The Persistence of Religious Ideas (2003)

Book Review from the July 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Persistence of Religious Ideas in the 21st Century: a Contribution to a Debate, Revolutions Per Minute, number 10. £3

This short pamphlet is like the proverbial curate’s egg: good in parts, but addled by the political purpose this work is supposed to serve. There are references to working class liberation, but Lenin and assorted anarchists are quoted approvingly. Marx is also quoted and it is of course from him that we get the most famous quotation concerning religion: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” However, the basic assumption in this pamphlet that an anti-religious thinker is worthwhile as long as they oppose religion is open to challenge. Antony Flew, a leading light in the Rationalist Press Association (full contact details are given in the pamphlet) and past debater with the Socialist Party, is a vehement opponent of both religion and socialism. Mere opposition to religion is not enough, and a religion-free capitalism (as Flew wants) would not bring socialism any nearer.

So why have religious ideas proved so persistent? Religion, the pamphlet argues, “is the tool which helps to explain away fundamental inequalities which are rooted in material circumstances (that is, economic realities). It is in this sense that debates about whether God exists or not are irrelevant. Changing economic realities will inevitably lead to the redundancy of the religious imperative . . . God exists only for as long as the economic realities which created him exist; when these wither away, so will he.”

For socialists, the struggle against religion cannot be separated from the struggle for socialism. We fight religious superstition wherever it is an obstacle to socialism, but we are opposed to religion only insofar as it is an obstacle to socialism. We leave the atheist gospel to those organizations that specialize in the spreading of secularist reason.

Lew Higgins

Socialist Party Summer School (1996)

Party News from the July 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

A third force (1996)

Book Review from the July 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Struggle Against the State and Other Essays by Nestor Makhno. (AK Press 1996. £7.95.)

The civil war in Russia following the November 1917 revolution involved the Bolshevik-controlled Red Army and the “Whites" (Monarchists and anti-Bolsheviks supported by foreign armies). What is generally less well known is that there was a third force in the struggle—the anarchist Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army. This peasant-based army, led by Nestor Makhno, held much of the Ukraine and briefly larger parts of Russia as the three sides won and lost ground in an increasingly bitter conflict. Eventually the Red Army won out and, by the time of the suppression of the Krondstadt Revolt in 1921, Makhno had fled to the West.

Before his death in exile in 1934 Makhno wrote a series of essays, collected here, defending the anarchist part in the Russian revolution. The anarchists wanted to smash the state; the Bolsheviks wanted to build a state; neither side required majority support for their objective. Both are dictatorial. Democracy requires that a majority understand, approve and participate in bringing about change. And this is the process which will bring about world socialism and sustain it.

Lew Higgins

Kings & Queens (2025)

Book Review from the July 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Unruly: A History of England’s Kings and Queens. By David Mitchell, Penguin, 2024

1066 And All That, published in book form in 1930, was a parody on how English history was taught in schools. One of the targets was a history of England as a record of kings and queens, their years of reign and their battles and wars. After the Second World War there was a concerted criticism of this approach from historians — EP Thompson in particular — who argued for a ‘history from below’. One consequence of this criticism was the creation of the GCSE history syllabus in the 1980s. This changed the emphasis from memorising the dates of kings and queens to ‘key skills’ such as empathy. Empathy was an attempt to encourage schoolchildren to imaginatively experience what it was like to live as others lived, such as being a child worker in the cotton factories of mid-nineteenth century Britain. It was controversial, didn’t last long, and the emphasis has shifted back in the other direction.

David Mitchell is a comedian, writer and actor. He has no use for empathy in the study of history. He claims that ‘it’s impossible for a child … to get their head round how different the lives of the people they’re trying to empathise with actually were’. No evidence is offered for ‘impossible’, not even an amusing anecdote of the sort which peppers this book. ‘I’m better with dates, to be honest’, he admits. Mitchell went to a private school, so he might not have done GCSE history. In a book with plenty of autobiographical detail, it’s curious that he doesn’t mention it. So what you do get are a lot of monarchs with a lot of dates and absolutely no history from below. ‘It’s like a soap opera,’ writes Mitchell, ‘It never fucking ends’. He doesn’t refer to Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, but Bennett has a student complaining that history is ‘one fucking thing after another’. This is what can happen when the subject matter lacks context.

If you are after the historical facts, there’s nothing here you can’t get from Wikipedia or Google. Apart from the jokes and one-liners such as his summary of Henry VIII — ‘He was a cunt’, there are some interesting factoids. For instance, according to the Domesday Book of 1086, ten percent of the population of England were slaves. By around 1200, after the Norman invasion, there weren’t any.

Lew Higgins

Dismal (2024)

Book Review from the November 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard 

The Shortest History of Economics. By Andrew Leigh, Old Street Publishing, 2024

Thomas Carlyle described economics as ‘the dismal science’. But Carlyle was a racist, writing in 1849, who believed slavery should be reintroduced in the West Indies. The ‘dismal’ view he was attacking was the economics of the time which he saw as regarding all peoples as equal (and not, as is commonly supposed, to the dismal Malthus doctrine of overpopulation and famine). Andrew Leigh’s book on the history of economics is, he tells us, ‘the story of capitalism’. Capitalism is defined as the existence of markets and economics studies how people ‘maximise their wellbeing in the face of scarcity.’ Scarcity is an important assumption made by most economists. Just as the slaves in the markets of the West Indies were subjected to deliberate scarcity, it avoids economists having to confront the artificial scarcity of modern capitalism for wage slaves.

Leigh endorses Thomas Hobbes‘s view of human life as ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. ’Hobbes was right’, declares Leigh, and he argues that human history has been a long struggle to overcome that condition. With the application of the correct economics, of course. However, Hobbes’s view was not based on anthropological or archaeological evidence but on the English Civil War of 1642 to 1651. He fled to France while the civil war raged and while there wrote Leviathan, published in 1651, from which the above quote is taken. In Hobbes’s hypothetical ‘state of nature’ (that is, human nature) a ’war of all against all’ exists and this calls for an authoritarian state to keep the peace. There can be no doubt that much of human history is a record of struggles, but if Hobbes was correct the ‘war of all against all’ should have meant that we would all still be living in caves, without hope for the future.

The fact that human productivity has increased enormously since settled agriculture took place about 10,000 years ago has mainly been due to the adoption of new technologies, not the following of economics wisdom. Leigh claims that at the turn of the twentieth century the Englishman Alfred Marshall ‘was the world’s most influential economist’. In academia perhaps, but the accolade surely belongs to Karl Marx. Leigh doesn’t mention him, and that’s probably just as well. A running argument of this book is the alleged superiority of capitalism over communism in practice. The 1917 Russian revolution was a ‘communist revolution’. Cuba established a ‘communist dictatorship’. East Germany had ‘communist rule’. North Korea has had ‘decades of communism’. They all failed miserably, of course, but none of those regimes claimed to have established communism. Leigh is by no means alone in making this mistake but it is a serious flaw in his book. So when he writes of Russia and China that they have recently ‘transitioned from communism to capitalism, this is simply not true. No country in the world has claimed to have established communism. Ever.

