The assassination of art (1975)

From issue number 1 (1975) of The Western Socialist

In a democratic society, art is politics in the widest sense, a celebration of common values which sweep away the old and clears the way for the new needs of man.

Victor Jara, Chilean play producer, singer guitarist, was a supporter of the Allende regime. In the military coup that followed he was assassinated on 15th September 1973. They broke his guitar fingers before breaking his spine. Bullets were then shot into his body.

He is one more addition to the many creative people in history who have become too dangerous to live. For the arts are not amusements, ornamental skills, diversions, comforts for tired businessmen or social polish for the pretentious. At least, not to the men who wield political power. The arts communicate and communication is the most potent force for progress and change.

History is full of the power of the arts, not the overt expression of dissatisfaction nor the blatant clarion call to rise and fight but the uniquely potent expression of ideas which show that man is ready for change. Art is a barometer and a celebration, a mirror to the emotional and intellectual development of man. The artist says, “This is man, how he feels, how we feel,” and once said, it can never be repealed. The ideas catch fire in the minds of men, not because they are new and logical but because they express clearly what people feel but cannot quite themselves make known.

George Bernard Shaw provocatively said that art is propaganda. It is this but far more. In a democratic society, art is politics in the widest sense, a celebration of common values which sweeps away the old and clears the way for the new needs of man.

This does not mean that artists are consciously political in the modern use of the term. In fact, the moment an art becomes consciously political, it usually ceases to be art. The pamphleteer is not an artist because he knows rationally exactly what he wants to say before saying it. He may express new values but they are communicated on a mechanically logical level. There is no bridge of feeling between the old and the new for the mass of the people, still struggling to understand their own feelings, to make the crossing. Art does not lead the needs of man; it expresses them and man, whose evolution is on a social and economic level rather than a physical one, can develop further because he then knows clearly where he is. He recognizes as his the values expressed by the artist.

But some artists do not communicate in their own time. They may lead the way for other artists to follow but they themselves may be a little too far ahead of their time. These artists are sometimes called “important” as distinct from “great”, the universally recognized artists who signify a whole epoch or “celebrate” a common feeling.

Both kinds of artists can be dangerous to the established powers but the “important” artists are more easily destroyed than the “great” ones. They are less supported, less recognized and their deaths provoke less reaction.

The Un-American Activities Committee could not destroy Charles Chaplin or Arthur Miller nor could the Soviets destroy Yevtushenko but artists with less recognition, ahead of their time and people, are frequently destroyed in the power struggles of the world.

President Allende did not have the control of the Chilean parliament or of the army and his own political programme did not have the understanding of the peasants. He was supported as a leader and all this suggests that he was not really the spokesman for the people. The intellectuals and artists who supported him were therefore not truly representative of the people; they were a little before their time. Victor Jara died because his death meant a delay in his ideas developing among the people. Had he been expressing true national feelings, his martyrdom would have been too dangerous because of the possible reaction. More importantly, his martyrdom would have been irrelevant because his values would already be held by the majority of people anyway.

Throughout the world, the fate of the Allende administration has been hailed by the left and the right wings as an illustration that a majority of people cannot change society by democratic and constitutional methods. In actual fact it merely illustrates the futility of a vanguard group trying to lead an ignorant mass of followers into a change which the majority do not understand. When you can destroy a leader and destroy a cause, destroying a leader is obviously the best solution.

A second moral can be drawn. We must learn to respect and protect our artists whatever their political opinions. A society which neglects them is destroying its capacity to change.

Mark Fury, 

S. P. of New Zealand

50 Years Ago: Borstal Boy (2008)

The 50 Years Ago column from the December 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Brendan Behan at the age of sixteen came from Dublin to Liverpool with an I.R.A. “do it yourself kit,” for the purpose of blowing up Cammell Lairds. He was arrested, and after a stay in Walton Detention Prison, Liverpool, was sent for three years to a Borstal Institution in East Anglia. The book (published by Hutchinson) tells of his experiences in these places. (…)

In spite of all the tumult and violence of the book, it has a monastic quality in that nothing of any significance from the outside world ever seeps in. not even the war which was going on at the time is mentioned, in fact, the author never seems to have really noticed it. There is no serious discussion, not even about Ireland. Behan indulges in rodomontade about Irish politics, religion and history, but never indicates that he has any grasp of the underlying economic and factors of Irish history. (…)

Behan at least went to Borstal wearing a slightly glamorised would-be Martyr’s crown. He came out none the worse, perhaps even a little better for it. But what of the mal-adjusted, the misfits and the unfortunates; what happened to them? That, perhaps, is the most disquieting thing of all, but Behan never mentions it.

