Voice From The Back: Not too blessed (2001)

The Voice From The Back Column from the July 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Not too blessed

From the pulpits at the Church of England, the passionate clergyman thunders on about the Sermon on the Mount. The hushed congregation hear the famous words “Blessed are the poor…" ; but not too blessed, apparently. “More than half of the Church of England clergy feel that they are not being paid enough, with one in ten demanding an increase in their stipend of up to 50 per cent according to an independent survey…" A spokesman for the Manufacturing, Science and Finance Union, which represents 1,500 clergy said: “We have never said that the majority of vicars are on the breadline or are having to sell the Big Issue. But they are not being remunerated according to their professional status…”, Times, 16 May. How far from selling the Big Issue can be gathered when the same report informs us that the Archbishop of Canterbury has a salary of £57,000 per annum.

Hit for six

In our youth we used to thrill to boys stories of “sizzling sixes over the tuck shop roof”. The game of cricket, we were led to believe, was the embodiment of sportsmanship and decency. Alas, like everything capitalism touches, cricket is prey to corruption and deceit “Lord Condon’s findings on corruption in cricket, published yesterday may come as a nasty shock to lovers of the game, but hardly a surprise. Ever since Hansie Cronje, the former South African captain, admitted taking money to fix matches, there has been a cloud over the game. Australia, Pakistan and India have had to deal with allegations touching some of their leading players. In asking a former Metropolitan Police Commissioner to look into this, the International Cricket Council took an unprecedented step, but it plainly had no choice. The findings, bluntly, are worse than most people expected. According to Lord Condon, allegations already in the public domain represent only “the tip of the iceberg”. He declares that some players are still acting dishonestly and to the orders of the bookmakers. He links a murder and a kidnapping to cricket corruption, and reports that some witnesses were evidently afraid to speak out. Daily Telegraph 24 May.

Filthy lucre

Socialists are always arguing that capitalism with its wars, poverty and insecurity has outlived its usefulness; but we’ve just found another reason to get rid of it. “US dollar bills are home to dozens of potentially dangerous pathogens. Most US dollar bills are bacteria farms, cultivating dozens of potentially dangerous pathogens, a study in Ohio has revealed. The findings raises the possibility that paper money could be transporting antibiotic resistant bacteria from one area to another, say the researchers.” New Scientist, 24 May.

What is socialism?

We thought our readers might be interested in our socialist email discussion forum, so here we give you a little taster It is from a comrade in New Zealand referring to a comrade’s ideas in the USA in reply to an enquirer in the UK. The American Harry Morrison, writing for the Western Socialist, explained some years ago what socialism is not. “If workers work for wages, it is not socialism. If goods are bought and sold in a market, it is not socialism. If the world is divided into countries, it’s not socialism. Unless every man, women and child has free access to the means of living, it is not socialism.” The comrade in New Zealand, Bob Malone, makes a good point, when he says, “Socialism will only be realised when the majority of people realise that our quality of life is not improved by just how much wealth can he consumed, and that collectively we can build a much better society based on co-operation within and between communities.” (See page two of this issue to get involved).

Soliciting solicitors

The heartfelt cry of the butcher in Shakespeare’s Henry VI — “First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers” — would seem somewhat severe, but maybe Old Will had a point when we read about the goings-on in modern Israel. “Israel brothel keepers have the right to buy and sell prostitutes in the same way that football clubs transfer players, a lawyer claimed last week. ‘There is no difference between trading football players, hi-tech programmers, or surgeons, and selling women for purposes of prostitution’, Yaacov Shklar, who specialises in defending pimps, told a Knesset committee.” Observer 10 June.

Intensive mortality

“Thousands of people are dying because they are being moved out of intensive care too quickly, according to a study by two London hospitals. Just two more days in intensive care would be enough to save many seriously ill patients, researchers from St. Thomas’s and St. George’s found after analysing the cases of almost 14,000 patients from across Britain". Times 25 May. So, next time that you hear that a friend or a relative is being moved from intensive care into the general ward, don’t heave a sigh of relief, be worried — very, very worried Unless of course your friend or relative happens to be a millionaire receiving the best medical care that money can buy; in that case the move has been dictated by best medical practice and not, as the report says, for purely economic reasons. “One in four of the patients identified as being at greatest risk died on the ward after being released from intensive care. Using a computer, the research team concluded that 39 per cent of these would have survived had they been given two more days special care. But that would require a 16 per cent increase in intensive care beds, which would cost more than £100 million a year.

Editorial: Apathy rules the waves (2001)

Editorial from the July 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

So the weeks and weeks of posing, posturing and politicking are over. The endless hours of TV reporting and radio coverage and the thousands of miles of newspaper column inches have resulted in just one notable thing: not the return of another Labour government, but the lowest voter turnout since universal suffrage.

What a triumph for the assembled ranks of politicians and pundits! The biggest turn-off in political history and yet no one can say they are truly surprised. After the politicians had spent the previous month stomping up and down the country stirring up apathy wherever they went, the voters turned away in their droves. And then sighed a huge collective yawn as the moment of irrelevance passed.

Out of the barrage of opinion polls to hit the headlines during the election the most interesting was the BBC exit poll conducted on the day itself. Not because of its (fairly accurate) prediction of a Labour landslide, but because it dared to ask a cross-section of non-voters, excluded from the headline figures of voting intent, why they hadn’t bothered. The results were fascinating.

The poll showed that a significant proportion of voters hadn’t bothered to trouble the tellers because they thought the result to be a foregone conclusion. This is obvious enough, as turnout fell most in safe Labour seats and least in Labour-held marginals where there was a real chance of the Tory Party making a gain. Nevertheless, this is enough to account for only a fraction of the mammoth drop in turnout from the fairly dismal 71.4 percent in 1997 down to the record low 59 percent this time around.

The main reason for the drop in turnout is evidenced in the fact that 77 percent of respondents in the BBC survey said that they wouldn’t be voting because they viewed the parties to be essentially “the same”. Allied with this was the supporting view that politicians of all persuasions “couldn’t be trusted”.

Herein lies the reality of the situation, something that socialists have been arguing for many years and which now appears to be the established perspective held by a very sizeable sector of the working class of wage and salary earners. The fact that it appears to be held particularly strongly by former Labour voters too is significant. A 34 percent turnout in a Labour heartland constituency like Liverpool Riverside is evidence enough that Labour can no longer rely on a solid working-class vote, for in areas of previously bedrock support it is viewed as being essentially no different to the Tories.

There are still many who argue that Labour is “the lesser evil” but their numbers are dwindling – literally, in fact, as there were nearly three million fewer Labour voters this time round compared with when Blair first got in. Ten and a half million votes, in fact, would have been a humiliation for Labour years ago – as was the case when Neil Kinnock got just short of this for Labour in the Thatcher landslide of 1987. In 2001 it is enough to be heralded a landslide.

In reality, of course, it was a landslide in name only and Blair knew that only too well. It was etched on his face at his count in Sedgefield as he heard his personal vote drop by several thousand. There is clearly now a large chink in the armour of New Labour and it is only the ineptness of the opposition provided by the other mainstream parties that has stopped Labour from becoming a true laughing stock, most of all among the Party’s most “natural” supporters.

In the months to come we promise that we shall be monitoring the continued progress of New Labour – if progress is the right term – and subjecting them to the closest scrutiny from a socialist perspective. For the Labour Party has tricked and bamboozled the working class for too long. Now that the trick is wearing thin, we will do all we can to expose what Labour is really about and the interests Labour is keen to defend. We do this in the hope that next time the refusal by millions of voters to back the bamboozlers of the working class will turn into something more positive and pro-active than mere abstention.

