SPGB Meetings (1937)

Party News from the October 1937 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

It's interesting to note that a C. Umpleby was listed as a SPGB contact in Leeds during this period. I'm sure there was a Dave Umpleby who was active in the SPGB in South Yorkshire during the 1990s and 2000s. I wonder if they were related? Umpleby can't be that common a name.

SPGB Meetings (1986)

Party News from the December 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Notes:

• First mention of the SPGB Canterbury Group on the blog. 
• As there's an advert for issue 6 of the World Socialist journal included, here's a link to its contents that are currently on the blog. At the time of writing, the issue is only partially uploaded on the blog. Another thing to add to my to-do list.
• Conservative Families Campaign speaker, Graham Webster-Gardiner, was linked to the notorious Monday Club. He was the Conservative Party's parliamentary candidate in Newport East at the 1987 General Election.

The Pleasure Tendency

Their name piqued my interest so I asked about the group, the Pleasure Tendency, over at Urban75. Someone was good enough to provide the following reply:

"I'd known one them slightly when they lived in London. I dimly recall encountering the group in the context of the ill-fated Intercom project.

Don't remember a journal (although it was a long time ago). Just some pamphlets/leaflets. Think I may still have some stuff by them but not confidant I could easily put my hands on it. One text was called "Theses Against Cynicism". There's a blog post here 'adapted from it' whatever that means. Their pamphlet 'The Subversive Past' is online here. There's a leaflet by them at archive.org.

I understand some of them became involved in producing the journal 'Here and Now' (first produced in Glasgow and also involved in Intercom). (Libcom archive). There are articles by them (issue 2 for example) and issues were produced in Leeds.

ETA: at the Sparrows Nest archive there are also online copies of three more pamphlets:

- 'Life and it's replacement with a dull reflection of itself'

- 'Desire-value and the Pleasure Tendency'

- 'Return of the moral subject'

So that's all of the pamphlets that I remember seeing."

Standard Leeds OK (1979)

Party News from the November 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

After unsuccessful attempts to sell socialist literature in Bradford two members of West Yorkshire branch switched their attention to Leeds City. Sales were slow at first but now persistence has paid off. We sell between fifteen to twenty copies each Saturday. We have found that our “special offer” deal of the current Socialist Standard plus a back-issue, for “only” 20p, also pays rewards.

The main reasons for the increased sales of the Standard in Leeds are our perseverance, the new design of the journal and our gradually acquired “selling technique”. The latter consists of shouting our message like a couple of political barrow-boys: “Labour No, Socialism Yes!”. . . “Abolition of the Wages System! . . . “Capitalism No, Socialism Yes!” . . . “Labour-Tory; same old story!” . . .

Selling socialist literature in the streets is often illuminating and amusing. We frequently get abuse from fellow workers, ranging from a basic “Eff off, mate”, to a “Go back to Russia”. The first type of insult receives the reaction it deserves—we ignore it. The latter type of advice usually gets the reply: “If we tried to sell our communist literature in Red Square we’d be arrested”.

Recently, the Tories have ventured forth in Leeds selling their new comic, which they have the nerve to call Democrat. One member approached one of these lackeys of the ruling class and, respectfully touching his forelock, asked ‘”Ow’s life up at the ‘All, Sire?” He defiantly replied that he was a worker, lived in a council flat and had six kids to support. Clearly a case of ragged trousered philanthropism.

Also selling their wares in the precinct are the predictable group of “Socialist” Workers, sporadically shouting about the “Right to Work” and the need for a minimum wage. This contrasts sharply with the neighbouring shouts of “What bloody Right!” and “Forget minimum wages, support their abolition!”

The final rival group we usually is the Young National Front, looking menacingly militaristic in their bovver boots, cropped hair and sun glasses. Recently, we approached one of the Aryan Race asking him if he wanted to buy a Standard. He proudly referred to the fact that he and his mates “smacked up” the SWP paper sellers every Saturday. However, after a wasted attempt to explain the gist of Socialist thought, he abruptly ended the conversation stating that the SWP were hardly “democratic”, which was a true enough statement, but somewhat ironic coming from him. Finally, before he went on his way, we entered the worst deal of out and swopped the last Standard for National Front News (price 8p, for pages of racist rubbish) whose presentation resembled the Socialist Worker paper in layout and design, as did their complete lack of understanding of the cause of social problems.

