unite in order to gel rid of
 capitalism. But this unity must be on the basis of a clear
 understanding of what socialism is, of what capitalism is,
 and of how to replace one with the other.

Without winning the battle of ideas socialists will achieve nothing. Workers, who constitute the vast majority of society, will either have their own class-consciousness or they will fall victim to the ideological attack of the minority class who are the legalised exploiters of the profit system There is no middle ground: workers must either understand and want a co-operative society which is fundamentally different from the class-divided system we have or capitalism will carry on in its callous, destructive way.

So we agree with a good deal of what Peter Nielsen says. Yes, the capitalist agenda does dominate mass media communication and makes it far from easy for workers to think for ourselves. Added to that, there are schools and churches and all kinds of institutions dedicated, intentionally or otherwise, to the confusion of the working class Yes, the triumphalism or capitalism's apologists in the light of the alleged “failure of socialism” has misled millions of workers. The fact that the Labour Party has only ever stood for capitalism and that the so-called socialist countries were no more than attempts by élite-run states to manage capitalism (state capitalism) makes it easy for workers to assume that real socialism could never work. The recognition that socialists have a big battle on our hands, made more difficult not only by media disinformation but also by the historical actions of pseudo-socialists, is one that does not need to be pointed out to the Socialist Party. After all, we stand alone in the political arena as the only party professing socialism which was never for a minute taken in by the socialist claims of state capitalists and left-wing reformers of capitalism. We know just how big an ideological mess this history has created.

Indecencies of capitalism

So, what is to be the way forward out of the mess? We are told that we need more than a definition of socialism, but an ethical language within which to express it. In truth, it would be impossible to define and argue for socialism without pointing to the indecencies of capitalism. It is the fundamental opposition to the interests and feelings of the majority which arises from production for profit (capitalism) which makes production for use (socialism) so compelling and urgent. We are not seeking to win workers to support for a dry political definition, but to a new way of running the world, a different way of living which is co-operative, caring and free from the shackles of the market. Indeed, this means rejecting the individual/community dichotomy and recognising in practical terms the need for a society where the interest of one is the interest of all.

We agree also that there are many workers who are far from actively liking or supporting the profit system. Capitalism thrives upon the passive support of the scared and the uninformed. But there are those who will not vote for any of the capitalist parties and would agree with Peter Nielsen that this huge radical political void needs to be occupied by an alternative movement.

So, what are these people to do? How is the radical void to be filled? Clearly, not by the Labour Party. It never was socialist or radical, but now it is so far from seriously claiming to be so that nobody in their right mind would join it with a view to ending capitalism. Nor does the answer lie in the Leninist Left which has spent this century wasting workers’ time calling for a re-enactment of the insurrectionary tactics which gave rise the state-capitalist tyrannies and telling workers to vote Labour at every election: a history' of double-confusion. Clearly, the alternative is not going to come from their direction

So, what is the case for unity? We agree with Peter Nielsen that those who unite for socialism must understand what capitalism is and share a common socialist objective. Indeed, that is the basis for membership of the Socialist Party. All workers who oppose capitalism and seek the establishment of socialism, not just as definitions but as practically understood and experienced systems of society, must unite. In this sense, we are all for unity.

Unity for socialism

But can we unite with those whose professed radical or socialist energies amount to campaigns to reform capitalism? No—never! This is not because we doubt the sincerity of such would-be reformers or enjoy standing aloof from active struggles. But we must at all times and without compromise stick to the Big Issue of opposing capitalism as a whole, not just bits of it, and advocating socialism as a basic social alternative, not just a new policy for running capitalism. Organised socialists must be politically hostile to reformism, whilst doing our utmost to win reformists from the path of mending capitalism to that of ending it.

We are all for “a show of strength”, but numbers without understanding and clear-cut principles do not constitute strength but easily broken weakness. So, to be plain-speaking about it, we reject the proposal that we should unite with reformists and call instead for them to abandon their struggles for the crumbs from their masters’ tables and unite to take possession of the whole cake and the bakery in which it is made: common ownership and democratic control of the means of wealth production and distribution.

We do not reject Peter Nielsen's call for “socialist unity” out of sectarian indifference to the need to build a mass socialist movement. Far from it: there is nothing that we would more like to see. But the unity of socialists with non-socialists, semi-socialists or single-issue radicals would be to build a castle made of straw.

In the spirit of Peter Nielsen’s enthusiastic and hopeful call for socialist unity, let us offer a different proposition. Consider what would happen if the active support for the Socialist Party, which is small at present, were to be doubled or trebled or multiplied by ten? What impact might 10,000 politically-conscious and actively-organised socialists make if enough people were to get to the roots of society’s problems and join our cause? And if we allow ourselves to think of 10,000, how long before they became 100,000? What if such numbers of people were to distribute socialist literature in opposition to the lie-sheets of the capitalist media? What if every phone-in programme had hundreds of socialists jamming the switchboards intent on arguing the need to get rid of production for profit and establish production for need? Now, that would be unity. It would be a force to be reckoned with. Of course, within a growing socialists movement there would be different people motivated by different problems, but all would be united by a recognition that the root cause of these problems is this rotten capitalist system.

These are exciting and invigorating thoughts, but left in the realm of though they will achieve nothing. So, why not start now? Why not think about uniting with those of us who are committed to the single aim of world socialism? Why not persuade friends, workmates and family to join us, or at least read what we have to say? Why not lake ten copies of the Socialist Standard instead of one or two—or write in for a few hundred free leaflets to distribute in your area? Why not organise a socialist meeting locally? Invite along the local radicals, convince them of the need for real socialist unity and let’s have new branches and groups everywhere. Why not unite for the greatest historical aim in human history: the possession of the world and all of its resources by its inhabitants? And why not do it now?

