Poland December 1970: A Clarification (1978)

From the November 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

In an article that appeared in the Socialist Standard in May this year we stated that "hundreds” of workers were shot and killed by government troops during the unrest over price rises that took place in Poland’s Baltic sea ports in December 1970. A previous article in September 1976 had stated that “at least six workers” had been shot dead in Gdansk (Danzig). The discrepancy between these figures is to be explained by the former being based on the highest unofficial estimates while the latter refers to the number officially admitted as having been killed on December 14, the first day of the unrest in Danzig alone.

The precise number, in the other ports as well as Danzig — and even one death would prove the brutal anti-working class character of the Polish state capitalist regime — is unknown. Keesing's Contemporary Archives says:

No definitive figures of the total number of casualties were available at the time but official spokesmen in Warsaw said early in January 1971 that 27 people had been killed in. Gdansk. Gdynia and Elblag and 346 injured, including 265 policemen; no official figures were given for Szczecin and Slupsk. On January 20, however, Polish newspapers revealed that 44 people had died in the December riots — 18 in Gdynia, 16 in Szczecin, nine in Gdansk and one in Elblag. It was also stated that there had been 120 injured, many seriously in Gdansk, where about 100 people were under arrest charged with looting, arson or attacking police. Unofficial estimates put the total casualties as considerably higher than those officially given (January 16-23 1971. p.24391).

50 Years Ago: Humanity and Reason (2002)

The 50 Years Ago column from the October 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

On August 17th the following news item was reported from Hamburg by Reuter:

“Dr. Hermann Ehlers, President of the West German Lower House, speaking yesterday during the unveiling ceremony to Hamburg’s 50,000 men, women and children who were killed during air raids in the 1939-45 war, said that nobody in Germany and few people in Britain had raised their voices against total warfare.

Therefore we must think of the one man who publicly protested against this kind of warfare – the Lord Bishop of Chichester, he said.

Today our special respect is due to the lone caller for humanity and reason.”

This will be news to members of the Socialist Party. Socialist speakers and writers protested many times during the war both against the war itself and against the inhumanity with which it was being conducted. It seems hard now to see the credit going to a member of the Bench of Bishops, who, as a body, were among the most bloodthirsty supporters of the war. Socialists agreed that the Germans suffered under the Nazi regime but we never saw the argument that we should help to kill them off in their thousands just to prove our sympathy for them. Socialists refused to help in the murder of the German and Japanese workers, and, for that refusal, some of them spent the war years being hunted by the police. Still, we may take this opportunity of telling Dr. Ehlers that we shall be publicity protesting against total war in any third world war too. We shall be calling for humanity and reason, that is to say, for Socialism, at every opportunity we have. And we shall be opposing the slaughter of the Russians, or of any other enemy our rulers may select for us.

(From Passing Show by A.W.E., Socialist Standard, October 1952)

At Home and Abroad . . . (1972)

The Home and Abroad Column from the October 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Review September 72

At Home

There are signs that the government is preparing to retreat from its previous entrenched position on wages. If this happens it will need careful handling as far as publicity goes, which may explain the heavy caution with which the recent talks between the unions, employers and the government were treated. When they came into power Heath’s government were quite positive that they had the solution to the economic problems which have plagued British capitalism since the war. The unions, they said, must be brought to heel; in future they would be met head on in any industrial dispute. There would also be a special Act which would in effect weaken the unions’ bargaining powers. At the same time prices would, in some mysterious way which has eluded all other governments, be held in control. The promised result of this would be a steady rise in prosperity for everyone. In fact what the Tories were concerned about, as any capitalist government would be, was basically wages and the level of capital investment in British industry, which were affecting the competitive power of British goods on the world market. Every government since the war has come in with promises to tackle these problems and they have all had apparently simple solutions. Every one has had "new” ideas and policies; Wilson’s government, for example, had the Prices and Incomes Board and the Declaration of Intent from the employers and the unions. Who remembers them now? Every government, faced with the day to day realities of capitalism, has been compelled to change its line and to abandon the programme it put forward at the election, while the problem continued as bad as ever. Heath’s had the brief period of open conflict, as he promised and he has the Industrial Relations Act. Some workers have been gaoled, a union has had a massive fine. But British capitalism could not have carried on for long like that; it makes more sense, economically and politically, for the Tories to change their policy. To repeal the Industrial Relations Act would be too obvious a signal of defeat but there will probably be other signs in the near future of the government’s surrender to the intractability of capitalism’s chaos.

Abroad

Since it has never happened before, the killing of the Israeli Olympic athletes helped foster the idea that we are living in times of special cruelty and disarray, and that guerrilla tactics are something of an innovation. It needs only a little effort to recall many examples of similar tactics, sometimes by small bands of killers and sometimes by larger, more organised groups. If the Arabs showed great courage in their raid, it was not the first time that bravery has been used to murderous ends. Capitalist states are always organising the courage of their peoples in a massive effort of destruction. At such times they use any weapon they can, including that of the ultimatum. The famous demand for unconditional surrender in the last war was no more than a threat to murder and destroy on a savage scale, if the other side did not give way — and it was a threat which the Allies carried out. The men who plan and implement such ultimata are not called terrorists and murderers but there is nothing to choose between them and the men who did the killing at Munich, or indeed those Israeli nationalists who waged so ruthless a guerrilla campaign against British occupation in the years after the war. Capitalism is a mass of conflict, springing from the competing economic interests of many rival groups both national and international. In one way or another, force is always applied in these conflicts and capitalism continually conditions its people to accept the use of force, often of a terrifying scale and intensity. The Arabs at Munich acted as they have been conditioned to. The outcome of violence is never pleasant, whether it is eleven dead bodies at Munich or a hundred thousand at Hiroshima. But if the working class are not clear on the issue, if their ideas on it are confused by the illogicalities and the violence of nationalism, they can have no hope of ending a victory of which bloodshed is so integral a part.