In the News: No breakthrough for Trotskyism (2001)

From the July 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

“One of the few exciting stories of this election, largely untold, is the emergence of the Socialist Alliance/Scottish Socialist Party as a credible alternative to Labour,” wrote Mark Steel, expressing the hopes of a section of the London leftwing intelligentsia, in an election day article in the Independent. If he really believed this, when the results came in he must have been as gutted as the Tories.

The SA put up 92 candidates. They got in total around 57,500 votes (i.e. about 625 per candidate). Rather than becoming the fourth party in England, as they intended, they ended up 8th, after the Greens, the UKIP and the BNP. Their only consolation was to have done better than Arthur Scargill’s SLP which put up 114 candidates and only got around 55,000 votes (or about 480 per candidate). It is true that in Scotland the SSP did rather better, with its 72 candidates totalling some 73,000 votes, or 3 percent of the total vote in Scotland.

We are not rejoicing over this failure since we know that it is also a reflection of the popular reception to the word “socialism” which rubs off on us. Of course neither the SA/SSP nor the SLP stood for socialism. Indeed, it was their traditions – respectively, Trotskyism and Stalinism – that have done so much to discredit the idea of socialism by associating it with a state-run economy run by a vanguard party.

The other tradition responsible for discrediting the word “socialism” is Old Labour, but it was precisely as a revival of this that the SA set out to pass itself off as. The SA was an electoral coalition of normally warring (and still mutually suspicious) Trotskyist sects which had come together to create a front organisation which, if it got off the ground, would become a new Labour party which they could then all infiltrate as they did Labour in the good old days. The SA programme was thus consciously constructed to be openly reformist so as to appeal to Old Labourites. In this it succeeded remarkably.

The title of its manifesto People Before Profit encapsulated the reformist illusion perfectly. Just as their other slogan of “Tax the Rich” assumes the continued existence of the rich, so “People before Profit” assumes the continued existence of the profit system but where the government would intervene to try to make it work in the interest of wage and salary workers. As we know from the experience of Labour governments, this can never work.

The profit system can only ever operate in the interest of the class of profit-takers, and any party which takes on the responsibility for managing its political side will inevitably end up doing this on its terms, finding itself obliged by economic circumstances precisely to put profits before people. In the end such a party, far from transforming capitalism into a new society, itself becomes transformed into an ordinary pro-capitalist party. That’s the explanation of the repeated failure of the Labour Party in government and of its eventual transformation into New Labour.

The Trotskyists who drew up the SA’s detailed programme of promised reforms of capitalism showed no imagination. They weren’t even promising anything new, but largely the restoration of reforms that had once existed but had been whittled away by the workings of capitalism since the 1970s. Thus their manifesto of “pledges” (they played the promise game just like any party of conventional politicians) consisted of “say no” to this and “bring back” that. But perhaps, when you’re pretending to be something you’re not, the tendency will always be to overdo it.

There is another possible explanation. That the SA’s reformist programme wasn’t a cynical ploy, but that they genuinely believed in it. In that case they would be genuinely Old Labour reformists. This could be the case but the arguments socialists had with them on the streets and at meetings suggest that they did indeed have a hidden Leninist agenda of violent insurrection led by a vanguard party (but that they couldn’t agree which one of them it should be). So perhaps after all it is reassuring that they did not emerge as a credible, reformist alternative to New Labour.

Adam Buick

In the News: Oldham (2001)

From the July 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The workers of Oldham were battling in the streets, against each other and against the police, for three days from the 25 to 28 May this year. The poisonous despair, powerless and poverty of the area, caused in large part by the decline of the town’s traditional textile manufacturing industry, lead to workers turning upon one another. Differences in skin colour and culture became the focus for the pent-up energies and frustrations engendered by these social conditions.

The spark was, apparently, the provocative actions of followers of the British National Party and their ilk, who damaged property and harassed and attacked brown skinned workers, seemingly without reprisal from the police or authorities. Their targets eventually responded to the provocation, coming out onto the streets to fight them. As a part of the conflict, the unfortunately named Live and Let Live pub was attacked, and windows in the area were bricked. The police turned out in force, and a series of running battles ensued, leaving some 25 workers (including police officers) injured.

The centre of the trouble was the Glodwick area, with groups of up to 500 workers throwing petrol bombs and firecrackers at the police lines. Over the three nights of clashes a post-office was looted and the offices of the local newspaper became the target for firebomb attacks.

It has been suggested that the trouble was stirred up by the British National Party, as a part of their election campaign in the area. The BNP advocates divisive confusionist policies, based upon the scientifically absurd idea of racial differences. Its leader Nick Griffin, their candidate in Oldham West & Royton, advocates communal separation, along the lines of the so-called “Peace Wall” in Londonderry/Derry. This is supposed to be the only way of ending the allegedly irreconcilable differences between people of different “races”.

Their campaign turned out to be highly successful, with workers continually let down by the promises of reformism and the lack of any prospect for change from any other parties, being attracted to the radical posturings of Griffin’s band of would-be leaders. Their promises, geared toward insularism, putting a mysterious group called “The British” first, by protecting their “homeland” and ending their unemployment by prohibiting “foreign” products, attracted a high number of votes for such a small party. In Oldham West and Royton the BNP recorded 6,552 votes (16.4 percent) and in Oldham East and Saddleworth they scored 5,091 votes (11.21 percent). Each total is almost twice the entire number of anti-capitalists who turned up to the London Mayday event.

Naturally, the left is outraged. One commentator in Socialist Worker expressed shock that police refused to prevent the BNP members canvassing for their candidates, stating it was “perfectly legitimate election activity”. Presumably, the SWP must believe that the state should be allowed to vet and permit candidates’ campaigns.

They and other groups blame the failure of leaders, Socialist Worker observed that Oldham workers couldn’t identify with Many-Homes Meacher (their MP), and no-one in power listens to them but instead neglects them; while Militant noted that “the community leaders should be fired” for being out of touch. The problem, apparently, lies with the leaders and not the social system. Michael Meacher himself blamed William Hague and his “foreign land” speech for stoking up xenophobia.

Of course, the leftists see the fascists as rivals for leadership, and are thus happy to join with liberals in relying on emotive tactics and censorship to impede them. Such tactics back-fired badly at the announcement of the vote, because the local council forbade any candidates from speaking. This allowed the fascists to pose before the television cameras, wearing t-shirts proclaiming “Gagged for telling the truth”, and sporting large and visible gags in their mouths. This played into their victim posture, along with their attempts to claim they were trying to defend “whites from racism”. It also effectively prevented anyone from being able to hear how ridiculous their policies really are.

Liberals and leftists alike will not debate fascists, because they have no real answers to their arguments. They both support nationalism and its logic, albeit qualifiedly. Their differences with the fascists are those of degree not of quality. After all, the SWP has unfurled openly reactionary banners by merging with the Scottish Socialist Party whose slogan is “for a Scottish Socialist Republic”, the capitalist politics of national self-determination. What is the differences between “moderate nationalism” and “moderate racism”? Both are absurd creeds used to mystify and divide the workers.

The SWP calls upon workers to “turn anger on the real enemy”, by which they mean not the capitalist system, but the fascists. It means a futile programme of continually trying to suppress the manifestations of fascism, without destroying its root cause: the fallacy that workers share in some national interest. Without that understanding then the privations of capitalism will always lead to workers misidentifying the cause of their problems as not the capitalist system, but other workers.

Dividing the workers against the fascists will not ultimately bring the resolution of these problems, nor will simply appointing a different set of leaders to save us. Only the clear understanding that workers of all types share a common interest against the capitalist system, and that its replacement with socialism will end the social conditions that breed such violence will be of any use to us. That understanding will only come about through trusting the workers to think for themselves, instead of trying to crush the fascists with state power or street politics.

