From Privilege to Profits (1990)

From the March 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

On a recent visit to Poland I stayed, first, in Warsaw, then moved to Wroclaw (formerly Breslau) in the south-west. In both cities, my main contacts were with the Polish Socialist Party (Democratic Revolution). This is a minority political party, opposed to the Solidarity government of Mazowiecki. It originated in a breakaway from the PSP, led by Jan Lipski, a revival of the old social-democratic, reformist PSP. At its first congress in December 1989 it adopted a new programme, and from this it is worth quoting their analysis of “Polish changes”:

  The alliance concluded between the opposition elite and the nomenklatura rests upon an agreement on a pro-market and pro-capitalist course of change in the economy. The immediate result of this has been the rescue of the ruling nomenklatura at the price of the admission of part of the opposition to power. At the same time, Solidarity has been transformed from an organisation struggling for the rights and interests of the workers into an instrument for wielding power. This is expressed in the conception of the union as a partner in government. In reality it has had to become a mechanism for transmitting orders from the government to the workers . . . The nomenklatura has realised that the previously existing system of rule over society has broken down and has executed indispensable manoeuvres to adapt . . . Part of its privileges are being exchanged for the profits arising from ownership, rather than political authority . . . 

This makes a lot of sense. It helps explain Jaruzelski’s sudden craving for “democracy” and power-sharing as being due to the ruling nomenklatura’s need for some sort of survival strategy. Last year Gorbachev declared that Russian troops would not be used to prop up unpopular regimes in Eastern Europe. Without Moscow’s support, and facing up to unpopular economic reforms, the nomenklatura needed some other prop, and Solidarity’s bosses could deliver the votes.

Secondly, the old “official unions” which had previously functioned as “a mechanism for transmitting orders from the government to the workers” were completely discredited. They served as a part of  management, disciplining the workers and urging them to increase productivity. But now that they no longer had sufficient support or credibility to be effective a new organisation was needed to take their place. Solidarity was happy to oblige.

The third point to note is that the nomenklatura – the Party officials, government apparatchiks and bosses of all sorts – are determined not to go under. A free market and a private enterprise system is taking the place of the old, corrupt and inefficient “planned economy”. Successful adaptation will require them to become capitalists and ideology is not going to stand in their way. Some have already set up private companies and are taking over the assets of state enterprises. Opportunism was a characteristic of Lenin. It continues to characterise Lenin’s heirs.

The workers’ position remains the same as before – working for wages while others reap the profits. Exploitation is always exploitation, and it doesn’t matter at all whether the bosses are organised as a private company, a public corporation or a party committee. Whatever the arrangement, what we get are mere wages; what they get is all our unpaid labour.

Importance of Democracy

PSP(DR) actively supports efforts to put pressure on Solidarity to hold democratic elections, long overdue. Although Solidarity was set up in 1980 as a democratic organisation, it long ago ceased being that and, as an organisation, has operated just like the Communist Party, with the leadership deciding policy over the heads of the members.

My impression is that the people I met liked our Party’s consistent and thorough-going opposition to vanguardism and to Lenin’s elitist view that workers need to be told “what’s what” by intellectuals and “experts”. They asked about how our Party is constituted and organised, and seemed to approve our insistence on democratic organisation, with our policy decided by the membership at conference, and our executive committee and party officers being required to comply with conference decisions.

I was asked if we were Trotskyists. There wasn’t much time, so I dealt with this bluntly by saying that any who call themselves Trotskyists have to answer for the suppression of the workers at Krondstadt in 1921.

Another point which had to be discussed was our opposition to reformism and refusal to ally ourselves with non-socialist organisations. Here we differ from the PSP(DR). Their programme includes a lot of immediate demands. In particular, they advocate “self-management”. At enterprise level, this suggests that workers’ representatives can work in tandem with management. The PSP (DR) also intend that workers’ self-management representatives should play a role in regional government and form a separate chamber in the Sejm (parliament). They do not specify how this would function in relation to the rest of parliament or what its powers and responsibilities would be.

This is to suggest that the state could be transformed to operate in the interests of the whole community. Tinkering about with constitutional changes does not change the reality of the system.

Fighting Solidarity

Another group I met was Fighting Solidarity, a group which operates underground, having little confidence in the success of perestroika in Russia. Like the PSP(DR) it campaigns for democratic elections in Solidarity but its ideas have little in common with ours. Essentially they are liberals, with a strong belief in such vague values as freedom, equality, brotherhood, and human rights. Liberal too in their belief in “natural market regulators”.

As I considered Poland’s worn-out pre-war trams, the drab half-empty shops, the archaic telephone system, well, I must admit I thought they might have a point. At least, in England you can get lavatory paper quite easily in the shops. But then I returned to England. And in this happy land I saw beggars in the Tube stations and teenaged jobless and homeless in London’s Cardboard City. The “natural market regulators of supply and demand” achieved that. Somehow I don’t think the grass is greener on either side of the fence. It never is for the working class.

What we would say to Fighting Solidarity and those who think like them in Poland and the other parts of the Russian empire is this: Do not deceive yourselves. Your problems as workers will not be solved merely by shaking off Moscow role. Free enterprise capitalism has precious little to do with the ideals you cherish.

In conclusion, the fact that ours is a movement with a clean and honest record where Leninism and dictatorship are concerned – our critical stance maintained over many decades has been shown to be right – will surely open many doors for us in Eastern Europe and Russia at this time of change.

Charmian Skelton

Marxism versus Leninism (1990)

From the March 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx’s theory of socialist revolution is grounded on the fundamental principle that “the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself”. Marx held to this view throughout his entire forty years of socialist political activity, and it distinguished his theory of social change from that of both those who appealed to the princes, governments and industrialists to change the world for the benefit of the working class (such as Robert Owen and Saint Simon) and of those who relied on the determined action of some enlightened minority of professional revolutionaries to liberate the working class (such as Buonarotti, Blanqui and Weitling).

Conscious Self-emancipation

Marx saw that the very social position of the working class within capitalist society as a non-owning, exploited, wealth-producing class forced it to struggle against its capitalist conditions of existence. This “movement” of the working class could be said to be implicitly socialist since the struggle was ultimately over who should control the means of production: the minority capitalist class or the working class (i.e. society as a whole). At first the movement of the working class would be, Marx believed, unconscious and unorganised but in time, as the workers gained more experience of the class struggle and the workings of capitalism, it would become more consciously socialist and democratically organised by the workers themselves.

The emergence of socialist understanding out of the experience of the workers could thus be said to be “spontaneous” in the sense that it would require no intervention by people outside the working class to bring it about (not that such people could not take part in this process, but their participation was not essential or crucial). Socialist propaganda and agitation would indeed be necessary but would come to be carried out by workers themselves whose socialist ideas would have been derived from an interpretation of their class experience of capitalism. The end result would be an independent movement of the socialist-minded and democratically organised working class aimed at winning control of political power in order to abolish capitalism. As Marx and Engels put it in The Communist Manifesto, “the proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority”.

This in fact was Marx’s conception of “the workers’ party”. He did not see the party of the working class as a self-appointed elite of professional revolutionaries, as did the Blanquists, but as the mass democratic movement of the working class with a view to establishing Socialism, the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production.