Lew Higgins

Pirates (2024)

Book Review from the August 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pirate Enlightenment, Or The Real Libertalia. By David Graeber, Penguin, 2024

The Age of Enlightenment is usually said to be the intellectual movement that occurred mainly in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, based on knowledge learned by reason and evidence. Graeber argues that the Enlightenment did not begin in Europe and that its true origins are to be found on the island of Madagascar, in the late seventeenth century, when it was home to several thousand pirates. This was in the Golden Age of Piracy which lasted no more than fifty years, but it was also an experiment in radical democracy as the pirate settlers attempted to apply the egalitarian principles of their ships to a new society on land. Those also involved were Malagasy women, merchants, traders and escaped slaves. They were exploring ideas that were ultimately to be put into practice in Europe a century later.

This short book was first written to be a chapter of a book on ‘divine kingship’ Graeber co-authored with fellow anthropologist Marshall Sahlins. Graeber obtained a doctorate under Sahlins doing ethnographic research in Madagascar. Graeber died in 2020. This book answers the question: since they were wanted men who couldn’t go home, what happened to the pirates who wanted to escape or retire? The answer seems to be: they often settled in north-east Madagascar, a large island (one thousand miles long) to the east of Africa. Libertalia is the name given to the utopian pirate experiment, even if there was never any actual settlement that bore that name. Piracy is still practised in that part of the world.

Graeber’s treatment of piracy and Madagascar is convincing. He argues that what unifies the pirate Enlightenment of Libertalia and the later Age of Enlightenment was an intellectual movement which was conversational. In Libertalia there was an expectation of rational conversation, on an egalitarian basis, of such subjects as liberty, authority, sovereignty and much more. There is however no persuasive evidence of the pirate Enlightenment feeding into the later Enlightenment, as Graeber claims. He admits that he is being ‘intentionally provocative’ as if he knows the evidence he presents is flimsy and speculative. In this respect he is following in the buccaneering tradition of not letting the facts get in the way of a good story.

Lew Higgins

Not concise (2024)

Book Review from the July 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism. Editors: WF Haug, F Haug, P Jehle, W Kuttler. (Brill, 2024)

This is a selection of essays by a Berlin-based group of contributors, translated into English, in what the publishers claim is the Historical Materialism Book Series. It’s an open-access title freely distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Licence. The start of the Foreword gives some indication of where they are coming from:

‘The sudden downfall of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc after 1989, an upheaval of cataclysmic proportions, left many of us in a state of shock, disbelief, grief, relief, doubt and hope. It forced us to take stock of what was irretrievably lost, and what could and should be saved’.

The result is this book. Its scope is impressively wide-ranging but pithy it ain’t. Anyone looking for concise dictionary definitions will be disappointed. Each of the 30 entries gives a detailed historical background but in crucial respects some are uncritical. Among the contributions you might not expect to find are entries on Cooking, Hackers, Hope and Intellectuals.

In the essay on Communism we are told that it is without classes, without state, without market and without contractual relations. However, the writer then poses the question:

‘Which form of trans-subjective relationship can determine such a society, without opening itself to the constitutive intersubjectivity of a new kind of social contract? Communism threatens to become an activist or operaist variant of an absolute knowledge in the sense of the Hegelian objective spirit.’

Whether the writer is being deliberately obscure or bullshitting is difficult to say, but this way of writing occurs frequently in this book. We are also told that socialism is a transitional society between capitalism and communism, where ‘social activity is still subject to the organisation by state planning’. Marx and Engels made no such distinction. Lenin did, though in the entry on Lenin’s Marxism this is not explained. Most of the contributors to this book refer to the former USSR as an example of ‘state-socialism’. There is no stand-alone entry on socialism.

The essay on Crisis Theories is probably the best of the book. It makes the point that Marx’s writings on this subject are ‘somewhat disjointed or even contradictory’. For three decades Marx wrote about underconsumption theories, overproduction theories, disproportionality theories, profit-squeeze theories, and over-accumulation theories which take the ‘law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall’ as their starting point. The author argues that cyclical capitalist crises only emerged in the 1820s. In 1844 Engels was to state that ‘periodically recurring’ crises were an inherent feature of capitalism. This point is important because some influential defenders of capitalism wrote before this time. For instance, Jean-Baptiste Say’s Traité d’économie politique (A Treatise on Political Economy), published in 1803, declared that ‘the value we can buy is equal to the value we can produce’. This ‘law’ is usually interpreted as saying ‘supply creates its own demand’. Or, more precisely, that the normal state of an economy is equilibrium in which total demand equals total supply. This notion can still be found in some branches of capitalist economics where any imbalances are said to be ‘self-clearing’. This may have been the case when Say wrote but not when capitalist production became a competitive disequilibrium.

Lenin and Leninism are treated largely uncritically and the writings of Antonio Gramsci are given reverential handling. Most of the entries, to a greater or lesser extent, are guided by his thinking. For Gramsci, ‘organic intellectuals’ had a key role to play in social transformation. They would provide the cultural politics that would allow the working class to establish its hegemony. In Gramsci’s version of Leninism, capitalism is a system of privilege and oppression, but he said it is ‘the duty of the “leader” to explain the source of these privileges and this oppression’ to the working class. This is the way to socialism, so it is claimed. This cult of political leadership is a line of theory and practice which stretches back through the twentieth century from Gramsci to Lenin, to Kautsky and the Second International. Its failure wherever it is tried is a vindication of any basic understanding of Marxism: that the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself. There is no understanding of that anywhere in this book.

Lew Higgins

Socialist Party Summer School (1996)

Party News from the June 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Money (2009)

Book Review from the January 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx’s Theory of the Genesis of Money. By Samezō Kuruma, translated with an introduction by Michael Schauerte, Outskirts Press, 2008

Money can function as a means of exchange, a measure of value, a general equivalent, a standard of price, a store of value. Samezō Kuruma takes a close look at some of the key theoretical issues related to Marx’s concept of money. Kuruma (1893-1982) was a Japanese Marxist economist and the text here is translated by a member of our American companion party. He also provides an introduction which seeks to outline the answers to how, why and through what is a commodity money. Karuma’s text, however, is purely analytical in its approach and is devoid of historical context, a common failing amongst many Japanese writers on Marxian economics.

