Too Much Food (1980)

From the June 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism has outlived its usefulness; it has developed the means of production and distribution to a point where abundance is within our grasp. Yet as the twentieth century totters to a close, we still have to contend with the same old problems that were a feature at the turn of the century —unemployment, poverty, bad housing, war and so on, and, in some parts of the world, starvation wipes out thousands of human beings. If these deaths were the result of an unbountiful Nature, of the world being incapable of producing sufficient food for its people, we would be faced with a very difficult problem. But this is not the case.

Capitalism is a system of commodity production — of buying, selling, profit. Sometimes the wheels grind to a halt, with too many cars, carpets, ships, suits or whatever to meet market needs. And "too much" food, even when so many go without; but food, like a car, is a commodity. If too much is produced for the market to absorb production is cut back.

When Russia invaded Afghanistan President Carter, waxing indignant, decreed an embargo on US exports of grain to the Soviet Union, which is heavily dependent on this feedstuff to increase cattle population. The American farmers, who for long have looked on the Russian market as a profitable channel for their surplus grain crops, hummed and hawed, did a bit of tooth sucking but eventually agreed to support Carter. It was supposed to be their sacrifice for the nation's good — but the farmers were not about to turn a shotgun on themselves. It was of course agreed at the time, that the US government would compensate them by itself buying this grain.

The American government has just completed the purchase of 156 million bushels of grain at a cost of 600 million dollars. With this amount of grain around, storage space is at a premium and there is a constant search for any odd corner where the stuff can be dumped. The bottom fell out of the market and as a result many American farmers have gone bankrupt. As those still in business (the majority) plan their sowing schedule for this year, the high cost of borrowing money (US Bank Rate around 20 per cent) for seed and fertilisers is having its effect on the total acreage to be planted. This cost, and the large surplus of grain available, has led one Chicago grain analyst to say . . . "It would be economic suicide to plant at these prices". Prudential Insurance of Chicago, one of the largest agricultural finance houses, has already stopped loans to farmers and does not know when they will recommence.

Food production and selling is big international business. To add to the woes of the American farmer, Canada is planning this year a 6 per cent increase in planting acreage; the Indian harvest looks good; Brazil has just gathered the largest soya bean crop for years and the world stock of grain is the highest for 15 years.

Anyone who thinks this promises well for the starving millions should remember: in the past, grain stocks have been high and yet people died through lack of food. In the Guardian (17 April) a large advert stated that harvest failure has led to a new crisis in Kampuchea. This country desperately needs food to survive, but the profit motive of capitalism ensures that it does not get enough of it. As long as food is produced for sale and profit, then so long shall we have these futile appeals.

When food is produced for the sole reason that people need it then we shall have socialism —a world community based upon common ownership of the means of production and distribution. It will be a way of life divorced from the stupidities of a wages and monetary system. For the good of all, the earth with its riches and potential, harnessed with humanity's creative ability, will provide what we need for a full and meaningful life.

Cyril May

Fallacious Arguments: The Threat of War (1980)

From the June 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

It would be rather nice were we not all blown up in a nuclear war, but it is by no means certain that we shall not be. Why is this? Perhaps there has been a conscious and reasoned decision on the part of the world's population to put an end to the unsatisfactory standard of life. After all, did Dostoevsky not say that suicide was the only form of freedom? If the rush to mass destruction is the result of a world debate, in which a majority expressed the opinion that life on earth is no longer worthwhile and we should all transfer to the mythical kingdom of God, why were socialists not invited to put our ideas to it? The reason is that there has not been such a debate. Unlike the inconsequential matter of whether or not the British capitalist class should join the Common Market, there has been, and will be, no referendum to ask "the public" whether they fancy being blown up. There is nothing democratic about war.

Exterminating human beings seems to be an unintelligent way of running a society, especially when it is considered that the main purpose of a society is to ensure the survival of its inhabitants. One would think that any system of society that ceases to ensure survival would meet with the disapproval of its members. But there are a number of currently popular arguments that are intended to justify mass legalised murder:

1. The economic argument. War can be profitable for one or other of the sides.
2. The philosophical argument. Rationality is an inadequate method of explaining and solving social problems. We should recognise that humans will sometimes act in ways that cannot be explained and the causes of war are attributable to such inevitable irrationality.
3. The moral/religious argument. The enemy in war is invariably immoral, valueless and ungodly and thus deserves to be killed.
4. The anthropological argument. Men like fighting because they are naturally aggressive. (And women like bandaging their wounds because they are naturally caring and impressed by the virility of warfare.)
5. The political argument. Murder is right when it is in defence of the Queen/President/State/State-to-be/ideology.

Such justifications of war are wholly unworthy of popular acceptance. Yet they prevail, which must either mean that the majority of people agree with them, or that the majority of people are excluded from making decisions about their own survival. To account for both possibilities, we shall first consider why the above-mentioned "justifications" are unworthy of working class acceptance, and we shall secondly consider the means by which the majority of the world's population can voice our rejection of war.

THE ECONOMIC ARGUMENT

Wars in a capitalist society are concerned with profit accumulation, the concentration of wealth and power into the hands of a class that owns and controls the means of wealth production and distribution. According to the recently published report of the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Wealth and Income, 1 per cent of the British population owns more wealth than the bottom 80 per cent. Wars are not fought between the owners and non-owners of wealth, but between one set of owners and another. Every war in the history of capitalism has been fought, directly or indirectly, to secure markets or raw materials. Russia and China, as much as their power rivals in the West, are concerned with this squalid battle over who owns what in and on the earth, for they are both state capitalist countries obsessed, no less than their avowedly capitalist enemies, with markets and profits. If it were made clear to the majority that wars are fought to protect and expand the prosperity of a minority class then the workers, who are expected to fight the wars and who gain nothing, would cease to accept the economic argument. The businessmen of seventeenth century England responded in this way when many of them refused to finance the commercial adventures of William III: they realised that there was nothing in it for them and so told William what he could do with his foreign policy. The economic nature of modern war is disguised by conditioning the majority to believe that the interests of society (survival) are the same as the interests of the owners of the means of life (profit). Their battles are our battles. We die for them, they live off us. Nation first.

More enlightened members of the working class will recognise that the struggle that should concern them is not that between rival sections of the capitalist class, but that between the two main classes of society: those who possess but do not produce and those who produce but do not possess. They will realise that the power and wealth of the capitalists results from the acquiescence of the working class to exploitation, to be paid wages that are less than the value of the commodities that they produce. In September 1914, The Socialist Standard published a statement on war that made clear the real interest of the working class:

"Whereas the capitalists of Europe have quarrelled over the questions of the control of trade routes and the world markets, and are endeavouring to exploit the political divisions and blind passions of the working class of their respective countries in order to induce the said workers to take up arms in what is solely their masters' quarrel, THE SOCIALIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN, having no quarrel with the working class of any country, extends to our fellow workers of all lands the expression of our goodwill and Socialist fraternity, and pledge ourselves to work for the overthrow of capitalism and the triumph of Socialism." 

