Letter: Free access (1999)

Letter to the Editors from the July 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Free access

Dear Editors,

Regarding recent letters urging socialists to avoid using the S-word, the Socialist Party should take account of Tom Jones’s article about life being so “dull and hopeless that a lot of people hope for nothing more”. And how “psychological effects of many tiring, boring hours has a knock-on effect” in that “workers are unable to imagine a world free from the drudgery of wage slavery” (June Socialist Standard).

While agreeing with your February view that it’s wrong to “surrender the word”, I think most socialists accept Paul Azzario’s April letter point that “socialism” can evoke an immediate disapproving “Pavlovian reaction”. And this conditioned negative response (which a very influential media is still reinforcing today) combined with today’s widespread pessimistic indifference does require an apposite approach. Not a Basil Fawlty “Don’t mention the S-word”—just avoiding using it too soon.

One feature that can overcome disinterest, pessimism and any latter negative reaction to the S-word is the free access to food, goods and services that common ownership brings. Concentrating foremost on promoting shopping without paying; free homes, cars, overseas travel etc; and all public services being available without any cost is a promise that cuts through social despair and attracts interest, even if with disbelief more often than not. Supported by the basic explanation of collective asset-owning resulting in an equal right to everything produced, together with other significant benefits, means voters find socialism—far better than socialism trying to find voters with premature S-word use, and detailed meanings which, given Tom Jones’s accurate report of downbeat thought processes, inevitably turns people off. Getting major advantages across first and why they aren’t pie-in-the-sky, then gradually introducing the S-word no longer unintentionally puts backs up. As Aki Orr’s February letter said, “adapt language and tactics” to promote socialism. Capitalism’s hopelessness has necessitated spin doctors to conceal defects and lack of substance. But the Socialist Party must also spin socialism to break through with trumpeted benefits and supporting content—not raising an immediate S-word obstacle which does regrettably stop socialists from communicating and the exploited from listening.

Regarding the Socialist Party name, despite its fundamental truth and long existence, is it not credible that a title-change to Free Access Party (or whatever) could ironically help increase socialist awareness and party support considerably? I cannot see a changed title causing upset as socialists will only be concerned with completing the journey as soon as possible—not the vehicle’s name conveying them (and which is to be abandoned once socialism’s established). Is a membership vote on this possible to settle matters and avoid further doubts and distractions?

Max Hess, 

Folkestone, Kent

Voice From The Back: The wasteland (1999)

The Voice From The Back Column from the July 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Wasteland

Derelict land in England now covers an area equivalent to a city twice the size of Birmingham, according to the country’s most detailed survey of vacant sites and buildings. The so-called national land use Data Base, due to be released shortly, finds that almost 130,000 acres are idle—in theory enough for 2.5 million medium-density homes. Guardian, 20 May.

How are the mighty?

The world’s biggest personal computer maker was thrown into crisis today as two of its top chiefs dramatically quit following a dire profits warning and plummeting share price . . . Compaq stunned Wall Street two weeks ago by announcing its first-quarter earnings would be half of what analysts expected, leading to a 23 percent tumble in its shares. Evening Mail, 19 April.

Russian capitalism 

Fifty-three percent of the Russian people are said to be living below the “official” poverty line; 2 percent own 57 percent of the country’s wealth (land, means of production, etc). the super-rich have, since 1991, managed, largely illegally, to transfer between 200 and 250 billion dollars out of the country. In 1997, 27 percent of the workers’ salaries had not been paid. The economy will contract by 6 percent this year. Source: The Centre of Studies for Living Standards, Moscow.

Capitalism is depressing

“There are more people suffering from depression in Britain today than asthma and diabetes combined. It is a major problem,” said Dr [Chris] Manning. One in four of the population suffered depression at some point in their lives. Four thousand people suffering depression committed suicide each year . . . According to the survey, money worries are the most likely trigger of depression, cited by 88 percent of people, followed closely by death and illness in the family, work worries and marriage or relationship problems. Guardian, 22 April.

Great expectations die again

Former freedom fighters and militant unionists who spent decades struggling to topple South African capitalism have become instant millionaires as the directors of new black-run companies or white-owned firms keen to get a few black faces on the board. Trade unions, the Communist Party and a slew of other organisations that once campaigned for the nationalisation of the gold mines and other “commanding heights” of the economy have joined the scramble to buy into private business. But critics say that black-owned firms treat workers little better than the white companies that financed apartheid . . . When a former Robben Island prisoner, Mzi Khumalo, took over a major company, JCI he was asked whether he would be sympathetic to the unions. “I have spoken to the unions at JCI and made it clear: we are here to run a business. I’m not for any of this brotherhood stuff.” Guardian, 22 April.

Winning the war

The world’s estimated 6m millionaires have shrugged off the effects of last year’s financial turmoil and are getting richer by the day. New research by Merrill Lynch, the investment bank, with Gemini Consulting, a management consultancy, found the wealth held by high net worth individuals with more than $1m of financial assets grew last year by 12 percent to $21,600bn. The World Wealth Report produced by the two firms projects a steady rise to $32,700bn by the end of 2003—a growth rate which is expected to attract more firms into the lucrative market for private banking and wealth management services. Financial Times, 17 May.

Class war casualties

More than 1m people are killed at work every year—including 12,000 children—and 250m suffer workplace injuries which force them to take time off, according to International Labour Organisation estimates. The worldwide annual workplace death tally of 1.1m outstrips the numbers killed in road accidents, war, violence and Aids and costs 4 percent of the world’s gross domestic product in terms of absence from work, treatment, disability and survivor benefits. Guardian, 28 April.

Losing the war 

Our Health Challenge:

• Thirty percent more men [in the area] die from lung cancer than the national average.
• Sixty-eight percent more people die from heart attacks.
• Eleven percent more people die from strokes.
• We are among the country’s ten worst places for deaths of babies at or just after birth.
• We have one of the country’s highest teenage conception rates.
• Thirty percent of households have someone with a long-term illness.

Our Social Challenge:

• Thirty-five percent of households have no central heating.
• Twenty-three percent of public housing and 17 percent of private housing are unfit for human habitation.
• Four percent of privately rented accommodation have no exclusive use of bath/shower or inside toilet.
• Ninety-five percent of Sandwell people have no qualifications beyond school.
• Fifty percent more people are unemployed than the national average.

Better Health for Sandwell People.

Editorial: Voting and democracy (1999)

Editorial from the July 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Only about one in four people bothered to vote in last month’s election to the European Parliament, the lowest ever in a national election in Britain. Some are saying that this is a threat to democracy and an insult to our forefathers who struggled for the right to vote. Maybe, but only if you define “democracy” as the kind of representative system we have today where, every once in a while, we give the politicians a blank cheque to do what they want, or can get away with, in the meantime. Whether we can call this charade, in which rival leaders parade before us asking for our votes, a real democracy is another matter.

A real democracy is fundamentally incompatible with the idea of leadership. It is about all of us having a direct say in the decisions that affect us. Leadership means handing over the right to make those decisions to someone else. We don’t vote for leaders to implement this or that decision; we vote according to our ideological inclinations to give them a “free hand” to make decisions.

Does that mean that in a real democracy all our time will be taken up with making decisions leaving no time to do anything else? Not at all. A person may not be particularly interested in, or significantly affected by, what happens in a neighbouring community, judging that this is something better left for them to decide. On the other hand they may well feel concerned by the problem of global warming but, within the framework of a “representative democracy”, the only recourse available to them is to join some environmental lobby group to petition governments who are under no obligation to comply with their wishes but who will in fact be more obliged to attend to the needs of Big Business whose very activities have directly contributed to this problem.