Lenin’s Opposing View

This was Marx’s view, but it wasn’t Lenin’s. Lenin in his pamphlet What Is To Be Done?, written in 1901-2, declared:

   The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own efforts, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical and economic theories that were elaborated by the educated representatives of the propertied classes, the intellectuals” (Foreign Languages Publishing House edition, Moscow, pp. 50-51). 

    Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only from outside of the economic struggle, from outside of the sphere of relations between workers and employers” (Lenin’s emphasis, p.133). 

   The spontaneous working class movement by itself is able to create (and inevitably creates) only trade unionism, and working class trade unionist politics are precisely working class bourgeois politics” (pp. 159-60) .

Lenin went on to argue that the people who would have to bring “socialist consciousness” to the working class “from without” would be “professional revolutionaries”, drawn at first mainly from the ranks of the bourgeois intelligentsia. In fact he argued that the Russian Social Democratic Party should be such an “organisation of professional revolutionaries”, acting as the vanguard of the working class. The task of this vanguard party to be composed of professional revolutionaries under strict central control was to “lead” the working class, offering them slogans to follow and struggle for. It is the very antithesis of Marx’s theory of working class self-emancipation.

The Bolshevik Coup

The implication of Marx’s theory of working class self-emancipation is that the immense majority of the working class must be consciously involved in the socialist revolution against capitalism. “The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority in the interest of the immense majority”.

The Bolshevik coup in November, 1917, carried out under the guise of protecting the rights of the Congress of Soviets, did not enjoy conscious majority support, at least not for socialism, though their slogan “Peace, Bread and Land” was widely popular. For instance, elections to the Constituent Assembly, held after the Bolshevik coup and so under Bolshevik government, gave them only about 25 per cent of the votes.

John Reed, a sympathetic American journalist, whose famous account of the Bolshevik coup, Ten Days That Shook The World, was commended in a foreword by Lenin, quotes Lenin as replying to this kind of criticism in a speech he made to the Congress of Peasants’ Soviets on 27 November, 1917:

  If Socialism can only be realized when the intellectual development of all the people permits it, then we shall not see Socialism for at least five hundred years . . . The Socialist political party – this is the vanguard of the working class; it must not allow itself to be halted by the lack of education of the mass average, but it must lead the masses, using the Soviets as organs of revolutionary initiative…” (Reed’s emphasis and omissions, Modern Library edition, 1960, p.15).

Compare this with a passage from the utopian communist, Weitling: “to want to wait . . . until all are suitably enlightened would be to abandon the thing altogether!” Not, of course, that it is a question of “all” the workers needing to be socialists before there can be Socialism. Marx, in rejecting the view that Socialism could be established by some enlightened minority, was merely saying that a sufficient majority of workers would have to be socialists.

Lenin’s Legacy

Having seized power before the working class (and, even less, the 80 per cent peasant majority of the population) had prepared themselves for Socialism, all the Bolshevik government could do, as Lenin himself openly admitted, was to establish state capitalism in Russia. Which is what they did, while at the same time imposing their own dictatorship over the working class.

Contempt for the intellectual abilities of the working class led to the claim that the vanguard party should rule on their behalf, even against their will. Lenin’s theory of the vanguard party became enshrined as a principle of government (“the leading role of the Party”) which has served to justify what has proved to be the world’s longest-lasting political dictatorship.

The self-emancipation of the working class, as advocated by Marx, remains on the agenda.

Adam Buick

Practical Socialism pt.2 (1990)

From the March 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

The first part of this article appeared in our January issue

Our practical proposals for the organisation of production in socialism are not based on arbitrary speculations about future society. These are developed, as Marx insisted they should be, from “the existing state of things”. In socialism, useful labour will produce goods and provide useful services directly for needs. In outlining the ways in which this could operate we begin from the fact that a world-wide structure of useful production already exists.

Under capitalism, useful production serves privileged class interests and is geared to all the conditions of the market, buying and selling and the profit motive. With the establishment of socialism these class features will be abolished, leaving the useful factors to operate freely and directly for needs. The mechanisms which co-ordinate the structure of useful production now will be continued into socialism.

Modern production is an immense structure throughout which even a simple article has a complex productive history involving a world-wide division of labour. For example, the components of a ball-point pen include a plastic holder, a plastic tube containing ink and perhaps a brass ferule joining the steel ball point to the tube. Yet these few components and their materials are the products of metal mining and processing, the oil and chemical industries, energy supply, and world transport. These features of modern production are widely dispersed and, in supplying each other with processed materials and finished components, they combine to produce goods with no single or overall plan. Instead, they operate in a way which is self-regulating. Each mine, industrial plant or manufacturing unit and each point in the distribution of materials and goods performs its function without having to know what is happening in all the other parts, even though it may depend upon what these other parts are doing.

Useful Stream of Information
A copper mine in Zambia receives orders from around the world and this is sufficient information to signal it to begin mining activity. A plant processing brass in Britain may order quantities of copper from Zambia and quantities of zinc from Australia, and on receiving these materials it produces brass which it then supplies to the units producing things like ferrules for ball-point pens. At a further stage in this sequence, the unit which produces brass ferules supplies them to the unit which assembles ball-point pens. In response to its orders, this point of final assembly then supplies them to the distribution system and eventually they are taken up by the users.

This communication of required goods and materials operates as a sequence of signals throughout the entire structure of production, indicating what each part of the structure should do. If orders exceed stocks, this indicates more production. Conversely, if stocks exceed orders, this indicates reduced production. Without any need for a single, overall plan, this will operate in socialism as a system of self-regulating production directly for need.

This useful stream of information begins with consumer needs and then flows throughout distribution and on to each required part of the structure of production. In the opposite direction, throughout the markets under capitalism, there takes place a contra-flow of information. It flows from producers, through distributors, to the consumer. This information is the prices of goods determined by the accumulating costs of production and distribution plus profit. Prices are increased in each part of production, from mining through industrial processing, manufacture and assembly, then accumulating further through distribution until the final price is passed on to the consumer.

Whereas the useful flow of information expresses needs and both stimulates and co-ordinates the production process, the opposite flow of information about the prices of goods constrains production by restricting it to what can be sold at a profit. In this way the effects of the market, with its buying and selling, are disruptive in that they erect economic barriers against the free use of society’s productive powers. The effects of the market also load production and distribution with a burden of wasteful activities which vastly reduce overall productive efficiency. A further related fact is that the disruptive effects of the market constrain the rational allocation of resources for needs.

Waste of the Market
This is most obviously demonstrated by the countless billions of work days which have been lost over recent years as a result of unemployment and the fact that it has not been profitable to employ the workers concerned. Unemployment has excluded from production a wide range of human skills vital for the well-being of the community and represents a lost opportunity to produce of incalculable magnitude. Due to the constraints of the market we have seen from time to time an accumulation of unsold stocks of goods that people have desperately needed. This has included such things as building materials when many people are homeless. Millions of hectares of land in Europe and America have been taken out of production because of limited market capacity for food sales, while at the same time millions have died of hunger.

Because of economic rivalries between capitalist states, millions of people are held in military forces and vast resources including materials, sections of industry, manufacture, energy supply and high technology are diverted into armaments production. Because of the high costs involved, the techniques which are now available for reducing emissions of sulphur dioxide from coal-burning power stations have not been applied. As a result, this pollution continues.

