Our May Day message (1978)

From the May 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

May Day is a pagan festival that has survived from the mists of pre-history, changing as society has changed. It was one of the few pagan festivals the Christian Church did not annexe for its own ceremonies, and the welcome to summer and fruitfulness continued through the centuries. The meaning of the old Druid celebration was forgotten, and the event became ritualized, with the early morning gathering of greenery, the crowning of the Queen of the May, and dancing around the maypole.

In 1644 the Puritans banned it, their consciences no doubt shocked by the dissipation of so much energy in dancing and merriment, that could have been more profitably expended in the developing means of production. With the Restoration the maypoles returned, and on the first of May the common people once more danced on their village greens and the streets of the towns. But social forces stronger than the laws of King and Parliament were stirring. Capitalist production was changing, and destroying, the customs of centuries. Men, women, and children, were forced into Blake’s dark satanic mills, mines, and sweat shops. May Day became as every other day, back breaking, mind numbing and miserable. Only in isolated rural areas did the celebration linger, a dim folk memory of unity and happiness.

In 1889 at the Paris Congress the Second International was formed. A resolution was passed affirming that the limitation of the working day was the first step in the emancipation of the working class, and May Day was set aside for international labour demonstrations. Behind the scenes in the labour movement in England there was conflict. The Social Democratic Federation* which had boycotted the Paris Congress and allied itself with the French Possibilists tried to prevent the demonstration. The London Trades Council, the representative of the older craft unions, supported a shorter working day on the basis of free collective bargaining. The newer trade unions wanted the eight hour day to come about by legislative regulation. However both the SDF and the London Trades Council eventually joined in the demonstration though with separate platforms. The story of this struggle was told by Engels in his article The Fourth of May in London, first published in Vienna’s Arbeiter-Zeitung May 23, 1890.

The first international May Day celebrations held in London on May 4th 1890 saw a procession to Hyde Park of over 100,000 workers in support of an eight hour day. Since then May Day has been haunted by the spirit of reform.

Year after year workers have marched behind banners seeking not the overthrow of the capitalist system, but only to protest against its effects. They have called for a “fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work”, for better housing, for cuts in unemployment, for pension schemes, for better health and education services, for disarmament, for “rights", for racial and sexual “equality”. Every political careerist and opportunist has scrambled for a place on the May Day platform. Sworn enemies in the labour movement join together on this one day and address each other in terms of brotherly love. Lofty sentiments and pious resolutions fill the air. Labour leaders who in May 1914 and May 1939 paid lip service to international working class solidarity, only months later were urging the working class to take up arms and slaughter their fellow workers in other countries.

Hitler staged an official “Labour Day” in May 1934, with the hammer and sickle, alongside the swastika. If these seem strange marching companions after the Communist Party whitewash of the last 40 years, it should be remembered that at the time of the last free elections in Germany in 1933 both the Nazis and the German Communist Party were united in their hatred of what they both called “bourgeois democracy”. Since the early years of so-called communism in Russia, the Russian ruling class have cynically used the May Day parade to display their armed might. Whatever flowery greetings are sent from Moscow, the silent message of the tanks, missiles, and marching forces, is intended for the ruling classes of rival powers.

If we now have shorter working hours, unemployment benefits, old age pensions, and comprehensive education, some of the problems we face are even more terrible. What worker who demonstrated on May Day 1890 for an eight hour day, could have imagined that a weapon would be developed, capable of incinerating every man, woman, and child, in a 40 kilometre radius? The lesson is clear. Marching for short term aims has not brought emancipation to the working class.

Good intentions on the part of the working class are of no value without an understanding of how capitalism produces their problems and why only Socialism can solve them. That is why the Socialist Party of Great Britain must stand apart. We cannot demonstrate in solidarity with the Labour Party, Communist Party, SWP, IMG, WRP, and all the other protest groups who mouth their hollow promises of social reform on May Day platforms. We seek the end of the system that brings war, poverty, crises, unemployment, and misery to the majority of the world's population.

Our May Day message to the working class is therefore our message for every other day. Those who do not own the means of production are nothing but the slaves of those who do.

The forces of production long ago reached the point where they could produce the abundance necessary for the change from private ownership into social ownership. The interdependence of society has outgrown local and national bounds and is world wide.

The working class of the world must organise politically to dispossess the capitalist class of the means of production and distribution and establish common ownership.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain sends greetings to our fellow working men and women of all nations and races and urges them to join with the world Socialist movement in order to free society from the tyranny of class rule. Our common task is the establishment of Socialism.

Alice Kerr

* Some members of the SDF who wanted to work only for Socialism instead of immediate aims, and who were against the SDF associating with the second international or the French Possibilists, left in 1904 and formed the Socialist Party of Great Britain — They were dubbed by their opponents the "impossibilists”.

Trade unions and the law (1978)

From the May 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Trade unions arise out of the class struggle between those who own the means of living and the working class, "between those who possess but do not produce and those who produce but do not possess".

On the industrial field the struggle takes the form of agitation and the use of strikes to influence bargaining over wages and working conditions. Eventually political action will be taken to establish a system of society based upon common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by, and in the interest of, the whole community—the purpose for which the Socialist Party of Great Britain exists.

United front

Workers early realised that they could strengthen their position by forming organisations to present a united front to the employers, to conduct strikes or resist lock-outs, and to give protection to individual members against victimisation. This did not mean that the struggle became one between equal forces, for in the background was the government, always there to use its control of the legislature, the police and armed forces, to protect capitalist ownership. Power is in the hands of the government but how, and with what degree of ruthlessness they use it depends on a variety of political and other considerations. In the general capitalist interest they will, on occasion, put pressure on particular employers to make concessions to strikers (as President Carter is reported to have done in the American Miners’ Strike) but never so as to jeopardise capitalism. It was possible in India for Mrs. Gandhi’s government to break a strike by ordering the arrest of tens of thousands of railwaymen, but it was not practicable for President Carter’s administration to contemplate arresting 160,000 miners, even though they defied a court order to return to work. In Britain we have seen a Labour Government use troops to break a firemen’s strike.