However, despite such aggressive competition, literature selling in Leeds has recently left us with a greater sense of satisfaction as we leave for home with all our Socialist Standards sold.

If you are one of those people who buy the Socialist Standard from us in Leeds and you sympathise with the Socialist case, then please follow up your interest by getting in touch with us to find out more about Socialism. If you agree with the ideas you’ve read, don’t just sit there, get up and join!

RB (West Yorks)

Leeds and district Open Air Meetings (1937)

Party News from the August 1937 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

'L. Davis' was Lew Davis. He was a member of the SPGB from Leeds who joined the Central Branch of the Party in May 1937. He lapsed his membership in January 1947.

SPGB Meetings (2011)

Party News from the September 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Party News. (1932)

Party News from the October 1932 issue of the Socialist Standard

New Branch at Birkenhead.

As a result of consistent open-air propaganda in Birkenhead a branch of the Party has been formed.

Sympathisers desiring to join or wishing for further information, are invited to communicate with the Secretary, Edmund Howarth, 60, Park Road South, Birkenhead.

Propaganda meetings are held every Sunday, 8 p.m., at the Main Entrance, Birkenhead Park, where the Socialist Standard and Party pamphlets are on sale.

Fulham.

Members and sympathisers willing to co-operate informing a branch are asked to communicate with the General Secretary, at 42, Great Dover Street, S.E.1.

North West London.

Will members and sympathisers willing to co-operate in the formation of a branch in North West London communicate with Mr. G. Beeson, 56, Barnfield Road, Burnt Oak, Edgware ; Mr. W. Edgley, 41, Brett Road, Stonebridge Park, N.W.10 ; or Mr. H. G. Holt, 36, Rosebank Avenue, Sudbury, Wembley.

Leeds.

Meetings are held on Sunday evenings at 7 p.m., in Victoria Square, at which announcements concerning indoor meetings will be made, Watch for local announcements.

Letters: For the fans? (2021)

Letters to the Editors from the June 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

For the fans?

Dear Editors,

I was interested to read Dave Alton’s article in the May Socialist Standard concerning the proposed European Super League.

As a football fan for many years, I have seen numerous proposals of this nature come and go. The only variable seems to be how long they take to collapse! The latest fiasco was particularly gratifying as the whole thing fell apart in barely 48 hours.

I am firmly of the opinion that any future similar proposals will go the same way. Indeed, I suspect many of the club owners involved are fully aware of this and are just looking to see how far they can go as a bargaining ploy to obtain a bigger slice of the cake from existing and future TV deals.

Why? Well, as Dave writes, ‘Whatever the purpose, money will be the driving force behind it.’ This money comes from the TV companies who show the matches, and therefore ultimately from their advertisers.

But the ‘elite’ clubs behind such proposals are only ‘elite’ in any meaningful sense in their own countries, where their wealth virtually guarantees success. Put 15 or 20 of them together on an equal basis, and ultimately someone has to finish bottom. Take away any meaningful threat of relegation and the matches between the ‘under-performing’ clubs become meaningless. So you end up with the same handful of clubs playing each other year after year in sterile, pointless games. Once the novelty has worn off (or even before then for me and most other fans I know), no-one wants to watch this.

So what then is the likelihood of advertisers continuing to fund inflated TV deals for something with a minuscule audience? Er, zero! This is the reason why I do not believe such a ‘competition’, in whatever guise, will ever take off. To that extent, fans DO still have power. Dave is right to suggest that impotent rage does not achieve anything, but refusal to watch their product, whether in person or on TV, most certainly will.