The economic mechanisms of the market serve no socially useful function whatsoever. On the contrary, their effects are entirely destructive. The function of cost/pricing is to enable a business enterprise to calculate its costs, to fix its profit expectations within a structure of prices, to regulate income against expenditure and, ultimately, to regulate the exploitation of its workers.

With the establishment of socialism these economic barriers against the free flow of information about consumer needs to the structure of useful production will be swept aside. People in mining, industry, manufacture, farming, energy supply and transport will in the first instance carry on with what they are doing, together with the people running useful services such as hospitals, education, communications and so on. The basic difference will be the new relationships in which they carry on this work. Instead of being employed as wage workers by capitalist companies or state capitalist enterprises, they will be able to work in voluntary co-operation with each other to provide goods and services directly for the needs of the community.

A proviso is that the self-regulating mechanisms which have been outlined, although adequate for an existing useful structure of production, will also operate against a background of democratic planning where further development is required. With the elimination of wasteful and destructive activities, however, vast resources of people, materials, means of production and technique will become available. Any such development would take place in accordance with a balance of needs and not the least of these would be a proper care of the environment.

Pieter Lawrence

50 Years Ago: Should We Leave Politics to the "Intelligent Minority"? (1990)

The 50 Years Ago column from the March 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. Shaw has given us another weapon with which to attack him. He now ridicules the ignorant masses who fell for Hitler and Mussolini, but has he forgotten that he has named himself among their great admirers7 Who was it who said only 18 months ago that he thought them “two highly capable revolutionary and proletarian leaders"? In saying that Mr. Shaw placed himself among the self-deluding masses who, he says, are not capable of engaging in politics.

In actual fact the working class, with all their costly errors, have not shown themselves worse than the intellectual thousand. In many respects they have shown themselves superior. It is Hitler's highly-educated university professors and others who have swallowed whole the Nazi nonsense about superior and inferior races, and it is their British counterparts who gave support to a class doctrine equally nonsensical. When Dr Ley, one of Hitler s key-men, says that “an inferior race needs less space, less food and less culture than a superior race", few people in this country would defend it as a proposition (though some are willing to apply it elsewhere in the Empire), but how many of the intellectual thousand will be prepared to repudiate the corresponding class doctrine? Mr. Shaw may pass the test, but will even Mr. Wells? And even if he does how many other comfortably placed intellectuals will reject and oppose the capitalist practice which divides the population into a "superior'' class which gets more space, better housing, more food and better quality food, and more culture than the "inferior" class?

(From an editorial "Democracy and Understanding", Socialist Standard, March 1940.)

Sting in the Tail: Spare Parts For Sale (1990)

The Sting in the Tail column from the March 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Spare Parts For Sale

Those who take the view that profit has nothing to do with health must have been startled by the reports of the General Medical Council hearing on the "kidneys-for-sale" allegations.

Four doctors were in the dock accused of serious professional misconduct. They were charged with buying kidneys from four Turkish donors for use in transplant operations.

The defence produced Geoffrey Alderman, Professor of Politics and Contemporary History at Holloway and Bedford College. University of London, who told the hearing: "I think it should be open to living donors to give or sell their kidneys."

The report in The Independent (18 January) stated:

  He claimed the decision to give a kidney would always be an altruistic one even if money was received. "No money could compensate for the loss of a kidney".
  Nor should arguments about exploiting the poor prevent the sale of kidneys, he said. "In a liberal democracy there are bound to be inequalities. This is the way of the world".

The professor's “liberal democracy" is of course really capitalism. Inside capitalism everything is for sale. We leave the reader to judge the "altruistic" nature of poverty-stricken desperate workers selling vital organs, and the "inequalities" that let people die because they are too poor to buy a life saving transplant.

As far as capitalism is concerned "this is the way of the world". As far as socialists are concerned it is time we got rid of the whole rotten system.

Caring Capitalism

From time to time we hear from the government that they care about the plight of the poor, the ill and the handicapped.

They point to such things as attendance allowance for those who look after terminally ill people.

A report in The Independent of 23 January 1990 illustrates what this "caring" amounts to in practice.

  But Community doctors at University College and Middlesex School of Medicine argue that many ill people die before their carers receive the allowance because of a six month qualifying period.
  Dr. Irene Higginson and colleagues discovered from records of nearly 500 cancer patients who were sufficiently disabled for their carers to be able to claim, that 92.8 per cent died within three months and 98.8 per cent within six.

Some "caring" - some system!

After Dinner Waffle

The Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd recently visited East Berlin. After a very good dinner he gave his host the East German Foreign Secretary the benefit of his views on free elections.

It was all very impressive stuff - dealing as it did with fair access to the media for all political parties. It must have been a very good dinner indeed for according to The Independent (23 January) he said:

  For in order to hold legitimate and successful free elections it Is not enough to assert a principle or even to fix a date. There have to be rules of fair and open administration of elections.
  There has to be equity in the opportunities open to the political parties. There has to be fair access to press, radio and television.

We applaud Mr. Hurd's sentiments, but we fear it was just another of those empty after dinner speeches much loved by politicians.

He surely doesn’t mean that in Britain at the next election the Socialist Party will have equity of access to the press, radio and TV.

This Gun for Hire

The fall of the dictatorships in Eastern Europe has not been greeted by universal joy. One group who are less than thrilled are the former spies and secret police who now face unemployment.

A number of Middle East regimes have started recruiting these security experts, thrown on the scrapheap by recent events. Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria and Israel are now recruiting this pool of spooks, spies and thugs.

The Saudi intelligence chief, Turki Bin-Faisai is reported as having a 3 million dollar budget to start hiring secret agents, it says a lot for the "freedom and democracy" so beloved by the media, that every government in the world has a secret police.

Big Burger Business

27,000 people applied for a job in the latest McDonald's fast food restaurant according to Time magazine (February 5).

The American culinary empire - which some say has more to do with gastro-enteritis than gastronomy - already stretches from Seattle to Singapore. The newest offering, besides being the largest in the company's 11,300 chain, is also the first of 20 planned outlets in a $50 million deal that took 14 years of negotiation and which will see Big Mac boldly going where no burger has gone before.

Meanwhile, the lucky 605 youngsters chosen for exploitation at wages of S2.40 an hour are busy learning how to say "have a nice day" with the appropriate ingratiating smile. They can also look forward to dressing up in silly hats and scurrying around at top speed. After all, fast food demands staff who're fast on their feet.

That should be no problem for the new starts according to George Cohon, President of the Canadian subsidiary of McDonald's.

"These kids win a lot of medals in the Olympics," he says. "We can train them to work in McDonald's"

So where is this new 700 seat restaurant? It's in Pushkin Square, Moscow, just a few streets from the Kremlin.

Is there anyone out there who still thinks capitalism isn't a world wide system?


Only Human

If you ever watch "The Money Programme" or "Business Daily" on TV you will see some of society's great men being interviewed.

They are industrialists, bankers and financiers. How assured and articulate they are. and how they seem to have all the answers to every question. Here, surely, are brilliant men whom workers should admire and regard with awe.