Steve Coleman

Cashless - but not moneyless (1995)

From the July 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Welcome to a World without Money” ran the headline of a full-page feature article in the Daily Mirror on 30 January. But it wasn’t an article on Socialism or anything like it. Written by Tanith Carey, it was about an experiment that starts in Swindon this month when people will pay for things by using a special smart card instead of notes and coins or cheques or even ordinary bank and credit cards.

Tanith Carey describes what the experiment will involve:

“Imagine going on a shopping spree and never having to shell out a penny for your purchases. Groceries at the supermarket. a new outfit, even a burger on the way home all yours without ever opening your wallet. There are no bills to sign, no rooting around in your back pocket and no reaching for change in the bottom of your purse. In fact not a note changes hands. Instead, everything is taken care of with a simple swipe of a card. ”

If ever this was to be adopted universally the result would be a cashless society, not a moneyless society which would be something quite different.

A cashless society would be one in which we no longer used paper notes and metal coins to pay for things; in other respects things would stay the same. A moneyless society, on the other hand, would be a society in which the whole concept of money—as a unit in which prices are expressed and as a means of payment—would have become redundant because the things we need to live would not have prices and would no longer be bought and sold. It would be a radically different society from today.

Most people tend to see money as giving access to wealth. Indeed it does, on condition that you have some. But from another angle it can be seen as a means of excluding people from wealth—from the wealth we need but can’t pay for because we haven’t got the money. Money, in other words, only gives conditional and restricted access to wealth. It is a means of rationing—it only gives people access to what they can pay for—and the workings of the capitalist system distribute these rations to people in very' unequal amounts.

Cashless society

The idea of a “cashless society” was first promoted by the banks in the 1960s as a way of encouraging people to use cheques and so open bank accounts. In those days most people still received, each week or fortnight, a pay packet in the literal sense—an envelope containing cash. This you put in your wallet or purse and spent to meet your needs over the next week or fortnight; if you wanted to save something you had to take it as cash to a bank or building society or to the Post Office.

The banks’ scheme to increase their business worked and today most people have a bank or building society account and are paid either by cheque or by a direct transfer to their account. People now pay for many more things than they used to by cheque, with the result that the need for cash—circulating notes and coins—has declined and an approach towards a cashless society made.

A cheque is basically an IOU, a promise to pay the payee (the person or business it is made out to) a sum of money at a later date, when it is presented to their bank in fact. This, too, takes place without the need for any physical transfer of cash. It does, however, involve the physical transfer of the cheque and the feeding of the details into a computer by a bank employee. This is time-consuming and so relatively expensive for small amounts, and now the banks are dissatisfied with cheques too. They prefer bank cards.

Originally these were guarantee cards presented with the cheque to guarantee the payee that the bank would honour the cheque up to a certain amount even if the payer didn't happen to have that amount in their account at the time the cheque was presented for payment. Then, with the incorporation into them of a microchip, they became "smart cards” which enabled their holders to withdraw notes from the hole-in-the-wall cash machines that sprang up in high streets throughout the country. Now they can also be used instead of a cheque to pay for things, provided, that is, the seller (a supermarket, shop, restaurant, etc) is equipped with a machine that can read the information on the card's microchip and transmit details of the transaction to a central computer. The banks envisage these cards eventually replacing cheques altogether.

So, after the cashless society the chequeless society, the society of electronic money or, as the computer bull's call it, “digital dosh”.

Digital dosh

The experiment in Swindon, financed by the Nat West and Midland banks, takes a different approach towards the same end. It aims to see if it is practicable—and of course profitable—to replace not just cheques but cash itself in everyday transactions.

Cash differs from a cheque in two important respects. First, it circulates: the same note or coin is used many times, by the different people whose hands it passes through, to pay for things. Second, payment in cash is a transaction between two persons only; no third party is involved, only the payer and the payee, the buyer and the seller To recreate electronically these conditions, while at the same time safeguarding against fraud, is technically more difficult than the bank-card-type system which uses a third party—the central system—to carry out and confirm any transaction. But it can be done, and has been done for the Swindon experiment.

Those taking part in the experiment will be issued with a plastic card but this will be different from an ordinary bank card in that holders can transfer to it from their bank account a sum of money of their choice. This can be done either from a machine at the bank or from one attached to their phone or from an “electronic wallet” This wallet is similar in shape and size to a pocket calculator and it too contains a keyboard and a display panel; money can be transferred to it in the same way as to a card but it can also be used to transfer money directly to someone else’s card.

The card works on the same principle as a BT phonecard except that it can be used to pay for anything from a supermarket, comer shop, pub, restaurant, etc participating in the scheme, even for small items like newspapers, stamps or sweets not normally purchased by cheque. When the amount transferred to the card has been spent it can no longer be used without more money being transferred to it.

When the card is used to pay for something it is inserted into a machine that transfers the money but no information about the buyer to the retail outlet's electronic till. A perfect substitute for cash and one that avoids the dangers of robberies and muggings (but not of counterfeiting).

What a waste

It’s all hi-tech stuff, but what a waste! What a waste of the ingenuity and technical skills of the computer analysts, programmers and software and hardware engineers, since electronic money is still money, i.e. still a means of rationing people's access to things.

All these smart cards, electronic wallets and scanners with their digital signatures, guardians, cryptographic algorithms and PINs are designed for one purpose: to allow those with money access to things and then only up to the limit of the amount they have, and so to deny this conditional access to wealth to those who don't meet the conditions, i.e. to those who don’t have money or who don't have enough money. They only make “sense” in a society based on private property and buying and selling and are yet another example of how' today under capitalism scientific knowledge and technology is prostituted and used to serve anti-social ends.

