The Sad Religion (1958)

From the May 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

Talking of the great religions that enslave men’s thoughts, Spiritualism rarely comes to mind. Nevertheless, it has more devotees than any minority; and, if you reckon all the half-convinced and the non-practitioners, probably as many as most branches of orthodox Christianity.

Nobody knows even approximately the number who believe in spirits. There is no demarcation between Spiritualism and the ordinary religious beliefs: most Spiritualists are simply Christians with special interest in the after-life. Virtually every town or suburb of any size has a Spiritualist Church, but there is also a good deal of séance-holding in front rooms, as well as occasional mass demonstrations of clairvoyance in the larger cities. There are two Spiritualist journals, and the older-established of these, Psychic News (Two Worlds is the other one), claims a circulation of 25,000.

In the last few years popular interest in Spiritualism has grown considerably. The reason hardly needs pointing out. It was, in fact, the 1914-18 war that set the Spiritualist movement on its feet; J. Arthur Hill’s Spiritualism, published in 1913, testifies that numbers then were "not very great.” For the truth is that Spiritualism is a sad religion which has sprung from the disconsolation and loneliness of the bereaved; its sustainers have been not Lodge, Crookes, Wallace and the rest, but the dead of two wars and their widows.

Leaving aside the anthropological aspects (though the medium's ancestry goes back to Plato and his kinship to the ju-ju man), the modern Spiritualist movement can be said to have begun in America in the eighteen-forties. A Methodist household astonished New York State with rapped-out messages from the dead; and, though the daughters later confessed to cracking their toe-joints, table-rapping spread like wildfire through the eastern states. A few years later the first “spirit medium,” D. D. Home, left America to tour half the world.

And again, it is not difficult to see that the background to this was the tremendous growth of industrialism and all its consequences, in which the depression of 1837 had left its mark. Jack London was to find “the congested labour centres of the eastern states, where men were small potatoes and hunted the job for all they were worth . . . I saw the workers in the shambles at the bottom of the Social Pit.” There is hardly a difference between Spiritualism in its origins and the hopeful, near-hysterical revival movements which fed upon the degradation of the nineteenth-century working class.

Several of the early Spiritualist leaders were clergymen: the Reverend Moses, for example, who had a large part in founding various Spiritualist bodies. It is not surprising, when one thinks of the miracles and apparitions to which orthodox Christianity commits them. Indeed, spirits are part of almost every religion in the world. Even the Catholic Church, which condemns Spiritualism, does so only on the ground that the Spiritualists’ spirits come from the Devil; within Catholicism there is belief in visions, miracles, poltergeists and every kind of long-leggity beasty.

The Society for Physical Research was founded in 1882. Some of the early Spiritualists left or would have nothing to do with it, disapproving of any proposal to investigate their claims. The only real question for the Society, however, was the degree of supernatural activity, and by 1913 it was made up of people who shared beliefs in telepathy and, in the words of Hill’s book, “the existence and agency of disembodied minds.” The voluminous Proceedings of the S.P.R. read, as Fitzgerald remarked in the Socialist Standard in the nineteen-twenties, “ like the minutes of a gathering of intoxicated persons,” and to think of them as scientific enquiries is ludicrous: D. H. Rawcliffe, in The Psychology of the Occult, comments scathingly on the Society’s methods of investigation.

The history of Spiritualism is, in fact, a pitiful chronicle of frauds and gullibility (at the time of writing, a Sunday paper is featuring yet another medium’s “revelations”). The biographer of Houdini, the great illusionist, relates how he was continually sought after by Spiritualists and embittered by the attempt to trick him cheaply at a séance arranged by Conan Doyle. It is easy to discredit Spiritualism and easier still to make fun of it; really, it is not funny at all. For every fraud, charlatan or ectoplasm-pedlar there has to be a lonely, unhappy or even deranged person. The once-eminent scientist who thought he walked arm-in-arm with a spirit named Katie, and the aged Blatchford listening to his dead wife, are sad figures.

Most Spiritualist meetings are not hauntings, however. They consist usually of hymns and an address, followed by “ clairvoyance ” by a medium who professes to see and pass the messages from dead people. "I am talking to airman who was killed in the war; is there anybody here? There is. He says his name is—is it John? James? His name is James, he says. He has a message for his sister. A lady, at any rate. He says he saw you not long before he died in a place where there were some trees. Do you understand that? You do. He wants to tell you everything will be  alright . . . " and so on. It is often done with considerable skill in observation and deduction, and it is not surprising that some people are strongly impressed.

