Property Society — Russian Style (1977)

From the October 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

When Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917 they were not making a revolution. The revolution had taken place some months earlier when the Tsarist regime was finally toppled together with the abandonment of feudalism, the build-up of capitalist production relations, and the recognition that this was to be the new form of society. All this had started before the Bolsheviks disbanded what democratic rights then existed in Russia and took control of the state machine. The Lenin coup speeded up this development.

However, Lenin and his conspiratorial clique claimed that they were about to do the impossible—establish Socialism without first having gone through the phase of capitalism. To this day, the Russian dictators claim that the present form of society is something to do with Socialism; is somehow the opposite of what happens in the West. The old joke is absolutely correct—“capitalist society is the exploitation of man by man, but in Russia it is the other way round”.

Almost as soon as Lenin had gained control of the state, the SPGB was able to point out that whatever else might be going on in Russia, it could not be the establishment of Socialism. Information about Russia was scarcer than it is today, but the SPGB had a sound understanding of the way society developed. We were able to point out that the two fundamental requirements for the establishment of the common ownership and control of, and free access to, all wealth and the means of producing it were missing. First, the potential of production in abundance, something which is only possible after capitalism has built up the productive forces; and second, mass Socialist consciousness, that is people ready to take over all wealth in society owned privately or by the state, with the knowledge of how to set up and run Socialist society. In 1977, sixty years later, it is clear to all that capitalism exists in Russia.

Capitalist constitution 

The hall-marks of capitalist society exist there; large amounts of property owned by certain sections of the community with the corollary that other sections do not own property in any meaningful sense, money, and buying and selling, a wages system, production for sale at a profit, a state machine backed up by armed force, and a system of law. This is capitalist society. The Russian Constitution (adopted by the 8th Congress of the Soviet of the USSR on December 5th, 1936, though slightly amended since) proudly and unashamedly boasts of all the major features of capitalism.

A few examples will make the point. To begin with, take the Russian legal system (of which the constitution is a part). Laws first developed when private property first appeared; they exist to maintain private property in the hands of the minority. All laws have this fundamental purpose. The more advanced the society, the more complicated and “mature” its legal system, and the Russian legal system is as complex and thorough as any. The need for a constitution and all that goes with it (judges, police, courts etc.) is only necessary for advanced property society. Their legal system is so similar to that which exists in Britain that W. Wilson MP, after a recent visit to Russia, could write:

The hard wooden seats and the long straight corridors of Leningrad City Court were no different from the wooden seats and long corridors often found in English Courts. The citizens of Leningrad who sat on those benches had the look of fearful expectancy that appears to be the never-changing mien of those who sit and wait outside English Courts. Inside the Leningrad City Court the occupants of the Bench could have been English provincial magistrates. The defendants — two waitresses charged with defalcation of the restaurant takings — appeared little different from two English waitresses in similar circumstances. (Law Society's Gazette, 10th Nov, 1976.)

The same misery and indignity that is imposed on the working class by the capitalist class the world over! Wilson concludes: “There are many aspects of Soviet criminal law that are on all fours with English criminal procedure.”

“Fundamental rights”

This conclusion is detailed in the Russian Constitution: capitalist relations are to exist, by law! The Constitution is divided into thirteen Chapters dealing with aspects of Russian property society. For example. Chapter 1 deals with “The Social Structure”, Chapter 2 “The State Structure”, Chapter 3 “The Highest Agencies of State Power”, Chapter 9 “The Court Structure” and the very revealing Chapter 10 is headed “Fundamental Rights and Duties of Citizens.” Each Chapter is divided into numbered subheadings (articles) covering the detailed matter of state power and administration. The Russian Constitution boldly protects individual liberties but this is meaningless. The Russian ruling clique has shown such scant regard for the “fundamental rights” enshrined in the Russian Constitution that it is right to say these “liberties” do not exist. Nevertheless, it is instructive to see what the Constitution says they are. In Article 125 of Chapter 10 It is provided as follows:

In conformity with the interests of the working people and in order to strengthen the socialist system, citizens of the USSR shall be guaranteed by law (a) freedom of speech; (b) freedom of the press; (c) freedom of assembly and meetings; (d) freedom of street processions and demonstrations.

Those people with any knowledge of western constitutions might think all this is suspiciously familiar. It is. Why is it necessary for the constitution to “declare” these “interests” of the “working people”? Does it mean that these so-called rights could be withdrawn, cut down, or totally ignored? In a Socialist society such meaningless declarations of good intent will be as unnecessary as they are absurd. In a free society there will be no possibility of forcing anyone to do anything, or taking away anything from anyone. If I want to speak, write, assemble with my friends, or march and demonstrate there will be no possibility of anyone preventing it. Socialism will be a voluntary society: the opposite of the coercive form of society that exists in Russia and the so- called “liberal” or “democratic” forms of society that exist in the west. There will be no need for constitutional claptrap.

The system of wage-labour is an essential feature of capitalist society. It is one of the fundamental characteristics that separate capitalism and its form of private property exploitation from every previous form. Right in the centre of the Russian Constitution (Chapter 10, article 118) the wages system is solemnly set forth in these words: “Citizens of the USSR shall have the right to labour, that is, the right to a guaranteed job with payment for their labour in accordance with its quantity and quality.” Article 12 of Chapter 1 makes sure the Russian worker does not miss the point: “Labour in the USSR shall be an obligation and a matter of honour for every able-bodied citizen in accordance with the principle ‘He who does not work, neither shall he eat.’ ” Thus the Russian proletariat is told that it is an honour to produce wealth for the rulers!

Wages and profits

The Council of Ministers of the USSR publishes each year a booklet called USSR in Figures. Their tables for 1975 give average wage and salary levels (“the average wages and salary plus allowances and benefits per worker”) and states that a minimum monthly wage of 70 roubles has now been agreed. Income tax has been abolished for those earning less than 70 roubles (so much for the minimum wage?); also taxes have been reduced for those workers earning less than 90 roubles per month (p. 182/3). The converse of wages is profits. Profits are produced for the capitalist class throughout capitalism by paying the worker less in wages than the value he has produced. The balance left over is appropriated by the capitalist class, and spent as revenue, or accumulated in order to reinvest to produce more profits and so on. The booklet actually prints tables of profits (p. 45) and proclaims that these have increased by 9.6 per cent, against 1974 figures! The Russian workers have made it possible for their exploitation to continue and increase. What capitalist government would not be proud of such efforts?

For a country that claims to have established Socialism many years ago, it is notable that the Russian rulers constantly have to remind their wage slaves that Socialism has been established. The first page of the rules of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (adopted in 1961 and amended in 1966) states: “Under the direction of the Communist Party exploiting classes in the Soviet Union have been liquidated, and the moral and political unity of Soviet society has been formed and strengthened. Socialism has triumphed fully and finally.” Chapter 1 of the Constitution, concludes that in the USSR “the principle of socialism shall be carried out; from each according to his ability, to each according to his labour.”

Socialism has not been established in Russia—it could not have been. When it is established, the world over, the principle will be from each according to his ability right enough, but to each according to his need. Need will be determined by each individual according to his own requirements, not according to his pay-packet. The wages system, money, buying and selling, constitutions, law courts, police and jailers will be unnecessary. The conditions for establishing socialism are now the same in Russia as the rest of the world. It needs a working class politically educated to take the necessary steps for their own emancipation.

Ronnie Warrington

Cobra (1986)

From the September 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

The publicity for Cobra describes this latest celluloid venture by bare-chested, grenade-draped. machine gun toting Sylvester Stallone into the pornography of righteousness like this: "Crime is a disease. This man is the cure".

Very few adults, apart from perhaps his bank manager, take Stallone seriously so there is nothing to be gained from any exhaustive examination of the many fallacies in those two short sentences. But it is worth discussing the claim that there is a "cure" for crime, if only because it is made so often by so many people.