In a rationally-organised society, where we produced goods to satisfy the various needs of people and where people had free access according to their individually-defined needs to what had been produced, the same technology could be used to set up and operate the efficient system of stock control that would be needed to ensure that the stores were always stocked up with the products people had indicated they wanted. But this presupposes a society of common ownership and democratic control, not the banks' advertising agency’s slogan of a cashless society. Then we would truly be able to say “Welcome to a World without Money”.

Adam Buick

Press Exposure: Winners and Losers (1995)

The Press Exposure column from the July 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

What do you want from your newspaper? Do you want a comprehensive, insightful report on what is happening in the world to help you form your opinion on whether we need to run things differently and if so how? Or masses of analysis and policy to help you come to the same conclusions as the writer? Or would you prefer, along with page-after-page of sport (which usually means page-after-page about the off-field foibles of the sportspeople) and dedicated probing of the sexual meanderings of pop stars. politicians and aristocrats, the chance to take part in some sort of competition which promises a chance of making you rich beyond your maddest dreams?

Competitions have been a consistent feature in the press. There is, for example, the humble (although that can depend on which newspaper it is in) crossword which occasionally offers the sort of prize—like a dictionary—which will not make you rich for the rest of your life. In the past there was a peculiar competition called Bullets, giving prizes for constructing apparently meaningful responses to obviously meaningless phrases. It seemed densely indecipherable but was very popular. Some newspapers have run competitions with a car as the prize, or enough petrol to run a car far into the future. Others have offered to pay the mortgage on a house. The so-called quality press has not been immune from this: the Sunday Times has run competitions—one was about post-war test cricketers—which were little more than lotteries and the Times has run one involving the phantom buying of shares. And of course there is good old bingo, which in the newspapers came in different styles. Sometimes the player had to get a card from a newsagent, sometimes the card came through the letterbox with all the other junk mail. All that you had to do then was buy the newspaper which published the numbers to be crossed off the card. It promised big prizes—perhaps a million pounds but there was a loophole. As both cards and numbers were produced by the newspaper and the "game" was not played openly as it is somewhere like a working men’s club, there was nothing to prevent the cards and numbers being designed so that nobody even won the jackpot.

If you think this is farfetched consider the case of Spot-The-Ball. This was another popular, long-running, competition in which the newspaper published an action photograph of a football game, with players leaping and thrashing about—without a ball. Competitors had to mark a cross where they thought the ball was. Addicts of Spot-The-Ball could spend a lot of time with a magnifying glass and a ruler, trying to work out where the players’ eyes were focused and where their boots were aimed at (assuming they were looking at the ball and trying to kick it; which is not always the case) and drawing lines in the hope that the point of intersection would be the winning spot.

In 1990 the Sun ran a Spot-The-Ball competition, in which the photograph was draw up into a grid. The unlikely to prize was £5 million. This desperate venture was quickly copied by the Daily Mirror, then stumbling under the even more desperate ownership of Robert Maxwell. In the Mirror contest readers had to Spot-The-Ball on five consecutive days: the promised top prize was £1 million.

The snag

It all seemed very exciting and enticing but there was a snag. The competition would be judged—that is to say the position of the ball would be decided—after the Mirror had all the entries. This would be done by a panel of judges (on the first occasion chaired by none other than Maxwell himself) who could put the ball in a square which nobody had marked. And that is what happened. Maxwell had instructed his editor "Make sure it doesn’t cost me any money" and, apart from a few "second’’ prizes of £10,000 that is what happened. The whole thing was a fraud on readers of the Mirror who were gullible enough to believe that a newspaper would help them solve their money problems in that way.

When this sort of trickery is exposed—as Maxwell’s Spot-The-Ball was exposed in a subsequent Panorama—we are subjected to a lot of indignation from people who seem to expect the press always to be honest, always to tell the truth. Which brings us back to the original question of what we want from the papers. Imagine for a moment what would happen, if the press suddenly dropped its unwavering support for capitalism and began to publish material which could be sustained by serious argument. What if they stopped treating every pronouncement by political leaders with such grovelling respect? It is difficult to believe that journalists listening to some revered figure churning out yet another discredited placebo for society’s problems do not reflect that that have heard it all before. Difficult to believe that they don't realise that capitalism’s spokespeople have nothing fresh or effective to say and that they should admit to their impotence and advise us to swamp them out in a social revolution.

Fraud

Because capitalism itself is a massive fraud, in which millions of useful people allow themselves to be exploited to sustain a parasite minority and a social system which cannot be organised in the interests of its people. Beside that, a newspaper's bogus bingo, Win-A-Car, or Spot-The-Ball are so trivial that in the history of fraud they won’t rate so much as a column inch.

Ivan

World Review: Nightmare scenarios (1995)

From the July 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

From the middle to the end of May, Western commentators treated the working class, already stressed out and fed up with the rat race we know as capitalism, to a triple synopsis of doom.

In mid May, the International Institute of Strategic Studies revealed US concerns about China's $100 billion annual defence budget, the growing Chinese military assertiveness and their strong resemblance to a superpower.

Only two days after China had joined other nuclear powers in endorsing an indefinite extension of die Non-Proliferation Treaty, it carried out an underground atomic explosion that brought immediate international condemnation.

A few days later the Guardian reported China as setting "alarm bells ringing . . . with its military muscle flexing", and how there were "renewed anxieties about its willingness to live by international rules" (22 May).

China, it seems, had taken a sudden interest in the Spratley Islands and the mineral wealth beneath its reef. That this reef could provide China with oil revenues and access to wider Pacific Rim markets only added to Western fears of China becoming a rival superpower.

A few more days and the Guardian would run another panic-laden story about how "the West’s nightmare scenario of an alliance between Iraq and Iran moved a little closer . . . with the former enemies pledging to improve relations" (26 May).

The catalyst it appears has been the mutual acceptance of Iraq and Iran as the joint focus of Western economic boycotts.

