From Orange Law to Whitelaw (1972)

From the May 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

March 22nd. Mr. Brian Faulkner in London being talked to by his Tory overlord, Heath. Press says talks “crucial”. Ten hours talking . . . Brian walks out peeved. Brian comes back . . . talk . . . talk. 

March 23rd. Faulkner is back in Belfast giving the bad news to the rest of the gang at Stormont. Northern Ireland tense . . . waiting. Dark clouds over Stormont. Faulkner goes back to London. 

March 24th. The news is out! Stormont is “prorogued”, the semantics of anti-“backlash” strategy. Everybody knows that Westminster is not only the assassin but the undertaker! Orange law is dead; Wullie Whitelaw, Heath’s Ulster hatchetman, takes its place with near-absolute powers. Real change is alleged. 

Trauma . . . anger . . . suspicion . . . fear . . . bitterness . . . hope — all are elements in the emotional shock-wave that hits Northern Ireland. What does it all mean? Whitelaw or Orange law? We say there has been no change: capitalism still rules.

So often over the past few years in Northern Ireland have we seen the unexpected occur in a continual succession of nine-day wonders that have knocked many of the sacred cows from their sacrosanct pedestals . . . so many of the things which the cynics said “will not happen in our time” have happened.

The lessons are many but, primarily, they show two things: they show the speed with which political change can occur and the ability of the great majority of people to reconcile themselves to that change and they also show that whatever amount of apparent change occurs in the administrative organs of the system, they leave, wholly and totally, the real problems that affect the working class intact and undisturbed.

If, like the “Left” the Communists, Labourites, P.D., official I.R.A., etc — we were sufficiently ignorant of the real nature of capitalism, and the alternative to that system, Socialism, to take sides in the major dispute in Ireland concerning how capitalism should be organised or by whom, then we could take either side — almost with equal “justice” — and have an excellent case for rapping our opponents: But we are not “Leftists”, concerned with administering social aspirin to a society suffering the horrible economic cancer of capitalism. We are Socialists, holding to the demonstrable fact that only the surgery of social revolution, carried through with the weapons of democracy and Socialist knowledge, can bring about real change. As such we are not concerned with taking any “side” in the political struggle in Ireland (or elsewhere), a political struggle that has emerged from, and was caused by, the earlier internecine struggle within the country’s propertied class, and are, thus, absolved from the hypocrisy, the lies, the contradictions, the prejudices as well as the deliberate exploitation of working class blood and tears for the accomplishment of purposes that bear no relevance to working class interests.

We have seen anglophobic Irish nationalists demanding “British standards of justice”, sometimes even when the military stalwarts of that “justice” were engaged in the crassest brutality against them. We have seen “Loyalists” of the Unionist Party, and its fringe lunacies, denounce those same British standards while boasting their loyalty to Britain. We have seen the “Protestant Parliament for a Protestant people” take in a tame Catholic to its ranks in a lame attempt to convince the world that it was not a Protestant Parliament. And we have seen the British Tory Government sack the local Tory bigots, with all the implications of disgrace, and establish a dictatorial overlord to implement the aforementioned “British standards”!

And we could go on . . . and on . . . but, why? Nothing really has changed. Nothing, that is, that really affects the life of Paddy Murphy, Catholic, workingman or Jimmy Brown, Protestant, workingman. The regime of the alarm clock, the job, the dole, the poverty, the slums, even, the violence — real and intended — goes on and all the happy slogans of reform are turned on their head as their diametrical opposite draws the cheers of the leaders who first taught you the slogans of reform. “One man — One vote”? No! Now we have Whitelaw — and no votes! Abolition of the Special Powers Act? Now we have the infamous Act administered by the British Army with a repressive ruthlessness that sometimes makes even the RUC appear playful! Jobs? Homes? These are now the governmental preserve of the Heath administration and its wanton failure in both fields in Britain can hardly inspire confidence!

Because, so often, we saw the viciously-contorting face of Brian Faulkner vomit its blood-curdling hatred at those whom he opposed; because we lived with his lies and hypocrisy and his leadership of a group of self-seeking political gangsters prepared to stop at nothing to maintain their power and privilege, we may see in the ignominous dismissal of the foul Unionist coterie some victory. But there is no real victory for the working class, even in the satisfaction that some of them may see in the political demise of Faulkner and his cohorts. For these people, like Heath, Wilson and Lynch, or, if they achieved political power, the leaders of the IRA, the Ulster Vanguard or the professional “moderates” of the Alliance Party, are the mere political servants of capitalism.

It was to maintain capitalism in such a manner as would make most effective its exploitation of the working class that Unionism and Nationalism became political forces in Ireland. It was the immediate needs of capitalism in the nearly part of this century that exploited the divisive influences historically bound-up with class society in the country and brought forth the slogans of bigotry and patriotism, hatred and prejudice — the inane Orange battle-cries and the futile Nationalist shibboleths. The poison of sectarianism and nationalism was used by the contending factions within capitalism to rally the working class in the North behind the continuance of union with Britain, in order that the Northern capitalists could maintain their free access to the British markets, and the working class in the South behind the demand for “freedom” from British rule, so that the political servants of the developing capitalist class in the South could take legislative steps to protect a weak native capitalism from the competition of foreign, mainly British, capitalism.

With the changing of conditions affecting capitalism in both parts of the country the old friction of interest between the Northern and Southern capitalists largely declined. It was this decline and the closer economic integration of the UK-Irish economy, endorsed in the Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement, that led to the closer co-operation of Northern and Southern politicians in the latter part of the Sixties and paved the way for the O’Neill-Lemass bun-worry at Stormont in 1965. Capitalism in Ireland no longer needed the unpleasant levels of bigotry and hatred that had been necessary to promote both parts of its divided interests nearly fifty years before. With as little scruple as had been employed when the weapons of hate and division had been first used, the political servants of capitalism attempted to throw them aside, and, in the process, to take credit for their integrity and political perspicacity! But, in Northern Ireland, the poison had been injected deep into the vein of working class life and the sheep baulked at following their leaders through the pens of hypocrisy to a tolerance based on the new needs of capitalism.

The rest is the history of the last four years: the story of murder, arson, brutality, torture and increased hatred and division when the working class paid with its lives, its freedom and endured privation and repression beyond the norm and the capitalist class saw its profits endangered and its lives discomfited. This was the background to Heath and his gang bestowing on Faulkner and his mob the old order of the boot!