Alongside the general purpose for which Governments use their power in industrial disputes is the question of the extent to which, and the way in which, practice is governed by trade union laws. A simple, but erroneous, view held by some politicians and some trade unionists, is that the law is the last word on any trade union activity, so that if the law prohibits something it will not take place and that if the law permits something all will be well.

It is erroneous because there are occasions when masses of angry workers will strike in defiance of even savage penalties. During the two world wars there were large numbers of illegal strikes many of them successful. Governments sometimes chose to turn a blind eye and refrain from enforcing laws, as with the Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act 1875 and 1919, which prescribed a fine or imprisonment on electricity and gas workers for certain strikes. It was hardly ever used, and when the Labour Government in 1950 prosecuted some gas workers under that Act and under Emergency Power Regulations and a conviction was obtained, the Government had second thoughts in face of protests from their supporters, and the proceedings were dropped. (These provisions were repealed by the Heath Government.) Also, it is hardly necessary to say that the fact that strikes are legal does not mean that the workers are bound to win.

Limitations of law

The early history of British trade unions shows the limitations of the law. Before 1824 trade unions were illegal under the Combination Laws, but they went on being formed and operating.

  "That was the difficulty which both the employers and the government faced. Pass laws against Combinations as they might, spy on the workers as they in fact did, nothing could stop the workpeople from organising to resist the degradation of heir standard of life”. (Two centuries of Trade Unionism, TUC 1952, p. 15)

The question of trade union law has been raised again by a court decision, confirmed in appeal to the House of Lords, that under the Post Office Act, postal workers commit an offence if they ‘‘wilfully delay or detain the mails”, and therefore cannot legally strike. A Bill to remove this disability is before Parliament with Government backing.

Periodic setbacks

This repeats a familiar pattern in trade union history; a pattern of relaxation of trade union law, interrupted however by periodic setbacks, often brought about by court decisions upsetting accepted interpretations; as for example the court decision in 1867, depriving Unions of legal protection against theft of their funds and the decision in 1906 in favour of the Taff Vale Railway Company in its action for damages against the railway unions. The way in which these setbacks have been dealt with through amending legislation also follows a pattern; that of the unions doing a deal with a political party; with the Liberals in 1906 and 1913; with the Labour Party in 1946 (repeal of the 1927 Trade Disputes and Trade Union Act, passed by the Tories after the General Strike) and with the Labour Party in 1974 (repeal of the Tory Industrial Relations Act).

The concessions in the form of relaxations of the law made during the past two centuries have not been made without expectation of compensatory gain; some members of the government which legalised strikes in 1824 had even been persuaded that unions would not take advantage of it. When a political party has made a deal with the unions about amending the law, it has counted on electoral support in return, but the employers have also had an interest. As the unions established themselves under the protection of the law and increased their membership, the big employers of labour not only came to terms with the unions, but saw that they too have need of trade union organisation because they must have some body with which to negotiate, and because unions can be drawn into schemes for raising productivity.

Frederick Engels, surveying the changes in the second half of the nineteenth century, had already noticed the new attitudes of employers. While commenting on the way the conditions of the workers organised in trade unions had “remarkably improved since 1848” Engels had this to say about the employers:-

  Thus a gradual change came over the relations between the classes. The Factory Acts, once the bugbear of all manufacturers, were not only willingly submitted to, but their expansion into Acts regulating almost all trades was tolerated. Trades Unions, hitherto considered inventions of the devil himself, were now petted and patronised as perfectly legitimate institutions, and as useful means of spreading sound economical doctrines amongst the workers. Even strikes, than which nothing had been more nefarious up to 1848, were now gradually found out to be occasionally very useful, especially when provoked by the masters themselves at their own time. (1892 Preface to Conditions of the Working Class in England in 1844).

The process has gone further since Engels wrote.

Running capitalism

The unions are more occupied with promoting productivity schemes and export drives and more closely involved with the Labour Party in the running of capitalism than ever they were with the Liberal Party in its heyday. Spreading (capitalistically) “sound economical doctrines” among the workers through the unions flourishes still, as witness the way the “wage restraint” has been put over by successive Labour and Tory Governments.

Edgar Hardcastle

An Appeal For Funds (1978)

Party News from the May 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have been appealing in the Socialist Standard for funds to help us meet the printer’s bill for the new edition of ‘Questions of the Day’.

We find that in addition we need at least £500 per month just to “keep the Wolf from the door” and we are calling on all concerned to send the very largest donations possible direct to the Treasurer at 52, Clapham High Street London SW4.

Readers are also urged to favourably consider arranging through their own banks to pay a regular monthly amount into the SPGB Special account No. 02823446 at the National Westminster Bank, Clapham North Branch (50 21 00) and advise the Party Funds Organisers. This can easily be arranged by your local Bank, or we will send you a Banker’s Order form upon request.

They are not so ignorant (1978)

From the May 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

“A socialist society requires an economy developed to the point where production for need supersedes production for profit. Socialist humanity will no longer produce goods to be exchanged for money on the market. It will produce use values distributed to all members of society in order to satisfy their needs”.  

Trotskyist leader Ernest Mandel in From Class Society to Communism, just published by Ink Links (p. 143).

The French Non-Revolution (1978)

From the May 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

France ten years ago this month. Barricades in the streets of Paris. Ten million workers on strike. Factory occupations. No wonder some people were misled into thinking that a revolutionary situation existed which might have ended in the take-over of power by the working class. But in fact this was never even the remotest possibility. No revolutionary situation existed.

Students and workers were certainly, for different reasons, discontented but mere discontent, however deep, is not the same thing as a positive desire for revolutionary change. A real revolutionary situation will only exist when the great majority of wage and salary earners have come to consciously want and understand the revolutionary change which the establishment of Socialism in place of capitalism will represent, and will express itself as democratic political action via the ballot box and not as barricades and factory occupations. This was not the case in France in May 1968.

The students’ leaders — “Dany le Rouge” (Daniel Cohn-Bendit, now settled down as a lawyer in Germany), Alain Krivine (still a leading French Trotskyist), Alain Geismar (later a Maoist, for a while), etc.—together with a minority of students proclaimed themselves “revolutionaries” and issued appeals to the workers to take power and overthrow capitalism. They were encouraged in this by the fact that it was undoubtedly their occupation of the Sorbonne and subsequent clashes with the police that had sparked off the general strike. But a majority even of students were only discontented with the archaic French university system and would have been satisfied with reforms in this field—and were in fact to be when the Gaullist government later changed the system.