Shane Roberts, 

Bristol

 

Dear Editors,

‘Leeds United head coach Marcelo Bielsa says the fundamental problem is that the rich always aspire to be more powerful without considering the effects this has on the rest’. This is the caption that should have been attached to this post-match interview (you can see the caption they actually use on the website ).

Bielsa is in no doubt that football works just the same as the rest of society. Addressing the issue of the European Super League, he says that the big clubs are ready to dump the smaller ones when they no longer need them to make money, and that structures intended to limit inequalities in the sport are going to break down.

He says this should come as no surprise: ‘The logic that rules the world, and football isn’t outside of it, is that the rich get richer at the cost of the poor becoming poorer.’

Football is for the fans? Hmm, think again!

S. Finch, 

Bolton

The Influence of Television (1961)

Book Review from the May 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

Television and the Political Image by Joseph Trenaman and Denis McQuail, Methuen, 30s.

During the last few years, a new word has crept into the English language. Psephology is the name given to the business of putting voters under the microscope and probing their innermost electoral reflexes. Where once people simply voted at election time, now every cross must be checked and analysed.

We might have expected that television would come into this. No self-respecting psephologist can ignore a communication medium which four-fifths of the population have access to. 1955 was the first television election, although at that time sound broadcasting was still dominant. 1959 was different; apart from the enormous increase in the number of T.V. sets, both channels broke with past practice by putting out such programmes as the B.B.C.s “Hustings" and Granada's “Election Marathon".

What were the effects of this? Did, for example, any votes change sides because of the parties' broadcasts on T.V? Did television affect attendance at political meetings, the number of party workers and so on? A Research Unit at Leeds University (working on a Granada grant) tried to find answers to these, and other, questions. They closely studied the campaign on television and at the same time sampled political opinion among the voters in the two Yorkshire constituencies of Pudsey and West Leeds. Television and the Political Image reports their findings.

The authors conclude that television had little effect on the outcome of the 1959 election. Partisan programmes were not as well received as those which hid their propaganda under an informative camouflage. The professional slickness of the Labour Party programmes, which so irked the newspaper reviewers, was not generally resented. Whatever knowledge the viewers had on the issues of the campaign tended to increase as a result of their watching television.

The specific validity of such conclusions may be open to argument. But the overall picture of the voter which emerges from them seems fairly accurate: somebody who is mostly bored with politics and who, when an election stirs him to vote, does so in accordance with his hitherto sleeping prejudices.

Television and the Political Image is not light reading, and it is loaded with statistical tables and graphs which demand close study. Doubtless, we shall see many more such works, for if the power-conscious parties can find out why the working class vote as they do, they are a long way towards winning an election. If Trenaman and McQuail are any guide, Labour's problem in 1959 was to convince everybody that their promises were not rash bribery. The Tories, it seems, must still work hard to persuade us that they really care about the aged and the needy.

This is a dirty game. And the psephologist, busily adding up his figures to discover the reasons for the working class preferring one type of capitalist subjection to another, does not make it any cleaner.

Ivan

News in Review: South African martyr (1966)

The  News in Review from the June 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

South African martyr

Mr. Abram Fischer, who was sentenced last month to life imprisonment on charges of conspiracy to commit sabotage and of being a member of the Communist Party, is the latest of South Africa's martyrs.

The South African Government have been gunning for Mr. Fischer for a long time. He defended Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu at the Rivonia trial in 1964 and, having broken his bail, has been on the run for over a year.

Now that the evil dictatorship has caught up with him he is likely to spend the rest of his life in gaol, for there is no remission in South Africa for political sentences.

Mr. Fischer made no secret of his membership of the Communist Party and gave his reasons at his trial:

  . . . one is the glaring injustice which exists and has existed for a long time in South African society, the other, a gradual realisation . . . that it was always members of the Communist Party who seemed prepared, regardless of cost, to sacrifice most; to give of their best, to face the greatest dangers in the struggle against poverty and discrimination.

While it is true that in South Africa the Communist Party opposes apartheid—and suffers for it—it is impossible to think that Mr. Fischer does not realise that countries which are under Communist rule are in many ways similar to Dr. Verwoerd’s dictatorship.