He has nothing to say against patriotism or nationalism either of the English, Irish or any other variety. He seems to regard many Englishmen as stiff-necked and arrogant, but sees no reason why they should not be either in their native country or to people who come from other countries. But in a world of conflicting national interests, being pro Irish, English or American, means even at the best of times being negatively anti-something else. In the worst times such feelings take on an active and hostile form.

[From book review by E.W., Socialist Standard, December 1958]

The singularity of a socialist revolution (2023)

From the September 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

According to the Left there have been multiple socialist revolutions. Or, more precisely, there have been many political dramas that are claimed by both the Left and by the protagonists involved to have been socialist in nature. A great pantheon of heroes has been created to satisfy the Left’s desperate need for messianic figures which include such individuals as Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky, Castro, Che Guevara, Nelson Mandela, Hugo Chavez and even the likes of Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin! One thing most of these have in common is failure but can we consider all or any of them to be socialists? We can say that the socialism of Marx and Luxemburg was profoundly different in nature from the political structures favoured, and in some cases created, by the others in the list. Fifty years ago this month is the anniversary of the ‘martyrdom’ of another great hero of the Left – Salvador Allende. Perhaps by considering his ideology and activity we can further explore the profound political divide between his (and the Left’s) notion of a socialist revolution and that of Marx before the subsequent evolution of the theories of ‘state socialism’, Bolshevism and reformism.

The ‘Socialist Party of Chile’ was formed in 1933 as an attempt to unite the various groups that identified as ‘socialist’. Like so many Leftist ‘broad churches’ it was plagued by division and disagreement but by 1967 it had embraced the oxymoron of Marxism/Leninism with its de-rigueur ‘central committee’. Allende managed to get himself elected as president in 1970 through his popularity with wider leftist movements and the formation of a ‘Popular Unity’ coalition. In this way he believed he could create socialism by nationalising the major industries of Chile. Why he believed this, as the Left still do, is primarily down to the influence of the Bolshevik coup of 1917 in Russia. Lenin had transformed Marx’s view, that nationalisation was a good way to accelerate the productive forces and so make socialism possible, into a perverse form of socialism itself. Capitalism was in its infancy in Russia and Lenin knew that there was no chance of creating the mass consciousness and productive forces needed for a socialist revolution so he created the concept of a vanguard who could lead the masses to ‘communism’ via an intermediate stage he called socialism. In the absence of a full understanding of Marxian politics this became the ideological orthodoxy of the Left, showing a callous disregard for the misery and suffering it had caused in Russia and emphasising an unprincipled greed for power that Bolshevism represented. Thus the scene was set for yet another ill-fated episode in the long political tragedy that was state capitalism.

Although we cannot see into the mind of anyone it is quite possible that Salvador Allende was primarily motivated by a real concern for the poor and oppressed among his people, but what we can identify with certainty are the reasons for his failure: calling an economy and society socialist when it is based on wage labour and capital, even when the means of production are owned by the state, is politically incoherent at best and downright duplicitous at worst; socialism can never be created in one country alone since it inherits the global structure that capitalism has instigated and which makes socialism possible; without majority mass consciousness socialism cannot be imposed by any elite, however well intentioned they may be. There can only be one global socialist revolution (in contrast to the Socialist Party of Chile’s Bolshevik-inspired piecemeal concept of a Confederacy of Socialist Republics) and any claim that there have been and will be many socialist revolutions is born of political naivety, egotistical hubris or an opportunist lust for power.