Politics

When the Monday Club meet to protest against the Ugandan Asians, they thunder that the immigrants are being allowed in against the wishes of the people of this country. When Wedgewood Bonn talks about British capitalism’s entry of the Common Market, he whines that the voice of the people should be heard on the issue, in a referendum. We do not need to be too perceptive to realise that concern for a democratic society emerges only when policies are being pushed through which the speaker opposes. Tory M.P. Soref supports a government which, like the one of which Benn was a member, has imposed plenty of measures without asking what the majority of people thought or wanted. Democracy is a word for capitalist politicians to play with and to use if they see advantage in doing so. In fact capitalism cannot be a democratic society; it cannot take its people into its confidence, cannot make all its information freely available, cannot run itself as the majority wants, cannot involve everyone in the decision taking from top to bottom. Soref is no more interested in making available full information about race, about housing, population, social services and so on than Benn is in telling us everything about the economy of capitalism. Democracy needs knowledge and when the working class have that there will be no more capitalism with its irrelevant issues and politicians to exploit them.

Nazism – the ultimate evil? (2009)

From the September 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Everything undertaken in the regimes called Nazi, or fascist, finds its parallel in the capitalism of other areas.

Capitalism stinks. It stinks of corpses. The millions starved to death, dead of preventable diseases, killed in war, worked to death: and the myriad mundane vicissitudes of class life, beaten to death in the petty squabbles of humans thrown together against their will, coughing out their final days with coaldust on their lungs or dying of lung cancer from tobacco, promoted to children, killing them in old age, ending with the suicide of those who can no longer stand the ruin that capitalism makes of a modern life.

For those of us who remain amongst the living, capitalism is a constant trial, mocked gleefully in the soap operas that, like fairground mirrors, reflect the ugly truth of our existence, misshapen and distorted. Rather than simple poverty, capitalism runs the full gamut of a life with a void at its centre: poverty of the underweight, poverty of the overweight, poverty of the deluded in their temples, poverty of the disillusioned who bear the absurdity of life lived not even for another, but for a number, a bank account, in more or less terror for their sanity.

I say all this to put my next statement into context. Nazism is not a special, nasty kind of capitalism. Everything undertaken in the regimes called Nazi, or fascist, finds its parallel in the capitalism of other areas, whether the ‘free world’ or the ‘communist’. As Captain Willard said in Apocalypse Now, of Vietnam, “charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets in the Indy 500”. It’s capitalism with a black shirt on.

In case there’s still resistance to this notion, consider the rivers of blood that European powers – amongst which we should really number the United States – waded through in the Americas, treading a bloody trail from sea to shining sea, exploiting and murdering all those in their path. Or the British Empire, whether addicting millions to opium or starving them to death through either discipline or incompetence. The supposedly communist, in both Russia and China, starving millions of their own people in famines both intentional and accidental. Millions have been worked to death in slave conditions within capitalism, from the plantations of the Americas, through the Gulags of Stalin, to the Nazi work camps. Today, of course, the whole world is a work camp, with the barbed wire replaced by immigration control and the richer parts of the West and other parts as gated communities.

So when I say that Nazism is no different to capitalism generally, I am not exonerating Nazism. I am damning capitalism. I am damning the Stalinists who still claim ‘at least we defeated fascism’ as their sole claim to fame – while Stalin killed more than Hitler ever did. The so-called liberal democracies claim that they could never go to war, and their forces are only for defence: yet they have slaughtered their way across the globe on the flimsiest of pretexts, such as the sinking of the USS Maine leading to the Spanish-American War in the late 19th century – a purely imperialist grab against a weakened Spain, fulfilling the Monroe Doctrine just as closely as the Nazis with their Lebensraum. Other incidents, such as the Gulf of Tonkin, are now known to have been ruses; there is no need to enter into vast conspiracy theories to say that a disproportional response is no different to a war of aggression. At least ironically, one could credit mad dictators with honesty; the drive to profit inherent in all capitalist regimes, in them is closer to the surface and less buried in doubletalk.

In fact, one can measure the bankruptcy of a political position fairly accurately by the need to resort to ‘we’re better than the Nazis’ as an excuse. It means that their wages are 5 percent better, they kill 7 percent less civilians, their press is 13 percent less prone to lies and censorship; but they still force their citizens to work, they still murder for profit, they still lie to keep ‘their’ workers in line.

Racism, for example, is not some special product of a diseased ideology. It is a basic part of state building in the early stages, reused at those times when international trade is low and protectionism, coupled with aggressive or military action, becomes a state priority. There is not a magic race ogre that leads people, Pied Piper fashion, down the road to bigotry: in class society it is a well-travelled highway.

In short, capitalism is a thing that should fill us with disgust and revulsion. To pick and choose isolated moments of its history and claim that they are the true evil is to attempt to rescue the whole, like Bolsheviks bickering over whether the charnel house that was Russia in the 1930s would have been better or worse with Trotsky or Stalin at the helm: or, really, like any US presidential election, for the rest of the world. Kennedy or Nixon? Carter or Reagan? Every one of these men has been prepared to turn the world into a radioactive cinder, yet people still debate their relative merits.

We have had a century and more of capitalists trying to bolster their pathetic reputations by showing how much better their labour camp is than that run by those next door. Whether it’s Nazis, Bolsheviks, Maoists, or Prussians, Russians and the Inscrutable East, every single one of these societies has been built on the energies, the lost hopes, and the bones of workers, both at home and abroad. To single out any one of these as the one root of evil is to try to whitewash capitalism itself, to deny that there is evil at the very root of our whole world.