But are they really so brilliant? Many of them who were lionised only yesterday don’t look so clever now. For example Ernest Saunders, ex-chairman of Guinness, is in disgrace and awaiting trial on serious charges. Then there's Alan Bond, the Aussie who could do no wrong but whose vast financial empire now lies in ruins. And what about all those so-shrewd bankers who threw away billions by lending to countries the rest of us wouldn't have trusted with a fiver?

Now we learn that Ferranti was taken for £215 million by a con-man who sold them a dodgy American company. What does this make Ferranti’s chairman and board?

So all of these men are clearly as fallible as anyone else and probably owe their exalted status to a combination of ability, luck, having the right connections and, in many cases, not having been caught yet.

Scorpion. 

Between the Lines: MURDOVISION (1990)

The Between the Lines column from the March 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

MURDOVISION

Would you pay Rupert Murdoch to let you watch his cheap, shoddy Sky TV network? Most TV viewers in Britain have answered very clearly. They have refused to buy satellite dishes and show little sign of being prepared to give their money to Murdoch so that they can watch bad game shows and old movies. One year after the launch of Sky TV the enterprise has been a failure, reaching far less than its original target audience. Murdoch appeared on The Media Show (C4. 8pm. 3 February) to defend his TV network He appeared to be a man who not only owned The Sun but also read it, and it is clear that if the control of culture is to be left to money-worshipping billionaires like him the future looks pretty bleak. As the Australian controller of Sky TV explained, when asked whether he thought that the channel was a threat to media quality, after working on satellite TV for a year now. I don't think I know the meaning of the term quality" Quite so.

PLAYING WITH NATURE

Notes In The Margin 1980-1990 (BBC2. 8.20pm. 1 February) was presented by Rosalind Coward. Her look back to the Eighties surveyed the growth of public concern about the environment. As a feminist, whose writings have tended to expose the claims of those who suggest that Nature determines what is normal. Coward has good reason to be cautious in the face of some of the current greenish noises about the need for humans to live in harmony with nature. She is not opposed to the principle of ecological balance Far from it. she seems to agree with the view of the Socialist Party that humans will only have a future if they see themselves as part of the environment rather than as its destructive masters. 

Coward's concern is about those people who have suggested that there is some kind of Nature—normally depicted as a person (Mother Nature) and as female—which humans must obey and that failure to obey Mother Nature means that we shall be punished. Coward showed the example of the advocates of so-called alternative health therapy who tell people that illness is a result of failing to have the right mental attitude to Nature. Therefore, if you have cancer it is because you have had the wrong attitude to living; if you adopt the right lifestyle Nature will be kind to you. This sort of eco-fascism. which suggests that Mother Nature is some kind of tyrannical and punitive goddess who will hurt those who fail to fall in line with Her laws, is dangerous nonsense. Of course, it is a material fact that if you live in conflict with your environment you will harm it as well as yourself, but Rosalind Coward was quite right to point out that it is idealistic self-deception to imagine that illness and mortality are the products of bad thinking. Certain radical Greens adopt a rather smug attitude concerning proper lifestyles. They leave out of account the material pressures upon millions of workers which leave them no option to live healthily. They also fail to see that much of what they imagine to be "natural" is only the norm in a society which puts money before people Coward did a good job in warning us of the philosophical baggage carried by many well-meaning greenish folk

TV AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE

We pointed out last month how TV played a key role in spreading ideas during the recent workers' upsurge in Eastern Europe It is interesting to note, in support of this claim, that when Azeri workers tried something similar, one of the first actions the Russian army took was to disable the TV station in Baku to stop it playing the role it had in Eastern Europe The Azeris were motivated by politically unsound nationalist sentiments, but once workers have the right ideas in their heads it will be just as well for Rupert Murdoch and his gang to book themselves a room reservation on the next space shuttle.

Steve Coleman

Who are the dreamers? (1990)

From the March 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

The world is crying out for change. Routinely, millions of children die each year of starvation while billionaires spare themselves no indulgence. Meanwhile, ever new weapons of death are produced for our "security". Yet people say that we socialists are utopian because we hold to the view that a new society is the only lasting solution to the mess we're in. and that this must be achieved democratically. Yes", they say. "the world is heading for disaster, but it's better to try to make smaller changes than go all out for socialism and perhaps change nothing",

We are called Utopians because we dare to suggest that we could run our lives in a much more harmonious way, instead of succumbing to the prevailing view that things must carry on more or less as they are. At root, the critics see socialism as just an idea, perhaps even a nice idea, but one that is not likely to materialise. From their perspective we are mad even to sketch out what a better society could be like and should limit ourselves to short-term changes such as bringing down interest rates, or getting rid of a certain type of missile, which might improve things— somehow.

Utopians and Socialists
Part of the confusion about the meaning of the term utopia comes from its first use in Thomas More's book of the same name The word is a pun: eu in Ancient Greek meaning "good". (o)u meaning no", and topos meaning “place". This definition implies that a utopia is a good place that doesn't exist, much like the land described in the Big Rock Candy Mountains. Many books other than More's have outlined utopias, the most famous socialist utopia being News from Nowhere by William Morns where he painted a picture of a classless. stateless, moneyless society, something like the one the Socialist Party is talking about. Many political books have utopian elements, features that the writer sees as desirable in a good" society. Even a book of Mrs Thatcher s speeches might have utopian elements in it, for some people.

There has been a tradition in socialist writing dating back to Marx and Engels of avoiding going into too much detail about what socialism would be like (although there was a great deal of agreement about socialism meaning a moneyless classless society). When Marx and Engels labelled earlier socialists (like Saint-Simon and Robert Owen) utopian, they simply meant that their ideas were before their time. Earlier socialists wanted a world of abundance and co-operation before there was a sufficient level of political consciousness and technology to support such a society: so the more completely plans of a new society were worked out in detail, the more they drifted into fantasies with no basis in the real world. It wasn't that Marx and Engels thought that you should never talk about what socialism was, but rather that talking about it made no difference until the other requirements had been met.

The idea of socialism stopped being utopian (in the sense of an unrealisable dream) for Marx and Engels once capitalism had developed sufficiently to allow the working class to become politically organised, and when the level of industrial technology brought the potential to produce an abundance of goods to meet everyone's needs. It is more than a hundred years since Marx's death and the advanced level of technology that now exists is a very real basis for a truly free and co-operative society. There's certainly nothing unreal about suggesting that we could organise a better world now. The real dreamers are those who refuse to describe the sort of society that they're after but rather muddle along hoping that this or that reform will somehow make the profit system behave humanely—something it has never done so far.

The Real Dreamers
So who is being unrealistic? Some people on the "Left" won't even say what socialism is, because they think that any account of a future society is a waste of time and that we should concern ourselves with present-day struggles. But unless you do talk about where you're going, how will you know when you've arrived? Others even try to convince themselves that socialism already exists in Russia or could be brought about by a Labour government twiddling with capitalism for a few years.

Some of those who accept the aim of socialism still argue that we must go through a "transitional society" which will only later lead to socialism. These "transitional societies" always seem to bear some resemblance to post-1917 Russia and look nothing at all like a truly liberated world society. Even Trotsky (who never stood for the society that we're working for) recognised how the reality of such a supposed transition in Russia dragged the name of socialism through the mud and gave people a wholly false idea of what a socialist society would be like. Workers today still feel that if this is socialism, then you can stick it.