Lew Higgins

History writing (2008)

E. P. Thompson

Pamphlet Review from the January 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

All Knees and Elbows of Susceptibility and Refusal. Edited by Anthony Iles and Tom Roberts, 2007. 

 

The clumsy title comes from E. P. Thompson’s phrase to describe the difficulty of writing “history from below.” After the Second World War, a group of Communist Party historians including Thompson, Christopher Hill and Rodney Hilton set out to bring the experiences of the working class to the fore in the study of history. This was to some extent a reaction to structuralist and functionalist interpretations in which workers’ experiences and abilities to effect social change were down-played or ignored. The most famous example of “history from below” is EP Thompson’s classic The Making of the English Working Class, first published in 1963 and still worth reading. But Thompson’s concept of class is controversial in some quarters:

“If we stop history at any given point, then there are no classes but simply a multitude of individuals with a multitude of experiences. But if we watch these men over an adequate period of social change, we observe patterns in their relationships, their ideas, and their institutions. Class is defined by men as they live their own history, and in the end, this is its only definition.”

Some have seen this definition of class as being subjective, but Thompson must be right in saying that class is not simply an economic category but also an historical concept. The working class was not just the product of capitalist social relations or the industrial revolution: “The working class made itself as much as it was made,” wrote Thompson. Writing history from below means not invoking “iron laws” and ignoring the abilities of the working class to effect social change on the one hand, or getting lost in the detail and denying the importance of class on the other hand. This short pamphlet discusses these and other problems in writing history.

Lew Higgins

Marxist Historians (only) (2022)

Book Review from the December 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

The British Marxist Historians. By Harvey J. Kaye, Zed Books, 2022

This is an update to a book first published in 1984. It’s a study of an influential group of academic historians, but there are wider lessons to be learned. They were mainly active in the second half of the twentieth century. Kaye’s survey is mainly confined to the following writers and books.

Maurice Dobb in Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1946) wrote on the transition from feudalism to capitalism. For Dobb the ‘bourgeois revolution’ of the seventeenth century provided the necessary foundation for the later Industrial Revolution. Dobb emphasised the role of class struggle in this process.

Rodney Hilton focussed on feudalism and the English peasantry. For instance, in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 there emerged a ‘positive class consciousness’ which ‘was initiated from within peasant society.’ Hilton argued that ‘one of the most important if intangible legacies of mediaeval peasants to the modern world is the concept of a freeman, owing no obligation, not even deference, to an overlord’ (Bond Men Made Free, 1973).

Christopher Hill wrote extensively on the English Revolution of the seventeenth century, though probably his best work is Reformation to Industrial Revolution: A Social and Economic History of Britain, 1530-1780, (1969). The English Revolution was ‘the world turned upside down’. In Hill’s account: ‘Levellers called for political democracy, Diggers for communism, Ranters for free love. Others called in question the common law, the Bible, the existence of heaven and hell, God and the devil’ (John Bunyan and the English Revolution, 1979).

Eric Hobsbawm wrote on workers, peasants and world history. Industry and Empire (1969) is a commercially successful social and economic history of Britain from 1750 to the 1960s. His examination of the development of the modern world, what he called ‘the long nineteenth century’, is divided into three phases: The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848 (1962), The Age of Capital, 1848-1875, (1975), and The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (1987). These books probably made Hobsbawm Britain’s most famous ‘Marxist’ and historian.

E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) is one of the biggest selling non-fiction books in Britain. It is still widely used as a school and university textbook. His statement on the role of the historian was Thompson’s contribution to an understanding of class:

‘I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan . . . from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties.’

In William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (1955) Thompson defended what he called ‘Morrisian-Marxism’. According to Kaye, this is ‘a Marxism transformed by the concerns and values represented in the work of William Morris’. The Poverty of Theory (1978) is Thompson’s attack on the then growing popularity of interpreting Marxism as a form of structuralism.

Kaye pulls together a useful survey of some key Marxist historians and how they grappled with Marxism and history. The trouble was, and remains, their politics. Their collective contribution as historians has been called ‘history from the bottom up’, but their politics can be termed ‘politics from the top down’, and it calls into question their understanding of Marxism. All the above historians were at one time members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB).

After the suppression of the uprising in Hungary by the Russian military in 1956 all the above resigned from the CPGB – except Hobsbawm and Dobb. Hobsbawm remained in the CPGB until its break-up in 1991. As a cheerleader for the CPGB and the Russian empire, Hobsbawm defended the leading role of the party advocated by Lenin, and dismissed the view that the emancipation of the working class had to be the work of the working class itself – the cornerstone of any Marxian politics. Thompson later tried to justify his CPGB membership by claiming it was part of a ‘Popular Front’ against fascism. But he did not appreciate that his CPGB membership would lend legitimacy to Stalin’s reign of terror. His concern for the lives of ordinary workers did not extend to the working class in Russia, Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Later in life, after Thompson had joined the Labour Party, he rebuffed an approach by the Socialist Party to discuss ‘Morrisian-Marxism’.

Lew Higgins

Michael Lebowitz's Beyond Capital (2003)

Book Review from the December 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Beyond Capital. By Michael Lebowitz, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.)

Karl Marx originally planned to write six books under the project title “Economics”, but only the first book Capital was ever written. The other books in the planned series were: Landed Property, Wage Labour, State, International Trade, World Market. Because Marx never got beyond the first, claims Lebowitz, the theory is somewhat one-sided. Capital analyses in particular the laws of motion of capital and a detailed consideration of the other side of the social relationship, wage-labour, was to be left to the third book in the series. The resulting description of capitalism in Capital can be interpreted in a mechanical and determinist way, with capital having a “logic” of its own from which the class struggle of the workers is absent. Would anyone be so foolish as to read Capital that way? Well, yes, it’s surprisingly common. For instance, G.A. Cohen has built an academic career largely out of popularising a functionalist account of Marx’s theory in which, among other things, we learn that “high technology was not only necessary but also sufficient for socialism” (Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence, 1978, p.206). For Lebowitz, on the other hand, the subject of Capital is capital and it explores that relation from the perspective of capital. However, an adequate understanding of capitalism as a whole requires us to recognise it as a totality, as a class struggle between capital and wage-labour.

From the point of view of capital, the value of labour-power (the worker’s ability to work which is sold for a wage or salary) is determined by the necessaries of life. This can imply that the process of establishing wage levels and the value of labour-power is more or less automatic, with the direction of causation going from the necessaries of life to the value of labour-power to wage levels. On the other hand, although Marx never wrote the planned book on wage-labour, he did a lecture that is written up as the pamphlet Value, Price and Profit. Here Marx explains that wage levels will vary with “the respective power of the combatants” and in the long run this will determine the value of labour-power and the necessaries of life. From the point of view of wage-labour then, wage levels and the value of labour-power depends on the balance of class forces, on what workers can actually get from their employers.