This is why socialists oppose all capitalism, and refuse to take sides. We recognise that some circumstances are better than others, but none are worth a drop of workers’ blood, especially not when all of our energies should be turned towards rooting out capitalism as a system. We do not set up fascism against capitalism – we set up capitalism against socialism. Join us in the real human crusade.

SJW

USA: To Whom It May Concern (1999)

From the October 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Day trading and Internet trading on PCs have grown rapidly due to the need to attract smaller investors by giving them faster access to the trading floor. But it is not only money at risk from widespread playing of a financial video game with volatile share prices.

Time magazine (August 9) featured the 12 killings and suicide carried out in July by an American day trader who tried to make a living betting on share prices. “Who was Mark Orrin Barton? Why did he go berserk?”, they asked. But despite reporting how Barton had lost heavily from trading in erratic Internet stocks; despite mentioning how he twice remarked on a declining stock market to people he worked with at brokerage firms before opening fire on them; despite pointing out he was the prime suspect in his first wife’s murder shortly after taking out a $600,000 life-insurance policy on her (he had wanted it to be $1 million, but could not afford the premiums); and despite printing Barton’s thoughts in his letter for the police (“I have come to hate this life and this system of things. I have come to have no hope . . . [I plan] to kill as many of the people that greedily sought my destruction”), the magazine concluded “he scatters clues but no answers.”

On the contrary, to those willing to face them, the answers for 13 dead and 9 others with gunshot injuries are unmistakable: money and the marketplace. Or—as these are both part of the same system—capitalism. Only capitalism requires money to exploit productive resources, offer finished goods and services to a subordinate majority for profit, and coerce those able to work into becoming employees of an asset-owning class. And because capitalism makes money vitally important for obtaining necessities of life, achieving a bearable existence, and avoiding all manner of disturbing problems; getting and retaining as much of it as possible are what daily preoccupies and drives the vast majority of people, thereby helping maintain the status quo.

Inevitably, when difficulties and worries intensify to the point where sufferers “come to have no hope”, people can snap and lash out. Perhaps Barton thought blame lay just with specific people “that greedily sought [his] destruction”. Or perhaps, as his To-Whom-It-May-Concern letter suggested, he knew full well that capitalism’s “system of things” was indeed responsible, but was not aware a much easier way of living could be pursued, and so, seeing no way out, chose to die with those connected most closely to his downfall.

On July 27, the manager of Momentum Securities, where Barton hired computers and phone lines to gamble at online share trading, insisted debts incurred over several weeks be cleared up. Barton handed over a $50,000 cheque without funds in the bank to cover it. He went home and bludgeoned his estranged second wife to death with a hammer. Next day, the cheque bounced. That night, he killed his 11-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter the same way. On the third day, Barton arranged to see the Momentum manager, purportedly to pay off his debt at the firm. Once inside his office, Barton opened fire. He also gunned down the manager of All-Tech, another brokerage across the road where Barton had ceased trading in April, apparently because he had been barred until able to restore his account to a minimum balance of $40,000. Several other day traders who had lent Barton money to settle numerous debts, and no doubt wanted paying back, were also killed or injured.

Following the suicide of the man other traders called “Rocket”, because of how excited he got when his stock gambles were climbing, it can be seen that his losses consumed virtually all the cash from his first wife’s insurance settlement. If he did kill her for a better life, as the police believe, the “system” soon determined otherwise. With the known facts, is there the slightest doubt that minority ownership of vital assets, a market necessary for business transactions, and the money mechanism an owning class needs to exploit property and people were what drove Barton “berserk”?

If those working in the media insisted on reporting the true cause of these regular losses of life, rather than usually just beating about the bush, then we would all move that much nearer that much sooner to ending them for good. For this deadly violence is not unavoidable. A change of ownership of productive industries and resources from a few to the many would eliminate the stress of personal financial worries since there would be no finance to worry about.

Maybe, in needing money themselves just like Mark Barton, media employees don’t want to risk their own living standards until support for common asset ownership becomes overwhelming. But as the media do have the ability to inform and influence most people, their weak-kneed entertaining-for-profit reportage of capitalism-caused tragedies and scandals merely perpetuates these incidents, endangering everyone including themselves.

Perhaps those who write and broadcast will consider what will happen when the prolonged US bull market collapses in a big way. How many more Mark Bartons will violently emerge from an estimated 5 million other apparently normal Americans also engaged in online trading from home computers, and from millions of other small-scale investors with life savings tied up in stocks and shares? And how many more “ordinary” individual killings from robberies, domestic quarrels, financial disputes, etc will follow that such a serious market downturn, which would impact on economies world-wide, accompanied as it will be by an increase in social poverty and desperation as squeezed profits means unemployment rises and indispensable money becomes even harder to obtain?

Just one week after Barton’s rampage, another gunman in America shot two dead at his workplace, and a third at a firm where his mother stated he had earlier been laid off due to “economic downsizing”.

Max Hess

50 Years Ago: Murder of 137 and Death of a King (1960)

The 50 Years Ago column from the June 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard 

By far the greatest calamity that has befallen the nation this year took place early in May when 137 working men were buried alive in a coal mine in Cumberland. Compared with this the passing away of Albert Edward Wettin. otherwise known as King of England, etc., is as nothing compared with everything. . . .

According to Mr. Henry, under-manager of the mine, the fire started in quite a small way, and could probably have been easily extinguished. Valuable lime was wasted and when experts with life-saving apparatus arrived . . . [they] could not reach the entombed men, but declare that had they been there, earlier the latter could have been saved. And—horror of horrors!—despite the convictions of many . . . that the men below were alive . . . it was decided to no longer try to save the men, but to save the coal . . . So the mine was bricked up and the only possible means of escape for the men cut off, while preparations were also made to flood the pit should those who owned it deem it necessary.