The point is that the very mechanism of decision-making we have today is a product of the social system we live under. The market economy, with its built-in contradictions and conflicting interests, has massively complicated the process of decision-making itself. It has moved it further and further from the ambit of “ordinary people” as the system itself has become more and more globalised. It is this that has made the paper pledges of our elected leaders seem increasingly irrelevant and ineffectual as they attempt to grapple with the monster that holds them in its tightening thrall.

We have at our disposal today the very means, in the form of modern telecommunications, that could enable us to resuscitate the ancient model of Athenian democracy on a truly global level. What we conspicuously lack is the will and the imagination to look beyond the crippling assumption that capitalism is here to stay. In the meanwhile we delude ourselves into thinking that the economic dictatorship imposed by this class ownership of the means of living can somehow be made compatible with democratic control within a system of political “representation” which is essentially adapted to that end. But we can have a real democracy—as soon as a majority of us are prepared to replace minority class ownership by common ownership.

Mary Gray and Eleanor Marx (1999)

Eleanor Marx

From the July 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

A number of papers of Mary Gray (1854-1941), an active member of the Social Democratic Federation before the First World War, have been donated to us. They contain some interesting material, including two previously unpublished letters from Marx’s daughter Eleanor.

The SDF had been founded in 1881, mainly on the initiative of H. M. Hyndman, as the Democratic Federation, a federation of London Radical (i.e. leftwing Liberal) clubs. In 1883 it proclaimed Socialism as its aim and changed its name to Social Democratic Federation. However, it kept its programme of “advanced” reforms to be achieved within capitalism, or what its 1892 Programme and Rules (which are amongst these papers) described as “measures called for to palliate the evils of our existing society”. In 1884, over this issue of retaining a reform programme as well as over the authoritarian behaviour of Hyndman, part of the membership (including William Morris) broke away to form the Socialist League. However, the SDF survived, and was always the bigger organisation.

After the demise of the Socialist League following its take-over by bomb-throwing anarchists, the SDF was the only organisation in Britain propagating the ideas of Marxian Socialism. Most of the early members of the SPGB had been members of the SDF, the Socialist Party being a breakaway from the SDF in 1904 for the same reasons that had led to the SL breakaway 20 years earlier.

Mary Gray joined the SDF in 1890. She had been born Mary Rogers near Wokingham in Berkshire, the daughter of a baker, in January 1854; in 1876 she married Willie Gray, a stonemason, and lived in Reading where their daughter, Florence, was born in 1879. Later the family moved to Battersea in London.

Mary Gray became a very active member of the SDF. In 1895 she stood as an SDF candidate, and was elected, as a member of the Battersea Board of Poor Law Guardians. She was a speaker and lecturer for them, and not just in London. Amongst the papers is a handbill advertising two meetings by her in Coventry in November 1896, one on “Socialism, The Only Hope of the Worker” and the other on “The Economic Position of Women”. There is also a press cutting from an Ilkeston paper of an outdoor meeting she addressed in the market square there in July 1897 on “Society As It Is”. For a time she was on the Executive Committee of the SDF.

As the title of the second lecture in Coventry shows, Mary Gray was interested in what was then called “The Woman Question”, not just votes for women but also the economic position of women generally under capitalism. She was on friendly terms with two other prominent women members of the SDF, Marx’s daughter Eleanor and Edith Lanchester.

Eleanor Marx lived with fellow Socialist Edward Aveling without getting formally married. This was a daring thing to do in the 1890s as Edith Lanchester found to her cost. A schoolteacher who at the time lodged with Mary Gray, she stood as SDF candidate in West Lambeth for the London School Board elections in 1894. The next year, when she decided to follow Eleanor Marx’s example and live with a man without getting married, her family found a doctor to certify her and she was locked up in a private mental asylum. As a result of the outcry and campaigning that followed she was released after three days. Various items in connection with this campaign are included in the papers.

The papers also contain two letters from Eleanor Marx, or Eleanor Marx Aveling as she called herself. Eleanor Marx was not simply Karl Marx’s daughter but an active Socialist in her own right. She had been amongst those who had left the SDF in 1884 to found the Socialist League but had resigned a few years later because she disagreed with the anti-parliamentary position it eventually took up. She rejoined the SDF in 1896 and was a frequent attender at the classes at the SDF offices at 337 The Strand, where Aveling lectured on economics.

Eleanor Marx’s letters to Mary Gray are not political but we reproduce them as they have not been published before. The first, dated 25 September 1896, is a short note which reads:

Dear Mrs Gray,

As you cant come Wedy you + Florrie must fix some other day. But try & come tomorrow night to 337. First because of classes, but also to fix up an evening to come here.

Yours

Eleanor Marx Aveling.

Florrie was Mary Gray’s daughter, who was then aged 17, and “here” was The Den, Jews Walk, Sydenham, London, where Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling lived.

The second letter, dated 24 January 1898, is longer:

My dear Mrs Gray,

I had a letter from Edith on Saturday — + if you have any news of her please let me know. I’ve written to Sullivan to ask if I cd see Edith. Is n’t her boy lovely? I am quite in love with this delightful little man.

I shd have been to see you — but as you know, Edward has been dangerously ill. He is now at Hastings, but though the lung trouble seems better, it seems certain that he must soon — in a week or so — undergo a most dangerous operation for the abcess he has so long suffered from. The operation is so serious that there is the utmost danger. But without operation there seems no hope at all.

So you will see, dear Mrs Gray, that I have very great trouble. Of course, I have not said anything to Edith in my letter of this — it wd be unwise for her, but I tell you, as I am so sure of your kindly sympathy.

Hearty greeting to Mr Gray + Florrie + you, + a big kiss to the sweet little man.

Yours

Eleanor Marx Aveling.

“Edith” is Edith Lanchester and “Sullivan” is James Sullivan, the man she lived with and the father of the baby boy mentioned in the letter. What is poignant about this letter is that within two months Eleanor Marx was dead. While he was on the South Coast, Aveling—who had never been highly regarded in the Socialist movement for his personal integrity—married an actress he knew. Eleanor felt she had no alternative but to commit suicide, at the age of 41. Those who believe in some form of immanent justice will be reinforced in their belief by the fact that Aveling did not survive the year.

Mary Gray is credited with founding the first Socialist Sunday School, in Battersea in 1892. Battersea happened to be one of the SDF branches which contained many of the founding members of the SPGB—the protest meeting which eventually led on the founding of the Socialist Party was held in Battersea Town Hall—and it is interesting to note that the Battersea branch of the SPGB continued the Socialist Sunday School tradition, a report from the branch in the Socialist Standard for November 1904 reading: “A Sunday School class for the children is held every Sunday afternoon, and is well attended, and after the school a communal tea is provided to which all comrades are most heartily invited”.

There existed a Socialist Sunday School Union, organised from Glasgow, though it seems to have been more of an ILP rather than an SDF movement, using progressive teaching methods and preaching a kind of “ethical socialism” but which was still recognisably socialist in general terms. For instance, a handbook published in 1923 which is amongst Mary Gray’s papers gave two definitions of socialism, one of which was:

Socialism is the co-operative ownership and control of the vital industries (connected with food, clothing, housing, transport, etc) and the means of education by all the adults of a national community, and it implies the abolition of rent, interest, profit and the wages system.