Faulkner and his Tory hate-mongers were kicked out by their erstwhile friends of the British Tory party not because they were the Party that generated hatred and bitterness nor because they had set up an authoritarian statelet in which lies and deceit imposed the same miseries on propertyless Protestants as did hate policies and political coercion on propertyless Catholics. If these crimes had represented the indictment against Unionism, Unionist politicians would never have been allowed to relax their privileged backsides in the plushed splendor of Stormont. No, Teddy and his friends did not abandon Brian and his boys simply because the latter had been found out nor did the Leader of that other great act in capitalism’s political circus, the Labour Party, recommend dismissal on such grounds. Faulkner and his party had to go because they could no longer deliver the goods to the capitalist class in the form of a reasonably peaceful, docile, hard-grafting working class churning out goods for sale and profit without the expenditure of too much in the way of overheads for maintaining “law and order”.

A few points are worthy of note; the Party of acknowledged political gangsters whom Westminster have seen fit to dismiss are the same Party who were given power by Liberal Lloyd George’s Government of Ireland Act of 1920; the same Party that enjoyed the confidence and support of successive Tory governments up to the present Heath administration; the same Party whose political foulness was strengthened by the Labour government’s Amendments to the Governments of Ireland Act, in 1948 and whose corruption was beneath the cognizance of Harold Wilson until it became an expensive embarrassment in 1969.

And the alternatives for the future? Again it is worthy of note that Harold Wilson—who can doubt with the foreknowledge and connivance of Heath? — sat in counsel with “the gunmen and murderers” of the IRA in Dublin. It is worthy of note because capitalism will employ, and has employed, any trick, any hypocrisy, any instrument that guarantees its untroubled exploitation of the working class. And none of the contenders for power are any worse than those presiding over capitalism’s system of theft at present.

And the future for the working class? This we can predict with easy confidence. The continuation of poverty, insecurity, of going without . . . living in slums or letting the larder pay the rent or the mortgage . . . division . . . violence. In a word, no change! But, then, the working class knows its miseries and, ironically, while it seeks assuagement of political or religious problems it does not expect relief from its class miseries. Nor will it get it before it jettisons its inculcated nationalistic and religious prejudices and its notions that a society in which a minority class owns society’s means of living can provide the material basis of a peaceful, a full and a happy life for everybody.

Richard Montague

The Stretcher Bearers (1972)

From the May 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

At a time when it is still the professed policy of the Heath government that we should all learn to stand on our own feet, the social services, which are seen as a crutch for social cripples, are expanding at an unprecedented pace.

In fact over the past couple of years social service has become one of the great growth industries. In local government it is already a powerful factor, with budgets which can run into several millions of pounds a year, which puts it second (although a long way second) to education. The prospect is that the power and influence of social service departments will grow and that they may become dominant at most Town Halls throughout the country.

This makes a job in social service an attractive proposition. One Director of Social Services in a London borough remembers that when he was at Oxford none of his fellow students would have dreamed of going to work in social service. Now, when he goes back to the university to lecture about his job, he finds many undergraduates prepared to consider it as readily as they would the law or industry. (A Director of Social Services in a large, busy borough can earn £10,000 a year.)

Most of this has come about after the Seebohm Report of 1968, which suggested sweeping changes in the structure and organisation of the social services. The Seebohm Report came as another stage in a long, typical development. For centuries the state has had to take some sort of an interest in social casualties like the sick, the aged, the mad. The Industrial Revolution, with its increase in population and the concentration into towns, brought its own particular problems as well as the machinery to administer them. At first government interest was comparatively slight but here, as in so many other fields, the ruling class have now accepted the economy of state intervention and after Seebohm this is here to stay.

Until the Second World War social work was often considered the field of the amateur or the part time do-gooder. It has been really discovered during the past twenty-five years, as local authorities have taken over more and more responsibilities in the field. But it all tended to happen piecemeal, with the scope of the service varying from area to area and with separate departments springing up as problems came to light, with little overall strategy or communication.

Imagine a family where the father is out of work and behind with the rent, where there are a lot of children and the mother in hospital having another. Before the Seebohm reorganisation, this family might have been attended to by an army of social workers, all coming from the same Town Hall — Education Welfare, Childrens Department, Housing, Family Welfare, Home Help, Medical Social Worker.

Now this would never do, in the age of rationalisation, in which capitalism has so diligently sought out those jobs being done by two people where one would do. Seebohm was in this tradition, something of a hatchet job. It proposed that each local authority set up a Department of Social Service responsible for such work as child care, mental welfare, home helps, the elderly and the handicapped; a few fields such as those attached to hospitals were excluded. The report described this reorganisation, in established social work jargon, as providing “. . . a community based and family orientated service, which will be available to all.”

The stated aim was to set up a service which would take care of every problem which could conceivably afflict a worker from the cradle to the grave. In each case, this service would be applied through, just one social worker instead of, perhaps, five or six as before. The Seebohm Report also gave support to social work as a profession with the status and authority of a separate department and no longer as an adjunct to the medical and education services. The result has been the mushroom growth of the powerful departments, the career structure in social work, the death of the old image of the do-gooding spinster in her flowered hat and dress.

As might have been expected, Seebohm was widely welcomed among social workers. The Report’s recommendations were largely passed into law in the Local Authority Social Services Act 1969 and now it needs only a ’phone call to suck us into the great, caring, organising, providing machinery of modern social service.

All of this sounds very comforting but what of the snags? One of these is the enormous power which social workers can exert over the lives of the people they call their clients. A social worker can exercise — or choose not to exercise — influence which can affect a family’s chance of rehousing or of help with cash grants. When a child has been ordered by a court into the care of a local authority it is the social services department which decides — without reference to anyone else — whether the child remains at home or is taken away, perhaps to what was once called an approved school but which is now known as a community home.

So this is a good time to ask what it is all about. Why does a social system which is so clearly uncaring spend so much resources on apparently caring for us? All capitalist parties, whatever incidental differences they might have, support the idea of social services. In wartime, social services have expanded and established themselves in many fresh fields. It is, of course, at such times that the ruling class place special importance upon keeping their workers as healthy and as contented as possible; hence schemes like welfare food, controlled rents, subsidised prices. These guidelines lead us to the conclusion that social service can be an effective method of keeping the working class docile, of defusing their discontents and dampening their problems by giving them the impression that capitalism cares about them.

It is no coincidence, that so many social workers are to be found in courts and town halls, the very places where capitalism is administered by its laws of privilege and suppression. When the social worker comes tripping through the front door of the problem family she does not bring only material help or emotional support (if she even brings those) but also a whole lot of advice and counselling aimed at conditioning the recipient to accepting life as a misery of denial and repression in the slum, on a worker’s poverty income.