The plunder of war is part of the economic rationale of capitalism and so it is no use complaining about "unjust" wars. What is required is a social system in which the material interest of the many rather than the few is what constitutes justice.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENT

Ever since the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century there has been a school of thought that has rejected rationality as a way of explaining and changing social affairs. Irrationalists argue that human beings are motivated by inexplicable accidents of sentiment and that it is impossible to work out a method of understanding how and why social phenomena occur. Faith, trust and sensual responsiveness are the guidelines to which they direct. Many fascists in the early twentieth century argued that the inhumanity of society was due to innate stupidity, malleability and lack of consciousness on the part of the mass of people. "The masses" were seen as stooges to be used by an elite for its own purpose. The link between such anti-democratic beliefs and the similar beliefs of Leninism is based upon a common perception of the limitations of human self-assertion. The Irrationalist idea of "the masses" has understandable appeal among those who seek to lead people. It supposes that only a minority is capable of scientific thought, that most people are blended into the crowd and have no desire to act in their own interests, and that consequently irrational events like war are inevitable. Such views are likely to be attractive to "intellectuals" who imagine that they are members of the intelligent minority and are not as susceptible as the masses.

It is not justifiable to conclude that irrational social behaviour is an inevitable human feature. In an anti-social environment like capitalism, that contrives to keep its wage slaves in the most degraded, unfree and stupid condition, the forces of rationality are fighting an uphill battle. But the contradictions of capitalism will force workers to see the folly of their own irrational ideas.

THE MORAL/RELIGIOUS ARGUMENT

Moralists and religious believers are forced to present rewards for being good and punishments for evil-doing. So, if you kneel in the church and obey the law you get to heaven, and if you are hungry and steal some food you go to Hell. When wars take place moralists are brought in to tell the fighters that they are doing God's work because the enemy is evil. One of the early members of the Socialist Party of Great Britain said that the sight of the priests blessing the guns in 1915 made him first consider becoming a socialist. In the last war the messengers of God blessed the aeroplanes of both the British and the Nazis before they went off to carry out their respective holy missions of murder.

Most workers accept morality because they feel powerless to reject the guidance of their rulers. The church encourages this sense of impotence by telling us that not only is it sinful to kill, but it is unpatriotic and sinful not to kill when our masters so decide.

THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL ARGUMENT

Anthropologists who have asserted that homo sapiens is essentially aggressive have been opposed by many empirical observations. Where there is a social harmony of interests, non-aggressive, cooperative people are found. It is not "human nature" for men to wish to kill one another, and if it is why do they have to wait for a legal decree before war can commence? The anti-social conception of mankind is not indicative of inherent human characteristics, but of a system that forces people to act inhumanly and, in that sense, unnaturally. The myth about "the Glory of War" has been somewhat exposed by stories that have followed the war in Vietnam: war is not about bravery and heroism, but about the indignity of plunder and the inhumanity of slaughter. Of course, there might be some people who do wish to kill other people for pleasure. But should society accommodate the perverse tastes of the would-be killers? At present it does, and we are told that "It's a Man's Life in the Army".

THE POLITICAL ARGUMENT

The least convincing justification of war is the argument that murder is alright if it is in defence of something that people fanatically believe in. For example, there is no doubt a considerable number of people in Britain who would be prepared to lay down their lives for the Queen. Perhaps it would be a solution if they were simply to lay down their lives and be given honorary peerages; this would at least prevent involving those of us who do not want to die on behalf of monarchs, nations or beliefs. Islamic fanatics, left-wing insurrectionists and nationalists like the IRA are not only claiming the right to die for their cause, but are demanding that other workers die with them. A system of society that compels workers to fight for a nation that they do not own is urgently in need of being removed. If there is a nuclear war – or even a serious conventional war – millions of workers would die in defence of countries that are not and cannot be theirs. The workers have no country and therefore no worker should fight in a war.

There is no need for war, just as there is no natural need for poverty or mass starvation or housing shortages or hospital waiting lists. It is because society is organised to provide profits for the few rather than satisfaction for the many that these problems face us. There is no immediate likelihood of the world being destroyed by natural means, but there is more than a slight probability that it will be destroyed by the social madness of mankind, a madness that is created and maintained by the long outdated ideology of capitalism.'The working class has only to say "stop" and the entire present. system of society will cease to be. We have only to take the means of wealth production and distribution into the common ownership and democratic control of the whole community to put an end to the need for fighting over markets and resources and frontiers. We need only withdraw our consent to capitalism, in a majority, to set in motion the revolution from the pre-history to the civilised history of society. Or alternatively, perhaps we ought to pray to the sky that we're not blown up. At least that way one cannot be accused of being naive, or worse still, of being a social revolutionary.

Steve Coleman

Marx and Engels Wrong on War (1980)

SPGB 1950 pamphlet.

From the June 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

We are a Marxist party but we recognise that the conditions of the time, when Capitalism was relatively young and Feudalism had not yet been completely swept away, led Marx and Engels into a false position on war in the course of pursuing their pioneer work. It was a time when freedom was in chains, when the barricade seemed to be the answer to oppression and when war took on a somewhat different aspect from what it does today. The road of the pioneer is difficult; those who follow profit by his work and his errors and have a wealth of experience to help them. The Bolsheviks and their followers, however, were not Marxists. They threw overboard Marx's fundamental tenets and borrowed a few of his views (the erroneous ones) that helped them in their struggle for dictatorship. They did not profit by the work of Marx; they only sought to profit by his name. Marx relied on the workers; they spurned the workers.

Those who continue to hold nineteenth century conceptions about the possibly "progressive" nature of war are refusing to learn the bitter lessons of experience. They fail to see that the instrument of war that served the rise to power of the capitalist minority cannot be used to achieve the emancipation of the working class. Socialism is held back by the lack of understanding in the ranks of the working class. Armed force cannot make up for the backward political development of the working class. With the development of the technique of destruction war now means the wholesale destruction of human life by atom bombs. It is the supreme irony that some who claim to seek to save the human race by achieving Socialism should be able to contemplate pursuing that aim through the mass destruction of human life.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain will continue on its way loyal to international Socialism in the sure knowledge that it is the duty of all who seek Socialism to oppose war.

From "The Socialist Party and  War" (1950)

Thatcher's monetarism (1980)

From the June 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Outlook dry but stormy

Towards the end of April 1945, as the Russian armies closed in on Berlin, Hitler returned to the city and with a band of unrepentant Nazis took refuge in the bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery, in a sort of collective madness. At his daily briefing sessions, he deployed armies that had ceased to exist. He married Eva Braun shortly after having had her brother-in-law put to death. Under the ruins of Berlin there was endless reminiscing about the Nazis' rise to power, nobody dare suggest that there might have been mistakes, that the Nazis were less than historically perfect or that their hands bore any unjustified blood. Whenever he confronted the failure of the Third Reich to last a thousand years Hitler fumed against treachery among his generals, armed forces, the German people.