Also, a model lesson on “Money” ends as follows:

When the fields and factories, the trams and the houses, and all the material wealth of the world shall belong to all the people, and shall be used for the happiness and welfare of the people, no money will then be needed nor any millionaires.

At least this shows that socialism, as we have always defined it, is not our own invention but was once the more or less widely accepted definition.

Mary Gray was well-entrenched on the reformist wing of the SDF and wouldn’t have had any sympathy whatsoever for those who broke away from the SDF to set up the SPGB. The papers include a poem she wrote in 1903 on the first birthday of her grand-daughter which contains twelve excruciating lines describing an SDF meeting held to celebrate Hyndman’s recovery from an illness at which “the cheers that went up showed the love and reverence” of “his comrades and friends”.

The papers have nothing on her political views after 1903 but she remained in Battersea until at least 1935 before moving to Hampshire and then Wiltshire. She died in 1941.

Adam Buick

Letter: Censorship or conformity? (1999)

Letter to the Editors from the July 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Censorship or conformity?

Dear Editors,

1. Michael Gill’s experience (May Socialist Standard) in having his invitation to participate as a Socialist Party representative on Kilroy withdrawn on the researcher learning of his political views, will surprise only those who thought that audience participation involved no pressure from the production team.

Whilst dissent is acceptable with the framework of conventional left-right politics, that is, over which party can run capitalism better, pressure to conform exists at all levels of broadcasting. That this happens at the highest level is made quite clear by the original 1927 BBC Charter. This state “Government has the last word . . . an absolute power of veto over BBC programmes”, and it can also instruct the Corporation to withdraw programme material even before it is sent.

But censorship such as Michael Gill experienced may result not from government instruction, but from either the personal bias, conscious or otherwise, of the production staff, or, as probably in this case, the sheer pressure on staff themselves to keep within the bounds of political conformity. They too, are workers afraid to step out of line and dare not risk being accused of introducing either irrelevant or contentious material.

The sympathetic presentation of Kilroy tends to obscure the fact that many personal issues touched upon are trivialised by not relating them to a deeper social causation. But then, if it were to do this, every such programme would point the finger at the wider audience’s acceptance of capitalism as the cause, and the closing catchphrase, “Take care of yourselves” would take on a wider significance. The banal might even give way to the exciting and adventurous.

But does the Socialist Party really expect the government media to provide a free unbiased platform for their views? I am not optimistic. Despite a number of Broadcasting Reports recommending that broadcasting provide an outlet for minority political views, I feel that the Socialist Party must rely on its own slender material resources for this.

2. Stewart King’s letter (May Socialist Standard) on the anti-working class activities of the Labour government evoked many memories for me. As one of the conscripts he mentions, dragooned into the army by that government, I refused their order to help break a London dock strike—one of the eleven occasions that government had used troops in industrial disputes. I was of course punished. In a perverse way, the 1945 Labour government helped make me a socialist.

But the history of politics is shrouded in myth, especially where the “social welfare” legislation of the post-war government is concerned, and I hope I may correct the misconception in Stewart King’s letter ascribing child benefit to them. The principle of Family Allowances had received general cross-party support in the wartime coalition government, but the Family Allowance Act was, in fact, given Royal Assent on 16 June 1945, the operational date being set for August 1946, to be implemented by whichever party was then in power. The government on 16 June was a Conservative-led caretaker government and the legislation was put forward by Hore-Belisha, a Conservative minister.

The Family Allowance Bill was therefore enacted some six weeks before the General Election put Labour in power on 26 July 1945. For obvious reasons neither Labour nor Conservative parties are keen to publicise this fact.

W. Robertson, 

Hove, Sussex 

World of buying and selling (1999)

Book Review from the July 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Manipulators by Jeffrey Robinson. Simon and Schuster, 1998, £17.99.

More than 40 years ago an American journalist, Vance Packard, wrote The Hidden Persuaders. In it he revealed how the advertising industry was mass producing customers the same way manufacturers were mass producing goods for the market. Now along comes Jeffrey Robinson to update us on the same theme. Short sentences. Racy style. The blurb is a fair summary of what buyers get for their money. Robinson unveils:

    * The new sciences that are being developed to turn the ads we see into magic bullets which can penetrate our defences.

    * How modern retailers are following hot on the advertisers’ heels with their own sleight-of-hand to snap off any lingering resistance to buy.

    * How we unwillingly contribute to our own commercial seduction.

    * How the worst is yet to come, as the internet and television combine to create a monster whose sole function will be to pick us off, one by one, and make us buy.

A truly scary scenario. One, you might think, that would provoke a call to oppose such a bleak future for homosapiens. Not a bit of it. Robinson’s tone and lack of critical comment amount to saying “Don’t worry about it—it’s the real world—just accept it”.

Most of the book is a series of sound bytes (or sound gnaws, as someone recently called them) about the tragi-comic world of advertising. They range from the disturbing to the tacky. Apparently people are employed to put tiny cameras inside frozen-food compartments in supermarkets to chart the eye movements of shoppers in the hope of determining better placement for high-margin items. My favourite quote is “In the ad biz, sincerity is a commodity bought and paid for like everything else”.

American authors are quite good at writing books about how badly the mass of people are treated and treat each other. Over the years Galbraith has excelled at being a “friendly” critic of capitalism. Don’t expect even that much from Robinson. He doesn’t mention capitalism, let alone say anything against it. The closest he comes to questioning the status quo is his sub-heading “It’s them against us, and the thems are winning”. Enigmatically, the last two sentences of his book are:

“It is not that Big Brother will have won. It is, rather, that we will have become Big Brother.”

To which socialists can only reply “Speak for yourself, brother!”

Stan Parker

Socialism has never been tried (1999)

From the July 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism is a simple idea but people don’t know what it is.

In our present-day selfish society, any talk of a society based on solidarity will usually be met by little more than a dismissive nod. “Don’t tell me–yet another collection for a few more poor devils! I’m sick to death of these collections–I’m getting very sceptical about them.” So when socialists try to explain that a society based on solidarity (traditionally called socialism) would have nothing in common with the present-day begging bandwagon, all they usually get is an incredulous groan. So what do socialists actually say? That we only have to want it and we can live in a moneyless world in which anyone can simply walk into a warehouse and take what they need, a world in which there are no armies, no police, no banks or stock exchanges, and no national borders. Clearly, anyone presenting such an argument must expect to be regarded as being mixed up or—an idealist. Such a reaction is understandable, as even the simplest of processes, the simplest of solutions must of course seem completely crazy to people like those depicted above, who have only a nebulous or completely distorted image of what a society based on solidarity means.

But socialists, on the strength of their knowledge and conviction, mean exactly what they say. More than that, they can prove not only that such a society is possible, but that it represents the only humane solution to present-day problems. Politics means something completely different to us than to the capitalist parties from far left to far right. We maintain that all current problems, such as wars, environmental pollution, racism, crimes of the worst kind, squandering of raw materials, housing speculation and not least unemployment, are not caused by governments or specific leaders, but are a product of the way in which society is organised worldwide.

Characteristics

The present-day system—we call it the capitalist system—is characterised by the fact that the basic essential resources for the production of goods, in other words the production plants, the entire transport network, the mines and other sources of raw materials, are in the hands of barely 5 percent of the world’s population. This minority includes both private companies and those here and there still in charge of state industries. Common to all of these is the fact that they supply goods and services only on condition that they can draw maximum profit from them. This is essentially how they are able force the other 90 to 95 percent of the world’s population to live and work under the conditions they do. It is the cause of all the serious problems in society.