From the Socialist Standard, June 1910.

Lest We Forget. (1919)

From the May 1919 issue of the Socialist Standard

How the capitalists suppressed the Parisian workers in 1871.

At last the smell of the carnage began to choke even the most frantic. The pest, if not pity, was coming. Myriads of flesh-flies flew up from the putrefied corpses. The streets were full of dead birds. The "Avenir Libéral" singing the praises of MacMahon’s proclamations, applied the words of Flechier; ‘He hides himself, but his glory finds him out.’ The glory of the Turenne of 1871 betrayed him even up to the Seine. In certain streets the corpses encumbered the pathway, looking at the passers-by from out of their dead eyes. In the Faubourg St. Antoine they were to be seen everywhere in heaps, half white with chloride of lime. At the Polytechnic School they occupied a space of 100 yards long and three deep. At Passy, which was not one of the great centres of execution, there were 1,100 near the Trocadero. These, covered over by a thin shroud of earth, also showed their ghastly profiles. ‘Who does not recollect,’ said the Temps, ‘even though he had seen it but one moment, the square, no, the charnel of the Tour St. Jacques? From the midst of this moist soil, recently turned up by the spade, here and there look out heads, arms, feet, and hands. The profiles of corpses, dressed in the uniform of National Guards, were seen impressed against the ground. It was hideous. A decayed, sickening odour arose from this garden, and occasionally at some places it became fetid.’ The rain and heat having precipitated the putrefaction, the swollen bodies reappeared. The glory of MacMahon displayed itself too well. The journals were taking fright. ‘These wretches,’ said one of them, ‘who have done us so much harm during their lives, must not be allowed to do so still after their death.’ And those that had instigated the massacre cried ‘Enough!’

‘Let us not kill any more,’ said the Paris Journal of the 2nd June, ‘even the assassins, even the incendiaries. Let us not kill any more. It is not their pardon we ask for, but a respite.’ ‘Enough executions, enough blood, enough victims,’ said the Nationale of the 1st June. And the Opinion Nationale of the same day: ‘A serious examination of the accused is imperative. One would like to see only the really guilty die.’

The executions abated, and the sweeping off began. Carriages of all kinds, vans, omnibuses, came to pick up the corpses and traversed the town. Since the great plagues of London and Marseilles, such cart-loads of human flesh had not been seen. These exhumations proved that a great number of people had been buried alive. Imperfectly shot, and thrown with the heaps of dead into the common grave, they had eaten earth, and showed the contortions of their violent agony. Certain corpses were taken up in pieces. It was necessary to shut them as soon as possible into closed wagons, and to take them with the utmost speed to the cemeteries, where immense graves of lime swallowed up these putrid masses.

The cemetries of Paris absorbed all they could. The victims, placed side by side, without any other covering than their clothes, filled enormous ditches at the Père Lachaise, Montmartre, Mont-Parnasse, where the people in pious rememberance will annually come as pilgrims. Others, more unfortunate, were carried out of the town. At Charonne, Bagnolet, Bicêtre, etc. the trenches dug during the first siege were utilized. ‘There nothing is to be feared of the cadaverous emanations,’ said La Liberté ‘an impure blood will water the soil of the labourer, fecundating it. The deceased delegate at war will be able to pass a review of his faithful followers at the hour of midnight; the watchword will be ‘Incendiarism and assassination.’ Women by the side of the lugubrious trench endeavoured to recognize these remains. The police waited that their grief should betray them, in order to arrest those ‘females of insurgents.’

The burying of such a large number of corpses soon became too difficult, and they were burnt in the casemates of the fortifications; but for want of draught the combustion was incomplete, and the bodies were reduced to a pulp. At the Buttes Chaumont the corpses, piled up in enormous heaps, inundated with petroleum, were burnt in the open air.

The wholesale massacres lasted up to the first days of June, and the summary executions up to the middle of that month. For a long time mysterious dramas were enacted in the Bois de Boulogne. Never will the exact number of the victims of the Bloody Week be known. The chief of military justice admitted 17,000 shot, the municipal council of Paris paid the expenses of burial of 17,000 corpses; but a great number were killed out of Paris or burnt. There is no exaggeration in saying 20,000 at least.

Many battlefields have numbered more dead, but these at least had fallen in the fury of the combat. The century has not witnessed such a slaughtering after the battle; there is nothing to equal it in the history of our civil struggles. St. Bartholomew’s Day, June 1848, the 2nd December, would form but an episode of the massacres of May. Even the great executioners of Rome and modern times pale before the Duke of Magenta. The hecatombs of the Asiatic victors, the fetes of Dahomey alone could give some idea of this butchery of proletarians.

Such was the repression ‘by the laws, with the laws.’ And during these atrocities of incomparably worse than Bulgarian type, the bourgeoisie, raising to heaven its bloody hands, undertook to incite the whole world against this people, who, after two months of domination and the massacre of thousands of their own, had shed the blood of sixty-three prisoners.

– “History of the Paris Commune.” Lissagary

Dunblane — a question of evil? (1996)

From the May 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is impossible to imagine the horror that confronted those first on the scene of the Dunblane tragedy; little children lying dead along with their school teacher, with many more children injured. Difficult though it may be in such circumstances, it is surely necessary to look for what motivated Thomas Hamilton beyond the simplistic notion that he was merely 'evil'.