These countries also suppress opposition. They also stage trumped-up trials under repressive laws. They also imprison and execute political opponents.

There is strong evidence of the existence of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. Sharpeville was a horrible affair, but there have been similar outrages in, for example, East Berlin and Budapest.

Dictatorship and racism are features of capitalist society. They cannot be removed by joining one capitalist party in preference to another.

Abram Fischer has proved his courage and his sincerity, but we cannot ignore the fact that he is a tragically misguided man.

Gromyko in the Vatican

Another visible sign of the Soviet Union’s edging closer to the West was Mr. Gromyko’s visit to the Pope at the end of April.

This was the first-ever official meeting between the Kremlin and the Vatican. To mark the event the Pope gave Mr. Gromyko two Russian copies of the Schema de Ecclesia, which sets out the constitution of the Roman Catholic Church.

Perhaps he will need it. Russia’s split from China grows ever wider, which probably means that in the near future Moscow will be exploring more and more ways of making contact with opinion in the West.

This is a typical development in capitalism’s mighty international power game.

In the process of this development—and again this is typical—statesmen on both sides will have to forget a lot of what they said in the past. The Soviet Government and the Roman Catholic Church will have to forget that they were once hostile to each other.

All over the world Communist Parties will have to forget the days when they said, with Karl Marx, that religion was the opiate of the people.

They have, in fact, always been ready to compromise on this issue; there has never been anything to prevent a Christian joining the Communist Party.

Only last March the Communist Party in this country were protesting at religious attacks on them on television, which, they said, “. . . can only have the object of dissuading Christians from voting Communist."

If the Kremlin and the Vatican become bedmates, we may be sure the sheets will have been well aired for them by their faithful acolytes all over the world.


Getting away from it all

How would you like to get away from it all? How would you like to escape from the worry, and scurry of everyday living and spend some time in blissful solitude?

One way of doing this is to imitate Mr. Leonard Matchan, who recently bought the island of Brechou, in the Channel Islands. “For me,” he said, “It is going to be a means of getting away from the maddening crowd.”

The one big difficulty about this method is that it is rather expensive. Mr. Matchan, who is chairman of Cope Allman International, paid about £80,000 for his hideaway.

There is a cheaper way of getting solitude—one that is familiar to a lot of people.

In Leeds, for example, the police last year investigated 166 calls from people who were worried about old neighbours whom they had not seen or heard of for some days.

Forty-eight of these old people were ill or injured and needed help. One hundred and one of them had died— silent, lonely, unwanted.

So you see there are two ways of getting away from it all. One costs you a lot of money. The other costs you a lifetime of servitude and poverty as a member of the working class.

We are often told by well-kept politicians that we now live in a classless, affluent society.

The next time we hear that let us remember Mr. Matchan and his costly, tranquil island and let us contrast this with all those friendless deaths in the troublous city.

Independence for Guyana

British Guiana, after a long and sometimes bloody struggle, is the latest colony to gain its independence from British rule.

The people there were promised a great deal about the supposed benefits of independence and, if they believed what their nationalist politicians told them, are now probably expecting some of these benefits to be coming their way.

They are obviously going to be disappointed.

In a speech on 8th May last the Prime Minister of Guyana, Mr. Forbes Burnham, summed up what independence will mean when he asked the people to sleep less (for six hours a day, he said), eat less and work more. His Government’s motto for progress will be “Work and harder work.”

Mr. Burnham also attacked what he called the “disgusting habit” which Guyanese workmen have of stopping work to shelter from the sun and the rain.

This is all reminiscent of the English Methodist protest, in 1764, that a theatre in Bristol would be “. . . peculiary hurtful to a trading city . . . and directly opposite to the spirit of industry and close application to business.”

In more ways than one, the emergent nations resemble England in the 18th century. If Guyana is to make its independent way in the world of capitalism its people will have to lose some of their leisurely habits.

Their lives will become more organised, more alienated and faster. They will be more intensely, more scientifically exploited. They will become, in other words, members of a modern working class.