As for the workers, even though the first factory occupation, that of Sud-Aviation at Nantes, occurred in an area with a strong anarcho-syndicalist tradition, their demands were strictly of a trade-union nature: higher wages and shorter working hours. The trade union leaders, including those of the Communist Party dominated CGT, realised this and used the general strike as a means of extracting improvements in wages and conditions from employers and the government.

Industrial action

From this point of view, that of an industrial action to get the employers to disgorge a little more of the wealth they had taken from the workers, the strike can be rated a success. But even though it was part of the class struggle, and as such had the support of the SPGB (expressed in a leaflet issued by our Executive Committee in French), the general strike had nothing to do with Socialism. The factories had been occupied, not with a view to taking them over and producing for use instead of profit, but simply as a means of bringing pressure to bear on employers to concede some improvements on the industrial field.

The non-revolutionary situation in France was to be confirmed in the elections De Gaulle called in June after the strike was over. His Gaullist party and other openly conservative groupings swept back to power in a landslide victory which gave them 359 of the 487 seats in the National Assembly.

Student leaders

The student leaders accused the Communist Party of “betraying the revolution”. Cohn-Bendit referred to them as “stalinist scum” and they replied by calling him a “foreign anarchist”. But this was an illogical accusation. For you can only betray something if you actually stand for it. But the French Communist Party had long ceased to be the Bolshevik vanguard party the student leaders wanted it to behave like and had become thoroughly reformist, though remaining a dangerously disciplined party dictatorially controlled by its leaders. And if they had seized power the student leaders would not have liked the result: the establishment of a bureaucratic state capitalist regime as in Russia. Or would they? Cohn-Bendit’s position as an anarchist was clear on this point but the others were Trotskyists or Maoists wedded to the idea of a vanguard party seizing power and ruling in the name of the workers—in other words, a Leninist dictatorship over the proletariat. From this point of view the workers were sensible to have ignored the students’ appeals and to have used the strike to pursue industrial ends only.

The May events did however have a profound effect on the thinking of the “extreme left”, and not only in France. For the wildest dreams of students who make up the bulk of the membership of all Trotskyist and Maoist sects — as someone once put it, left to themselves students are capable of acquiring only a Leninist consciousness!—seemed to have been confirmed : they, a student vanguard, had been the catalyst that had set the working class in motion. If this had been done once, they argued, it could be done again, and they changed their tactics to trying to influence the working class directly instead of through “the mass party of the working class”, which in France meant for them the Communist Party and the CGT. Far from appreciating being used as an access to workers for Trotskyists the French CP did not hesitate even to employ physical violence against Trotskyist literature sellers at meetings and outside factories. Not that this shook the Trotskyists’ pigheaded resolve to be where they thought the workers were.

Entryism

The May events thus led to Trotskyists in all countries, including Britain, abandoning the tactic of “entryism” into Communist and Labour parties (though not that of electoral support for them) and to come out into the open as independent groups in their own right. 1968 marked the start of a process which has led in Britain to the appearance on the political scene of a “Socialist Workers Party” and of a “Workers Revolutionary Party”, direct descendants of groups which throughout the fifties and sixties had been accusing us of being “sectarian” and “cut off from the working class” for maintaining a party independent of and opposed to the Labour Party.

We drew a different, indeed opposite, lesson from the May events. The continuation of capitalism in France confirmed that as long as the working class are not conscious socialists capitalism is safe. Socialism can only be established by democratic political action through the ballot box when once the vast majority of wage and salary earners have come to want and understand it. The emancipation of the working class, as Marx had pointed out years ago, must be the work of the working class itself and not of some self- appointed minority.

Adam Buick

Little Children Suffer (1978)

From the May 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Closely rivalling, if not outdoing, sex as the advertising industry’s most popular theme is the home and the family. There is, of course a difference; sexually orientated ads work on promise — the near-nude rolling in the surf, the tightly jeaned female bottoms — while those based on the home are about fulfillment. The image of a smart, comfortable home with affectionate parents and secure children is used to sell toothpaste, breakfast cereals, soup, scouring compounds . . . Because the family, as a place of care, of security, where children grow into happy, well adjusted adults, is one of capitalism’s essential ideals.

Well a recent survey by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (The Child’s Guardian—Winter 1977) estimated that 110 children —mostly babies—are battered to death every year and that beyond these at least 7,700 children receive non-accidental injuries of varying degrees of severity. The NSPCC’s annual report for 1976 said that during twelve months they actually found 30,878 children potentially at risk of neglect or injury.

Concern about child abuse is a comparatively modern fashion; for much of the span of property society children have been regarded as wilfully deficient adults and therefore deserving of whatever punishment their elders liked to inflict on them. As a child king, Edward VI was regularly flogged; Charles I managed to interpose a whipping boy to take his treatment. In the 17th century Massachusetts and Connecticut had a law which prescribed the death penalty for unruly children (nowadays, in England, they are likely only to be put into prison). The case of Mary Ellen, in the 1860s, which saved her from parental brutality, succeeded only on the grounds that she was an animal; while it was illegal to maltreat animals the rights of parents to chastise their children was inviolable.

It was entirely natural, then, that the Industrial Revolution should extend the field of child abuse. In Halifax, Defoe admired four year olds earning their living like grown ups, which meant that in the mines and factories they worked 14, 16, or even 18 hours a day, whipped at their machines to keep them awake and often subjected to imaginative torture by sadistic overseers. The tradition was carried on in the schools, where children were persistently beaten and humiliated to make them learn or behave themselves. It was not only poor kids who suffered; Lord Shaftesbury recalled the school he was sent to, at the age of seven, at the start of the 19th century:

  The memory of that place makes me shudder . . . I think I never saw such a wicked school before or since. The place was bad, wicked, filthy, and the treatment was starvation and cruelty.