If Iraq, with a population of 17 million, and with a rag-tag army, war-weary after an eight-year conflict with Iran, necessitated the mobilisation of 750,000 allied troops and accompanying hardware in 1990, what, analysts wonder, would be the consequences if Iran sided with Iraq?

Iran, for instance, with a population of 55 million, with a recently upgraded missile system and a nascent nuclear programme and an army of fundamentalists famous for their suicide missions, siding with a vengeful Iraq, could give Western governments and their masters the mother of all headaches.

War footing

On the last day of May, Britain declared it was sending 6,000 troops to the Balkans. The US also looked for ways of muscling in on the world publicity this would generate and NATO gave a sigh of relief, at last being given the chance to justify its existence.

The Guardian's front page headline—"Allies on war footing"—appeared a sad irony for those apologists who saw VE Day in May as a vindication of world peace thanks to Western liberal democracy.

May had also been the 50th anniversary of die United Nations—a contradiction in terms considering there have been over 300 conflicts since 1945. Nowhere has the futility of the UN been more apparent than in the Balkans in which the Croat-Bosnian-Serb war has exhausted every UN method of conflict resolution. Sanctions have been imposed, negotiators have redrawn maps and attempted to broker cease-fires while peacekeepers have been sent to see they are carried

Any credibility the UN had was lost when the UN pulled out 75 percent of its forces from Rwanda following the death of 10 Belgian peacekeepers, leaving the country to anarchy, starvation and the machete. This was followed by the UN pull-out from Somalia at the end of another attempt to bring stability to an African country.

It is a grave indictment of the capitalist system, that the initial relief and joy with which the demise of the cold war was greeted has melted into an increasing anxiety about the future. Within five years of the Berlin Wall falling, 25 new states have sprung up, only two minus the blood that accompanies such birth pangs. More await to be born.

The logic of capitalism is as insane as it is obscene. Conflict rages in 30 countries and much bigger ones await that gentle shove into motion, from Iraq to China. There are wars in Chechenya, Bosnia. The South China Seas seethe with tension. The time-honoured panacea remains military readiness and the threat of aggression. just as the nuclear bomb and the awareness of its destructive potential forced a 40-year stand-off between the US and the Soviet Union.

The 20th century, more than any period in history, should have taught the working class that bombs and borders do not solve problems or bring peace. They only stall war and make conflict, when it does come, more gruesome.

As we approach the millennium, we look back over 100 years that have witnessed more bloodshed than any other century in human history, on a world punctuated with 100 million land mines, on a world one fifth of whose population live in extreme poverty. What an indictment of capitalism.

John Bissett

50 Years Ago: This Phoney Election (1995)

The 50 Years Ago column from the July 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Voters who try to interpret the issues in the election by studying the more flamboyant utterances of the Party leaders may well wonder what it is all about.

Mr. Churchill declares that the election is a fight between individualism and Socialism and between his own Party and the "Socialist Party”. By individualism he means capitalism, which has, however, long since got past the stage of a competitive struggle between independent small capitalists and gone over increasingly to giant monopolies.

The Labour Party, equally anxious to misrepresent the situation, accepts Mr. Churchill's “terminological inexactitude" that they are a socialist party and declare in its Election Declaration (“Let us Face the Future”), “The Labour Party is a Socialist Party and proud of it"—and then proceeds to give us a blue-print of the State Capitalism that they propose to retain and develop.

We confidently make one electoral prophecy. Whatever the result capitalism will be safe because the majority of the working class are not yet Socialists.

(From editorial in Socialist Standard, July 1945)

Help, you’re trapped (1995)

The A Word in Your Ear column from the July 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Get up in the morning. Go to work. Receive as pay less than you produce. Give the surplus to your boss. Survive on your wage. Spend it on buying back what you and the other wage slaves have produced. No wages left. Need money. So . . . get up in the morning. Go to work. Receive as pay less that you produce . . .  Repeat until you die or are thrown on the scrapheap.

That is your life. You call it being employed. “Luckier” than the poor sod next door: he’s unemployed, forced to look for a boss to exploit him. Employment is exploitation It's legalised robbery: you produce the goods and services and others, who possess the means of producing, get rich. Employment is a trap. You're in it.

The sole reason for workers being on earth is to be employed—robbed—trapped. Without us there would be no surplus value produced. If it could be created without us perhaps we would be culled like seals. But we are necessary to the system. Out of the hole which capitalism has dug for us comes profit. Lots of lovely profits to keep the rich rich. Aren’t they lucky to have us?

But you never asked to be in this trap. Tough luck. It was an act of birth. “Sorry. Mrs Bloggs, but you've given birth to a wage slave" Workers are those who own virtually nothing worth selling except ourselves: our mental and physical abilities, our work. (That’s why we’re called workers—because we’re forced to work ) “Well done, Lady Fotheringdale-Smythe, you’ve given birth to a healthy baby parasite, no sooner out the womb than the inheritor of five company directorships and a trust fund worth more than Worker Bloggs will earn in his lifetime as a wage slave.” No trap for baby capitalist. Well, somebody has to mind the Caribbean beaches while the rest of us look after the factories and offices.

Illustration by George Meddemmen 

You want to get out of the trap and be like the loafers who live off the surplus? Easier said than done, wage slave. You might try robbing a bank. The prisons are full of wage slaves who tried escaping from the trap only to book themselves into a cell. Or do the lottery. There’s always a hope that the fifteen-million-to-one odds will go your way. And that is precisely the function of the lottery: to offer hope to the trapped. Pay a pound and purchase your illusory crack in the cell wall.