Pik Smeet

In the News: Nobody cares about you! (2001)

From the July 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

So, has anything positive come out of another instalment of British capital’s election farce? Well, 41 percent of those eligible to vote on 7 June turned their backs on it altogether. The representatives of capitalism and the media have done no end of moaning about our “apathy”, but then, of course, they are never going to give workers the credit that we might actually have seen through capitalist political “democracy”. So, maybe we can talk of rejection rather than apathy. But are there any positive challenges or alternatives coming from the working class?

Any readers from the Bristol area will have seen the posters and stickers stating “Nobody Cares” and “Vote Nobody”. Well, on 3 May (the date council elections were originally meant to take place) people in the Easton area of the city did indeed really have the chance to “Vote Nobody”. Thousands of forms were delivered ahead of an “election” held at Easton community centre, where those voting had a choice on the question “who do you want to run Easton?” between Bristol City Council and “Nobody”. 150 local people participated, with the result being Council – 5, “Nobody”– 145. The Nobody campaign then “derecognised” the council and invited people to meet on Thursdays at the community centre, at an assembly where they could discuss local issues. There are now a few “You are now entering free Easton” signs to be seen around the area.

As reported in the Big Issue South West (April 30–May 6 edition): “We’re telling people to ‘Vote Nobody’ for two reasons,” said campaign spokesman ‘Nobby O’body’.

“Firstly, we want to ridicule the idea that democracy is working. Democracy isn’t about ticking a box every four years to choose between a few cloned candidates whose manifestos say almost exactly the same thing. Secondly, on a more serious level, if the council is failing local people, we believe that the community has a right to say that it doesn’t recognise the council’s authority any more”. (The Vote Nobody campaign can be accessed at: http://uk.geocities.com/votenobody)

The “Nobody” team then went on to encourage people pissed off with the political con-game to express themselves by writing “Nobody” across ballot papers in the general election on 7 June. Spoilt ballot papers? Sound familiar?

Yes, in this respect there is more than a little common ground between the Socialist Party and the Nobody team in the elections just gone. We were both saying, if you are opposed to all the political con-merchants and the capitalist interests for which they stand – why vote for any of them? Why not vote for yourself, for a change, rather than just saying “voting changes nothing”? Why not vote “Nobody”? Or, better still, as we support the use of the vote as a potential revolutionary form of political expression, write “world socialism” across your ballot paper?

Both the world socialist campaign and “Nobody” rejected all the parties of capital. And, in the case of the 3 May Easton “referendum”, the Nobody campaign was perhaps tentatively exploring the sort of community/workers’ councils embodying direct working class democracy that would be vital in any future social and political movement for socialism. In our case though we are slightly more specific that this must be accompanied by electoral action to win control of parliament for the revolutionary working class. This in order to neutralise the capitalist state and its forces of repression, express the revolutionary desire of the working class majority and formally dismantle capitalism and its state apparatus. These, of course, are questions and situations for the future. But at least we have seen in Bristol, for any criticisms that could be made, a positive reaction to the evident failure of capitalist politics of all shades to work in the interest of the working class and their communities.

Local Socialist Party comrades delivered our own “anti-capitalist guide to the general election” leaflets to homes in Easton, putting our case for the rejection of capitalism’s election charade and for the rejection of the capitalist system entire – and for self-organisation to build a free society based on the principle of from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs. So let’s put self-emancipation and the abolition of capitalism on the agenda. Let’s vote for ourselves for a change, and act for ourselves for a change – turning “apathy” into positive action.

Ben Malcolm

“Money na hand before the chop” (2001)

From the July 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

For many years we have read about hunger in Africa. Newspaper headlines and television news have been saturated with gruesome scenes of corpses; and pictures of emaciated women and children standing helplessly before NGO officials waiting for food to be doled out to them. Sudan, Burundi, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia have all experienced famine unparalleled in the history of the continent for the past forty years. Again we have seen statistics that show more than 800 million of our fellow humans suffering from chronic malnutrition; that on any day 1.3 million will go without food.

While these statistics are extremely shocking we can still find governments that pursue policies that are nothing less than obscene – ordering the destruction of food and paying farmers to take land out of production in order that prices can be kept high. The June 1999 issue of the European Voice, for instance, reported that the EU Agriculture Commissioner Franz Fischler was expected to propose a doubling of the proportion of arable land to be left uncultivated. Experts predicted that he was going to put forward a proposal to set aside 10 percent of land in the 1999 season, because the 5 percent level in previous years had failed to prevent soaring cereal production, causing a sharp drop in European Union market prices. This, according to the experts, forced the institution to buy in large amounts of surplus wheat and barley at guaranteed prices. Surplus stocks stood at about 15 million tonnes. “We estimate that if this rate of 5 percent is carried over into the next year, they will rise to 25 million tonnes,” Franz Fischler said. If this is not abominable what else can it be?

The Roman Catholic Church, charity organisations and NGOs may do their bit to soothe the pangs of hunger, by distributing milk powder, yellow corn and beans here and there. This would not be bad. But their work would not be addressing the fundamental cause of hunger. They would only be treating the symptoms of a malignant tumour which has deeper roots. The problem is the capitalist system of production whose article of faith is “money na hand before chop” (pay before you eat). It is a system many governments believe can be made to run in the interest of all, i.e. of both rich and poor alike. Thus the New Patriotic Party in Ghana refers to building a prosperous nation by creating wealth and sharing on the basis of private capital. The question is, is it possible to abolish hunger when a tiny minority own the means of production? In other words, is it possible to abolish hunger under the global profit system? The answer for me is no.

Need to make a profit

The fundamental reason for capitalist production is to produce for the market with a view to making profit. This overriding interest in profit does not change, no matter in which economic sector production is carried out. In agriculture, production is not carried out because people need food. Of course needs are not completely ruled out in the process of capitalist production. They are met albeit inadequately for the producers and more than sufficiently for the owning class, otherwise human society would perish. The point, however, is that this is marginal to the main focus of the market economic system, which is the accumulation of capital. But capitalist enterprises can only accumulate capital if they stay competitive by adding value to their products. So the market is also important in the capitalist system of production because profits can only be realised from a commodity if it is sold in a market and converted to money. It is also the reason why enterprises would go full hog to hoodwink people through deceptive adverts in order to sell their products even if they are shoddy and injurious to the health of the consumer. Most of these profits are then reinvested in production so increasing the size of the capital the enterprise controls. This is an imperative that is imposed on all capitalist enterprises by their competitive struggle for profits. In this competition capitalists are not reluctant to use the most base methods of survival – forgery, swindles, bribery, lies and extortion. Capitalists become like a pack of wolves wrangling over the prey – anytime ready to tear each other by the throat. Emile Zola, a French writer, put this dog-eat-dog scenario in perspective when he said:

“In these battles for money, secret and vile, where the weak are disembowelled, there are no longer bonds, kinship or friendship. It is the cruel principle of the strong, who eat others or else they will be eaten themselves” (L’argent, Francois Bernaud, Paris 1928, pp.339-40).

An irrational and cruel system such as capitalism is not a productive and distributive system concerned to ensure that bellies are full. Food is not produced because people need it to survive, but because the owners of land other means of production need to make profit. Also, no account would also be taken of whatever method is used to produce such food, i.e. whether it is ruinous to the environment or not. Chemical fertilisers and pesticides are used in agriculture, animals injected with hormones, and fertile lands used to grow coffee and tobacco instead of millet or maize. One’s ability to access food is through ownership and money. Amartya Sen underscored this point in a study he undertook for the ILO when he pointed out that starvation is a function of entitlements and not of food availability.

