Current Jargon (1982)

From the March 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Arguing with left-wing groups is not always a useful way for socialists to spend their time, but it’s difficult to resist when they are so willing to take up the role of fall-guys to the socialist case. One such group which often attends on the SPGB is the International Communist Current; our opponents in several recent debates.

Outwardly their talk and publications are forbidding, unless you have a political appetite that relishes jargon. “Bourgeoisie”, “decadent” and “reactionary” are the ICC’s favourite words. Trade union leaders are always “derailing the workers”, politicians are always uttering “verbiage” and the proletariat are always being exhorted to “generalise their struggles”. Not bad sentiments really, except that they lose their descriptive power when you read them ten times in a single journal. Nevertheless, some do adjust to this form of political communication because it always gives the impression of familiarity, like a collage of well-known newspaper headlines gummed onto a canvas. Those members of the ICC with whom I have argued are among the most committed political people I know. Perhaps the jargon and the commitment are linked. For if you exchange the power of creative expression for a set of ready-made phrases, that only make sense when bolted together in particular ways, then you cease to be able to describe the world if you change your political position. And if you do, you must suffer a period of communicative incoherence.

Strangely, the case of the ICC is quite unlike their mechanical language. They delight in and glorify spontaneous action by the working class. Whenever some workers down tools or typewriters and strike or occupy their workplaces, this fills the ICC with hope for the revolution. Their publications are full of details about strike committee meetings around the world and they devote much space to encouraging attempts to seize control of an industry by councils of workers.

It is here that the ICC display an amiable, if childlike, character. Their sensitivity to the economic and social difficulties of the workers makes them lionise those who express militant discontent. An ICC member in an occupied factory would count him or herself as one among the potential key actors at a possible turning-point in history.

So great is their respect for spontaneous expression in the economic class struggle, that they build their programme of action around an international expansion of strike committees or workers councils. Themselves they see as providing the missing link between anarcho-syndicalism and the vision of socialism carried by the SPGB, repeated in their principles:

   Socialism, the mode of social reproduction initiated by the workers’ councils, is not ‘workers’ self-management’ or ‘nationalisations’. Socialism requires the conscious abolition by the working class of capitalist social relations based on the law of value, such as wage labour, commodity production, national frontiers, and the construction of a world human community. (International Review, May 1976, back page)

Urge the workers’ councils on, they say, and these will spontaneously throw up political institutions able to dictate the will of the workers, overcoming the capitalist class and their governments. From this exercise of power by the workers will arise full socialist consciousness in an international workers’ councils movement, that can then be used as an untainted vehicle for a complete revolution; in much the way that the SPGB says the parliaments of the world could be.

The fragmentary and local nature of workers’ councils means that their solidarity is easily broken by very ordinary propaganda from the employers. While the massive effort required to create and co-ordinate a world-wide council movement is likely to trigger invasions, or wars, in the countries so disturbed.

Anyway, the existence of the SPGB is a standing refutation of the ICC claim that all who advocate “revolutionary parliamentarism” become corrupted and absorbed into capitalism.

B. K. McNeeney

Thought For The Day (1982)

Quote from the March 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

A peasant approached his king and asked: "How is the fight to abolish poverty going? The king replied, "Very well". The peasant then asked, "Then how is it that I am still poor?" "Ah", answered the king, "I am winning, you are losing".

(BBC Radio 4, 1.2.82.)

No Fares Not Low Fares (1982)

Illustration by George Meddemmen.

From the March 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last May the voters of London elected a new set of leaders to run the Greater London Council. No more were they prepared to be governed by witless Horace Cutler and his fellow Tory rogues. The Labour Party swept to power on a wave of disapproval of Thatcher’s efforts and the radical rhetoric of reform was in the air. The press portrayed Ken Livingstone as the Joseph Stalin of County Hall, while Livingstone portrayed himself as the cleanest guy in town performing the dirtiest job in town. “Our Ken” was going to take on the might of the profit system. “Socialism in one city” was the battle-cry; the Metropolitan Police were going to be converted into a “democratic people’s militia”, it was to be the Paris Commune, Round Two. Leftist reformers fantasised with all of the impotence of old men in a porn shop: what they weren’t going to do to capitalism wasn’t worth doing. And the jewel in their crown—the Reforme Royale—was the new cheap fares policy for London Transport. “Fair fares for all” ran the advertising campaign, and the voters seemed to have got what they asked for. Little did they know that what they asked for was yet to come.

Under capitalism everything has to be paid for. After all, you can’t run buses without money, can you? Imagine trying to drive a bus from Brixton to Clapham without sticking pound notes into the engine! So Ken and the boys had to raise the cash. The answer they came up with was to increase rates by precisely the amount they were cutting fares. So, the rates went up and assorted Londoners hissed and booed and the fares went down and assorted Londoners (many of whom had been hissing and booing) cheered and thanked the Labour Party for making it cheaper to travel from A to B.

Not long after the fares went down and the rates went up, the Tory-controlled Bromley Council began to take legal action to outlaw the GLC fares policy. One thing can always be said about the Tories—they will stop at nothing to defend their system. First they went to the Appeal Court where they stated their case to Lord Denning—who was born in the nineteenth century and upholds the social conventions of the eighteenth century. According to the 1969 Transport (London) Act it is illegal for fares to be subsidised by the state and therefore Denning agreed with Bromley Council that the GLC—and the people who elected it—were aiming for something which is against the law. The GLC appealed to the House of Lords, which ruled that it was illegal not to run London Transport “along business lines”. Lord Wilberforce stated that LT had a duty to ensure “that outgoings were met by revenue” and Lord Diplock chastised the GLC for its “thriftless use of monies obtained from ratepayers and . . . deliberate failure to deploy to best advantage the full financial resources available to it . . . ” The result of this decision is that LT fares are due to rise by about 200 per cent.

The failure of the GLC “fair fares” policy is yet another indication of the utter futility of reformism. Back in May of last year the Labour Left were making promises and millions of workers were really believing them. It is not that the Labour Party did not intend to provide cheaper fares. But the Labour Party was elected with a mandate to run the capitalist system. When the SPGB GLC election campaign drew attention to the nature of capitalism our opponents in the Labour Party told us that we were wasting our time. So Labour won the election—they won it with the support of workers who supported production for profit. All that Labour voters wanted was the profit system without its unpleasant consequences—and that is a utopia. The benefits of socialism will not be won by applying the rhetoric of socialism to the administration of capitalism, but by conscious working class political action to transform society from production for profit to production for use.

Under capitalism production is for profit. If there is no profit in sight, production ceases. The same goes for the production of vital services: under capitalism they must be “economical”. It is more “economical” to close down hospital casualty departments and let people die than to keep them open and let people live. Now, “Our Ken” is no great lover of this. He wants to run capitalism without the nasty bits. The trouble is that when you play a rough game like rugby according to the gentlemanly rules of cricket you are likely to get hurt. Livingstone presumed that he could run a capitalist transport service “fairly”. Alas, what is fair for the profit system is what is fair for the ruling class and fairness for them equals a bad deal for us.

Socialists will not get excited about “cheap fares”. Why should we have to pay money to travel on buses and trains when we build them, drive them and produce the petrol for them? The problem is that under capitalism the workers produce all goods and services but we do not own or control them. In a sane society, where wealth is owned and controlled by the whole community, all people will have free access to everything. Under capitalism you can only have what you pay for. The transport technology exists today which could make mobility simple and available for all. Isn’t it time that workers stopped voicing the slaves’ demand for more of the cheap and shoddy and started organising for free access for all?

Steve Coleman

Letters to the Editors: A Sympathiser Writes . . . (1982)

Letters to the Editors from the March 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Sympathiser Writes . . .

Dear Editors.