The more spectacular spirit manifestations are brought forth at séances: ectoplasm, rappings, trumpet-blowing, levitation and apparitions. Not uncommonly, too, Spiritualists have individual encounters with the spirits. If it all sounds ridiculous, it is not much more so than some of the Catholic visions and the Anglican taboos; and the high-water mark for Methodists and many hot-gospel addicts is the religious “experience" — a blinding flash of revelation which takes all kinds of forms.

Why, one wonders, are they not all prosecuted and locked up under the Witchcraft Act? That has occasionally happened to over-ambitious mediums (more often, however, they have been brought to court for bilking wealthy clients at the spirits' instigation). For one thing, as has  been said, the Spiritualist cult does not hold anything which is foreign to Christian beliefs. Its basis is a simple belief in God, and it holds a strong line of respectable Christian morality.

Indeed, Spiritualism always holds an element of hopefulness for the Christian churches, if it were true, if the spirit-world could be incontrovertibly proved, the effect would be a field-day for Christianity generally. Thus, though some churchmen (Dean Inge was one) pooh-pooh Spiritualism, more keep “an open mind"— i.e., hope for something useful to come out of it. Dr. Winnington Ingram, the late Bishop of London, believed that people would be “exactly the same five minutes after death as five minutes before" and would “still take great interest in the world we have left" (Sermon at St. Lawrence. Jewry, quoted in Hill's Spiritualism),

If is worth mentioning, in this connection, that the “extra-sensory perception” experiments of recent years are only new attempts to prove the unprovable basic fallacy of Spiritualism: that the mind is a thing in itself. The Churches have watched just as hopefully, for the same reasons. It is a curious proof, in fact, of the materialist case—that mind and consciousness are effects of material causes—which the bishops hope somehow to see disproved by the roll of a dice.

It is often argued that if Spiritualism provides comfort and solace to people who might not otherwise find them, there can be not much harm and possibly a lot of good in it Rawcliffe, who attacks every form of spirit belief in The Psychology of the Occult, says this. “Religious spiritualism, for many, transforms the facts of death and suffering into something which does not hurt quite so much. It often helps the individual to adjust himself to the problems of life, compensates for frustrations, and provides a seemingly logical justification to existence.”

Put like that, the social rôle of Spiritualism sounds unobjectionable and even praiseworthy; but, of course, it isn't that at all. The same might be said of the great religious movements of the last century, from Wesley’s onwards. Stimulating hope in the after-life, they provided a shield against existence for millions to whom existence was hell—and thereby made them submissive and unquestioning to the miseries they should have fought. The real question is not how to make up for suffering and frustration, but whether most of the suffering need exist at all.

The coercion of Spiritualism is as great as that of any other religious form: the conception of a “great cloud of witnesses” watching the believer is, as Hill (himself a member of the S.P.R.) puts it, “a moral lever of immense power.” Though there is no laid-down body of doctrine and instruction as to personal and social conduct, the implications are clear enough. The effect, after all, is the important thing. People with their eyes fixed upon the next world are not likely to concern themselves too much about this one.

All the world's religions serve the interests of their respective ruling classes—the cult of spirits in Japan as well as Christianity in the western world. In its smaller way. Spiritualism contributes to the same end: the making of a submissive working class. Perhaps more than any other, however, its existence and nature point to the need not to accept, but to end as speedily as possible the conditions from which unhappiness and suffering grow. Only a sad, sad world could produce such a sad religion.

Robert Barltrop

The Capitalist (1958)

From the May 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

Reproduction of a leaflet issued by the Socialist Party of Canada

The capitalist is another of those misunderstood people. He is often portrayed in something less than glowing terms. Not that his clothing is shoddy. Usually it is shown to be carefully tailored and made of costly materials. But he is offered to us as a smirking pear-shaped specimen, lips folded over a fat cigar, whose weight is mainly encompassed by his belt. Sometimes he appears as a banker, a big, bad banker, who has corralled all the money and won't let the rest of us have any except at impossible rates of interest. Sometimes he turns up as a munitions maker who plots to keep the world at war so that he may sell his guns and tanks and other wares and keep the profits flowing in. Then again, he may be a landlord whose girth is gained from high rents on slum dwellings inhabited by poor people.

He may be found in any of these categories, or he may be found in any of a number of other categories equally distasteful. Indignant people are the ones who portray him in these terms, people who believe that more of the good things of life could come to those in need if more money or cheaper money were made available, or that wars could be reduced in number or intensity if profits were removed from the sale of arms, or that better or cheaper housing would be possible if curbs were placed on his bad habits; indignant people, rebellious people, people who see wrongs in society that must be righted and who see in the capitalist the source of so many of these wrongs.