In the developed capitalist countries of Western Europe people get money to pay for their food in two ways. They either milk other people or allow themselves to be milked, depending on the position they occupy in relation to the means of production. So one’s ability to eat and make a choice of what one wants to eat depends on money. This is a property claim in that the exchange of money for food is a property transaction involving the exchange of equivalent values.

In underdeveloped countries like Ghana, Ethiopia and Bangladesh, the situation is not exactly the same. There is a category of people that can have access to food without necessarily selling their labour output to others. Such people can have access to food without money because they directly own and work the land. But, here again, one realises some concurrence between what pertains in the sense that it is either ownership or non-ownership of the means of production that determines the ability of a person to have access to food. There are others according to Amartya Sen whose ownership arise from money obtained from petty trading. The loud noises made about the scarcity of food is not entirely justified. There is a lot of food in Ghana and most other developing countries; but the fundamental problem is whether the propertyless masses can afford to pay for it.

No solution within market system

With the opening of the Ghanaian economy to unbridled market forces, the market stalls are stocked with a variety of food items – burgers, cheese, honey, ham, frogs’ legs, etc; but the poor can only cast desirous looks at them and pass by. In spite of the glaring inequalities and obvious contradictions in the market system, the New Patriotic Party government and other governments in Africa, together with imperialists frontal organisations like the IMF and World Bank believe that it can work in the interest of all – poor and rich alike.

Whether this type of thinking is born out of a genuine lack of understanding of how the capitalist system works is not the main thrust of this article. What is of concern is whether the market system can solve the perennial food shortages that continue to affect hundreds of millions of people in Africa and other parts of the world, including those in the capitalist metropolis. The myth surrounding the capability of the capitalist system to feed the hungry and abolish hunger was demythologised many years ago when Henry Kissinger made a promise to the world food summit that this was indeed possible. At the time there were 400 million chronically malnourished, a 75-million increase over the previous ten years. Yet Kissinger had an almost sanguine expectation that this would happen. He swore world hunger would be eradicated without considering the eradication of the most fundamental cause of the problem – capitalism. Twenty years after Kissinger’s promise the situation has more than worsened. The number of poor and hungry people has since doubled; and experts believe that not even the best of efforts could improve the situation in the next thirty or so years.

Many more years to come we will continue to witness many more of such summits and conferences all purporting to examine the phenomenon of global hunger and find lasting solutions to it. A lot of bilge will be thrown up as solutions to the problems, but you can bet the last coin in your pocket that no remedy will be found. This would not be because there is no solution. It would be because there is one solution which is distasteful and horrifying to governments whose role is to facilitate the running of the capitalist state machine. It is socialism.

Adongo Aidan Avugma

Socialist election result (2001)

Party News from the July 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party contested one seat in the General Election, Jarrow. The result was:

Hepburn (Lab) 22, 777; Selby (LD) 5,182; Wood (Con) 5,056; Badger (UKiP) 716; Le Blond (Ind) 391; Bissett (Soc) 357.

The turnout at 54.6% was 14.2% down on 1997.

So in fact the abstentions — 28,000 — outnumbered the votes of the winning candidate.

Capital study group (2001)

Party News from the July 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

We will soon be restarting our studies of Karl Marx's seminal work, Das Kapital. And we'll be starting from the beginning of Volume 1, so you've not missed anything.

Please note that these study groups are very popular and are often booked up weeks in advance. To avoid disappointment, ring to save your place NOW.

Tel Stuart on 07785 106*** or email: stuart_commie@yahoo.co.uk

Letter: "Does the Socialist Party applaud the Scottish postal workers? . . . (2001)"

Letter to the Editors from the July 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

Considering myself a socialist postal worker, I wish to direct your readers’ attention to an aspect of a recent mail strike.

Re-acting to the Post Office’s “slap across the wrist” disciplining of a manager, guilty of sexually harassing a 16-year-old postwoman, the entire Glasgow mail ground to a halt as postal workers came out on wildcat strikes.

Now, what struck me, as a socialist, was the sense of solidarity that has developed, after many years’ experience of industrial action, amongst postal workers. As is the custom, regardless of whether official or unofficial, all mail from Glasgow was blacked, a tactic to foil any Royal Mail attempt to move mail around the country to isolate and defeat a strike-bound office. It is illegal secondary action under the statutes, but the Post Office rarely challenges the refusal to handle blacked mail. On this occasion, however, and no doubt, as a result of their success in forcing through the “way forward” productivity deal, Royal Mail tried to divert letters to Edinburgh who subsequently went out on strike too.

Once again, postal workers have demonstrated the strength of industrial solidarity and expressed a spirit, nobly cited by Anton Pannekoek in Workers’ Councils:

“Direct action means action of the workers themselves without the intermediary of trade union officers…The first and most important task is to propaganda to expand the strike…Capitalists know or feel this quite well and so the only inducement to concessions is the fear that the strike might spread universally…”

Also in his “Ethics And Socialism” article:

“The workers could not be made to understand what wrong they had committed by stopping work for a day in support of a group of workers at war with their employers. The bourgeois journalists argued along these lines:…to go on strike for others through solidarity! (sheer madness, indeed…).”

Does the Socialist Party applaud the Scottish postal workers, as I do?

Alan Johnstone, 

Livingston

Reply: 

Yes, even if we don’t share Pannekoek’s view that unofficial, wildcat strikes are always best. As far as we are concerned, any strike to improve conditions or stop them getting worse, official or unofficial, legal or illegal, is all right as long as it is democratically decided and run by those involved. Full-time trade union officials should be the servants of their members, not their bosses as is so often the case today – Editors.

Ending child slavery (2001)

From the July 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Today’s world is fraught with deliberate distortions. This is why it is not unusual for NGOs, governments and the powers-that-be to, once in a while, pick on a banal issue and carefully weave a web of heart-breaking propaganda around it. This is done with the aim of covering up the reality and at the same time to arouse the fellow-feeling instincts of candid individuals to donate money. Last May the world was treated to such an episodic storm-in-a-teacup by an NGO-based in the Republic of Benin in West Africa.

This time around it was a big noise about an ageing ship which was not seaworthy carrying, according to the NGO, about 450 underage children to be sold into slavery in Gabon. These kids were allegedly bought in Togo and Benin. When about a week or two later the ship was tracked down, it was found out that there were actually about 40 youth in it. Only a few were underage, and many were accompanied by their relatives. I do not deny that human trafficking exists nor do I dispute the fact that the Benin slave ship incident was a case of child slavery. However, as will be explained presently there was gross exaggeration involved and, more importantly, virtually nothing was said about the nature, causes and remedies, to such a hideous phenomenon.

The nature of child slavery

Child slavery (and also adult slavery) is not a new phenomenon in the world (not only in Africa). The incidence of this cruel activity takes place in two main forms. In the first place there is the crude aspect of it where the child becomes the property of the rich owner. This is mostly found in Sudan, Mauritania and other North African countries. It is also practised in Ghana among the Ewe tribe (of former President Jerry Rawlings). It is called the “Trokosi”. However unlike the Trokosi system is based on culture and tradition, in North Africa mainly blacks are forcibly ceased and turned into slaves. The case of the victims of the Benin slave ship of those children who were being sent from Ghana to Gambia to work in the fishing industry (that controlled by some Ghanaian fishermen living in Gambia or even those children providing slave labour in cocoa or coffee plantations in West Africa are usually “sold” out by parents and relatives and mostly not for good. (See Daily Observer, Gambia, 10 May.)

