Sting in the Tail: The restrictive society (1995)

The Sting in the Tail column from the March 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

The restrictive society

Capitalism is a divisive society that not only puts worker against capitalist in a fierce class struggle. It also drives worker against worker in competition for work and wages.

A recent example of this is illustrated in the Independent (24 December) under the headline “Bring back pass laws, says black South Africans”. This report dealt with the influx of illegal immigrants to South Africa from Zaire, Mozambique and other African countries.

"Pass laws may make a comeback in Nelson Mandela's new democratic South Africa. Many black people who were victimised by them under apartheid in the past are now looking with favour on controls for immigrants. "

What a miserable society capitalism is. In the last two months of 1994 the South African government had deported 50,000 workers back to Mozambique. The same sorry story applies to Mexican workers deported from the USA. Capitalism is a world-wide system of exploitation and restriction.

Only inside a socialist system of society will men and women be free to roam the world as they desire.

Shared fantasy

First, the Fantasy Football league and now the Fantasy Share League, a creation of BBC2's Working Lunch programme. Players are invited to compete with the City of London's professionals in forecasting how shares will perform and to back their judgment by pretending to buy and sell them.

But what chance can the amateur forecasters have against the professionals? One clue was provided by Mick Clarke, Stock Market Correspondent of the Times, who confessed on Working Lunch that he had been plugging Asil Nadir’s Polly Peck company prior to its collapse.

And an article in the Guardian (27 December) reviewed how the experts had fared in 1994:

“Most of the City’s leading ‘gurus’ are probably wishing they could have eaten their words — especially those issued with great confidence this time last year. ”

When it comes to predicting how any market will perform, the only real difference between professionals and amateurs is that the former get paid for doing it while the latter do it for nothing.

Muddle-headed Ken

Ken Coates, Labour MEP, is upset over Tony Blair’s plans to change Clause Four of the Labour Party’s constitution. You can tell this from his comments on Blair and the Party “modernisers’’ whom he described as:

“bastards and shits who are going to walk past the unemployed” (Guardian, 14 January)

Does Coates really think that Clause Four, which he says “I cannot live without”, ever made a scrap of difference to unemployment under Labour governments? The fact is that every time Labour left office unemployment was higher than when it came in.

But Coates also asked an interesting question:

“How can you talk about equality and assume the permanent continuation of employers and employees?"

If he is being serious here then what is he doing in a party which, despite the presence of Clause Four, has always endorsed the production from profit system of which the employer/employee relationship is such an integral part?

Trial by torture

Kilroy on BBC1 isn’t one of Scorpion’s favourite TV programmes but the edition on 20 January was riveting stuff.

Two Tories were stuck with the task of defending the government against an angry bunch of OAP’s who complained over and over about their poverty. The luckless pair were Barbara, a County Councillor, and Daniel, a would-be Tory' MP.

And how they floundered as they tried to deal with the pensioners' flood of accusations: Barbara couldn’t even bring herself to say the word “poverty”, preferring instead “lower living standards”, while Daniel could only answer the demand for higher pensions by bleating “Where's the money to come from?” and insisting that “People should save more for their old age.”

It was a joy to see how those Tory' apologists were made to squirm by the pensioners, but the dogged way in which they defended the indefensible must have earned them the admiration of every watching politician.

Alive and kicking

Are trade unions finished? Vicious antiunion laws, large-scale unemployment plus the growth of part-time work have planted the idea among many workers that TUs can no longer produce results. These changed circumstances do mean that unions are not so effective as they once were in some activities, but they are increasingly effective in others.

For example, figures published by the TUC show that the unions won £335 million in 1993/4 in compensation for members who suffered injury or ill-health at work or were unfairly dismissed. This figure represents an eight percent increase over the previous year and is in spite of falling membership.

Socialists are the first to point to the limitation of trade unions, but their value to workers in the industrial struggle remains and should not be underestimated.

Pseudo-revolutionaries corner

In the olden days when the Communist Party used to exist they used to justify every change of “tactics" by reference to “dialectics, comrade, dialectics”. Now their mantle has fallen on the SWP whose leader Tony Cliff spouts the same gobbledegook Here he is writing about the “third stage”of the industrial struggle:

"Now we come to a problem. The level of generalisation is on the one hand quite low, but at the same time it is quite high. This sounds like a contradiction, but the contradiction is reality. ”

Eh?

Scorpion

Capitalist Values in the Modern World (1995)

From the March 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

The long stated aim of the Labour Party is to run the market economy better than the Tories. What they really mean is that they want to try and run capitalism better — though, as yet, they haven't mustered the courage to use that word. To most people now, the Labour Party is an alternative to the Conservative Party only in the same way that Pepsi is an alternative to Coca Cola

There is a profound dishonesty about the Labour Party’s discussion document, Labour's Objects: Socialist values in the modern world, which is the basis for discussion throughout that party and for its special conference abandonment of Clause Four next month. We use the term dishonesty advisedly, for, the document is a work of confidence trickery, designed to convince Labour’s rank-and-file that it is about “strengthening socialist values”, when in fact it is a total capitulation to the ideology of capitalism.

Of course, Labour has always been a capitalist party in the sense that it has never sought to abolish production for profit and establish production for use. Even veteran left-winger, Tony Benn, whose knowledge of the Labour Party is rather longer and broader than that of Tony Blair, has repeated persistently that "the Labour Party is not — and probably never was — a socialist party” (Independent, 17 May 1989) and that "Socialism has been explicitly repudiated. Capitalism is hardly ever mentioned. The only political choice seems to be between two management teams, both committed to . . . the status quo. " (Tribune, 8 April 1994). Most Labour activists know that Benn is right, so the current talk of “socialist values” is nothing more than fraudulence.

Neither democratic nor socialist

Never in recent times has the term “socialist” and“socialism”appeared so often in a Labour Party document as in this latest one. It is there as a sop to the party's members. It is an insult to their political intelligence, treating them as mugs who will be won over by empty words. Sadly, in many cases it will succeed. But the mugs will pay their price, for once the leaders have their new constitution you can be sure that the term “socialism” will be as absent from future speeches and literature as it has been from every recent Labour Party manifesto. The truth is that these power-seeking politicians are embarrassed by those of their “comrades” who joined the party thinking (mistakenly) that it was socialist.

Not only is it dishonest, but also undemocratic. Blair announced that he wanted to change the objective of his party. Having stated this and called for debate, when the first response to his view came in a Guardian ad placed by a number of Labour MEPs who totally repudiated his position he admonished them for daring to criticise him in public, declaring such action to be “immature”. Is that Blair’s idea of a democratic discussion? According to polls, the overwhelming majority of constituency Labour parties are opposed to scrapping Clause Four. Blair’s response is to move the goalposts and insist that all book-members of his party have a vote, ensuring that the constituency activists will be outvoted. When the current document was circulated there was no invitation to opponents of the leader to circulate their points of view' in the same mail-out. Such democracy would not even occur to a fundamentally undemocratic party like Labour. Indeed, worse than that, on the green “Response Sheet” within the bogus consultation document, incredibly, there exists no place to state any support for Clause Four.

Contrast this with the Socialist Party where all policy is made by conference, which is mandated by all members, or by a party poll of each and every. member. Any move to change our Object or Declaration of Principles would be thoroughly debated, undoubtedly the subject of a party poll in which all sides would have their views published and circulated at the party’s expense, and then decided by a vote of members after full discussion without any priority being given to leaders (we have none) or officials That is the only way to conduct socialist debate and those who stray from the ways of democracy have absolutely no right to call themselves socialists.