Those who understand this basic premise, namely that the whole of society is subordinated to the profit motive, are already qualified to understand our case. They will understand that, notwithstanding the constant drivel spouted by professional politicians, in the present form of society profit is of necessity much more important than human interest. They will understand that any party which recognises the capitalist system can act only in the interests of that system. How often do we hear the old excuse that we are governed by circumstances?

The alternative to this—a society based on solidarity—has never seen the light of day in any country in the world. We socialists stand for the co-operation of all people worldwide on the basis of free decision-making and democratic control. We maintain—and anyone can check this claim—that the technical means have long since reached the stage at which we can use the world’s raw materials in the most economical manner so as to guarantee everyone a sufficient supply of the necessities of life, in every sense of the term. A minimum of effort—which is an obligation for all members of a community—will create a maximum of contentment, of joie de vivre.

Capitalism is essentially based on scarcity of resources. Such scarcity is maintained in the interests of profit, among other means by the ruthless squandering of human life and raw materials.

Moderate abundance

A society based on solidarity has as its foundation a system characterised by moderate abundance. Under such circumstances, the whole process of buying and selling clearly becomes superfluous. Poverty, strikes, stock market crashes, economic crises and barbaric wars will only be found in the history books. Striving for the best possible production results with ever improving human conditions will form the basis of activity for all those working in production, science and research.

On this basis, a community can be constructed in which all branches of art and culture will flourish. The upbringing of the young will be flooded with new ideas, as will the education system as a whole. The entire health sector will be freed from the miserable constraints of monetary considerations and be devoted entirely to humanity, to the benefit of all members of the community.

Under such circumstances, men and women will be filled not with hate and envy but with contentment and pride when they look at the products of the human mind.

What we need is great people, not great leaders

Anyone striving for a society based on solidarity does not need leaders. You cannot have leaders without the led, and by that we mean people led up the garden path their whole life long. For us, democracy is not simply a method of swindling people and in the final analysis continually depriving them of the fruits of their labour. We do not seek personal power or power for a small clique. We do not want some minority living a life of luxury at the expense of others.

Our aim is a society based on solidarity, in other words socialism. This means that, with the elimination of the downtrodden status of the working class, class society as a whole will be abolished. And not 10, 20 or 100 years after men and women have freely decided to abolish the exploitation of human beings by other human beings, but immediately afterwards. Anything less would be dishonest.

We are convinced that neither praying to gods, symbols of any kind or dogmas, nor placing one’s trust without any justification whatsoever in enlightened leaders is of any benefit to humanity. Nor are we nationalists. Our philosophy can be summed up by the slogan: one world, one people, socialism! This commits us to allegiance to the 90 percent and more of the world’s population who, like us, are victims of domination and exploitation.

Socialists cannot deviate from these basic principles. They therefore oppose all groups which support the profit system in its various forms and stages of development.

We are part of the working class. If we wish to live, we must sell our mental and physical efforts like the majority of the world’s population. We know capitalism from the bitter experience of those at the bottom. We do not belong to those privileged by this system, those who generally see nothing more in other human beings than inevitable cost factors, to be hired or fired, as appropriate, in order to guarantee profits and thereby privileges.

Many of our fellow citizens regard us as utopians. This is not because our ideas are unsound but because the defenders of the inhumane profit system have at their disposal a massive propaganda machine which day and night clouds people’s clear vision of things.

Hear us out. Talk with us. By all means question what we and others are saying, but remember one thing: the decision lies with you and with you alone.

Socialism is the simplest thing in the world. It is based on the voluntary co-operation of all members of society and guarantees free access to the fruits of their labour. Clearly, such a system can function only if it is based on the consciously expressed will of the majority of the members of society. There is no better means of establishing this will than by secret ballot. It is therefore essential to put up as many candidates as possible as quickly as possible, and thereby enable an unambiguous decision to be made between capitalism and socialism.

Help us bring about the simplest thing in the world. It cannot be done without you.

(Translated by M.D. from the March 1997 issue of Internationales Freies Wort, quarterly publication of the Bund Demokratischer Sozialisten, the World Socialist Movement party in Austria)

Foolish Totem of a Hapless World (1999)

Theatre Review from the July 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Money by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. National Theatre.

The National continues to boast proudly in its programmes that “The National Theatre is for Everyone”, whilst its newish director, Trevor Nunn, seems increasingly to pander to safe bourgeois tastes.

Last month Noel Coward’s Private Lives joined the repertoire, and audiences were invited to identify with two spoilt members of the “upper set” whose egotism and selfishness leads to the break-up of not only their own marriage but also threatens the well-being of their subsequent partners. The critics in the broadsheets had a field day affecting to see “significance” in the puerile machinations of the two combatants, whereas arguably the real significance lies in the fact that by producing such witless tosh in favour of other fare, the theatre offers an experience of stunningly irrelevance to the lives of most of their audience: Mills and Boon for the chattering classes. And this month Money by Bulwer-Lytton, Victorian son of a rich aristocratic mother, one-time Liberal Member of Parliament, novelist and playwright, Conservative MP for Hertfordshire and briefly Colonial Secretary, and latterly Baron Lytton of Knebworth.

If Bulwer-Lytton’s biography is hardly encouraging, neither is his play Money. In what seems a long evening Bulwer-Lytton is at pains to make what he sees as a crucial point: that money conjugates with success; poverty with failure. When Evelyn, the play’s central character, is in the funds he has friends by the score; once seemingly bankrupt his friends desert him like rats from a sinking ship. Bulwer-Lytton takes nearly three hours to ram his message home. Three hours in which to expose hypocrisy, but not a minute to question the economic and social structure which lies at its base. Cosy sentimentality in lieu of analysis. A triumph of escapism.

The talented cast do wonders with a turgid script. Bulwer-Lytton may well have been a successful novelist but on the evidence of this play he is an indifferent dramatist. His characters don’t so much speak as give voice to lines of prose. Close your eyes and you might be listening to someone reading a book rather than speaking.

Writing in the programme Peter Ackroyd paints a warts-and-all picture of Victorian London, and I wondered what the audience made of this. In easy, uncomplicated language Ackroyd describes everyday life in mid-century London “in terms which Lytton’s contemporaries would have preferred not to recognise”. Here is a real picture of Victorian London—”the streets filled with teeming and struggling life; the city as a prison, with walls and buildings towering above the people”—not the fay, prissy fantasies of Bulwer-Lytton.

Michael Gill

Election Results (1999)

Party News from the July 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the elections to the Scottish parliament on 6 May the Socialist Party lists obtained 388 votes in the Lothians Region and 309 in Glasgow.

In local elections held the same day in England, the result in Primrose ward of South Tyneside Metropolitan Borough Council was: Perry (Lab) 1169, Armstrong (Con) 314, Bissett (Soc) 138. In the Deneside ward of Eastington District Council (three councillors) the result was: Peadon (Lab) 569, Lee (Lab) 558¸ Crowley (Lab) 534, Colborn (Soc) 163.

The election to the European Parliament in the North East Electoral Region on 10 June, where we put forward a 4-person list, was easily won by the abstentionists, the option chosen by over 80 percent of the electorate. The result, amongst the 19.6 percent who voted was: Labour 162,573, Conservative 105,573, LibDem 52,070 UKIP 34,063, Green Party 18,184, SLP 4,511, BNP 3505, ProEuro Conservative Party 2926, Socialist Party 1510, NLP 826.