Of course socialists take the side of workers in the class struggle. However, the problem of a possible one-sided interpretation in Capital was first recognised by Maximilien Rubel, and he concluded that because of the “fragmentary state” of Marx’s “Economics” project, in particular the intended book on wage labour which remained unwritten, we do not have a rounded analysis of capitalism (Rubel on Marx: Five Essays, 1981). Lebowitz suggests that it is possible to get that rounded analysis scattered throughout Marx’s work and by including the class struggle in the analysis. So, for example, a rise in tax borne by workers should not be assumed to be automatically passed on to employers in the form of higher money wages. From the (one-sided) viewpoint of capital, workers are variable capital and, from this perspective, it may be thought that, because of the “law” of motion of capital, wages will rise in due course. But once the class struggle—pressure from the capitalist as well as the workers’ side—is factored in, this issue can only be answered empirically, depending on “the respective power of the combatants.”

Lew Higgins

Blogger's Note:

G. A. Cohen's Karl Marx’s Theory of History was reviewed in the August 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard.

The Anti-God Squad (2007)

Book Reviews from the November 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who Was Jesus? by Kamal Salibi, Taurus Parke Paperbacks, 2007

Against All Gods by A. C. Grayling, Oberon Books, 2007

God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens, Atlantic Books, 2007

It has long been acknowledged by Christian theologians, and by anyone else who cares to study the evidence, that the Bible does not give a coherent account of the life and sayings of Jesus. There are just too many contradictions and inconsistencies within and between the various books which make up the New Testament. Not only that, many of the historical and geographical references involving Jesus are not confirmed by modern scholarship. For instance, the earliest known archaeological record for the existence of Nazareth in Palestinian Galilee dates from no earlier than the third century AD, which undermines the case for a “Jesus of Nazareth.”  Salibi, a Christian, does a good job of pulling together many of these problems in his book Who Was Jesus?. He draws on the Koran and other sources to argue that “Jesus” is actually a compilation of two people: an Arabian named “Issa” who lived around 400 BC, was a Jewish preacher but was not executed; and about four hundred years later “Jeshu,” a preacher who was crucified in Jerusalem (though the Koran insists that only the first is the real “Jesus” and the latter account is false). Salibi’s method is to reconstruct the Jesus story so as to iron out the contradictions and inconsistencies, using careful selection and a fair amount of his own speculations (“it could well have been true”). But it doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that the Biblical evidence is so unreliable as to be worthless.

One of the sources Salibi believes early Christianity drew upon was the ancient fertility cult of  the “god” of “life-giving water” — that is, semen. Grayling doesn’t swallow this and sticks mainly to a philosophical critique of religion, as befits a professor of philosophy at the University of London. His Against All Gods is short and bluntly put (64 pages and no index). Religions are not deserving of respect just because they are religions; they must be subject to the same scrutiny as any other belief and cannot hide behind the notion that they are personal beliefs. Are atheists themselves fundamentalists? Is atheism itself an act of faith? These claims are often found coming from religious folk who are somewhat taken aback by the plain speaking of people like Grayling. His humanism is guided by reason and respect for the evidence, the antithesis of fundamentalism and faith. And then there is the familiar objection that secular Stalinism and Nazism were worse than religion. Grayling’s response is to point out that  Stalinism and Nazism were basically the same as religions in that they were monolithic ideologies of oppression and control.

However, Grayling also argues that most wars in the world’s history “owe themselves directly or indirectly to religion.” Granted that in the Crusades of the Middle Ages religion was an important causal factor, but are religions a cause of war in the modern world? Were the First and Second World Wars (where a largely Christian Britain and France declared war on Christian Germany in both cases) caused, even indirectly, by religion? Even if we accept Grayling’s description of GW Bush’s foreign policy as “conducting jihad for American/Baptist values,” this is not convincing as an explanation of the war against Iraq. Because he doesn’t take into account material interests, Grayling confuses cause and consequence: propaganda instead of the underlying cause; religion invoked in the furtherance of material interests.

In contrast, Hitchens’ God Is Not Great is lengthy and detailed. The title is his riposte to the Arabic-Islamic phrase Allahu Akbar: “God is Great,” which is brave considering what happened to his friend Salman Rushdie. Subtitled “The Case Against Religion” (in the American edition it’s “How Religion Poisons Everything”), it’s a powerful and vehement denunciation of all religion and its practitioners. According to Hitchens, religionists allow themselves “permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.” All the usual arguments and some you may never have heard of are here. Like Grayling, Hitchens deals with the secular-Nazism-and-Stalinism-was-worse-than-religion argument, only in much more detail. He makes what should be an obvious point, that Hitler claimed to be a defender of Christianity against the “Christ-killer” Jews. (Incidentally, it was not until the 1960s that the Vatican officially absolved “the Jewish people” from collective guilt in Jesus’ death.) And prior to Stalin’s political career he did have a strict religious upbringing and did train to be a priest, so he would have conformed to the Jesuit saying: “Give me the child until he is ten, and I will give you the man.” Hitchens claims to have been a Marxist in his youth but now says its “glories” were in the past, without specifying what those glories were or why they are in the past. And Marxism is “no longer any guide to the future,” again without giving any reason. He was a Trotskyist however and he may be really talking about his loss of faith in that dismal ideology. If he had taken a Marxist stand against capitalist imperialism, he would have avoided having to, as he saw it, support the Bush-Blair war against Iraq.

Grayling and Hitchens see themselves as defenders of the Enlightenment tradition of respect for reason and evidence against its traditional foe, religion. But they see nothing wrong in capitalism. Socialists share in the Enlightenment inheritance but recognise that the main source of irrationality in the modern world is to be found in the capitalist system of society. For socialists, therefore, the struggle against religion cannot be separated from the struggle for socialism. We fight religious superstition wherever it is an obstacle to socialism, but we are opposed to religion only insofar as it is an obstacle to socialism.

Lew Higgins

What revolution? (2008)

Book Review from the November 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The Communist Manifesto’, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Introduction by David Harvey, Pluto Press, 2008. £7.99.

The publisher’s blurb on the back says: “This book truly changed the world, inspiring millions to revolution.” Unfortunately, this is not true: this book has not changed the world, nor has it inspired millions to revolution. The Manifesto of the Communist Party (to give it its original title) has been republished many times since its first publication in 1848. And now, 160 years later, in this edition it has a new Introduction by David Harvey. The Manifesto needs to be understood in its historical context, in order to sift out the immediate demands of 1848 from its timeless communist content. Marx and Engels emphasised this point in their 1872 Preface where they argued that already part of the Manifesto dealing with immediate demands (at the end of Section Two) had become “antiquated”, a point which was repeated in the 1888 Preface.