Even so. despite this vilification of the term socialism, more and more people today recognise that the present system of production for profit makes our lives needlessly stressful and is ruining the planet. Given all this, the real dreamers are those who refuse to outline a viable social framework in which the routine catastrophes of capitalism will stop recurring month after month, year after year. It's naive not to say exactly how a better society will differ from the present one. The real Utopians are the people who won't even talk about utopias.

A Very Different Alternative

Socialism has never been tried. This is why we have a clear answer to those who say. "look what socialism is like in Poland or China". We can counter the nonsense of Thatcher who sees socialism as "a life of debilitating dependence on the state". Every day socialists balk at the terms “state socialism", "market socialism", "socialist France", or even "National Socialism”. All these assume a political spectrum that stretches only from so-called free market societies on the right to state control of industry on the left. Our ideas have nothing to do with these variations on a grey theme.

We support a very different alternative. We do not say that socialism is a democratic. moneyless world society just because it sounds nice. Our ideas are part of a political tradition which views these social conditions as the only viable framework for stopping the inevitable consequences of continued production for profit. Socialism takes the skills developed under capitalism and puts them to truly co-operative use for the first time. Our outline of socialism is no more than a description of the social conditions in which human talents can truly blossom.

Unless you do have a clear idea of socialism then anyone can claim it, defame it and say it doesn't work. And unless we keep the idea of working directly for a worldwide co-operative community on the agenda people will always be sidetracked by each month's new worry—armaments, starvation, disease, urban decay, or pollution. All of these are tragic, but trying to tackle them separately is to fight an ever more difficult battle. These problems are all part and parcel of the sort of society in which we live.

Almost a hundred years ago William Morris saw the dangers of treating the problems of capitalism separately by reforms and insisted on the need to work for a socialist society and nothing else. He argued, with Belfort Bax in Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome, that "it is essential that the ideal of the new society should always be kept before the eyes of the working classes, lest the continuity of the demands of the people should be broken, or lest they should be misdirected".

Since this time much sincere political effort has indeed been misdirected in attempting to deal with social problems by reforms Meanwhile the real enemy still wreaks havoc; more than ever the inhuman forces of capitalism dominate the world, throwing up ever new problems each day.

The rules of the game need to be changed from producing what makes a profit to producing what we need. At the moment time and resources are wasted on advertising, marketing, the financial systems and weapons while millions die because they don't have a few coins to pay for the food to fill their stomachs. A competitive society clearly does not meet real needs: by describing how socialism would operate we simply point out how our potential could be realised if we used current know-how in a different way. None of this is utopian in the unrealistic dream sense of the word. "We have the technology", as they used to say on TV.

KA

Workers' Paradise? (1990)

From the March 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

  Unemployment has become a topic of discussion and even the Soviet party newspaper Pravda admits that perestroika has caused people to lose their employment. On 31 October 1989 Pravda stated that three million people have lost their job as a result of the reform programme and that this figure could rise to 16 million by the year 2000. In particular, 500,000 men are due to be demobilized from the Soviet armed forces during 1990 and 1991, following Gorbachev's speech to the United Nations in December 1988, adding to the pool of unemployed. In Central Asia youth unemployment has increased sharply rising to 25 per cent in certain districts and this has contributed to ethnic violence among the different nationalities.
  As well as unemployment the Soviet Union now concedes that a proportion of its population lives in conditions of poverty. The minimum level for material security is reckoned to be 75 roubles per month but 43 million people or 15 percent of the Soviet population are reckoned to fall below this level. There is no state plan for poverty and no government agency with the task of providing for those who are below this level as formerly poverty was not supposed to exist. Soviet officials resort to a euphemism and designate such people as 'underprovisioned' but the youth communist party newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda has stated that 'poverty is a reality, our national tragedy'. It is possible to see people begging on the streets or more commonly in the underpasses of major Soviet cities.

—Geographical, January 1990.

Land of the Free? (1990)

From the March 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is no universal definition of hunger, but a concept generally accepted in the medical community is that a hungry person is chronically short of the nutrients necessary for growth and good health. Asking how many Americans are hungry by that definition, one encounters an astounding statistic: 12 million children and eight million adults, or about 9 percent of the population.

—Scientific American, February 1987.

The price of caring (1990)

From the March 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

The overwhelming majority of British workers support the industrial action taken by the ambulance workers. Despite all the efforts of the bosses press to depict them as money-grubbing troublemakers, few workers fail to see that when ambulance workers are offered a pay award which is less than the rate of inflation (a relative pay cut) there is something badly wrong. 

When that miserable embodiment of well-fed callousness. Kenneth Clarke, the Minister of Health, says that ambulance workers are only van drivers, he insults the medical skills of ambulance crews as well as the hard work of van drivers The reality of our rulers economic priorities are plain to see: if you are a seventeen-year old police officer, trained to protect property, you are worth considerably more money than if you are a fully-trained life-saver in the ambulance service: if you are a nurse in an NHS hospital you are worth ten—sometimes one hundred—times less than a money-vandal in the City who wastes away his days playing the Stock Exchange game for his parasite employers.

To most workers it seems unfair that useful work should receive low wages. There is something wrong. Maybe it is the government and that heartless woman Thatcher. If only we were led by Neil and his well-meaning team. To be sure, the Labour government-in-waiting is making the most of the ambulance dispute. Smiling Labour politicians adopt postures of the most self-righteous indignation and sermonise against the government's indifference to human need. They forget to mention their own NHS cuts when they were in power, and keep conspicuously quiet about the last Labour government's plans to use troops to break a threatened ambulance strike in the winter of 1978.

It may seem "unfair", but what is fairness under the present social system? It is getting the best price for what you sell. The price of labour power (wages and salaries) is no different from the price of cat food when it comes to "fairness". If there is a profit to be made by putting one tin of pet food on the market for 30 pence and the other for 50 pence, that is going to happen, regardless of the fact that the 50 pence commodity may taste no better than the 30 pence brand. Similarly, if a junior doctor can be purchased to work in a hospital for up to eighty hours a week for, say, 40 per cent less than it costs to buy a military research scientist, then this has nothing to do with the greater usefulness of arms production than working in a casualty department.

Illusion of Fair Wages

The market does not exist to measure or reflect social use. but only supply and demand in relation to what can be bought and sold profitably. There is a big market for new ways of killing people: skill in giving medical assistance to those who are ill but poor has lesser market significance. That is why we live in a mad-house society where killing is rewarded more than caring. The soldier trained to shoot and kill is given a medal: the ambulance worker stands in the high street with a bucket asking for a few pence to sustain the struggle for better pay.

There are stickers being handed out by the ambulance workers calling for fair pay. The only fair pay is no wage at all. We agree that the government would be more than ready to concede to such a demand, but let us take the matter a little further.

Let us suppose that nurses were paid well. For this to happen the market would have to be ignored. Why should workers be given fat salaries for looking after the sick when only a minority of the ill can afford to pay for their treatment? But let us imagine that a capitalist utopia has come about, as the left-wing reformers hope will happen. Ambulance workers are taking home big salaries and so are all of the most caring occupations. A problem would still exist. What about those workers who are doing necessary work for society, but receive less pay than the ambulance workers and nurses? They will then be demanding greater "fairness". They will say that it is unfair that they, whose contributions to society might be just as useful, if less visibly caring, are not equal to the well-paid health workers.