The failure of the Allende regime was inevitable since any kind of capitalism is subject to the same global economic pressures that ensure that the exploitation of labour for profit is foremost. Those who claim that it would have survived without the interference and ideological hostility of the USA are missing the point that state capitalism is just as bad, if not worse in many respects, as is ‘free-market’ capitalism from the perspective of the exploited masses. The moral outrage that masquerades as ‘realpolitik’ among the Left is in reality a mixture of contempt for the intelligence and potential of the working class combined with an elitist idealism which can only be described as bourgeois. They cannot conceive of a moneyless, stateless democratic global society and so they believe no one else can – certainly not the uneducated masses. The Marxian understanding of social revolution is not concerned with the changing identities of governments who attempt to facilitate or control capitalism but with the emergence of a mass consciousness that will replace production for profit with production for need.

It cannot be doubted that the subsequent dictatorship regime led by General Augusto Pinochet and supported by the CIA was a nightmare for the Chilean people. While capitalism lasts there will always be malicious empires like that of the USA whose job it is to destabilise and destroy any regimes that are considered to be against their imperialist interests. While visiting the UK in 1998 Pinochet was arrested on charges of genocide and the British people had to witness his stomach-churning and grotesque defence by Thatcher and his subsequent release from house arrest by Labour’s Jack Straw. Allende was a courageous individual but, in the end, like his fellow Leftists who have achieved power, he changed nothing.

Wez.

Political Notes: Another wasted Irish martyr (1981)

The Political Notes Column from the June 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Another wasted Irish martyr

It is usual for IRA activists to be condemned by their opponents as cowardly thugs but that description could hardly be applied to the hunger strikers so the media hacks had to search for other words. They were not very successful.

Their confidence may have got the boost it needed, as Bobby Sands lay dying, from the' appeal by Northern Ireland Secretary Humphrey Atkins for, people not to heed lies and rumours but to pay attention to local councillors and clergymen and to “monitor the media".

The idea that local politicians and priests can be relied on to tell the truth is simply ludicrous, since if they did so they would drop out of capitalist politics and stop peddling religious nonsense.

All of these deal, in either side of the conflict, in the basic absurdity that the troubles in Ireland stem from religious differences. Such bigotries may inspire some of the nastier violence, and give fuel to the more extreme incitement by self-seeking politicians. This may make the bigotries appear as the cause of the problems when in fact they are part of the symptoms.

For Ireland is split, like any other of the artificial divisions in capitalist society, on lines of clashing economic interests. The incidental political and religious-theories simply bedevil and aggravate the problem, which will not be permanently resolved short of abolishing its cause — the private properly basis of capitalist society.

The hunger strikers were undoubtedly brave and steadfast literally unto death. Their martyrdom—for such was the object of their fast—obscured the essential fact that they were also tragic men. For their courage and steadfastness were applied in the interests of one side in a struggle in which they, as members of the working class, had no interests.

So the tragedy was that, having so much to give, they were content to give it only to be wasted.

Pay out at the bank

Among the many betes noires which torment the repose of all crusading lefties one of the blackest and most beastly is Barclays Bank.

The reason, as is well known to all cheque book holders, is that Barclays have a lot of investments in South Africa, whose racist oppression rouses those same lefties to a frenzy of protest no less intense for being discriminatory in its target.

This has reached the point when Barclay's Annual General Meeting is a sort of day out for the protesters who, perhaps because it is after all one of the Big Five Banks, usually include some expensively trendy lefties.

This year, for example, there was ravishing actress Julie Christie, indignantly bobbing golden curls in attack on the policies of the South African government. Possibly she is the trendiest — certainly she is among the most attractive of the protesters so far. At all events something persuaded the Bank to stop stone walling for a change and guardedly agree with some of the criticisms.

Retiring Barclays chairman Anthony Tuke did this, however, with some spirit, pointing out that about 300 other British companies also operate in South Africa and that one of Barclay’s first objects is to promote the exports of British capitalism td that country.

Now this was pretty shrewd of him, because British exports are dear to the heart of all British lefties as they are supposed to provide jobs for British workers (even if at the cost of jobs to other workers abroad  — perhaps in South Africa).