Sometimes this counselling is mashed up with a fair measure of psychoanalysis, which qualifies it for the description of casework. This can be a fascinatingly complicated and skilful process in which the elements of a dialogue may be played backwards and forwards like an endless game of tennis which is very entertaining except that the ball becomes increasingly battered and misshapen. The really dedicated (let us not say bigoted) caseworker can move in on a family living in a rat-infested slum, where everyone is sick and apathetic, and tell them in the kindest possible way that their material problems are irrelevant. What such a caseworker would really like to toy with are the parent/child relationships in the family, whether they have all passed adequately through all the Oedipal phases, whether they were successfully pot-trained.

Help with material problems can in any case have only the limited object of helping the family tolerate the intolerable. If the electricity has been cut off because the last two bills are unpaid the social worker may try to arrange the instalment of a prepayment meter, which deals with the temptation to get behind with the bills but not with the urge to break open the coin box when times are hard. In the 19th century voluntary social workers would organise mothers’ meetings where the women were taught needlework, simple cookery and the cheapest ways of making nourishing soup. Now, there are homes where women can stay with their families while they receive expert (and it really is expert) instruction on how to survive on Social Security payouts. It is all rather like the army training shock troops to exist on iron rations in the desert.

Although most social workers accept the present order of priorities, there are many who are becoming increasingly frustrated at their function in capitalist society. Some of these have supported groups like the squatters and Claimants Unions, which has the disadvantage for them that these groups tend to become respectable with time, like the squatters who have been tamed into another office of the council housing department, with their own allocations of dwellings to find tenants for. Other social workers have set up their own underground, with its own magazine — Case Con. There are Case Con groups in many parts of the country, angrily but confusedly questioning the established concepts of social work. They are aware that capitalism needs social tranquilisers and angry at their own part in providing them; at present they have no better answer than what they call “revolutionary social work”. Despite their discontent, the Case Con adherents have yet to realise that social work is essentially aimed at meddling with the problems of capitalism and that it cannot be revolutionary because it does not operate in the political field where the revolution, which will end social work just as it will end the problems of capitalism, must be carried out.

Capitalism is a social system of privilege and repression in which insecurity, bad housing, acute poverty, are continuing symptoms of a basic condition. With some perseverance and luck a worker may survive the pressures upon him and die without too many debts or other handicaps. But in the nature of the system there must be plenty of casualties from capitalism’s assaults upon us and it is these that social workers are supposed to pick up and attend to.

It is not difficult to snipe at them, as they pick their way through the battlefield with their stretchers and bandages. Yet there are positives in their situation; like the stretcher bearers, they accept that there is need and that the condition of the people they pick up is not their own fault but that of conditions outside their immediate control. Social workers accept the concept of unconscious motivation; they accept that our behaviour has been largely fashioned for us by the situation in which we find ourselves. They also accept that social casualties should not be left in distress, that they are a communal responsibility.

Because of this, social workers have something to offer in terms of tolerance, co-operativeness and concern. Is it too optimistic, to see hope in the fact that these will be the accepted attitudes in the society of the future, when the social carnage of capitalism is an ugly memory.

Ivan

Unemployment in Russia (1972)

From the May 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

If, as the Socialist Party of Great Britain maintains, Russia is broadly State Capitalist, and, as Marx held, that capitalism breeds and needs unemployment why does there appear to be no unemployment in Russia? Is it, as members of the Communist Party claim, that the Russian planning system has abolished unemployment?

It is first necessary to recognise that the term unemployed has two meanings which overlap but are not the same. It means “not working” and also “out of a job”. The difference can be seen from experience in this country. Ideally, from the capitalist point of view all workers on the pay-roll would be fully and continuously working and as soon as work is not available they would be sacked and become out of work. For several reasons this is not always practicable. Owing to weather conditions, as in agriculture and building, it is sometimes impossible to carry on work out-of-doors and impossible to organise alternative work under cover. Also there are industries or services in which it is not possible to secure an even flow of traffic or even to foresee from day to day when the peaks will arise; inevitably therefore, there are periods in which workers on the pay-roll are unoccupied.

In the early post-war years when experience justified the employers’ belief that any falling off of trade would be short-lived it was a fairly widespread practice to keep some workers on in slack periods rather than face the possibility of being short of labour when the expected early recovery came. One of the reasons unemployment has jumped so much in the past few years is that the prolonged depression has destroyed employer’s confidence that recovery will come soon and their case for “hoarding” labour has disappeared.

Some, if not all, of these factors operate in Russia as in Britain. It is known for example, on the admission of Russian authorities, that in part of the Autumn and Winter a third or more of farmers on the state and collective farms have no work to do on the farms. (See Socialist Standard November 1968). There is also in Russia as in Britain a considerable number of workers unemployed in the period between changing from one job to another. Russian sources are quoted in Russia — a Marxist Analysis by T. Cliff to the effect that 36 per cent of the workers in certain areas changed their jobs each year and that the average duration of unemployment was 31 days.

Consequently, the claim that in Russia there is no unemployment and no workers out of a job is not to be taken literally, but this leaves to be answered the more important question why the cycle of expansion of industry followed by depression and heavy unemployment now strongly evident in Britain and elsewhere seems to be absent in Russia.

When Marx wrote about 19th Century British capitalism he assumed free market conditions of production for profit, a working class able to strike over wages, and that failure to make a profit would compel the individual capitalist firm to curtail production, sack workers or go out of business. Under war-time conditions with millions of workers in the armed forces, wages and prices controlled, maximum output demanded and profit guaranteed, unemployment fell to abnormally low levels (Under 1 per cent in some years). Some of these conditions continued after the war when maximum output was in demand to make good wartime destruction and under-investment, and unemployment remained abnormally low. In Russia where war damage and loss of life were incomparably greater the unsatisfied demand for output and the shortage of labour were correspondingly greater and lasted longer than in Britain.

But the great difference between Russian and British industry is that Russian centralised control and financing of production and foreign trade has the result that the failure of a particular factory or industry to maintain efficiency and make a profit does not put it out of business — the loss is borne by the national budget.

On the side of employment and unemployment the evidence is that Russian industry is heavily overmanned.

David Bonavia in the Times (2 February 1972) reviews the situation and concludes: —

  “Russia has no unemployment problem, as such, because it is illegal for an able-bodied person not to work, unless supported by a spouse. In practice this means that the state merely accepts the losses from an economic situation which would result in huge unemployment in the West . . . From the individual’s point of view, the Soviet approach to unemployment may be preferable, because it increases his security. From the point of view of the economy as a whole, it is a heavy burden to have large numbers of people drawing their pay for working useless or even counter-productive jobs.

Russian planned agriculture and promises of abundant food supplies have not prevented Russia from having to buy millions of tons of foodstuffs abroad. Recently, in spite of planned expansion of sugar production the Russian government has had to default on an agreement to supply Finland and is a big buyer in the world market. Above all the Russian claim that they had planned control of the monetary situation has seen the rouble become a black market currency in the outside world, selling at a fraction of its nominal value.