One of the most illusory concepts in present-day politics is that it would be possible to have a crime-free capitalism. All that is needed, it is argued, are a few changes in the law, an increase in the police force, a beefing up of the penal system . . .  no election manifesto. no Home Secretary's speech, no Tory

conference debate on law and order, feels complete without some reference to a plan for the imminent eradication of crime. The deception rests on the Stallone assumption, that crime is a type of sickness, an irrationally anti-social disruption in a fundamentally reasonable and humane society.

The problem, however, is that in spite of these assurances, even in spite of the "cures" which get beyond the state of being promised and are actually applied, crime is not only not eradicated but continues stubbornly to increase. One result is a growing concern about the extent of crime, which at times reaches the point of the sort of neurosis which promises some weighty box office receipts for Stallone's prescription for the summary execution of those criminals he considers deserve it.

It would be more hopeful if those who queue to see Cobra were to look at the issue in more basic terms. This society is based on the minority possession of the means of life. The rest of us — the majority, including the people in the cinema queue — are allowed access to what we need to live only on terms which are essential to the class existence of the owning minority. We are employed by them, as wage slaves, and we are required to respect the privileged status which their property rights confer on them. If we don't, they have the means to restrain and punish us; we might even end up at the receiving end of one of Stallone's grenades.

But the essence of capitalism is that property. with its laws and its coercion, is everywhere. No matter what a worker's intentions may be. it is really virtually impossible to avoid breaking the laws of property in some way. Wage slavery is a degrading, frustrating way of life and it is not unnatural for workers to try to burst free of it by deliberately taking some of the wealth which they as a class have produced but which is legally denied to them.

So crime is natural and inevitable under capitalism. It cannot be cured. It can be eliminated only by relegating it to history, through a revolution to establish a society of common ownership and free access to wealth in which the acts which are crimes under capitalism will not happen because there will be no reason for them. That revolution will come about through political awareness, but Stallone's eager fans are not famous for that.

Justice isn’t for us (2025)

From the September 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

We love watching cop shows where the rugged dick wins. The bad guy gets caught, everyone breathes a sigh of relief, and law and order are secured for another day, again. The detective’s a heavy drinking, chain-smoking, emotionally wrecked mess, but somehow they get the bad guy. Usually some rich, powerful bastard who almost gets away with it, but justice wins in the final act. We get to feel good. Satisfied.

But that’s not how it works in real life. For the working class the justice system doesn’t exist to deliver truth or fairness. It’s a system: a system under capital, a system that serves capital. It protects property, not people. It punishes survival. It targets the working class, the dispossessed, the traumatised, those who’ve already been hurt by other material conditions this system throws at them.

The real bad guys: wife-beaters, rapists, the corrupt bosses, the violent cops, they often walk free. Or they don’t even get looked at.

The victims? They’re ignored, re-traumatised through the courts, blamed, left to pick up the pieces with no support.

Let’s have the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth: most ‘crime’ is shaped by class and trauma. People with Borderline Personality Disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Complex PTSD, … people who’ve been through it are more likely to end up in front of a judge than behind a desk. And when the harm is personal – sexual assault, domestic abuse, assault, the eyes of the system glaze over. Victims are told to report online, just trust the police, wait for justice, hope the Crown Prosecution Service thinks its viable… but ‘justice’ almost never comes. And when the abuser is the police? Only then, when it’s inescapably public, when it’s, PC Wayne Couzens, murderer and rapist, enabled by his position as a police constable, does the system act. It feels more like it’s PR.

Scotland Yard recently declared violence against women and girls to be a national epidemic. Where was that energy before it became another Met. Police media scandal? Survivors have been shouting into the void for decades. Justice isn’t something you find in a courtroom, not under this system.

Movements like MeToo (the campaign against sexual abuse) show the cracks — how deep the rot goes. But even they hit a wall. Restorative justice circles gain popularity then vanish again or end up doing more harm than good because they are operated by the enthusiastic but unqualified. We need systemic change, but the structures we live under fight revolution in every way.

The system fails over and over: the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the Met’s decades-long cover-up; the brutal killing of Sarah Everard by a serving officer known as ‘The Rapist’ among the force. Survivors of rape still face a system where only one percent of reported cases lead to charges. The Grenfell fire exposed how working-class lives are treated as disposable, wrapped in flammable cladding and sacrificed for profit. The Hillsborough disaster showed how the state lies to protect itself while victims’ families are left to fight for truth alone. These aren’t one-offs — they’re symptoms of a system doing exactly what it was built to do: protect power, property, and profit.

So what does socialism offer? Not more punishment. Not longer sentences. Not more cops with better PR. Socialism means we stop asking a broken system to fix what it’s built to ignore. It means no one has to live in the material conditions that cause crime in the first instance: poverty, trauma, insecurity, isolation. It’s built so that people who’ve been harmed are actually cared for. And people who’ve done harm are made to take responsibility, not locked in a cage, but made to understand, repair, change.

Justice under capitalism tends to protect power and often reinforces it. We’ve seen enough to know the courts won’t save us. But we also know that we’re not powerless and can bring change. This starts when we stop pretending this system works and start building something better ourselves.

A.T.

Letter: What justice? (1992)

Letter to the Editors from the September 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

What justice?

Dear Editors,

“What Makes You Angry?” (Socialist Standard, July). I do not know whether responses were anticipated to such an open question, but I certainly feel able to throw in my twopenny worth.

The system under which we all exist, live, prosper and exploit (in that order) angers me constantly. The system is an evil joke played upon humanity, where success at one end of the scale is measured by the amount of poverty and suffering at the other.

I believe it was Balzac who remarked that “behind every great man is a crime”, or words to like effect, and it is true, if crime is defined as causing suffering and deprivation through greed and wanton cruelty.

Civilised society is merely a facade, the icing on a cake consisting of the following ingredients: selfishness, theft, murder; yes, even murder! After all let us remember that murder has not always been a capital offence. In Saxon times, the penalty for murdering a labourer was about £10, a bishop cost you £60, and an archbishop would set you back about £180. In fact, with the exception of regicide, you could pay in cash for most malefactions.

Inequalities in the way justice is administered enrage me. In the light of Guildford, Birmingham, Kiszko, and the remainder of Lord Lane’s whipping boys, what happened to Habeas Corpus, the presumption of innocence, and the burden of proof? Were they conveniently forgotten in the haste to secure convictions for undeniable atrocities. And why aren’t the West Midlands rabble in prison instead of voting for the return of public executions, the tumbril cart, and the Tyburn Tree, when each week people who are unable to pay their poll tax are carted off to gaol amid harsh condemnation from the bench?

Why do people like Anthony Blunt get offered immunity from prosecution for offences against the Official Secrets Act, allowing them to continue their bourgeois lives, in exchange for a few names and dates?

And last, but by no means least, why is Lord Lane allowed to retain his title in spite of the damage he has done in the name of British Justice?

David Hinchcliffe,

Accrington

Reply:

“British Justice" has always been what it is today: an arm of the state machine which exists to defend the interests of the ruling class at home and abroad. Nor could it be anything else since, as Kropotkin once pointed out, the whole system of law courts and prisons is essentially only “organised vengeance called justice”.

Editors.

Running Commentary: Clerics’ confusion (1986)

The Running Commentary column from the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Clerics’ confusion

Are we all god 's children, or are some of us — women — rather more distant relations of his — nieces perhaps? Are we all made in his immaculate image or are those of us in the female sex less capable than those of the male gender?

The Church of England, which purports to instruct us in morality and keeping our place as docile wage slaves in the capitalist order of things, is having difficulty in deciding whether to allow women the same opportunity to be ordained as men. The recent vote of the Synod, to refer the issue to a panel of 53 bishops, was not so much a decision as a deferment, in the hope that the slickest religious brains in the church can use the next six months or so to cook up a face-saving compromise.