Capitulation to capitalism

On page two we are told that “The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party” which is a lie: it is neither democratic nor socialist. But you have only to read on to page eight to see just what that means to them: "We believe in an economy that works in the public interest. A competitive market economy, with a strong industrial and wealth generating base is in the public interest. ”

Now, you are either in favour of production "in the public interest” (i.e. for need) or within “a competitive market” (i.e. for sale and profit). The two aims are mutually exclusive. The market cannot be run in the public interest because it is a market in which most of the public are themselves on sale, as items of labour power to be bought for less than the cost of what they produce. Profit arises out of the difference between what workers produce and what we are paid. So, in supporting the market Labour is necessarily opposing the workers’ interests. We are prepared to accept that Blair and his co-leaders are quite ignorant of this point and really believe that you can run a socialist society on the basis of market competition. They are theoretically shallow people whose sole political experience has been gained in vote-trading and devising policies for capitalism. But surely many of their followers, some at least of whom will have joined Labour in revulsion against the market and profits, will see the absurdity of the position they are being asked to vote for.

Again dishonestly, the document explains that talk of “common ownership” only came about because "there was a genuine revulsion at the sheer anarchy and exploitation associated with the free market of Victorian capitalism”. The reference to “Victorian capitalism” is a clever piece of trickery, leading readers to assume that of course 1990s’ capitalism is free from economic anarchy, the exploitation of wage labour and the vandalism of “the free market”. Many Labour members and supporters will know just how much this applies to capitalism in 1995, especially when looked at as a global system.

We offer no advice to Labour's membership as to whether they vote for or against Clause Four. If it is retained the party’s leaders, including Blair, have already declared it to be meaningless and to have meant nothing to them for years. (So much for what is written on every' Labour Party membership card!) If it is scrapped the process of turning Labour into a more successful version of Owen’s SDP will be completed No self-respecting worker seeking the end of the market-capitalist economy will remain in the Labour Party.

Power at any cost

But there is one reason for supporting anything that Blair proposes, however dishonest, undemocratic, confused and at odds with what you actually believe it might be, and that is spelt out in the second paragraph of the document:

"There are those who will ask why it is necessary to have this debate. The answer is simple. We will not win an election unless we win the trust of the people. ”

But what precisely is winning “the trust of the people”? Is it really the case that millions of workers (who, oddly enough, have put Labour in a massive poll lead because they are so desperate to get rid of the Tories) are saying “Well, we would vote Labour, but not until they can convince us that they support a competitive market economy”? We think not. But you can be quite sure that the Murdoch Empire and the Stock Exchange are after a firm assurance. Remember, in the last election the crook’s own daily, the Financial Times, urged its readers to vote Labour. Blair’s job is to convince as many of these people as possible that his government can provide a low-taxed, low-waged, highly-policed competitive market economy in Britain. The increasingly obnoxious Daily Mirror on 30 January carried an editorial entitled “There's No Clause for Concern” in which readers are urged to "be cheered by (Blair’s) determination to create a just and equal society”. This is fraud, not that different from the tradition of the Mirror's unlamented old crook of a proprietor (himself an ex-Labour MP).

There will be those workers within the Labour Party who will reluctantly bow to their leaders and do simply anything to get a Labour government elected. Anything, they will tell themselves, must be better than the Tories. Must it? What about a party of Blair-led Labour-Tories, funded by union money and acting like recent Labour governments in Australia and New Zealand which, according to workers there, are worse, if anything, than their conservative rivals? Power at any cost is a very foolish course to adopt.

It is not as if there is no choice. There is a Socialist Party. Our Object is what any self-respecting and principled socialist would support. Tony Benn says that he will stick with the Labour Party until he dies: an act of dogmatic commitment worthy of religious zealotry. But what about workers who are young enough to want something more than loyalty to a dishonest capitalist party for their future? You owe it to yourselves to find out more about what genuine socialists are saying and doing.

Steve Coleman

Letter: A Campaign with Revolutionary Implications? (1995)

From the March 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

ALB’s review of Selma James's Marx and Feminism (Socialist Standard, December 1994) not only gives a misleading portrayal of a tradition which has made a valuable contribution to libertarian communist thought, but also displays the usual blind-spots present in much orthodox Marxist theorising (or lack of it) on the position of women under capitalism.

The Socialist Party may dismiss Wages for Housework as "conservative" and reformist.but I believe that they, together with the Autonomist Marxist tradition with which they are connected. have made the following critical interventions which have revolutionary implications:

(a) Selma James, together with Mariarosa Dalla Costa, was among the first to show how capitalism is founded not only on the capital/wage labour relationship but also on a hierarchy between waged and unwaged within the working-class. Thus capital “hides behind" the unpaid labour of those, usually women and people of colour, who carry out activities such as care-giving, cooking, cleaning, and basic food production, upon which "free" wage labour depends. Where these activities are provided in return for a wage, this usually involves the "super-exploitation" of labour-power as in the case of the so-called Third World where many women and men are paid far less than the average cost of meeting their subsistence needs. The production and reproduction of the commodity "labour power" is central, therefore, to the ongoing process of capital accumulation.

(b) Present day capitalism can usefully be seen as a "social factory" in which class struggle has spread to virtually all areas of everyday life, even as. numerically speaking, "wage labourers" have come to constitute a small minority of the world’s working-class. (The German sociologist Claudia von Werlhof has estimated that only 10-20 percent of the world’s working class are wage labourers "free" to sell their labour-power in return for a wage or salary. The rest, made up of women, subsistence producers. peasants and other "marginalised" labourers appear to be the "norm" despite what Eurocentric forms of Marxism would have us believe.) Resistance to capitalist domination, therefore, occurs in sites far removed from factory-based industrial production and trade unions: from women fighting against the introduction of reproductive technologies to the resistance of indigenous peoples to the forced enclosure of common land. In this respect. James and Dalla Costa have stressed the importance of recognising the diversity of working-class experience as well as the commonalities. They and other feminists have exploded the myth of the white, male, unionised wage labourer as the subject of Marxist analysis and agent of revolutionary change.

(c) Wages for Housework and the Autonomist Marxist tradition has consistently stressed the futility of reformism, particularly as it is embodied in unionism, labour parties. Leninism, and the “left” in general. They have been critical of those leftists who see the way forward as more jobs/full employment, more rational control of capitalist production disguised as "workers control", a social democratic government, or a vanguard party leading the masses to revolution. Selma James castigates feminists who "don't aim to destroy the capitalist social relation but only to organize it more rationally" while Mariarosa Dalla Costa has argued that those "who advocate that the liberation of the working-class woman lies in her getting a job outside the home are part of the problem, not the solution. Slavery to an assembly line is not a liberation from slavery to a kitchen sink" (Dalla Costa & James The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community. Bristol: Falling Wall Press. 1972. pp 2 and 33 respectively). The alternative this tradition poses is concurrent with other non-market communist traditions; the abolition of capitalist work (both waged and unwaged labour) and of the state, common ownership and production for human needs, and the encouragement of the fullest possible range of human creative activity unmediated by the capital class relationship.