I have been a regular reader of the Socialist Standard now for about two years. I have also read your books and pamphlets on various subjects. I had always held the view that reforms by radical governments would eventually change this unfair society; I now realise that this is not possible. I agree 100 per cent with the argument put forward by the SPGB. Why. then, am I not a member? After a lot of thought I have come to a reluctant conclusion. It is this. I have attended meetings and debates, listened and sometimes argued with a multitude of different political opinions. I have argued with workmates, friends in the pub. even members of my family; in fact anyone who appears to be listening. The best response I have had however is. “yes, I sympathise with your beliefs but I will never be convinced that the society you want will ever work”. This is the depressing opinion put forward by class-conscious people who have, at least, bothered to think up to a point. They have, however, been unable to break out of false attitudes about "human nature” which are nurtured all too readily by defenders of capitalism. From an early age people are conditioned by propaganda from all sides. Educated and taught various skills and sciences. Taught about religion with the intention of producing what is known as "a useful member of society”. We all know what that is. The power and therefore the results of this indoctrination are not to be underestimated and I am beginning to despair that even the pure logic and rationality of the socialist case will be able to break it down. 1 have no wish to lead a life of self-imposed frustration trying to convince fellow working-class men and women that socialism is the only answer to their problems. Most of them refuse to listen anyway, preferring to watch the telly or follow other pastimes that eat up what little leisure- time most people have. Let them drool over their favourite political leader’s promises of pie in the sky: or follow religious leaders’ preachings of life after death and that the meek will inherit the earth. Let them fight and die in wars between capitalists and their counterparts in other countries. They are, after all, in the majority.

You may consider this to be a defeatist attitude, and so it is, but how else can constant failure to make headway result in anything other?

I have nothing but admiration for anyone who decides to become a member of the SPGB. They obviously possess a sense of hope and enthusiasm that I would in no way wish to dampen.

G. Nesbitt 

Seaham

Reply:
Socialism will be the result of social forces within capitalism driving workers to the conclusion that the present system does not operate in their interests and that only a society of common ownership of the means of production. democratically organised by themselves, can. The Socialist Party of Great Britain is one among many of these forces. We do not think that our efforts alone will bring socialism, but that the whole range of workers’ experiences (including contact with the SPGB) will prepare them for it. If to some people this preparation seems a tedious process and our progress seems slow, we must say that we too would like to see the socialist idea spreading more quickly. However, important ideas in human history have always taken quite some time to become popular and have only seemed credible to the majority after once being accepted by a sizeable minority. Then they have spread very quickly. Historically speaking the socialist idea has only been around a brief moment. Capitalism has not been around long either. We hope it won’t be with us much longer, but we may have to live under it for some time yet. This we must be realistic about and accept.

We don’t consider that being patient and carrying on our work in the meantime to be “self-imposed frustration”. There can on occasions, we agree, be a frustrating side to working for socialism, but this is far outweighed by the satisfaction we get out of knowing that what we’re pursuing is the only worthwhile social goal and not one of those will-o’-the- wisps chased by those who are concerned to reform capitalism. We also get satisfaction from seeing that people like yourself are capable of responding to and being convinced by our arguments.

But if you agree with us, it’s not your admiration we want. That won’t bring socialism any nearer. We want your active support. Join us and help add weight of numbers to ‘logic and rationality’. The bigger we are, the less likely it is that the people you argue with will say they’ll never be convinced that the society we want will ever work.

Editors

Questions about Socialism

Dear Editors,

I have recently received several excellent, informative issues of the Socialist Standard, and as a result I have several questions to ask.

1. In such a socialist society, how does the socialist policy to conflict manifest itself? You have opposed war as a tool of capitalism — do socialists agree that such a state would resist conflict by remaining impartially neutral, regardless of the consequences?

2. What is (or would be) socialist policy towards Northern Ireland?

3. What (if any) are the rewards of becoming well qualified in such a society? Are they substantial enough to create incentive?

4. You mention in your principles that as a working class emancipation party, you must be hostile to every other party. In what sense are you hostile and to what extent?

5. Surely, socialism in Britain would merely be a reversal of roles for master class and working class and therefore the antagonism of interests would still exist? Being primarily a working class party, do you hope to convince the middle class of the merits of socialism.

Michael Brown

Leatherhead, 

Surrey. 

P.S. I hold all socialism’s beliefs because they are contrary to the monetarist system we now have.

Reply:
You raise a number of interesting points. We will try to answer them in order.

1. Your question on how in a socialist society the state would react to war seems to be based on a misunderstanding of our views. There could not be a “socialist state". The state, even in those countries that call themselves socialist, exists to protect the property of the small minority class who own or control the majority of the wealth. Socialism, in our sense of a fully democratic society of common ownership of the means of production and free access to all goods and services, can only be established on a world scale. It will be a frontierless, moneyless society with none of the economic and territorial rivalries between ruling classes that generate war as at present.

2. The Irish problem has its origins in the struggle between rival groups of capitalists in Ireland early this century which workers were encouraged to take part in by being fed large doses of patriotic and religious mythology. The conflict between capitalists died down with partition, but the mythology lived on in workers’ minds and has now come to the surface again under the influence of poverty and feelings of injustice experienced by them. The Socialist Party deplores the killing, hatred and bigotry it has brought, but we are in business to help establish socialism not to help capitalist governments solve the problems they themselves have created. In any ease, the surest way to stop workers from murdering, maiming and terrorising one another is to undermine the false, misguided ideas that get them to do these things. In Ireland, as elsewhere, the real solution is the spread of socialist understanding.

3. Since socialism will be a society in which all people’s material needs will be satisfied and there will be no money or wages, “incentive" will not come from financial or material rewards but from knowing that whatever work one does will be personally satisfying, socially useful and appreciated by other members of the community. What better incentive could there be? Even in capitalism money isn’t the only motivation that will get people to do things. Think of the large amount of work people do for themselves or others on a voluntary basis and of their obvious need (recognised and often used for their own ends by governments) to feel part of a co-operative social effort.

4. The meaning to be given to the word “hostile” in Clause 7 of our Declaration of Principles is that we are in complete political opposition to other parties. We oppose them by rational argument and debate, in fact by all the non-violent means at our disposal. Our opposition is not based on pigheadedness, but on the fact that their aims are not the same as ours. Even if other parties call themselves “socialist”, their aim is to run capitalism in one way or another. It would be futile for us therefore not to oppose them or to support or form alliances with them.

5. The so-called “middle class” (office workers, teachers, dentists, doctors and the like) are in reality members of the working class because, like miners, dockers and roadsweepers, they have to sell their energies to an employer in order to live. The working class therefore comprises about 90 per cent of the population. The other class in society, the “master” or capitalist class, is the remaining 10 per cent—those who own enough not to have to work for a wage or salary, who live off the energies of the 90 per cent, and in whose interest the system is run. It is the majority, the workers, who will establish socialism because they will see it to be in their interest to do so. But socialism, once established, will be a classless society. It will mean complete economic and social equality. Every one will stand in an equal relationship to the means of production, owning none of it as individuals but owning all of it by their membership of the community.

It is true, as your postscript suggests, that socialists are opposed to “monetarism”. But we are equally opposed to non-monetarist and other ways governments may find of trying to run capitalism. The point is that capitalism, no matter what methods governments use, cannot be run in the interests of the working-class majority. Hence the widespread dissatisfaction perpetually felt among workers whichever government is in power. For more detail on this and other issues, can we recommend to you our pamphlet Questions of the Day? It will give you a good overall idea of our views.

Editors.

Political Notes: Splits (1982)

The Political Notes column from the March 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Splits

Does the Tory government know its own mind? On the one hand we have Howe and Tebbitt, dredging among the official statistics, assuring us that there are unmistakable signs that the worst of the recession is over and that we can now look forward to better times ahead. On the other there is Francis Pym, who has the job of master-minding the government’s propaganda, warning us that things are going to get worse:

  In the short run, living standards generally can only fall . . . we have to find ways of coping with and living with much higher levels of unemployment

There is no evidence that Pym was thinking about his own living standards or his own unemployment, although he talked about what “we” have to cope with. In any case, those with memories extending beyond last week may well prefer this sort of gloomy prognostication, from their experience of what has too often followed a politician’s hearty assurance that better times are just around the corner.

Are speeches like Pym’s, then, completely irrelevant? In fact, some people might find consolation in them, for no politician can forecast what will happen to capitalism’s economy; they can no more foresee a slump than they can a boom. If they had this ability the present recession would not have happened. There would be no three million dole queue. There would be no public expenditure cuts. We would be spared the offensiveness of ministers like Norman Tebbitt, who pretends that poverty (ours, not his) is good for us. We would not have to endure Thatcher’s nervous defiance of the reality she sees all around her. And we would be freed of the drivel of people like Pym.

Whatever stress this government is under, they are not split on the fundamental principle that capitalism must be run in the interests of its owning minority of parasites.