TV Review: Our Masters’ Voice (1999)

Tyndall (top left) in his younger days.

TV Review from the July 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last month’s Euro election campaign is probably best forgotten—just as well, as most of the electorate appeared to have forgotten about it even before polling day. It was not that the political parties made no effort to influence the electorate, it just seemed as if they were going through the motions, well aware that wherever real political power lies in Europe it is certainly not with the European Parliament. The Party Election Broadcasts screened during the campaign must have been among the most hopeless and insipid on record.

The Conservative Party ran with a two-part playlet featuring a young, upwardly-mobile couple whose prose turned with the trivial to overtly political with all the subtlety and finesse of Yasser Arafat gatecrashing a barmitzvah. Labour’s best effort was another risible attempt at the canonisation of Tony Blair, the saintly führer.

The real British führer, of course, achieved a Party Election Broadcast of his own this time thanks to the BNP running a full list across most of the UK. Standing resplendent in front of the Cenotaph in Whitehall was the man who poses as the saviour of the white race, Mr John Tyndall, professional bigot, race hater and petty criminal. If ever there was a case to be made for lengthier prison sentences of the type advocated by the BNP, then this man must feature prominently. Even he, however, looked good next to the “vox pop” type interviews which followed, where stilted fascists posing as “ordinary” members of the public read from cue cards, turning a few minutes of nationalist rhetoric into what seemed like a lifetime of televisual embarrassment. Unusually for the BNP, their broadcast this time around did not feature Tyndall railing against all those impure elements who have taken the Great out of Britain—communists, Jews, blacks, homosexuals, liberals, teachers, Guardian-readers, social workers, feminists, etc. Rather like the Daily Mail, Tyndall now has a greater, more all-encompassing target than these minority groups: Europe itself. Britain must Get Out Of Europe he bellowed, NOW!

For those whose familiarity with the BNP extends beyond a PEB every few years, this is odd. If it is the case that opposition to all things European and support for everything home-grown and British is what now really defines the BNP’s politics then why is it that they have been happy to spend so much time in the company of European terrorists from Italy and elsewhere this last 15 years or so? Why is it that the BNP attends international gatherings in Europe where—bizarrely—other foreigner-haters from all the different nations of Europe are in attendance? And, while we’re on the subject, wouldn’t it be interesting to know how much of the money to finance the BNP’s election candidates (and hence its PEB) actually came from Johnny Foreigner? Questions, there are many, but answers no doubt there will be none.

Left, right

Also in evidence during the Euro-election campaign was that other authoritarian comedy act, Arthur Scargill and his ever-decreasing and increasingly amazing SLP. Like Tyndall, Scargill made sure the SLP put up nearly a full list of candidates so that it would be eligible for a Party Political Broadcast, and like the BNP, the SLP’s broadcast was a homily to the Little Englander political mentality, this time with a bizarre Stalinist twist. Despite their national exposure, it would appear that the SLP now presents no challenge whatsoever to Labour anywhere in the country, despite the massive display of apathy on election day from Labour’s core support. The SLP, shorn of many of the Trotskyist activists which paradoxically both gave it presence and rent it asunder, is now little more than a Stalinist sect with small followings in the faction-ridden Asian working class movement in London. Just like the BNP, it its vote was desultory for a party with national political exposure and a lowest-common denominator political appeal. Like his great political enemy David Owen, Scargill truly has the negative Midas touch: everything he touches turns to shit.

Political mind control of the type manifested in Party Political and Party Election Broadcasts is a difficult and inexact science, though when it works it can infect the minds of generations of the working class. Those who doubt this should take a look at Party Political Broadcasts: The Greatest Hits, a video collection of PPBs since their inception at the end of the Second World War. As you watch it, the carefully planted myths of a capitalist political lifetime unfold before your very eyes. Here are MacMillan, Wilson, Thatcher and Blair, bamboozling the working class with nationalist rhetoric and reformist promises as if their very life depended on it. It is in fact, a monument to political trickery and flummery throughout the ages. Perhaps, one day, Arthur Scargill and John Tyndall will find their way on to the sequel, bearing in mind, of course, that sequels are usually a pale imitation of the original.

Dave Perrin

50 Years Ago: The Nemesis of Labour Government (1999)

The 50 Years Ago column from the July 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The dilemma facing this Labour government is one that must face every Labour government. It is one to which there is no solution and it must result eventually in the collapse of the experiment; for there is nothing a Labour government can do to end the workers’ discontent with capitalism. There are, of course, some Labour Party supporters who give what they think is the answer. They will admit that the workers can never secure lasting satisfaction within the capitalist system but will reply that the solution is the abolition of capitalism. Socialists agree with the latter but the dilemma still remains for the Labour government, because it is not in their power to introduce Socialism. Socialism is at present not a possibility because the mass of the electorate do not understand or want it. Anyone who considers the matter knows that this is so. The electors who vote Labour want all kinds of things but they expect them to be obtained within the framework of capitalism, through the efforts of the Labour government. (. . .)

The Socialist aims of abolishing the wages system, production for profit, buying and selling, property incomes, etc., in short the abolition of capitalism, is something quite outside the conceptions of the Labour Party.

(From the Socialist Standard, July 1949)

Greasy Pole: Keeping Their Hair On (1999)

The Greasy Pole column from the July 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Neil Kinnock fought a lot of losing battles along the way to the relative, but lucrative, obscurity of an EC commissioner but few of them were so hopeless as the struggle to discipline his hair. When he first came into prominence as Labour’s spokesman on education Kinnock had a reputation as a fiery left-winger, with ready verbal access to those facile, fatuous theories about how easy it was for left-wing policies to remedy all of capitalism’s ailments. He was a supporter of CND whose position as a Member of Parliament gave credence to the campaigns aimed at persuading the British ruling class to do something as unlikely as give up their capacity to wage nuclear war. All this, it was hoped, would add up to an irresistible appeal to young people making their way to the polling stations to choose between one capitalist party and another.

This was all very well, except for the hair. Kinnock had a tendency toward baldness, which was not consistent with an appeal to youth so he had to carefully train what was left of his hair across his head, to hide the thinning area on his crown. But alas for such vanity; in spite of all that care and attention the voters, young and old, could not be persuaded to elect a Labour government and as a result, as Kinnock became leader of his party, he saw a desperate need to change as much of his image as he could. Out went the left-wing stuff, to be replaced by bitter, raging attacks on Militant, Derek Hatton and the like. Out went the easy talk about simple solutions to capitalism’s problems; instead we had stern lectures on the absolute necessity to buckle down into obedient exploitability. Out went the CND marches, the banners and the chants; in their place Kinnock was wedded to the policy of the British ruling class being up there with the rest of the nuclear powers, with an arsenal capable of wiping out much of the world.

Baldness

And suddenly, one day without warning, out went the hair as well. Kinnock did not say: “Look here, I’m fed up with all this combing and arranging and spending a fortune on Brylcreem. From now on you will see the real me.” He simply appeared in public with a bald, shiny head where once his ginger tresses had been so painstakingly fashioned and left his public to draw their own conclusions. One conclusion was that this was the work of some image consultant, who had persuaded Kinnock to give up the unequal struggle in the hope that the voters would be more likely to trust a leader who looked like a mature family doctor rather than one who seemed to be clinging to an unfulfilled adolescence. In any case this drastic re-fashioning was no more successful than all the other changes as Kinnock continued to notch up lost elections until he bowed to the inevitable and resigned.