(d) In arguing for the importance of the self-activity of the working-class. Wages for Housework argues against vanguardism and the centralised Party (with a capital "P") and for the development of autonomous organisations within the working-class. These have enabled women, for example, to challenge the sexism of male-dominated socialist organisations which have colluded, perhaps unintentionally, with capital and the state in rendering women's work socially invisible, "natural" and unproductive, and relegating to "side issues” any attempts by women to organise independently to challenge their exploitation. It is only by supporting the autonomy of various organisations throughout the circulation of struggles within the working class, that divisions can be overcome as a prerequisite for class unity and fundamental social change.

It is in the above respect that the campaign for Wages for Housework should be understood. not as just another single-issue reformist group. Rather than an end in itself, the campaign for a guaranteed income for women and men homeworkers is best looked at as a strategic intervention designed to expose patriarchal capitalism's dependence on the unpaid labour of women, and bring to the forefront some of the unique experiences and struggles faced by women as members of a divided working-class.

With their fixation on wage/salaried labour as the source of surplus value for the capitalist class, socialists (following Marx) have generally ignored the production and reproduction of labour-power and have historically accepted the false division between "private"/reproductive/unwaged work and "public"/productive/waged work imposed by capital on the working class. Furthermore the Socialist Party has always maintained that the only worthwhile vehicles for defending the living standards, wages, working conditions etc of the working class under capitalism are trade unions. The Socialist Standard continues to pay scant attention to forms of working-class struggle outside of unions, such as that waged by women in Wages for Housework. Such a monolithic class analysis does little to overcome the many divisions within the working class at the same time as it provides cannon fodder for those who feel that Marxism is now outmoded.

Feminists argue that the liberation of women entails more than simply the abolition of wage labour and the establishment of "free access" to wealth produced. It is quite possible, they argue, to conceive of a socialist society (as defined by the Socialist Party) where the wages system has been abolished yet an exploitative sexual division of labour continues to exist, where women continue to lack control over their bodies, sexuality, or reproductive rights, or where male violence continues on a substantial scale. We might, then, question ALB's assertion that "the energies of those who are. quite rightly, concerned about the economic dependence of women on men would be much better directed to campaigning for socialism”, and ask instead whether at least some of the energies of those socialists who are concerned about the liberation of women might be better employed listening to feminists. 

Julian Prior

Burnaby, Canada.

Reply:

The claim that the Wages for Housework Campaign is now a single-issue campaign for a reform within capitalism was based on the contents of the pamphlet Marx and Feminism itself and of the accompanying publicity material sent us by the publishers.

In the 1970s Selma James did talk about "class struggle”, "revolutionary action", “abolishing capitalism", etc (though not so much about abolishing wages, money and markets and instituting common ownership and production solely and directly to satisfy people’s needs) and she saw the launching of a campaign for "wages for housework" in this context.

We wouldn't deny — and weren’t concerned to deny — that James and others made some valid criticisms of the narrow definition of the working class (and so also of the agent of revolutionary change) held by Trotskyists, Leninists, Stalinists and other leftists. In defining the working class only as miners, dockers, factory workers, etc these excluded whole sections of the working class from being able to play a full role in the transformation of society and downgraded their problems and struggles to being marginal or secondary.

But this criticism didn't apply to us since we have always had a broad definition of the working class as all those excluded from the ownership and control of the means of production irrespective of the job they do (or don't do). OK. perhaps not so broad as to include "subsistence producers, peasants and indigenous peoples” but this issue has been discussed amongst our members.

Nor is it accurate to say that we have "always maintained that the only worthwhile vehicles for defending the living standards. wages. working conditions, etc of the working class under capitalism are trade unions". We may see trade unions as the main vehicles for doing this, but we don't exclude other organisations like tenants associations, claimants unions, student unions — or some women’s organisations such as those advising women of their legal rights or refuges for battered women. The Wages for Housework Campaign. however, does not enter into this category. It is a politically-motivated reformist group.

James came from an ex-Trotskyist tradition, but one which had not got rid of all the assumptions and methods of Trotskyism, in particular the so-called "transitional demand". This is a demand put forward by militants for discontented workers to struggle for but which the militants know full well is not achievable under capitalism: their hope is that when, as a result of their unsuccessful struggle, the discontented workers realise this they will turn against capitalism and become revolutionaries.

James's disagreement with the Trotskyists was not over whether or not to put forward "transitional demands" but over what these demands should be and at who they should be aimed. They favoured demands of a trade union-type like “indexisation of wages to prices". “35-hour week", "workers' control". She rejected this on the grounds that these demands could only be attractive to unionised, mainly male, factory workers and left out unwaged women doing housework as “the slave of a wage slave". The alternative she proposed was "wages for housework" as a transitional demand to mobilise women as an autonomous movement. independent of (and even opposed to) the Trade Union and Labour Movement.

We always rejected "transitional demands". As far as we are concerned they were just reforms. while the Socialist Party had been founded on the principle that a socialist organisation should not advocate reforms; this was not because we were against all reforms but because we recognise that reformism cannot solve the problems of the working class within capitalism and because of the effect we felt that campaigning for reforms would have on the socialist nature of the organisation. We argued that for it to campaign for reforms would attract the support of people who wanted reforms not socialism and that this would eventually lead to it becoming a reformist organisation.

The fate of the Wages for Housework Campaign which James helped set up over twenty years ago illustrates this perfectly.

Whatever might have been her original intention (and there is no reason to doubt that she then wanted to get rid of capitalism with its privileges for the few and exploitation and oppression for the many), the WFH Campaign has become a single-issue reformist pressure group.

The publicity material accompanying the review consisted of an interview of Selma James and Margaret Prescod in the Los Angeles Times of 7 May 1987, a news item from the same paper headlined “Bill Would Make Housework Count in Calculation of GNP" (12 December 1991), and an article on Selma James from the London Times of 19 February 1992.

All these articles have a common theme: that the payment by the state of money to women for doing housework is a demand that should, and can, be achieved within capitalism, and is in fact on the way to being realised thanks to successful lobbying by James and others of the United Nations, the European Parliament and the US House of Representatives. James is quoted as follows:

"There are. she says, two questions. women always ask when confronted by the concept of wages for housework. "Who will pay for it?" and "Will we ever get it?' Her answers are "Trident" — she would siphon off the entire military budget to pay for unremunerated labour — and "Yes'. 

Her optimism springs from existing welfare provisions. "Child benefit and income support are forms of recognition that women working in the home have an entitlement to wages, even though it is not enough. Those benefits are creeping wages for housework and after you creep you walk, after you walk you run." (Times, 19 February 1992)

.

A far cry from what she was saying in the 1970s. Now it’s the inevitability of gradualism. We once heard somebody (not a member of the Socialist Party) describe "wages for housework" as a “crap demand". His point was that if you were going to make such a demand on the state you might as well demand a basic state income for everybody. We said you might as well establish socialism, at least that was achievable.

There are feminists and feminists. Some (most, these days?) feminists wouldn’t know what you were talking about if you mentioned "the abolition of the wages system" and "free access": they are concerned with getting women an equal chance to compete in the rat-race that capitalism is and to scramble to the top of the heap if they can. Or, in a language they wouldn't understand. to turn women from unequal wage slaves and from “slaves to wage slaves" into "equal wage slaves” with men.

Other feminists may well be able to conceive of a socialist society in which discrimination and oppression of women continued. Well, we can't and we're socialists and they're not. Socialism involves people voluntarily co-operating to produce and distribute wealth and to run their common affairs on a democratic basis, with free access for all to the things they need to live and enjoy life. Under these circumstances there would be no economic pressures on women to put up with discriminatory or oppressive practices: women could simply walk away from them and still have free access to what they needed. So there’d be no basis for their continued existence. In fact the feminist — and indeed socialist aim — of women’s equality is only going to be fully realised in a socialist society.