Barclays invest in South Africa for the same reason as all other capitalist concerns invest anywhere — to promote the process of profit making, which means the process of working class exploitation. As long as the government takes care of that aspect, the concerns need not worry too much about its other policies, however brutal and repressive they may be.

That is a fact of capitalist life—and such facts are habitually not easily absorbed by lefties who prefer publicity worthy demonstrations to effective remedies.

French lesson

The victory of Mitterand in the French Presidential election was another self-inflicted defeat for the working class.

Anyone who doubts this need only consider some of the utterances, before and after the result, by the two candidates. First Giscard, speaking just before the vote at that infamous World War 1 charnel house Verdun, asserted that of all the candidates only he had been in the army when the war in Europe ended in May 1945. As if being a soldier in a war necessarily makes a person a more desirable president. As if patriotism is a tenable, useful principle instead of a baseless and anti social fallacy. In any case Giscard was telling less than the truth, since his time in the army (as if it mattered) was actually less than that of Mitterand, who spent much of the war as a prisoner.

Mitterand had his own lies to tell. "It was a victory for youth, labour, creativity and renewal and will set off an enormous national upsurge” he exulted, too carefree — like his jubilant supporters in the streets — to recall the innumerable similar claims made by other victors before him, all of them discredited.

This mixture of deception and empty promises is fairly representative of the standard of debate in capitalism’s elections. Its object is not to encourage knowledge and participation but to ensure ignorance and apathy. Tragically, the working class swallow this muck and cast their vote in accordance with it.

When will they weary of this insulting, degrading, self-destructive process? When will they grasp the fact that they are the people who conceive, design and produce everything in society but allow themselves to be conned out of taking possession of it?

This is the measure of the defeats the workers inflict on themselves when they wastc their votes at election time by giving them for the continuance of capitalism. At such times they could resolve that capitalism shall be brought to an immediate end. But in France, as elsewhere, the message is that the deceit is still regarded as palatable and so capitalism grinds on.

Political Notebook: Jack Cohen is dead — Long live Jack Cohen (1979)

The Political Notebook Column from the May 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The apologists for capitalism are not known for their high principles. Profits come first under their system. This month’s Notebook takes a look at what a few of the twisting hypocrites have been up to lately and comes to the not surprising conclusion that the sooner the working class stops supporting the lot of them the better it will be for us all.

Jack Cohen is dead — Long live Jack Cohen

Sir John Cohen—described in one obituary as ‘the golden barrowboy who became the supermarket king'—died last month at the age of 80. According to the press reports, Cohen's was a 'rags to riches’ story of a man who pushed his way up the capitalist ladder until, at the time of his death, his Tesco stores' annual turnover is breaking the £1,000,000,000 barrier. The reason for this success was, according to The Jewish Chronicle, that

 Sir John was a redoubtable entrepreneur renowned for his aggressive salesmanship . . .

In fact, Sir John, just like any capitalist businessman made his profits by exploiting the working class. His own level of education or intelligence was, fortunately for him. another matter. But there is one thing that might puzzle the readers of Cohen’s sycophantic obituaries. If you go into any Tesco store you will observe that, despite the death of the owner, things are carrying on just as usual. It’s almost as if the dull, witless workers are able to organise things without the capitalists to tell them how to do it.

People's Democratic Prisons

It is a well known fact that China is a People's Democracy. And just like the other People’s Democracies, if workers have the audacity to complain that rich leaders are living it up at the expense of the poor toilers, they're locked away in a democratic people’s prison to punish them for their cheek. Increasingly in recent times, wall posters in Peking have criticised the undemocratic character of the Chinese State. The first reaction of the Communist Party was to lock up these bolshie proletarians for having the nerve to try and dictate to them, but more recently, according to The Guardian (14 March)

  China’s wall-poster protestors have won a major victory with the release from prison of a group of students who were the first to call for the establishment of ‘socialist democracy’ and a proper legal system. The leader of the group, Li Zhengtia, spent nearly four years doing forced labour in the mines or in prison or in the southern province of Guangdong. Posters on 'Democracy Wall’ in Peking have claimed that as many as seven hundred people were punished for their connection with the group.