Then there are other people who portray the capitalist differently. They see in him a public benefactor, a philanthropist, a captain of industry, a financial genius, an all round fine fellow. Press reporters and politicians often tell of his benefactions and sterling qualities. Preachers and elderly ladies dote on his philanthropies. Educators discourse on his industrial and financial greatness. In the eyes of these good people he brings grace, goodness and distinction to a society which with all its faults already scintillates with fine features.

The way people look upon society has much to do with the way they look upon the capitalist. Those who see evils about them tend to place these evils at his door. Those who observe instead blessings in modern life tend to credit him with these blessings. He is truly the object of much attention.

And most of it is undeserved. It is unquestionably true that he picks up a dollar here and there through colourful banking operations, the sale of guns, the renting of rat traps and other indiscreet activities. And it is equally true that his industries provide jobs for people, that he contributes generously to churches and charities, that he gives his support to all kinds of groups engaged in social uplifting and public improvement, activities widely conceded to be of worth. But he is really not much different from the rest of us. There may not be patches on his breeches or holes in his socks, or calluses where ours are. He may have better clothing, a finer home, a more attractive bank balance. But he could walk along the road with any of us, and who could determine which one owned the alarm clock?

The thing that makes him a capitalist is not the thing that makes him good or bad in people’s eyes. Most people don’t even give a thought to the thing that makes him a capitalist. They content themselves with some particular feature of his activities and judge him accordingly. He is a wicked banker, a blood-stained munitions maker, a thieving landlord. Or else he is the embodiment of many virtues.

The most important thing to note about the capitalist is that he is a member of an economic category. He belongs to a class in society—the capitalist class. As such he shares with his fellow capitalists in the ownership of the mills, mines, factories, in fact, all the means that exist in society for producing and distributing the food, clothing, shelter and other things needed for the preservation and enjoyment of human life. He and his kind own all these things; the rest of society own nothing of importance. It is this fact of ownership that determines in the long run what he thinks and does and how he lives and how the rest of us live.

Consider the position of the capitalist and his factory. Into the factory go raw materials and workers and out of it come products that are sold in the market places to bring him a profit. The profit does not originate in the market places. People who manipulate wealth in market places do not in that way create profit; they simply shuffle it around in such a way that some capitalists benefit at the expense of others. The profit is created by the workers in the factory. It exists in that portion of the wealth which the workers produce in excess of their own wages. Not all of it is profit, but there is no profit to be found elsewhere. To increase the amount of his profit the capitalist must improve the methods of production, or he must induce the workers to work longer hours or at greater speed or to accept lower wages. And unless he is prepared to sweat in the factory beside the workers, a thought that is usually repellant to him, there is not much else he can personally do about the profit, except spend it. This he does with all the assurance of one who is entitled to it. 

The capitalist is a parasite. He lives without working. He lives on the results of other men’s toil and he is able to do this because he owns the means of production and distribution, a condition that is neither necessary nor desirable, but is allowed to continue because people have not yet seen in it the source of most of the harm in modern society. For even those who rise indignantly to condemn the capitalists, in most cases condemn only the wicked ones.

To replace wicked capitalists with worthy ones will not end the exploitation of labour. The workers will continue to live in need, in insecurity, in fear of the future, no matter what may be the quality of those who occupy the high places. What is wrong in society is not the wickedness of the capitalists, but the wickedness of the capitalist system; and until this system is replaced by one in which there are no capitalists, society can have no hope for a better life.

It is not proposed here to imprison or exterminate the capitalist; it is proposed simply to put him in overalls and make him a useful member of the community.

Aldermaston (Easter 1958) (1958)

Aldermaston March 1958.

From the May 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

Text of leaflet distributed to demonstrators on the march 

This Demonstration is evidence of the strong feeling throughout the country. We share your revulsion that the threat of nuclear weapons has aroused against the Hydrogen Bomb and are fully aware of its devastating consequences. But we disagree with the manner of your protest, which we hold is basically unsound and can only prove ineffective.

Mere emotion, however passionately directed against the horror of war, does not prevent war. Effective protest and action demands both an understanding of the cause of war and a practical idea of how war can be prevented.

The cause of war today is the capitalist organisation of society, a society based on the private ownership of the means of life and on production of goods and services to make a profit. Capitalism creates ruling groups who constantly struggle with each other for control of the wealth of the world. Governments represent the interest of these ruling groups. Their conflicts are economic ones: the competition for markets, the race for sources of raw material, the mastery of strategic positions.