Editors.

World View: Teetering on the brink (1995)

General Sani Abacha

From the March 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Nigeria is on the threshold. Chaos and the demons of war, of anarchy and hell are gathering imperceptibly . . . the best minds have fled. Hunger wanders the highway. Corruption has become a god. Distrust lurks everywhere and cynicism pollutes the air.”

Thus wrote Ben Okri in the Guardian last 6 September. The image is immediately one of impending doom, a nightmare scenario. Okri’s words, though, were not overly pessimistic, for in the January 1995 issue of New African, they were echoed by Pini Jason who described the situation in Nigeria as a "chillingly frightening regression into absolute despotism".

Okri and Jason were both referring to the terror now felt by tens of millions of Nigerians, a terror made all the worse by a world that watches from die sidelines, as witnessed most recently in Rwanda.

In August 1994, General Sani Abacha, Nigeria's “leader", overturned what legal rights Nigerians had enjoyed by forcing through some of the most repressive decrees ever known in Nigeria. He earned himself the title of dictator (in every sense of the word) by firstly passing a decree that places himself and his regime above the law. He went on to make anti-Abacha opinions illegal, curbed the right to free assembly and abolished several human rights associations. Were that not enough, Abacha banned three opposition newspapers. dissolved the executive bodies of the Nigerian Labour Congress and the oil-workers unions, and lengthened the period a prisoner can be detained without charge to three months.

The decrees were, of course, pathetically justified by Abacha last November. In a broadcast a year after he came to power in November 1993. he declared his intentions were "to halt the drift towards anarchy . . . to strengthen our security system, revitalise respect for law and order and to restore faith among the citizens whose confidence has been stressed by political crisis in the country" (Quoted in West Africa, 28 November/ 4 December 1994.)

Annulled election

Since independence from Britain in October 1960. Nigerians have known nothing but "political crisis". The country has witnessed coups, counter-coups and internal military coups on six occasions: January 1966. July 1966.1975. 1976. 1983 and 1985.

The June 1993 elections, supposedly the fairest ever witnessed in Nigeria, were initiated by General Ibrahim Babanginda who had ruled the country since 1985. However, when only half of the result had been declared, Babanginda had the count stopped and the election annulled. The reason? Opposition leader Chief Moshood Abiola was storming ahead, capitalising on his promises to build more schools and health centres, to provide cleaner drinking water, cheaper food and improved roads. He was detained shortly after the elections. A leaked military statement later declared that Abiola had secured 58 percent of votes cast.

Arguably, the main reason why Abiola is not president is that he is a southerner, for in Nigeria the same north/south hostilities abound that were in existence at the time of the Biafra war.

Babanginda, however, was soon chased out of office. He was replaced by a civilian, Ernest Shonekar, who went a similar way when the state court ruled his office illegal. It was then that Abacha stepped forward and took power and. with it, brought Nigeria to the brink of ruin.

Abacha is guilty of untold human rights violations. But this does not seem to bother the governments of other countries much. The EU and the US might have imposed the token sanctions, but this did not stop Britain selling tanks and other military hardware to Abacha. The fact is that Britain has always sided with such northern tyrants in times of duress. More, the British High Commission have given their blessing to the judiciary set up to try Abiola.

Oil revenues

Between May and June last year Abacha ordered his army into southeastern Nigeria to destroy the villages of and murder, the Ogoni people. The Ogoni people number some 500,000 but it is to their great misfortune that the land they occupy is also the site of 112 of Nigeria’s 138 oilfields.

For years the Ogoni have protested against the environmental pollution caused by oil production, at the smoggy atmosphere they live in. at the contaminated soil they till — they are an agricultural people — and at their rivers choked with oil run-offs. They have every reason to protest. Nigeria is the largest gas-flaring country in the world. Some 16.8 billion cubic metres of natural gas are flared annually. The acid rain this produces is only matched by the region’s oil spills — 573 spills between January 1986 and May 1992.

The protests reached a high point in late 1992 and in reaction Shell Nigeria put a hold on oil production in Ogoniland and pulled out most of its staff.

In retaliation for this sudden loss of vital revenue, a certain Major P. Okunomo called for a “ruthless military operation” against the Ogoni. sending in 400 troops to stifle protests and opposition to oil production. Not only did the soldiers destroy dozens of villages and kill hundreds of the Ogoni people, they carried out military sabotage against various oil installations in the hope that the Ogoni would get the blame.

Oil provides Nigeria with 95 percent of its foreign exchange and has been the stake in Nigeria’s conflicts since 1966. The country makes some $6 billion a year from oil sales. During the Gulf War. the Babanginda regime made a staggering $12 billion from oil sales — money yet to be accounted for. None of it, however, seems to have benefited the people, least of all the Ogoni. At present 85 percent of the Ogoni are unemployed. They have seven doctors between them (remember they number 500000), a literacy rate of 10 percent and infant mortality stands at 40 per 1.000 births.

In the past twelve months there have been strikes by oil workers and medical workers, aimed directly at the Abacha regime, in a country already teetering on the brink of an economic calamity.

Western capitalists can only look on shrug their shoulders and tut; Nigeria, after all is still Africa — "the white man’s burden”. As one New African writer commented last October: “The international community showed with its reluctant response to Rwanda that it is tired of Africa’s problems."

Socialists, on the other hand, can only imagine how “tired" Africa is of capitalism. and how so utterly tired Nigerians must be of the cabal that rules that country in the interests of capitalism. 

John Bissett

World View: Learning the real lesson of Auschwitz (1995)

From the March 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fifty years ago saw the liberation of those who remained the victims of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. Its remembrance is important, but torturing ourselves with memories without learning from them can be next to useless.

The whining tones of the clerics of various unreasoning faiths urge us to remember the inhumanity that is within all of us. Every baby, say those who want to deliver us from "sin", is an embryonic Nazi. We reject such anti-human nonsense. Of course, humans are born with a capacity to behave co-operatively or callously and, depending upon environmental factors, can exhibit both characteristics. But humans are uniquely social animals, dependent upon one another for survival. To say that inhumane barbarity of the kind practised in the concentration camps is "within us all" is to say no more than that all humans can be driven to defy their social nature.

Stalinist Gulags

The gas chambers of Auschwitz, like the Stalinist gulags and countless other monuments to inhumanity, are not reflections of what humans naturally are, but of what we can become under certain historical circumstances. The lesson we must learn is not to repeat those circumstances.

There were no prisons, gas chambers. torture machines or genocidal experiments within the earliest tens of thousands of years of human history. We call these people primitives, but they were not Nazis or Stalinists. Faced with any army ready for the murderous task of battle they would have looked on with human incomprehension.

For most of human history there were no property relationships. There were no nations or states. Modern mass murder, be it organised warfare or organised ethnic killings, is a product of property society and the resulting ideologies of nationalism, racism and religious tribalism.

German workers supported the Nazis in specific historical conditions which were exclusively connected with the property system of capitalism. Fascistic feelings were not “within them", but were responses to a world which they felt they could not control. Without capitalism there could be no Nazism, just as state capitalism lay the ground for Stalinist thuggery and butchery.

Today we see the same system causing the same effects. From Bosnia to Rwanda to East Timor literally hundreds of thousands of people have been murdered because workers have yet to learn the real lesson of Auschwitz.