In the name of freedom and progress they will have cast off one type of slavery and substituted another.

China's bomb

Good news for all lovers of militarism and destruction was that China detonated her third nuclear bomb—it may even have been a hydrogen one.

Good news, also, for all lovers of the distortion of words was that this latest test was described by Peking as "a great victory for the party’s general line of Socialist construction.”

Good news for all connoisseurs of hypocrisy was that the State Department condemned the test because of its effect on the atmosphere—as if the United States had never exploded nuclear weapons in the air, and as if they are not continuing to test the things underground.

The Chinese bomb is yet another lap in the desperate nuclear arms race which has been in progress since Hiroshima. As each new country joins the race it justifies its presence with lies about its concern for peace and world security.

And the countries who are already in the race always “deplore” and “condemn” and murmur about having a disarmament conference somewhere, sometime—because they are concerned about any threat to their dominant standing in the world.

China is a rising capitalist power, and she has paid for her entry in the race in the coin which all the others have used and which is the only one universally recognised—force.

If it were not so terrifying it would be laughable that this onward march to destruction should be called Socialism. We live now in a society of madness, in which the very words we use often lose all sense and meaning.

Happily, there is one band who work determinedly to keep the word Socialism sane and clean, and who will not have it confused with the terrorism and hypocrisy of capitalism.

Poor men in their castles

Who has not heard the lament, from mortgage-burdened worker or from high-climbing local politician, about the alleged opulence of the council house tenant? Wallowing in the luxury of a subsidised rent, polishing the Jaguar at the door, the man in the council house takes it easy while the rest are stripped bare to pay for it all.

Recently, however, The Sun gave a glimpse at another side of this popular story. In Leicester many workers have refused the offer of accommodation on a new £2 million estate because the rents are too high for them. These rents range from £4 18s. 0d. for a one-bedroom flat to £6 12s. 0d. for a three- bedroom house.

“It's fantastic,” said the chairman of the city’s housing committee. “This is one of the wealthiest cities in Europe with good wages and full employment.”

But this does not mean that Leicester’s workers are wealthy, nor that they do not suffer the poverty that their mortgaged brothers know too well.

In Paris a similar story. There, Government Social Security officials have found that families who have moved recently into new skyscraper blocks of flats are by no means living high. The new-found fascinations of a bathroom have led to heavy fuel bills to pay for a flood of baths.

This was bad enough, but even worse was the revelation that of two thousand women living in the fiats about one thousand were trying to pay the higher rents by putting in a bit of prostitution on the side.

The amenities of the skyscrapers may have cleansed a few Parisian bodies, but the difficulty of paying for them has stained some morals.

Proper Gander: Investigating The Yorkshire Ripper Investigation (2019)

The Proper Gander column from the May 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many documentaries about serial killers have a barely-disguised morbid streak to them. Gravel-voiced narration, flashy graphics and salacious reconstructions of the crimes often sensationalise the most horrendous acts. Fortunately, these kinds of cheap tactics to pull in the viewers weren’t found in BBC4’s recent three-part series The Yorkshire Ripper Files: A Very British Crime Story. Filmmaker Liza Williams focuses on the women who were attacked by the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ and the police’s hunt for him, interviewing some of the victims and their families, along with detectives, lawyers and journalists involved. Williams perceptively draws out how the case highlights some of the attitudes to women common during the 1970s.

Peter Sutcliffe killed 13 women and attacked at least eight others between 1975 and 1981, with his first assault dating back to 1969 (which the police dismissed at the time). He found his victims in Leeds, Bradford and surrounding areas, leading the press to dub him the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’. Sutcliffe looked for women out alone late at night, began to talk to them and then struck them with a hammer before stabbing them. As well as the pain and grief caused to the victims’ families, communities across the north lived in fear and suspicion. Sutcliffe tended to target suburbs known for prostitution, such as Chapeltown in Leeds. Many families were struggling to cope financially, with jobs lost through the decline of heavy industries in the area, and so some women were pushed into the sex trade to bring in enough money. Police referred to the victims as women of ‘loose morals’ or ‘doubtful moral character’, and it was expected that they would treat crimes against sex workers less seriously than those against other people. For the police, sex workers were a frequent annoyance. Whenever a sex worker was arrested, they would get fined by the courts, and released to go back on the game to pay the fine, and so the cycle continued. As the number of Sutcliffe’s victims grew, police officers, trained less in ‘Public Relations’ than now, came out with statements like ‘of course we can’t cater for the killing of the odd female at any time’. The press were predictably tactless and offensive in how they reported the murders, referring to ‘good time girls’ and using headlines like ‘the hazards of the job – by a whore’.