Well it has not yet come to quite that with the Thatcher government, although there are whispers that Keith Joseph is not entirely in touch with reality, that he is cracking up under the strain of trying to convince everyone that he is absolutely right in everything he does. And as their problems multiply the government is beginning to be seized by something akin to the bunker mentality. Thatcher’s rigid obstinacy shows no sign of weakening and the Tory line seems to be that they can fail in their historic mission to revive British capitalism only if their policies are enfeebled by treachery in their own ranks. They have coined a ready name for the traitors within, who are called the Wets, which adequately expresses the hardliners’ impatience and contempt for them.

Thatcher took over at Number Ten on the policy of monetarism (although not all monetarists would agree that the Tory policy justifies the name). It was, they said, all quite simple. The market mechanism has an inbuilt logic, a sort of economic Darwinism by which the best — the most useful, the most adaptable — must always survive because only the best is profitable. Anything other ,than the best, in a free market economy, must go to the wall. It follows from this that a government must allow the market to run its course. In ho circumstances should a government underwrite wage settlements or try to revitalise bankrupt firms with an injection of state money. In disputes between unions and employers both sides should be left to argue it out with the market deciding, to everyone’s benefit, who wins. As government operations were to be reduced state expenditure would be cut back, which would mean lower taxes, which would give everyone a lot more money to spend as they wanted, without the government forcing them to pay for state health services, education and so on.

But it has not turned out to be as simple as that. To begin with, there must be some confusion in the Conservative Party about the path they are supposed to be travelling with such grim purpose and which the Wets are trying to divert them from. Are they following the policies laid down in their election manifesto:

"To restore the health of our economic and social life, by controlling inflation . . . ”
“. . . the creation of conditions in which new, more modern, more secure, better paid jobs come into existence."
"Mortgage rates have risen steeply because of the (Labour) Government’s financial mismanagement. Our plans for cutting government spending and borrowing will lower them.”

Or are they following the policy of actual events: inflation continuing at a high level, unemployment rising above 1½ million, mortgage rates at an all-time high? None of these aspects of capitalism pleases the working class and all too soon they are showing their restlessness in their votes.

To make matters worse, ministers seem unable to agree about when we can expect to be enveloped by Tory prosperity. Thatcher guesses that we must wait about eighteen months; Geoffrey Howe recently mentioned ten years. John Biffen. who is said to be one of the sterner-monetarists in the government, has thrown doubt on the whole thing by wondering aloud whether there is any demonstrable link between government expenditure and inflation. But they are all agreed on one thing: for the working class, who voted them into power, worse is to come.

Unmanageable

There might be an argument that, for anyone who supports capitalism and who accepts the system’s anti-human features of private ownership of the means of production and profit motivation, monetarism is a more likely policy than what might be called interventionism. Given a society of commodity production, is it not more logical to allow free rein to the market instead of launching doomed efforts to control—or rather distort—it through government action? This argument ignores two facts. Firstly, the theories of people like Keynes, on which much government policy—Tory as well as Labour—has been based since the war, did not come out of thin air. They were a response to the failure of free market monetarism to control capitalism and to have the very effects that are now being claimed for them. This is not surprising (and this is our second point) since no theory for controlling or even regulating capitalism so that it works to the benefit of the majority of its people can succeed. One after another, they have all failed and will continue to fail.

Let us look at just one of these problems. Last October, the Low Pay Unit estimated that 87,000 families are caught in the "poverty trap’’—that is to say, although they exist on desperately low incomes they gain nothing from the average wage rise. These are the sort of people who suffer acutely another problem; Shelter is now forecasting that the 1980s will see a new (!) housing crisis. At the other end of the scale there are people who will not be described as being caught in the "opulence trap”; about ten per cent of the population, they own nearly 61 per cent of the total personal wealth in this country. This social class is not affected by a housing crisis or by the price of essential goods in the shops. It is the owning, privileged class in capitalism and it is in its interests that governments administer the system. The problem of poverty on one hand and riches on the other is an enduring feature of capitalism, it is not susceptible to any remedy other than a social revolution.

It follows from this that Thatcher's monetarism will fail. Those who are waiting for her government to change course have some confidence from history being on their side. In 1970 Heath's government set out with some of the same policies: reduced government expenditure, a refusal to bail out bankrupt firms or to intervene in industrial disputes. As the realities of capitalism came home to them, Heath was forced into what were called U-turns, reversing many of the policies on which he had been elected. Most post-war governments, on coming to power, have declared against imposing wage controls but, with the exception up to now of Thatcher’s, they have all imposed those very controls. How long, then, will Thatcher last? Will the Wets finally succeed in reducing the Tory strong-men to a soggy, feeble pulp?

Common ground

If they do, many Tories may protest that their party is being corrupted into a pale version of the Labour Party. In fact, the opposite process has been taking place, so that on the issue of monetarism there is little to choose between the two. Well before Thatcher's victory at the polls, Keynesian theories had been discredited and monetarism was returning to favour. The last Labour government was no enemy to it: “Mr. Healey”, wrote Maurice Green in the Dally Telegraph (19/9/79) “was a good practical monetarist, even if mounting public expenditure was making restraint difficult towards the end of his tenure”. And both Labour and Tory ministers applied the same, monetarist analysis to the supposed effects of trade union action:

“We must go on down this painfully difficult road of getting people to understand that their responsibility towards pay bargaining means their prosperity, their jobs . . . failure will mean higher interest rates and taxes and lower public expenditure." Geoffrey Howe, Chancellor of the Exchequer, ITV, 25/11/79.)
“Trade union leaders . . . accused me often enough of using cash limits as a means of making cuts to which they strongly objected... That charge should he levelled at those responsible for breaching the cash limits by high pay settlements." (Joel Barnett, Labour’s former Chief Secretary to the Treasury, the Guardian 19/6/79.)

It is no coincidence that there should he this common purpose, since both parties aim to run capitalism. As each of them fails, as each policy is exposed os an impotent sham they turn out another, to dupe the working class into voting for yet another spell of capitalist servitude. The Tory Wets are arguing for their party to adopt a more flexible style of duping the workers and for policies that can be less embarrassingly adapted in reaction to capitalism's crises and to the frustrated responses of the voters. They see Thatcher as trying to mug the working class, when they argue that a gentler picking of the pocket will lose less votes. Perhaps this will turn out to be the more attractive idea to workers who support their own wage slavery, since flexible policies may be politically more profitable in a society that is out of control. Both sides of the Commons agree on this anarchy of capitalism:

“ . . . no government of human beings can ever be completely master of its situation; world trade, foreign relationships. international loan constraints. industrial disputes, productive efficiency, and much else that is transient and unpredictable always influence and sometimes govern its actions." (Labour MP Arthur Palmer, in a letter to the Guardian 13/3/80.)
“Wc would all do a great deal better to pay less attention to the economic fortune tellers . . . Economics is not primarily about forecasting, it is above all about markets which by their nature can neither be reliably predicted nor fine tuned". (Nigel Lawson, Financial Secretary to the Treasury', the Guardian 30/4/80.)