If there is to be any hope out of the tragedy of the holocaust it will come when enough of us say not merely "Never Again", but organise consciously to ensure that the soil within which future death camps can be planned is removed from the landscape of our history.

Steve Coleman

Instability and Corruption (1995)

From the March 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is now almost universally accepted that politicians aspiring
 to positions of power do so on the failings of those already in 
power rather than on any ideas of their own. Everywhere we 
look in the world today capitalism is in chaos - and it isn't
 going to get any better.

It seems that the more capitalism develops the more anarchic the global as system becomes, with chaotic economic development in such areas as China's free enterprise zones and the mad scramble for power in the wars of Soviet succession. In the West so-called democracy just seems to lead to confusion as politicians are unable to solve basic economic and social problems. As people have not yet identified capitalism as the real cause of these problems, the latest set of incumbent politicians are blamed, as if the next lot have the magic formula.

So in France we have seen the “Socialist" government and parliamentary representatives decimated in elections as unemployment and crime rise, to be replaced by a right-wing government who in turn are incapable of solving economic problems and will probably be replaced by a resurgent left. Whilst in Italy a government elected on a specific anti-corruption ticket has collapsed through corruption allegations and a confused electorate are prepared to vote in desperation for extremist parties.

The list could go on, so in this context the convoluted events in Ireland do not seem so surprising. The fact that Ireland's electoral system, in common with much of Europe, creates coalitions means that frequent changes of government are common as partners in these coalitions squabble. In Ireland the specific causes of that squabbling in recent years revolved around the main coalition partner, Fianna Fail, and its cosy relationship with Ireland's largest beef baron and how that relationship upset the “normal” running of government business, irritating the other coalition parties.

Having already caused one general election this underlying feeling quickly soured another coalition, this time between Fianna Fail and an electorally confident Labour Party. The catalyst that broke this coalition, as everyone probably knows by now, was the inexplicable delay by the Irish Attorney General's office to extradite a paedophile priest to Northern Ireland, and the insistence of Fianna Fail to promote the very man responsible for this delay. The catalogue of excuses, blame and backbiting that ensued meant that the coalition was doomed. This bizarre story finally ended with a parliamentary coalition reshuffle excluding Fianna Fail and the introduction of Democratic Left into the coalition to make up the numbers.

Political instability and corruption seem to be endemic to governments but whatever the specific causes of each incidence of graft or dispute the general underlying cause is capitalism.

Never-ending search for profit

Capitalism as an economic system is inherently unstable for a number of

reasons.

• It is based on the never-ending search for profits through competition, which manifests itself as rivalry between companies, regions and social and economic interest groups. Just the fact that the world is divided into about two hundred countries at the last count is example enough. The majority of them are divided again into numerous regions each with their own elites who in turn are divided into various factions due to historical, cultural or regional developments. This can only result in unequal economic development as resources go to areas of greatest potential profit or patronage rather than to areas of greatest economic need. This economic confusion and instability caused by capitalism leads to threatened or actual armed conflict between economic rivals on a grim and regular basis.
• The economic cycle of boom and slump caused by the tendency of capitalism to over-produce during a boom and thus reduce the rate of profit causing a slump. This cycle tends to hit the most economically and socially vulnerable harder in a slump and benefit the wealthy most in a boom.
• The division of society into two opposing and unequal classes. The minority owns the means of production and obtains profit by extracting unpaid labour from the majority who have only their labour power to sell. This fundamental difference of needs automatically results in conflict, class conflict, a never-ending, daily war of attrition that manifests itself in various ways. The most obvious is continual industrial disputes throughout every sector of the capitalist economy as workers attempt to defend or improve their economic position and are resisted at every step by the employers intent on improving their profit margins.

Thus, because the economic base of society is unstable, it is logical to assume that the social and political structure which rests on this base is also unstable. The facts prove this assumption correct. The supposed separation of powers in liberal democratic governments between the judiciary, legislature and executive, rather than acting as checks and balances on each other, are just the tools or conduits through which rival groups compete for access to power and resources. Indeed the American government, which is supposed to be the prime example of the separation of powers, can also be the prime example of a government in thrall to graft and corruption from lowly congressmen up to the President and riven by rivalry between the regions and social groups.

So what of the future? Well it's business as usual. The political theatre may provide entertainment but, as one economic commentator mentioned at the height of the crisis, who is in government has very little impact on the workings of the capitalist system. The iron laws of competition, profit and class conflict will remain as long as capitalism remains together with the disastrous global ramifications that this entails.

Jonathan Meakin

These FoolishThings . . . (1995)

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

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

Corporate loyalty

“In El Segundo, California, just before Christmas, Mattel, the toy manufacturer, made some announcements. Dividends would increase, the company would have record sales and earnings for the sixth year in a row, the balance sheet was strong and getting even better.

“Also, the company would eliminate 1,000 jobs, about four per cent of its work force . . . The deal most workers thought they had — that their jobs would be safer and wages higher if thing were good at the factory — is over”. New York Times.

True courage

“I wore my fur coat to Salisbury's at the weekend and one lady came over to congratulate me on being so courageous,” says Aliza Claremont, director of a lingerie company. Robyn Opie, proprietor of a West End nail salon, says: “I have a full-length silver fox — a serious fur coal — that I walk to work every' morning, and I haven’t had the slightest bit of hassle". Mail on Sunday, 15 January.

Dazed and confused

Paratrooper Lee Clegg who was convicted of shooting and killing a joyrider in a stolen car in 1990, said: “The irony is that, if war broke out tomorrow I would have been willing to lay down my life for these pillars of society who have sent me to prison for life for acting in accordance with my training and regulations.”

Learning

From a local headmaster’s newsletter to parents: “Behind these crimes [junk culture] against education are the profits of big business — large firms and their shareholders . . . They are also the people whose voices are loudest in complaining about education standards. Hypocrisy rules.”

“It’s a free country”

“Britain’s prisons are behind the state of play in our security conscious department stores and town centres . . . Seeing how the outside is actually becoming more like an open prison, the prison system will have at least to try to catch up”. Nigel Burke, Guardian, 19 January.

The Scavenger

SPGB Meetings (1995)

Party News from the March 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Press Exposure: Sun Stroke (1995)

The Press Exposure column from the March 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nothing was more memorable in Dennis Potter's interview on the South Bank Show, shortly before he died last year, than when he revealed the name he had given to the cancer which was killing him. It was Rupert — after Rupert ("I’d shoot the bugger if I could") Murdoch. I look at the Sun said Potter, warming to his theme and I ask myself is this what we've come to.

Well yes. except that there’s a bit more to it than that. What we’ve "come to" is not just a malignant press baron and a newspaper which will stoop as low as it needs to boost its sales. We've "come to" a situation in which a quarter of the population lives below a Department of Social Security poverty line. A situation in which Shelter are handling a record caseload as more and more people are homeless. A situation in which the publisher of a string of soft porn magazines (the kind of man who is always liable to be "exposed" by the Sun) says he is flooded with requests from women anxious to pose for his publications. Because that's their only way of getting a living.

This situation — its poverty, misery, degradation — is not new. We have not "come to" it because we have lived with it for a very long time, however its details may have changed. How do we cope with it? Well one way is to understand it as the symptoms of a social system which is outworn and sick at its roots and which must be replaced by a fundamentally different way of running the world. Another way (but we would have to be like Rupert Murdoch) is to say we're doing very nicely so we’d like to leave things as they are. Or (if we're among Murdoch's devoted customers) we can defend our sanity with the kind of mental anaesthetic which makes the trivial important and vice versa. Flavour the anaesthetic with a large measure of fantasy and we "come to" the Sun.