The second, mild, type appears in the shape of such euphemistic terms as “maid”, “babysitter” etc. This category involves mostly females. These are children from impoverished homes who are supposedly employed by the more affluent families. But it is the conditions under which they work that betray the slavery relations – they find themselves in: they are mercilessly underpaid; they work throughout the day. Those who are made to sleep with the family they work for do not have “working hours”. As long as there is something to be done, they have to do no matter the time. But what is more pathetic is that they are often targets of sexual abuse either by the man or his sons. They are also subjected to verbal and physical assaults. This system is very widespread in the Senegambia region and among the Arabs.

In fact many of those making noises about child slavery keep maids. This abuse of children’s rights as regards their exploitation by the owners of wealth can also be seen in the so-called civilised world. Notice for instance the case of over half-a-million schoolchildren working illegally with many playing truant to do for just a pittance. (See “Voice from the back”, Socialist Standard, May.)

Why?

Many people may not be able to figure out how in this modern age people can indulge in slavery or, worse still, willingly offer their loved ones for sale. These people are so sympathetically touched that they cannot imagine the cause of such inhumanity. On the other hand those rabble-rousing on child slavery fail to highlight the causes, most of the time for obvious reasons.

But one thing very certain is that almost all those engaged in slavery (in all its forms) are Christians, muslims or believers for that matter. Under normal circumstances these slavers would not do any harm to fellow human beings especially innocent children. So if these people irreligiously defy the holy books and perpetrate such wickedness, then it is obviously for a reason more important than religion. And that is money, profit. The system in operation throughout the world today is based on money. Without money one cannot live. Consequently anything that one can do to have money is “normal”. Even religious leaders (Christian, Muslim, etc) will use every underhand tactic to extort money from their mostly impoverished followers, and without any pity; businessmen and women will tell every lie just to make profits, etc.

This world, as it is now, is controlled by those who own big money and the means of living. They use their wealth to form political parties which, when in power, rule on behalf of the owners. Since the rich make their money by exploiting the masses through their (the rich) control of the means of production and distribution of wealth, the ruling parties or governments act in the interest of the party owners. In the process, the masses are neglected since social wealth is appropriated by the few and rich party owners. Left with nothing to eat, a starving man or woman can easily (out of dire necessity) give out a child in exchange for food (reflected as money). This is what pertains not only in Africa but also in especially Asia and Latin America.

In the same vein, others knowing what such possibilities exist will take advantage of the situation and get involved as agents just to enhance their access to a continuous flow of money and thus food. Thus child slavery is real business (money – commodity – money) which is capitalism in practice.

In mid-May, in the wake of the Benin slave ship saga, government officials from Ghana and La Côte d’Ivoire flew to England to discuss the problems in the cocoa and coffee industries. The issue was apparently sparked off by the news of the Benin slave ship. The discussions highlighted among other things the fact that chocolate industries in Europe and America reaped all the profits whilst the poor cocoa farmers experienced lower and lower incomes. Such a phenomenon, they said, naturally leads to the search for cost-effective methods of production. This is a euphemism for the use of child slave labour in cocoa and coffee plantations. Thus the whole issue is making money, profit.

What is to be done?

In extolling their usefulness to society, NGOs and their ilk often claim that they sensitise the world community on problems or that they expose the problem to the whole world. This, to an extent may be true. But invariably it is done more to attract funds for their organisations than to seek solutions to the problems. A clear case of making money out of other’s misery. And that is exactly why most of the time they exaggerate or blow issues out of proportion.

However experience has proved that attempts to correct “injustice” in the world can never be attained by pursuing single-issue matters like talking to people about child slavery. Child slavery is only one of the symptoms of the disease confronting mankind. Call it the profit system or the rule of money or capitalism. Tackling child slavery is thus like trying to treat the symptom of a disease and leaving the disease intact. So the NGO and those agencies and governments who keep crying foul constitute in the main a dubious business entity. They solicit for funds from the two antagonistic sections of society: they are spawned by the rich to enhance exploitation by soothing the pains of the poor; and they also take from the poor (especially through contributions from taxes levied by states) to keep them (the poor) immersed in poverty.

In furtherance of such objectives governments, NGOs and other such groups facilitating exploitation of man by man, easily come up with farcical and indeed nonsensical solutions to such issues. Consider for example the suspension by a German football team of the owner of the Nigerian-registered vessel involved in the shipping of the child slaves from Benin to Gabon. The owner, a Nigerian professional footballer in Germany may rather use as a pretext his suspension or even total expulsion to get more deeply involved in child trafficking (if he personally did take part in the matter at all). Such solutions are hypocritical and complete non-starters.

Again, just around the time the Benin slave ship episode was unfolding, the BBC’s Focus On Africa programme carried a news item on a proposed trip to Sudan by the world-famous musician Michael Jackson to assess the issue of child slavery there. Paradoxically Jackson himself was alleged to have been accused before a law court of sexually abusing a little boy. The case was however settled out of court. Such is the double standards of this money-infested system that the rich who are seen to be solving problems are actually those causing them.

Child slavery like poverty, illiteracy, disease, war, hunger, corruption and all the misery afflicting the human race have one thing in common – they result from (the use of) money. Before I explain the relationship between these tribulations and money, one point will have to be noted. That is that a wrong notion is preached by the ideologues of the present system (who of course formulate and control public opinion) that human needs are unlimited whilst resources are limited. Therefore only those who have money can meet their needs. This kind of misinformation is wicked and malicious. On the contrary money is the root cause of all the woes we live with. A few examples will suffice here.

The most important human need is food. Available records indicate that world food production is far higher than the quantity required to go round all mankind. However because of money food is locked away in huge quantities just to make super profits in the form of money from those who have it. In fact sometimes they callously dump food into the sea or even refuse to cultivate arable land. This, just to maintain high prices.

Another problem facing mankind is sickness. The pharmaceutical industry is so advanced that enough drugs and medicines can be produced to prevent and cure most illnesses. Yet this will never be done and people will continue to die because they cannot afford medicines as these are manufactured and locked up in drug-stores reserved only for the few who can pay. The recent lawsuit brought by the South African government against some western pharmaceutical companies on the issue of HIV/AIDS medicines is a typical example of inhumanity of money. The owners of the companies may publicly declare that they help mankind, yet when it comes to their money and profit they refuse to allow cheap drugs to be produced for sick people who cannot afford the expensive ones they produce for the rich. One could go on and on.

Thus until the money factor is eliminated and in its place, a system based on free access is practised, child slavery; child soldiers, mass murders; war; want and deprivation, etc will continue to live with us.

The question now is: how can mankind attain this money-free society of free and equal access to goods and services? Part of the wealth bequeathed to us by those who preceded us in this world is written records of how society came about, underwent changes and how we can improve upon our life today. Marx, Engels, William Morris, etc are some of such thinkers. People who agree that there is something wrong with our society will have to acquaint themselves with the literature that these precursors have put down and lots more by others who think on the same lines. Once people understand these theories of change then they may want them implemented for the benefit of mankind and together we can make a change.

Suhuyini

Greasy Pole: High Noon In Southall (2001)

The Greasy Pole column from the July 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ealing was once known, by those who were adept at ignoring the large chunks of serious impoverishment there, as the Queen of the Suburbs. As might be expected of a place with so impressive a name, it regularly returned Conservative MPs to the Commons. It’s all changed now though; other bits of west London have been tacked on to the original area and all three of the recast constituencies elect Labour MPs. The safest of them is Ealing Southall, at the western end of the area, where the sitting MP is Piara Khabra.

Southall was a railway town and there is very little left from how it was before Brunel pushed through the line to the west. The railway brought immigrants from Wales and Ireland, to work in the factories which sprang up along the line. It was not the railways which brought the Asians, in the 1950s; the first of them were recruited by a rubber factory which had difficulty in persuading the locals to work in its sulphurous confines. Few of the Asians who came then thought they were making a lifetime commitment; they imagined making enough quick money to set themselves up to go back to the place they called home. It didn’t happen like that and the population of Southall is now about 50 per cent of Asian origin – the second largest in the country.