Malignant

The death last month of Ritchie-Calder saw the end of an identikit lefty, who moved easily in the unreal world of soft headed, temporising liberals, ready to support any excess of capitalism provided it is the work of their favoured party.

A devoted member of the Labour Party and a journalist who wrote mainly about science—which he saw as a means of dealing with social problems—Ritchie-Calder must have been thrilled when, in 1963, Harold Wilson began to claim for Labour the role of the party of science. The red (or was it white?) hot technological revolution, promised Wilson, was going to abolish poverty and strife through a four per cent growth in productivity. It sounded simple and it deceived a lot of people, like Ritchie-Calder, who should have known better. And of course it didn’t happen as Wilson promised.

Typically, Ritchie-Calder was a professed pacifist who nevertheless supported war, ending up with an important job on the Political Warfare Executive during 1939/45. Plenty of other lefties went the same disreputable way, after a brief obligatory struggle with what they called their principles.

After the war, Ritchie-Calder's continuing quest for impotence led him into the United Nations; he toured the Congo on their behalf during the troubles in 1960. He probably felt more comfortable there; the history of that country’s blood soaked exploitation by the rubber-seeking imperialist powers can keep a left wing journalist’s typewriter rattling for months.

Inevitably, he joined CND. No Aldermaston march was complete without his personification of the delusion that capitalism can be a society where human knowledge and achievement are used for human benefit.

And inevitably again, the ruling class showed what they thought of him that he presented no threat to their interests—when in 1966 he became a life peer and. a few years later, chairman of the Metrication Board.

Ritchie-Calder was one of those eminent people who give respectability to the organisations of capitalist reform—and therefore to capitalism itself. They may or may not be sincere; what is undeniable is that they are dangerously misguided. We have had too much of them and of their works. Behind a benign exterior they are as devastating as a malignant disease.

 

Cuts

Margaret Thatcher was once dubbed by Labour MPs, taking advantage of the abolition of free milk for some school children, as Thatcher the Snatcher. (The Iron Lady later said that she had been so wounded by these slurs that she would creep home and weep privately to her husband Denis.)

Well now the Prime Minister has advanced up the scale of criminality and from a snatcher has become, according to one outraged Labour MP. the Westminster Ripper. This parliamentary language may be written into the Labour Party campaign to exploit the government’s discomfiture over the cuts in public expenditure, which are now being blamed for almost all our ills from suicidal unemployed to decaying hospitals.

From this there has emerged a handy, distorting equation: Tory equals cuts equals poverty; Labour equals no cuts equals prosperity. Like all such propaganda, this has no basis in truth.

The Labour government of 1929 was infamous for its attacks on the already precarious living standards of the workers. That this was no accident was proven by such Chancellors as “Austerity” Cripps and Roy Jenkins, with his lugubrious warnings about the disaster awaiting us if we continued to live it up in our palaces on caviar and champagne. As a result of watching Jenkins on TV, a number of slum dwellers are said to have guiltily reduced their consumption of fish fingers, hoping thereby to contribute to the national recovery.

The last in this line—Denis Healey—was known as the “first monetarist”, which did not mean that he was a “monetarist” but that he zealously pursued a policy of public expenditure cuts. The latest account of this is in the book Inside the Treasury by Joel Barnett, who was Healey’s Financial Secretary. Apart from admitting that, in contrast to their promises to be able to control capitalism, the Labour government of 1974 did not have the first idea of what to do about the economy, Barnett records how Healey’s proposed cuts were pushed through the Cabinet, against some typically inconsistent opposition: “There is no will in this Cabinet,” expostulated Peter Shore, “To tell the IMF to take a running jump, even if unemployment rose to 2 million”.

Both Labour and Conservative governments have imposed cuts, which is another way of saying that they have both tried to do what the capitalist system demands of a government. They are basically in complete agreement on that. And that is another way of saying that no member of the working class, with the power to transform society, should misuse that power by supporting them.

Our Masters' Voice (1982)

From the March 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

From the manifestly cheap (The Muppets) to the mystifying (Jesus of Nazareth), Lew (Lord) Grade and his cronies, at enormous profit to themselves, have socked it to us until (or so one might reasonably have supposed) our corporate stomach for the products of their tawdry road-show could take no more, thus hastening their downfall. The truth, unfortunately, lies elsewhere. It is that the recent collapse of Grade's extensive empire came about not so much because the public rejected his patronisingly inferior offerings but because of sheer boardroom incompetence.

To cut a long story short; it appears that Grade fancied himself, not merely as a highly successful light entertainment entrepreneur, but as a would-be film magnate in the grand tradition. Unfortunately for him and his fellow shareholders the film side of his enterprises never really got profitably under way: his biggest flop among some thirty-odd others was Raise the Titanic, which all but sank his Associated Communications Corporation (annual turnover, £250 million).

But, in order properly to understand the true nature of this growing catalogue of greed, graft and mismanagement—in itself a fair reflection of the euphemistically named “entertainments industry" as a whole—we need to remind ourselves of how it all began. Grade (believe it or not, a one-time professional Charleston dancer) had his chance, and took it, in 1954 when, on being awarded the Midlands Independent Television licence, he set up Associated Television (ATC). Dubbed from the start “licences to print money”, the ITV franchises lived up to their name. Through advertising and the promotion of a great deal of such unmemorable rubbish as that referred to above, Grade and his fellow operators seemingly could do no wrong. Grade's empire expanded almost as rapidly as his own ambitions. His board gave him every opportunity to do more or less as he pleased. They lived to regret their trust: Grade badly misjudged the American market for his films and ACC ran up debts in excess of £75 million. (All of which must be one further rebuff for that other slick operator, Harold Wilson who, in recognition of Grade’s services in helping deflect attention from his own betrayal of the working class, presented Grade with his fancy ermined robe and bloomers and bundled him off to the Lords.)

The grenade that blew up in Grade’s face was his attempted payment to his, by that time, evidently dispensable financial manager. Jack Gill, of a bob or two by way of beer-money in lieu of the boot— £560,000 cash, no less; not to mention other acceptable little perks, such as the quarter-million-pound house he lives in. Gill swallowed this insulting treatment with a brave smile—the City did not. A major shareholder, the National Association of Pension Funds, has secured an injunction withholding payment. In due course, no doubt, we shall be treated to yet another swinish struggle around the pig-trough. I don’t know about the Muppets, but Jesus of Nazareth must be throwing up all over the place, wherever he resurrected himself to.

Episode three-thousand-seven-hundred-and-forty-nine of the ACC farce sees, slithering in from the wings, the salivating figure of one Robert Holmes à Court. This South African born lawyer turned asset stripper from Australia (they do get about, these capitalists, don’t they?) has developed his alternative skills to a fine art. The trick, apparently, is to exploit the not infrequent coincidence on the stock market of low share prices and high asset values: buy in the shares at knockdown prices, wait for take-over bids, and then sell dear. Should this ploy fail then the companies themselves can be bought at bargain-basement prices and the assets sold off. (See David Philip, “Moving in for the kill”, New Statesman, 29/1/82.)

What, it may be asked, is à Court inheriting? Well, for one thing. The Muppets, and for another, Jesus of Nazareth — mortgage on future sales? £22.7 million—an awful lot of loot for some of the most puerile and patronising codswallop ever passed off as “entertainment” to a punch-drunk, unresisting public. This, however, is not all. Along with the papier-maché and the pseudo-religious we have ACC assets variously estimated at between £50-100 million, taken over for £15.5 million, the sum Holmes à Court paid for 51 per cent of the non-voting shares of the company. These assets include Classic Cinemas. Stoll Moss Theatres, Northern Song (which holds copyright on many Lennon and McCartney songs), Bentray Investments, Elstree Studios, Central TV and Jetsave, the travel company.

As will be appreciated, there is a great deal more to these unlovely shenanigans than is necessary or possible to describe here. The question is: where does all this leave us of the working class? One thing is certain: we’re unlikely ever to find out if we never venture deeper than, say, the surface of our television set. There are the very soundest of reasons we owe it to ourselves to subject, not merely television, but the communications business in its entirety, to the closest and most critical scrutiny. Take the political and economic nature of its ownership and control. We hear enough from our masters and their lackeys about state control of the means and content of media communication in so-called communist countries, most of it no doubt true enough. But the clear inference is that our own media is free from such domination—which is manifestly untrue.