Harvey acknowledges this point but then goes on to claim that some of these immediate demands – such as free education for all children in state schools, a heavy progressive or graduated income tax – are still “wholly sensible proposals … to rid ourselves of the appalling social and economic inequalities that now surround us”. But that was then and this is now: however progressive those reforms appeared then, it is clear now that reforms of capitalism do not reduce social and economic inequalities. Harvey argues that eradicating class privilege requires an organised association of workers backed by democratic control of the state, and then adds in brackets “this is as far as the Manifesto goes”. But this is untrue: in the paragraphs preceding the immediate demands the Manifesto calls for the revolutionary “communistic abolition of buying and selling” and other specifically communist demands. Astonishingly, Harvey has nothing to say about this.

Harvey refers to the collapse after 1989 of “actually existing communisms” without irony and asserts that the former Soviet Union succumbed to “capitalist counter-revolution”. But there is nothing in the Manifesto which would warrant such claims. The Soviet Union and similar regimes did not institute the abolition of buying and selling and are best characterised as state capitalist dictatorships over the proletariat. Harvey has an online course “Reading Marx’s Capital” (http://davidharvey.org/), but in this Introduction he alleges that crises can be brought about through underconsumption (lack of effective demand), an economics theory which Marx emphatically rejected. Harvey’s Introduction is very disappointing, but the Manifesto itself is still an inspiring read.

Lew Higgins

Engels, pioneer socialist (2020)

From the November 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Friedrich Engels was born two hundred years ago in November 1820 in what is now called Wuppertal in Germany. He was the eldest son of a textile capitalist. Engels was trained for a career as a merchant, but in 1841 he went to Berlin and became closely involved with the Young Hegelians, a group of left-wing philosophers with whom Marx had also been involved. While in Berlin he did his military service in an artillery regiment, and for the rest of his life he took a keen interest in military matters. Later on, in the Marx household he was known as ‘The General’ and in the socialist movement as ‘Marx’s General’. In 1842 Engels became a socialist – before and independently of Marx – and went to Salford to work in his father’s business.

In England he became interested in the struggles of the English working class. His research resulted in The Condition of the Working Class in England, first published in German in 1845 and in English in 1887. It recorded the absolute poverty of the families in Manchester and their degrading working conditions. Based on first-hand observation and local sources it is still an important primary source for historians. This book greatly impressed Marx and contributed to what was to be their life-long friendship. In a preface for the 1892 edition, Engels wrote that ‘the most crying abuses described in this book have either disappeared or have been made less conspicuous.’ This is why ‘in 1844’ was then added to the book’s title. Engels went on to say:

‘It will be hardly necessary to point out that the general theoretical standpoint of this book – philosophical, economical, political – does not exactly coincide with my standpoint of to-day. Modern international Socialism, since fully developed as a science, chiefly and almost exclusively through the efforts of Marx, did not as yet exist in 1844’.

‘Historical materialism’

Engels first met Marx in Paris and agreed to produce a political satire aimed at the Young Hegelians: The Holy Family (1845). Engels and Marx then began writing The German Ideology in November 1845 and continued to work on it for nearly a year before it was abandoned unfinished, as Marx put it, to ‘the gnawing criticism of the mice’ (teeth marks of mice were subsequently found on the manuscript). This work contains an attack on the Young Hegelians (the German ideology in question) and in so doing they set out the basic principles of their materialist conception of history:

‘The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity’.

These key concepts would provide the guiding thread for their researches of the past and present. Engels would later label this materialism ‘historical materialism’, but it should be noted that the materialism here is not a philosophy of knowledge, as it is usually understood in philosophy. It is in the practical sense of the word (not in its acquisitive sense) that socialists are said to be materialists in outlook. This may look uncontroversial now, but at the time it was a revolutionary way of thinking. The widely influential German philosopher Hegel, for instance, conceived human history as the unfolding of an idea.

In 1848 the Manifesto of the Communist Party (now usually known as the Communist Manifesto) was published. Engels was not involved in writing the Manifesto but in the 1888 revised English edition he claimed joint authorship with Marx, who had died five years earlier. The revised edition sometimes improves on the original as, for example, this classic statement of the socialist revolution:

‘All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority’.

Engels had a better grasp of the English language than Marx, and he put it to good use in the many newspaper articles he wrote, some of which were published with Marx’s name as author. In the short book The Peasant War in Germany (1850) Engels drew comparisons between an early sixteenth-century uprising and the recent revolutions in Europe. It could also bear comparison between those revolutions and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917:

‘The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class which he represents and for the realisation of the measures which that domination would imply’.

‘Scientific socialism’

In 1850 Engels re-joined the family firm in Salford, where he stayed until 1870, helping Marx financially and journalistically. Engels also developed his own lines of interest, especially in the natural sciences, and one result of his studies was his notes published in 1925 as Dialectics of Nature. According to Tristram Hunt, a few years previously the manuscript was in the possession of Eduard Bernstein, acting as Engels’ literary executor, who sent it to Albert Einstein for comment. Einstein thought the science was confused (The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels, 2009).

In 1878 he was able to retire and move to London. As Marx became less politically active due to ill health, Engels took on more responsibility for setting out what was becoming known as ‘Marxism’. In 1878 Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (subsequently abbreviated to Anti-Dühring) appeared. In an 1885 preface, two years after Marx’s death, Engels claimed that the arguments used against the German philosopher Dühring were mainly Marx’s ‘and only to an insignificant degree by myself’. Engels then said: ‘I read the whole manuscript to him before it was printed’. However, Terrell Carver has flagged this comment as odd (Engels: A Very Short Introduction, 2003). The implication of Engels’ comment is that Marx agreed with everything in the book. But with a large, closely argued book like this it seems implausible.

In Anti-Dühring Engels wrote that the dialectic is ‘the science of the universal laws of motion and evolution in nature, human society and thought’. Marx’s scattered comments on science and the dialectic could never be construed as making such a bold claim. That there are universal laws of motion in physics and of evolution in biology may be conceded, but it is more contentious to say that there are entirely equivalent laws of motion or evolution in human society. Like some other thinkers of the time, Engels had difficulty in disentangling philosophy from science.