Yet governments win power precisely on their competing claims to be able to forecast and control capitalism’s economy. How many votes would they get if they produced a manifesto that did no more than confess to their impotence? Both Thatcher and the Tory’ Wets are playing the same, familiar game of insisting that, when a few temporary’ problems have been got out of the way, capitalism can be fashioned into a benign, abundant society. They do this in open contempt of the workers, in the assumption that the working class has a limitless appetite for being duped and despised. And so far, they have been given plenty of reason to he complacent. Will this Tory government, will capitalism itself, last another thousand years? How long before the working class wake up to the madness of it all?

Ivan

Tito and Balkan Capitalism (1980)

From the June 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

The truth behind the crocodile tears

Josif Tito, President of Yugoslavia, died on May 4, 1980. The media commentators dug out the cringing cliches that they use to describe the despots of foreign states that are (actually or potentially) the allies of British capitalism. The editor of The Times, William Rees-Mogg, said in a leading article (5/5/80) that Tito was “a man of extraordinary stature”, and that he "belonged among the great men of his time"; the whole-page obituary in the same paper said he was "perhaps one of the few remaining idealists", and so on. Reporting his funeral, Keith Graves on the BBC news (8/5/80) said "this was the day when the world mourned" (did you mourn, dear reader?) and Sue Lawley, on Nationwide (8/5/80) said Tito had "brought brotherhood and freedom to a divided nation”. The pundits could not have been more servile if he had owned an oil-field. But these comments belong in the fantasy world of highly-paid journalists and broadcasters: they have no connection with the facts.

In reality Tito was a remorseless ruffian, an implacable hatchet-man, who rose to power by jailing and killing potential rivals, and who then lived in ostentatious luxury as front man for the Yugoslav ruling class while the workers toiled m poverty to produce the good things that the Yugoslav upper class enjoyed. A tyrannical dictator of Tito’s stamp would be attacked without mercy by the British media if he was an enemy of the British ruling class; as a thorn in the side of Russia, he was, and is, glorified.

A glance at the historical background is necessary to understand Yugoslavia, its relations with other countries, and the internal and external strains that threw up such bully-boys as Tito. As capitalism established itself in south-eastern Europe during the nineteenth century the existing political divisions (that is the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Turkish empires, all dating from an era when the landed aristocracy had held the power) became increasingly out-of-date. Capitalism needed new political structures, and the "nation-state” was in much of south-eastern Europe the chosen vehicle. The idea behind these so-called nation-states- that homogeneous “nations" of convenient size, with one language, one culture and united economic and social interests, occupy neatly-divided sections of the earth’s surface has always been an illusion. The Albanians, for example: they speak two dialects so divergent that they should be regarded as two languages rather than one; they do not by any means all dwell in what is called Albania—many are scattered across the Balkans, others live (and have lived 600 years and more) in southern Italy; and among those speaking Albanian languages live others speaking other languages. However, capitalism has forced us to swallow greater illusions than that. So an entity called "Albania” was created in part of the old Turkish empire, with an Albanian national anthem, Albanian armed forces and history-books full of Albanian patriotism: all based on the class-division of capitalism—the many, poor, labouring, and ready to die for the (newly designed) flag and the few, prosperous, leisured, and ready to let them. It would have been a farce if it were not so tragic, and it was paralleled throughout the Balkans.

Motley people

The earlier empires creaked and groaned under the stresses of the First World War, and two of them (the Austro-Hungarian and the Turkish) collapsed entirely while the third, the Russian, survived only under entirely new management. But the reorganisation of the Russian empire, as capitalism established its political power there, meant that for twenty years after 1917 Russia had to concentrate on internal affairs and postpone its previous steady advance across Eastern Europe.

East of the Adriatic, between Italy and Albania, was a heterogeneous collection of people, languages and religions (Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Moslem) — the Slovenes in the north, the Croats around Zagreb to their south, the Dalmatians on the coast, the people of Slavonia further east, the Bosnians, Herzegovinians, Serbians, Montenegrins, Macedonians, and so on. Most of them spoke Slav languages, and most were too few to populate a state suitable for independent capitalism on their own. so they were all lumped together, willy-nilly. Some were less willing than others: the Montenegrins, who had already had a brief existence in a separate state before the war; the Macedonians, who wanted to join up with other Macedonians in Greece and Bulgaria, and the Croats, who feared the Serbs would swamp them. Serbs and Croats spoke dialects of the same language, but had been divided by their separate and antagonistic histories—the Serbs had the Cyrillic alphabet and the Eastern Orthodox church, the Croats had the Latin alphabet and the Roman Catholic church. In among this already motley collection of mainly Slav peoples were many Hungarians and Albanians, with sizable populations of Turks, Rumanians, Gypsies, Slovaks, Bulgarians, Germans, Ruthenians, Czechs and Italians, as well as smaller groups of Poles, Austrians, Greeks and Jews. Capitalism forced all these people together in one discordant mass, and called the concoction the Kingdom of the South Slavs, or Yugoslavia. The King of Serbia, Peter Karageorgevitch, became King of Yugoslavia.

Yugoslavia and the other Balkan states created or confirmed in 1918 were always shaky, lacking the morale-boosting propaganda advantages of a long history and furthermore Russia, though still pre-occupied with establishing state capitalism, never ceased to cast its eyes covetously at eastern Europe. The Balkan countries became increasingly autocratic. King Alexander, Peter’s son, overthrew the democratic constitution and became a dictator in 1929. The rumbling discontent (and sometimes more than rumbling — Alexander was assassinated by a Croat dissident on a visit to Marseilles in 1934) was all to Russia’s advantage. The Russians organised underground parties of the discontented in all the eastern European states (as well as elsewhere) in the 1920s and 1930s, using, as many other capitalist states before had done, revolutionary language to cloak expansionist aims. The Yugoslav "Communist Party” was formed in 1919, although of course it had nothing whatever to do with Communism. One of its members was Josif Broz, later known as Tito.

Russia’s puppet

Broz was born in 1892 near Zagreb, then in the Austro-Hungarian empire. As a young man he worked in a car factory near Vienna, then joined the Austrian army and was captured in Russia during the First World War. When the 1917 revolution broke out Broz became a Bolshevik and served for three years in the Russian army. Returning to Yugoslavia, he worked for the Russian-inspired underground (the "Communist Party” was banned in 1921). In this puppet party of the Russian Bolsheviks Broz worked hard (or his Russian masters. As Zagreb branch secretary he denounced the Yugoslav leadership to the Comintern (the Russian-led international organisation of Bolshevik-style parties) and the old central committee was sacked wholesale by the Russians, and a new one appointed which would be more loyal to Russia. After this success, Broz was arrested and jailed for five years by the then Yugoslav dictatorship. Emerging in 1934, he became a member of the Yugoslav party’s central committee, and began installing in influential party positions members devoted to himself (much as Stalin had done in Russia in the early 1920s). Then he left for Moscow as Yugoslav link-man with the Comintern.