But even if there were no state control—which there clearly is in the way senior appointments are made, or in funding—the media under capitalism would still find itself in the strait-jacket of business interests. Anything that runs counter to these interests is bound to be circumscribed, or mutilated, or banned—in a gentlemanly fashion, of course, behind closed doors, and with an oily smile. After all, what millionaire is willing to allow a fundamentally dissentient voice a chance to be heard, and heard regularly, exposing that same millionaire and the system that spawned him to the penetrating criticism of an informed and hostile working class viewpoint?

To confine ourselves to TV and Radio: if we accept the necessarily innocent abstractions of music, and the coded, less menacing, language of the more adventurous broadcast theatre, what are we left with? It is an unremitting diet of the innocuous, the banal, the slanted, the censored, the hypocritical, the chummily familiar or ingratiating, the half-true and the bare-faced lie. When the inevitable industrial disputes happen we see and hear, with monotonous regularity, ordinary working people and union leaders alike subjected to thinly-veiled hostility from front persons who have evidently never recognised their own status as members of the working class, leave alone forgotten it.

Then we have the other side of the coin. Tune in of a morning to the likes of Brian Redhead and his mates and note the manner in which they deal with, say, the Secretary of State for Employment, or the Chairman of the CBI. And then compare it with their approach to some underpaid, undereducated, relatively inarticulate striker. It never fails to leave a thoroughly nasty taste in the mouth of one listener, at least. As the Glasgow University Media Group has discovered, bias in the media can be disarmingly subtle, as can obsequiousness, or politically loaded hostility. But our own carefully analytical listening and viewing can usually reveal more than enough to put us on our guard.

By the same yardstick it is instructive to study, as objectively as rising irritation and frustration will permit, those programmes—usually televised—which purport to give a voice to “the people". Watch how, after suffering perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes of anodyne and unproductive opinionating, somebody “starts” something by putting a provocative spoke in. Jill Tweedie, in a revealing piece for the Guardian of 1 February, has asserted that these people are “plants” put there to wake things up a bit. This may or may not be true: what is worth noting is that rare occasion when a genuine “uncooperative” strikes home with something slightly more fundamental or politically embarrassing. Watch how the “chairperson” adroitly, and with the assiduous co-operation of the cameramen and sound-technicians, manages to beat a diplomatic retreat. Of course, as that notorious scourge of the Establishment Robin Day would confirm, such undemocratic antics can be suitably recognised and rewarded.

Our message is plain. Workers can and must make the effort correctly to interpret, in the light of their own experience, the gigantic con-trick that is being swung on them, not only by the likes of Grade and Holmes à Court, but by the equally dangerous, if urbane and discreet, ex-public schoolboys of the BBC’s upper echelons. The swindle is perpetrated for two main reasons. The first, and most obvious, is to make money. The second less apparent but not less insidious—is that, under capitalism, the bulk of the media in general, but the broadcasting media in particular, is obliged to play the role of “Our Masters’ Voice”.

Richard Cooper

CIA and the Third World (1982)

Book Review from the March 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

CIA and the Third World, by Satish Kumar (Zed Press, 1981).

   “In the Clandestine services we were ready. On the morning after the election of Eisenhower one of the senior paramilitary officers home from the SEA Supply Company in Thailand ran through the offices shouting: “Now we’ll finish off the god damned Commie bastards. We’ll get rid of the fucking pinkos in the State Department and around this place too. They’ll all be as dead as that little bald-headed son-of-a-bitch who said he thought he was going to cry last night when he had to concede to Ike." 

This scene, described in J. B. Smith’s Portrait of a Cold Warrior, is reported in Satish Kumar’s new book as summing up the atmosphere in CIA headquarters the day after Eisenhower’s victory in 1952.

But American secret service operations were in full swing well before Eisenhower came to power. By 1953 they extended to 48 countries and since then, whoever has been president, have never ceased to escalate in nature and extent. Kumar takes us through these operations in Africa, Asia and Latin America using the evidence available from various books, articles and official reports published in recent years. He has chosen the Third World countries in particular (the Congo, Angola, Laos, Vietnam, Indonesia, Chile, Guatemala, Dominican Republic) because they have been especially susceptible to “penetration” by foreign secret services owing to the relative newness and fragility of their rulers and institutions.

Subsidies, bribery, arms supplies, blackmail, assassination plots and hiring and arming of mercenaries are some of the methods described as being clandestinely used by the CIA to undermine undesirable regimes and shore up or instal favourable ones. Not, however, that such efforts have always met with success. On the contrary this book is less a catalogue of success than one of dismal failure with Cuba, Laos and Angola being prime examples. And failure for the CIA has usually meant success for its Russian counterpart, the KGB, which, as Kumar is at pains to point out, has certainly been at work with an intensity equal to the CIA but whose operations are impossible to document because of the more closed nature of Russian society.

The main point, however, is that every major CIA operation, whether a triumph or a disaster politically, has brought turmoil, misery and death to the population it has been visited on. And although this study tries to be as technical and dispassionate as possible, and not to dwell on the grisly human consequences of "covert diplomacy", it cannot at times’ avoid giving glimpses of the horror stories behind the operational details: the "decimation" of local populations secretly recruited to help favoured regimes in Laos and Vietnam, the mass slaughter and public torture in the Congo in the early ‘60s and the “recurrent terror and repression" there ever since.

Kumar is not completely silent either on the question of why the super-powers go to enormous trouble and expense to clandestinely win foreign rulers and, if possible, populations on to their side. “Foreign policy in the ultimate analysis", he writes, “is the extension of a country’s domestic policy . . . it is natural that foreign policy should also reflect the interests of corporate capitalism ". He goes on to quote with approval the view expressed in R. J. Barnet's Roots of War that what a government does is to “use its power to open up investment and market opportunities, to collect bills and to regulate competition". In other words a country's foreign policy, whether open or covert, is directed towards the defence and capture of markets, raw materials, trade routes and the strategic positions needed to assure these. And Kumar, although frequently pointing to the cloak of "ideology" behind which the battle for control of the Third World is fought, also makes a number of telling references to the underlying economic and strategic motives ("market for US goods”, "mineral wealth”, "strategic location", “wealthy nations"). If he had still been writing his book he might also have referred to the recent declaration by an American Embassy official in North Yemen that the US intends to do nothing to stop the present government there falling in favour of a Communist regime: "We feel that if North Yemen moves left, the Saudis will be so terrified they will move even closer to us. North Yemen has no oil. Saudi has. It’s as simple as that". (Sunday Times, 13 December, 1981.)

Not that the author is anti-American or thinks there is anything wrong with the world being run on the basis of international economic rivalries. Indeed he agrees with R. J. Barnet that the foreign policy of American governments is a legitimate “means of enhancing the power and prosperity of the American nation”. What he is opposed to is this being done in covert underhand fashion by an agency whose crude anti-Communist mentality has at times been at cross-purposes with the interests of American capitalism and which, with its considerable independence from central government, has sometimes landed America’s rulers in the international soup. He qualifies CIA operations as “illegal” and as “violations of human rights", and advocates traditional diplomacy conducted through ambassadors and adherence to “international law" embodied, as he sees it, in a United Nations General Assembly resolution of 1965 which declared that: “No state has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever in the internal or external affairs of any other state".

These are extraordinarily naive solutions to offer. The author's wide knowledge of his subject should have taught him that the economic rivalries of capitalism defy appeals to notions such as “legality", “human rights" and the rest. These rivalries inevitably lead to conspiracies, corruption and bloody conflict. The real lesson of this book, apparently unlearned by its author, is that the need for a vast expenditure of resources, energies and lives in so-called “intelligence operations" will only disappear with the disappearance of the need for governments to seek profitable outlets on the world market for their capitalists’ goods. In other words we will have the CIA, the KGB and all their lesser brothers until we decide to get rid of the system that produces them and that needs them as tools for its normal functioning.

Howard Moss

50 Years Ago: Birth Control and Unemployment in France (1982)

The 50 Years Ago column from the March 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

For many years the advocates of birth control as a cure-all for social and economic problems have pointed to France as a proof of their claim that unemployment and poverty can be abolished by the limitation of the number of births. In the Socialist Standard for August 1930 we examined this claim and showed that the theory is unsound. We pointed out that France had not solved the problem of working class poverty, and that unemployment had not been abolished. It was the absence of statistics, not the absence of unemployment, which made the claim appear to have foundation. Unemployment in France was for a time kept relatively low by the demand for workers to rebuild the devastated areas. We then confidently foretold a big increase in unemployment, and recent reports fully confirm our view. The following appeared in The Star (January 9th, 1932): “The French Ministry of Labour issuing its weekly unemployment return, estimates that there are 2,500,000 persons wholly or partly unemployed in the country, says the British United Press”. According to the French Federation of Trade Unions, the number is even larger, being 3,000,000. Most of them are not entitled to relief.