If health workers are extremely highly paid there will be queues of wage slaves wanting to do these jobs (rather than a rush to leave such jobs, as is the case now) and those who are surplus to requirements might well complain that it is unfair that just because there is no room for them m the health service the price of their standard of life poorer. So. there would still be inequality—still there would be cries against "unfairness".

Of course, the scenario outlined above is a daydream. The most useful workers will never be the best-paid people Under the market system labour power is valued in terms of production for profit, not social use. It is pointless for workers who feel under-valued" to ask to be recognised and paid a "decent'" wage Like it or not. they will be paid the market rate. The degree to which they struggle against the downward pressure upon their wages will help them a little, but in the end it is not going to enable them to escape from the tyranny of the profit system and its anti-human priorities.

There is no such thing as a decent wage or salary. The worker on 100 a week would rightly prefer to be on 1000 a week, but if all workers were paid 1000 a week we would still have to sell ourselves to the boss and still have to spend our earnings buying back some of the goods and services which we, the workers, have produced.

Abolition of Wage Labour

There is only one alternative to this situation and that is to abolish wage labour altogether. Instead of seeking "fair" wages, workers should realise that all wages are less than the value of what they produce. It is the difference between what the workers produce and what they are paid that is the basis of the unearned profit which the capitalists legally rob from the working class. The wages system is a system of legitimised exploitation. Those who do useful work can never win under such a system.

In a socialist society we shall work because it is useful to do so. People will contribute according to their abilities. In return, they will take freely from the common store of wealth in accordance with their self-determined needs. There will be no need to sell human care. Women and men who work in hospitals or on ambulance crews will do so simply because they are needed. They will have free and equal access to the wealth of society, not a bag of metal tokens called money wages.

Free access to all wealth will be the right of all people in a socialist society, regardless of whether they perform visibly caring work or less obviously important work or if, as a result of age or illness, they are unable to work at all. In a wageless society the sole rewards for work will be the satisfaction of utilising your mental and physical faculties and the appreciation of others. Ambulance crews will have the pleasure of knowing that they served their fellow men and women, who in many other ways will be serving them.

The wages system is still here. If Tories and Labourites have their way it will be forever. Even the few leftists who favour the abolition of wage-labour regard it as such a long-term aim as to be on a par with the Popes preparation for the second coming of Jesus Christ. While there is a wages system workers must unite to get the most possible out of it. As fellow workers. socialists offer the hand of solidarity to the ambulance men and women. But as revolutionaries, seeking a new and saner way to run society, our immediate objective is to be contrasted with the parrot cries of pseudo-radicals who cannot see beyond the illusory horizon of “fair wages" for all. The Socialist Party stands alone in the political arena, united by Marx's revolutionary slogan, “abolition of the wages system”

Steve Coleman

Caught in the Act: Punishers and Moonlighters (1990)

The Caught in the Act column from the March 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

PUNISHERS AND MOONLIGHTERS

One thing to be said about the governments latest plans for the reform of what is still called Criminal Justice is that they are not designed around any nonsense about eliminating crime. This is something of a historical curiosity since all such reforms in the recent past have pretended to be moving towards a discovery of the key to the understanding, treatment and cure of crime. The White Paper Crime, Justice and Protecting the Public puts a simpler and perhaps more popular case: some criminals must be punished more severely while many of the rest can be punished more cheaply. Whatever effect these plans may have on the criminal statistics (where all progress or stagnation in the "fight against crime" is mistakenly measured) they are sure to give a thrill of satisfaction to the more seriously haunted sections of the Tory Party, whose appetite for savage vengeance would be sorely frustrated if crime were ever to disappear.

Although he came too recently to the job of Home Secretary to take any significant part in preparing the White Paper, David Waddington is likely to heartily approve of the main drift of what it proposes. Waddington is already in the tradition of Tory Home Secretaries—Leon Brittan was a recent example—who appear to be living in a different age. Brittan was like a Dickensian workhouse master while Waddington's looks, voice and arrogance are reminiscent of an eighteenth century magistrate reading the Riot Act to starving peasants before unleashing the dragoons to teach them that while it is permissable to be poor they are not allowed to protest about it. A QC who was a Crown Court Recorder, he is not abashed to parade his philosophy that anyone who goes outside capitalism's laws, with their plentiful licence for legal theft and disorder, to do a bit of the illegal sort, has got it coming to them. Waddington remains an obdurate supporter of the death penalty: he would have been in favour of hanging the Guildford Four and all the other people whose conviction for murder was later discredited. His proposals for reform of the criminal law display a similar disregard for evidence and logic.

SUN READERS

The White Paper originates in the fact that putting offenders in prison is ineffectual and—the most persuasive argument of all—very expensive. The answer to this problem is to legalise a new range of penalties to enable courts to deal with offenders in other ways whenever possible. It is then assumed that the courts will not be attracted to the new penalties unless they are not only tough but are seen to be tough by the average reader of the Sun. There is very little evidence to support this case.

But popular attitudes to crime, which help to determine how many people vote, are not normally based on uncomfortable reality. As anyone who has been burgled or assaulted will tell you, crime is an emotive business and if you are one of its victims you are likely to be interested in revenge before any criminological niceties. Except that in the case of the Tory hangers and floggers it is not necessary to be a victim to be motivated by vengeful lusts. That is why the proposals in the White Paper are likely to become written into law in the near future.

RUTHLESS TORIES

Whatever this does to the courts and the criminals it is not likely to harm the reputation of the likely author of the proposals, who has watched over them practically since their inception. John Patten is a Minister of State at the Home Office, a man whose ambition is as plain as his bouffant hair style. Viewers of the Commons proceedings may already have noticed him out of concern for the fact that, as he sits behind David Waddington. he seems to suffer from an uncontrollable tic. In fact it is even more serious. Patten is nodding vigorously at everything his boss says, uncaring that as Waddington has his back to him his displays of devotion go unnoticed.

Let us hope, for the sake of his friends and family (he lists his only recreation in Who's Who as "talking to my wife") that Patten realises, as he struggles up the rungs of power, that the Tory political machine can be excessively ruthless. There is no more instructive example of this than the sad case of Nigel Lawson who. as far as is known, was never caught out nodding in agreement with anyone apart from himself. For those with a defective memory and for the more dangerously sycophantic Thatcherites we should explain that Lawson was once Chancellor of the Exchequer. He held the job for a long time and was widely praised as the man responsible single-handedly for a miraculous revival of the British economy and so for enabling the Tones to win a couple of General Elections. Such was the reverence in which Lawson was held that he was said to be the one minister Thatcher dare not sack, so he helped her out by resigning.

MOONLIGHTING

And what has happened since then? In a propaganda feast of startling skill and audacity the Tories have undermined Lawson's reputation as the miracle man. They have been unstinting in their efforts to publicise the fact that British capitalism is not in miraculous ascendant but declining into one of its periodic crises—that prices are rising too fast; that the balance of payments is badly out of true (or what the British capitalist class regard as true): that the unions are beginning to flex their muscles again . . .  Let us give thanks, runs the message, that the Treasury is no longer in the hands of that overweight buffoon with the untidy hair and the ready sneer and is instead run by nice, trim Mr. Major who can be trusted to really work the economic miracle and who will at least not argue with Margaret Thatcher.