The violent death of a child is always a terrible thing; there is something particularly appalling, obscene, about it. The younger the child the worse it seems, the more upsetting, sickening, infuriating, even frightening. The difficulty comprehending such an action is what frightens, the murder of a young child plumbing the depths of depraved behaviour and inevitably raising an anguished "why?". A great many people are probably unable to answer this any more satisfyingly than the hospital chaplain, interviewed on television after the massacre in Dunblane, who said that people have free will and there is no other answer than that. Many other people will blame evil itself, using the terms as a metaphysical category, something more than a concept, something that acts, something that is a cause rather than effect. Socialists find both explanations unsatisfactory, but many of us will grope as blindly as anybody in the face of such horror, all words paling into insignificance as we try to imagine the absolute desolation of the bereaved, or the fear of the victims.

Such events always prompt reflections on the subject of evil. The Guardian (16 March) published a particularly thoughtful and interesting article on which it raised the question of evil as a question that is particularly disturbing for liberal ideology, an ideology to which the author, Henry Porter, obviously subscribes:

  "It seems almost implicit that what took hold of that school was a terrible extraneous force, and the only word we have for it is Ron Taylor’s [the headmaster of Dunblane Primary School] word— evil. That should satisfy us, but it goes against every liberal's instincts to acknowledge evil as a dynamic in human affairs. "

Evil as an explanation goes against “liberal instincts” because it suggests the impossibility of eradicating the problems that beset humanity by reforming them away. This is a political point, a philosophical point and an ethical or moral point. Evil as a metaphysical force is pre-Enlightenment; it is a religious concept that challenges everything that the liberal heirs to the Enlightenment believe. It is a concept that underwrites a certain reactionary defeatism; it is essentially conservative and it stands behind the belief that we should, in John Major’s phrase, “understand less and condemn more”. This phrase “understand less” can be read in more than one way, and still be revealing if we want to understand the political and social dynamics of this metaphysical concept of evil. Let’s put it this way: simply, do we really want to understand less? Is it good enough for the survivors and the bereaved in Dunblane, or for victims of apparently senseless violence at any time or in any place, past or future, to understand less? Continued mystification is never a satisfactory answer, is never any answer at all, and will never do anything to prevent such horrors happening again.

Let’s look again at the above quote from the Guardian. Evil is a “terrible extraneous force”, a “dynamic in human affairs”. Docs the word “evil” really necessarily imply these things? It may be a social dynamic in that people are prompted to react in certain ways, but the idea that it is a cause of death or that it is something that acts independently of everything else is, as stated, an essentially theological view. That is the real “dynamic” of metaphysical evil; it cuts off any possibility of understanding, it abdicates responsibility and at the same time denies the possibility of dealing with violence in any other way than with punitive and draconian judicial measures—which will finally have little or no effect in any case. Irrational and tragic acts of random violence continue to occur.

Liberals at a loss

Liberalism, on the other hand, cannot understand such irrational violence because it is blind to the idea that “nurture” extends beyond the private family. The formation of an individual is an extremely complex open-ended process which, even after that individual’s death, and even with all possible information about that individual at our disposal, can never be adequately grasped or “summed up”. We might never know what tiny, apparently insignificant detail of a person’s life provides the spur to violence. There are two things we do know, though. One is that the individual remains responsible for his or her actions; we should never be prepared to allow an individual to abdicate their own responsibility for what they do, except perhaps in cases of absolute and total madness. The second thing that we also know on the other hand is that the individual is formed in relation to the world in which they live, that “nurture” involves the whole of society and in so far as we are part of society we all bear some responsibility for what occurs within it.

It can be said that evil exists, in that evil acts occur, but is does not at all follows that evil exists as an independent metaphysical force. Those who hold religious viewpoints often state that religion is necessary for “knowing the difference between right anti wrong”, implying that the irreligious are in some way necessarily morally deficient. Those of us who reject the ideology of religion may find that questions of ethics and morality are often more complex than religions like to admit, and we may have some difficulty with “moral absolutes”; but socialism certainly has a very strong ethical dimension, and disbelief in higher supernatural powers of authority is often more severe in terms of ethical imperatives than religion. We have no recourse to concepts of grace or salvation. As Jean-Paul Sartre once put it (quoted in Adieux by Simone dc Beauvoir), without God “all evil is in itself irreparable” This leaves us with the necessary responsibility for understanding the sources of evil acts and attempting to deal with them.

We live in a capitalist “liberal democracy”; this is another reason why liberals find events such as Thomas Hamilton’s actions in Dunblane difficult to understand. After all of the liberal social reform of the last hundred years or so here was a man who, while obviously deeply disturbed, was also not strictly insane, and who committed such a terrible act of violence against the least powerful members of his community. Liberalism can find no answer for—is incapable of understanding—such an act in a liberal society. This tragedy issued a challenge to liberalism because unless liberal capitalism is at fault then there must be some force of evil that compelled Hamilton to murder. Liberalism finds both options unacceptable.

Individuals and society 
If we turn our attention to the little we know of Thomas Hamilton himself, we find that he conforms almost exactly to the classic profile of the mass murderer. He was a loner; he was paranoid, with the constant feeling that he was being persecuted; his relationship to children was such that, if he was not a paedophile, it at least involved the need to dominate and exercise power over them. He was desperate, in the strongest sense of the word; he was obviously in despair (the murder of children followed by suicide can only be accompanied by the kind of contempt for life that springs from despair). It does not require any leap of imagination to sec that all of these factors are linked to the failures of liberal capitalism, with its inevitable social fragmentation, alienation, powerlessness for the majority and feelings of anxiety or even despair that many feel at being apparently thrown into a world that is chaotic beyond all our attempts at control.

There was obviously more to it than this, and we shall never know exactly what additional factors drove Hamilton past a general dissatisfaction or unease into, first, the need to deny his own powerlessness by exercising an exploitative power over children, and finally the terrible and, yes, evil act of mass murder. But can anybody seriously believe that these events would definitely have occurred anyway, without the alienation, social fragmentation and chaos that are endemic in capitalist societies? In the final analysis, it must be recognised that there are no truly “evil” people in the sense of having been born that way—there is no metaphysical force of evil, there are only evil acts, and their genesis can be traced to the relationship between the individual and his or her society. Individuals are always responsible for their actions, but at the same time any crime, large or small, unless committed through an insanity that can be traced to a biological cause, is also an indictment of the society in which it is committed.