For Russia, as a world power, needing more and more to move into world markets, the key question is whether controls and planning can achieve the levels of efficiency of rival powers. In spite of boasts of surpassing American industrial output, the gap between Russia and the USA has not been closed and in the meantime Japan with half the population is fast overtaking Russia.

Edgar Hardcastle

The things they say (1972)

From the May 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

“The earth is polluted neither because man is some kind of especially dirty animal nor because there are too many of us. The fault lies with human society —with the ways in which society has elected to win, distribute, and use the wealth that has been extracted by human labour from the planet’s resources.”
— Ecologist Barry Commoner, The Observer 9 January 1972.

“A better method (. . . of controlling inflation . . .) might be to pay all workers that amount of money which just suffices to preserve the living standards of the lowest paid workers . . . it would be injudicious of a government not to recognise that workers, in struggling for earnings, see themselves struggling for them at the expense of profits. At the same time, a reduction at this moment in the average rate of profit or rate of return on funds invested could further hold back investment.
— Rt. Hon. Aubrey Jones, one time Chairman of the National Board for Prices and Incomes—Lloyds Bank Review January 1972.

The poor are likely to die at an earlier age than the rich, and the gap is getting wider. Their chances now are even worse than in the depression years of the early 1930s, a doctor said yesterday.
— Registrar General’s figures quoted at a meeting of the British Society for Responsibility in Science, The Times 10 January 1972.

“Everyone agrees that it would be ideal to prevent all road deaths. No one’s going to deny that we know how to do it. But when we say we’d like to abolish road deaths, we mean at no cost. Given the economy, which has to continue, then people are expendable. We reckon to kill a few thousand just for the sake of keeping the economy right.”
— Dr. Eric Laithwaite, Chairman of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, The Listener 13 January 1972.

There are 33 millionaires in the village of Soltvadkert, Hungary: 33 peasants, that is, who earn over 1 million forints a year. The average working wage in Hungary is about 36,000 forints a year. Calculated at the tourist exchange rate that’s a difference of roughly £14,000 to £500 . . . in Soltvadkert the old system has returned: the poor peasants are once more employed by the rich.
— William Shawcross, The Sunday Times 23 January 1972.

“The problem of source depletion is a phoney. What will happen to the standard of living if we run out of mercury? Probably nothing. The most essential resources are virtually inexhaustible —oxygen, nitrogen, iron, aluminium, sulphur . . . Provided that we have the energy to do the necessary extraction work, there is no resource problem.” Weinberg and his colleagues believe that nuclear energy can amply provide for about 15,000 million people without wreaking havoc on the environment (. . . and that . . .) the whole world can enjoy a standard of living even higher than that of present day inhabitants of the United States.
— Dr. Gerald Wick interviewing Alvin Weinberg director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, New Scientist 20 January 1972.

“Economic forecasting in this country in the last few years has gone awry. We certainly never wanted and never expected to have unemployment at the present level.”
— Mr. Robert Carr, Secretary of State for Employment, The Times 24 January 1972.

“I do not personally believe that unemployment will get back to the sort of levels we were used to in the 1960s. There will be more people unemployed than we have been used to . . .”
— Campbell Adamson, Chairman of the Confederation of British industry, Financial Times 13 January 1972.

50 Years Ago: Class War in West Virginia (1972)

The 50 Years Ago column from the May 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

The mine owners in West Virginia were determined to stamp out the movement for organising the workers into the United Mine Workers Union. More than 45,000 miners are already enrolled in this Union, and the organisers were determined to get another 45,000 non-unionists in. These are mostly located in the Logan and Mingo counties, where, it seems, the mine owners are in complete command of the County administration, with the sheriffs also in their pay. As most of the houses tenanted by the miners are owned by the companies, naturally the first thing the latter did was to threaten with eviction every man joining the union.

This they did, utilising for the purpose detectives of the Baldwin-Felt Agency, who are notorious gunmen. Fights were the result, with loss of life on both sides. On one occasion during a march of Union men, they were met by troops and mine guards, which resulted in a battle in the mountains, lasting for days.

Whenever things are not lively enough for the gunmen, they proceed to ‘shoot up’ a town or two in order to strike terror into the hearts of the miners and their families. The State Attorney General himself admits that the mine owners hold the entire machinery of administration in their grip so that the miners in their quest for ‘justice’ find themselves ‘up against it’ at every turn.

From an article Under the Iron Heel by Tom Sala, (Socialist Standard, May 1922).

Review: April 1972 (1972)

The Review of the Month column from the May 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Home

The cruelest month brought yet another bout of misery for workers who rely on the trains to get them to and from work, as the railway workers went slow in an effort to get some results on their pay claim. There might be some argument about whether the railmen were well advised in their handling of the episode in which Alex Jarrett awarded them a rapid 12½ per cent. That would be a matter of tactics. What cannot be in dispute is the fact that here we have another section of workers who are struggling to arrest a lowering of their living standards. In view of the recent history of the railways, which has been one of cut back and decline, they may well be trying to hold back the tide; but theirs is a struggle which all workers should support. And in giving this support workers should not be in the slightest impressed by the cynical mouthings of the press and of official spokesmen, who express such concern over the “suffering of the public”. To take only one example, British Rail have not considered public interests when they have decided to shut down lines; they have been concerned only with the profitability of the railways. That remains their concern and that is why they are fighting the railmen. In the confusion of the struggle, the essential facts must be kept clear.

Of course the government claimed that their stand against the railway workers was a matter of principle—and any worker who still accepts that capitalist politicians have such things may have believed them. Yet they showed again, how flexible their “principles” can be, when they agreed to pump more money into the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast. Those with a memory which goes back to June 1970 will recall that the Heath government was going to make capitalism a joy to live in by the simple process of refusing to support lame duck firms and industries and making all of us stand firmly on our own two feet. This policy took a knock when the government virtually nationalised Rolls Royce; now there is another example, in the case of Harland and Wolff. The plain fact is that modern capitalism runs on a large measure of government interference in, and support of, private industry. When the Tories pretend otherwise they are merely playing for votes by ignoring facts.


Abroad

Vietnam forced its way explosively back into the headlines it had been kept out of by Northern Ireland and all the other news items about the current violence of capitalism. As Nixon prepares for his re-election campaign, it may be remembered that in 1968 he seemed quite sure that his administration would not have too much difficulty in finishing the war, which seemed at that time to be about to drag on for ever. With the approach of election year, Nixon has put in force a policy of training the South Vietnamese to fight the war themselves on the ground, with support from American aircraft and “advisers”. This policy has now been exposed, like the rest, as impotent. Nevertheless, we can depend on it, that in November there will be more policies, more plans, more vote-catching promises. None of them will deal with the reality, which is that the war in Vietnam is another of the conflicts which spring from the essentially divisive nature of capitalist society. It should not matter to workers, what nationality of people it is that fights a war; as workers their interests are the same. War is unavoidable in a capitalist society and workers everywhere should unite to end the system.