This is all rather curious. The church has been operating for centuries as a bunch of intellectual storm-troopers (although latterly rather more like a company in Dad's Army) for class society. Do they think they might perform better, on behalf of the ruling class, if women were allowed to dress up in those silly clothes, perform the same meaningless rituals and preach to us about the rewards waiting in heaven for all who do their duty for capitalism?

On the other hand, why should any of them oppose women priests? (Graham Leonard, the Bishop of London, hinted broadly that he would leave the church if women are to be ordained. Not exactly a grievous loss to us if he did). Other churches have female priests, as does the Anglican church in some other countries. They don't seem to have any problems in doing the church's work of putting across the baseless, reactionary nonsense of religion.

This brings us to the most important question, of why women should want an equal right to become priests, especially if this means first being insulted by people like Graham Leonard. Of course, it's all part of the drive for sexual equality, for proving that women can do any job as efficiently as men. So far the jobs where this has been proved have included the armed forces (in some states there are female combat troops); the police (watch Hill Street Blues of a Saturday night to see how a girl can handle a truncheon); the prison service (there are now female governors of male prisons in Britain, making sure the prisoners are firmly locked away and punished appropriately); and of course there's the Prime Ministership . . .

Perhaps there are some women libbers who think it is a worthwhile result for their long campaign, that they can now do the same dirty work for capitalism as men. In fact, there are worthier aims to campaign for. Like a society free, not just of sexual inequality and repression but also of the religious hypocrisy which has helped to keep us all — and especially women — enslaved for too long.

Health service priorities

Another recent demonstration of the perverse priorities in capitalism is the statement by Norman Fowler, the Social Services secretary, that he has authorised health authorities to pay managers bonuses of up to £3.960 for making cuts in health service expenditure — cuts that are likely to entail the closure of hospitals.

Health service managers who don't mind acting as the government’s hatchet people can expect an extra £ 1.660 a year if they are general managers (five per cent on top of their annual salary of £33.200); for district managers £3,160 (ten per cent of their maximum of £31.600); and for unit managers. who run individual hospitals, an extra £3.960. or up to 15 per cent of the maximum salary of £26.400.

One of the ways in which the government seeks to justify its programme of hospital closures is through the cosy euphemism of "community care". This is the name given to the plan to remove many long-term sick, disabled and mentally ill from hospitals to be "cared for" in the community. Most people would accept that being looked after by loving friends, family or neighbours backed up by appropriate medical, nursing and social work support is preferable to incarceration in impersonal hospital wards. Unfortunately the reality of "community care" is often very different. Many long-stay hospital patients have remained in hospital precisely because they don't have family or friends willing or able to care for them; social services and community medical provision are already over-stretched and are unable to provide the support that would make "community care" a reality; there are insufficient resources being put into sheltered housing, group homes and day centres. The result is that the reality of "community care" for many people is a lonely, near-destitute existence in a depressing hostel; or homelessness or. for some, relapse into illness and a return to hospital.

Health service managers are being offered bribes to close hospitals, not because they are no longer needed but because meeting the needs of those who make up waiting list statistics is too expensive. Neither are hospitals being closed because "community care" is a more humane alternative. They are being closed because it is a cheaper alternative.

Policing pupils

Over the last few months the government has done its best to try to divert attention away from uncomfortable, but real, issues such as the continuing suffering caused by apartheid in South Africa, the failure of economic policies to stem the rise in unemployment, questions being asked about the nuclear power industry after the Chernobyl nuclear accident, and so on. Instead we have had our attention focused on a series of pseudo-issues which can be "solved" easily. Litter in the streets: solution — call in capitalist entrepreneur Richard Branson to start a "Clean-Up Britain" campaign. Hippy peace convoys in the New Forest: mobilise an army of police at five in the morning to break up and disperse the camp. Sexual promiscuity among the young: introduce an amendment to the Education Bill to require teachers to stress moral values and family life in sex education classes.

This amendment to the Education Bill attracted considerable media attention and yet at the same time another two amendments were being tacked on to the Bill which, although they attracted less comment, are perhaps more insidious. They will require school governors to pay attention to the view of Chief Officers of the police when making decisions about school curricula and head teachers to take account of Chief Officers' views when organising lessons.

Are the police going to use their newly-acquired influence to ensure that children are taught about road safety, or the necessity of having lights on their bicycles, or what to do if they witness an accident7 So far the evidence suggests that this is not what the police have in mind. The 1983 report from the schools inspectors suggested that the value (to the police) of closer liaison between the police and schools would be that of "intelligence-gathering":

Police forces generally attach considerable importance to the advantages to be gained through unofficial contact with schools. Home-beat officers “drop in" at school during break for a chat with pupils or teachers . . . Most schools welcome and encourage this informal contact and may ask home-beat officers or juvenile bureau officers to have an unofficial "word" with pupils, or their parents, about whom they feel anxious in relation to criminal activity.

Of course there's an official term for this informal, unofficial contact between police and schools — "multi-agency policing". In practice this means that as many different people as possible are co-opted to do the dirty work of the police and inform on their neighbours and fellow workers through neighbourhood watch schemes and the involvement of social workers. Now it seems that the police, having got their foot in the door of school, are going to be allowed some input into the curriculum too.

Most teachers who attempt to talk about the morality of family life in sex education lessons will simply be laughed down by sophisticated teenagers who have their own moral code. But it's much harder to laugh down a police officer who enters the classroom to glean information through chats with pupils or teachers, or a Chief Constable who insists on his right to vet the curriculum.

Blogger's Note:

Though this Running Commentary column is unsigned, there's a strong chance it was written by Janie Percy-Smith. During this period, she was on the Standard editorial committee and was one of the journal's most prolific writers, and the 'Clerics' confusion' piece indicates that the author is female.

Should the workers obey the law? The working class viewpoint. (1911)

From the July 1911 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Capitalist Ideal … ‘a law-abiding citizen‘

Those four words constitute the very highest eulogy than can be pronounced by capitalist lips. A man may be a poltroon or a hero, a rogue or a fool, a Christian or an atheist, an abstainer or a sot, a prince or a porter, but the finale for all worthy men alike, at the end of the day’s workless pleasure or pleasureless work, is this sententious approval – “He was a law-abiding citizen.”

On all other matters appertaining to the conduct of other people capitalists may be divided. One is monarchist, another republican, a third a teetotal fanatic, and a fourth a devotee of the hop and the grape, and the convictions of each play their part in the appraisement of the merits of their fellow men; but, whether they fill it with wine or water, not one would refuse to drain a glass and turn it, empty, down, to the memory of “a law-abiding citizen”.

But what is this fetich which is the highest pinnacle of capitalist ethic, the last word in capitalist morality? The Law! The Might and Majesty of the Law; the strong arm of the Law. Ah! that is the whole secret of it. The Law is all might, and majesty, and strong arm. Soldier and sailor, judge and jailor, policeman and prison and Jack Ketch! The Might and Majesty of the Law, indeed.

One would think that the Law, needing the support of such a vast machinery of coercion, must be a very uncomfortable and unpleasant thing to some people, and not that only, but antagonistic to an enormous number of the population. It must be so indeed. If Peace sits armed beneath her olive, she is armed against somebody.

And who is it that the Law is armed against? Perchance, reader, it is you and me. 

It is a saying which  continually assails our ears, that without Law there could be no Order. If this is true, if this is the very nature of things human, then it is truly a sad case with that poor, miserable rag, “human nature”, which it profits the prophets to tell us is fore-ordained to frustrate the Socialist ideal.

But it is not true. In spite of all that our “civilisation”, and particularly our capitalist “civilisation” has done for it, still “human nature” has not fallen so immeasurably below the wild beast standard that, in all circumstances, order can only exist under the wing of the Law.

The Law is a Class Instrument.