We cannot say that there would be no terrible tragedies in a socialist society. Albert Camus was exactly right when he wrote in The Rebel (a text that is otherwise in many ways philosophically questionable and politically confused) the following:

"children will still die unjustly even in a perfect society. Even by his greatest effort, man can only propose to diminish, arithmetically, the sufferings of the world. ”

One point, though, is that if such sufferings can be reduced, if only arithmetically, then we should obviously do so—but the reform of capitalism is incapable of this. The social problems that are necessarily implicated in evil acts such as occurred at Dunblane are the inevitable by-products of capitalism. The only solution that will reduce such problems to an appreciable extent is the revolutionary solution, which is to say the empowerment of ordinary people, the democratisation of society, the abolition of exploitation and oppression.

Jonathan Clay

Harold Shipman (2004)

Harold Shipman

From the February 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

His murders are said by many to be inexplicable, while amateur psychologists have put them down to grief over his mother’s death. But what’s most likely to lie behind Harold Shipman’s assuming of medical power over “who lived and who died”? Well, what stands out from the Shipman story is the way he saw himself as superior to others, which resulted in him feeling at liberty to either treat or terminate.

He left grammar school as part of an elite within society and went on to university. He set up his own one-man surgery because he couldn’t abide working with others in a group practice. He targeted the working class poor and elderly (rather than higher-income so-called “middle class” patients) for being a miserable burden on his valuable time (relief from which he sought by stealing and self-injecting pethidine), as well as a drain on the NHS (which his professionally- and hard-earned taxes helped pay for). He looked relatives of those he murdered in the eye and gave bogus explanations without feeling any remorse. He is said to have enjoyed the role of “master of ceremonies” following a death and presented himself as “omniscient”. He constantly denied having ever done wrong, doubtless because in his own mind, he hadn’t. And finally, there was his behaviour in jail (“annoying, arrogant and difficult”), which resulted in him being locked up each evening an hour and a half earlier than other inmates, losing his prison cell TV, and having his pocket money reduced from £12.50 to £3. For a man who saw himself as better than most, this would have been intolerable.

So, what is it that makes people see themselves as better than others, and confers a hierarchical ranking in society? It’s capitalism, the word that appeared nowhere in the media following Shipman’s death, and won’t appear anywhere in “Dame” Janet Smith’s reports into his murders which numbered around 200 to 400.

Shipman can be seen as an extreme example of a working man – a “professional” – who came to develop an intense loathing of people because of capitalism and its money mechanism. Thousands of GPs have become bitter over heavy workloads, underfunded surgeries and pay, and wanting to apportion blame, have also felt resentment towards the poorest patients, as Shipman did. Such feelings are generated when doctors accept the capitalist way of living, even unenthusiastically. But most pressurised GPs usually find other ways than a lethal morphine injection to get rid of human ‘burdens’.

This anger and resentment is due to the steady decline of the NHS, which in turn is down to a desire by successive governments to cut state funding and introduce market forces and privatisation wherever possible.

That the thought processes of medical practitioners can be so perverted by capitalism that they go along with murdering ‘inferior’ people seen as burdens is by no means new. It happened to thousands under Adolf Hitler’s euthanasia programme. Over a four-year period up to 1943, mentally ill patients of all ages were selected and taken by the bus-load to “killing hospitals” to be disposed of by lethal injection or starvation “for their own good” by doctors and nurses.

Capitalism, having created the monster that was Shipman, also played a part in his own death. Modifying all prisons to remove or cover ligature points, like window bars, from which prisoners might hang themselves, has never happened because of the financial cost to capitalism.

Shipman’s suicide isn’t something that many will regret, though not having abolished the system that produced him, should be. As are the suicides of many others imprisoned – many merely poor and deprived, driven to shoplift some food or clothing they couldn’t afford, or unable to pay a bill.

Max Hess

Massacre in Norway (2011)

From the September 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 22 July, the government offices in Oslo, Norway, were blown up, killing eight people. Shortly afterwards the bomber travelled to a Norwegian Labour Party summer camp mainly attended by children and began shooting them. He killed 68.

To begin with, the news media reported this accurately as a terrorist attack, speculating predictably but wrongly that the attacker was muslim. When it emerged that the attacker was not in fact muslim but a self-declared christian, with political views similar to that held by many mainstream news commentators and politicians, and with links to right-wing political parties throughout Europe, suddenly it was decided that Anders Behring Breivik was not a terrorist after all, merely a deranged madman, acting alone.

Then began the usual debate about how to define terrorism, which is held, as Chomsky has pointed out, to be a “vexing and complex problem” – at least, it’s deemed vexing and complex by those whose job it is to provide apologetic cover for the forms of terrorism that are acceptable to the ruling class.

There is just as much confusion about multiculturalism, or what the Norway terrorist called in his political manifesto “Marxist multiculturalism”. The fact is that human societies, and especially modern ones, are almost always multicultural. As Gary Younge pointed out in the Guardian (14 March): “Cultures are dynamic, and emerge organically from communities. None exist in isolation or remain static. So the presence of a range of cultures in Britain or anywhere else is not novel, but the norm.” There’s nothing wrong with that. A diversity of languages, festivals, music and food is something to be welcomed and enjoyed.

But the other kind of multiculturalism – that which advocates liberal, state-led policies for encouraging and supporting cultural differences at the expense of working class unity – has nothing to do with Marxism. It is something to be opposed as much as the alternative policy pursued by some states of inculcating a single “national identity”. Workers should be encouraged to think of themselves as members of a worldwide class with a common interest, not as members of different “nations” or different “ethnic” or “cultural” groups with their own different, competing interests.