This disreputable episode was forgotten until the advent of William Hague, who has suffered more than most from a negative image. No sooner had he been chosen as Tory leader than the hacks were queueing up to pour scorn on his infantile appearance. At first Hague seemed to have decided that there was some advantage in having a youthful appearance and launched himself into a series of publicity stunts which in the event only made matters worse for him. There was the conference, soon after their defeat in May 1997, of Tory leaders trying to look like people who were repenting their past arrogance and complacency. Hague had them posing for the cameras wearing chunky sweaters instead of the usual suits—which made them appear acutely uncomfortable and no less gruesome than usual. There was the time Hague made a visit to the Notting Hill Carnival—apparently spontaneous if it were not for the press cameras waiting for him—when he tried to amass some street cred by eating ethnic food from a roadside stall. Then there was the baseball cap.

Party Colours

Hague was trying to do to the Tories what Kinnock and Blair had done for the Labour Party—change the way the party was regarded by the voters. One of the early changes in the Labour Party on the way to becoming New Labour was to get rid of the red flag and replace it with the red rose. Hague decided to do something similar at the Tory conference, abandoning the usual blue backdrop and symbolic torch in favour of one made up of multi-coloured different shapes. This upset many Tories. They were probably unaware that blue was not, in fact, that much of a tradition for the Conservatives. It had been established as their colour as recently as 1961, when Harold Macmillan was their leader, replacing a variety of colours which, for example in Macmillan’s constituency, were orange and purple.

But as was the case with Labour’s red rose, these changes did not have the desired effect and it soon became obvious that desperate measures were called for so Hague, who had suffered from the same sparseness of hair as Kinnock, put the matter in the hands of his barber. He emerged from this with a similarly bare head, which did not make him look like a kindly, mature bank manager but a prematurely bald schoolboy. Soon afterwards he set about proving how strong and decisive he is by sacking several prominent members of his opposition team, including Michael Howard, Norman Fowler and Peter Lilley.

Even Peter Lilley hastened to put his head on the block, which was especially nauseating as he had apparently been sacked over a speech he made when he questioned the emphasis the previous Tory government had put on market operation and the policy to ” . . . convert public services into profit-making businesses”. This speech angered a lot of Tories but a few days later Hague came out in support of Lilley:

“It is a great mistake to think that all Conservatives have to offer is solutions based on free markets. If we think that, we would have little to say about public services where there are limits to the role of the market.”

This may have encouraged Lilley to think that his place in the shadow cabinet and as deputy party leader was safe so that in his turn he may have protested at the decision to sack him. But this did not happen.

Kinnock

Observing such typical back-stabbing and betrayals, Neil Kinnock has changed yet again. Now he says that all the effort he put into a new image for his party was a waste of time. Whatever the party did, the voters did not want him in Number Ten:

“One of the reasons [voters] eventually put their cross by the Conservative candidate was this innate feeling among a relatively small number of people that they couldn’t see me as prime minister. It’s just there in the biochemistry as it were.”

Well Kinnock is no more an authority on biochemistry than he is on how to win elections so when he offers Hague some advice on this latter issue the Tory leader would do well to proceed with caution. “When I saw William Hague put that baseball cap on . . .,” said Kinnock, “I recoiled for his sake . . . The best advice is collar and tie, shiny shoes, a degree of formality . . .”

Perhaps this kind of fatuous rubbish impresses enough people to have them give weighty consideration over which party they want to run British capitalism. They might spend a bit more time to reflect on how meaningless all this is and that this cynical posturing is designed to ensure that a social system endures which is so damaging to its people that it cannot be justified in any free and open assessment.

Ivan

Capitalist Priorities (1999)

From the July 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

I have just received a letter (dated 19 April) from a friend in Cleveland, Ohio. It is worth quoting almost in full as the contents demonstrate the priorities, as well as the contradictions, in the United States, the “land of the free”.

  “I am unemployed at the moment. I am receiving unemployment benefits, but they are very low. In this country, such benefits amount to half of the salary you were drawing, and they last half a year. It’s a real bummer, as we used to say.
  Other than that, though, I’m in good health, which is a good thing because people in this situation usually don’t have good health insurance, either. Some hospitals and many doctors won’t treat a person without such insurance. As it happens, I live quite close to a local charity hospital. So I’m assured of emergency care if I need it.
  What’s that I heard about this being the “greatest nation on earth”? (they actually say that, you know).
  News from the Balkans is quite depressing. This country is being led towards a ground war, with troops being called up, etc. I’m enclosing a newspaper clipping, complete with the “appropriate” photograph.
  A couple of months ago, Congress was in such an argument about how to spend a surplus of funds that normal legislative business was not being taken care of. That argument, of course, is totally irrelevant now.”

The enclosed clipping, an article by Paul Richer from the Los Angeles Times, stated that the Kosovo campaign will cost $4 billion through September, and that already there are insufficient reservists and volunteers. “We’ve gotten to the limits of volunteerism,” said a Pentagon official.

Apparently the only people who have gained anything from all this are the Iraqis. The Pentagon has had to scale back its activities in the “no-fly” zones in northern and southern Iraq, and shift the planes to Europe. The “appropriate” photograph from the newspaper is of Amanda Brown, 8, holding up a drawing she drew, bidding goodbye to her father, as he and other members of the 133rd Airlift Wing leave Minneapolis for Europe.

Meanwhile, back in the States, if Amanda Brown or anyone else falls ill and needs hospitalisation, but haven’t gotten insurance cover, then they won’t get suitable treatment. Such are the priorities of American capitalism.

Peter E. Newell

Sick society (1999)

Book Review from the July 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Cancer Stage of Capitalism by John McMurty, Pluto Press, 1999.

In the UK, one in three people will suffer from some form of it. At most about 5 to 10 percent of cases are caused by defective genes, the rest have their cause not just in the natural environment but—as oncologists are increasingly becoming aware—the social environment. (How long before the Chief Medical Officer issues the health warning: “Capitalism seriously damages health”?) McMurty takes the argument much further and identifies the causes of the world’s social problems in the global market, which in the last 30 years or so has developed a cancerous state. He argues that the global market is “a profound perversion” of the market, “much as a diseased cell formation is a perversion of a healthy cell formation, but succeeds in invading its host by masking its nature as the normal ‘self’ of the body”. Money no longer has a direct relation to wealth creation. Within the global market transnational corporations in particular make money out of money. Corporations “create credit and thus increase domestic money supply with no restriction on the amount of new currency demand so created in the host economy”. This is the carcinogenic disorder within the global market.

McMurty claims that the global market and the new role of money is a development that Marx did not foresee, and that “the gold standard, and therefore the dead-labour basis of money value which Marx supposed as money’s stable yardstick, was eliminated in 1974”. However, Marx’s theory of money, which explained the prices of commodities by the value of gold using a fully convertible currency, is not the same thing as the Bretton Woods gold standard which McMurty refers to, which was concerned mainly with international exchange rates between currencies. If McMurty were correct in his claim that transnational corporations make money out of money, mainly through the creation of credit, then this would be incredibly inflationary. In fact, in recent years in the UK and US and a number of other countries, inflation has declined while globalisation has continued apace. Furthermore, no corporation would go bust in this scenario. If in difficulty, corporations would merely pull themselves up by their own bootstraps by “creating money”. McMurty’s grasp of what constitutes capital is decidedly shaky: “wealth that can be used to produce more wealth”. In which case your garden spade and many other inanimate objects become capital. It would have made more sense if he had added: “for sale with a view to profit”. But then this would have altered his argument about the dynamics of capitalism and this would have been a very different book.