The common impression of that all is disorder and insecurity in savage life is far from the truth. In point of fact all the might and majesty of the Law has never been able to secure the orderly existence that obtained among primitive savage people. Barbarities there may be, connected with superstitious rites, but anarchy has never found a place among the savage races of the communistic stage. The reason is obvious – the interest of one is the interest of all.

Disorder creeps in with the rise of a ruling class, and Law slinks at its heels. A ruling class is always more or less parasitic. It raises itself upon the class it rules, making the latter toil and moil for it. In other words, it is a robber class.

Now if there is one trait inherent in “human nature” it is this – a rooted objection to being robbed. That process never fails, as far as the victim is conscious of it, to arouse the spleen of him whom it is practised upon. Hence a coercive force becomes necessary – not to the subject class, but to the ruling class.

This coercive force exists to conserve the social system under which, and the institutions by which, the dominant class practise their robbery. At first coercion is open, lawless force, for no cunningly devised cloak can obscure the antagonism of interests between the chattel-slave and his master. But as society grows more complex, as the ruling class finds itself threatened by other classes rising from below, as the rulers in society become relatively fewer, and, finally, as they are compelled more and more to rely on the subject classes to become their own suppressors, the necessity develops of substituting laws to be maintained for people to be suppressed.

Suppression is the function of the Law.

But whether the big ones of the earth  make laws for the suppression of people, and maintain those laws by force, or they suppress the people without troubling about laws, is in essence the same thing – suppression. Only the method is different.

From the earlier rising of the “State”, class rule has been based upon private property, so Law, at the bottom, has always had a private-property basis. This explains how it happens that the Law of ancient Rome has served for the foundation of the Law of every modern State. Roman Law was projected to maintain the ascendancy of a propertied class. After all these centuries, though new classes have risen and died away, still Law has no other function than to support a propertied class against the expropriated.

Law, then, is nothing but a class instrument – a weapon of the capitalist State for its own preservation. It is necessary to the capitalist State because the ruling class in capitalism have laid thieves’ hands upon the means of life and enslaved the people. The strong arm of the Law, soldier and sailor, judge and jailor, policeman and prison and Jack Ketch, is significant of the class struggle and class antagonism set up by that seizure of the means of life.

The Law is the Enemy of the People.

When the worker understands this his attitude toward the Law will be determined  accordingly. As he perceives it to be antagonistic to him, so he will become antagonistic to it – as, with increasing class-consciousness, he must to every instrument of the capitalist State. However much he may be made to fear the Law, the proletarian will no longer respect it. He will come to regard it in its true light, as the enemy, not the friend, of the working class; as the necessary adjunct of class rule, by means of which alone the producers of all wealth can be robbed and murdered and debauched, with some sort of one-sided orderliness, by a class of idle, drunken parasites, steeped to the neck in moral turpitude, sunk to the eye-brows in abomination which even the hardened Law dares find no name for.

That superstitious awe which, quite apart from the fear of policeman and prison and Jack Ketch, surrounds the Majesty of the Law, will dissipate, and no longer will the worker “blush for shame” at being caught in the act of law-breaking. On the other hand, such episodes as the “Houndsditch affair” and “Sidney Street” will assume a different aspect. It will be seen that, instead of the police laying down their lives for any high principle, they have died to secure against the depredations of desperate members of the working class, the wealth stolen from their fellows with outrage and violence infinitely more villainous than ever these so-called Anarchists resort to, as the ghastly murders of Whitehaven and Westhoughton transcend in callous brutality those of Houndsditch.

Great as the revolutionary’s satisfaction must be to observe the breaking down and extinction of this reverence for the Law that is equivalent to so many thousands of extra policemen to the capitalist class, such satisfaction does not arise solely from the fact of the increasing difficulties of our expropriators and spoliators, but from the recognition of the larger fact that, as successive lessons such as that now being wrought out in connection with the strike at Hull, teach the workers how the Law is always on the side of the masters, how completely it is in their hands, they will be driven to enquire what the Might and Majesty of the Law really means.

The Workers’ Course.

This spirit of enquiry will be the herald of the dawn. They will perceive then that this mass of legality which men call law, is simply the stalking-horse of oppression, the verbal garment of brute force. They will realise that it is this brute force alone which maintains the murderers of Whitehaven and Bolton, of Belfast and Tonypandy, in power, by maintaining their control of the means of life.

The workers’ course will then be very clear. They will set their faces toward the capture of all this coercive force, by organised struggle on the political field. When they have succeeded in capturing political power they have, by the very fact of so doing, proclaimed at once their strength and their capacity. Their strength to wield the armed forces to the revolutionary purpose, since they will have captured the instruments by which it is wielded. Their capacity to organise themselves as a productive community, since they will have organised themselves for the infinitely more difficult task of their own emancipation.

The first fact in itself would undermine the military strength of the capitalist class, for the working-class soldiery armed in the capitalist interest, realising the political strength of their own class, and inevitably sharing in the advanced proletarian class-consciousness, would be encouraged to follow their class interest – just as the French regulars, under the much less favourable circumstances of the Paris Commune, sided with the workers when they thought them strong, and against them when they thought them weak.

Let the workers, therefore, regard the Law and its machinery from their own standpoint – as an instrument of their oppression, and organise themselves into a political party in order to capture it, and use it in the final act of all law, the glorious crowning fruition of the last and bitterest of all class struggles – their own emancipation from slavery.

A. E. Jacomb

Greasy Pole: Straw man at Howard's end? (1996)

The Greasy Pole column from the July 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anyone who is concerned about the human condition must be getting worried about Jack Straw. As he goes about the business of being the man who hopes to be Labour’s next Home Secretary, Straw is finding life more and more stressful and threatening. In this situation, what do politicians do? They make a speech—or perhaps, depending on how strongly they feel, several speeches. And so it has come about that Straw, who obviously feels strongly about his chances of getting to sit on the govemment Front Bench in the near future, has spoken out.

Among the first to feel the lash of Straw's tongue were beggars and alcoholics. Or rather aggressive beggars and alcoholics; so it could be that addicts and vagrants, who accept their position cheerfully, will avoid the worst consequences of any laws designed to sweep them away which a future Labour government may introduce. Until then, the streets will continue to be littered with the open, human evidence of the fate which awaits anyone who does not fit into capitalism’s presumptive pattern of wage-slavery. The rich will still have to avert their eyes to this spectacle, as they make their way from the opera to an expensive supper, or to their club, or to the discreet shops of Knightsbridge.

Intimidation

Then there are the squeegee merchants—the people who wait, with bucket and sponge, at busy traffic lights and insist on cleaning car windscreens, with an implied promise that provided the driver pays them for this service, they won’t hold on the aerial as the car is driven way. Now this can be intimidating, especially to drivers who take a pride in keeping their own windscreen sparkling clean and their aerial stiff and straight. Not nearly so intimidating, though, as the pressure a lot of the motorists are likely to be under from their employers, who now wield all the power associated with widespread unemployment. Of the adult population, 60 percent are now either unemployed or in jobs which can be defined as insecure. Three-quarters of full time jobs are on short-term contracts. Sitting in the petrol fumes at the lights, the motorists are harassed all right—but not only by the squeegee merchants.

Perhaps encouraged by the response to his campaign to clear the streets and the busy junctions of all offenders against good order and wage-slaves' discipline, Straw then turned his attention to children. Not just any children; at the moment he is concerned only with those who are out on the streets at a time when Straw thinks they should be at home, watching party political broadcasts on television or tucked up in bed with a copy of the Labour Party’s latest policy document. Driving home from the Commons, says Straw, he sees children who he judges to be under ten years old and he wonders where their parents are. He didn’t actually say that these children are a threat to anyone, or had committed any crime but he clearly feels they are another threat to Labour's ideal society and something must be done about them.

Straw’s proposal of a curfew for all ten-year-old children was, he said, a “sensible" way of dealing with a problem. In fact the police already have the power to pick up any child who seems to be at any kind of risk and take them home, or to hospital, or to a social worker. Where Straw’s curfew would break fresh ground is in the fact that it would not be necessary for the children to be at risk; merely being out of doors after a certain hour would be enough for the police to act.