In 1936 disloyalty to Stalin and Russia was again rearing its head in the Yugoslav party. The whole of the Yugoslav politburo was called to Moscow and dismissed from office. The loyal Stalinist Broz became organisational secretary. In 1937 the Yugoslav party secretary, Milan Gorkic, was arrested; he and most of the other Yugoslav party leaders were jailed and executed by Stalin. Broz was Stalin’s close collaborator in this sweeping slaughter, and ascended over the bodies of his dead colleagues to the leadership of the Yugoslav Stalinist party. In 1938 he returned to Yugoslavia as Stalin’s trusted emissary. He advanced men he could rely on to positions of power, and purged those not slavishly obsequious to Stalin and himself.

The war

The war came, and Yugoslavia was occupied by the Germans. When Russia entered the war, Broz (or Tito) loyally called for an insurrection against the German occupation forces, with the immediate aim of helping the Russians, and to pave the way for a Stalinist takeover of Yugoslavia after the war. The Yugoslav royalist government, in exile in London, had also organised clandestine warfare against the Germans under General Mihailovitch, so that they should have armed forces in the country ready to seize power again after the war. The two sets of terrorists, or freedom-fighters (the nomenclature depends on one’s political convictions) fought against each other as much as against the Germans. The same was happening in other east European states, which suited neither Russia nor the Anglo-American allies. The British and Americans wrote off most of the Balkans as being Stalin’s reward for fighting the war, but insisted on Greece remaining as an Anglo-American client state.

So Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt came to an agreement at the Tehran Conference of 1943. The British and Americans would abandon Mihailovitch and the other “right-wing” guerillas of eastern Europe, while Stalin promised to abandon the Stalinist partisans of Greece. Henceforward in Greece only the anti-Stalinists, and in Yugoslavia only the Stalinists, got military aid from the Allies. So when Germany collapsed in 1945, Tito was able to smash all opposition—Mihailovitch was captured and executed, and Archbishop Stepinac, leader of the Yugoslav Catholic Church, sent to jail—and establish a Stalinist dictatorship. In the same way the government of "liberated" Greece, backed by the Anglo-Americans, was able to smash the Stalinist organisations EAM and ELAS, while Russia, keeping its promise, stood by with folded arms.

Many of those who fought under Mihailovitch against the Nazis had to flee the country to escape Tito’s revenge. The writer, working in South Wales just after the Second World War, lived in a hutted encampment that also housed many of those (Yugoslavs and others) who had chosen the wrong anti- Nazi army to fight in, and as a result had lost their families and homelands, and were doomed to permanent exile, labouring in a foreign land.

Stalin was triumphant. The warm water ports on the Mediterranean that Russia had craved for 150 years seemed now firmly in his control. But the plans even of capitalist superpowers not infrequently go awry. The new Yugoslav ruling class were restive as clients of the Russian empire, and Tito aspired to be Yugoslav dictator in his own right, not merely as Stalin’s vice-regent. Relations between Stalin and Tito deteriorated, and then the Comintern, on Russian orders, expelled the Yugoslav party from the fold. When other countries became uneasy under the yoke later—on Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968—the preponderance of opinion within the native ruling class was in favour of Russia, against the home-grown boss. In Yugoslavia it was not so. Tito had done too good a job in gaining control of the party machinery and its propaganda weapons. Though border incidents were almost a daily occurrence for some years, Stalin was never able to re-assert his control.

Having carried out many purges in the cause of Stalinism, Tito now carried out others in the cause of anti-Stalinism. Opponents were executed or jailed. Twelve thousand Yugoslav Stalinists found themselves in prison on the Adriatic island of Goli Otok. At the same time the other Balkan states, under Russian instructions, rooted out and put on trial any members who the Russians felt might follow Tito’s example, and declare their independence of Stalin. Executions of so-called Titoists became common throughout the remaining Stalinist countries of eastern Europe.

But Tito himself survived, and after Stalin’s death his successor Khruschev visited Yugoslavia to explain that it had all been a mistake. Thereafter Tito played a cunning game, allowing both superpowers, Russia and America, to woo Yugoslavia with economic and military aid. He also tried to create a “third world" bloc under his own leadership, independent of both Russia and America. In all things, he defended and promoted Yugoslav capitalism. 

He claimed that capitalism in Yugoslavia was socialism; a good propaganda line to persuade the oppressed and exploited that they are really free. Tito himself saw the facts clearly enough, when his own interests were not involved, and he himself described the Russian system as state-capitalism. But honesty in capitalist societies is often available for export only.

Tito's dictatorship remained as tyrannical os he felt necessary for the prolongation of his own power and his state-capitalist system, and he continued until the end to put opponents in jail, such as his former comrade Djilas, or to have them killed. In 1971 he purged the Croatian party leadership for "nationalism", and followed it with a purge of the Serbian party leadership for "liberalism". Dissidents who fled abroad were pursued by the Yugoslav secret police. The Times (29.4.80) reluctantly referred to the accusations of Yugoslavia "arranging the murder of Croat emigres”, and thus drew an indignant letter from a reader with a Serbian surname (Pavlowitch) reminding the editor (6.5.80) that "the list of murdered Serbs is also most impressive: at least one in Paris, three in Brussels, two in Canada, two in the United States, one in Stockholm and one in West Germany, the last one Dusan Sedlar, on April 16 in Munich. Not to mention the known cases of kidnapping, one in Switzerland and one in Rumania".

As political boss of an autocratic country Tito was not dissimilar to others of the same kind. (And over eighty per cent of the world’s population is in the grip of dictators: capitalism breeds them, as a dead rat breeds maggots.) While his opponents were fitted with prison garb, or their winding sheets, Tito sported flashy uniforms and diamond rings, and his hat always had more gold braid than anyone else's. While those who differed from him were incarcerated in their cells, or their graves, Tito was driving expensive fast cars, or was out shooting game. While those who had not been spry enough to change sides at exactly the right moment stared through the barred windows, if they were that lucky, Tito amused himself in luxurious speed boats, cruising round his island of Brioni. While those who held incorrect opinions forced down prison food, or themselves fed the worms, this large-bellied bon vivant savoured the succulent delicacies of state banquets.

And the great majority of the Yugoslav people, drudging in workshops and factories, and on the farms and railways, accepted it all os being part of the natural order of things. Since they supported capitalism, they were brainwashed by Tito’s propaganda machine into hero-worship of "the leader". Turning out in their thousands to Tito’s funeral ceremonies, they demonstrated their own political ignorance, just as so recently the loyal crowds in Iran turned out to support the Shah, or in Uganda to support Amin. In a socialist—a sane—society people will find it difficult to understand how such a blood-stained monster as Tito was ever allowed house-room by human beings—much less permitted to lord it over an entire country as a dictator.

Alwyn Edgar

Mullahs and oil wells (1980)

From the June 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Following China’s takeover by its so-called Communist Party in 1949, American politicians and commentators embarked on a spree of self-recrimination and examination. How could the enormous Nationalist army, with its American arms and advisers, have been defeated by ill-armed guerrillas? Who, in short, was responsible for “losing China”, and how could it have been “saved”?