(The Prevention of Cruelty to Children — Leslie George Housden)

The agitation over child abuse, which gathered strength in the late 19th century, was largely an upper class affair, typified by a letter in The Times in 1884 which bemoaned “. . . the cruel neglect towards children among our degraded and criminal classes.” From this movement the NSPCC was born, to grow up with the (undeserved) image of the black-uniformed inspector calling in response to anonymous and groundless complaints from malicious neighbours.

Since then there has been a progressive refinement of the techniques of dealing with cruelty towards children, beginning with the deficiencies existing in the methods of detecting the condition some of which were hair raising. One girl, who had herself battered her child, gave an example:

  My elder sister, I think she could have been classed as a battered child, though you didn’t have them then, did you?

(Children in Danger — Jean Renvoize)

Doctors and social workers were pretty slow to detect the signs of baby battering, even misinterpreting something as apparently obvious as healed fractures showing up on an X-ray plate. Now the paediatrician works as a specialist in his own right, but under the restraints common to anyone whose job is to minister to capitalism’s casualties. And, as the NSPCC indicate, a substantial amount of child cruelty still goes undetected.

In 1961 an American doctor, Henry Kempe, published his theory that baby battering might be regarded in the same way as a disease, in that its presence was indicated by certain symptoms which collectively made up what he called the battered baby syndrome. The first symptom may be the act of the parents bringing their child to hospital with, say, a large bruise on its face and a story about it falling off the settee a couple of days before.

Questioning the parents may then reveal other symptoms—one or both of them may have had a bad experience at the hands of their parents; they may make excessive demands on their children for obedience or achievement or uncritical affection. And in among this mixture of physical and emotional problems there are also often social ones, part and parcel of the working class status of the battering parents.

An NSPCC research project in 1976 (At Risk) found that an unwanted pregnancy, marital difficulties and bad housing were predisposing factors in baby battering :

   Many of the parents were living in poor, cramped accommodation, unsuitable for the arrival of a new baby. Hence they spent much of the pregnancy desperately seeking an alternative, which must have added to their general insecurity and anxiety.

If the battered baby syndrome tells us anything it is that human behaviour is largely a response to the conditions the human being finds himself in.

The growth of knowledge about child abuse should cause some questioning of the assumption — on which many of the decisions in domestic and juvenile courts are based — that the best and safest place for a child is at home with its natural parents and that the greatest institution ever developed by man is the monogamous marriage which is, was and shall be.

In fact the family has been a changing organism in society reflecting development in the mode of production. Frederick Engels (The Origin of the Family) describes the monogamous family as: ". . . the first form of the family to be based, not on natural, but on economic conditions — on the victory of private property over primitive, natural communal property”, and points out that it was the intensification of production in agriculture, metalwork and later slavery — all of them the preserve of the male — which finished of the primitive social order dominated by kinship groups, with group marriage and matriarchal families.

The observations of primitive society by Margaret Mead (Coming of Age in Samoa) revealed households consisting not just of biological families but also of all those related in any way to the headman or his wife. One effect of this was that children could wander freely and always find food, shelter and protection because they were never out of surveillance of some older relative. If a child was under pressure in one household it could always move to another — a safety valve against over-punitive discipline:

  A girl whose father has beaten her over-severely, in the morning will be found living in haughty sanctuary, two hundred feet away, in a different household. So cherished is this system of consanguineous refuge, that an untitled man or a man of lesser rank will beard the nobler relative who comes to demand a runaway child.

As the Samoan child was passed from one relative to another it learned that no one person, or small group of people, represented care, security or authority, it grew up without the need to invest a great deal in any one relationship; at the same time as passions like jealousy were practically eliminated so was my strong emotional attachment. It couldn’t have been more different from Woman's Own; in Samoan society the successful people were those whose affections were spread thinly over many others, in contrast to modern capitalism’s ideal of an intense focussing of affection onto a small group.

One conclusion from this is that conformity and deviance are very much subjective concepts, fashioned by the demands of the social system within which they exert their pressures on people. The tragedy in what capitalism does to us is that we have the worst of all possible worlds. The monogamous family is restrictive and repressive; it encourages intense involvement over a small scale but it does not bring the commensurate rewards which the moralists claim for it. To begin with it is a perilously fragile arrangement; for example children who conform and form a dependence upon their parents are grievously damaged if anything goes wrong with that relationship. The family of capitalism copes only with difficulty with the natural pressures of the system, which amount to the everyday burdens of working class poverty. If the bough breaks, and the cradle falls, there is rarely a safety net below.

At the same time the family of capitalism is under pressure to become ever more private and introverted. In face of the popular notion that it is breaking up, an increasing amount of money is being diverted into cementing the family together. Mortgages, washing machines and television sets are not just ways of spending money; they are also inducements to use, or enjoy, the results of that spending behind your own front door. And if you must go out you can always keep yourself intact as a unit within the mobile privacy of the motor car.

When we intensify this situation of stress with the normal pressures of survival under capitalism — the need to keep, and progress in, a job for example — we have something which can realise its explosive potential in violence among the electrical gadgets or in a battered baby lying in the G Plan bedroom. Jean Renvoize puts it starkly, as an everyday problem in a working class home when a baby arrives:

  Time and again battering parents report sleeping problems. and no one consistently deprived of their proper quota of sleep can be said to be fully themselves.

Capitalism works by deception and among the cruellest is its family, which it presents as a haven but which is often a torture chamber. Organisations like the NSPCC, typical of their kind, sit Canute-like, puzzled and dismayed at the ever-encroaching tide of reality. Panicked, they splash among superficialities — bad housing or emotional tangles or misconceptions about a child’s abilities. Capitalism is a society in which some violence earns a gaol sentence and some wins medals. It cannot provide for its children or its adults and it will go down in history as having much blood on its hands.

Ivan

Letter: Half Way House? (1978)

 Letter to the Editors from the May 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

As a newcomer to the Socialist Standard, I am struck by the fact that you appear to make no distinction between various stages of socialism. You talk of socialism as a classless, moneyless, stateless society, based, presumably, upon the principle ‘‘From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs.” I had always thought this principle to apply to a developed stage of socialism, which some would call communism; whereas the socialist principle is “From each according to his ability, to each according to his work,” and relates to a society where money still exists as a medium of exchange and state-power remains, though exercised by the working class. Could you clarify your position on this matter? Do you in fact envisage socialism as having transitional stages?