(From an article The Economics of Unemployment in France. published in the Socialist Standard, February 1932.)

The Future of British Aerospace (1982)

Pamphlet Review from the March 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Future of British Aerospace, AUEW-TASS, price 50p.

This pamphlet imparts a great deal of interesting information, in spite of the self-proclaimed bias of its standpoint. To quote the front cover, we have here “A policy statement by TASS, the Union that fights for British Engineering", and the policy it enunciates is openly designed to increase the British Aerospace share of the market at the expense, inevitably, of its competitors and the livelihood of the workers employed by them. It is at least a relief that little or no attempt is made to deck this policy with garlands of confused and misleading names. TASS has had a bad track record in the past, and their use of political terms should be viewed with suspicion.

TASS is confused on a number of issues. For instance, it correctly points out that following "denationalisation" a year ago, employee shareholding is only just over 3 per cent of the share capital despite a free issue and some shares being sold at half price, the vast majority being held by City institutions. The latter are then condemned because their “raison d'etre is profit making", as if capitalism could exist on any other basis. Even so-called "public" transport outfits which operate at a loss are allowed to do so only because their cheap services allow higher profits to be made elsewhere. And even if employee shareholding could be raised to a level to allow participation in policy making, the same capitalist pressures would force the same profit oriented decisions as at present. It is also clear that TASS remains wedded to nationalisation and Keynesian economic theories. Government money only differs from private investment in the aerospace industry in as much as it may not require such a quick return, but sooner or later the return must come or cancellations, closures and redundancies follow.

The pamphlet abounds with advice to the British Government on how to conduct its business. Some of this may be heeded, but governments have to consider on a broad base the interests of the capitalist class they represent. One issue has caused TASS considerable embarrassment. Two-thirds of the business of British Aerospace is on the military side, and TASS has had trouble in reconciling its aerospace policy with a long standing commitment to press for a reduction in arms expenditure. The pamphlet reminds us again of the historical role of military technology as the pace-setter for new developments, and it has largely been drafted by workers engaged on military aircraft whose idea of their own interests goes no further than trying to expand the area of their wage slavery.

The growth of multinational projects such as the Airbus and Tornado is supported by TASS, who could scarcely do otherwise in view of the industry’s cash flow problem. This stance, however, is scarcely consistent with their super-nationalistic tub-thumping, which demands withdrawal from the EEC in addition to its self-appointed fighting role on behalf of British industry.

E. C. Edge

Obituary: Bill Pritchard (1982)

Obituary from the March 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

When Bill Pritchard died last October at the fine age of 93 the socialist movement in America lost one of its Old Timers, for Bill had been active in Canada during the first World War. He played an active part in the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 when he was arrested, made his own defence speech and received a year’s gaol. Part of his speech appeared in a paperback, Winnipeg 1919. Bill arrived in Vancouver in 1911 and immediately joined the early Socialist Party of Canada. He became the editor of their journal the Western Clarion. He joined forces with Charlie Lestor in speaking and writing activities. Charlie edited the OBU Bulletin in which he wrote a column headed “Lestor’s Corner”, a title taken from his speaker’s site in Vancouver. An interesting item in one of Bill’s letters was that his Father, at the age of 9, worked in Erman & Engel’s mill in Manchester. Along with Charlie Lestor, Bill was well known for his articles in the Western Socialist over many years. At the age of 91 he travelled by air, coast to coast, from Los Angeles to Boston to attend a WSP Conference. In co-operation with local Comrade W. Z. Miller, he produced and distributed several Marxian socialist leaflets. I'd like to conclude this tribute to Bill with one of his poetic endings to a letter:

When the Frost is on the Pumpkin
And it’s cooler in the Fall,
I may be in better spirits
And in better shape to call.

Our sincere condolences to his son, Arthur, and relatives.

G. R. Russell

Letter From Europe: The French Nationalisations (1982)

The Letter From Europe column from the March 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

President Mitterand and his PS/PC government were hoping that the nationalisation measures voted in December would be in force by the beginning of February, but an appeal to the Constitutional Council by the opposition parties in Parliament delayed matters. The Council ruled that, although the nationalisation measures in themselves were not unconstitutional, the compensation terms were not generous enough to comply with the rights of property as laid down in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man. The government was thus obliged to revise this, and certain other aspects of their proposals, and to resubmit them to Parliament. Hence the delay.

The original plan was to nationalise 36 banks, two financial holding companies (Paribas and Suez), the steel industry and five other industrial groups involved in' such fields as chemicals, electrical goods, telecommunications, electronics, glass and fertilisers. Previously, the state had already acquired by mutual agreement a 51 per cent holding in two armaments firms, Dassault (Mirage jets) and Matra. Three other, mainly foreign-owned, companies—Roussel Uclaf (chemicals), CI1-Honeywcll Bull (computers) and ITT France—are to be nationalised later. The state sector in France is thus being considerably extended.

The last wave of nationalisation in France took place in 1945-6 and was initiated by De Gaulle. It involved coal, gas, electricity, civil aviation, the Renault motor firm and parts of the aircraft and arms industries. A number of banks (BNP, Crédit Lyonnais and Société Générale) and insurance companies were also nationalised. The railways had been virtually nationalised before the war and the manufacture of matches and cigarettes has been a revenue-raising state monopoly since the time of Louis XIV. To this list can be added the state oil company, ELF, set up in 1965.

France will therefore have quite an array of state capitalist enterprises, most of them competing in their fields mainly against foreign-owned firms at home and abroad (as Renault has been doing, fairly successfully for years). Although in their internal documents the PS talks about nationalisation being “anti-capitalist" and part of their strategy of “rupture" with capitalism, before the general public these measures are being justified on quite other grounds. Mitterand, for instance, has said that they will provide France with an “economic strike force", both to compete on the world market and to “reconquer the home market” from foreign suppliers, so placing these measures squarely within the logic of capitalism. He has been echoed here by his Minister of Industry, Pierre Dreyfus, who speaks from experience since under De Gaulle he was a managing-director of the state capitalist car company Renault.

In a very real sense this is a continuation of the policy pursued by De Gaulle, after his return to power in 1958, and by his successor Pompidou to try to make France a leading industrial power. De Gaulle wanted to encourage the emergence of French-owned industry able to compete on equal terms with the foreign-owned multi-national corporations which were threatening to take over the French market. These enterprises, which remained in private ownership, were brought into being and survived with help from the government, particularly in the form of orders but also by generous loans. These companies (CGE, Rhone-Poulencc, PUK, St. Gobain, Thomson-Brandt) are now being nationalised; but their role is to remain unchanged: to be French capitalism’s “industrial champions" at home and abroad. The new state capitalist concerns that have been set up will join Renault, Elf, SNECMA (aircraft engines), SNIAS (aerospace, headed by the President's brother. General Jacques Mitterand) and the others—with the exception of the bankrupt steel industry—as pace-makers for technological innovation; at least that’s what the government hopes.

The French capitalist class is well aware that these nationalisations are in no way opposed to their interests; indeed, those facing nationalisation only fought a rearguard action to get the compensation terms increased. Thus the financial daily Les Echos (14 October) headlined its front page the day after the debate on the nationalisation proposals opened in Parliament: “Pierre Mauroy pleads the case for the nationalisations. STATE CAPITALISM AND Till STRATEGY OF PACE-MAKERS”. The accompanying article explained:

   The socialist government wants to apply the doctrine of State industrial capitalism in the name of the strategy of large technological pace-makers. Pace-makers for the reconquest of the internal market, for independence and influence. Not a punishment nationalisation, but a move to give more dynamism to the factories of the Hexagon (France).

Shades of Harold Wilson and his “white-hot technological revolution”!

When a company or an industry is nationalised all that is changed is that the top management is henceforth appointed by the state instead of as previously by the biggest private shareholders. Everything else remains unchanged: the workers remain wage-earners selling their labour-power and producing surplus-value; the former owners remain capitalists living off the income derived from the compensation they are paid; the industry continues to be run on capitalist lines, producing for profit.