There was a predictably mixed response, on the one hand from people who are concerned at the apparent increase in violence and offences by young children and on the other from people who are worried about civil liberties and the presumption of innocence and why kids should be out by themselves at night and how the curfew would fall heaviest on families who are already the most disadvantaged among the working class.

Straw was unperturbed, probably convinced that his ideas would strike a sympathetic chord with enough people to be a vote winner. He did not seem to be concerned to ask why the adults who are supposed to be caring for children are apparently so careless. He did not refer to the fact that, however it is measured, poverty in this country gets worse and more distressing year-by-year. According [to] the Child Poverty Action Group, about a quarter of the population live at or below the poverty line; in 1979 about ten percent were at that level. Straw did not dwell on the fact that as poverty deepens all sorts of human factors go with it, like self-esteem, like confidence in the future, like care for the family . . . 

Backlash

There was a time when it was hardly necessary to argue this case, as one White Paper after another promoted the policies which eventually sprouted the great social work boom of the Sixties and Seventies. Many members of the Labour Party could delude themselves that they were in the forefront of this movement in ideas, that in future problems like crime, homelessness, addiction would be treated in their social context instead of being explained away as the poisonous fruit of evil personalities.

Well that was along time ago and now we live, as socialists said we would, in a period of reaction—of backlash. The present Home Secretary, Michael Howard, has single-mindedly exploited this, presumably on the assumption that in this way he advances his political career. He has not bothered to respond to Straw’s odious attempts to outbid him in the contest for the get-tough-on-crime vote. Perhaps he agrees with the Labour voter who said Straw is “. . . the only man on earth who can make Michael Howard look left-wing’’.

From the politicians' point-of-view the advantage with the policies of Straw and Howard is that they blank out the need to properly investigate social problems and come up with a considered response to them. They suffocate debate under panic and hysteria. They perpetuate the social system which impoverishes, brutalises and represses us—mortgages and homeless, addicts and athletes, adults and children.

Ivan

The Passing Show: Holiday Reckoning (1964)

The Passing Show Column from the July 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

Holiday Reckoning 1.

The residents of Clacton had hardly gathered their wits after the Easter punch-ups, when Whitsun brought fresh outbreaks of teenage violence, but this time at Margate, Brighton and that paradise of retired army officers—Bournemouth. Margate was the worst afflicted, as hoards of “Mods” and “Rockers” descended on Dreamland and other parts and laid into each other without pity, egged on by their girl friends.

One aspect of these outbreaks which has alarmed the authorities is the contempt in which the warring youngsters held the police. “Here come the coppers; let's do ’em! ” was heard at one point and seems to sum up the prevailing attitude. It’s little wonder, then, that the coppers got just as tough and waded in with truncheons swinging. Neither is it surprising that heavy penalties were imposed by the courts on practically all those who were caught.

Just about as sickening was the spate of comments, excuses, call them what you will, in the press and elsewhere. Some people had blamed the poor weather and the lack of teenage amusement facilities at Clacton for the trouble there, but the same excuse could not be used for those which occurred at Whitsun. Nobody seemed to have any real grasp of why the violence had broken out and everybody was shocked and angered by it, forgetting that this was not the first trouble of its kind—neither is it likely to be the last.

When it came to suggesting ways of preventing it, we were treated to a rich variety of uselessness. The Evening Standard featured brief impromptu interviews with people in the street One young woman thought that confiscating their scooters and motorbikes would “immobilise the little horrors and soon put a stop to them,” as if there were no such things as buses and trains. (Anyway, what is to stop them from fighting at home if they want to?) Stiffer penalties, prison, birch and the inevitable “put ’em in the army for a spell’’—all were trotted out, and all equally futile. The army, after all, exists to do just this sort of thing, only on a bigger and more highly organised scale. There is another difference, of course. The army has the sanction of the government in particular, and society in general. When it knocks other people about, it is done in “the interests of peace” or “to establish the rule of law” or “to protect the territorial integrity ” of some puppet state or other. Yobbos do not enjoy such privilege.

We hold no brief for the Whitsun wild ones, but at the risk of being told to turn the record over and play the other side, we say again that they are the ugly product of an equally ugly society. In the main, they are members of the working class—that much is obvious, despite some of the inane suggestions about their supposed riches. Their homes are usually in the drabber and meaner parts of the big towns, and their everyday lives are generally in character with their surroundings. Like most of us, they have to face a monotonous, unfulfilling and insecure existence of going to work for a wage packet.

This faces them with all the associate problems, boredom not least of all. Not just the boredom of “nowhere to go in the evening” but the greater boredom which is part and parcel of the uninspiring life of a wage slave and which does, in fact, colour his every waking minute. If we are honest with ourselves, we will all admit this.

The remarks of some of the “ Mods’ birds” to Daily Mirror reporter Paula James the day after the fights, are illuminating.

Listen—it gives you a kick, a thrill. It makes you feel all funny inside. You get butterflies in your stomach and you want the boys to go on and on . . . You’ve got to get your kicks somehow. You’ve got to make up for all that boring time you're going to spend at work next week.

This, then, sums up their attitude. This, they think, will solve their problems— and the “kicks” have got to be extra hard to give them any pleasure at all. No use telling them that their problems will still be with them long after they are too old for kicks any more. Reefers, Purple Hearts, violence and noise are the empty pleasures they seek. No use telling them either of the broken health which lies only a short way ahead for many of them. The Mods’ birds have a reply to that, too:

We like life the way it is now. We want it to go on and on like this. . . . We want to live today. For here, for now, not next week.

They have yet to realise that they are really at the receiving end of the biggest kick of all, one that lands fairly and squarely on them, so long as they are members of the working class. All the bust-ups in the world won’t alter that. That is the real lesson they have to learn and until then Capitalism has the laugh which really matters.

Holiday Reckoning 2.

Whitsun was warm and sunny, the roads hot and smelly—and dangerous. It was estimated that about six million cars were on the move over the four days, mostly rushing to and from the holiday spots. A record number of cars and road deaths. At least eighty-four people lost their lives. In France the number was one less. Sweden, with seventeen, had its highest total for years.

There were the usual warnings and appeals from motoring organisations and Ministry of Transport Parliamentary Secretary, Lord Chesham. Strange though it may sound, these might have had some effect. Apparently overall driving was better, but the relentlessly increasing volume of traffic has a counteracting effect. As The Guardian pointed out: “ The ultimate effect is that we are marching slowly backwards.”

This trite little statement seemed to illustrate neatly the mockery behind the whole problem of road traffic. In this and other countries, a great deal of motorway building has been going on, but the fastest road building does not seem to keep pace with the mounting number of vehicles. It is typical that only capitalism could produce such machines as the motor car, inefficient and unwieldy when viewed from the viewpoint of human interests and then plonk it onto a road system completely unable to cope with it. In addition, only Capitalism would have us all on a ball and chain, and then release us all at once for “a much needed break,” half of which is spent rushing “to get away from it all ” only to find that we have not really escaped, because everyone else has had the same idea.

Majorcan Holiday

Situated in the Mediterranean about five miles off the Spanish mainland, Majorca has become tremendously popular in recent years as a holiday centre. With its warm climate and beautiful rugged mountain scenery, it attracts tourists from many parts of the world. It is noted, amongst other things, for its cultivated pearls, its cathedral at Palma, and the Valldemosa monastery where Chopin stayed for just a few unhappy months.

Many workers manage a fortnight there by travelling tourist class on a “package holiday,” some spending most of the daylight hours lying on the beach frying themselves in the sizzling sunshine, concerned less with the benefits of sunlight than with getting a tan to take back home and show their friends. They may get heatstroke for their trouble, but the prestige of a golden brown skin is obviously considered worthy of the risk.