John Southcote 

Coventry

Reply:

The idea of a transitional period between capitalism and socialism (or communism—the words mean the same thing) was concocted to explain away the dismal reality of the Russian revolution after 1917. Capitalism has performed the historical task of clearing the way for socialism; apart from anything else it has reduced the class struggle to one where there are only two classes. When the working class have won the struggle they can set up socialism immediately; there is no need for any half way house.

The proponents of a transitional society never define it in any concrete terms; what sort of class structure will it have; who will own the means of production; will there be a coercive state machine?

The entire concept is a dishonest attempt to cover up the fact that capitalism exists in places like Russia just as it does in England and the USA. When the international working class want socialism they can have it; the socialist revolution is the next step in social evolution and there is nothing in between.

The Price of a Life (1978)

From the May 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anyone asked to think of a product of capitalist society that is designed to kill would probably think of armaments, in all their many forms. But if it were suggested that capitalism also produces quite ordinary products such as motor cars, deliberately calculating that they are going to kill a certain proportion of their users, most people would not believe it. But it happens to be true.

One thing most workers would agree on, though, is that everything has its price; work, play, necessities, luxuries, food, drink etc. — all have this in common. Although most workers don’t realise it, above all capitalism prices a worker’s labour-power; the price being of course, wages. But capitalism does not stop at pricing a man’s ability to work, it also prices human lives themselves. In a remarkable legal case in the USA the horrifying fact was revealed that the Ford Motor Company decided it was cheaper (more profitable) to kill and maim people than incorporate a small design change in one of their models; a design change which would only cost something between $9-11 for each model.

The full details of this story of capitalism’s gross inhumanity in the search for profits was revealed in a report of the case in The Sunday Times (12/2/78). The Ford Pinto is one of a number of smaller American cars. It appears that the fuel tank for this car was (and in the case of those cars already on the road, still is) placed right at the rear. This meant that if hit from behind, even quite gently (a common accident) there was a strong chance of the petrol tank buckling, the petrol spilling out and the car bursting into flames. Several reports in the 1970s had pointed this out, and Ford were well aware of the risk. The car in which 13-year-old Richard Grimshaw was travelling was involved in just such an accident. The vehicle was hit from behind, the petrol tank exploded, and the driver was burnt to death. Richard however was “lucky” — he survived. Now 52 operations later (with more still to come) and horribly scarred for life, he has won his court case against Ford.

The jury in the case awarded Richard $128 million (roughly £66 million), punitive damages. That is, they not only gave Richard compensation for the injuries he suffered; they also punished Ford, imposing specially heavy damages. They did this because it was shown that Ford had killed and maimed deliberately. The Californian jury were presented with some shocking evidence, the results of detective work undertaken by Richard’s lawyers. In order to obtain this huge sum of damages it was not sufficient to show that the car had a design fault. Ford knew all about this and anyway they had a defence — the car met all government safety standards at the time. (This would not have been sufficient to prevent Richard getting a more normal level of damages — the current rate against Ford in the USA for this sort of horrible injury seems to be between $500,000 and $1 million). But Richard’s lawyers discovered that not only were Ford aware of the potential hazard of the car, but that they deliberately calculated the cost involved in altering the design, and the cost involved in terms of personal suffering) if they did not alter the design.

Ford’s calculations were that approximately 180 deaths and 180 serious injuries a year would result from the faulty design (though some estimates put the figure nearer to 1800 deaths a year and one journal estimates the death rate at 5000 a year). They then worked out the likely “cost” of each death or injury. They did this by adding up such items as victims’ pain and suffering ($10,000) fatal burn injuries ($67,000) medical expenses, loss of future earnings etc. Based on these grisly figures (and not forgetting the costs of damage to the car!) Ford put the total benefit (“savings”) of a design change at slightly less than $50 million. Let The Sunday Times take up the story of how this particular capitalist enterprise calculated from there:

 The figure of $50 million was set against the costs— $11 million worth of modifications per Ford vehicle sold—of $137 million. That, Ford engineers observed, was almost three times greater than the benefits, even using a number of highly favourable benefit assumptions! They could not envisage any development which would make compliance . . . cost effective.

The further evidence that Richard’s lawyers were able to produce to support their claim for punitive damages came from — a “star witness”. This was H.F. Copp, a retired senior design engineer, who had worked with Ford for 20 years. (The fact that he had retired was rather important — otherwise presumably he would not have dared give evidence against Ford for fear of being unemployed for life). This is how the Sunday Times continues its report

  Copp had worked on Ford’s successful Capri range in which the petrol tank rode, saddle-style, above the back axle; he was certain this was the safest design. . . . What could a designer like him do, Richard’s lawyers asked, if “corporate management” specified the location of the petrol tank? “Follow corporate policy” Copp replied. Had Ford’s top management, in fact, issued a design directive for the Pinto’s tank? "Behind the rear axle, beneath the floor.” Could he estimate how much extra it would have cost to place the Pinto’s tank above the axle? “About $9 more per car."

So why didn’t Ford introduce the safer design that Copp (and others) advised? Quite simple really — a Ford engineer explained that in the “ferociously competitive small-car market” Ford had to be extremely price-conscious (price here referring to cars of course — not human lives). The car was governed by the 2000 limit: “. . . it was not to weigh more than 2000 pounds and not to cost more than $2000 . . .  An increase in production costs could price a compact car out of its market”.

So there are the simple economics; no frills, no attempts to hide it, no subtlety. Naked concern for sales means that the price of a human life is weighted in the scales against the price of a car; in this instance the human life is found to be the lighter.

Of course the very heavy damages awarded are little comfort to Richard. As poor Richard himself said after the case: “If I had a choice of whether to take this money and go through all those burns and stuff or just lead a normal life, then I’d lead a normal life”. The lesson for the world working class from this story is obvious. A society that coldly evaluates the cost of killing or maiming a human being (quite apart from the horrors of war) and decides that it is more profitable to do so than to spend a miserable $9-11 a car is no society for human beings at all; it is a society OF human beings FOR profits. If the tragedy of Richard Grimshaw and many others teaches this lesson, then perhaps his sufferings have not been totally in vain.