As practised in the long-established Western capitalist countries, nationalisation does not affect the social standing of the former owners as capitalists living off the exploitation of the workers. For nationalisation takes place within a legal framework which protects the rights of existing property-owners. In France in fact the “rights of property” are enshrined in the Constitution which requires the state to pay a “fair” compensation when it nationalises an industry or a company—something reaffirmed by the Constitutional Court in its ruling on the first version of the current nationalisation law.

Nationalisation is a buying and selling transaction between the state and the former owners. The state buys the assets in question from their owners more or less at their value. The wealth of the former owners is not reduced at all; it merely changes form. Previously they were shareholders, now they become bondholders. This is precisely what is happening in France, as Le Monde (22 January) explains:

   The shareholders of the companies to be nationalised are going to have to exchange their property titles for State bonds. These will be redeemed capital and interest over 15 years. The interest on these bonds will be paid by two sinking funds, one for the banks and one for the industrial groups, which will be constituted by grants from the budget but also by “contributions” paid by the nationalised industries if they make any profits. Each year the State will lay down how much of the interest payments are to fall on the budget of the State and how much on the industries themselves.

For 1983 it has already been decided that, of the 5,000 million francs (about £460 million) that will be needed to pay that year’s interest on these bonds, 3,000 million francs will be provided by the Budget and 2,000 million francs from the profits of the nationalised industries. The rate of interest payable will be the same as that paid in other medium-term state bonds. As can be seen, the workers in the nationalised industries will continue to be exploited by the former owners, part of whose interest will come directly from the surplus value they produce. And this is supposed to be a step towards “socialism”!

Apart from continuing to receive a property income as interest, the former shareholders will also be getting their capital back. Each year from 1983 until 1998, when the operation will be completed, a number of bonds will be chosen by lot for redemption at their face-value. Most of the former shareholders are in fact expected to sell their compensation bonds fairly quickly so as to be able to re-invest in shares. Thus, the former shareholders will, after a brief period as government bondholders, go back to being shareholders again! The bonds will end up in the hands of those financial institutions which specialise in investing in government bonds.

It has been estimated that the government will have to pay out over the 15 years a total of about 40,000 million francs (about £3,670 million) as compensation—and this is only the cost of redeeming the bonds: the interest payments (another 40.000 million francs) are in addition to this. The government upped the compensation terms (the price the state is to pay to buy up the industries it wanted to take over) twice, once on its own initiative and then again following the ruling of the Constitutional Council. The capitalists concerned must be quite happy with the final terms for the sale of their industries to the state, helped considerably as they were by the obstructionist parliamentary tactics of the opposition Gaullist and Giscardian parties, many of whose members and leaders have close connections with the business world.

The other great change often promised (but never put into practice) in connection with nationalisation is what used to be called “industrial democracy”, now revived by Benn and the Labour Party under the name of “workers’ control”. In France the term is autogestion (“self-management”) and is the official policy of the PS. In fact it is their (mistaken) definition of socialism: a society where the most important means of production would be nationalised and run by management committees composed of representatives of the workers, consumers and the government. But this would not be socialism because production for sale on a market with a view to profit would continue and the management committees, however democratically chosen, would still have to run the industry in accordance with the logic of the capitalist economy: keeping costs, including wages, down so as to remain competitive, making profits, accumulating capital, and so on.

But in any event the Mitterand government is only taking a token step in this direction. The existing elected works councils will be consulted more often and will be given more information. A number of so-called “workers’ representatives” (trade union bosses) have been appointed to the boards of the new nationalised companies, but real power will be in the hands of the government-appointed managing directors.

Even if it wasn’t just a façade, such “participation” in the organisation of their own exploitation, dressed up as an extension of democracy, is something workers in France and elsewhere would be well advised to refuse even from a simple trade union point of view. It blurs and is in fact meant to blur—the fundamental conflict of interest between wage-labour and capital which is built into capitalism. As long as capitalism lasts workers and their trade unions should avoid getting involved in the management of industry and should stick to being a permanent opposition to "management” (i.e. the owners or their agents) over wages and working conditions.

Adam Buick (Luxemburg)

Rape Prejudice (1982)

From the March 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

The rape-inspired panic arising from a series of recent incidents has, to put it mildly, served to distort the true picture, which is bad enough as it is. There was the televised questioning, by incredulous Thames Valley policemen, of a woman who complained that she had been raped. There was the decision by the Scottish law authorities not to prosecute three young men suspected of raping and slashing a young woman in Glasgow. And there was the rapist who was “only" fined £2,000, rather than being sent to prison, because the judge thought his victim had contributed to the offence by her negligence (she accepted a lift in his car when there was no other way to get home which she could afford).

These incidents have been interpreted as proving that there is a lot wrong with the way the offence of rape is dealt with. The police won't believe the victim, or if they do the authorities won't prosecute the offender, and should the case come to court some doddering male chauvinist judge will let the man off lightly. One result of this is a dramatic increase in the interest being taken in rape; Spare Rib (February 1982) claimed: “Every accessible Women's Liberation group has been flooded with telephone calls from women wanting to do something". The London Rape Crisis Centre said their switchboard was jammed with calls, with a 100 per cent increase in the number of women alleging that they had been raped.

Naturally the press has rushed to exploit this panic, confident that nothing sells newspapers like sex. Acres of newsprint have been turned by this particular plough. Here for example are some headlines from the same page of the Daily Telegraph of 30 January: 2 Years For Sex Assault “Too Little". “Horrifying” Sex Attack By Railman; Jail For Raping Prostitute; Sex Attackers Bound Husband. And all this, mark you, from a “quality” newspaper; the hysteria among the other levels of Fleet Street, where soft porn is habitually dressed up as moral indignation,was of historic intensity.

One spin off of the decision not to prosecute the three Glasgow men was the sacking of Nicholas Fairbairn from the job of Solicitor General of Scotland. Fairbairn’s defence of the decision in the Commons was itself panic stricken and so earned the contempt of the House, where they will readily applaud all manner of deceit but cannot abide an incompetent performance at the Dispatch Box. The Baron of Fordell (to give Fairbairn his other name) is an Old Etonian who lives in a castle in Dunfermline—a comfortable, ruling class world away from the sordid working class slum where the girl was raped and knifed. He once informed the Commons that: “It is part of the business of men and women that they hunt and are hunted and say ‘Yes' and ‘No' and mean the opposite”. Any sympathy for this boorish aristocrat should be tempered by the knowledge that he still hopes to get into the government. Immediately after being sacked by Thatcher he described her as “. . . probably the warmest and kindest human being that those who have met her have ever had the privilege of encountering”, and a few days later as ". . . very loving, very kind and very compassionate”.

The Glasgow case provoked a great swell of outrage on the opposition benches. Relentless penal reformer Robert Kilroy-Silk denounced the government's decision to stand firm against the panic and not to change the law on dealing with, rapists as “. . . totally unsatisfactory . . . a grave disappointment to all women and those who want law. order and justice maintained”. Kilroy-Silk, normally among the loudest of those demanding more leniency for criminals, has tabled an amendment to the pending Criminal Justice Bill providing for harsher treatment-mandatory gaol sentences for convicted rapists. There is nothing remarkable in Labour reformers, who endlessly and boringly trumpet their progressiveness, demanding that the clock be put back. Standing out against a popular panic can lose votes.

In this country rape is the third most serious criminal offence, after murder and treason (like discharging blanks from an imitation pistol when the queen is nearby on a horse). The panic is obscuring the fact that it is notoriously difficult to judge the frequency of rape and whether it falls or rises, or even to compose a satisfactory legal definition of it. The statistics depend on highly subjective elements—on whether a woman decides she has been raped, whether she then reports it to the police and whether they believe her; whether the final conviction is for rape rather than for a lesser charge. To begin with, only about two-thirds of reported rape is recorded as such by the police.

For what they are worth, then, the figures show an increase of 39 per cent in cases of rape recorded by the police in England and Wales between 1970 and 1980—from 884 to 1225. During the same period, all recorded sexual offences fell by 13 per cent. Nearly a quarter of recorded rape now happens in the area of the Metropolitan Police, which might say something about the delights of life in one of capitalism's great urban concentrations.