Russia, with its state-controlled capitalism, is no less involved in this sordid business than are the U.S.A. and Great Britain.

Governments cannot be moved to disarm by appeals to their humanity. History shows to the contrary that governments always prepare for war, that the horrific consequences of war do not minimise the likelihood of war, and that “agreements” between governments are no guarantee of peace.

  Effective protest against nuclear weapons demands protest against the whole monstrosity of war.    The abolition of war tan only be effected by the reorganisation of human society.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain in its pamphlet on war states: 

    “War can solve no working class problem. It cuts across the fundamental identity of interest of the workers of the world, setting sections of this class at enmity with each other in the interests of sections of the capitalist class. 

     “War elevates force into the position of arbiter in place of the common human desire for mutual peace and happiness. Its effect is wholly evil. It depraves all the participants by forcing them to concentrate upon the best methods of producing misery and of annihilating each other. 

    "War elevates lying, cheating, disabling and murdering opponents into virtues, confers distinctions upon those who practise these means most successfully.  

    “Young men and women, in their most impressionable years, have the vile methods of warfare impressed upon them so thoroughly that they lose a balanced outlook on life and are impregnated with the idea that force, with all its baseness, and not reason, is the final solution in all problems. 

   “Socialism is completely opposed to war and to what war represents. At the same time it is the only solution to the conditions that breed war. It is a new form of society in which the people of the world will work harmoniously together for their mutual benefit, for there will be neither privilege nor property to cause enmity. 

   “No coercion will be needed in Socialism because each will gain from co-operating harmoniously with his fellows. But it is a new social system that demands understanding of its implications from those who seek to establish it. 

    “With the establishment of Socialism war will disappear and humanity will have taken the first step out of the jungle.”

The Communist Patriots (1958)

Cartoon by Robert Barltrop.

From the May 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

   “Real patriotism to-day can be found among the millions of workers and middle-class people—the industrial and professional backbone of England."
   "To win rising wages is one of the most patriotic things to do because rising living standards benefit the vast majority of our people and, therefore, promote the welfare of the nation.”

No! This is not a statement by the “League of Empire Loyalists ” or the Daily Express. It is quoted from a recent leaflet entitled “Patriotism Ltd.”, published by the British Communist Party. It attacks certain Tories and businessmen in Britain for being “anti-British” and unpatriotic.

The leaflet informs us that ". . . the Tory leaders gave the Americans permission to patrol our skies with loaded H-bombers” (emphasis ours.)

Now all this “Communist” patriotism seems, at first sight, all very peculiar. For the Communist Party, ever since its inception, has claimed to be a party of the working-class; the party which addresses itself to “the masses.” But why talk of patriotism or “our country” or “the national interest” to the working-class? Did not Marx and Engels, the founders of modern Communism, say that the worker is “without property” (Communist Manifesto)? And, later in the Communist Manifesto, they wrote:—

   “The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality
  “The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got."—(p. 78. The Communist Manifesto and the Last Hundred Years, S.P.G.B. ed.)

The Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels was written over a hundred years ago—when the vast mass of the people owned nothing in the means of life: they were “without property.” They did not have a country; the skies were not theirs, neither was the land; they could have no “national interest,” neither were the workers of 1847 “. . .  working for themselves and their country . . . " as the recent Communist Party leaflet puts it.

But, of course, things are different today!! Do we not live in a “property-owning democracy,” as the Tories put it? Do the workers of 1958 own Britain? Are ‘‘they working for themselves and their country” as the Communist Party pretends? Or are our so-called modem Communists, like Tories and Labourites, pulling a fast one? Do the workers work “for themselves” or are they working for their employers, as Marx and Engels claimed in 1847?

According to Lord Beveridge in 1943 “80 per cent. of the private property of the country is owned by seven per cent of the population.” And, more recently, in December, 1955, Prof. W. Arthur Lewis, of Manchester University, admitted that “two-thirds of the private property in this country is owned by less than four per cent. of the population” (Socialist Commentary, December, 1955), which leaves virtually nothing for the mass of the population—the working-class.

The fact is that, despite the lies of the Communist Party and others, the workers of today do not own Britain; it is not their country. They are propertyless wage-workers—proletarians in the language of Marx and Engels—working for, and creating a profit for, the people who really do own Britain—the capitalist class. If Marx was alive today he would vomit at the lies and the rubbish that “Communists” publish and put before the workers of this and other countries. He would reiterate what he wrote in 1847—"The working men have no country.” And he would not bother himself unduly at the lack of patriotism of British Tories as does the British Communist Party!

Peter E. Newell