Prevalent attitudes of the time were also highlighted by the response to Sutcliffe’s first murder of a woman not linked to prostitution, in 1977. Among many people there was the view that only now had the killer gone too far, and the police investigation was stepped up. The victims who weren’t sex workers were described as ‘innocent’ and ‘respectable’, implying that the sex workers weren’t. Alongside this was the assumption that sex workers were worth less than the other victims, and even that they deserved to be attacked.

Even though some of the victims had no connection to prostitution, the police, especially in the early years of the enquiry, focused on the theory that the killer was fuelled by hatred for sex workers. This narrowed their perspective too much; detectives followed their assumption that only sex workers were being targeted, which meant they didn’t connect similar attacks on other women, and thereby missed important information. The case also shows other prejudices among the police. In 1976, Marcella Claxton survived being attacked, and subsequently provided a fairly accurate description of Sutcliffe. However, as the documentary explains, the police, predisposed against black women, didn’t trust Marcella’s testimony, and told her that her attacker must have been black. Again, vital evidence which could have caught Sutcliffe earlier and prevented further attacks was ignored because of institutional bias.

The police investigation became the ‘biggest manhunt in British criminal history’, albeit botched. As well as not recognising Sutcliffe’s attacks on women who weren’t sex workers, the police were also diverted by fixating on a tape recording and letters sent to them by someone purporting to be the killer, which turned out to be a hoax. Sutcliffe was questioned and released nine times before being caught, which happened by chance when his car was found to have false number plates, by police officers not even assigned to the case.

In concentrating on the investigation and the stories of the victims, the documentary spends little time on Sutcliffe himself. It seems that he led an otherwise unremarkable life, on the surface. He was quiet, married, and worked as a lorry driver. He developed a fascination with corpses, and a violent anger towards women other than his wife. He targeted sex workers because of their vulnerability and likelihood to be out alone after dark as much as because he hated them. Once arrested, he soon confessed to the attacks, meaning that his trial didn’t need to determine whether he had committed the crimes, but instead whether mental illness accounted for his actions. Sutcliffe claimed diminished responsibility following his diagnosis of schizophrenia, but this defence wasn’t accepted by the jury and he was imprisoned, where he remains now.

So, what does the case tell us about society’s attitudes at the time? As the documentary brings out, it was particularly shaped by views towards sex workers, not only in Sutcliffe’s brutal hatred of them, but also in the police’s demeaning assumptions. Attitudes to women, both in terms of dismissing their evidence and of them somehow being less worthy if they were sex workers, shaped and delayed the investigation. The police, being a part of the state, are bound to reflect the values encouraged by our alienating, divisive system.

Mike Foster

Exhibition Review: Women, Work and War (2016)

Exhibition Review from the December 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Cotton in Lancashire and wool in Yorkshire was the traditional division. What was once the world’s largest woollen mill, at Armley, is now the Leeds Industrial Museum, with the expected displays of machinery for weaving and so on, but also covering various other areas. Part of the site is still closed after the floods last Christmas.

An exhibition ‘Women, Work and War’ is currently running there, dealing with the impact that the First World War had on women’s working lives. It consists of a series of displays in various parts of the museum, rather than a single exhibition.

Many women had of course worked in wool and other textile industries before the war, but the need for men to fight, kill and be killed led to many women taking jobs in mills for the first time. They were generally less well-paid than men, but earned more than they had previously at cleaning and sewing. The need for uniforms for those in the armed services resulted in increased demand for clothing and so to an even larger workforce.