The last great outcry about rape arose from a particularly nasty case in 1973, which brought stiff gaol sentences for four men in the RAF. Their appeal eventually reached the House of Lords, where Lord Hailsham spoke from beneath his wig in words which raised a storm. No man, said Hailsham, could be convicted of rape if he genuinely believed, however unreasonably, that the woman was actually consenting. Tediously vociferous Labour MP Jack Ashley quickly composed attacks from his dictionary of cliches, describing Hailsham's ruling as a “Charter for Rapists” and fulminating in the Sunday Mirror (where better?) that “The Scales of Justice have swung heavily in favour of rapists. . . “Amid all the fuss it went almost unnoticed that the four men remained in gaol. The result was a new Act in 1976 which, among other things, attempted a redefinition of rape.

This law was the latest in a very long line; as might be expected, rape has preoccupied legislators for a very long time. Four thousand years ago the Babylonian code of Hammurabi decreed death for any man who raped a betrothed virgin (married victims were classed as adultresses, were bound and thrown into the river). More recently the Second Statute of Westminster (1285) chillingly proclaimed that any man who . . ravishes a wife, maiden or other woman . . . shall have judgement of life and member" . . .  Rape remained punishable by death until 1840, although it was likely that the severity of the sentence had long disuaded juries from convicting.

Early rape law was concerned with the protection of women as men’s property; it now claims to provide for the restraint of the offender as well as for revenge for the rest of society. With a few exceptions, the sentence is assumed to match the nastiness of the act and to express a widespread abhorrence of it. This apparent symmetry is dented when we remember that this is a social system which legalises and rewards a great deal of activity which goes directly against human interests—a society in which sexuality is too often a neurosis, liable to relieve itself in horrific excesses.

Sexual behaviour—including misbehaviour such as rape—does not spring from nowhere; it is socially conditioned. In her book The Mountain Arrapesh Margaret Mead told of a primitive people living in harsh, remote mountains in New Guinea. The Arrapesh’s living conditions persuaded them that they depended on peaceful co-operation for their lives and this was the basis for their morals. They were neither aggressive nor even competitive; they did not engage in warfare. These attitudes extended into their sexual relationships:

Of rape the Arrapesh know nothing beyond the fact that it is the unpleasant custom of the Nugum people to the southwest of them. Nor do the Arrapesh have any conception of male nature that might make rape understandable to them.

In contrast were the Gusii people, studied by Robert Levine, who lived in the Highlands of Kenya, in seven tribes which were further split into clans and sub-clans, all traditionally hostile to each other. But each group imported wives from another group, which carried over the tribal hostility into their sexual activity in the marriage. The husband’s role was to hurt and subordinate—to rape—the wife, who resisted to the limits of her powers. At a conservative estimate, during 1955/6 rapes happened in the Gusii at the rate of 47.2 for each 100.000 of the population, while the rate in England and Wales was about 4 in each 100,000 (See The Facts of Rape, Barbara Toner).

Capitalism, a technically more advanced society, also fashions sexual conduct through a basic antagonism. It exists, first of all, on the antagonism of the commodity—wealth which is socially produced but privately appropriated. For the majority, access to that wealth is through the antagonistic relationship of wage labour. Capitalism conditions antagonism in sexual relationships. On the one hand it idealises the monogamous, nuclear family where sexual contact is as predictable, contained and as unsatisfying as an intravenous drip. On the other hand it sells promiscuity, in its popular press and in the sexually loaded inducements to buy cars, cigarettes, clothes . . ,

Capitalism is preoccupied with productive efficiency, with keeping the exploitative process pouring profits into the balance sheet. It can spare very little resources for the misfit, who cannot measure up to its expectations in social or sexual terms. Capitalism is a society populated with rejects, where deviance is more isolating than crime. Little wonder that sometimes the despair of the deviant misfit may explode into an act of intolerable aggression, with all the humiliation and suffering which it brings.

The true horror of rape is its deprivation. Sexual activity is necessary to human beings but it is no mechanical business; it is improved by some mutual respect between the participants. Rape substitutes anger and despair for affection; it makes a torture of a human essential.

Capitalism could never concede that its people are its victims, and must behave as such. So rapists will continue to be punished and after they are sentenced will experience a living hell in prison, at the hands of convicts anxious to reassure themselves that there are others more wretched than they are. This sordid mess is just one measure of the struggle before us, before we have an abuse-free society, of liberated relationships in humanity.

Ivan

Editorial: Unemployment and Socialism (1982)

Editorial from the March 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tide-like, the total of unemployment rises remorselessly, perhaps eventually to wash the Tory government out to sea. Canute-like, ministers insist that although the waves are running higher and higher the land is actually becoming drier, safer, more fertile. They assure us that whatever impoverishment and distress is being endured is only temporary; their policies are beginning to work and, with success so close at hand, must not be abandoned now. There is no other way.

A devotee of this line is the Employment (sic) Minister Norman Tebbit, who is notorious as a political bovver boy. Tebbit’s determination to protect the interests of the British ruling class is unusually combative, even for a Tory. Discussing the latest 3 million unemployment figures he was reported:

Mr. Tebbit said that he could see signs of an economic revival. Apart from the improved vacancies, he highlighted higher industrial output, lower short time working and more overtime. (Guardian 2/1/82)

Part of Tebbit's usefulness to the Thatcher government is that, careless of common popularity, he is ready to be the fall guy, to absorb much of the anger generated by the statistics. This has a value beyond the Tory party; it promotes the myth that the problems of the capitalist system are in some way connected with the personalities of the people who try to run it. According to the myth, someone like Tebbit would cause unemployment even in the middle of a hectic boom, while the problem would easily disappear if a kindlier person (Gilmour?; Walker?) were in charge instead.

This is only one of the numerous false ideas about unemployment which are so popular. In truth, people are thrown out of work when commodities cannot be sold profitably. As capitalism is a system where wealth is produced with the object of profitable sale, if there is no profit there is no production. That is a simple, inexorable economic law. The difficulty—for Tebbit as for all his predecessors—is that that profit cannot be guaranteed. There can be no confidence that as wealth is turned out there will be a welcoming market for it. If there could be such confidence, the history of capitalism would be very different. There would have been no Great Crash of 1929, no recession of the 70s and 80s. Capitalism is anarchy. It cannot be controlled or regulated, whoever is said to be in charge.

An equally important fallacy is that employment is vital to the working class, to the extent that all would be well if only the dole queues could be made to disappear. Because of this fallacy governments are often assessed in terms of the presence of significant levels of unemployment. High unemployment is rated as failure (as the Thatcher government is finding out) while full employment is rated as success.

In one sense it is natural that the fallacy should be so popular. The vast majority of people under capitalism depend on being employed for their living. Having virtually no ownership in the means of wealth production and distribution they survive by working for a wage for an employer. That is why, concisely and accurately, they are called the working class.

Depending on employment for a living means that being out of work presents a special threat. But it does not therefore follow that being in work is particularly prosperous or even desirable. The working class sell their labour power (which is what employment actually is) for a wage. This represents in general terms—over a period, under varying conditions—the value of that labour power, which is the food, clothing, shelter, recreation which are needed to reproduce labour power. Workers’ wages are generally just about enough to keep them in existence. Their level of subsistence and consumption is restricted; they live at a sub standard. When they have bought what is needed to reproduce themselves there is little, if anything, over. The working class live in poverty.

It is clear from this that the workers’ concern should extend beyond the immediate intensification of their poverty which follows from unemployment. Their interests lie not just in alleviating their stresses but in abolishing them. They should not fret about changing a government minister like Tebbit but in establishing a society which will have no use for a government and state machine. Urgently, they should consider the case for a social system opposite in every way from capitalism.

The problems of capitalism stem from its basic nature as a system of commodity production. In contrast, wealth in socialist society will be made for human use. This will fundamentally change the social character of wealth and so will also change all social relationships. To begin with, there will be no social classes; no employers and employees. People will not depend for their living on being able to sell their labour power. Production will be a free process of co-operation for the common good and wealth will be freely available to all human beings.

Socialism can be reality now; in terms of its technical and productive capacity society can today support a system of common ownership and free access. All that is needed is for the majority—the world working class—to understand socialism and to opt for it. That is the only useful lesson to be drawn from the crises of capitalism. On whether, and on how effectively, it is absorbed depends the welfare and the prosperity—perhaps even the very continued existence—of human society.