Politics

Another great split in the Labour Party, bringing back memories of the days of Aneurin Bevan, although elegant Roy Jenkins is of course much more acceptable in the vote-floating areas than was Bevan, who might sometimes sound as if the Labour Party was in opposition to the Tories and who could therefore be a bit of an embarrassment. At least until he learnt his lesson at the famous Brighton conference in 1957.

The latest split came over the issue of a referendum on the Common Market. Recently a group of Labour M.P.s have been agitating for this, completely ignoring the fact that when they were in power they were trying to push through membership of the Six without any talk of a vote on whether the workers wanted such a thing or not. Apart from this, the Jenkins rebels are fighting over the Labour leadership, however much they protest, hand on heart, that nothing is further from their intentions. This is not a battle over principles, since neither side have any to fight over. It is at best a struggle over an issue of capitalism—whether and how the British capitalist class should join a trading combine of other capitalist classes on the Continent. It is of no consequence to workers whether their rulers join any such combine; neither is it of any consequence how the affairs of that combine are handled. Jenkins may or may not improve his career prospects as a result of his resignation; the real issue for workers is whether they will continue to stand for capitalism, with its trade and its conflicts and its cynical leaders.

Conference Report (1972)

Party News from the May 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

The 1972 annual conference of the Socialist Party of Great Britain was held at Conway Hall, London, over Easter and was attended by delegates and visitors from many parts of Britain. Among the resolutions passed were ones criticising the format of the Socialist Standard for being too formal, calling for consideration of publishing Russia 1917-67 in German and committing the Party to contesting at least one seat in every General Election. Conference again discussed the Party’s attitude to reforms and the following resolution was carried:

That this Conference affirms that the Socialist Party of Great Britain has as its sole object the establishment of Socialism. It is a revolutionary Party based on the class struggle. All reforms are put into operation on behalf of one section or another of the capitalists in their own interests, even though some may contain incidental advantages to the workers. The Socialist Party of Great Britain is opposed to the workers wasting time and energy in attempting to improve capitalism by means of reforms, thus obscuring the class struggle. Consequently, the Party cannot support any action aimed at gaining or maintaining a reform as such support would not only confuse the workers but it would overlook the fact that the Party’s sole object is the establishment of Socialism. We must therefore confine ourselves directly to the furtherance of that object and not take any steps up the blind alley of reformism. This statement deals with reforms, not with the Party’s attitude to the struggle of the workers on the industrial field.

At one point the proceedings were undemocratically interrupted by a group calling themselves “the London Situationists” who noisily stopped a discussion on the need to develop Marxist theory in order to hand out An Open Letter to the SPGB. This turned out to be a peculiar amalgam of Freudian pseudo-psychology (both Marcuse and Reich, despite their opposing views), some organisational ideas and an ill-informed criticism of our policy of conscious political action, via the ballot box and Parliament, to establish Socialism. The organisational criticism boiled down to saying that the time was not yet ripe for a formal, centralised socialist group, while the political criticism failed to take into account that the Socialist Party has never said that the establishment of Socialism involves just a few million X’s for Socialism followed by a parliamentary resolution. We have always said that Socialism can only be established by a conscious, participating working class organised not only politically to capture and destroy the State machine but also outside parliament ready to take over and run industry and society generally.

The best—and most readable (most of it is written in mock political French)—part of the document which called for “the automated economy of abundance’’ was clearly influenced by our thinking anyway. Unfortunately, though they will the end they don’t will the means. The spectre of the Russian Revolution still haunts them: their alternative of our policy is “workers’ councils”, i.e. soviets!

Who can read Marx? (1972)

Book Reviews from the May 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Concept of Nature in Marx, by Alfred Schmidt. Published by NLB. £3.25.

Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society, by Bertell Oilman. Cambridge University Press. £4.

These two books by professional philosophers are very different in approach, yet both seem to have been chiefly inspired by two manuscripts of Marx: the Grundrisse and the Paris Manuscripts. In these, Marx’s debts to other writers, particularly philosophers, are much more evident than in Das Kapital, and it is much easier for scholars to get to grips with the feelings which motivated him and the principles which governed his thinking. Neither writer believes that Marx altered his attitudes in anything more than detail or emphasis later in life, and they trace the development of certain ideas from the earlier to the later works.

Socialists will approach both books with a measure of caution, because they are tacitly welcoming Marx back into the philosophers’ fold from which he was at pains to escape. Alfred Schmidt, in the doctoral dissertation which forms the main part of his book, sets out to show that, in spite of Marx’s avoidance of philosophical terms in Das Kapital, the work contains a considerable amount of implicit and explicit philosophy which is a natural development of his earlier ideas about the interaction of man and nature and whose origins lie in Hegel and Feuerbach. Schmidt’s scope is more limited than Ollman’s: he is principally concerned to set the record straight as regards Marx’s philosophical respectability and consistency. This involves the painstaking dissection of a number of Marx’s followers as well as his critics. Although Lenin emerges unscathed, the generality of

Soviet philosophising is repeatedly criticised. Kautsky, Plekhanov, and even Engels are shown to be less consistent and rigorously honest than Marx; and the chimera which leads most of them astray is the dialectic. Schmidt examines dialectics in some detail and shows that Marx was judicious in his use of it, whereas Engels, in Dialectics of Nature was led into silliness by his enthusiasm for it, and the Soviet thinkers who have followed him almost up to the present day have made a new metaphysics of it.

The most refreshing thing about Schmidt’s rather turgid book is its scholarly manner, which never gives way to the point-scoring partisan writing on Marx with which socialists are so tiredly familiar. Its most valuable attribute is the documentation of Marx’s scrupulous caution in employing ideas in the effort to understand and describe what exists. Oversimplifications, such as the one some of us slip into when we talk of the development of stages of society, are laid against the considerably more sophisticated explanations used by Marx, and we are reminded that the critics, even to the present day, are in the main [much] less intelligent than the writer they are criticising, and only half aware of what he said.

Bertell Ollman is very much aware of critics, and lays about him with considerable vigour. His is a much more lively book than Schmidt’s, and sets out immediately to challenge the reader with a new approach to Marx’s writing which is to make everything clear. Perhaps it is because he really has an established reputation that he speaks with such scholarly authority and does not think it necessary to substantiate his contentions with many or with very substantial quotations; but it may be simply due to the fact that he is American. When he takes it for granted that the workers in "imperialist” nations have benefitted at the expense of the colonial workers, or suggests that, because the workers of the world have not attempted to bring about a communist revolution, they must therefore have a character defect preventing them from acting in their own best interests—such glib assumptions make one wonder whether the main thesis of his book is any more reliable than these.