Those who so recently clamoured to praise Lawson now eagerly bury him. As he nurses his bruised reputation he may take consolation in the fact that, like so many other discarded Tory Ministers, he has got himself a couple of well-paid jobs on the side. In case Lawson's constituents in Blaby have forgotten, he already has a job which is supposed to demand all his time— he is their Member of Parliament. His new job with an off-shoot of Barclays Bank is a two- day-a-week commitment but that does not mean the ex-economic wizard will miraculously be putting in a nine-day week. He will, in words familiar to the Sun reader, be moonlighting except that it should be called sunlighting because he will be at the Bank during the day when he should be on the benches of the Commons nodding like John Patten at his leader s words.

HYPOCRITES

Moonlighting is something which Tory Ministers have been pretty scathing about in the past—at least when it involved the sort of extension of their working day when many workers have to resort to m order to bump up their wages. Norman Tebbit once got very annoyed about the alleged (not an inappropriate word since he regarded it as akin to a crime) moonlighting of a group of workers who were pressing for more pay a bit too effectively for Normans comfort. Tebbit argued that it was dishonest to pretend that the miserable pay they got for their basic job was all those workers had to exist on. This was a typical Tebbit blunder, in the class of his reminiscences about his cycling father, because the workers were nurses. When he left the government Tebbit was immediately moonlighting himself, accepting so many directorships that he couldn't possibly do a proper job in all of them let alone be a full-time MP as well. Of course he was only doing what other Tory ex-ministers had done, like John Nott, Jim Prior and Francis Pym for example. Like them, he was only being as hypocritical as he needed to be as an administrator of the capitalist system. 

Which brings us back to Nigel Lawson, John Patten and David Waddington. All of them claim to be reformers, to apply radical change to sweep away problems which have festered for too long. Lawson said he would bring about a fundamental change in the system of taxation and had been chipping away at it for some time, which impressed workers who mistakenly believe that taxation is a concern of theirs. Waddington and Patten are proposing changes in criminal law the like of which have not been contemplated for some forty years, which may impress workers who are deluded that they have something to gain from the states protection of property rights.

LOSERS

But effective, pre-designed reform is not possible unless the reformers have some control over what they are trying to change. As the Tory machine is now at pains to point out, Lawson had no real control of the economy of British capitalism. The history of crime and the laws made in response to it (if it should not be the other way round) indicate that this problem, typical of the social consequences of capitalism's class society, is also uncontrolled and uncontrollable. This might be seen as an amusing, trivial game except that it is always the same people who are the losers and who are punished by the law for being so.

Ivan

Letters to the Editors: East Europe (1990)

Letters to the Editors from the March 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

East Europe

Dear Editors,

I suppose it is true to say that most people who write to journals and newspapers do so to disagree with something in those publications.

I write, however, to praise your February 1990 issue (“Welcome to the West—East Europe Special"). Clearly. you demonstrate that it is not socialism that has failed in the Soviet Union and eastern and central Europe but various forms of dictatorial state and semi-state capitalism. Nevertheless, as you correctly point out, the so-called revolutionary upheavals in these countries are only the beginning.

In the immediate future, despite a partial democratisation of social structures, the socio-economic condition of the workers may well deteriorate. It should also be stressed that the “alternative" (so-called "free market" capitalism) is no alternative at all. at least for the majority of workers and peasants. They will remain slaves— with, perhaps, slightly looser chains; that is all.

Furthermore, increasing "freedom" of expression in the Soviet Union also has its ugly aspects. Racism and nationalism are rampant. And even groups claiming to be socialist and anti-Leninist are. inevitably I suppose, very muddled. For example, in Ukraine, a social-democratic organisation has been formed which claims to be based upon the ideas of Marx, Engels, Plekhanov, Martov and Dan, yet it adds a list of reforms to its socialist objective!

The workers of the disintegrating Russian Empire, like workers elsewhere, still have a long way to go before they achieve a largely harmonious and free society.

Peter E. Newell

Colchester, Essex.

Dear Comrades.

Events in Eastern Europe have now reached the stage when it ought to be obvious to the most myopic that the SPGB has been correct all along in its analysis of the so-called “Communist" countries.

I would like to pay a tribute to the outstanding theoretical clarity which enabled our members in those early days to make the correct diagnosis, and to cling on under tremendous pressure for so many years until at last the truth came out. as it had to.

Being able to latch on to this ready-made "case" against Russia, etc at any early stage of my political awakening has, I am sure, saved me from a lot of unpleasant confusion and disillusionment.

E. C. Edge

Preston

Manila, 7 December 1989

Dear Editors.

On December 1, 1989, thousands of soldiers belonging to an underground military organization called RAM (Reform the Armed Forced Movement) captured several military bases in the Philippines, including Villamor Air Base, the Headquarters of the Air Force. Their aim was to overthrow President Aquino's government and replace it with a civilian/military coalition government. When the RAM forces threatened to destroy Malacanang Palace, where President Aquino was trapped, the USA sent jet fighters to Manila from one of their military bases in this country. Although no shots were fired by the American planes, the rebel aircraft were scared off. Having lost air superiority, the rebels were quickly defeated. Some rebels managed to hold on to their positions in the financial district of Makati until today. December 7, 1989, when they finally surrendered.

As of today. 79 people have died, and 43 of them were civilians who were hit by stray bullets, rockets, and bombs from both sides. Although some civilians were killed at home, many were killed while being entertained by the violence. These were mostly young men on the fringes of the urban battlefield, who cheered the soldiers on. The RAM forces were called "Anejo" (after Anejo Rhum, a popular basketball team). The government forces were called "San Miguel" (after San Miguel Beer. Anejo's rival). In my neighbourhood, people stared at the sky, some even stood on rooftops, and watched the "air show". A helicopter turned slowly above, then rushed forward firing rockets at rebel tanks a few miles away. I heard on the radio afterward that the helicopter missed and hit a row of houses instead. Most of us fled our homes at 5AM when soldiers started firing at each other near our street, but later in the day we all went back and watched the “air show" again. Violence can be fascinating when you are separated from it by miles, a TV screen, or an arcade game, but up close it is terrifying.

The soldiers had nasty experiences. One soldier destroyed an Armoured Personnel Carrier only to discover later that his elder brother was inside. Once, government jets bombed government troops approaching Manila to reinforce a military base under attack by RAM forces. Many of the soldiers shooting at each other would have enjoyed each other's company under different circumstances.

Hardly anyone cared who won or lost. The radio was full of people pleading for an end to the fighting, not for the victory of one side or the other. Many people knew that their lives would not be different regardless of who took power. The coup of February 1986 that brought Aquino to power disillusioned many people.

The coup is nearly over. At the time of writing, rebel soldiers still control an air base near Cebu City, a few hundred miles south of Manila, but are surrounded by government troops. People are beginning to ask what caused the coup, and how to prevent another one from happening. This was the sixth and most violent coup so far in the 3 years of the Aquino government. Many newspapers blame graft and corruption in government, the politicization of the military that occurred during the Marcos dictatorship, the increasing poverty of the people, and many other symptoms of an arrangement that most people accept because they do not know any better. This arrangement, called capitalism, is one where a minority controls the world. When minority leadership is replaced by shared leadership, where all actively participate in the making of decisions, wars will end. Most people do not want to kill or be killed, but want power to control what goes on around them. Poverty will end, because our lack of control of the means of producing the things we need causes it. Maybe people will begin to enjoy their lives, instead of distracting themselves in order to forget their problems. In a socialist world, violence will no longer be entertainment, but an ugly perversion.