Piara Khabra has been the local MP since 1992. Before that it was Sydney Bidwell, who had emigrated from the Revolutionary Communist Party when they disbanded and advised their members to infiltrate the Labour Party. Towards the end of his time in the Commons Bidwell seemed to be not entirely in touch with reality, although that was not what caused him to be de-selected. Khabra had long been prominent and influential locally, through being chair of the Indian Workers’ Association (Southall is teeming with community support organisations), a local councillor and so on. There was a flood of new members into the local Labour Party, which simply washed Bidwell away. Miserably, hopelessly, he stood against Khabra as “True Labour” – there were rumours that he did this only to qualify for his ex-MP’s pension – but got only 4,665 votes against Khabra’s 23,476.

Swing

In 1997, in tune with the rest of the country, Khabra tightened his grip on the seat. By then there was no Bidwell, who had retired with his revolutionary delusions and his pension and Khabra benefitted from a 15.1 per cent swing against the Tories, racking up an astonishing 32,791votes and, at 21,423, the country’s second largest Labour majority. In some ways this was surprising because the constituency boundaries had been extended eastwards to include older, posher parts of Ealing more accustomed to voting Conservative. But of course that was an exceptional time, with widespread anger against the sleaze and complacency of the Tories, their in-fighting and arrogance. A lot of voters really thought that things could only get better. But in Southall that was not the whole story for there was disquiet, not about Khabra holding the seat but about him being the Labour candidate in the first place.

For some time Southall has claimed to be the largest constituency Labour Party in the country. Of course this could mean that it is populated by people who have carefully examined the party’s policies and decided that these are in tune with their own principles. If that were true the place would surely be unique. Before Khabra ousted Bidwell there was some restlessness in the party – and outside it – about all those new members and about how genuine many of them were – or even whether some of them actually existed. At one stage Khabra faced a legal challenge from Valerie Vaz, sister of the embattled ex-minister Keith Vaz (who was rumoured to have tried to help rig the selection procedure against Khabra) but this came to nothing. Perhaps it is merely a coincidence that Valerie Vaz – who, as a forceful, articulate lawyer and media presenter could be expected to be picked out for a plum Labour seat – has only ever been nominated for more hopeless prospects such as Twickenham. Recently, for example, she was considered to be the front runner for the by-election in Betty Boothroyd’s old constituency of West Bromwich West but Labour headquarters had other ideas.

Ineffective

So far Khabra has shrugged off all the opposition to him; “I have been misrepresented in the press,” he said just before the election “but that doesn’t bother me, nothing does”. But with the approach of this year’s election the opposition against him has gathered strength as an electable rival came on the scene with the resources to air popular criticisms about him. Khabra has an established reputation as one of the most inactive and ineffective MPs, who is reliably evident only when he sits behind Tony Blair at Prime Minister’s Questions, which gives him some valuable TV coverage. Occasionally he stirs into action, as he did in 1993 when he tabled a Ten Minute Bill to legalise voluntary euthenasia only to withdraw it at the last minute. In February this year he asked a question which conveniently enabled Paul Boateng, who was then a minister in the Home Office, to give some detail about the planned enquiry into the coroner system. In December 2000 he wrote to Foreign Secretary Robin Cook in support of the Hinduja brothers’ resistance to being extradited for investigation in India over an arms-sale scandal. In the light of recent events, this was not entirely wise of him. (Cook promised “full consular support” for the Hindujas).

Meanwhile there has been a burgeoning discontent in the constituency about local problems – traffic congestion, crime, decay and a massive heroin problem among young people. In face of this Khhabra has been hard put to detail any intervention on his part which has been to any degree effective. The local Socialist Labour Party (of course, hardly an objective observer) calls him “congenitally demented” and rages at his “self-seeking careerism…his inability to be even an effective bourgeoise politician…” One constituent old the AsianXpress newspaper : I’ve never seen Mr. Khabra but I know of him and all the scams he’s done over the years”. And on 15 February this year the Daily Telegraph put the boot in:

“Piara Khabra…confirmed himself as surely this Parliament’s weakest performer…His question was near inaudible and his delivery laughably weak. Perhaps because he is Indian, or perhaps because he is old, the House listened to him with a straight face. How patronising. Mr Khabra deserved a loud and long raspberry. If he cannot lift his game he should make way for someone better.”

Stranglehold

And when it came to the elecetion there was someone who claimed to be better. Avtar Lit is a Labour supporter, the multi-millionnaire owner of Sunrise Radio whose personal fortune is put at £60 million. “Money,” he said recently, “to me isn’t everything “. . . and then again “I am known as a man of the people”. Lit complained about Khabra’s “strangelehold” on the local selection process and the MP’s “dismal record . . . an insult to the people who elected him”. On the basis of a rather dubious opinion poll, which may not have been any more valid that all those Khabra recruits, Lit claimed that he was about to be elected, after which he would join the Labour Party.

But on the day he managed only a little less than 6,000 votes, to Khabra’s 22,239 which gave a comfortable majority of 13,683. As the evening wore on the bundles of votes for each candidate were in lines on the central table, with Khabra’s stretching far beyond all the others. There was little perceptible difference between Lit’s votes and those for the Tory, whose startlingly young face settled into a bewildered despondency as he contemplated the humiliation facing him. Towards the end a group of Khabra supporters filtered into the room. They were large, groomed men wearing immaculate turbans, exuding influence and privilege and the expectation of always getting their own way. They cheered dutifully – but restrainedly – when Khabra was announced as the winner but it was a fair bet that at the same time they were calculating how best they could do to him what he did to Bidwell – and what advantage they would get from it. These are probably the men Lit will have to best if he is to get the seat.

So Piara Khabra, who says he is 76 years old but who may be 80 or more, is back in the Commons for another spell – four years or maybe five – to hang on to his position and to “represent” the people of Ealing Southall. This is the very essence of capitalism’s politics—the politicians denying the truth of their impotence while they cynically manoeuvre to keep themselves in power and so the system in being.

Ivan

50 Years Ago: War and Socialism (2001)

The 50 Years Ago column from the July 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Sunday Express on May 20th. 1951, reported that a “United Nations curtain of guns, armour and planes today battered massed Chinese assaults and thwarted attempts to make major breaches in the Allied line.”

Did you read that? If you did, we expect you have forgotten it already. But we do not forget. Later the report says that, “the United Nations forces were still killing scores of Chinese for every Allied casualty.” How glibly do our newspapers speak of the loss of working-class life. They are glad that large numbers of Chinese should be slaughtered. We are not. We are sorrowful. These Chinese are our class brothers. True, they speak a different language, wear different clothes, eat different food, but underneath it all they are members of our class, the working-class. The struggle being fought out in Korea is not their struggle. Whoever wins, their conditions will remain the same — poverty and struggle.

In Korea the scene is being set for the next major world conflict. Who controls Korea will control a large part of Asia. Korea belongs neither to us nor to the Chinese who are dying there. Brothers of the working-class, isn’t it time we stopped this insane slaughter? Korea is but a picture in miniature of what is to come. Then millions and millions will die. The last war cost probably 40,000,000 lives. The next one may cost more.

There is only one way to stop wars and that is to establish socialism. Don’t tell us that that will take a longtime. How long it takes depends on you. You can hasten it or delay it. There can be no doubt that it will come. We need it, the working-class of the world needs it. Join with us and help bring it about.

(An article by Groves from the Socialist Standard, July 1951)

Naturally greedy? (2001)

Book Review from the July 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Socialists’ Guide for the 21st Century. By Jack Grassby. TUPS books, 2001.