A similar debate has been taking place over the last eighteen months concerning another country lost from America’s sphere of influence—Iran. A friendly dictator-emperor, reinforced by a massive army, was sent packing, and is now forced to scuttle from one country to another. Even worse, fifty American diplomats (of whom some no doubt were spies) were held hostage, and still are after an abortive marine attempt to rescue them. Could Iran too have been “saved”, given a little more competence and finesse on the part of President Carter?

One of the reasons for the intense interest that the rulers of other countries show in Iran is of course oil. But it is not the only factor involved. Vast though they are, Iran’s reserves are relatively small when compared with those of countries like Saudi Arabia, and (unless new reserves are discovered) Iran will not be a major exporter of oil much beyond 1990. Western capitalism wants Iranian oil but could certainly get along without it, as it will soon have to do.

The prospects of exports to Iran are also an important factor The massive revenues from oil sales go exclusively to the Iranian state, and a large part of this income is used to pay for imports. Iranian imports have risen spectacularly as a result of the country’s new-found wealth, from four hundred million US dollars in 1958-9 to $18.45 billion in 1975-6. A large part of this figure is made up of arms purchases—Iran under the Shah was for a time America’s best arms customer. Any capitalist class will want a piece of eighteen billion dollars' worth of action, and will inevitably have an interest in maintaining a friendly government in Tehran.

The third reason for Iran’s importance is its strategic value. It borders on Russia and commands the route to the Middle East oilfields. A pro-Moscow government (or, for that matter, a Russian invasion) could blockade the Persian Gulf and drastically reduce the amount of oil reaching Western capitalist nations. On the other hand, a pro-Western regime functions as a regional balance to both Russia and the Arab oil-producing states. In fact, the Shah acted as a kind of policeman for Western interests, supporting the royalists in North Yemen in the nineteenth-sixties, the Sultan of Oman in 1971, and Pakistan against the Baluchi guerrillas in 1973. There was no need for, say. direct American intervention in these cases; an army trained and armed by them was on the spot to defend the status quo.

Thus American policy since the beginning of the Shah's dictatorial rule in 1953 has been to keep in power a friendly ruler. This involved, as we have seen, massive arms sales, the weaponry being used for both internal repression and external intervention. The notorious secret police. SAVAK, was set up in 1957 with a permanent secret US mission attached to it (in light of the American government’s occasional hypocritical ramblings about “human rights", it is salutary to recall its role in establishing this vile SS-like organisation). Even the land reform of the early sixties was a response to American pressure on the Shah to carry out just enough by way of reformist policies to avoid too much rural opposition.

The opposition was restricted by press censorship and the lack of independent trade unions as well as by the ubiquitous agents of SAVAK. Agrarian reform failed to benefit those who actually worked the land (not that it was ever intended to), and the fruits of the oil industry reached only a tiny minority of Iranians. As elsewhere, nationalisation has been of no benefit to the ordinary workers. Apart from the fantastically wealthy and corrupt royal family, and a small capitalist class, Iranians lived lives of poverty and squalor. Their position was made even more unacceptable by knowledge of the rich resources beneath their feet and the manifest affluence of their rulers:

 “As early as 1971 a cautious observer of Iran remarked that, on walking through the streets of the southern, poorer part of Tehran, he encountered 'more expressed hatred than I have ever heard before’ from ’people who watch the cars of the people who are doing well’. The wealth in Iran was being distributed in a manner that was ‘ostentatious’ and 'grotesque’. (Fred Halliday: Iran: Dictatorship and Development, quoting Richard Cottam.)

In the absence of genuine political parties, opposition centred around religious movements (rather as the Catholic Church in Poland is a kind of symbol of anti-government forces).

There are additional reasons why opposition should have come from, and been centred on, the Islamic religion. Sunni Muslims recognise the temporal ruler as the successor of the prophet Mohammed, but this is not the case with the Shi’a branch to which most Iranians belong, The various land reforms of the Shah and his father have deprived the religious leaders or mullahs (of whom there are some 180,000 in Iran) of their lands. They have thereby been forced to rely economically on the “religious tax" paid by their followers, especially the bazaar merchants—and the sums paid over in this way were probably greater than the secular taxes paid to the government. The mullahs constituted a large, influential and financially secure grouping outside the formal state apparatus, and one moreover with a sizable grass roots organisation. The Shah’s new-style oil-based capitalism inevitably led to undermining of the merchants’ position and hence of the mullahs. The result was a clash of interests between the merchants and the Shah as spokesman for the new oil-financed bourgeoisie. The priests are but the ideologists of the merchants, and the seemingly religious dispute masks an economic conflict.

Opposition to the Shah’s regime gradually increased throughout 1977, and by the middle of the following year the Shah was promising “liberalisation" with “free elections”. These carrots failed to quieten things down and martial law had to be declared in September 1978. Opposition still seethed, however, and in January 1979 the Shall left Iran. It was a striking demonstration that even an apparently all-powerful dictator cannot survive for long without the support, or at least the acquiescence, of those he rules over.

The replacement has been the so-called “Islamic republic”, which is effectively run by religious leaders like the Ayatollah Khomeini. The Tehran workers are provided with a diet of “bread and circuses", parading outside the US embassy as if American imperialism were the cause of all their problems. Their new rulers are no better than the Shah and, like him, go in for executions and secret trials. Like the Shah, they wage bloody war against nationalist movements in the non-Persian speaking areas of Kurdistan and Khuzestan. And above all, the division of society into two classes remains.

Meanwhile opposition too continues. At the end of April, bomb explosions in Tehran killed four people, those being blamed for this including the Americans, the Iraqis, the Kurds and left-wing guerrillas. The position of Iran’s new rulers is by no means secure. It is unlikely that the Shah will return (other than to face trial), but the Islamic republic will be as unable to solve the country’s economic problems as he was. The dispute between different sections of the Iranian capitalist class will continue, with the new industrial bourgeoisie likely to come out on top eventually. As has happened so often elsewhere, an inter-capitalist dispute has been dressed up in other clothes (religious, nationalist, or whatever), and workers have been deluded into supporting one side or the other.

Our message to workers in Iran is the same as our message to workers everywhere: do not waste your lives and energy by supporting one group of your masters against another—instead, unite as a class against the system that sets up some human beings as masters over others.

Paul Bennett

"War can solve no working class problem" (1980)

From the June 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism and War

Anything which in the slightest way encourages the workers to retain the blighting and poisoning belief in nationalism and so-called national interests, perpetuates the dangerous illusion of class harmony and plays always into the hands of the capitalist class. Only class-conscious socialists can speak across the frontiers of the capitalist nations to the working class of the world and they can do so only because they are entirely free from the taint of so-called national interests which can be none other than capitalist interests.