Populariser of socialist theory

Three chapters from Anti-Dühring were published as Socialism: Utopian and Scientific in 1880. This latter work proved to be immensely popular within the growing socialist movement as a general exposition of Marxism. In 1884 The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State was written and published. This was based on a synopsis Marx had written on Ancient Society, a book by Lewis Henry Morgan that was published in 1877. The Origin takes an historical view of the family in relation to issues of class, female subjugation and private property. It also contains Engels’ classic socialist position on the state:

‘The ancient state was, above all, the state of the slave owners for holding down the slaves, just as the feudal state was the organ of the nobility for holding down the peasant serfs and bondsmen, and the modern representative state is an instrument for exploiting wage labour by capital’.

In Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1888), Engels explained and defended his philosophy of nature. In his criticism of the German philosopher Feuerbach he wrote that a limitation of his ‘materialism lay in its inability to comprehend the universe as a process, as matter undergoing uninterrupted historical development’. Despite his claim to reject idealism, the universe as an unfolding of the idea is a return by Engels to the Hegelian philosophy of his youth in Germany,

After Marx’s death in 1883, Engels spent most of his time editing Marx’s notes for volumes two and three of Capital, published in 1885 and 1894, respectively. He devoted his last few years as an adviser to the parties of the Second International before dying of cancer in 1895. During their working life together, Engels always regarded himself as the junior partner. However, after Marx’s death and at a time of massively increased interest in Marxism, it fell to Engels to do the explaining. Most of it was done superbly, but he also produced a tendency towards ‘scientism’ – the belief that science also explains human political life. The term ‘scientific socialism’ is really just a philosophical viewpoint, and no less valid for all that.

From the twentieth century onwards, Engels’ political status has been raised to the equal of Marx. But there is nothing in the writings of Engels which justifies the existence of the political and social monstrosities erected in the names of Marx and Engels.

Lew Higgins

Darwin’s Origin of Species (2006)

Book Review from the November 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Darwin’s Origin of Species by Janet Browne. (Atlantic Books, 2006)

In a New York Times poll in November 2004, 55 percent of respondents agreed that God had created human beings in their present form. Clearly the Darwinian revolution has some way to go. Darwin’s revolutionary work was first published in November 1859 with the full title: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. And yet the theory of evolution could have been known under a different name. In the previous year the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace had sent Darwin an essay in which he set out the theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin’s friends hurriedly arranged for both works to be published at the same time, so the theory should really be known as the Wallace-Darwin theory, if not the Wallace theory of evolution. In any event, Wallace and Darwin became good friends and Wallace collaborated with Darwin in his research and helped in the revised editions of Origin of Species.

Origin of Species went through six editions during Darwin’s lifetime and he made many corrections and alterations. In the fifth edition (1869), at Wallace’s suggestion, Darwin first introduced the notorious phrase “survival of the fittest.” Wallace had taken this phrase from the writings of Herbert Spencer, a well known atheist and supporter of capitalism in late nineteenth century Britain. Spencer’s ideas would became known as “Social Darwinism” and he maintained that society was an organism exactly the same as a biological organism. From his perspective he argued against the building of lighthouses around the British coastline because, so he claimed, shipwrecks were “nature’s” (i.e. capitalism’s) way of sorting out the fit from the unfit. Darwin had never taken any of Spencer’s ideas on social evolution seriously and the phrase “survival of the fittest” is at odds with Darwin’s own ideas about natural selection by adaptation.

Browne ends her account of Wallace by saying that he went on to become a “utopian socialist.” In fact he became a supporter of utopian capitalism. He advocated land nationalisation and was an enthusiast for Edward Bellamy’s state capitalist vision of the future in his novel Looking Backward (1888). When Darwin died in April 1882 aged seventy-three, Origin of Species had truly become one of the “Books That Shook The World,” the publisher’s title for this series of biographies which includes Marx’s Das Kapital (see the review in the October Socialist Standard). There is a slight link between the two books. Marx thought very highly of Origin of Species and sent Darwin a presentation copy of Das Kapital. But he did not, as sometimes claimed, offer to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin. Rather it was Marx’s son-in-law, Edward Aveling, who offered to dedicate one of his books to Darwin. Darwin never read Das Kapital and he rejected Aveling’s offer.

Lew Higgins

Against religion (2010)

From the November 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the first things the pope did as soon as he got off the plane was to launch into a bitter attack on “aggressive secularists” and “extremist atheists”. Here’s our reply.

The only reasonable position to adopt towards any religion is one of atheism: unbelief. There is a presumption in favour of not believing fantastic claims. It is up to the believer to present proof for the existence of God or life after death. After all, few are agnostic about Father Christmas, fairies or unicorns; we know they don’t exist. The same scepticism should also apply to the extraordinary beliefs of religion. With religious believers, however, there is a willingness to believe despite the lack of evidence. And it is this gullibility which socialists find to be dangerous and objectionable.

Of course religious believers do claim to have evidence, and they cite their holy texts as proof of the infallible word of God. But these writings contain so many contradictions and absurdities that no reasonable person can take them seriously. Traditional interpretations of the Bible, for instance, are highly selective and leave out the inconsistencies. In the Old Testament there are two different creation stories (Genesis 1-2, 4;2, 4-24) and two different versions of the Flood (Genesis 6,5-9,17). Needless to say, geological evidence does not confirm the Biblical accounts of the Earth’s age or the Earth being flooded to a depth of five miles all over its surface.

Nor do the prophecies fare any better. No unicorns or dragons have been found, as foretold (Isaiah 13,22;34,7). God promised the Jewish people that they will never lose their land (Psalms 89,3-4), that no uncircumcised man will ever enter Jerusalem (Isaiah 52,1) and that Jerusalem will always be a quiet place, undamaged by war (Isaiah 33,20).

In the New Testament Jesus is often reported as saying that the world is about to end, and that the end will come in the lifetime of his listeners (Matthew 4,17;10,23,-16,28;24,34). This is why he advocated giving away personal possessions, and forms the basis of the myth that Jesus was an early socialist. There is nothing socialist about making yourself deliberately poor in any case. Jesus is usually portrayed as peace-loving, but he also said: “Think not that I come to send peace on earth: I come not to send peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10,34). Carl Lofmark, from whom many of these examples are taken, comments in his book What is the Bible?:

“This passage has been useful to army chaplains and church leaders who have had to persuade people that they should go to war in spite of all that Jesus said about peace and forgiveness.”

But if the Bible and other religious texts are not literally true, as many theologians now accept, are they true symbolically? As with the above examples, do they have a “deeper” meaning? The trouble with this line of argument is that it is even more selective in choosing what to believe. It means turning a blind eye to the contradictions and obscenities and choosing to believe something you know is not true.

Once you have rejected the special authority of the Bible (or whatever text) as the infallible word of God, how do you know that you have interpreted the symbolism in the way the writers intended? Fundamentalists have a point when they say that this changes religion into a form of art appreciation.