In this 150-page book which sets out to “attempt to clarify what socialism means at the beginning of the 21st century” Jack Grassby shows himself well-disposed towards the Socialist Party. He devotes a whole page to reproducing our object and declaration of principles, and another page to a factual summary of our history and policy. Unfortunately he also devotes lesser space but similar tacit approval to nine other “socialist” parties and groups.

Grassby understands that “the SPGB…are totally opposed to the idea of a revolutionary vanguard and hold to the necessity of the working class capturing control of national and local government by democratic means leading to the overthrow of the capitalist system”. Yet he deplores the fact that “the SPGB and the SWP exemplify current divisions in the revolutionary socialist parties”. He faces both ways on which “division” to support: “It will be necessary for a political vanguard to break through the conditioning of the working class. However, experience of political vanguards has shown the dangers of elitism, authoritarianism and exploitation”.

Grassby shows himself to be rather gullible on the question of “human nature”. After quoting Peter Jay’s assertion that “after sex, wealth is the second great passion”, he declares that “it is clear that greed and selfishness are part of our genetic inheritance, and that capitalism meets that predisposition”. In a chapter that approves rather than critically examines the views of “sociobiology”, he questions whether human nature (he means human behaviour) “can be changed to become uniformly selfless, generous and just”. He also believes that “it is necessary to accept that rebellion and dissent belong to our genetic inheritance and will be difficult to eradicate or change”.

In a concluding chapter Grassby paints human nature as both a good guy and a bad guy: “We are genetically predisposed to fairness and altruism and co-operation – as well as to greed and selfishness and competition”. Obviously, he is over-influenced by recent questionable claims of status-quo supporting geneticists. In fact humans have a far greater capacity for acquired behaviour than any other animal. There is nothing in our biological make-up to prevent us living in a socialist world.

Stan Parker

The West Wing (2001)

TV Review from the July 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The West Wing arrived from America as a successful US television show depicting life behind the scenes in the White House, setting out to show the way the White House really works, the “so far unrevealed dedication of these hitherto unpublicised workers and their efforts to keep the president and presidential office functioning”. As a show it is fast, slick, articulate and witty. It is highly watchable TV. Does it tell you anything about the reality behind the scenes other than the exact reproductions (we are assured) of the White House interior and furniture? You would be very unwise to believe much, if anything of the relationships shown or of the presidency. It's highly glamorised fiction designed to bolster the image of the presidency and reassure an American public that this is how democracy works. As such it is merely another example of the age-old myth surrounding the beneficent presence of the great in power. Yes Minister it ain't. But it is very cleverly done.

The staff come across as warm, caring and intensely loyal to the president in whom there is absolutely no trace of a Nixon, a Kennedy, a Reagan or a Clinton or in fact to any president going back to George Washington. This president has no faults other than a few endearing minor characteristics. And he is educated: he reads Latin!

But credibility is sought by having his staff display recognisable human weaknesses from time to time. The president's adviser and close personal friend has been disclosed as a recovered alcoholic and drug addict (nothing more potent than Valium) and has to come clean. The president himself has been revealed as a long-term sufferer from Multiple Sclerosis which he never let on to even his closest friend because he wanted to be president so much. This is about the extent of any flaws revealed so far. Not a sign of sleaze anywhere. As Queen Victoria would have said, “So unlike our own dear parliament.”

More credible is the way that government is shown to work by balancing minority interests one against another. To stay in power it doesn't pay to upset too many people, especially if they represent big business interests. The president is shown as being bitterly opposed to owning guns (by ordinary people that it, not by his armed forces) and he has to use all sorts of pressures and trade all sorts of offers to get his Bill through Congress. It starts to get unbelievable when at the last minute he has to revoke his nearly final appointment of a Supreme Court judge when it's discovered that the judge does not support the right of the individual to keep their private life private and to not allow such devices as bugging to have the force of law. Oh horror! This contravenes the Constitution as laid down by the founding fathers and cannot be allowed. The whole team is shocked, and a last minute substitute (who just happens to be Mexican) is appointed. Similar liberal sentiments abound and one gets the feeling that there is an element of propagandising in all this in an attempt to teach the American public how to think.

It is not only in the USA of course that the role of government is believed to be that of looking after the people who vote for them. It is probable that most people believe that that is what government is for and they record a vote acting under such a belief. It is even possible that there are politicians who believe this and they try to act accordingly. This is a delusion the reality being that government throughout the capitalist world acts to maintain capitalism and usually tries to favour the interests of one group of capitalist interests. Even given the remote possibility that a government may be elected that genuinely tries to represent the majority the realities of administering a market system soon teaches them otherwise. The idea that things go wrong just because politicians are corrupt is too simplistic and leads to the conclusion if only we can get this lot out and another lot in who are honest, things might get better. This is the “if only” attitude and can never work, not because there will never be any honest politicians but because politicians are unable to change the system. A properly-run society – socialism – must be brought about and run by the majority, from below, and can never be imposed from the top, just as capitalism, a system that is constructed to serve the interests of the few, can never serve the interests of the many.

And of course in a land where to run for president, or any public office can cost millions in campaigning and where those millions mostly come from those who have millions, the priority obligation of the president, and his government is to pay back those millionaire supporters. In other words the function of government in the US just as in all governments wherever they are to serve the interests of a class, the capitalist class. The West Wing is romanticised wish fulfilment fantasy, feeding the desire to believe that somehow, somewhere, someone up there is looking after us. A dangerous belief, but it can be interesting viewing to see just how they manipulate us.

Cyril Evans

The fall and fall of the Labour Party (2001)

Book Review from the July 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Strange Eventful History: Democratic Socialism in Britain. By Edmund Dell, Harper Collins, 2000.

Last year's centenary of the foundation of the Labour Representation Committee led to a number of histories of the Labour movement being published. Edmund Dell's was one such, steering away from the more self-congratulatory tone of some of the other offerings. In fact it is an excellent account of the Labour Party written by an ex-Labour MP and Cabinet member.

Clearly describing the limitations of Labour in government, Dell takes the reader through the main political currents of the Labour movement from its inception to New Labour. From the Webbs and Keir Hardie through MacDonald, G.D.H. Cole, R.H. Tawney, Harold Laski, Evan Durbin, Bevin, Attlee, Cripps, Bevan and co., to Gaitskill, Crosland, Wilson, Callaghan, Jenkins, Healey, Benn and Foot, up to Kinnock, Hattersley, Brown, Blair and Mandleson – from Labour's claim to be able to advance to what it called socialism (basically state-managed capitalism) through the control of political power, through to Attlee's partially nationalising government beset by currency concerns, Wilson's liberal and state welfare extending government which was also beset by currency crises and inflation. Callaghan's government which ended Labour's commitment to full employment and attempts at Keynesian economic management in the face of an insupportable borrowing requirement, to Kinnock, Smith and Blair's final rejection of anything that might be considered at odds to the interests of capital. All the way the leaders tried to drag the membership away from any hope that Labour could deliver anything much different from any other party managing capitalism.

Time and failure led the Labour Party:

"further from socialism [state capitalism] and nearer to, and eventually beyond , the acceptance of capitalism ... Starting often from a far left, or even Marxist, orientation, they would move through a series of third ways from left to right, from radical intentions to an acceptance of capitalism modified only by a wish to root-out its greater evils. In many cases even the wish to undertake serious reform disappeared."

Dell tells the story as the critical insider, having gone to the Labour Party, via the “Communist” Party in the 1930s, from business as a manager for ICI and being unconvinced of the core of “Old” Labour political economy:

"My experience of industrial management made me sceptical of the practicality of traditional socialism [state capitalism], and of economic planning. But I regarded the Labour party as the humane party and I did not feel that to remain a member I had to endorse Clause Four which, in any case, seemed no longer an expression of serious Labour intentions."