Ronnie Warrington

50 Years Ago: Unemployment in Australia (1978)

The 50 Years Ago column from the May 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

While Australia is being boomed abroad — by emigration touts — as a paradise for the workers, and thousands are flocking to her shores in search of work, in the capital cities the unemployed are marching the streets, registering at the Government Labour Bureaus, and sending deputations to the State Governments asking for sustenance or work.

All the old fallacies that have done service this century are being trotted out by the pen-valets, politicians and other hangers-on of the capitalist class. Free trade and protection hold pride of place although in circumstances in which either of these fiscal policies is in operation unemployment still remains a problem. According to Stead’s Review, June 1927, the figures submitted by the League of Nations demonstrate that the percentage of unemployed in Australia was greater than in any other nation associated with the League.

When the Labour Government came into power in Victoria it set out valiantly to deal with unemployment, but after six months unemployment is worse than ever. The Premier’s (Mr. Hogan’s) explanation is that the sole cause of the unemployment problem is the adverse trade balance.

From “A Letter from the Socialist Party of Australia”, published in the Socialist Standard, May, 1928.

Obituary: R. B. Gill (1978)

Obituary from the May 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have learnt of the death in a car accident of our Comrade Ray Gill, who last December emigrated to Australia. Doctor Gill joined the Party in 1974 and subsequently wrote a number of informative articles on the National Health Service for the Socialist Standard. Our Australian comrades will share our regret at his untimely loss.

The Poverty Trap (1978)

TV Review from the May 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

One thing that is not lacking under capitalism is public exposure and debate of the inescapable poverty that is the lot of the majority. This debate has been taken up by the television industry and the viewers are treated to no-holds-barred confrontations in which not only politicians take part but also those directly involved, landlord and tenant, employer and employee and so on. The general point of view is that things are grim now and the best that can be hoped for is that they do not get worse.

This point came over well in Are We Really Going To Be Rich? (April 4) the Yorkshire Television Production on ITV on the subject of North Sea Oil. Representatives of a mass of conflicting interests made up the studio audience and as if the talents of Jimmy Reid, Sir John Methven, Sir Keith Joseph, Lord Ballogh and all were not enough, no expense was spared to bring in the images of Tony Benn from London and participants from America including top of the pops economist Milton Friedman. Chairman David Frost saw to it that all (except Socialist) opinions were voiced. These ranged from the oil rig hand who wanted “full blooded socialism” (really milk and water state capitalism) to the capitalist who was well satisfied with his stake in North Sea Oil. Or Jimmy Reid who wanted the operators to be directed to buy British equipment, providing it was competitive and the American executive who complained of delays in the deliveries of it.

When it came to the question of what should be done with revenue the government were expecting to get from North Sea Oil, there was general agreement that it should be used to revive ‘British’ industry and reduce unemployment. The Tories wanted to do it by tax cuts and the Labourites by government ‘enterprise’. All seemed to agree that the most they expected was some form or other of capitalism with the wage labour and capital relation left intact. That is, all except Milton Friedman who showed what it takes to be a Nobel Prize winner. He proposed to make lump sum payments to turn us all into capitalists, as these assets belonged to the people, not the government. Apart from the fact that £5,000 as capital could not bring in enough income to enable even the stingiest person to live, capitalism needs workers to produce wealth. This modest handout would not change things, the majority would remain propertyless in the means of production; they are workers, not capitalists. Indeed it is the needs of capital to find a profit that dictated the form the debate took, with workers seeking work and capitalists (private and state) seeking profitable investments.

Any worker having the illusion that there are good times ahead, from an oil bonanza would have done well to learn the lessons of the BBC2 Horizon programme The New Breadline shown on Good Friday. There are, it was claimed, 7 million people living on or below the official poverty line, which has not changed substantially since that established by Seebohm Rowntree in 1899 based on a diet below that of the workhouse, and slightly amended in the 1930s. Also shown were the results — children sent to school without breakfast from Wednesday each week as the money has run out; children reduced to being dressed only in jumble sale clothing. Social isolation is another result, they cannot afford the fares to visit friends and relations; cannot afford their own drink, never mind the round that is mandatory among mates in a pub.

Among these 7 million are old age pensioners. People who, after a lifetime’s work, have insufficient income from pensions and savings to live above the official poverty line. Grinding poverty, with inadequate food, heating and so on is still the future most workers face in the evening of their lives. Then there are the unemployed, victims of the slump in world trade. For many it is their first taste of idleness after years of steady work. Many disabled people, and single parent families, are among the official poor. Even some workers with regular jobs earn wages below the poverty line. What is obvious is that the 7 million official poor belong to that section of society who have to work for wages in order to live; the working class. Most workers are but a couple of wage packets away from the situation of the official poor.

Poverty is therefore not restricted to those who are officially classified as such, it is the condition that workers in general are familiar with. Not mentioned in the programme were the people who not only never need go near a social security office, but never need worry about getting a job. The rich are not irrelevant to the question of poverty. The existence of one is the condition of the existence of the other. The wealth going to the rich of this world comes from the work of the poor. The rich own the means of production, the poor do not. The poor produce more than is required to maintain them as workers and this surplus keeps the rich. Be they old, lame, part of a single parent family, the rich need no supplementary benefits, least of all need they seek employment. The answer to David Frost’s question “Are we really going to be rich?’’ is obvious. There will be rich and poor as long as capitalism lasts.

Joe Carter

Parliament and Political Power (1978)

From the May 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is necessary to capture political power to install Socialism and to do this, workers must organize themselves as a political party having Socialism as its sole aim and send elected delegates to Parliament or its equivalent. However it is important to bear in mind that the objective to obtain a socialist majority in Parliament is totally subordinate to the need for a majority of workers to want and understand Socialism.

If it can be shown that political power must be captured and that Parliament is the seat of this power and can only be captured through parliamentary activity, one is bound to concur with the socialist, that Parliament must be legally captured to consummate the socialist revolution.

What is power?