Is the prognosis for capitalism terminal? With enough political momentum, McMurty argues, internationally enforceable legal limits can be established so that money “returns to its proper value function”. This begins the eradication of the carcinogenic disorder and markets then serve the common interest. If you believe that, then you don’t understand the economics of capitalism.

Lew Higgins

Obituary: Jimmy Robertson (1999)

Obituary from the July 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The death of Jimmy Robertson after a short illness came as a shock to his comrades in Glasgow.

He was such a regular attender at branch and propaganda meetings that any absence had the rest of us wondering what could have happened. He served the Party in whatever way he could, and, whether it was as branch treasurer or taking care of the literature table, every task was done cheerfully.

Jimmy’s political activity began in the Communist Party and he was one of the thousands who left it over the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956. Later on he came in contact with Glasgow branch of the Socialist Party and became a member in 1962.

But there was another side to Jimmy. He was to the very end a keep-fit devotee who hiked, ran, cycled and swam. Indeed his swimming ability earned him a medal from the Humane Society for saving a drowning man in the River Clyde, but, true to his nature, he would never do any of these things competitively, only for the enjoyment they brought.

Jimmy Robertson was one of those members who form the essential core of the Party and his passing is a grievous loss, especially to Glasgow members. We extend our deepest condolences to his family.

Vic Vanni

The Warmakers (1999)

From the July 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

A TV documentary series, "The Century," with Peter Jennings, shown recently in Britain on the History Channel, reviewed some of the most significant aspects of the 20th century. One segment, on the development of the atom bomb, made a point well worth stopping to think about.

Late in the Second World War, the generals and the politicians made a tactical decision with chilling implications: they switched from striking at military targets (without regard for the "collateral damage" this might inflict on civilians) to the deliberate, premeditated mass murder of civilian populations. They were able to make this switch, which they did quietly and without fanfare, because TNT-based weapons technology—delivery vehicles included—had evolved so rapidly under the lash of war. As one of the scientists working on the Manhattan Project put it, with the atom bomb the government's interest shifted from simply making a new weapon for winning the war to making a new weapon. Having gained the ability to manufacture and deploy large numbers of bombs quickly and efficiently, the government began to go in for destroying not merely military targets but the economic infrastructure on which weapons manufacture and deployment was based—indifferent to the fact that this meant targeting ordinary non-combatant populations for annihilation.

Winning the war was the justifying obsession where TNT bomb technology was concerned. But the interest in developing a weapon of unprecedented destructive capabilities—initially by the scientists themselves, so horrified by the Nazi war machine, who proposed it as a "humane" alternative to a war of incredibly vast destruction—set up a drive to test it under battlefield conditions. If you could use something so powerful, why should you not use it? The generals and the politicians had become so blunted to the emotional impact of directing a process of mass murder that the human implications of this radically new tactical emphasis escaped them: some involved in the Project reported having "misgivings," but their vacillations were easily neutralized.

Only Leo Szilard actively went on the offensive, campaigning against the new weapon as an error of judgment on the part of the scientists; but the government, having accepted the initiative of the scientists, wrapped in its humanitarian rationale, stonily turned them out when they did protest. Truman, along with his generals, was already moving so fast that it was quite impossible for the protesters to catch up with them, and the decision to drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima raced arrogantly ahead on the assumption that what the protesters had to say regarding policy did not matter politically or militarily. And very few of them turned against the Project or their connections with the government's war effort. Edward Teller, in fact, even went on to invent that great pseudo-scientific monstrosity, the hydrogen bomb, "800 times more powerful than the atomic bomb" which had so appalled its own creators.

The only possible use weapons of such numerically huge destructive ability could have was to terroristically murder (or threaten to murder) enormous numbers of people—still, of course, on a military justification. The convenient tactical switch of emphasis had become a strategy expressing the highest degree of insanity. All of it had become possible because the process of technological development had gotten so thoroughly socialized that the designers and users of bomb technology could almost innocently devise weapons of mass destruction entirely in the absence of exposure to the latter's effects. In ancient times, generals and politicians practising the "art" of war had had firsthand experience of its impact; turning the human imagination to inventing better weapons, evil though it was, at least registered a direct, emotional sense of awareness. The monsters who clawed their way to the top in Imperial Rome nevertheless retained some basic sense of humanity in their behavior, if only because it was still not yet technologically possible to go off the deep end.

With the Second World War, however, the separation between warmakers and civilians had become a sort of proscenium arch made of steel, complete with war rooms and theatres of combat. Emotionally, the warmakers showed that ruling classes had finally lost the ability to relate to the effects of their own efforts. Since almost no wars in history have ever been decided on by the people who were called on to fight them, this represented a radical step forward in the emotional implosion lived daily by warring élites: their peculiar occupational hazard. These élites could no longer relate humanly and emotionally to their targets. With the Manhattan Project, war stopped being hell for those who decided to have a war fought by other people, to whom they gave orders; with the result that the outcome of global thermonuclear war would at last show the world there really was a Hell after all: the planet Earth. The blunting emotional impact of mass murder had finally attained schizophrenic proportions in the minds of the warmakers.

Thus, the capitalist class of today, corrupted as they are by this emotional sickness, have acquired an absolute and terrible decision-making power that autocrats and emperors could once only have dreamed of even as the relative numbers of the warmakers among them have dwindled to extraordinarily tiny proportions. Capitalist intelligence has entered a world that no longer recognises its own origins in human intelligence, with which human beings are naturally endowed to promote the survival of our species. But the capitalist class will only recognise those fragments of that larger intelligence as long as these support their power or promise to extend their advantage. Since capitalists in general all have this warmaking sickness that only "breaks out" in the highest circles, where it assumes such forms as the military-industrial complex, we humans down here below can expect to find no security in their adopting responsible policies on warmaking.

War is the problem, and capitalism promotes—encourages—the situations that result in war. We do not need capitalism, but we do need to protect ourselves from their unsanitary habits by bringing the world back into line with ordinary human emotions. The only solution to war is a system of society that people control, one in which élites cannot appear. The only way to lay the foundations for this is to eliminate the twin contagions of capital and wage labor, on which the whole structure of capitalist élitism has come to rest.

Ron Elbert

Educating the workers? (1999)

From the July 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

As this journal has always pointed out, world summits and conferences are as notorious for the verbal rubbish arising from them as they are for highlighting the inadequacies of capitalist society and all attempts to reform it.

Remember, if you will, the Food Summit in the 1970s, at which Henry Kissinger announced to the world that global hunger would be eradicated within 10 years! Today the number of humans starving around the world is double the 400 million figure that enraged those delegates of 25 years ago.

Almost 10 years ago, there was another great meeting of the well-intentioned. This one was in Thailand and organised by the World Bank and various UN agencies, and called to debate the issue of education. To cut a long story short, the delegates of the 150 countries represented at this gathering were so appalled at the state of global education that they signed up to a plan to establish universal primary education by the year 2000. A good idea, you may think, but with months to go before that deadline, the world still has 125 million children out of school, 150 million who will drop out of school unable to read and write, with these figures being set against a world adult illiteracy rate of 20 percent, or 875 million adults.