We have never had a problem doing that. That’s because we understand that working class people of all cultures need to come together as equals to fight for issues that unite them as a class. And that’s the only way we’ll ever achieve a society where we can work together for things that unite us all as human beings, regardless of skin colour, religious beliefs, cultural or national origin, or individual difference.

Editorial: Murder of 137 Miners and Death of a King. (1910)

Editorial from the June 1910 issue of the Socialist Standard

By far the greatest calamity that has befallen the nation this year took place early in May, when 137 workingmen were buried alive in a coal mine in Cumberland. Compared with this the passing away of Albert Edward Wettin, otherwise known as King of England, etc., is as nothing compared with everything.

On the night of May 6th this individual died, after an easy, useless life of nearly 70 years duration, and despite the endeavours of five prominent physicians, and the order is given FOR THE NATION TO GO INTO MOURNING. Then, as if to mock the hollowness and hypocrisy of the pantomime engineered by interested parties, and assisted so successfully by their allies of the Press that people were actually beginning to worship the inanimate form of one that had ever been wasted clay—came the shock of the tragedy in the Wellington Pit.

Throughout the mining districts a warning was published on the morning of May 12th, drawing attention to the existing dangerous atmospheric conditions. During the day these grew worse, particularly in the vicinity of Whitehaven, ’til they were practically similar to the conditions observed at the time of nearly all previous mining disasters. In such circumstances no one should have been allowed down a mine save those necessary to tend what animals might be below. And when it is realised that there was no life-saving apparatus near the mine, that the pit in question was a veritable deathtrap, extending four miles under the sea and having but one way of entrance and exit, it becomes increasingly difficult to charge the mineowners with anything short of murder.

According to Mr. Henry, under-manager of the mine, the fire started in quite a small way, and could probably have been easily extinguished. Valuable time was wasted, and when experts with life-saving appliances arrived from Sheffield and Glasgow, it was found that valuable coal and mining plant was being burnt. The experts could not reach the entombed men, but declare that had they been there earlier the latter could have been saved. And—horror of horrors !- despite the convictions of many and the assertion of one who had escaped, that the men below were alive and had fresh air and water enough for a month, it was decided to no longer try to save the men, but to save the coal.

“Alas ! that coal should be so dear
   And flesh and blood so cheap.’’

The decision to brick up the mine in order to smother the fire (and the men) nearly caused a riot in the town —but the mine, if not the men, must be saved. So the mine was bricked up and the only possible means of escape for the men cut off, while preparations were also made to flood the pit should those who owned it deem it necessary.

We venture to suggest that had Teddy Roosevelt, the late King Edward, or even the latter’s pet dog Caesar, been down in that mine, there would not have been such unseemly haste to make it a tomb. But a few score of workmen—what of them! They don’t count: there are plenty more of them at a few shillings a week. And as for the heartbroken widows and. orphans—they are accustomed to such things, you know. A few pounds will solace them! Thus we speak the capitalist mind; and the capitalist Press cynically passes over the brutal murder of workingmen, the fiendish interment of living human beings in a flaming pit in order to save coal and plant, with a report that a relief fund is being raised and that work is being resumed in the district.

Thus the little town of Whitehaven provides an object lesson in the class struggle. To those who believe in the “brotherhood of Capital and Labour” the Whitehaven tragedy is inexplicable, but to us class-conscious workers it is as dear as noon-day. That capital may have its profits workingmen must be sacrificed. And so it will be until Socialism ends conflicting class interests by the abolition of classes.

In the meantime we go on with our revolutionary propaganda. Our sympathy, sincere, deep and lasting, goes out to our brothers and sisters in Whitehaven in this sad hour of trial. The Stoical bravery and fortitude shown by our women at Whitehaven under real grief and suffering, under the mental torture of knowing that even yet their loved ones may be lying in that blazing pit beneath the sea, staring laggard Death in the face through long weary hours— such fortitude as this, we say, we commend in other places, where what is lacking in grief is made up for, many times over, with hired mourners and a mighty show of hollow, pompous mockery and pretence, which could not be complete without Caesar—on a string. 

And to add to our insults and our injuries, this triumph given to Caesar (if we may speak from Caesar'a point of view), is accompanied by the impertinent order that we, the working class of the country, shall exhibit such outward signs of grief as would move these superior mortals to derision were we to display them on account of our own dead. We fling the insult back with scorn and contempt. Between kings and queens and their capitalist henchmen (or should we say masters) and the working class there is a bottomless abyss. Woe to those of our class who forget it: we never can. Across that chasm we repudiate and absolutely reject the invitation or command to participate in the tomfoolery of national mourning for what is in no sense a national calamity. We are not on the same string with Caesar. Across that chasm we fling, in the name of our murdered brothers in that grave under the sea, with undying hatred and contempt, the gage of unceasing battle to the bitter end. That is how we consign a royal relic to its tomb; that is how [we] keep green the memory of the murdered miners of Whitehaven.

Crisis in Indonesia (1998)

From the April 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1965, General Suharto came to power in a military coup in Indonesia that had the full backing of Britain and the US. During a Cold War arms build-up and a world focusing on the Vietnam War and the "communist threat", Suharto became a welcome ally as he massacred 600,000 of his opponents. In the years that followed, Suharto would consolidate his power, corruption would take on a whole new meaning and Indonesia would become a by-word for human rights abuses, most notably following the annexation of East Timor and the massacre of a further 200,000. All the while, the West turned a blind eye, supplying him with arms and training his military staff--interested only in the vast oil reserves Indonesia straddles.