Firstly, what is power? It is the capacity to coerce. The exercise of political power is ultimately dependant on the extent to which people, consciously or otherwise, permit themselves to be coerced. This willingness is sustained by the ideology of the ruling class which permeates all levels of society. Thus for socialists to capture political power entails supplanting the prevailing capitalist ideology with socialist consciousness among workers who, at present, place their trust in leaders and governments to administer capitalism. The apparent powerlessness of workers derives from the fact that they place their trust in others to do their political thinking for them — the very idea that “great men” determine history or how society is run, is itself an obstacle to the realization of the political power the working class can wield through class unity based on class-consciousness, whereby they can capture the state and install Socialism.

So the power that governments and leaders appear to possess is social; it is a product of social forces and how it is used is conditioned by the social environment. The social process of legitimizing power is formalized through the franchise which makes explicit the dependence of rulers on the consent of their subjects for them to rule. But even in dictatorships this dependence on the active or passive consent of people obtains. The power hierarchy pyramidal structure of ascending layers with each "layer” exercising power within the limitations placed on it.

The state is an organic expression of the fundamental class conflict within property society. It will not “wither away” as long as the class basis of society exists and conversely the class basis of society will not disappear as long as the state exists to prop it up. The state cannot be abolished without first abolishing property relations of which it is a product — and to abolish them, as the political act of establishing Socialism will do, it is thus necessary to capture the public power of coercion vested in the state which is at present geared to the protection of these property relations.

Marx hailed universal suffrage as a “socialistic measure” in England and claimed that, “Its inevitable result, here, is the political supremacy of the working class” (The Chartists 1852). Yet many so called “marxists” repudiate the “parliamentary road” to “socialism” even where such a road is open to them. Some of these critics indulge in flagrant hypocrisy in damning Parliament as a “farce” whilst exhorting workers to “vote Labour” or even contesting elections themselves! Socialists would be the last to deny that the Palace of Westminster reverberates with farce and hypocrisy but these qualities are inevitably bound up with running capitalism and are no less prevalent in dictatorships.

Thus it is necessary to distinguish between Parliament as a political institution as such and how it is used, which depends on who has control of it. Governments exist to administer capitalism, for which they have massive electoral support, by passing legislation through Parliament. Legislation is necessary for the same reason that it is bound to fail to solve the many problems attendant upon capitalism which it tries to ameliorate, because it is concerned basically with protecting and efficiently perpetuating the class structure of society whereas it is precisely due to the existence of class relationships that these problems arise in the first place. Socialists have never asserted that Parliament controls capitalism — indeed it is part of the socialist case that capitalism controls Parliaments and dictatorships alike. Parliament does however control the state. It would be very wrong to attribute political impotence to Parliament, as many "leftists” confusedly do, on the basis of its inability to solve the problems built into the capitalist economy. The political machinations of capitalist parties which involve attempting to solve these insoluble problems while conveying to a non-socialist electorate the illusion that they can be solved, are inevitably farcical.

The charge that Parliament does not control the state may best be answered by considering other alternatives. Certainly, the monarch does not. The civil service, police and army are all under the ultimate control of cabinet which itself operates within the framework of Parliament. Some argue that Big Business is the power behind the state but this overlooks the fact that Big Business is not some homogenous abstract entity but represents many diverse, clashing interests between which the state must mediate. Certainly, political representatives in Parliament are heavily influenced by pressures from all quarters but the very fact that it is felt necessary by these various interest groups to exert influence on Parliament confirms the power vested in Parliament: in the final analysis, Parliament is the crucible in which legislation is forged. Finally, the very fact that capitalists subsidize political parties heavily, underlines the view that the capitalist class most certainly considers Parliament to be the seat of supreme political power.

For socialists the end and the means are in harmony. If political power relies on mass consent then likewise the methods to capture political power must be socially recognized and that means contesting elections — anything other than this would mean the forcible imposition of the will of a minority on the majority. The creation of alternative structures like workers’ councils, does not constitute a positive rejection by the majority of the rule of the capitalist class through its state machine and leaves state power intact in the hands of a capitalist Parliament. Any attempt to appropriate this state power would constitute a direct threat to the state and would inevitably founder.

Socialist consciousness

The attainment of a majority of socialists in Parliament is the only practical way to unambiguously and democratically signal the existence of a mass socialist consciousness which is an absolute prerequisite for what can only be a clean-cut, change-over to a new social system, a “radical rupture with traditional property relations” (Communist Manifesto). The formation of a single revolutionary party to contest elections with a built-in anti-reformist democratic constitution is the only practical way to clearly demonstrate the extent of socialist consciousness in isolation from reform- mindedness and to unite and coordinate socialists, thereby welding them into a political force to capture the state.

There is a view which holds that parliamentary activity would “turn the majority of the working class into passive spectators of an active minority” (Libertarian Communism No. 6). But in what sense would the minority be active and the majority passive? The fundamental function of the minority (socialist delegates) would be the single political act of declaring capitalism abolished. Indeed, as delegates (as opposed to representatives) their actions would be wholly subordinate to the active control of the whole working class. Besides, the very nature of the socialist revolution requires that the majority understand and want Socialism and to this extent involves every socialist in active propaganda. For socialists what matters is not the activity of a few delegates but majority understanding.

Engels, in the introduction to Class Struggles in France, recognized the value of parliamentary activity:

   Everywhere . . . the German example of utilizing the suffrage, of winning all posts accessible to us, has been imitated . . .  Slow propaganda work and parliamentary activity are being recognized here, too, as the immediate tasks of the party. The irony of history turns everything upside down. We, the “revolutionaries” . . .  are thriving far better on legal methods than on illegal methods and revolts. The parties of order as they call themselves, are perishing under the legal conditions created by themselves.

Not only would attempts to “smash” or undermine the state, or to illegally dispossess capitalists of their property, result in, at best, providing governments with handy scapegoats to toy with or at worst suicidal folly, they would also necessitate leadership — an idea which is wholly incompatible with Socialism — and would detract from the all-important task of convincing people of Socialism.