What exactly Dell did endorse is never clear as, despite persistent attacks on the gap between Labour's aims, ideas and reality and on the personalities of the Labour movement, he remained a member of the Wilson and Callaghan governments and later joined the Liberal-SDP Alliance in the 1980s. Perhaps he stayed a Labour member as a humanitarian or some such but at any rate, very early on in the book, Dell declares that because the Labour Party failed to bring about a socialist society, socialism is also dead:

"As a new form of society, socialism was never a practical project in Britain. Democratic socialism was a mirage, beautiful in the eyes of the beholder, but beyond reach. The hope that by democratic means one form of society, capitalism, could be replaced by another, socialism, proved to be nothing other than one of the more striking human self-deceptions ... the insurmountable obstacle to democratic socialism was democracy, and democracy would have killed socialism's chances in Britain even unassisted by the ineptitude of successive Labour governments in managing the economy."

Nationalisation not socialism ...

It certainly is the case that socialism cannot be arrived at through electing Labour governments. It is also the case that the Labour Party was created only to represent trade unions (never particularly radical) in parliament and that when Labour adopted “socialism” in the form of Clause Four in 1918, it was only support for nationalisation of the means of production (of the so-called “commanding heights” of the economy). Quite what Labour hoped to achieve by bringing industry under state instead of private ownership was not very clear apart from vague and fuzzy ends of “greater equality” and centralised planning these were apparently going to transform capitalism into something that could be controlled by the state (via the myriad economists and managers that had an interest in perpetuating the myth that their expertise was all that was required for growth and prosperity). This, surprisingly enough, didn't happen. On transferring coal, steel, iron, fuel, power and transport to state ownership (with weighty compensation to their previous owners), after 1945 the performance of British industry in the world market still remained declining and working conditions remained mostly unaltered for those employed by the state sector. Indeed, Dell notes:

"Nationalisation was a technocratic act, placing industries under the control of managers thought better capable of running them than their predecessors, though they were often the same persons."

The remarkable blind faith of the Labour Party in nationalisation began its decline from the Attlee government. And this decline in the faith of nationalisation as somehow moving towards a new society is associated, not just by Dell, as being the death of socialism. There are still a few in the Labour Party and in the ranks of the hotchpotch of Trotskyists, Leninists and “Old” Labour in the so-called Socialist Alliance who would still claim that it was not nationalisation that was at fault but Morrisonian nationalisation (that based on the model adopted by Herbert Morrison) and that vast swathes of British industry should still be nationalised. But such methods clearly have nothing to do with socialism. As the Socialist Party has consistently shown since 1904, “public” ownership as favoured by the left of capitalism is simply state ownership and a society with a high percentage of state- compared to privately-owned capital is clearly state-capitalism and does not represent a new form of society. Social (common) ownership means that the means of living (production) are owned by, and its products accessible to, all, with no need for artificial systems of exchange (money). Ownership of the means of production by individual capitalists or by the state makes no difference. Where goods or services are produced for exchange values (for sale) and not for use, where the majority work for wages and a minority (either capitalists or the state) siphon off the surplus value (profit) produced by working people, there is capitalism.

In this sense the declining faith in nationalisation and the Labour Party to effect real change is a positive development for real socialism as the results of Labour in government can be seen for what they are – management of capitalism with a touch of, not always beneficial, reformist tinkering. The problem and challenge is that those in the Labour movement and its surrounds, such as Dell, persist in perpetuating the myth that nationalisation is socialism (the standard dictionary definition) and that as its influence as an attractive option for capitalism declines, so does socialism. The fact is that Labour was never socialist and for that reason it is absurd to claim that socialism is dead while it has never been put before most of the electorate, let alone been a choice in any but few places in a handful of elections. The myth of nationalisation as an answer to the problems of capitalism is more or less dead but socialism as a political movement is yet to come, aided it is hoped by the abandonment of the false hopes of Labourism's palliatives.

... nor is the Welfare State

It may be argued that the state welfare and social security provisions initiated by the Attlee and Wilson governments have benefited the worst-off sections of the working class and that municipal housing and suchlike, often but not always initiated by Labour in local government, have done likewise. This may be the case for the very worst-off who may now find a very basic social security net, albeit one which now forces claimants to take the best job on offer whatever it might be and for whatever pay. But as we all know, there are still many homeless and destitute in every town and city and, according to government statistics (and the government has no interest in increasing the figure) one-third of all children live in conditions of poverty. For most members of the working class very real destitution and poverty still lies just around the corner. Further, low pay and job insecurity, so-called “flexible” working conditions, are on the increase as the power of states to regulate capitalism diminishes – global capital increasingly asserting its power over states who need capital inflow more than capital needs them, thus pushing down the level of basic protection of labour that can be expected to be enforced by any given state.

In Britain the post-1945 welfare state (implemented to streamline existing state welfare rather than creating anything particularly new), the National Health Service, Family Allowances, the Social Security Act, have all come under attack in the last couple of decades, reducing its stated purpose from being a universal security blanket for all to a system of benefits for the worst-off. It is the case that many workers would be better-off without them anyway, given the tendency of the presence of state benefits and allowances to reduce wage levels (indeed Barbara Castle consistently appealed to trade unions in the 1960s and 1970s to take account of the “social wage” that the Labour Party had provided in the form of state social security, pensions and so on, in order to try to inhibit wage demands). The simple case is that systems of social security and welfare do not change the character of capitalism. Poverty hasn't been reformed away and poor housing, ill-health, unemployment and job insecurity remain the very real concerns of most working people. Meanwhile the rich are still getting richer and the failure of Labour's attempts to “redistribute” wealth seem the more amusing for New Labour's being “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich” – if you can't beat them join them, eh Peter?

Dell's account runs from Labour's beginnings, to the apex of its hopes and down the whole slippery slope of disappointed expectations and wasted efforts. The reader at times feels sorry for this bunch of radical optimists, having to chop and change their views and, through experience of their failures, mutate into the sort of political economists (though let's not forget the professional politicians climbing the greasy pole) that the Labour Party once, in the fast fading past, professed to despise. Dell shows very well the limits of a government running capitalism to control the economic and social forces acting upon it. But his conclusion, that socialism is dead, comes from his assumption that socialism is “what Labour governments do” or are prepared to do.

In the Prologue Dell sets out three main currents of thought in what he calls socialism, that is the Labour Party – a vision of “a better society which would replace capitalism and which would be characterised by greater equality, common ownership, and production for use rather than profit”, a belief in democracy, and a managerial element which believed that the expertise of economists could transform capitalism through centralisation and nationalisation. It does not seem to occur to Dell that the managerial strand to Labour's thinking contradicted the socialist vision or democracy, despite its claim to be able to run capitalism better and its professed need for centralisation. But then the Labour Party was always more concerned with getting elected, with what they suppose is “doing something”, than in progressing the cause of socialism.

If they could claim that they could eradicate capitalism's ills without the effort of persuading the majority of the socialist vision and the necessity to act for themselves, then socialism could be arrived at without a great deal of disruption, without the need to “make socialists”, to educate a socialist majority and consciousness. In this way what socialist vision many Labour pioneers had and what desire to advance democracy there may have been, were rapidly pushed to the back of minds of activists by the need to gain political power and enact their economic miracle – much in the way that William Morris, in the 1880s and 90s had suggested it would. Thus, gradually, what emerged from years of reformist efforts was not a slowly evolving socialism but a Labourism which increasingly judged itself by the success of the one thing it could do in government – manage capitalism; all reformist baggage being abandoned in the pursuit of Labour's desire to manage capitalism better than the other lot.

Colin Skelly