Then there is morality. Many who would not describe themselves as religious will, nevertheless, have their children given religious indoctrination at school on the grounds that it will give them a moral education. In this country the law requires that Religious Education be “broadly Christian” in content. But would you want your child to be stoned to death for being disobedient, as God commands (Deuteronomy 21,18-21)? This is the morality they keep quiet about. If a husband finds that his bride is not a virgin on her wedding day, then she shall be stoned to death on her father’s doorstep (Deuteronomy 22,21). God instructed Moses:

“Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourself” (Numbers 31,17-18).

Not only does God give this approval of the murder and rape of children, but slavery also (Exodus 21,1-11). Jesus says that to be a true believer you must hate your mother and father and “yea, and his own life also” (Luke 14,26). For the unbeliever, “thou shalt eat the fruit of thine own body, the flesh of thy sons and of they daughters” (Deuteronomy 28,53). Jesus says that anyone who does not believe him will burn forever in hell (Mark 16,16). It has frequently been said that it is a very sick morality which can punish by sending people to hell. Even Hitler and Stalin only had their victims tortured and killed and then their suffering ended, but God wants the suffering to continue – literally –- for an eternity.

Faith is the last refuge of a believer. Religious faith, however, would only make sense if what was believed in were plausible. Neither the existence of a God nor life after death are plausible, though faith in them undoubtedly offers solace to many. It can make the unbearable seem bearable. But why should an all-loving God allow so much suffering, so much pain in this world – including the so-called “Acts of God” – earthquakes, hurricanes, floods and the rest? If God really did exist, we have no reason for supposing that he cares for us.

For some in recent years religion has combined with New Age beliefs, largely at the expense of the traditional religions whose emphasis on personal guilt, sexual repression and the inferiority of women have become unacceptable. This pick and mix approach can combine elements from the New Testament, Buddhism, psychoanalysis, paganism, astrology and various other bits of the occult. So why, the, the persistence of religious belief?

The socialist analysis of religion derives from our basic materialism (not in the acquisitive sense, but how we view the production of wealth in society and the sort of ideas it gives rise to). Historical materialism traces how religions have evolved, from their beginnings in ancestor worship and private property in primitive societies, to established social institutions. Marx hit a number of nails on the head when he described the social psychology of religion:

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed, the feeling of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless circumstances. It is the opium of the people . . . The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about their condition is a demand to give up a condition that requires illusion. The criticism of religion in therefore the germ of the criticism of the valley of tears whose halo is religion.”

For the materialist, in other words, society is not really under human control and humans really are at the mercy of blind, impersonal forces – in ancient times the forces of nature, in the modern world the economic forces of capitalism. Under capitalism people feel, rightly, that they are governed by forces they can’t control but attribute this, wrongly, to forces operating from outside the world of experience. Churches of all types are then at hand for the sustaining of fear and superstition. For the socialist alternative to our lives being controlled by impersonal forces we must bring about a society in which humans consciously control the forces of production.

It is on this basis that we can say, rather than being abolished, religion can be expected to (as Engels put it in another context) “wither away”. And it can be seen that the socialist case against religion differs from the usual humanist position: there are rationalist superstitions as well as religious. For humanists, criticism of religion is a process towards the eventual “triumph of reason”. But they ignore the material circumstances which give rise to superstition:

“Consequently, in his worship of the ‘Idea’ the bourgeois freethinker is, like the Christian, attributing miraculous powers to the figments of men’s brains” (Socialism and Religion, Socialist Party pamphlet, 1911).

Capitalism has many opiates to offer the unwary. Reject the pedlars, reject the product, but above all, reject a society which can create such an unhealthy psychological dependency. On the new basis of material security and social co-operation individuals can gain a sense of meaning in their lives, and hope for a future free from the dead hand of religious belief and tradition.

 Lew Higgins

George Orwell (2023)

Book Review from the November 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Orwell: The New Life. By D. J. Taylor, Constable, 2023

Eric Arthur Blair was born in 1903. In 1933 he adopted a pen name for his first book mainly because he thought the seedy subject matter of Down and Out in Paris and London would upset his parents. It was George, after the reigning monarch, and Orwell, after his favourite river in Suffolk. Having shown little previous interest in politics, at the end of 1936 he decided he wanted to ‘fight fascists’ in the Spanish Civil War. He travelled independently to Barcelona and served with POUM (Workers Party of Marxist Unification). His service on the front line ended when he was shot by a sniper. His Homage to Catalonia noted two years later that the real aim of the military mutiny, backed by the Church and landowners, was not to impose Fascism but to restore feudalism.

In Spain he befriended members of the ILP (Independent Labour Party) and on his return to England he joined the ILP because, Orwell said, they were the only party ‘which aims at anything I should regard as Socialism’. A little later he wrote that he hoped to see ‘something that has never existed before, a specifically English socialist movement’ (Orwell’s emphasis; The Lion and the Unicorn, 1941). His conception of socialism was mainly state interventionist: nationalisation, income limitation and reform of education. On this last reform, Orwell had wanted his son to go to Eton, as he had, though eventually he put his name down for Westminster Public (that is, private) School.

Taylor claims that one consequence of his experience fighting in Spain was a newfound pacifism; Orwell wrote about the looming Second World War ‘in which I do not intend to fight’. His wife Eileen commented on the psychological effect of his six months in Spain and that her husband had turned to ‘complete pacifism’. But Orwell was a committed patriot and as the Second World War was near he wrote in his diary that ‘I would give my life for England’. On the possibility of a Nazi invasion in 1940: ‘there is nothing for it but to die fighting, but one must above all die fighting and have the satisfaction of killing somebody else first’. The ILP were now deemed to be hopelessly pacifist: they ‘live almost entirely in a masturbation fantasy, conditioned by the fact that nothing they say or do will ever influence events’.

Orwell sometimes contributed articles to a small but influential quarterly magazine called Adelphi. Founded by John Middleton Murry in 1923, it was self-consciously ‘literary’ in tone. Taylor states that It had ‘unorthodox Marxism’. He doesn’t explain what that means but it’s probably their writers not being members or supporters of the Communist Party. Adelphi had an important influence on Orwell and the contacts it provided in the north of England enabled him to do the research which was published as The Road to Wigan Pier in 1937. In 1932 Murry had read the Socialist Party pamphlet Why Capitalism Will Not Collapse and wrote to us saying: ‘It seems to me I ought to join’. He didn’t pursue the matter and in any case we pointed out that we didn’t allow members of other political organisations to join us – he was a member of the ILP. Later in his life Murry became a Tory and an advocate of war against Russia.