Or you can grin and bear it. Most do. Some don’t. Suicide is always an option. (At least it’s not illegal any more.) Or drugs. Yes, the shop doorways are full of kids who thought they could have a little Ecstasy within the trap. Or you could always turn to religion and screw up your mind without shooting drugs. Pie in the sky when you die. But what about life before you die? You're not here to live, wage slave You're here to produce profits. Living is something you can attempt in your own time.

In this trap your time is rarely your own. Most of it is spent being employed. That’s what you're here for. That’s what gives you the right to go home at night and prepare to work the next day. A slave couldn't go home. Slaves belonged to the boss. Slaves had no rents or mortgages to think aboul. You do, sucker. No sooner are you let off the employer’s chain it ’s back home to a place that you must rent or borrow money to live in. You’d probably prefer to live somewhere else. The trap can get a little cramped. That’s the luck of the draw: if you were one of the one percent who own and control the earth's resources you would have had a stately home, or a mansion at the very least, to pass away your idle hours in. But your idle hours are all too few. Unless you’re unemployed in which case you’re forced to be banging on the exploiter’s door begging him to legally rob you. And then it’s back to doing time for the profit system.

You work as you work because you're trapped. You live where and as you live because you’re trapped You travel in a lousy car in congested traffic or in overcrowded public transport on which you pay to go to be exploited because you’re trapped. Your children are born into the same trap as you’re in and they are sent to school to learn how to be trapped. You are well and truly trapped in the profit-grinding machine of this rotten social system And your bosses call it freedom.

And in a way you are free, because like every trap there is a door. The fact that those pointing the way out are labelled loonies or troublemakers might lead you to stay put. You might even be scared of the freedom which lies beyond the cage. At least in the trap you get your wage, just like a dog on a lead gets its bone. You are free to accept your bone to chew on. Tory bones. Labour bones. Green bones. Trotskyist bones. Hie well-adjusted inmate likes his bone.

Steve Coleman

These Foolish Things: It could be you (1995)

The Scavenger column from the July 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

It could be you

Mistake! This print-out from a certain charity’s head office should never have been sent out to its members—because against every name there was a cryptic comment about the person’s housing and social status—for fund-raising purposes. Here are some of them:

Low rise pensioners

       Sweatshop sharers 

Rootless renters

       Pebble dash sublopia 

Bijou homemakers

       Aged owner occupiers 

Gentrified villages

       Rejuvenated terraces 

30s Industrial speculative

      Corporate careerists 

Low rise subsistence

       Smokestack shiftwork 

Co-op club and colliery

      Depopulated terraces

Who concocts jargon like this?

Getting rid of pollution (1)

Albright and Wilson, the Oldbury chemical firm, has just set up a joint venture with Hunan Resun Industrial General Corporation in China to manufacture wetting and foaming agents for detergents and toiletries. This adds to the manufacturing plants they have already established in Singapore, Malaysia. Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand.

The night-time emissions of foul smells from their Oldbury chimneys may soon be only a fond memory. They will have moved to the other side of the world.

Getting rid of pollution (2)

GEC Alsthom of Rugby is to build £2 billions-worth of power stations in China, including a second nuclear installation at Daya Bay, association with two French companies. But this one will be 20 percent cheaper than Daya Bay I because China has forced down the price. Nuclear power stations are no longer popular around the world. The People’s Democracy of China, however, has no such misgivings.

Getting rid of pollution (3)

Resio Moses, a senior official from the Federated States of Micronesia, said pacific governments are worried about “numerous approaches that have been made to some island countries by unscrupulous foreign waste dealers.” These South Pacific nations have recently agreed a draft treaty banning the passage or dumping of all hazardous waste in the region in an attempt to halt this growing branch of capitalist enterprise.

Three in a cell

Britain’s prison population of nearly 52,000 is increasing by 250 a week. New blocks costing £55 million are being built in an attempt to house the 2,000 surplus to capacity. Six private prisons are planned for the future but none of these is likely to be ready for about two years. Meanwhile, severe overcrowding, like that of the 1980s, seems inevitable.

The Scavenger

Letters: Oxfam — only seeking to alleviate (1995)

Letters to the Editors from the July 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Oxfam — only seeking to alleviate

Dear Editors,

I was greatly saddened by the attack on the work of Oxfam by your columnist,"Scorpion", in the May Socialist Standard. Oxfam has never claimed, as Scorpion implies, to end hunger, disease, exploitation and poverty, that is endemic to capitalism in the third world; and the first one for that matter, but does set out to alleviate some of the effects of these evils, to the utmost of its abilities. Of course the establishment of Socialism world-wide is the only real answer. but what do we do in the meantime? Sit on our hands and sneer at those who show their concern in a practical way by doing something?

Oxfam goes much further than just raising funds to combat the ravishes of war, famine and floods. A vital part of its work is promoting Fair Trade with groups (mostly co-operatives), of small-scale producers of foodstuffs and craft goods in the third world, that are sold in Oxfam shops. Such Fair Trading has grown over the past thirty years so that there are now well over 300 groups in 40 countries that are paid a guaranteed price for their products, that is a fair reflection of their labour, i.e. one that enables workers and their families to provide enough food and other basic necessities including schooling for their children. Oxfam as trading partners are committed to ensuring producers have health and safety regulations in the workplace and are allowed to organise. This kind of practical Socialism in action, is in stark contrast to the gross exploitation by the multinational companies of workers in the third world; most obvious of coffee, tea and banana growers.

Since the early 1970s Oxfam has been campaigning to increase public, and government awareness that the root causes of third world poverty lay in the unfair trading policies imposed by the industrialised countries of the first world, aided by the IMF and World Bank of course. An indication of the impact this has had can be gained from the fact that our government has been stung into threatening to withdraw Oxfam’s charitable status on more than one occasion for being "too political". But Oxfam is part of a growing international movement of more than 50 organisations that are trading for change in the third world, by means of Fair Trade principles. It's a pity that Scorpion didn’t pay a visit to his nearest Oxfam shop to do a little research into the scope of their work, instead of making a cheap jibe in order to fill his column.