Leeds was also a centre of the printing industry, with many war propaganda posters produced there. Women came to take on a central role in this, for instance as keyboard operatives. They also worked on the railways, as porters, cleaners and guards, but not as drivers. They worked as conductors on the city’s trams, earning the same as men but required to wear long skirts rather than trousers.

From 1915, women working on the railways were allowed to join trade unions for the first time. The National Union of Railwaymen (sic) campaigned for women to receive the minimum wage for a man (presumably involving a pay rise). The number of women in the United Garment Workers’ Union also increased during the war, but the vast majority of women workers were not in a union.

Women in addition played a prominent role in the munitions industry. In 1915 the first National Shell Factory was established at Armley, but the biggest works was in the Leeds district of Barnbow, which produced over half a million tonnes of munitions. On 6 December 1915 there was an explosion at Barnbow that killed thirty-five women workers. Two further explosions there, in 1917 and 1918, killed five more workers, men and women. Guns and bombs did not kill just on the front line. 

Paul Bennett

Party News Briefs (1951)

Party News from the August 1951 issue of the Socialist Standard

Delegate Meeting Venue. A reminder to all Comrades and sympathisers that the Annual Delegate Meeting will be held at Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, W.C.1, on Saturday and Sunday, September 1st and 2nd. Commencing each day at 11 a.m. A social and dance will be held on the Saturday evening.

Provincial Branches and Groups have some very encouraging reports on outdoor propaganda. In Yorkshire the two London Comrades are having good meetings. York, Bradford and Leeds have been visited and Leeds has proved a very good spot, large audiences attending our meetings on the Town Hall Steps. Two Meetings were held in Nottingham on June 5th, one with an audience of 350 and literature sales 8/- and later in the day another meeting with an average audience of 800 and literature sales 22/-. The speaker reports that the audience was eager to hear the Party case and very little opposition was shown.

Swansea Group is arranging a debate in the near future with a local minister who will be defending, and the Party representative opposing, the ideas of Christianity. Brighton Group is holding excellent meetings each Sunday afternoon and evening. The seaside meeting spot was the centre of a visit for several London members on Sunday, July 8th. One meeting commenced at 3 p.m. and a most interested audience, varying between 500 and 700 people listened attentively. A member of the Labour Party took the platform in opposition during the afternoon. The meeting reluctantly dispersed at 5.15 for a tea break. At 6 p.m. the meeting again resumed and continued until 9.15, many of the previous audience were present. Good questions were put from an audience of 400 which hardly changed throughout the evening. Here again an opponent, this time a Communist, took the platform in opposition. Literature sales during the two meetings amounted to thirty shillings.

This brief report is of one of several meetings that have been held in Brighton this season and the Group members would appreciate the help of London Comrades. The meeting spot is at the Fishmarket, immediately off the beach, and if Members are thinking of a day at the sea, here is the place to enjoy the sea air and help along the Party’s work. Ealing Branch Comrades organised another trip to Southsea on Sunday, July 15th. An excellent meeting was held on the sea front during the afternoon, four or five London speakers addressed the meeting. Literature sales were good and at the termination of the meeting, two large groups of the audience continued to discuss points raised during the meeting.

This spot is well worth continuing, and the Branch is organising another trip on August 18th. Information regarding this can be obtained from the Organiser of Ealing Branch.

The telephone has now been installed at Head Office—MAC 3811—will members please note.

Phyllis Howard

Immigrant struggles (1984)

Book Review from the September 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Immigrants and the Class Struggle: the Jewish Immigrant in Leeds, 1880-1914. Joseph Buckman. (Manchester University Press. £19.)

This excellent and readable book examines the economic and social life of the Jewish immigrant community in Leeds between 1880 and 1914. The community comprised refugees from Russia and other parts of Europe, who were to provide a cheap and pliable source of labour for the tailoring and slippermaking trade in Leeds and elsewhere. By the use of Yiddish sources and untapped statistical material such as factory reports, a vivid picture emerges of the social and economic relations in the Jewish community over this period.