During the Second World War, while serving in the Home Guard in London, a member of his platoon put a direct question to Orwell: ‘Are you a communist?’ To which Orwell replied: ‘It depends what you mean.’ It’s not known whether he elaborated, but Taylor is baffled by Orwell’s response and accuses him of being ‘enigmatic’ and speaking ‘delphically’. However, for many Socialists this exchange will be familiar; we sometimes get asked the same question and we usually give the same answer as Orwell as a start. Like Orwell, we have been bitterly opposed to the Communist Party and its regimes; but we accept a properly understood conception of communism — classless, moneyless, stateless. Orwell never identified as a communist but he obviously knew enough about communism to differentiate it from what he called ‘the smelly little orthodoxies’ of the Communist Party and similar organisations. His response suggests that he saw nothing objectionable in communism, even if he didn’t support it himself.

Orwell mentions the Socialist Party a few times in his work as a journalist. In his Observer article covering a few London constituencies in the 1945 general election he claims that the Tory candidate in Paddington North could win, and that if he does:

‘It will quite likely be because Mr C Groves, the Socialist Party of Great Britain candidate (this is the sole constituency the SPGB is contesting) has split the Labour vote’ (24.06.1945).

The Labour candidate, General Mason-Macfarlane, won comfortably. Orwell had made enquiries at the Socialist Party election office in Paddington North and it’s possible that he took this opportunity to buy Socialist Party literature. His collection of political pamphlets (tinyurl.com/297szbet) is held by the British Museum and it includes these by the Socialist Party:

• The Socialist Party – Its Principles and Policy (1934)
• War and the Working Class (1936)
• The Socialist Party Exposes Mr Chamberlain and His Labour Critics (1938)
• The Next Step for Trade Unionists (1939)
• Socialism (1941)
• Family Allowances: A Socialist Analysis (1943)
• Should Socialists Support Federal Union? (Two editions: 1940 and 1943)

They can be downloaded from our website.

Orwell wrote six novels and he would probably have been considered a minor novelist of the twentieth century were it not for the last two: Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty Four (1949), which made him world famous. Taylor argues that all his novels feature a rebellion that fails; there could be an interesting link between this and Orwell’s political outlook but he doesn’t pursue it. The last books gave many the impression of being anti-Russian or ‘anti-Soviet’, but Orwell regarded himself as anti-totalitarian; in a letter to a friend he wrote:

‘I don’t think I could fairly be described as Russophobic. I am against all dictatorships and I think the Russian myth has done frightful harm to the leftwing movement in Britain and elsewhere, and that it is above all necessary to make people see the Russian regime as it is.’

Orwell died from tuberculosis in 1950. The title of this book may suggest his reincarnation, but it’s merely a new edition of his life story first published in 2003. Taylor doesn’t mention the Socialist Party.

Lew Higgins

Globalization (2009)

Book Review from the September 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Globalization in Question. By Paul Hirst, Grahame Thompson and Simon Bromley. Polity Press, 2009

Globalization is one of the key concepts of our time, accepted by both the right and left as the cornerstone of their analysis of the international economy. In both political and academic discussions, the assumption is often made that globalization of the past few decades is a qualitatively new stage in the development of international capitalism; that integration of national economies into the international economy is an inevitable process to which national governments are largely powerless. This book challenges these notions.

The authors, using detailed evidence, argue for the following conclusions. The present highly internationalised economy is not unprecedented. In some respects, the current globalized economy has only recently become as open and integrated as the regime that prevailed from 1870 to 1914. Genuinely transnational companies are relatively rare. Most companies are based nationally and trade regionally or multinationally on the strength of a major national location. There is no major trend towards the growth of truly global companies. Foreign direct investment is still highly concentrated among the advanced industrial economies, and the Third World remains marginal in both investment and trade. The emergence of India and particularly China has disrupted this picture, though it has not significantly shifted the centre of gravity from the already advanced countries. Investment, trade and financial flows are concentrated in the Triad of Europe, Japan/East Asia and North America, and this dominance seems set to continue. Supranational regionalization (e.g. European Union, North American Free Trade Agreement, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) is a trend that is possibly stronger than that of globalization. The major economic powers, centred on the G8 with China and India, have the capacity, especially if they coordinate policy, to exert powerful governance pressures over financial markets and other economic tendencies. Global markets are therefore by no means beyond regulation and control, though this will be limited by the divergent interests of states and their ruling elites.

The authors show some awareness of the historical development of capitalism, though they view this largely as the history of technological innovation. As the above shows, the emphasis in this book is on the institutional arrangements (social, economic and political) and their interrelationships within capitalism, with no real comprehension of the underlying dynamic of capitalism. As a result they do not explain that it is the competitive accumulation of profits which is the driving force of capitalism’s inherent tendency towards globalization.

Lew Higgins

A Devil’s Chaplain (2003)

Book Review from the September 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Devil’s Chaplain by Richard Dawkins (Weidenfield & Nicolson, 2003)

The ironic title of this collection of essays comes from a letter Darwin wrote to a friend commenting on his own work, Origin of the Species: “What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write . . .” Most of the essays here concern Darwin’s intellectual legacy. Dawkins is probably the world’s foremost advocate of Darwinism – or as he prefers to call it, “Neo-Darwinism.” His uncompromising defence of scientific method and scorn for irrationally held beliefs has earned Dawkins some notoriety, and some reviewers of this book have been dismayed by what they perceive as his arrogance. But what is offensive to some is refreshingly outspoken to others.

The core of Darwinism, argues Dawkins, is the “theory that evolution is guided in adaptively nonrandom directions by the nonrandom survival of small random hereditary changes.” Several of the essays here defend and expand on that theory. But at the same time as Dawkins supports Darwinism as a science, he states “I am a passionate anti-Darwinian when it comes to politics and how we should conduct our human affairs.” This corrects the impression which may have been given to some by his earlier book The Selfish Gene that we are all somehow prisoners of our genes. He denies ever holding a belief in genetic determinism in the sense that genes determine social behaviour.

Dawkins’s withering criticism is mainly directed at religion and associated beliefs. Yet it is important to realise that Dawkins is not being gratuitous; where irrational beliefs affect us all they should be subject to the closest scrutiny. Dawkins tells the story of a TV debate he had with a cleric (later elevated to the House of Lords). The cleric refused to shake hands with any women in the studio for fear that they might be menstruating and so be, in religious terms, “unclean.” Dawkins’s comment is typical Dawkinsism: “They took the insult more graciously than I would have, and with the ‘respect’ always bestowed on religious prejudice – but no other kind of prejudice”. Dawkins is an honorary member of the Rationalist Press Association, and it’s safe to say he is no socialist, though he did come out publicly against the recent Gulf War.

Lew Higgins