Despite the warmth and the comparatively relaxing atmosphere, it is interesting to note the number of people who, even there, never let down their guard for a moment. Here is the woman with pointed sunglasses and a loud affected voice, trailing an enormous dog behind her. Over there is the man who boasts constantly about his “good job” and high income and, most laughable of all, some of them even get patriotic about the English weather.

Their hotel is quite well appointed and perhaps this is what has gone to their heads a little. They seem to miss the point that it is by no means as exclusive as they like to think. For exclusiveness you go to another part of the island, such as Formentor, where the cheapest hotel room will cost you about six guineas a day, where the beaches are superb and serene in their peacefulness. It is the playground of royal families and other rich types.

Some of the better-off have settled in Majorca and live the usual life of ease associated with their wealth. But for most Majorcans it is the usual story of working for a wage packet as a means of living. This is the lesson which stands out just as much among the beauty of the Balearics as it does amongst the dirt and bustle of London.

Eddie Critchfield

Blogger's Note:

A short Panorama video about Mods and Rockers from 1964 gives you a flavour of the period. Failing that, you can always check out Sting as a Bell Boy.

Crime and Politicians (1995)

From the February 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

What to do about crime is a question the capitalist parties 
are forever debating without ever coming near a solution.
They refuse to accept that capitalism causes crime

The Tories, the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats are all preoccupied with the problem of crime because crime is one of the principal concerns of the public. Even the smaller political organisations have been forced, by public demand, to address the question.

That demand is based on the proximity of crime — theft, burglary, mugging, armed robbery, car stealing, violence and murder, to name only the illegal variety — to the citizen. Crime is not now only something most members of the public read about; it is a frightening reality for most people, either as a personal experience or through association with a friend or neighbour. Nor is the illusion of security traditionally reinforced any more by the presence of the ubiquitous policeman a comfort. Despite massive increases in their numbers and vast sums spent on prevention and detection technology, the police response to run-of-the-mill crime is such that thousands of offences go unreported.

Like unemployment and the problems of the NHS, crime has become a potential election winner — or loser. As such, it occupies the attention of government and opposition while, in the background, specialists, like the police, criminologists, sociologists and other experts wrestle with the problem. Like poverty, homelessness, unemployment, health care and other acute problems of our present social order, no politicians, experts or academics would dare to suggest that they could ever solve the problem of crime; indeed, they all claim that crime results from our “human nature” and, therefore, all they can do is create mechanisms for containing the fruits of our human frailty.

Gutter media

The problems for the politicians and the experts is that they face a public opinion largely fed by a gutter, headline-seeking press which, like the criminals, benefits from crime — without taking any of the chances the criminals have to take. Recently Channel 4 had a programme on crime and its prevention in its series, Power and the People. Of the 300 people used in an experimental programme aimed at testing the citizen’s response to intelligent persuasion — as opposed to the brutal rhetoric of the gutter media — most of the suggestions for dealing with the problem of crime, offered by the majority of these voters, made the crimes they were discussing seem innocent and benign.

The floggers were there, the throw-away-the-key brigade, string-’em-up was well represented, cut-off-their-fingers seemed a cross-cultural response. Listening to the “solutions” offered by these opponents of crime, it occurred to this writer that, if the 300 had been a convocation of criminals, the innocent would be in grave peril.

Happily, and most instructively, after they had heard from the experts, police officers, criminologists, jailers and others, about the application of some of their “solutions” there was a swing of 12 to 15 percent towards more civilised views. The point is, though, that these people were a random sample of the electorate; the people with votes; the people who want something done.

It places the humane politician in a dilemma. If he, or she, has done their homework on the question, they know that all the knee-jerk “solutions” have been tried and found wanting. The death penalty didn’t stop sheep-stealing or reduce murders. An obvious, and an economically-effective, means of ending the intractable problem of “joyriding” would be to give the offenders the means, through employment or otherwise, of having a car, but that sort of solution would not win votes. Indeed, recently we saw the reaction of the gutter scribes of some of the tabloids and the so-called “quality” press to attempts by penologists to create some self-esteem in youthful criminals by exposing them to something that their station in life doesn’t allow them to contemplate — a holiday in East Africa.

But elections, for the politicians, are about winning. That means that political parties cannot be seen to be soft or innovative about crime — and many of the opinion-formers think that looking for its cause is being “soft”. In the Channel 4 programme referred to earlier, Labour leader Tony Blair was subjected to questioning about his attitudes to crime by people whose questions showed that they suspected him of being “soft” on the subject. He squirmed but his solutions, though more intelligently expressed, were essentially the same as those of Sir Ivan Lawrence, a typical Tory twit who had been questioned earlier. Blair may not have believed the nonsense he mouthed but capitalist politics are not about changing people’s ideas but with identifying with those ideas in order to get votes.

Of course it is easy to understand public reaction to crime — especially those most despicable of crimes carried out against the poor, the weak, against children or on the elderly. Actually, such crimes, though they get the big headlines, are relatively rare and represent a very small percentage of all crimes. The overwhelming volume of crime, some 94 percent, is against property and the offences at the top of the crime league, in monetary terms, are rarely associated with members of the working class. The really big money is in fraud, embezzlement, insider trading, insurance racketeering, tax evasion and the like.

Mammoth swindle

In these matters detection and convictions are low because there are grey areas between capitalism’s legal thieving and the illegal variety. An example of this appeared in the Observer on 15 May of last year and concerned a mammoth swindle carried out by insurance companies cashing in on Tory pressure on workers to join, or transfer to, private pension schemes. The Director of the Serious Fraud Office, responding to enquires about the insurance super-crooks said: “We have neither the resources nor the powers to investigate the whole area of personal pension transfers”. The same cannot be said about the resources and powers enjoyed by the army of snoopers the state employs to detect social security fraud.

Crime is a filthy business. According to Ken Smith, in his book Free is Cheaper, it employs about one million people, guarding, protecting, policing, transporting, arresting, convicting and incarcerating. The police, especially, are judged by the number of convictions they achieve and over the last few years there have been a succession of cases that have shown that police officers of all ranks are as ready to use thuggery, lies and deceit to achieve their purpose as are the criminals. In the upper echelons of crime, opportunity often plays a part in determining who is the criminal and who the victim but, at the low end of the crime scale are the really sad eases, the mugged, the terrified, the deprived and the injured. It is difficult for these victims to appreciate that the petty criminal is the product of the same system that made them his, or her, victim.

Free Access

Socialists do not need an answer to the problems of crime. We are organised to gain majority support for the abolition of capitalism, and the achievement of a society in which all human beings would have free and equal access to the goods and services they need. It requires little mental effort to appreciate that, in a society where everybody could avail of their needs the overwhelming burden of crime would disappear.

Space precludes a deeper examination of that other small volume of crime that does not appear to be directly connected with property but which usually results from the values and conditioning of people in a property society.

Capitalism without crime is just not possible. Most of the more repressive and brutal means advanced for its containment are not only angry, despairing and degrading ways of striking back at the criminal, they are utterly futile. While we have competition, profit, aggression, conflict and, of course, poverty, despair and alienation, we will have crime and while we have capitalism we will have all of these things.

Richard Montague

These FoolishThings . . . (1995)

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

The basic contradictions in capitalism cause widespread death, destruction, pollution, poverty and waste. But this is to take the world view. Most of us experience day-to-day capitalism as a series of small stupidities, irritations and frustrations. Here are a few. If you encounter any worth a wry smile, please send them to The Scavenger, who will publish the best.

“I won't claim the Workhouses didn't have their problems. but they were set up by people who cared. " Edwina Currie MP.

Central eating - a letter in a local newspaper:

“Did this caring government not promise to provide a little more for heating to keep us old ones warm?

I applied for heating allowance at the age of 81.

I was refused, so with my 25p bonus for reaching 80 years I bought a packet of extra strong mints.