Ollman’s contention is that Marx is largely misunderstood because he used language in a special way. He had adopted, says Ollman, the philosophy of internal relations, so that a thing was never regarded as itself pure and simple, but a plexus of relationships viewable from many different angles. Marx could only tackle the enormous job of describing the interrelated and changing elements of capitalist society, without distorting the picture, by using such an approach. The result is that his words have different meanings at different times. This is a degree of subtlety which has led critics like Karl Popper to make fools of themselves, according to Ollman, because they have tried to pin Marx down to a more naive terminology in which things are stationary and mutually exclusive.

Ordinary socialists have never found it difficult to think of capital as money at one moment and a factory full of machines, materials and workers the next, or to regard the process of production as also one of consumption. This may be at the root of their steady contempt over the years for the ‘what-Marx-really-meant’ brigade of writers. Nevertheless, if this erudite explanation of how to read Marx is what is necessary for the avowed experts, then Oilman’s book could have a salutary effect on the level of Marxian criticism.

Ollman’s second thesis is that Marx’s experience of philosophy convinced him that it was impossible to state a fact without incorporating a value judgement in the statement . Accordingly, any such study as Das Kapital was bound to set out from a point of view and to incorporate the relevant value judgements. And the point of view that Marx adopted, says Ollman, was that of alienated man—particularly the alienated worker —whose life and whose self were so much inferior to what they might be in a communist society. This is why Ollman entitles his book ‘Alienation’. He regards it as the most meaningful way to study modern society.

On the whole, Ollman’s approach is very convincing. It illuminates the labour theory of value and the role of religion with equal relevance, but his Critical Evaluation which sums up is very disappointing. It is not his pessimism which disappoints, or even his introduction at this late stage of the notion of “character structure’’ to account for working-class apathy, but the strong impression he gives of making reservations about Marx’s work simply in order to seem impartial. In this it echoes the Introduction to the book, but is quite out of keeping with the enthusiastic eulogism of the main text. Perhaps the fact that the Ford Foundation helped to finance the writing of the book has something to do with it, but it does add further doubts about Ollman’s integrity. It also points up the fact that readers who are not considerable Marxian scholars have very little chance of detecting the flaws in clever cases built up on selected quotations. Only a steady scepticism on our part, and the repeated testing of the ideas against our own experience offer any protection. Occasionally we shall have the added advantage of watching the professionals fall out amongst themselves, as these two do to some extent. In his Preface to the English Edition, Schmidt says

It will help the English reader to understand this book if from the outset he bears in mind its polemical aspect. It was one of the first attempts to draw on the politico-economic writings of middle-period and mature Marx . . .  for a ‘philosophical’ interpretation of Marx’s life-work. In doing this, the book opposed the widespread Western European, often neo-Existentialist, tendency of the 1950s to reduce Marx's thought to an unhistorical ‘anthropology’ centred on the alienation problematic of the early writings . . .

Which is largely what Ollman is doing.

Ron Cook

Return to Labour (1972)

From the May 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

The concluding article in our series on the early history and ideas of the British Communist Party

One of the main political events of 1932 in Britain was the breakaway of the ILP from the Labour Party. Until July of that year the ILP had been a constituent part of, and indeed had played a key role in establishing and maintaining the Labour Party. Its secession reflected the feeling of disillusion with the failure of the Labour Party's reformism which had been demonstrated by the collapse the previous year of the Labour government amid a record number of unemployed and with their leader going over to the Tories.

The ILP breakaway had no effect on the attitude of the CPGB to the ILP and its members. Which is not surprising since no authorisation for any change had come from Moscow. But at the 12th Plenum in September Gusev denounced the British party's attitude to the ILP as "right opportunist lagging behind the mass movement". The Party, in other words, had failed to realise that the breakaway of the ILP represented a leftward trend amongst working class militant and so had failed to take advantage of this.

"Right opportunism", as we saw, is in Bolshevik jargon the opposite of "Left sectarianism" and since in this period the Comintern was abandoning the old "sectarian" line it was on the face of it odd that a Party should be accused of "right opportunism". But an incident in 1932 well illustrates what "right opportunism" was. The victim was ex-SLP man, J. T. Murphy, a local Communist leader with a trade union following in the factories of eastern Sheffield. At this time the CPGB was pursuing an anti-militarist policy and had raised the slogan "Stop the Transport of Munitions". Murphy was against this and suggested as an alternative "Credits for the Soviet Union". In fairness Murphy really was guilty of opportunism be- cause the factories of eastern Sheffield where his followers worked were munitions factories -an interesting example of how Communist trade union leaders had built up their following for industrial rather than political reasons.

The Comintern order to co-operate with and try to win over the members of the ILP was conveyed to the 12th Congress of the Party in November 1932. "The basic task", said Pollitt, "is a definite turn in our united front work, to drawing in ILP workers in every phase of united front activity". The ILP leaders, however, continued to be denounced as "the most dangerous reformists in this country" who were trying "to build a barrier between the leftward workers and the CP" (The Road to Victory, Pollitt's Speech to the 12th Party Congress).

Four months later, however, in February 1933 the CPGB, following another lead given by the Comintern, called for united action with Labour, the TUC, the Co-operative Movement and the ILP. The "United front", the Comintern had decreed, was to be extended from co-operation with workers who were members of other workers parties to co-operation with those parties themselves. What had caused this change of line was Hitler's appointment as German Chancellor at the end of January 1933. This represented a failure of the policies pursued by both the Social Democrats and the Communists to stop the rise of fascism. The Labour Party, needless to say, turned down this appeal with contempt but the ILP had agreed and in May a kind of non-aggression pact between the ILP and CPGB was concluded. This alliance was to prove highly embarrassing to the CPGB since they were moving rightwards while the ILP continued moving leftwards. The ILP, said Bell, "subsequently tried to break up the united front by making anti-Soviet Trotskyist attacks upon the USSR and the Communist International" {p.152). Actually, what was happening was that both the Trotskyists and the Communists were trying to take over the ILP by the dishonest policy of boring from within.