The recent Oxfam report Education now: break the cycle of poverty, which hits at the shortcomings of the latter makes interesting reading, particularly for critics of New Labour, fond of juxtaposing Blair's education policies with children saving Walker's crisp packet tokens to exchange for school books.

The report reveals that there will be no real commitment to universal primary education until the year 2015, and even then there will still be 75 million children out of school with the proportion in sub-Saharan Africa actually higher than now, and that the cost of educating every child now out of school is $8 billion—which is about 4 days' global military spending, or Europe's pet food bill for 4 months.

While OECD countries spend an average of $4,636 per year on each child's education in the developing world the figure is $165. And while Britain, whose annual education bill is some $3,553 per child, is far below the OECD average, it is still 130 times more than is spent on a child in Zambia.

Oxfam is keen to point to the benefits of universal primary education, stating that it not only improves life, but that it increases democracy and enhances a country's growth. They have observed that every year spent in school decreases the risk of child death by 8 percent and that in sub-Saharan Africa the completion of primary education increases a farmer's output by 8 percent.

The report insists that human capital is vital for growth and for integrating the developing world's imported technology where there is little relevant infrastructure. It further points the finger of blame at organisations such as the IMF and World Bank, whose structural adjustment programmes often mean a country has to cut back on education spending as prerequisite to the securing of a loan, and that the concurrent debt burden means a lesser chance of spending on education.

There is a blatant cycle of disadvantage woven into the poverty-education equation, a kind of Catch-22. Poverty means less education which results in further poverty and accompanying poorer education. Oxfam's solution, involving total reform of the Heavily Debted Poorer Countries Initiative through the implementation of a "human development window" that would offer the incentive of debt-relief to governments prepared to invest four-fifths of savings in poverty-reducing initiatives. Oxfam suggest the debt burden could be shored up with more carefully thought out aid programmes. At present only 2 percent of the aid programme provided by the West is put into education. If this figure was raised to 8 percent, then $4 billion could be invested in education, or so the projection runs—incidentally this is also Europe's annual ice cream bill.

Moreover, Oxfam would like to see reform of IMF and World Bank programmes, with the ring-fencing of education funds. The former would be most opposed to Oxfam's suggestions, not least because of its commitment to structural adjustment programmes and because of its reluctance to aid that might be diverted away from school books and into military projects.

There is a lot the average socialist could argue in favour of improved education standards throughout the world, taking on board much of what Oxfam argues. Even less-liberal economists cite rates of return on investment as a chief incentive. But is a more highly educated global working class really in the interests of capitalism, as already suggested? Only if those workers' newly-acquired skills are going to be exploited for profit. The capitalist class won't want to educate workers more than they have to, if this means eating into their profits. It's a fair bet the education issue in the years ahead is as welcome in the US, for instance, as the idea to set up an International Criminal Court, or to vote in favour of access to food being a basic human right at the UN.

This is not simply socialist cynicism taken to the extreme. Capitalism is a filthy and rotten and decrepit social and economic system, whose apologists will stoop to any level to ensure their profits are never threatened. If this means starting a war, destroying crops from above with poison sprays, overthrowing a democratically-elected government, then so be it—there is no shortage of evidence to support this. Likewise with global education. The real winners in the long run from education can only be the working class.

John Bissett

Ordinary People (1999)

A Short Story from the July 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

From as far back as I can ever remember, probably from the first time I became aware of my social environment, I have found myself wincing at the term "ordinary people". Politicians use it when speaking of the electorate. It is used mostly to delineate the working class and it has become a derogatory description either for people who are not members of the establishment, or for those who do not get themselves in the news. What the word conjures up, for me at any rate, is a picture of thousands upon thousands of dull, drab powerless people, hollow-eyed and mindless, trudging to work with no other thought in their heads than sullen obedience to their masters. Perhaps somewhere there are workers who appear like characters from Brave New World, but that is not my experience.

There have always been people who crave attention; they become local councillors, trade union leaders, MPs. Maybe some of them start out with altruistic motives and, are therefore, surprised at how being in the limelight makes them feel extraordinary. Surprise must soon turn to elation because it could be tempting to feel, once you are in the news, that you are in some way an authority, that your every word is received like pearls of wisdom escaping from the lips of the Oracle. Yet it is a myth that leaders know better than we do and possess the God-given right to direct our lives.

I once heard a man on a radio programme announce, when asked a question about the preparation of vegetables before cooking them, that, yes, it is preferable to rinse them lightly under the tap. Now isn't that something? I didn't know that, did you? He didn't say anything else. He didn't need to. He was an expert. Another time I listened with horror to Paul Boateng telling parents that it was perfectly all right to smack their children, when I had spent most of my life believing that it wasn't. But he is one of those with the authority (and the audacity) to inform the rest of the nation that a belt round the ear does our kids the world of good. Some people will believe him. He is extraordinary, after all.

My dictionary says: Ordinary—usual, common, normal, not specially good. I don't know anyone like that. In my street lives a builder. Among other things he builds marvellous flint walls, poetry in themselves. He erected the conservatory which acts as an extension on the back of my house and he worked with a skill which I found fascinating. When Henry plies his trade he does it lovingly and gracefully and so for the first time in my life I began to value people who built things. But that is not all that Henry does. He has an allotment where he grows spectacular vegetables, row-upon-row of whatever is in season. I am on the receiving end of some of those vegetables and they are wonderful to behold. Sometimes he will take a cabbage, a green pepper or a bunch of carrots from the proffered bag and comment on how fine it is. He says it with pride and I know he is remembering buying the seeds and sowing them in the ground. He would have nurtured them as tenderly as if they were his own children until they were ready to be harvested. And at the end of the season he would set about preparing the soil for his next act of creation. Henry doesn't say much, but is he ordinary? Never. Scratch the surface of anyone you know and you will see what I mean.

My own mother would have come under that awful heading "ordinary". Though bowed down by poverty and five kids she played the piano. Neighbours would come to our front gate to listen to her. I would be moved to tears at the pieces she played with such feeling. I used to wonder that if she hadn't been my mother then who would she have been? I felt a little jealous that inside my mother dwelt another person—a woman who could produce such beautiful musical sounds. She wasn't ordinary.

Ordinary under capitalism means you haven't been discovered or there isn't a market for you. It means, too, that you are there to be told what to do. Your opinions are of no consequence unless the powers-that-be have created you or you are rich and powerful enough to create yourself. You are mostly not defined by your uniqueness but by your market value. When I give an acquaintance the Socialist Standard to read and they come across something I have written, they will often ask "Do they pay you?" When I answer in the negative they quickly lose interest in my modest efforts as though there can be little merit in them unless they bring in the filthy lucre. My response to people who ask what I like doing is always that I like writing. They invariably ask "Are you a professional?" So little in life has real value unless it is rewarded with money. Yet the majority of us would surely blossom without the daily grind.

My little daughter once wanted to be a nurse. She spent happy hours heaping blankets upon her father as he snoozed in his armchair, sticking imaginary hypodermic needles into his arms and wiping his brow with a tea towel. All this soon altered as her working life loomed large. True she could have grown out of her desire to heal the sick but in the end what must focus our minds is how much we can get paid for the countless hours spent away from home for the best part of our lives. Most of us do it without understanding that there is another way of organising our time. But that does not mean we are ordinary.

Heather Ball