Peter Kentfield, 

Norwich

Reply:

You yourself admit that Oxfam only seeks to alleviate. not abolish, world hunger and poverty. So why isn't it fair comment to point out the ultimate futility of only trying to relieve the symptoms while leaving their cause intact? And if, as you say, you accept that "the establishment of Socialism worldwide is the only real answer" surely you should be devoting at least some of your time and energy to promoting this too? By not doing so you are helping to prolong “the meantime" and its miseries including those Oxfam and all the other charities are trying to relieve.

"Fair Trading" is merely an extension of the principle of charity since it relies on the generosity of people to buy goods they might not really want or of a lower quality than they can get elsewhere just because they have been produced by poor people in the third world. (This no doubt is why the Charity Commissioners allow it.)

In any event, it is not the solution—or even an embryo of a solution—to the problem of world poverty. Like food handouts, it's only ever going to help a comparative handful compared to the millions who suffer from hunger. You proudly announce that "there are now well over 300 groups in 40 countries that are paid a guaranteed price for their products”. Yet. according to the United Nations, "some 550 million go to bed hungry each night. More than 1.5 billion lack access to clean drinking water and sanitation". (Fact Sheet 2 on "Global Poverty", prepared by the UN Department of Public Information. July 1994, for the World Summit for Social Development, Copenhagen, Denmark. 6-12 March 1995.)

Nor is Fair Trading an example of "practical Socialism in action”. Socialism is the common ownership and democratic control of the productive resources of the Earth. In other words, the expropriation of the multinational corporations and ruling classes who currently own and control these resources. It is only once this world framework has been established that we will be able to get down to the urgent task of tackling world hunger and poverty. The world is quite capable of producing enough to decently feed, clothe and house all its inhabitants, only this is held back and distorted by world market forces which only respect paying demand and the profit motivc. Socialism is needed precisely so that we begin to produce directly to satisfy human needs, instead of for sale on a market—trading whether "fair" or “unfair"—or for profit. 

Editors

A Socialist police force?

Dear Editors,

I was surprised to read your brief reply to Terry Liddle's letter in the May Socialist Standard. The statement that "there won't be any cops or prisons in a socialist society" demonstrates an alarming naiveté which occasionally runs through your publication, made all the more worrying by the fact that it is the voice of people who are proposing to create a better society.

While it's obvious that a great many crimes are directly or indirectly caused by capitalism (especially theft and fraud), surely the worst crimes, such as rape and murder happen because of the mental instability of the perpetrator as much as. if not more than, wider sociological factors. Under Socialism, a police force of sorts would still be necessary to deal with such crimes. If a Socialist society was run properly it would promote a healthier state of mind in its population, but it would still take many years for us to evolve out of a capitalist state of mind. For example, the effects of the capitalist media's exploitation of women, which is a root cause of rape, are now so ingrained in the minds of many men, that a conversion to socialism couldn’t instantly reverse this. If a police force became unnecessary under Socialism, I would estimate it to be two or three generations after conversion. Even then, an organisation would still be needed to investigate suicides, disappearances and the occasional murder or rape which Socialism hasn't been able to prevent.

Your original statement assumes Socialism to be a magic wand, one wave of which will sprit away all of society’s faults. A Socialist society needs to be constructed through a clear, fair, common sense approach, not by making rushed, naive generalisations.

Clive Hendry, 

Suffolk 

Reply:

Our short reply to Terry Liddle was in a different context to the one you posit. He had raised the question of what would happen if vegetarians employed civil disobedience in a Socialist society to oppose practices of which they disapproved, and asked "will socialist cops kick and baton us and throw us into socialist prisons?"

In other words, he was dealing with the question of decision-making and the carrying-out of decisions in a Socialist society. As Socialism will be a fully democratic society without any vested interests decisions of a political nature could be settled after a full and rational discussion of all the pros and cons, ideally ending in some consensus but, if need be, by a vote. Obviously this implies that the minority will accept the majority decision. We think this a reasonable assumption given the sort of society Socialism will be—a real community with a common interest in which democratic values will be generally accepted.. Hence our reply that there won't be any need for a police force armed with batons to enforce decisions, nor for prisons in which to lock up those who refuse to accept them. If those in a minority on some issue won't accept a decision reached in accordance with the agreed procedures then Socialism couldn't function. Socialism is a non-violent society of voluntary co-operation or it isn’t Socialism.

We never said there won't be any occurrences of anti-social behaviour in Socialism or that these wouldn’t have to be dealt with. It is true, however, that we do think that these, too. could be dealt with without recourse to prisons as "places of punishment” or to a special coercive body, whether armed with batons or with guns, which is what a police "force” is.

Most crime today is. as you yourself point out. property crime (people trying to acquire in some way money, or property they can sell for money). In fact this accounts for some 95 percent of all crimes and will of course disappear in a Socialist society, where people won’t need to acquire money before they can satisfy their needs but will be able to do this directly in accordance with the principle "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs".

As to the 5 percent remaining. of “crimes against the person", a large proportion of these result today from the corruption of relationships and general frustration due to lack of money and from the alienation that occurs in a society of rampant individualism which tries to reduce us to social atoms who only come into contact with each other when we are carrying out some monetary transaction.

So we are talking about a hugely-reduced level of anti-social behaviour which, apart from cases of people losing their temper (and then regretting it), will be carried out by disturbed individuals. Some of these may indeed need to be restrained or temporarily isolated from the rest of the community but not in "prisons" or anything like them; rather with all the best facilities in places like converted country mansions.