Murdoch's odious rag was originally the Daily Herald which, owned 49 percent by the TUC, was the Labour Party’s only reliable supporter — and. in the 1930s, the biggest-selling newspaper in Britain. In the 1950s the Herald fell on hard times and in 1961 it was bought by Cecil King’s IPC group, which guaranteed it another seven years’ publication. In 1964, in an effort to stem falling sales, the paper was revamped as the Sun, with a large orange blob on its masthead. By the end of IPC's guarantee it was seen that the Sun could not survive and it was again up for sale. Robert Maxwell offered to take the paper off IPC's hands for nothing but fell foul of union opposition. This let in Murdoch, who already owned the News Of The World; in 1969 he got the Sun for the knockdown price of £800,000. It now makes him millions every year, the kind of profits which can easily stand expensive libel suits, like the one which made Elton John richer by £1 million and a grudging apology in the Sun.

Regal Pomposity

It takes the breath away now, but Murdoch's Sun promised to be a paper "that cares — passionately — about the truth, beauty and justice". Its editor was Larry Lamb, whose regal pomposity was in sharp contrast to the loud boorish cruelty of the man who succeeded him. Kelvin Mackenzie was diabolically clever at rapidly setting out the shock horror stuff which passes for news in the Sun. And he did not seem greatly troubled about whether what he was setting out with such skill was true or not.

Since then the Sun has been synonymous with the lowest standards of journalism and concern for human society. Page Three girls present a relentless distortion of our sexuality, hyped-up by the kind of puns which are a speciality of the paper. (A recent example was the invitation to readers to give their opinion on Princess Diana's new wet-look hairstyle in a "RefHAIRrendum".)

The sanitised semi-nudity of Page Three girls and cartoons — like a recent example in which a policeman was apparently having oral sex through a car window with a well-known TV actress — do not prevent the Sun sometimes taking a stridently moral stance on sex. Double standards are something the paper takes in its stride. Like the time it invented an interview with the widow of a soldier — Sergeant MacKay — who had been killed winning the Victoria Cross in the Falklands. As "The Paper That Supports Our Boys" the Sun might have been expected to respect Mrs MacKay's wish to be left alone in her grief. Instead they tried every trick in the book to get at her and then simply invented an interview out of information from other people and a rehash of material published by other papers.

We could go on. And on. The headlines (Gotcha; Stick It Up Your Junta; Up Yours Delors). The relentless hounding of vulnerable people like the dying Russell Harty. These are what have made the Sun such a success, with a daily sale of four million and a readership three times as much. For it as an extremely clever and sophisticated newspaper, whose success says a lot about capitalism in the latter part of the twentieth century. A malignant mouthpiece of a cancerous society.

Ivan

50 Years Ago: Looking Back and Looking Forward (1995)

The 50 Years Ago column from the March 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

A sign of the times is that with Russia a first-class Power, represented at "Big Three"conferences, the Communist Party falls into line as defender of the Allied capitalisms (including, of course. Russian State Capitalism). Last time it was the "right wing” labour leaders (denounced by those who later formed the Communist Party) who supported capitalist campaigns to get the workers to work harder and join in the scramble for more trade. Now it is Mr Harry Pollitt who "has sent an appeal to all his mining members to speed up coal production" (Daily Express, February 19th). The Express report continues:-

  "His [Pollitt's] more serious concern, however, is that lack of British coal supplies for devastated European countries will delay the fruits of victory, and substitution of American and South African coal supplies may permanently injure British export markets"

(From the editorial in Socialist Standard, March 1945)

Ich Bin Ein Scheissburger (1995)

The A Word in Your Ear column from the March 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

There was a time when you could write what you liked about hamburgers, but to publish so much as a disloyal phrase against the Royal Family was out of bounds. (John Wilkes was sentenced to prison for it.) These days you can say what you like about the Royals, ranging from TV puppets of a dypso Princess Margaret to assertions that the Queen Mother has at last found her way from pompous arrogance to ill-concealed dotage; the Windsors will turn a blind eye to such home truths on the basis, we must assume, that when your entire function is to be conspicuously useless all publicity is good publicity. Call the Queen a bitch and a parasite and no guardsman will turn up on your doorstep, sword in hand, ready to defend the good name of the Crown. Say bad things about McDonald's hamburgers, on the other hand, and you’ll end up in the Old Bailey.

We’re no fools: this column will burst its edges with praise for the unadulterated culinary plague which has descended upon our class in the name of “fast food” Slithers of meat-like stuff with processed tomatoes, artificially-coloured sauces and enough chemicals to give Saddam Hussein a run for his money in any dirty war: Yum! Yum! Cancel the table at the Ritz — and make mine a double cheese topping with a big bag of chips — now called “fries" in case anyone might have thought they were cooked healthily. To be eaten without so much as a knife and fork (let it never be said that our masters have pretended to accord us dignity) and there you have a fast-food feast for the inferior.

The Big Mac logo is now shown in more places world-wide than any other apart from Coke’s. Eat a Big Mac with a carton of coke (allegedly leading to teeth-rot as well as an assault on your guts) and you will be playing your own horrible part in an Empire of Logos which leaves the swastika a mere bit player in history. (If only Goebbels had considered adding sugar to the sauerkraut and marketing it in stale buns.) When Western “freedom” came to Moscow it flew under the McDonalds flag of convenience.

What the Sun is to literacy Big Macs are to decent food, but that should not disguise the fact that before the Sun there was the Mirror and the Mail, and before anyone ever thought of “eating out in style" (poverty-style, to be precise) there were packaged steak pies without steak in them, skate and chips dripping with grease and, the staple diet of every self-romanticised wage slave, bread 'n’ dripping. In short, for most of recent history the working class has been expected to eat trash.

These days supermarkets contrive to invent more exotic names for their frozen portions of packaged fodder The "Mexican Delite” (spelt to warn that it’s a con) to the frozen chicken korma (mild) and “Italian lasagne” (not to be confused with Latvian lasagne, in case you were looking for that) all taste like one single pre-digested mush. The toad has fallen out of the hole in most supermarket packets, gone to find its market in your new high street Toad-U-Like or Spud-U-Like (yes, they’ve actually persuaded wage slaves to pay a quid for a potato in its jacket). What is this but the sour taste of profit before need? The truth is that the average medieval peasant ate better than the modern wage slave.

Each week in the Sunday Times the odious Michael Winner ululates in the name of criticism against selected five-star restaurants where the food was not just as it should be for the rich and privileged. Winner whines when his lobster doesn’t screech loud enough as it hits the boiling water and is merciless on any waiter who can’t get him just the right wine at just the right temperature from just the right part of France. As an advanced guard into the eating establishments of the snobs and parasites, Winner is your man. His critical hammer is not applied to the likes of Burger King whoppers, Chicken McNuggets and Kentucky Fried Cholesterol. Presumably Winner is aware that any old garbage is good enough for the Losers of the wealth-producing class.

It is costing McDonald’s £5,000 a day to mount their current libel case — the longest in British history — against the two victims who dared to publish a leaflet saying that their food was lousy, probably causes cancer and is produced by workers under super-exploited conditions. Anyone with a spare afternoon in central London should go along and laugh at the Big Mac’s briefs embarrassing themselves in public. (For example, they spent tens of thousands of dollars flying over from America expert witnesses to prove that McDonald's contain nutrients — only for them to admit under cross-examination that all food contains nutrients.)