Chinese workers are correct to doubt the value of their ‘People’s Democracy’. But under Chinese capitalism the liberty of the commodity comes before that of the people.

Exploitation without discrimination 

When apartheid is overturned it will not be because of the whining of trendy liberals like Peter Hain, but because the capitalist class who have interests in South Africa will see the profitability of the equal exploitation of all colours. An item in Boxing News (9 February) shows that South African fight promoters have discovered that mixed fights pull in larger audiences and so make them more money. So, these principled gentlemen who sincerely believe in the good sense of racial separation drop their high principles before the temple of Profitability. The situation now is that

   Blacks can manage and train whites. Whites are permitted to manage and train blacks. Blacks can promote major tournaments and whites have gone out of their way to assist blacks with better training facilities and financial support. Several major South African companies have come to the aid of boxing and Alan Proctor, a director of Sanyo, is looked upon by many as a godfather. Sanyo have poured thousands upon thousand of Rand into boxing and have just completed a Sanyo Boxing Academy in Soweto.

Other companies to invest in South African boxing since mixed fights started have been Old Buck Gin, Nashua. King Korn and Datsun. The spread of anti-racist liberalism? No bloody fear! All that’s happened is that the capitalists have seen the value of exploiting without discriminating against colour. Which must make liberals like Peter Hain terribly, terribly happy.

The Moronic Martyr

Robert Relf is a racist clown who has been on a hunger strike in gaol after being convicted under the Race Relations Act for posting up stickers saying that black people spread diseases and should live in the trees. Relf’s opinions can only be treated seriously in a psychiatric sense, but it is worthy of note that when he appeared at the Court of Appeal on 12 March to threaten the Court with his imminent martyrdom Lord Justice Lawton declared that

  if Relf wants to commit suicide that’s up to him. We are not going to be blackmailed . . . the sooner that is appreciated by him and others like him the better it will be for law and order in this country.

Readers may like to consider the fact that this great believer in law and order was himself a member of, and candidate for, Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in the 1930s. The main difference between Relf and Lawton is that the former is a moronic lout who is willing to act as a stooge for the sinister ambitions of his National Front leaders, while the latter is a professional hypocrite who is willing to act as a stooge to a rather wider section of the ruling class.

Steve Coleman

Arbroath 1320-1820: A History of Them and Us (2020)

From the April 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tens of thousands of Scottish nationalists would have been parading through the streets of Arbroath this month in their kilts and tartan regalia, flourishing their Saltires and Lion Rampants flags, celebrating a 700–year old document. Far fewer will be commemorating another event which took place 500 years later, this April’s bicentennial of the Weavers Uprising (also known as the Radical War.)

One is a story of a letter to the Pope requesting his papal blessing for the privileges of Scottish nobles and their birthright to the subjugation of their tenants and peasants (the correct title of the Arbroath Declaration is “Letter of Barons of Scotland to Pope John XXII.)

The other story is one of the common-folk’s resistance to exploitation and a struggle against oppression.

Scottish barons

For historians, the 1820 rising of the weavers was a minor insignificant event in the annals of Scottish history but then, of course, the Declaration of Arbroath was swiftly forgotten too, and only resurrected for a propaganda purpose very different from the mistaken belief held by today’s nationalists that it was declaring the independence of the Scottish people. In 1680 Sir George Mackenzie publicised it, not as an expression of nationalism but as support for those who wished to curtail royal power.

Historian Neil Davidson takes the key passage to be:

  ‘Yet if he [Robert the Bruce] shall give up what he has begun, seeking to make us or our kingdom subject to the king of England or to the English, we would strive at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own rights and ours, and we would make some other man who was able to defend us our king; for, as long as a hundred of us remain alive, we will never on any conditions be subjected to the lordship of the English. For we fight not [for] glory, nor riches, nor honours, but for freedom alone, which no good man gives up without his life’.