Agreed, we probably will need "an organisation", composed of trained and competent people "to investigate suicides, disappearances and the occasional murder or rape”. But this "organisation" would be more akin to today's rail or air accident inspectors than to the uniformed. hierarchical and baton- wielding police force we know today.

Editors

Reconstituted capitalist party

Dear Editors,

What follows is the text of a letter sent to the Labour Party:

"This is my letter of resignation from the Labour Party. The reason for this is my disillusionment with the leadership. The party has always maintained that it is a reformist party, with an emphasis on social justice, rather than socialism. However. "New Labour" is a reconstituted capitalist party. The modernizers in the Labour Party have a vision of "the enterprise of the market . . . the rigour of competition . . . a thriving private sector". This is a contradiction in its attitude towards social justice. F.A. Hayek, the New Right economist, attacked the left's notion of social justice, in that it is incompatible with a market economy, "in which no single person, or group determines who gets what, and the shares of individuals always depend on many circumstances which nobody could have foreseen. the whole concept of social or distributive justice is empty and meaningless". By accepting the "rigour of competition" in a market economy, the Labour Party compromises all notions of social justice to the extent that it becomes, as Hayek states, "a mirage". It is ironic that Hayek used this argument to attack the left, yet the modernizers in the Labour Party will attempt to attach notions of justice to a competitive economy, and in the process be converts to free market capitalism.

The second, more important, reason is that the Labour Party, in government, will set out to change the capitalist system to one in which there is social cohesion with less inequality. Yet will capitalism have the capacity to change? Reforms are generally accepted as temporary and concessionary solutions to the problems of unemployment, homelessness etc..yet it is merely tampering with a capitalist system which is fundamentally exploitative. It becomes useless reforming the social problems, when capitalism is corrupt, and therefore an increasing number of peoples' basic needs are not met in a class-divided society, in which production and distribution is owned and controlled by the minority capitalist class. The only way in which the exploitative system can be changed is through Socialism. This does not mean piecemeal reforms, but by convincing the majority working class that Socialism is desirable and can be achieved on a global scale. Collective ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution in the interest of the whole community can be achieved when there are enough Socialists who are willing to take democratic and participatory action against an exploitative capitalist system.

The Labour Party does not stand for Socialism, but has shifted its commitment from state capitalism, to a competitive market capitalism.” 

Robert Smith,

Bristol.

A rotten business (1995)

TV Review from the July 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Music Biz (5 June. BBC2) was a missed opportunity if ever there was one. Given the task of examining such a ruthless, profit-hungry and self-serving industry, BBC2 could and should have done better. What should have been an investigative programme into manipulation and exploitation at the basest levels turned into little more than an excuse to dish up more manipulative images. Like the previous week’s programme on the British sex film, the Music Biz glorified in its subject instead of dealing with it seriously.

Of course, snippets of the truth emerged. One record executive frankly admitted that it was now commonplace to manufacture a group with the “right appearance” if nothing else, and then spend one million pounds promoting them until the teenage girls swoon. New teen-idols Let Loose were a case in point, being apparently picked for stardom largely on the strength of their dashing hairstyles rather than actual musical ability.

This was an illustration of the obvious—today's teen-orientated pop bands are groomed on the basis of their interaction with fragile teenage sexualities. While it can be argued that this has been the case for some time, from the Beatles to the Bay City Rollers, never has it been more obvious or indeed, so detached from the talent—or lack of it— of the artists involved. Never before, it should also be noted, has sex been portrayed in such an obvious way to sell records—watch any music programme on TV and it will not be long before you see some teen idols engaging in simulated sex acts performed to the syncopated rhythm of their latest hit.

Although the record company bosses are manipulative enough it would of course be wrong to suggest that it is all a brainwashing exercise—in many ways it is even more sinister. The bosses—just like Rupert Murdoch in another fine capitalist industry—say that they are just giving the punters what they want, and although this is not entirely true it is not entirely false either. Humans in capitalist society grow up with a heavily-tainted view of life, refracted through a prism where profit, competition and passive idol-worship are the chief distorters. Capitalism itself provides the ideal breeding ground for the attitudes and images that the record executives wish to portray.

The artists themselves, especially when they have already been through the mill several times, know what is going on more than most. Two of pop history's most enduring sexual icons—gorgeous pouting Debbie Harry of Blondie and gorgeous pouting Jon Bon Jovi, knew how the game worked well enough. Jon Bon Jovi gave several illustrations of how his own band had been manipulated by the record industry, but said that such was the power of the record labels, they had little choice but to go along with it.

It is not impossible for a pop group to make it big without the backing of a major label, but it is becoming increasingly difficult. Some groups in the alternative, independent sector always break through, invariably to give in to the inevitable and sign to one of the majors, this often setting the scene for a major round of wrangling between the group and their bosses—as was recently the case with the Stone Roses.

Putting on the frighteners

In the last twenty years or so the music industry has had a couple of frights prompted by a decomposing capitalism, although these were hardly touched upon in BBC2’s programme. In the mid-to-late 70s punk rock entered the scene headed by the anarchistically-inspired Sex Pistols, a band whose motto was "cash from chaos" and who amongst other things played the music bosses at their own game, taking them for a large financial ride in the process. Punk rock baffled large sections of the music industry and many companies had their fingers burnt before they bought enough of the bands off and manipulated them into doing something less challenging. The other fright was the emergence of rap music from America in the mid-1980s, some of whose performers were rather too provocative and risqué for the liking of most record executives.

Rap music, more so than punk, had its deficiencies, primarily the fact that it was violence orientated and. more often than not, sexist to boot. But rap and punk set an example in that it showed musicians need not just accept the status quo and accept every dictate from the bosses. The Sex Pistols and The Clash were among those who, in their own rather unfocussed way, brought more than a smidgen of working-class politics into the mainstream of music, though admittedly it wasn't easy.