War can solve no working class problem. It cuts across the fundamental identity of interest of the workers of the world, setting sections of this class at enmity with each other in the interests of sections of the capitalist class. It elevates force into the position of arbiter in place of the common human desire for mutual peace and happiness. Its effect is wholly evil. It depraves all the participants by forcing them to concentrate upon the best methods of producing misery and of annihilating each other. It elevates lying, cheating, disabling and murdering opponents into virtues, confers distinctions upon those who practise these means most successfully, and inaugurates training courses on a vast scale to produce efficiency. Young men and women, in their most impressionable years, have the vile methods of warfare impressed upon them so thoroughly that they lose a balanced outlook on life and are impregnated with the idea that force, with all its baseness, and not reason is the final solution in all problems. Many of those who have been subjected to the atmosphere of war remain addicted to violence when war has come to a temporary end.

Socialism is completely opposed to war and to what war represents. At the same time it is the only solution to the conditions that breed war. It is a new form of society in which the people of the world will work harmoniously together for their mutual benefit, for there will be neither privilege nor property to cause enmity. No coercion will be needed because each will gain from co-operating harmoniously with his fellows. But it is a new social system that demands understanding of its implications from those who seek to establish it. One important implication is that coercion does not solve problems but only breeds fresh ones, and war is an attempt to coerce. Above all war is one of the means employed by the ruling class to maintain their privileged position at the expense of the subject class. With the establishment of Socialism war will disappear and humanity will have taken the first step out of the jungle.

From “The Socialist Party and War "

Scum (1980)

Party News from the June 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

A leaflet published by Islington Branch for distribution to cinema audiences at the film. “Scum

“SCUM"—THE NEED FOR A POLITICAL RESPONSE

The film you have just watched depicts the institutionalised brutality which is an inseparable part of the British state machine. The original version was banned as a television play by the 'authorities of the BBC because it was thought to be too one-sided to be shown to a mass audience. If the BBC employed similar editorial standards in the Nine o’clock News we might treat their claim to neutrality as having some meaning. In fact, it is the conscious intention of the media to “entertain” us with the likes of Starsky and Hutch and Porridge rather than let us see progammes which will set us thinking about the kind of society' in which we live.

Having come out of the cinema, aware of what goes on in the name of justice and order, you may conclude that something has to be done. Willie Whitelaw and the Short Sharp Shock Brigade believe that something should be done: they say that those who step out of line should meet with even worse forms of punishment. They justify, in the name of Discipline, the incarceration of inarticulate people who express their anger in acts of violence, mentally retarded people who fall foul of the law and can’t be accommodated in overcrowded psychiatric institutions, people found in the possession of cannabis in what is supposed to be a free society. Such offenders are locked up, humiliated and depersonalised for having the audacity to be born into a society which cannot provide for their human needs. Those who advocate law and order really mean violence in the defence of the.present order; they mean the legal retention of the status quo in which 10 per cent of the population own approximately 90 per cent of accumulated wealth.

Probably most people who watch Scum will not be of the “hang ‘em and flog ’em” mentality. They will be concerned and distressed by what they see. They will be outraged by the brutality which is being tolerated. They will be moved by a sense of hostility to authoritarianism and disregard for human dignity. These feelings are understandable, but liberal sentiments have never solved the problems facing us all. Some may look towards legislative reform to solve the problem—but that, at best can only lead to ‘improved’ borstals, not the abolition of the crime and punishment system itself. But it is clear from the film that it is not how you lock people up, but that you lock them up which is the inhumane act. Some may criticise the borstal system on moral grounds, claiming that it is un-Christian and that if only those in power knew what was happening they would put a stop to it. In fact, the penal system is quite in line with the cruelty and imposed discipline of Christianity, as was shown in the film by the Christian borstal governor. Neither is it true that those in power would be willing to eradicate the conditions and attitudes portrayed in the film. Their main concern is that the working class should stay in line and produce profits for them; if a few of us step out of line we can expect no sympathy from the mighty rulers who depend upon our consent for their power.

Prison and borstal are part of the entire inhibiting structure of the capitalist system. Prisons and borstals exist all over the world, including the so-called socialist countries, because capitalism prevails worldwide. Where there is capitalism there are two classes: those who own and control the means of producing and distributing wealth and the majority who produce but do not own the wealth. The legal system—laws, police, courts, prisons, borstals, armies—exist to protect the position of the minority against the majority. As long as this system lasts, so will the violence of the state. The only positive political response is for the majority us to gain control of the state machine for the purpose of abolishing the capitalist system. The only response to the crimes of the state is democratic political revolution. The Socialist Party of Great Britain stands without compromise for Socialist Revolution.

We want a society without laws, without police, without prisons and borstals. We want a society of rational human co-operation. We want a society of common ownership and democratic control of the world around us. Don’t just walk away from Scum feeling indignant and powerless. Put your indignation to a positive use by joining with us in the work of building support for the principles of Socialism.

Islington Branch

Socialist understanding is the key (1980)

From the June 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

It cannot be stressed enough, that without a widespread and clear idea among workers of what a socialist society entails, it will he unattainable. The reason is simple. The very nature of socialism—a moneyless, wageless world of unrestricted access to the goods and services provided by voluntary cooperative effort—necessitates understanding. There is absolutely no way in which such a sweeping fundamental transformation of social relationships could be thrust upon an unwilling, unknowing majority by some minority, however enlightened or well meaning.

In the first place such a minority would not have the power to do this against the might of the state, which is at present directed towards securing the continuation and the smooth and orderly functioning of capitalism in one form or another. The point to note though is that the state is able to do this because of the active or passive consent of the overwhelming majority. Being imbued with a capitalist ideology this majority continues to elect capitalist parties to power or, in places like Russia, to acquiesce in state capitalist dictatorship. Only by supplanting this capitalist ideology with a socialist outlook can majority support be gained to accomplish the necessary act of capturing state power to ensure that it cannot be used against the socialist transformation of society.

Secondly and most importantly, even if it were possible for a socialist minority to capture power, the majority would still need to participate in the complex process of modem socialised production, which has given rise to the possibility of socialism and which socialism will inherit. In socialism individuals would not be compelled to cooperate through the economic coercion of a wages system or the political tyranny of a state. It would not be socialism otherwise. How then could individuals be persuaded to participate in running a socialist society?

The answer is that people would have to want to do this in the first place out of “enlightened self interest”, in basic harmony with the interests of society as a whole and recognised as such. This means that people would have to know why socialism was in their own best interest and for that they would need to know what socialism was.

But given that for socialism to work people would have to cooperate it seems reasonable to suppose that the self-interest which drove them to establish socialism would compel them to participate in the required manner. Cooperative behaviour would spring from the realisation of self interest made one with social interests by the conversion of the means of production into the common property of all.

In practical terms this means people will need to know that with free access to the abundance of wealth modern industry could so easily provide (a potential imprisoned within the structure of the capitalist market economy) there will be no need to take more than they require which would, indeed, bring about social chaos.

