Party News Briefs (1958)

Party News from the February 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

Glasgow Branches (City and Kelvingrove) are holding regular Sunday evening propaganda meetings and full details are given in the local press. These meetings are being well attended and the Branch members are anxious to see that interesting subjects are dealt with and also to maintain the already good start made for 1958. Please make a note—full details of meetings in your local paper.

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Wales. The Party’s name is frequently in the news and the Western Mail (calling itself the National Daily of Wales) publishes letters from our Swansea Comrades in its “Letters to the Editor” column. The Swansea Group members, being few in number, not living very close to one another, rely on correspondence as their main source of propaganda. In the issue of the Western Mail dated December 4th a feature article quotes “The Western Mail seems to me to have been quite generous to political minorities. I noticed for example at least one letter from the Swansea Secretary of the Select Party of Good Boys, as I call the Socialist Party of Great Britain which still claims to be the only true Socialist Party in these isles.”

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"Socialist Standard.” Another reminder that a subscription form is in this issue, and although the Standard is now 6d. a month, 7s. 6d. will secure the Socialist Standard for a whole year, posted to any address in Britain.

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Camberwell Branch has not been mentioned in News Briefs for sometime now. This is not due to lack of activity; on the contrary, the Branch has been very busy. Two outdoor meeting stations have been maintained— East Street and Rushcroft Road—and although during the winter, months, these meetings are not so well attended as in the Spring and Summer, literature sales have been well maintained. The Branch Members regularly canvas the Socialist Standard and in the November “drive” nearly 20 dozen copies were sold.

One member who was very active in the Branch has moved out of London and the Branch has lost contact with him. The member is Comrade Goodman and the Branch would be very pleased to hear from him again.

Currently, the branch is arranging film-shows and lectures and mock debates at the branch room. Details of these activities will be given shortly. As in other branches of the Party, non-members are always welcome at branch meetings and lectures.

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Activity in Morecambe. Comrade Shaw of Morecambe sends us from time to time cuttings from local newspapers containing many letters of his putting the party case in answer to articles and letters from other readers. Recently he has had letters in the Barrow News, the Lancaster Guardian, Morecambe Times and Morecambe Visitor. In this way Comrade Shaw is able to put over the Socialist case on matters of current interest and it is an example other members could usefully copy.

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Our Advertising. In response to a recent advertisement we received the following letter:

“your strikingly-worded advertisement in the News Chronicle causes me to write for the free specimen copy offered.

I am still looking for a Socialist journal free from the omniscience of Tooley Street and the greasiness of Uriah Heep.

Is such to be found in Clapham High Street?”

It is pleasing to receive this tribute to our advertising. We only hope that the literature which has been sent to this enquirer will stimulate his interest sufficiently to induce him to make a fuller study of the Socialist case.

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New Journal published by our Irish Comrades. We welcome as an addition to Socialist literature the Socialist, published by the Socialist Party of Ireland. It is a brightly written and informative 8-page duplicated journal, issued monthly at 3d. Those who wish to get copies are invited to apply to the S.P.I., 29, Lincoln Avenue, Belfast, or to P. Boylan, 115, Walkinstown Drive, Walkinstown, Dublin, or to our head office. We wish our Irish Comrades success in their venture and urge readers of the Socialist Standard to give them support.

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Speakers’ Class. The Propaganda Committee is arranging a Speakers class to be held February—April. The last class was very successful as members know and the Propaganda Committee will be pleased to hear from Comrades who intend to join. Details are being sent to Branch Secretaries.

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Passing of an early member. We have received from Leonard F. Bailey a letter about the death of his father, B. S. Bailey on 17th December, at the age of 78. He writes:—

  “I understood he was a founder member of the Party in 1904, and was for many years an active member of Wood Green Branch, and mentioned to me amongst other comrades, the names of Anderson and Fitzgerald, which would take us back to the first world war of 1914.

    I know he had the party movement deeply at heart and should like, if I may, to send the Party a small donation each year to commemorate his memory on December 17th.

   His sons are scattered, one at Helpringham, Lines., another at Ringstead, Northants, and myself at Ilford, but I can safely say we have all father’s ideals at heart.”

Phyllis Howard

Pathfinders: Lights Out, Action… (2016)

The Pathfinders Column from the January 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

As UK readers will recall, people in the north-west of England had an interesting time of it just before Christmas courtesy of Storm Desmond. It was quite something to see the local town centre under water, and those not actually flooded out of their houses still had the unique experience of spending two or three winter nights without heating or power. With nothing but a candle for company when it gets dark at 4pm you quickly realise just how interminably long a December night lasts. There'll be a regional baby boom next September, in all probability.