The Communist Party, we said, was continuing rightwards. A curious feature of this was that each step in this direction was justified by saying that the final revolutionary crisis was getting nearer. Bolshevik ideology, we saw earlier, demanded that any change in "tactics" had to be justified by a change in the "objective" situation. Since the VIth World Congress of the Communist International in 1928 authorised the "left" turn its EC had met four times. Each time it authorised a move away from "sectarianism" and each time this was justified by saying that the final crisis was getting nearer. Thus the 10th Plenum of the ECCI held from July to September 1929 predicted the imminence of a world economic crisis. The 11th Plenum held at the end of 1931 declared that the crisis was deepening {and authorised a revival of the united front tactic, but "only from below"). The 12th Plenum in September 1932 spoke of a transition from the economic to a revolutionary crisis {and again ex- tended the united front). The 13th Plenum in December 1933 declared that times were even nearer to a revolutionary crisis; at any moment the revolutionary crisis could come; the capitalists were abandoning democracy for fascism; the slogan "Soviet Power" should be raised by all Communist parties. In response the British party republished in March 1934 the thesis of the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920, the previous occasion the Bolshevik leaders had hysterically predicted an immediate world revolution.

This demand of the 13th Plenum to step up "united front" tactics amounted to a demand to intensify the struggle for immediate demands under the leadership of the CPGB. From the beginning of 1934, however, as the Russian government re-thought its foreign policy, there were so many changes in the Comintern's line that the British Party was unable to keep up with them.

In February 1934 it was urging workers to vote against both the Tories and the Labour Party in the London County Council elections and in March put up a candidate against the Labour nominee in a parliamentary by-election in Hammersmith. "A third Labour government", it was said, "means only betrayals" (One Million London Workers to Welcome Hunger Marchers!, February 1934). Harry Pollitt declared that there was "no contradiction between being associated with the other parties in united front activity against capitalist attack, and opposing the same parties in elections" (Daily Worker, 19 March, 1934). As late as 9 August the Daily Worker was still arguing that for the Communist Party to extend the united front to electoral activities would be "renouncing its revolutionary policy and programme . . . This it cannot do and remain the workers' party. Therefore it opposes Labour Party and ILP candidates whenever possible". Less than two weeks later, on 21 August, the Daily Worker was reporting that the French Communist Party had concluded just such a deal with the Social Democrats there! The significance of this was not lost on the leaders of the British party and by the time the February 1935 local elections came round their policy had again shifted. Now they were prepared to back any Labour candidate who supported the united front. Harry Pollitt had the unenviable task of explaining this shift to the delegates at the Party's 13th Congress in February .The already bewildered delegates were treated to the now familiar excuse:

“The question has been raised: 'Do our new tactics in the elections imply that the previous line of the Party was wrong?' This question principally arises from our in- ability to understand that the application of the tactical line and policy of the Communist party is always adapted to the immediate concrete situation and needs to be changed as the situation changes, with its subsequent changes in the working class movement” (A Call To All Workers, 13th CPGB Congress, February, 1935).

Pollitt went on to speak of this leading to the conditions for "sweeping away the National Government, returning of CP MP's and a Labour Government".

This was in fact way to the right of the new programme For Soviet Britain adopted at the Congress. This had been drafted before Pollitt was ordered to do his about-turn and still reflected the policy of the 13th Plenum as far back as December 1933! After the Congress the old slogan of "Down With the National Government" was replaced by a call for a "Third Labour Government", though unqualified support for all Labour Party candidates had yet to come. In June the CPGB offered to form a United Communist Party with the ILP, but this was just a way of withdrawing its members who had been boring from within the ILP since by now the ILP was regarding the CPGB as a little moderate for them.

By the middle of 1935 the Russian government had decided on its new foreign policy: to seek the support of "democratic" France and Britain against "fascist" Germany. A full Congress -the 7th -of the Communist International was summoned in order to let the various Communist parties know what the new line was. "In the mobilisation of the toiling masses for the struggle against fascism", Georgi Dimitrov, hero of the Reichstag fire, told them, "the formation of a broad people's anti-fascist front on the basis of the proletarian united front is a particularly important task". Unity of action against fascism, he went on, must lead to political unity, to one working class political party in each country.

Their instructions clear, the leaders of the British party returned from Moscow and called a special Party Congress. The old programme For Soviet Britain adopted earlier that year was quietly forgotten and a call for a Labour government substituted. From then on the Communist Party gave unqualified support to the Labour Party; it backed all the Labour candidates, not just left-wingers, in the November General Election and soon applied for affiliation -only to be rejected of course, with some pointed reminders about their previous policy and the lack of democracy in Russia. In accordance with Dimitrov's instructions the Party went patriotic, dropped its anti-militarist line and cut out the subheading of the Daily Worker which read "Organ of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Section of the Communist International)".

The end of 1935 is a good place to stop in our early history of the Communist Party of Great Britain since this party's present policy is substantially the same as it had then become: support for the Labour Party and a Labour government. There is one difference, however, the Communist Party now puts up candidates against the Labour Party. How long it will take them to drop this inconsistency remains to be seen.

(concluded)

Adam Buick

Death of a Publisher (1972)

From the May 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

On March 15th of this year Giangiacomo Feltrinelli died a horribly violent death. The millionaire publisher, the man who first brought Dr. Zhivago to Europe, was found with his right leg bown off, his left side shattered and his face mutilated underneath an electricity pylon on the outskirts of Milan. Surrounded by powerful explosives, he had fallen victim, so it seems, to his own terrorist activities. A small technical hitch, fatal for him, saved half Milan from being plunged into darkness.

Giangi Janji, as his society friends called him, was no ordinary terrorist. With a midas for a father he inherited a vast fortune made in industry and banking and proved no mean capitalist himself. But he used part of his 140m. personal fortune in a somewhat unaccustomed way. Since his disenchantment with the political acrobatics of the Italian Communist Party in the 1950's, he is known to have contributed large sums towards the financing of left-wing guerrilla organisations. Globe-trotting, multilingual agitator, he managed to get himself expelled from Bolivia, France and Germany for subversive activities and in visits to Cuba formed a close personal friendship with Fidel Castro [1]. Until march 15th, however, he appears to have limited himself to merely advocating violence[2] and supplying others with the means by which to wage their vicious and futile war of iron bars, Molotov cocktails and home-made explosives. His first personal venture into this field was his last.

The extra-parliamentary Left has claimed, quite predictably, that this "45-year old boy scout" (as the third of his four wives called him) was murdered either by fascists or through an "international capitalist plot backed by the CIA". Despite the monstrous regularity of such claims from the left, its interpretations are by no means to be excluded. But if the Italian extra-parliamentary groups submit their record to examination, they can hardly be surprised at the incredulity with which people treat their protestations.