No Choice (1982)

Party News from the March 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

The latest series of Sunday night programmes from the Christians at the BBC is very aptly named. The producers of Choices choose what they want to be said on their "audience participation" programme, and make sure they get it. On January 18, six SPGB members sat in the audience. In a "warm up discussion" before the recording began, one of the producers assured us that nothing would be cut out because they don't like it; the amount of time recorded would be roughly the amount of time screened. But in the event, at least ten minutes more was recorded than was screened, and the one SPGB member who managed to get a point raised in the discussion was cut out. Apparently, in a discussion about mass starvation, to point out that there is in fact potentially food for all, but that private property and the profit system leave millions hungry, is considered irrelevant.

The member who had been cut out then contacted the producers and offered to appear on a subsequent programme as one of the special guests who raise propositions which are the subject of the discussions. The proposition was to be that belief in god holds back the human race, and the producer agreed to the idea in principle. Then, an hour later, a phone- call: he has his doubts, it might not be suitable. Two hours later, another call. He has found someone else. A Communist Party member who is also in the Church Army. The proposition is to be the opposite of the previous suggestion: Christians have a "moral duty" to "redistribute wealth". Surprise, surprise. Christianity is compatible with "socialism" after all. The BBC has decided.

The story does have a final twist. We received six tickets as compensation, to attend the programme on which the Church Army "Communist" was appearing. Two members made comments which were both screened this time. But the fact remains, Choices, like the rest of the media, is the opposite of what it claims to be. Free debate on any subject means edited debate on carefully vetted subjects. Serious discussion on important matters means shallow platitudes on side issues. And audience participation by "the public" means a few seconds for a few lucky individuals, out of thousands of hours and millions of people.

Clifford Slapper

The Media Versus the Workers (1982)

From the March 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it . . . the ruling class regulates the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. (Marx, German Ideology.)

What the Sun says today millions of workers will be repeating tomorrow. If the Daily Mail informs its readers that strikers are greedy and the Daily Express demands that patriots tighten their belts “for the sake of the nation” it is called news, not propaganda. Fed upon lies and distortions, who can blame most workers for regarding the mass media as a source of enlightenment? The distorting mirror of the press was not created by accident: it lies because it is dangerous for its owners to tell the truth. Their power is dependent on a majority ignorance about the nature of social reality.

In Britain three-quarters of all daily newspapers are owned by three companies. Rupert Murdoch’s News International owns the Sun (average circulation of 3,837,000) and the News of the World (4,472,000). These two account for 25 per cent of all national newspapers sold in Britain. Last year The Times and Sunday Times were added to Murdoch’s Empire. Reed International, publishers of the Daily Mirror, the Sunday Mirror and the Sunday People, also owns IPC which produces 37 per cent of all consumer magazines sold in Britain. Trafalgar House owns the Daily Express, the Daily Star, the Sunday Express, the New Standard (now London’s only evening paper) and has substantial investments in the Morgan Grampian magazine-publishing corporation. All of these multinationals have investments in capital projects other than newspapers. For example, Reed International receives only about 12 per cent of its profits from newspapers; its main investments being in pulp, paper and packaging, building products and home decorating. Trafalgar House is a major property company, owning ships (including the QE2), aviation projects, hotels (including the Ritz) and investment concerns. Associated Newspapers Group, publishers of the dreadful Daily Mail (1,985,000 copies a day) also owns fourteen provincial dailies, four commercial radio stations, Weekend magazine. National Opinion Rolls, the Wyndham and Picadilly Theatres, the London Cab Company, Teledata, several building and furniture companies and the Blackfriars Oil Company. The men who own the press have a great deal to defend—too much to allow the truth to get in their way. When Daily Mail editorials refer to “our” country the joke is on the readers, not the owners.

The press uses its power to mould working class prejudices. When workers are on strike the press takes the side of “the public” against the “anti-social troublemakers” who have dared to defy their bosses. When any aspect of their system is criticised the critic is immediately attacked as an “extremist”. Submissive wage slaves are “patriots” and political leaders who do not rock the boat are “moderates”. Newspaper editors preach to their working class readers about the need for austerity, honesty and moral righteousness, while the capitalist class live in luxury, deprive the workers of the fruits of our labours and indulge in the morality of a class which can afford to break their own rules. Praising the parasitism of their own class, the newspaper controllers make sure that the term “scrounger” is reserved for the unfortunate wage slave who is caught receiving more from the dole than the law allows. One only has to study the editorials of the press to understand just how much contempt the rulers of capitalism feel towards the working class.

Where the press cannot blind workers to their interests by direct preaching or by fraudulent reporting they do so by sensational diversions. In the 1960s the popular press hit on the idea of printing pictures of nude women to increase their circulation. More recently the fantasies have become more material and daily Bingo numbers are printed in order to con wage slaves into thinking that they too could become a Rupert Murdoch. Horoscopes, racing tips and trivial tales of men biting dogs have become part of the intellectual diet of the working class. The product of this massive outpouring of ruling class propaganda, through the columns of the daily press, is the existence of a class of men and women whose response to their exploitation is almost universal consent.

Experience is the greatest demystifier. Apologists for capitalism may be able to fool most of the people most of the time, but ruling class propaganda cannot perpetually hide the antagonism of interests between those who produce but do not possess and those who possess but do not produce. One recent example is the awakening of working class consciousness in Poland. The newspapers there are controlled by the government and official censors ensure that nothing is published which will expose the exploitative nature of the dictatorship. What passes for “news” is simply government propaganda.

The Polish press “sympathises” with strikers in Britain just as the British media suddenly found itself in militant recognition of the interests of the Polish strikers (while doing everything in its powers to oppose strikers here). The Polish newspapers are full of articles about the need to defend the Warsaw Pact against NATO aggression, just as British newspapers call for NATO vigilance against Warsaw Pact aggression. But despite the government-controlled media and the censorship and the overwhelming forces of indoctrination, the Polish workers did defy their masters. Their experience of poverty led them to go on strike, even though the media claimed that their actions were “unpatriotic”, “subversive” and even “anti-socialist”. The first action of the Gdansk strikers, in August 1980, was to publish a newspaper which would put their views, rather than the state’s. The first issue of Solidarity stated that

The whole country awaits genuine and accurate news . . .  but the news in the press, radio and television is both distorted and incomplete. (23.8.80.) 

Before long the Polish workers’ hunger for real news led to the creation of a number of new journals which were owned and controlled by the working class. In the northern port of Szczecin, the Solidarity journal Jednosc (Unity) was selling over 100,000 copies each week. It is in this journal that some of the most penetrating analyses of Polish state capitalism by Polish workers have appeared. The new military junta in Poland has banned the publication of all working class-controlled publications, but they cannot ban the ideas which such journals have encouraged in the minds of the working class.

In Britain, the “right” to publish a newspaper is open to everyone, as is the right to rent a suite in the Ritz Hotel. Much as the ruling class remind the workers of Britain about this generous freedom to publish what we like, most workers realise that printers have the freedom to charge what they like. In September 1904 a group of working class men and women did take up the “right" to produce and distribute their own publication. They called it the Socialist Standard, they sold it for a penny and they refused to compromise a single word for the sake of obtaining advertisers or attracting empty-headed readers. Seventy-eight years later the same party is still publishing the same journal the longest-running working class journal in the world.

Why do we do it? Because socialists realise that every newspaper, magazine and book which is produced under capitalism must make a fundamental decision: will it take the side of the capitalists or will it take the side of the workers? 99 per cent of what can be bought on any news stand is unadulterated pro-capitalist nonsense which deserves the contempt and ridicule of the working class. Unlike those journals, the Socialist Standard always takes the side of the workers’ interests. We do so for exactly the same reason as the capitalist press unceasingly takes the side of the bosses: because we share their class interests. The Socialist Party of Great Britain urges our fellow workers to reject the myths of the ruling class press and to join with us in producing and distributing the message of freedom.

NOW IS THE TIME TO 

• Take out a subscription to the Socialist Standard. It only costs £3.90. (including post) for a year's supply.
• Take an extra copy of the Standard to give or sell to a friend.
• Persuade your local bookshop/newsagent/ library to subscribe to the Standard. 
• Contact your local SPGB branch or group and help them to sell the Standard.
• Send a letter to your local newspaper/ union magazine urging workers to try the Standard.
• Send the names of local people who may wish to read the Standard to SPGB, 52 Clapham High Street, London SW4 7UN. We will send a free copy to them with a subscription form.

Steve Coleman