Working on the old dictum that you are what you eat, might we conclude that the class who order quails eggs regard the class who can afford Big Macs as being a load of . . . old scheiss, if you’ll pardon my German “I am a hamburger" declared JFK in a moment of identity crisis. “Let them eat crap”, says Ronald McDonald, "and a free photo of Princess Di in the raw for every teenager ordering large fries.”

Steve Coleman

Change the Record (1995)

TV Review from the March 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Political programmes on TV are generally as brainless as the major political parties themselves. However, it must be an unenviable task to create a watchable and interesting TV experience with such a paucity of raw material. There are only so many times you can run items about Tony Blair and the Labour modernisation or the Euro-rift within the Conservative Party.

Despite this, TV producers seem to have been queuing up recently to make the politicians look interesting. One such attempt, House to House, Channel Four’s weekday lunchtime effort, is set in a large restaurant in London's Millbank to give it that extra air of seriousness (luncheon is, after all, where all the great political fixes are concocted and where gossip is fermented). The producers of this programme have got it sussed — it is always going to be much easier to entice MPs to the familiar surroundings of an eating-house round the corner from Westminster than it is to a sweaty studio on the other side of London.

As its title suggest, House to House concentrates on Parliamentary affairs and the legislative programme, and does so solidly and without imagination. It is serious stuff, though still slightly more exhilarating than watching Alan Titchmarsh on Pebble Mill at the same time on BBC I.

Rather more interesting, at least at first sight, is BBC2’s The Midnight Hour, an end-of-day political bun-fight which often gives the impression of being a rather ill-tempered editorial conference on one of the broadsheets. This is partly because its hosts tend to be rather bad-tempered journalists and press people (notably Bernard Ingham and Andrew Neil) and partly because the guests are required to take their jackets off before being seated at the debating table. Roy Hattersley has commented after his first appearance that this boded ill from the start, and has since claimed that The Midnight Hour is the worst political TV programme he's ever had the misfortune to appear on. He is probably being rather harsh. Regular viewers of this programme — if it has any — will have noticed a splendid back-projection of a marine fish tank in one corner of the room. The fish tank might not be quite as colourful as Bernard Ingham's braces, but one suspects that the fish perform a rather more useful function at this time of the day than the braces' owner has at any stage in his particular career.

A load of ecus

One of the longest-running political programmes is BBCI’s Sunday On the Record, now hosted by John Humphreys. Its former host, Jonathan Dimbleby, hot-foot from his successful toadying to Prince Charles, has swopped sides to take over from Brian Walden for ITV. On 29 January On the Record decided to hit back at Dimbleby with an action-packed, hyper-charged edition on the European Single Currency. Well, at least they made a better fist of it than they normally do.

The theme was that it was 1996 and some of the European Union states had decided to go ahead with a single currency. Britain was to have a referendum, with two opposing cross-party campaigns vying for the attention and support of the populace. In the Yes camp were those two intellectual giants of the TV age, Roy Hattersley (again) and Edwina Currie. Opposing them were the Tory Euro- sceptic Iain Duncan-Smith — a protege of the Chingford skinhead Norman Tebbitt — and veteran Labour Keynesian Peter Shore. Their objective, pursued via Party political-style broadcasts made with the help of advertising agencies and then via some cross-questioning of the teams, was to convince an evenly-split audience of the efficacy of their case. Not surprisingly, the No campaign won handsomely. This was not principally because of the latent nationalistic tendencies of the audience, though this may have played a small part, but because of the total and transparent economic illiteracy of Hattersley and Currie.

The entire exercise demonstrated something socialists have known for years — it is far easier to knock down proposals for running capitalism than build up new ones. Without doubt, the Euro-sceptics were able to effectively demolish the argument that a single European currency — if it is possible — would be an economic panacea. The Yes camp responded with an appeal to transcend narrow nationalism, their most positive argument of all, but with an electorate that largely votes with its wallet in mind, this cut little ice next to woeful tales of the ERM disaster, impossible convergence criteria and the enormously wasteful Common Agricultural Policy. It was simply a case of one group of reformists being outmanoeuvred by another set, largely because the proposals of the Euro-sceptics themselves were not under any real scrutiny.

So On the Record has done something useful at last, short of having socialists on. The latest reformist panacea for capitalism, when put to the test, was found wanting. Hattersley. Currie and their ilk were debunked.

Of more than passing interest was that the programme also showed up the deep division between the capitalist class and its representatives on such a central political issue. All the major newspapers produced a dummy-run edition for the programme with their views on a single currency, and they were divided too. The Sun and the Times were against, the Daily Mirror and the Independent for. The Guardian, under its forward-looking new editorial team, couldn’t make its mind up. So the capitalist class and its leading thinkers continue to dither when faced with the non-alternatives, and well they might.

Having convinced an audience that genuine political and economic unity is a pipe-dream so long as we are stuck with the anarchic and class-riven capitalist economy, perhaps On the Record can go one step further next time and demonstrate the absurdities propounded by the Euro-sceptic supporters of capitalism too. The nonsense emanating from both sides will then have cancelled itself out. preparing the way for socialists to put the genuine alternative. Now that really would be worth watching, and might even stir the fish on BBC2.

Dave Perrin

Editors' note: The fish, as well as the viewers, remained unstirred by The Midnight Hour and it has since been axed.

Dispensing with politicians (1995)

Pamphlet Review from the March 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ulster's Protestant Working Class: A community exploration (Island Pamphlets No. 9,
 Island Publications. 132 Serpentine Road.
Newtonabbey, Co. Antrim 
BT36 7JQ. £1.50.)

In an age when the realities of class politics are too often being cast aside for the so-called "politics of identity" (women’s politics, gay pride, community campaigns, black power, regionalism and the rest) it is satisfying to see that a discussion has been generated amongst some ’’protestant” workers in Belfast’s Greater Shankill area which recognises that, whatever they are, they are workers first.

The pamphlet reflects an ongoing discussion and not a clear-cut case, but we can detect within that discussion statements from which socialists can take heart:

 "Republicans have long promoted the notion that the Protestant community was much better off than the Catholic community. This 'half-myth' retained its potency because Protestants even believed it themselves. The reality was that whatever privileges the Protestant working class was 'granted' were merely 'crumbs from the table' - it simply suited certain people to tell us that these 'crumbs’ had to be held on to at all cost."
  "All a Unionist candidate had to do was appear at a street-corner, wave the Union Jack, shout ‘This we will maintain', and he was as good as elected. Those days have to be brought to an end. It’s time we called our politicians to account for failing to address our real needs."

It’s time that Northern Irish wage slaves dispensed with politicians, be they Unionist nationalists or Republican nationalists, and recognised that only the abolition of wage slavery, which is the real source of cramped and miserable lives, will remove the situation where workers can be persuaded to fight and kill one another over crumbs.

Steve Coleman

Common Ownership — the Party hasn’t begun (1995)

From the March 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Under the heading "The Party's Over" the Spectator (14 January) published a leading article on the Labour Party and its Clause Four. The article contains a generous number of unwarranted statements and false assumptions, but is mainly of interest because of the rhetorical questions it puts:

• "Without it [Clause Four], what, distinctively, does the Labour Party have to stand for?”
• “What does that modest aspiration [running capitalism more efficiently and less stupidly] have to do with anything recognisable as a socialist party?"
• "Mr Blair's problem is that if Labour is not struggling to achieve the collectivist paradise of which its founders dreamt, what is there to unite the party, other than the mere desire for political power?"