Western eyes are now looking cautiously at Indonesia. In July of last year, the economy began to collapse and reached real crisis point during January of this year. Inflation rocketed and bankruptcies followed. Basic foodstuffs have more than doubled in price and thousands have died of hunger.

That much of his happened during January--a month of self-restraint (Ramadan) for Indonesia's moslems--perhaps explains why food riots born of country-wide discontent did not erupt fully until February, with Chinese food stores and restaurants taking much of the impact. The Chinese, who make up five percent of the population, were readily perceived as being the cause of the food shortages. That they own 70 percent of Indonesia's wealth was reason enough to convince angry crowds that they had grown rich off the backs of the masses.

Media analysts fear more trouble ahead, indeed a total meltdown of the Indonesian economy within the next month, particularly in light of a recent IMF decision to delay disbursement of the next tranche of a $43 billion bailout.

The IMF agreed to the $43 billion lifeline on condition that Suharto reformed a structure of monopolies, tariffs and subsidies--in other words, the targeting of the interests of his cronies and six offspring.

Suharto accused the IMF of trying to impose a liberal economy on the country, which he claimed was not in line with Article 33 of the Indonesian constitution, which stipulates that the economy should be developed along "family principles and which stresses 'regulated cooperatives' rather than the 'free market'".

Back to basics

"Family principles" takes on a whole new meaning in Indonesia. Not only is nepotism rampant, with Suharto's relatives up to their necks in all manner corruption, but Suharto himself is estimated to have assets worth over $40 billion (coincidentally the size of the IMF loan he is haggling over).

Having promised to give Indonesia's central bank full autonomy over monetary policy, Suharto then sacked its governor and directors for objecting to his plans for an "IMF-plus measure"--the setting up of a currency board charged with pegging the Indonesian rupiah to the US dollar. Not only was this opposed by the IMF, the World Bank, the US and the EU, but his own critics in Indonesia lambasted it, pointing to the country's limited foreign reserves and corrupt bureaucracy.

Having just been elected president for the seventh time, to rule for another five years, by a 1,000-member electoral assembly he vetted himself, Suharto is taking economic advice from his schoolfriend Professor Jusuf Habiba. Habiba's economic competence has long been questioned--even by Western economists who still dream up futile models of how capitalism can best work--at least since his "zig-zag" theory which professed that rising inflation is best offset with low interest rates.

It is highly likely that a state of emergency will be declared shortly. Riots have been widespread, often urged on by students less inclined to the rhetoric of scape-goating. Panic buying has emptied shelves and forced many shops to close and the military is becoming edgy, fearful for its own interests. With a restless population of over 200 million, split into 300 ethnic groups, Indonesia faces a precarious next few months.

If the worst does come, we can well imagine the front page analysts pointing to Suharto's corruption and poor economic insight as a cause, and others to the "bursting bubble" of the Asian economic miracle and its wider dimensions. None, we predict, will point out that this is how capitalism functions, that capitalism is an archaic, chaotic and ungovernable system. And we are not being churlish in suggesting that nothing out of the ordinary is happening Indonesia--for this is capitalism working normally, according to its own insane logic.

Our sympathies go out to the millions destined to suffer in the madness, the millions who will in fact lend their support to the same system that has impoverished them, and who will always suffer until it dawns on them there is an alternative and that it is they alone who can bring it about.

John Bissett

Editorial: Eichmann: Who is Responsible? (1960)

Editorial from the July 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is impossible to condemn too strongly the terrible brutality of the killing of millions of people, Jews and others, of which Adolf Eichmann is accused. The majority of people have reacted to the press reports with a demand for his punishment. Learning of Eichmann's deeds, they take the short-sighted view that to deal with him as an individual is enough. But Eichmann is the end product of a vast process; he arose from the inhuman conditions of capitalist society. The very people who condemn him are content to leave those conditions untouched.

The working class, not only in Nazi Germany but in post-war Germany—and throughout the world—blindly support capitalism. None of them can escape responsibility for the consequences. For the power wielded by the rulers of world capitalism is a reflection of the political ignorance of the working class everywhere. It is absurd to blame one man, when he is only the instrument of a policy supported by millions. 

After a war, the defeated leaders are vilified, some imprisoned and others executed. The victorious leaders are enshrined as heroes. It is fortunate for the leaders of the 1939-45 Allies that no cloak-and-dagger men are hunting for them. They, too, are responsible for terrible slaughter. President Truman gave the orders for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Churchill, Attlee and Stalin supported this atrocity. In Hiroshima alone, 80,000 people were incinerated in a flash and hundreds more have since died—and are still dying—from various causes. Thousands of Germans were killed in the bombing of Hamburg and in the destruction of Dresden.

These are the vicious conditions which make possible the race hater and the mass exterminator. Although tens of millions of people have been butchered in the last two great wars, the world is not safe. The fear of war is still with us. Nowadays, many nations have vast armaments poised in readiness to exterminate each other. How many future Eichmann's wait to stalk upon the scene?

If only workers would find out why all this madness takes place! War is caused by the struggles between national capitalist Powers over markets and economic resources. This can only be cured by the abolition of capitalism. As long as workers support this system, so will they be vulnerable to the racial theorist who, on nationalist grounds, gets support for his programme of mass murder. The dictators of yesterday, and the dictators and leaders of today, with their frightening military machines, only reflect the preparedness of their workers to ignore the bloodshed of two world wars and still to die for capitalism.

It is futile to punish an individual whilst ignoring the vicious conditions which made him possible. Eichmann was involved in some terrible things—but the exterminations which he so methodically organised are only a part of the greatest atrocity of all—the capitalist system of society. As the movement for a classless world—for Socialism—takes root and spreads, so will the possibility of inhuman murderers like Adolf Eichmann decline and die.