So there you are! I had something to cat and something to keep me warm at the same time.” 

L. Edwards.

Bimbos for Christ’s sake!

Deep cleavages and micro skirts are currently the height of fashion for those models who give prostitutes a bad name. But now religion is becoming fashionable too. Girls like Samantha Fox and Mandy Smith (ex-Mrs Bill Wyman) have embraced a few men and bared a few square feet of flesh in their time. But now, apparently, they arc embracing Christ and baring their souls as well.

Let’s face it — it’s got to be true if the barbie dolls believe it.

"We are prepared to shoot and kill in the interest of society. " Chief Constable James Anderton.

Dazed and confused

Emma Nicholson, Conservative MP, writing in the Mail on Sunday bewails the fact that charities are becoming career vehicles for highly paid executives who run them like businesses. She says of her own experience with Save the Children.

"As our fundraising improved, so did the notion that success should be measured in terms of the latest spectacular increase in collected cash rather than in the number of lives saved or bettered by the relief of poverty. "

The Scavenger

Running Commentary: Free speech (1985)

The Running Commentary Column from the December 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Free speech

The ruling class in South Africa has imposed new censorship laws preventing foreign journalists reporting the current unrest and violence. The editor of the liberal (by South African standards) Cape Times, Anthony Heard, is to be prosecuted for publishing an interview with the banned leader of the African National Congress, Oliver Tambo, under a section of the Internal Security Act which prohibits the printing, publishing or dissemination without government permission of "any speech, utterance, writing or statement'' of a "banned'' person. Heard did not seek permission to publish the interview since he considered the public have a "right" to be informed about matters of importance. What he will discover is that in capitalism workers do not have "rights" except those legal rights granted by their political masters. Such legal rights are neither absolute nor inalienable. If the capitalist class feels that its interests are threatened by such "rights" as freedom of speech, a free press, freedom of movement or freedom to demonstrate then they will be suspended through Emergency Powers legislation, internal security measures or in the interests of "national security".

The white ruling class clearly feels itself under threat from the black nationalist movement, hence the tightening of the screw. But does it really believe it can conceal for long the contradictions inherent in the apartheid system, and the cruelty, poverty and inhumanity perpetrated in the name of white supremacy?

Race laws

Twenty years ago, in 1965, the first legislation was passed which attempted to outlaw racial discrimination in Britain, since when a number of other Acts have extended the scope of race relations law. So what is the position of blacks in Britain today?

As is well known, and as the Policy Studies Institute confirmed in its report Black and White in Britain, blacks are still relatively disadvantaged: they tend to live in worse housing than white workers, receive lower pay, get the worst jobs and are more likely to be unemployed. Increasingly they have been the victims of racial attacks and violence.

Various reasons have been given for this failure to improve the state of race relations but none has even begun to address the real problem. That is that it is impossible to legislate to change people's attitudes. They are shaped by the conditions of society in which we live. In capitalism conflict and competition between workers is inherent: competition for jobs, houses and other "scarce" resources. It is not surprising therefore that those who lose out in that competition frequently give vent to their frustration in the form of hostility towards blacks as an identifiable group.

No amount of legislation can change such feelings. What is needed is the recognition amongst all workers, men and women, black and white, that we do have interests in common, that transcend racial, cultural or gender divisions, but those interests will never be fully realised so long as capitalism continues. What we don't need is another piece of legislation outlawing racial discrimination; what we do need is democratic, political organisation to abolish the root cause of racism—capitalism.

Queen’s speech

Although the next general election is probably another two years away, it looks as if the government's campaign has begun in earnest. Its programme for the new session of Parliament, outlined in the Queen's speech, includes a Bill to deal with Public Order (likely to be a big vote-catcher given the hysteria whipped up over events on miners' picket lines and in inner cities); more privatisation to raise money for tax cuts; further "de-regulation", including the removal of restrictions on Sunday shopping, a limitation on the activities of Wages Councils so that workers under 21 will no longer have their pay protected, more private management of council housing estates; and changes in social security benefits.

What will this programme of legislation mean to workers? Is there anything to persuade us that the government is indeed acting in our interests?

Sunday shopping

Although some people might think that unrestricted opening hours are in workers' interests. we should remember that the shop-workers' union. USDAW, at least, is opposed to such a change. They fear that it will lead to their already badly paid members working much longer hours without the benefit of overtime rates. It becomes clear whose interests the proposed change is designed to serve when "Open Shop", the pressure group in favour of Sunday trading, lists among its members such giant retailers as Asda. MFI. Habitat/Mothercare, W.H. Smith and Woolworth.

Social security

The review of the Social Security system was intended to look for ways in which benefits could be "targetted" on those most in need, or at least that's the story we were given. The changes are likely to affect pensions. supplementary benefit, support for the low paid and housing benefit. A report published recently by the Policy Studies Institute (The Examination of Social Security) states that if the government s plans go ahead, some of the neediest and most disabled claimants will actually lose money.

Privatisation

The government expects to realise £10 billion from its sale of British Gas. It also plans to sell off shares in airports owned by the British Airports Authority and introduce "commercial management" into the naval dockyards. All this, it is hoped, will not only provide some spare cash for tax cuts, but also give people the opportunity to buy shares in companies presently legally owned by the state. If the workers weren't conned by the Labour trick of nationalisation. then maybe they can be duped into believing that they can have a real stake in the capitalist system of society by buying a few shares. The truth is very different. It makes no difference to the working class whether the means of production are privately owned or state owned; whether or not we own a few shares, workers will never have access to the wealth that we, as a class, collectively produce. Plans to give tenants some say in the management of council estates are part of an attempt to create the same illusion. Who wants to be part of a "property owning democracy" when the only property we own is a tower block slum?

Public order

The proposed changes to the law relating to Public Order will give the police greater powers to restrict marches and demonstrations. and to decide how many people should stand where on a picket line. A new offence of "disorderly conduct" will be created and the old common law offences of riot and affray will be tightened up (no doubt because of recent failures to secure prosecutions of people charged with these offences). These changes will mean that the legal rights of workers to protest, demonstrate and picket will be curtailed.

So the Queen's speech seems to have left out one important statement. It should have read as follows: "My government will continue to support absolutely the capitalist system of society which concentrates ownership and wealth in the hands of the minority capitalist class, at the expense of the working class who produce all wealth through their labour. My government will continue to support the police force and the other coercive machinery of state, which acts to protect the interests of parasites like myself against any perceived threat by the workers".

Janie Percy-Smith

Editorial: Stopping the boots (2024)

Editorial from the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

It should not surprise us that a wave of far-right rioting has swept the country.

This is, surely, physics.

In some respects, there has been a rightward shift in mainstream UK politics since the rise of Thatcher and neo-liberalism. The media has been key in driving this, not just the billionaire rags but national broadcasters and papers of record. Farage’s 34 Question Time appearances since 2000, along with every other far right-winger that could be squeezed into a suit, are testament to a deliberate complicity.

On the other hand, over the last decade elements on the left in this country have arguably been deliberately smeared by these same agencies in a moral panic about anti-semitism. To be anti-colonial was anti-semitic, and increasingly to be anti-capitalist was to be anti-semitic, with capitalism as a semitic trope. By the time the press had finished, surveys suggested the general public thought that fully thirty percent of left-wingers, consisting of the country’s most notable and self-styled anti-racist campaigners, was anti-semitic. And at the same time, of course, immigration was touted as being the main cause of our problems and the signifier of whether any politician was to be taken seriously or not.

Faced with such an overwhelming barrage of Farage, and scattershot of Oakeshott, neo-nazis are granted licence and anti-racists need bar their doors. It was, surely, pretty inevitable.

Or, this is what we should think. In fact, public decency prevailed. Tens of thousands protested against the far-right riots. Because there is more than physics at play.