In the late 70's a successful band called The Specials wrote a thinly-veiled attack on the music bosses entitled "Gangsters", which included this line: “And Catch 22 says if I sing the truth they won't make me an overnight star". This is a clever line, but slightly misleading. Sure, the bosses may not be looking to make any socialists an overnight star, but if you are talented and challenging enough they will have to sit up and take notice, if only because money can also be sometimes made from challenging the system rather than openly supporting it, if the market exists. Do not despair must be the message—capitalism creates its own gravediggers in music as in any other form of life and if a green-toothed monster like Johnny Rotten can bring "Anarchy in the UK" to the children of Britain. there is hope yet.

Dave Perrin

Expressing the emotions (1995)

Book Review from the July 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Against the Current by Christopher Hampton. (Katabasis Press, £5.95.)

There is more than one way to skin a cat. Polemicising against capitalism is good and necessary, but we need to express the felt emotions of an oppressed class as well. Marx learned more about the awful impact of industrial capitalism in France by reading Balzac's novels than from statistical formulae. Poetry, too, is a potent force in the struggle we are waging. As Christopher Hampton writes in his poem, What Words Can Do:

It's not a choice. Words either play

their part in making actions count

(imperative as the pressures mount)

or— caught between— give way,

give up, condone, conform, betray.

Hampton has a fine pedigree of finding the right words for the struggle. His Radical Reader: The Struggle for Change in England, 1381-1914, published in paperback by Penguin in 1984, was a remarkable anthology of fighting words. The Faber Book of Political Verse, edited by Tom Paulin in 1986, added much to the repertoire of our political battle songs: a veritable feast of great poets showing that the capitalists might own the printing presses, but it is from our class that the great literature of our time comes.

Hampton's new anthology of poetry is an invigorating addition to that repertoire. It reflects wide classical knowledge (he is currently working on a novel about Cicero’s radical conservatism in opposition to the true voice of freedom expressed by an ex-slave), and the poems from and about the ugly Eighties, the decade when Thatcherism called upon us to celebrate commerce. is unrestrainedly angry. His poem, The Leash, reminds us of Shelley's fire and will not easily be extinguished in the minds of its readers:

We walk these streets believing we are free.

    We take our roast-beef rolls with beer

and sun ourselves in Little Tilchficld Street

    as if there were no questions to be answered.

Love, its message half unheard in the rhythm

   of a ground-bass beating intermittently

among the chatter and the jostle, binds.

    And at such moments one could be forgiven

for supposing London’s teeming lunchtime air

     was freely ours—not bought or fought for,

not constricted, driven by the chartered laws

    of property, but unconditional and open,

there to move through, in and out, at will.

    Yet all the time, containing us, the abstracts

are at work that keep us all on leash.

With great pleasure we can report that Christopher Hampton will be a participant in the show of Socialist Words and Music currently being organised by our Camden branch. 

Steve Coleman

You can't believe that! (1995)

Theatre Review from the July 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Broken Heart (RSC Barbican)

The idea of class art is well established. One has only to visit a public art gallery to recognise that throughout history painters have been employed to produce art that is valued by those who can afford it: that is, typically, by members of the landed aristocracy and their acolytes, merchants. capitalist entrepreneurs and so on. Even the value system by which paintings are valued has traditionally discriminated in favour of religious paintings and portraits of the great and the good, whilst genre paintings and scenes from peasant and working class life have been seen as relatively valueless.

But class art is also apparent in the theatre, and a good example is John Ford’s play The Broken Heart which is at present in repertoire at the Barbican (Pit Theatre).

Ford was born at the end of the sixteenth century, the son of a wealthy landowner. He trained for the law but soon began a literary career as a poet and playwright. He is believed to have written seven plays of which the most well known are probably Love’s Sacrifice and ‘Tis a Pity she's a Whore. Productions of The Broken Heart have been comparatively rare. The play seems to have been performed only once in the sixteenth century, and there are no records of revivals until 1898, 1904 and 1962. This year, however. there have already been four productions, including the one on view at the Barbican.

It is difficult to understand current interest in the play. The Broken Heart is about enforced marriages, and the use of marriage as a way of furthering the interests of families. social groups and even whole nations. Set in Sparta its characters are easily recognised as surrogates for the Earl of Essex and his sister, and Queen Elizabeth, and the events depicted chime with the recent histories of England. Ireland and Scotland. As the programme note says "The Broken Heart presents a kind of mythologised history of England's recent past and celebrates in the Spartan ideal a set of public virtues at once ancient and modern”.

But if Ford was intent on celebrating these virtues (sic), most of the audience could only have marvelled at the absurdity of the beliefs to which the characters were attached and. by extension, the aristocratic and emergent bourgeoise sixteenth century audience to whom the play was addressed. One can admire the way in which Ford has plotted his story — with its many twists and turns — and the wonderful skill of the actors and production team in bringing the play to life. But what a play! What amazing, bizarre and foolish sentiments are expressed: what extraordinary. craven and mean-spirited beliefs are paraded for our inspection. There were moments when I found it hard not to challenge the inanities being voiced on stage. "You can’t believe that!", I wanted to shout. "No one could possibly believe that.”

But ‘yes’ the audience for which the play was written did believe these nonsenses. They believed them with tenacity and passion.and these ideas informed the substance of social behaviour throughout the sixteenth century. Socialists will find comfort in this discovery as they imagine a time when folk will look back on the commonplace beliefs of the late twentieth century and similarly wonder how it was possible for most people to believe that poverty, war. pollution and all the other self-inflicted wounds of a class-riven world were inevitable features of life.

Michael Gill

SPGB Meetings and Debates (1995)

Party News from the July 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

The result of the Littleborough & Saddleworth by-election can be found here. A word of warning though; only click on the link if you have a strong stomach.