Its message is first directed at the English king, Edward II, informing him that it was pointless for him to attempt to depose Robert the Bruce with a more subservient king, since the remainder of the Scottish aristocracy would not cease its resistance. Secondly, it is also aimed at Robert the Bruce’s dubious past record; they would not accept his jeopardising their interests

The idea that the Arbroath Declaration challenged the Divine Right of Kings with the notion that the nation itself was foremost and the monarch merely its steward, is presented solely to justify Bruce usurping the rightful king John Balliol. The section of the Declaration reading:

  “if this prince [Bruce] shall leave these principles he hath so nobly pursued, and consent that we or our kingdom be subjected to the king or people of England, we will immediately endeavour to expel him, as our enemy and as the subverter both of his own and our rights, and we will make another king, who will defend our liberties.”

It should be read as a cautionary warning and a clear threat to Robert the Bruce himself.

Those medieval signatories to the 1320 Declaration were not leading any ‘liberation struggle’. In fact, John de Menteith, who turned William Wallace over to the English king, placed his seal upon the Declaration of Arbroath.

What did the the document actually mean? It was the ‘freedom’ of the Scottish barons that it was concerned with. The ‘people’ of Scotland were the nobles, the majority of whom at that time were still culturally Anglo-Norman, despite inter-marriage. None of the signatories held the view that the actual people of Scotland should have any say in any issue and they had no concept of popular sovereignty whatsoever

Weavers’ Revolt

If true ‘freedom-fighters’ are required then Scottish workers should look not to the winners and losers of aristocratic medieval family feuds over the throne of Scotland, but to those brave if foolhardy weavers who rose up five hundred years later in April 1820.

The  ‘Battle’ of Bonnymuir  took place on the 5 April, 1820. Thirty-two cavalrymen routed twenty-five, poorly armed, striking weavers. John Baird and Andrew Hardie, who came to be known as the ‘Radical Martyrs’, were sentenced to be hanged and beheaded (along with James Wilson who was later part of a riot that broke prisoners free at Greenock.)

Glasgow was at this time just a collection of small village communities with weaving being the main occupation. The handloom weavers enjoyed skilled status and worked to commission. They could choose their own hours of work if they were willing to forgo some proportion of their earnings. Given that these workers had free time many were able to read and would talk about what they had read, discussing the American and French revolutions. A slump in the economy after the Napoleonic Wars when pay and conditions deteriorated drastically resulted in workers, particularly weavers in Scotland, seeking reforms from an uncaring gentry-controlled government already in fear of revolution.

The ‘Committee of Organisation for Forming a Provisional Government’ put up placards on Saturday 1 April, calling for an immediate national strike. Many in central Scotland came out in support the following week.

The proclamation began:

  ’Friends and Countrymen! Rouse from that state in which we have sunk for so many years, we are at length compelled from the extremity of our sufferings, and the contempt heaped upon our petitions for redress, to assert our rights at the hazard of our lives.’ 

And, it called for a rising:

  ’To show the world that we are not that lawless, sanguinary rabble which our oppressors would persuade the higher circles we are, but a brave and generous people determined to be free.’

One group of strikers decided that attack was the best form of defence. With the purpose of acquiring weapons, about twenty-five weavers, led by Andrew Hardie and John Baird, marched on the Carron Iron Works near Falkirk to capture weaponry which was manufactured there. Tragically for that group, due to earlier underground societies like the United Scotsmen, government spies were active which meant the march on Carron was already known. The Army was given its own marching orders and when the two forces met  the radicals began firing. After a few volleys, the cavalry flanked the rebels and the inevitable end was swift. And so ended the ‘Battle’ of Bonnymuir.

On the day of his execution, Hardie’s words were:

  ’Yes, my countrymen, in a few minutes our blood shall be shed on this scaffold… for no other sin but seeking the legitimate rights of our ill-used and downtrodden beloved countrymen.’

An irate Sheriff ordered him to stop ‘such violent and improper language’. 

Hardie retorted:

  ’What we said to our countrymen, we intended to say no matter whether you granted us liberty or not. So we are now both done.’ 

1820 can be seen as the emergence of peoples’ power later to manifest itself in the Chartist Movement. The rising should be seen in the context of ordinary people from all over a growing industrial Scotland being inspired to overthrow the government in order to secure their rights and better working conditions.

We shall let the reader judge which historic event deserves to be remembered and celebrated.

ALJO