Kaibigan

Philippines

Dear Editors.

As a new reader of the Standard I was most surprised by Steve Coleman's reference to Nazism in the December issue, namely, “Why the hell couldn't the Nazis have caught Julie Andrews and those monstrously sugary kids and contributed one humane deed to history?".

I am sure Steve Coleman needs no reminder of the fate of Jewish children too young to work in the Nazi Concentration Camps—an immediate gassing or dispatch to the experimental blocks.

The precepts of Nazism were founded on national and racial hatred and its manifestations are not a subject for frivolity. I would find such remarks offensive in any publication—to read them in the Standard is particularly disappointing.

Sharon Bendelman 

Edgware, Middlesex.

REPLY:

We agree that the remark was distasteful and should never have appeared. 

EDITORS

Obituaries: Harry Edwards; Phyllis Howard; Vic Berry; Neil Brodie (1990)

Obituaries from the March 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Harry Edwards

West London branch members were shocked by the death of Comrade Harry Edwards at their branch meeting on 1 February at the age of 67.

Harry Edwards had joined the old Paddington branch of the Party in 1947 after being demobbed from the army, later transferring to Ealing and then to West London. He worked for the old road transport division of the railways, a job which entitled him to travel cheaply all over Europe where he had many friends and contacts and from which he retired early. This gave him the time to pursue the things that really interested him, the local rowing and chess clubs (he had been a keen rower in his younger days, the captain of his club in fact) as well as socialist activity.

At the time of his death he was branch treasurer, acting Central Branch Secretary and member of the Standing Orders Committee preparing this year's Conference at Easter. A quiet reliable man who was always prepared to take on such essential if unglamorous tasks in a revolutionary organisation, he will be missed both by the Party and his family.

Phyllis Howard

Phyllis died peacefully on New Year's Day 1990 at the age of 83.

She joined the Party in 1934, together with her future husband, Arthur George. Both were members of Bloomsbury Branch (now Camden), and were tireless workers of the Party in the 30s and the difficult period during and immediately after the war.

Phyllis served on practically every Party committee, including several years on the Executive Committee. Her last official post was that of General Secretary. In addition, she was a candidate in a local election in the 60s.

For many years she was secretary of the Editorial Committee of the Socialist Standard and the committee met regularly at her home in North London. Phyllis never really recovered from Arthur's unexpected death in 1982, and her health deteriorated.

All who met her will remember her as a warm-hearted and gentle person. Her contribution to the SPGB will be remembered with appreciation.

Vic Berry

We regret to have to announce the death last November of our Comrade V. J. Berry. Vic Berry first joined the old Leyton branch of the Party in 1932 and before the war was a regular speaker at the Party's outdoor stations in Leyton, East Ham and Hackney. Like so many others, family commitments led to him dropping out of activity for a number of years, and it was only in 1963 that he rejoined, Camberwell branch. On his retirement he moved to Torquay from where he continued to propagate socialist ideas. His last article, on Robert Owen, appeared in the October Socialist Standard.

Neil Brodie

Neil Brodie, who died in early January, joined the old Chiswick Branch of the Party in 1938, and was a member of the later Ealing and West London branches, for which he was the Treasurer for 18 years. As a young man he had come to London from Scotland and worked as a civil servant at the Post Office. When the Post Office Savings Bank moved to Glasgow he took the opportunity to return to Scotland where he remained after his retirement.

We extend our sympathy to his wife and daughter.

After apartheid, what? (1990)

Editorial from the March 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

So. after the nomenklatura in Eastern Europe, it is now the white minority in South Africa that has been forced to agree to negotiate on giving up its "leading role" and "guaranteed monopoly" of political power. For this is what the release of Mandela means. 

It means that those in charge of the South African state have at last publicly admitted what they have long realised in private: that they cannot maintain the law and order necessary for the proper functioning of the capitalist system they preside over without including the majority of the population in the system of political representation. Their hope is that Nelson Mandela will be able to command sufficient support among the black population to be the person with whom they can negotiate an orderly transition from apartheid to the new "non-racial democracy" that capitalism demands, indeed has been demanding for decades. 

The failure of apartheid, as an attempt to impose on a capitalist economy a caste system based on skin colour, is underlined by the fact that the party in charge of the South African state—the Afrikaner nationalist National Partei—is the same party that, under such hateful figures as Malan, Verwoerd and Vorster, introduced apartheid after 1948 as a rigid codification, and intensification, of the existing discriminatory practices against "non-whites". 

Already in 1948 apartheid was an anachronism, even from a capitalist point of view but. with the franchise restricted to "whites" most of whom were Boers in all senses of the word, the succession of parties directly representing the capitalist interest—the United Party, the Progressive Federal Party and, today, the Democratic Party—were unable to win a majority in the white parliament. Political power was exercised—and has been without a break since 1948—by the representatives of Afrikaner nationalism whose original policy was to try to reconstruct the master and servant relationship between whites and" blacks their forefathers—the people who organised the Great Trek from the Cape Province in 1836 to avoid the abolition of slavery in the British Empire—had known in the pioneer days of white colonisation. 

What the Afrikaner nationalist government sought to keep "apart" capitalism brought together. More and more Africans were drawn into capitalist industry, and not just as labourers in the mines but as workers of all kinds—clerks, accountants, bank employees as well as foremen and skilled and semi-skilled production workers—until today they form the majority of the urban working class of South Africa. 

From the 1970s onwards the development of capitalism forced the government to abandon apartheid bit by bit. First to go was the industrial colour bar under which certain skilled manual jobs were reserved for whites. Then Africans were allowed to form trade unions. Then the Pass Laws were abolished and Africans allowed to own property in the townships. Then the so-called "petty apartheid" of separate park benches, beaches and the like was relaxed. Then "coloureds" and Asians were granted some political rights. Then the Mixed Marriage Act—which criminalised sexual relations between the different "races"—was abolished. Then mixed residential areas emerged in some cities. 

All that remains—and of course it's a big all—are the laws which classify every South African into one or other "racial" group and which reserve areas for the exclusive habitation of these groups, but the De Klerk government has declared, as it had no choice but to, that these too are negotiable. 

Like all decent-minded people, Socialists are pleased at the coming demise of the obscene system of institutionalised race discrimination of apartheid. Although the coming of a non-racial regime in South Africa will allow the "non-whites" there a dignity and respect as equal human beings which they have been denied up to now, the ending of apartheid will not amount to "liberation" for the working class in South Africa. Capitalism without apartheid—which is all even the ANC wants, despite its talk of "socialism" (in reality, nationalisation, or state capitalism)—will remain capitalism and so exploitation for profit, bad housing, inadequate health care, cheap schooling, unemployment, poor transport, police brutality, pollution and all the other problems workers have to endure under capitalism will continue as well. 

The end of apartheid will not mean the end of working class problems. At most it will result in the creation of the best conditions under which the working class can struggle to protect its interests within capitalism and, more importantly, can struggle alongside the workers of the rest of the world for the non-class as well as non-racial society that socialism will be.