One might have thought that heating and lights would be uppermost in people's minds, and certainly it wasn't fun for those all-electric households which had only bread and cold water for dinner. But one can manage on the whole fairly well without basic amenities, so long as it's not permanent. What one can't manage without – and this is not obvious until you experience it – is information.

People were in the dark in more ways than one. No power meant no TV, no radio, no internet, and no mobile phones. It's hard to overstate, in our hyper-connected world, just how disorienting this is. It was as if a black shell of silence had descended on the area, shutting out all noise from outside. Hungry for news, or perhaps rediscovering the importance of human contact, people left their houses and poured into the city centre to find out whatever there was to find out. Every food shop was closed, and anywhere you might conceivably purchase a candle, but Claire's Accessories was incongruously open for business and so was Ann Summers. The town authorities seemed not to have quite grasped what was going on, and it did not occur to anyone to set up a central news point. On being asked for information, the duty officer in the well-lit counter booth at the central police station smiled innocently and said 'What about?'

An early rumour was that the nuclear power station had gone down. In an information vacuum every Chinese whisper is amplified to a shout of alarm. There was a rumour (rich irony) that the water was to be cut off. The bridges were closed (why?) and many roads out of town (why?). Continuing her whimsical attempt to be helpful the station duty officer enquired 'Did you want to go somewhere?'

Police officers on the street, drafted in from other counties, seemed uniformly uninformed. One directed people to walk miles to an out-of-town supermarket which was closed. Asked if he would use his radio to check what food services might be functioning, another officer simply laughed. Police radios are only for important things, apparently.

Showing more presence of mind than the constabulary, staff from the local flooded Sainsbury's began doling out free bread and a queue formed across the large car park, redolent of Soviet Russia. Similar queues grew around the few functioning public telephone boxes, anachronistic installations nobody had even noticed the day before. 

It wasn't the end of the world, and people knew it, because M&S still had its Christmas lights on. There was good humour and bonhomie, and a complete lack of the sort of panic which those in charge like to pretend populations are prone to. There were jokes too. These were terrorist floods, people said. Isis have been stuffing toilet rolls into the storm drains to block them up. It's a conspiracy by the carpet firms. It's a Tory plan to turn the North-West into a London reservoir ready for the next summer drought.

But it was sobering, all the same, to realise how fragile modern society is and how we can be so easily disconnected from it, and how upon disconnection that same social reality so quickly comes to look like the dreamed 'reality' in the film The Matrix. A few nights of blacked out streets, where even the street and traffic lights don't work, is not enough time for social order to disintegrate (though there was a spike in burglaries), but it is enough time to reflect on the blinding meaninglessness of reality TV, X Factor shows, Facebook and a million other things we think are real and important and interesting.

It wasn't the end of the world, but one couldn't escape a feeling that the end of the world, if it ever came, would look something like this. People would pour out of their dark, cold houses, their phones dead and useless, suffering an almost existential crisis of ignorance, while authority figures stood around vaguely, pretending to be in charge but not much the wiser. The end of the world would not be caused by a mere power cut. But it would certainly start with one.

The acid test of a society is how it copes when things go wrong. Socialists are not inclined to be melodramatic, but we do think about the big questions, like what kind of social structures humans would need to survive into the far future. We're certainly not alone in the conviction that capitalism is spectacularly not equipped to ensure that.

It's not just the chaotic casino economics. A key problem with property-owning societies is that they form rigid vertical hierarchies whose only purpose is to preserve the status quo, and this is an intrinsic weakness because it makes those societies non-adaptive. The people trapped in them are also non-adaptive. They are not encouraged to cope in adversity, they're encouraged to be weak, to be clueless and defenceless and over-specialised, because this is what protects the hierarchy. They are trained from infant school to rely on authority, to do all that is ordered and nothing that is prohibited. All the glare and dazzle of the information society, with its 24/7 news channels and its movies and its myth-making, obscures the essential fact that the majority of people are perpetually in the dark, out in the cold and disconnected from power. For capitalism to be perpetually strong, we must be perpetually weak. This is all good for capitalism but it is a survival flaw for humans. A flaw like this killed the dinosaurs. A meteorite caused havoc and shut out the sun, but what really killed them was their inability to adapt.

This is what the authoritarian Leninist Left doesn't understand, any better than the proto-fascist right-wing. That's why socialists talk about the future society as a 'horizontal hierarchy', an organisational structure which allows a maximum diversity of skills without the coercive weight of vertical stratification. It's not just a lofty obsession with egalitarianism. Such a society, unrestricted by the steel bonds of social rank and position, would be mobile and adaptive, able to respond to changing circumstances, able to survive long term, and probably a damn sight better organised when the lights go out.

Paddy Shannon