We are all capable and responsible social beings, despite the conformist pressure of the mass media, and for every four fascist thugs there are four thousand people from all walks of life standing against them. Yes, with four thousand different reasons for doing so, but this variety of thought can sometimes be a strength when a single dogma is not, because it originates with the individual as an independent thinker rather than being spoon-fed from a single source.

We are not playthings of external forces, even Question Time, unless we choose to surrender. We are not governed by the stars or by television, or even by our stomachs; merely alienated from our decision-making, political ability. We have a choice and standing against racism is the right one.

Life-skills learned in struggles under capitalist are essential for making the socialist revolution. Such actions are not to be dismissed. They are not the revolution, but they are something. If socialism is the liberation of the individual, then the work of making socialists entails people coming to their own conclusions. That will still be happening, in fact most of it will be happening, in the course of revolution itself when the floodgates will be opened to a rapid change of perspective.

Take heart from the solidarity expressed across Britain in the last weeks. It was not the revolution – but the solidarity it engendered can over time feed into more positive developments, rather than being simply a reaction to the negative.

Greasy Pole: Farmyard Politics (2004)

The Greasy Pole column from the October 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Greg Dyke, ex-Director General of the BBC, has changed his mind. About Tony Blair, that is – although in the circumstances in which he was winkled out of a job which was supposed to make him one of the most powerful men in Britain, he has probably had second thoughts on quite a lot of other issues. Dyke first met Blair sometime around 1980 when Blair was a fresh faced, posh speaking young barrister who nevertheless wanted to ‘serve his country’ by being a Labour MP. “The Labour Party,” Dyke advised him, “needs another barrister like it needs a hole in the head” – which did not prevent Dyke helping Labour get another hole in the head by donating £5000 to Blair’s campaign for the party leadership.

   

That was then; this is now, when Dyke thinks Blair, in spite of his promise to introduce a new sort of politics, is really “just another politician and in some ways worse than those before him. He was either incompetent and took Britain to war on a misunderstanding or he lied when he told the House of Commons that he didn’t know what the 45 minute claim meant”. Regular readers of the Letters column in the Guardian, which seems to operate as a kind of counsellor’s couch for disappointed Labour voters, will know there are many who agree with Dyke. These are people who also supported Blair under the impression that Labour meant a different type of politics; instead they have got something which in many important respects is indistinguishable from the Tories. And Blair seems intent on supplying plenty of evidence to support the case against him.

1960s

For example on 19 July he made a speech grandly titled a Five Year Strategy for Crime, which purported to look back on the consequences of the 1960s and what the Blair government plans to do to repair the damage caused by that supposed time of “a huge breakthrough in terms of freedom of expression, of life style, of the individual’s right to live their own personal life in the way they chose”. Blair argued that law and order policy then focussed on the offender’s rights, protected the innocent and understood the social causes of criminality. But now:

“Today, people have had enough of this part of the 1960s consensus . . . they do want rules, order and proper behaviour . . .

They want a society of responsibility. They want a community where the decent law-abiding majority are in charge, where those that play by the rules do well; and those that don’t, get punished.”

That speech might have been made by John Major back in 1993 when, conveniently overlooking his affair with Edwina Currie, Major audaciously decided to lecture the rest of us on the need to get Back to Basics. He called for a revival of “the instinctive values of neighbourliness, decency and consideration for others”. He wanted the criminal justice system to “blame a little more and understand a little less”. Blair’s speech might also have been made by Michael Howard who, shortly after Blair shared his thoughts on crime and society with us, informed us that:

“Conservatives will stand up for the silent, law-abiding majority who  play by the rules and pay their dues. We will put their rights first.”

Among all this competition for votes Blair ignored the fact that during much of the alleged wild days of the 1960s when, he now thinks, the foundations of a seriously irresponsible society were being laid, his party were in power. They achieved that position not by respecting human decencies and behaving responsibly but by misleading the voters. Labour’s 1964 election appeal was based on the assurance that prosperity would come through an increase in productivity arising from technological development. The Tories had apparently overlooked this but Labour were led by the ravishingly clever Harold Wilson, who had graduated in economics at Oxford. After harnessing the technological revolution Wilson would put George Brown in charge of the economy at the Department of Economic Affairs and the rest was easy. The problem was that capitalism is not susceptible to being managed in that way. Wilson’s facile assurances were exposed and his government descended into chaos and crisis. One of Wilson’s senior ministers said “The trouble with Harold is one hasn’t the faintest idea whether the bastard means what he says even at the moment he speaks it”. Another agreed: “The tragedy of Wilson was that you couldn’t believe a word he said”. It was not a shining example of a government driven by a desire to play by the rules – unless it was those governing the methods used by political parties to get power over capitalism – and behave responsibly about their electoral promises.

Fettes

Meanwhile, how was the young Tony Blair surviving in those times of  moral peril?  From 1966 to 1971 he was a pupil at Fettes school, said to be the Eton of Scotland. It was the kind of educational establishment to have a strong appeal to the Blair of 2004 for the headmaster, a Dr. Iain McIntosh, was a disciplinarian and an ardent opponent of the “liberalising” influence of the 1960s. Fettes had a system of fagging, under which the younger boys had to be servants of the seniors. (Blair resented this but was praised by his senior for making “particularly good toast.”) Flogging by masters and senior boys was in force, with Blair the occasional victim (once at the unusually advanced age of 17). It must have been a proud moment for the headmaster when, after a game of hockey against a nearby borstal, the Fettes boys and the young prisoners compared their respective regimes; the borstal boys were sure they had the easier time.

   

Blair did not willingly submit to the Fettes regime as a valuable lesson in morality, which would stand him in good stead when he was later lecturing the rest of us from the eminence of Number Ten. He was in fact something of a disruptive influence in the school, persistently questioning and opposing the rules and procedures there. His housemaster assessed him as “the most difficult boy I ever had to deal with”. A fellow pupil remembered that “Masters were very worried about sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll and Blair looked like all three”. When he was 14 he ran away – simply walked off the train his parents had put him on to go back to school and made his way onto a plane at the airport – he said to fly “to somewhere like the Bahamas” – but the plan came to nothing because he did not have a boarding pass.

   

There were masters at Fettes who enjoyed Blair’s nagging and questioning as stimulating. Well there have been many others who have been bemused by his charm into accepting his flexible “principles”. Some of these people are ministers in his government. Others are just ordinarily deluded voters. This was the kind of tolerance – if that is the word – which helped him be accepted into Derry Irvine’s chambers when he was looking to become a barrister, a favour which has been repaid since. It slid him up the greasy pole, at first as a by-election candidate in the hopelessly Tory stronghold of Beaconsfield and then into the safe Labour seat at Sedgefield. It was not an obstacle to his climb that he joined CND, after he had been advised that the “more badges” he accumulated the better his chances of getting on in the Labour Party – advice he accepted with alacrity. It has seen him into Number Ten and keeps him there, in spite of the exposure of his deceits and the fact that in all important respects – in his policies, his speeches, his phraseology – he more and more resembles the Conservatives who are supposed to be his opponents.

Animal Farm

If it is impossible to discern any significant differences between the Labour Party and the Tories, that is because there aren’t any. On the basic issue of how to run the capitalist system they are thoroughly agreed that this must be done in the interests of the ruling class, which means that both of them in government must impose policies which are against the interests of the majority, while assuring us that they are doing something else. They must both define the problems of capitalism in terms of ruling class interests and offer “solutions” which at best are little other than palliatives. It is not a matter of chance that as they try to deceive the working class the party leaders use the same words, the same phrases. It is rather like the final passage in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, when the animals outside the farmhouse observe the pigs who have taken control of the farm inside, enjoying a raucous get-together with neighbouring farmers. As the evening wears on “the creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which”. That is what Greg Dyke and all those disgruntled Labour supporters are witnessing now; will they cling to Labour or will they consider the alternative to the cynical mess of capitalism’s politics?

Ivan