The author argues that far from being one happy family, the Jewish immigrant community developed class antagonisms resulting from the capitalist mode of production. Buckman is highly critical of the commonly held view that the growth of the Leeds factory system in the tailoring industry led to progressive improvements for the workers. The alien tailoring trade was subordinate to the indigenous factory system, which was to undergo deskilling, division of labour and cheapening of products. Under such conditions and with for the most part a hostile host society, it was to take 35 years of struggle — until January 1912 — before they achieved a reduction in their working day to nine hours. In the tailoring trade socialists, anarchists and progressive trade unionists made some real gains in workers' organisation but the slipper trade over this period was a different story.

The forces driving wage labour against capital in a relentless competition for profits involved the intensification of working conditions in doomed pre-industrial type of manufacture. Despite valiant attempts to organise workers in the slipper trade in Leeds between 1896 and 1903, the wages had fallen by 50 per cent and a horrific 18 hour day was commonplace. Faced with the hopeless task of struggling against the machine, the Jewish workers replaced the host workers and eventually slippermaking in Leeds declined.

This book shows that capitalism is synonymous with suffering and misery. However, the class which does all the useful work in society has the power to organise for their own emancipation and put an end to sweat shops and the other misery of the wages system once and for all. 

W. McLellan

Exhibition Review: Rank or Class? (2009)

Exhibition Review from the April 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Rank" is an art exhibition organised by Alistair Robinson of the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Arts in Sunderland and on display across the North until the autumn. Its subtitle, "Picturing the Social Order 1516-2009", pretty much describes its content – a collection of visual depictions of class throughout the centuries. The early material, including a full set of Gustave Doré and Henry Mayhew prints, as well as fascinating and detailed Booth's poverty map, is excellent and well worth seeing. Sadly nothing so complimentary can be said about the modern material. Where not dominated by slickly produced but impersonal graphs and charts, it is crude, amateurish and incomprehensible.

However, it is not simply a difference in style but a difference in message. Despite the statement by the organisers that "Rank, Situation, Class and Hierarchy are still with us" the message of the moderns is nothing of the sort. Instead of the notion of social class - us and them, whether for good or bad – butchly depicted by the traditional material, we are presented with mere economic inequality – a range of economic states from the long term unemployed (17.5 percent of the population apparently) to the professional or manager. The slogan "No Them - Only Us" prominently displayed in "Rank" becomes one of ersatz social inclusion, a brushing over of the real divisions between owner and owned, a con job which no recipient of a wage, pension or dole - payments from our masters - should take in.

Class is not a moral issue of inequality as depicted here but a social question of ownership and control, whose effects are not just poverty in the narrow economic sense but have echoes throughout society: the machine-like, distorted nature of work – the hellish grind we call wage slavery, the degradation of family and social life; the subjection to the tyranny of the state power; above all, the sense that life under capitalism is not a full human one but one in which the worker is reduced to a unit of production and consumption.

The reduction of class to mere economic inequality – the patronising image of the starving little black baby and the single mother living on baked beans (which thankfully we were saved from in "Rank") – minimises and marginalises the results of class divided capitalist society. Without the knowledge of class as a social relationship with real personal effects, the worst of which we can mitigate through collective action called the class struggle, the socialist movement would becomes little more than a charity.

Particularly irritating in "Rank" was the obligatory Karl Marx quotation. The Big Beard's works are literally crammed with punchy one liners yet this is a (deliberately?) dull and long winded quote from The Communist Manifesto, which as even the dumbest social science graduate knows was written by Marx and Engels (the latter possibly having a larger contribution). It accompanies a Dyson cartoon depicting John Bull happily dancing to Master Capitalism's tune. Given his well known interest in class struggle - resistance to the gay dance – this doesn't really show much respect to Chucky does it?

“Rank" is on display at the Leeds Art Gallery until 26 April, then at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Arts in Sunderland from 15 May to 11 July, and finally at the Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool from 24 July to 5 September.

KAZ