The leader writer’s fundamental error (and we credit him with error rather than knowing distortion) is that common ownership means collectivisation or nationalisation. He asserts that experiments in common ownership have failed everywhere they have been tried, bringing destruction and impoverishment. The "experiments" he lists are Stalin’s collectivisation of agriculture, the nationalisation of the British car industry, and for good measure he throws in the names of Mao Tse-Tung, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, Leonid Brezhnev and Tony Benn.

None of these “experiments" or "experimenters" has anything to do with common ownership. They were, or represent, ways in which capitalism — the system of wage-labour and capital, the working class and the owning or privileged class — can be reformed, allegedly in the interest of the majority. The “experiments" have failed to achieve that limited objective. But they have not failed to achieve common ownership because they have not had that aim.

The writer does show some signs of understanding what common ownership is: "everything is shared and individuals’ activities are organised by, and for the benefit of, the community". This is not how we would prefer to put it, because it implies that the community is somehow apart from the individuals who make it up, but it’s clearly not collectivisation or nationalisation. And the writer also recognises the existence of the class struggle and how it might be ended: "The only way to overcome the fundamental conflict between the two classes was for the workers to take possession of the economy, and run it for themselves."

It is not a question of the common ownership party being over - it hasn’t begun. It can begin, just as soon as there are enough socialist partygoers. To clarify the answers to the Spectator's questions:

• With or without Clause Four, the Labour Party stands only as the B team to run capitalism.
• This has, of course, nothing to do with what the Socialist Party stands for, which is genuine common ownership.
• Because Labour is not struggling to achieve common ownership (socialism), there is nothing to unite it other than the mere desire for political power.

Stan Parker

The Full Fruits of their Industry (1995)

From the March 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Labour Party leadership has embarked on a course which it hopes will end in the abandonment of its Clause Four. Those in the Labour Party who see themselves as socialists are up in arms with the familiar chant of "betrayal", but, what exactly is being betrayed?

Tony Blair’s campaign to get rid of Clause Four has had one unfortunate effect from his point of view: to initiate a discussion on what exactly it means, indeed on what Socialism is. The full version of the Clause has appeared a number of times on the front pages of the broadsheets. It reads:

 “To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that maybe possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production. distribution and exchange and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.”

As we have pointed out, if it wasn’t for the reference to the common ownership of the “means of exchange”, ie of banks and insurance companies (which, ironically, wasn’t in the original 1918 version), this would be a passable, if somewhat wordy definition of Socialism. Socialism does mean “the common ownership of the means of production” and it does mean “the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service” But the reference to the means of exchange shows that the intention was not to commit the Labour Party to Socialism but only to establishing State Capitalism, or the nationalisation of capitalist industry which would continue to be run on capitalist lines only by a state-appointed board rather than by private capitalist firms.

Labour Theory of Value

In an article in the Independent (1 December) Andrew Marr submitted the Clause to a line-by-line analysis. Commenting on the opening passage about securing for the workers “the full fruits of their industry”, he wrote:

  “Full fruits implies hostility to all profits, indeed to joint-stock companies as such; it relies on Marx‘s discredited labour theory of value. ”

“Full fruits” does indeed imply hostility to all profits, seen as a deduction from what labour produces. But this view goes back well beyond Marx to . . . Adam Smith, who wrote that “labour is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities” (Wealth of Nations, Book I, chapter V). Smith also wrote:

  “As soon as stock has accumulated in the hands of particular persons, some of them will naturally employ it in selling to work industrious people, whom they will supply with materials and subsistence, in order to make a profit by the sale of their work, or by what their labour adds to the value of the materials . . .  The value which the workmen add to the materials, therefore, resolves itself in this case into two parts, of which one pay's their wages, the other the profits of their employer upon the whole stock of materials and wages which he advanced” (Book I, chapter VI).

This is clear enough: in transforming raw materials into some commodity that can be sold, labour adds value to them; this value is the source of both the wages they are paid and the profits of their employer. Profits, in other words, are produced by labour. So said Adam Smith, the apostle of free-market capitalism, though this is so embarrassing to the fanatics of the Adam Smith Institute that they never mention it.

So the labour theory of value has a pedigree which ought to be unimpeachable for defenders of capitalism. It has to be said, however, that Adam Smith and his successors, precisely because they were supporters of capitalism, got themselves into all sorts of contradictions. They wanted to justify the capitalist profit system as the best possible, indeed as the only natural economic system, yet the labour theory of value which they accepted out of intellectual honesty implied that profits were a deduction from what labour produced and that capitalism was therefore based on the robbery of the producers.

There were only two ways out of this contradiction. One was to abandon the labour theory of value. The other was to accept that the capitalist system was based on the exploitation of labour and should therefore be abolished.

Ending exploitation
Supporters of capitalism chose the first course, so that by the middle of the last century the labour theory of value had become “discredited” in respectable circles. Supporters of the workers — while Marx was still in short trousers — chose the second course. But they didn't quite get it right. They argued that the alternative to capitalism was a system that would ensure that every individual worker got the “full product of their labour”; this was to be done by pricing goods according to the amount of labour-time required to produce them and giving the workers who produced them a quantity of labour notes that would enable them to acquire the full labour-time equivalent of what they had produced. Under this scheme there would be no profit; all that was produced would go, in one form or another, to the producers.

What Marr in his profound ignorance of Marx’s views is unaware of is that Marx is on record as attacking the idea that each worker could be ensured the “undiminished proceeds” of their labour. A whole section of his Critique of the Gotha Programme adopted by the German Social Democrats in 1875 was devoted to exposing the absurdity of the idea that each individual worker could be given the “full product” of his or her contribution to the co-operative labour of the whole labour force (even supposing this could be measured).

In a socialist society deductions from this would have to be made for such things as the resources to be devoted to the replacement and expansion of the means of production, the general administration of society and the maintenance of those unable to work because of youth, old age, sickness or disability.

The only context, in fact, in which the phrases “full fruits" or “full product” or "undiminished proceeds” make sense is that of the whole community enjoying the full fruits of the collective co-operative labour of its working members; which in practice means allowing every member of the community an equal right to satisfy their own personally-decided needs. And, to be fair to Clause Four, this is quite compatible with the phrase “full fruits of their labour and the most equitable distribution thereof’.

Blair of course is not in favour of the workers by hand and brain getting the full fruits of their industry, whether individually or collectively. He is all for profits as a deduction from what labour produces going to shareholders and other parasites. May we, then, suggest the following amendment to Clause Four to accommodate him:

 "To secure for the workers by hand or by brain only enough of the fruits of their industry to maintain their working skills in a fit state to continue producing profits for their employers . . . ”

Blair, however, has come up with his own new version, including an alternative theory as to how wealth is produced. His discussion document Labour’s Objects claims that “a competitive market economy, with a strong industrial and wealth-generating base is in the public interest”.

No Socialist could make such a statement but quite how the market can “generate wealth" is not explained. As far as we know, there is only one way in which wealth can be generated and that is by human beings applying their mental and physical energies to materials that originally came from nature.

Wealth is not created by market forces; at most it is only distributed by them — unequally and to the benefit of those who own the means of production If Marr — or Blair — think that this view of the origin of wealth is “discredited" let them explain precisely how. Let them offer a satisfactory alternative explanation. In the meantime the labour theory of value, and its corollary that profits result from exploitation, stands unrefuted.

Adam Buick