Furthermore, to satisfy their needs in socialism they themselves will have to produce the things they require. They will assume a sense of creative responsibility; they will sited the slave mentality that craves the direction of leaders, a mentality that is reinforced by the insidious notion perpetrated by the left, of a “vanguard party” to lead the workers. That such a reactionary notion can have no place in the socialist revolution (though it certainly did in the case of capitalist revolutions such as the Bolshevik bourgeois revolution of 1917 which still provides inspiration for many leftists) was pointed out by Frederick Engels:

The time is past for revolutions carried through by small minorities at the head of unconscious masses. When it gets to be a matter of the complete transformation of social organisation, the masses themselves must participate, must understand what is at stake and why they are to act. (1895 Introduction to Marx's Class Struggles in France)

Having argued that majority understanding of socialism is indispensable to its establishment let us see how this may be brought about. One suggestion put forward by those who pay lip service to socialism is that it can be achieved through “raising consciousness" by a more rigorous prosecution of the day to day struggles of the workers.

The absurdity of this notion is apparent when we take a look at the very people who propound it—organisations like the “Socialist Workers Party” These are the people who presumably have had their “consciousness raised” and who therefore know how it is done—yet where are the indications that they know what socialism means? Certainly there is nothing in their literature in between the endless procession of pictures of banner bearing demos and inch-high expletives about “stuffing” this or “smashing” that. If anything it is more concerned with striking postures than conveying understanding, with sensationalism rather than socialism, moralism rather than Marxism.

Romantic militants

What these romantic militants want is not socialism but more of the same struggle, whereby they supposedly had their “consciousness raised", on the pretext that it leads somewhere. As they don’t want socialism they cannot possibly want to do away with capitalism. True the occasional reference is made to “smashing capitalism” but “capitalism" in this context is just a vague pigeonhole within which to deposit blame for social problems without need for further explanation. The correct analysis of the root cause of those social problems (capitalism) and their solution (socialism) are mutually interdependent. You cannot have one without the other and the left have neither.

If they did understand what capitalism was about, the left would not waste their time advancing daft ideas about “advocating policies beneficial to working people" (Socialist Worker 21.4.79) within a system which cannot possibly be run in the interests of "working people". Instead of dissipating their energies grappling with all the manifest absurdities and injustices thrown up by capitalism, they would concentrate on exposing that system as the cause of poverty, strife, pollution, racism. It is not possible to agitate for reforms which can only work to perpetuate the system, and at the same time claim to want to abolish it. By advocating reforms, the left imply the problems concerned are capable of solution within capitalism—a direct contradiction of the socialist view. The sterile prospect the left hold out is of struggle for its own sake, a vicious circle, for all they have "learnt from struggle" is that they must struggle in order to learn from it.

But let there be no misunderstanding on this score. The need to struggle in the industrial field is created by the antagonistic class interests inherent in capitalism. Nevertheless the purpose of a socialist cannot be to prolong this struggle but to bring it to a speedy end through political action. Our concern is not whether workers “learn from struggle" but what they learn and what use they put this knowledge to in the political field, where the decisive act in the emancipation of the working class will occur. Encouraging a hopelessly optimistic faith in the efficacy of industrial struggle cannot aid an understanding of capitalism. To the extent that it is shattered against the enduring reality of capitalism's economic laws, the outcome is more often than not one of despair, disillusionment and distrust for those who foster such a faith. Trade union activity is essentially defensive and limited as is explained in Marx's Value, Price and Profit.

The argument that “socialist understanding" develops out of class struggle is true enough. However the left then behave as if class struggle was something they conceived in their minds and they therefore feel obliged to go out into the world and initiate it. The idea of class struggle derives from the demonstrable fact that it exists irrespective of the knowledge or wishes of its participants. It exists because of the way society is at present organised into two classes whose interests are antagonistic. The need, then, is not to initiate it but to clarify it.

How then do socialists propose to bring about the understanding necessary for socialism? From what has been said we can identify at least two principles that define the work of a socialist party and are readily apparent in the way the Socialist Party of Great Britain conducts its propaganda. The first is total opposition to reformism because of its fundamental incompatibility with revolution. The second is to clarify, to directly transmit or embody in propaganda, what is meant by socialism. This should not be done in isolation but rather as an integral part of a coherent and comprehensive analysis of the world we live in. Analysis without a solution would be as sterile as a solution without the supporting analysis.

Shared experience

An understanding of socialism will not come by the spontaneous and automatic blossoming of this knowledge in the bosoms of millions of isolated workers. Feudal peasants could not effect a revolution in their own interests because the material conditions of their existence tended to "atomise” them, whereas capitalism, by bringing workers together in production, compelling them to organise and combine in trade unions, has willy-nilly brought into existence its own grave-digger. Mass socialist consciousness will develop out of the common experiences of workers and the interaction of ideas drawn from those experiences and through unity on the basis of socialist knowledge.

This means the growth of socialist parties around the world, armed with the strength that comes from unity, able to meet and vanquish the divisive ideology of capitalism by clearing away the smokescreen it creates between the worker and the recognition of his real real interests.

Already several such parties exist around the world but our effectiveness is limited. The spread of socialist knowledge will add to our effectiveness so that eventually we shall be able to break through the vicious circle that tends to keep us small simply because we are small. Indeed it is precisely because we are small that there is a greater significance in joining us now, rather than when we are numbered by tens of thousands.

Unlike the labour Party we do not solicit any support other than that of genuine socialists. It may keep us small but it has kept us socialist. That is the reason for what might on the face of it seem to some as an almost perverse and quixotic form of behaviour in resolutely refusing to place popularity before principles. That is why we screen applicants for membership just to ensure that they basically understand what we are about. This ties in with our opposition to the principle of leadership: leaders, in order to lead, have first to be accepted by those whom they wish to lead and that means getting support for the wrong reasons, pandering, and thus being ensnared by, the reformist aspirations of the majority. "The movement . . . will be shaped by the people it has tried to assimilate and not the people by the movement”. (On Spontaneity and organisation. M. Bookchin).

A favoured tactic of the left is that you should do the opposite of what you say you want, which means getting support for the wrong reasons. What this abandonment of principles is supposed to bring about is the gradual acceptance of your point of view by inviting people—urging them, in fact — to ram their heads firmly against a brick wall with consequences of which you were presumably aware. Thus you say, if you are in the SWP, “vote Labour" to workers and, sensing their reluctance, add a little incentive such as "W'ell at least they are not as bad as the Tories”. One can only wonder at the strange mental process whereby hatred for the brick wall is to be converted into faith in the conman who spurred you on to rush headlong into it.

Socialists see no merit at all in having working class heads rammed against brick walls. What we need is a class conscious working class, not a concussed one. It is the power of knowledge that is the weapon the working class must forge; for example, knowing the severe limitations within which trade unions work is not a weakness or an admission of defeat but a source of strength allowing workers to struggle to greatest effect within those limitations. Likewise socialist understanding is the most effective means to combat racism, nationalism and sexism. As a systematic attack upon the ideological props of capitalism, it is not only the key to the future but also a guide to practical struggle and the transformation of the social outlook.

Robin Cox