Just three days before Feltrinelli's death, for instance, various left-wing organisations, according to a prearranged plan of battle, brought panic and terror to the streets of Milan—and this for the umpteenth time in recent years. If you happened to be in Milan that day and were fortunate enough not to be burned by a guerrilla petrol bomb, or suffocated by police tear gas, you would have enjoyed a grandstand view of the kind of battlefield closely worked-out guerrilla strategy can make of today's big urban centres. Lines of trams with smashed windows; cars turned over and used as barricades; petrol stations set ablaze; police jeeps wrecked as they collide trying to crash through barricades; swollen heads, bleeding faces and screaming women and children. Even the poor Chief of Police has his trousers scorched by flames from one of the fires lit by guerrillas to distract the police and add to the confusion.

"What has all this to do with Socialism?". you may legitimately ask. Nothing at all, except that the organisations engaging in these activities, and those like Feltrinelli who support and finance them claim to be Socialist. The effectiveness of their action in propagating Socialism can be measured by the demands continually being voiced by large sections of a frightened antagonised Italian working class to suppress all minority political groups as a threat to public order. So aside from the utter confusion these self-styled "defenders of the proletariat" spread among the working class as to the nature of Socialism, they also bring about a climate in which the limited political rights already existing within capitalism can be reduced or removed. They put on a precarious footing the right to organise and spread Socialist ideas [3]. Perhaps we should not be too harsh on them, for, given their lack of political understanding, they can hardly be expected to see that minority violence is completely out as an instrument of Socialist revolution.

If there is a lesson to be drawn from this sorry mess, it must be that those who live by the sword always run the risk of dying by it. The pen and the conditions of capitalism itself are far more reliable agents of revolution—the revolution, that is, in people's minds which must precede the changeover from today's system of money and scarcity to a world of free access.

H.K.M.

[1.] Such was Castro's respect for Feltrinelli that he once agreed to suspend one of his periodical round-ups of Havana homosexuals when his guest took exception to it.

[2.] In 1968 his publishing house put out a manual of articles with instructions on how to make Molotov cocktails, bombs and explosives.

[3.] Italy already has a law concerning "subversive propaganda". On 15th March 1972 the editor of Il Bolscevico, a left-wing journal, was sentenced in Florence to a year's imprisonment for bringing out a leaflet with the words: "Democracy and republican institutions must be smashed and destroyed by the proletariat".

Letter: Our Opinion Of Marx (1972)

From the May 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our Opinion Of Marx

Dear Sir,

I am a Marxist, and interested in the problems and policies of the various anti-capitalist parties and organisations in this country. I would be grateful if I could have your opinion on some points of Marxist theory which appear to be in contradiction with your own policy.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain believe in a society in which "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs", is the outlook; in which the means of production and distribution are controlled by the whole population; in which the State as a means of class oppression (i.e., parliament, the armed forces, the police force, etc) no longer exists; in which money and all forms of similar exchange tokens have no place. This was undoubtedly the ultimate aim of Marx.

However, Marx at no time said that the transfer from capitalist society to true communist should be immediate. He stated something very different, both in the Communist Manifesto and throughout his later works.

In the Communist Manifesto, at the end of the chapter "Proletarians and Communists", he states measures which will be generally applicable to advanced countries. Among these are a graduated income tax, a national Bank in which all credit is controlled by the State, centralization of the means of communication in the hands of the State. The state referred to is the worker's state, an institution which is necessary and inevitable; the abolition of any form of state will come when all power is in the hands of the working class and when the forces of production have been raised and changed to working class rule. Only then will the dialectical process come to its final synthesis and completion; only then will, to use Marx's phrase, the State wither away.

I have no desire to criticise or decry the Socialist Party of Great Britain, but I feel you interpreted Marxism wrongly.

— Martin Allan, 

Edinburgh.

Reply:
Our general attitude to Marx is that he was a pioneer Socialist, the one in fact who put socialist theory onto a scientific basis. We accept his labour theory of value, his materialist conception of history, and his view that Socialism must be the outcome of the political struggle of the working class to free itself from capitalist exploitation. We therefore sometimes call ourselves "Marxists", despite the shortcomings of this term (such as suggesting that we might regard Marx as some infallible source of wisdom who never made a mistake).

But we are not committed to applying socialist principles in precisely the same way as Marx did a hundred years ago. This is because conditions have changed considerably since Marx's day. When he was politically active the workers were only just beginning to organise politically and industrially. He considered it his task to encourage this, even if the organisations the workers first formed were not explicitly socialist in character. He expected, somewhat overoptimistically as it has unfortunately turned out, that the workers would soon move on to become conscious Socialists.

In Marx's days the world political scene too was different. Capitalist Europe (those countries in which the bourgeois revolution against the landed nobility had taken place) was threatened by reactionary feudal powers, especially Tsarist Russia. Opposition to Tsarist Russia became something of an obsession with Marx and led him to take up positions, such as supporting the British-French-Turkish side in the Crimean War, which we have no hesitation in saying were wrong. Generally, what Marx favoured was the further development of capitalism since he knew that this would ultimately remove the threat the reactionary feudal powers posed.

He was proved right in this. The first world war (aptly named as it marked the final triumph of capital¬ism as the dominant world system) saw the end of the last great dynastic empires of Europe, not just Tsarist Russia but Imperial Germany, Hapsburg Austria and Ottoman Turkey as well. Since then capitalism has clearly been the dominant world-system so there is no further argument for socialists to favour capitalist development in order to undermine feudal-based regimes. This has been done, and Socialists can now concentrate exclusively on undermining capitalism by build¬ing a world-wide movement for Socialism. In this sense developments since Marx's death have made his tactics (but not his principles) outdated.

These same developments have also made it possible to establish a society of abundance, with from each according to his ability to each according to his needs, now without any transition period while "the forces of production are raised". The forces of production have already been raised immensely since Marx's day: Why, Marx lived in the age when road transport was still by horse and carriage and before the electrification of industry, let alone the discovery and application of electronics and nuclear power! The wonder of his age was "the electric telegraph" while we are now only a few decades away from the peaceful use of nuclear fusion which would give mankind an almost unlimited supply of energy which could be used to produce wealth in abundance.

To be fair to Marx though, he would have been the first to admit this. As he and Engels wrote in a preface to the 1872 German edition of the Communist Manifesto:

"The practical application of the principles will depend, as the manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today."

They went on to say that in view of "the gigantic strides of Modern Industry since 1848, and of the accompanying improved and extended organisation of the working class", and in view of the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871, "this programme has in some details become antiquated". If these measures were antiquated 100 years ago, they must be prehistoric today!

Marx, incidentally, never spoke of a "workers' state" and it was Engels who wrote of the withering away of the State. Marx himself preferred to talk about the abolition of the State. The political and economic developments listed above made Marx's formulations more appropriate than Engels' — though of course the abolition of the State will still be a consequence of the change in the mode of production.

Editorial Committee.