Achilles heel

When the emergent capitalist class, spearheaded by the industrialists, was challenging the feudal aristocracy for political supremacy, they were compelled to seek assistance from the proletariat. Once the new capitalist class were enfranchised with the 1832 Reform Act, workers were able to obtain the franchise with the Second Reform act of 1867 (for male town workers) and an 1884 act (for male rural workers) and further acts in 1918 and 1928, by playing sectional capitalist interests, represented by Whigs and Tories, off against each other. The capitalist class has come to recognize the crucial importance of democracy (or the illusion of it) as the most stable and effective method to govern and contain the resentment of workers in a number of countries, particularly those with relatively high educational and living standards. The enfranchisement of the working class is the Achilles Heel of capitalist supremacy. Workers must not squander, or sneer at, this historically significant gain, but must follow through by using their votes to establish Socialism.

Robin Cox

From Sweden: What is Marxism? (1978)

From the May 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Historically, Marxism has meant the materialist conception of history, the Labour Theory of Value and the political class struggle.

We accept the materialist conception of history as the only method that makes it possible to investigate and gain knowledge about historical and social events and changes. We regard Capital as a brilliant analysis of the workings and historical tendency of capitalism and an explanation of how the working class is exploited. We accept Marx’s theory that the working class can be liberated from exploitation only by its own class conscious, democratic political action for Socialism.

This is what we mean when we call ourselves Marxists. It does not mean that we accept everything Karl Marx said and did during his lifetime. Marxism was not something that came out all ready-made from Marx’s brain. It was developed gradually, with Marx as the main contributor.

Philosophical fantasy

The young Marx in his first presentation of the case for Socialism (the so-called Paris Manuscripts) based it on a philosophical humanism, using concepts and expressions like “human essence’’, “man’s alienation from his species life’’ and “man’s return . . .  to his human existence’’. Later however Marx came to base the case for Socialism on the interest of the working class under capitalism, not on any philosophical view of human nature. In the Communist Manifesto, written a couple of years after the Paris Manuscripts, he explicitly repudiates, in the section on “True Socialism”, views similar to those he had once expressed himself to the effect that Socialism represented “not the interests of the proletariat, but the interests of Human Nature, of Man in general who belongs to no class, who has no reality, who exists only in the misty realms of philosophical fantasy”.

But, whatever were the views of the young Marx, Marxism does not stand or fall with them. Marx’s early manuscripts were, for the main part, not available until the beginning of the nineteen thirties, but by that time Marxism—as we described it at the beginning of this article — had already existed for over half a century. None of Marx’s main theories stands or falls with his early philosophical ideas.

This does not mean that Marxism lacks a conception of Man. Man is throughout history a social being — not a “lone wolf”—and only in relation to other people is he human. This is the only basic human nature that exists; apart from this “the whole of history is nothing but the continuous transformation of human nature” (Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy).

The idea that Marxism regards mankind’s future as predetermined is wrong. It explicitly rejects this. In a letter he drafted but did not send to a Russian journal in November 1877 Marx himself took up the question and explained that his “outline of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe” was not “a historico-philosophical theory of the general course, fatally imposed on all peoples, regardless of the historical circumstances in which they find themselves placed, in order to arrive finally at that economic formation which insures with the greatest of productive power of social labour the most complete development of man” (i.e., Socialism).

Not inevitable

Marx’s analysis of capitalism points to Socialism as the next, higher stage in social development, but there is nothing of predeterminism in this. With today’s large stocks of nuclear and biological weapons and massive pollution of the environment the old socialist challenge “Socialism or Barbarism?” is more relevant than ever. Socialism will not be inevitable until the working class decides to establish it.

It is true that the young Marx sometimes saw the socialist revolution as a more or less spontaneous process. But the mature Marx — “Marx the Marxist” — stressed that the change-over to Socialism must be a conscious act, “the conscious reorganisation of society” as he put it in volume III of Capital (chapter V, section II). And this was not a question of consciousness among a small minority leading the great majority (as in the Leninist theory). As Engels put it in his 1895 Introduction to Marx’s Class Struggles in France 1848-50:

Where it a question of a complete transformation of the social organisation, the masses themselves must also be in it, must themselves already have grasped what is at stake, what they are going in for, body and soul.

And in his 1890 Preface to the 4th German edition of the Communist Manifesto:

For the ultimate triumph of the ideas set forth in the Manifesto Marx relied solely and exclusively upon the intellectual development of the working class, as it necessarily had to ensue from united action and discussion.

Ake Spross (Sweden)

A Question of definition (3) - revolution (1978)

From the May 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Revolution

Revolution originally meant a revolving movement and is still used in this sense when we talk about engines doing so many revolutions per minute. It later came to be extended to describe a change in the political set-up (a change of ruler or constitution). Thus, when in 1688 Parliament and the Bishops expelled the Catholic King James II and replaced him by the Protestant William of Orange, appointed by Act of Parliament, they described this as the Glorious Revolution. Then, in the following century, there was the American Revolution and of course the French Revolution.

The French Revolution was a great deal more radical than the so-called “glorious revolution” of 1688 in England, but it gave rise to a body of thought which demanded an even more radical change which by 1848 was called “la révolution sociale”. The exact significance of this phrase will not be grasped if the French word social is understood to mean simply “something to do with society” so that “social revolution” would merely mean revolution in society. Of course “la révolution sociale” was to be a revolution in society, but then so had been the French “bourgeois revolution” as it was now being called. It meant a particular kind of revolution in society, one which would benefit the mass of ordinary, working people. Thus it might even be said that “social” in this phrase had some of the meaning of “socialist”. A contrast was also drawn between “la révolution sociale” and political revolutions, which, like the French bourgeois revolution, involved as far as the mass of people were concerned a change of rulers

Social Revolution

We would be more precise today and use political revolution to describe a change in the class which controls the State, social revolution to mean a change in the basis of society and socialist revolution to describe the particular change of society from capitalism to Socialism following the winning of political power from the capitalist class by the working class. Proletarian revolution is not a phrase we use though it was used by early Socialist writers and thinkers but, if we did use it, it would mean the winning of political power by the working class, i.e., the political revolution (change in control of political power) preceding the social revolution from capitalism to Socialism.

Now, whether we like it or not (and we don’t), we cannot deny that the word revolution has often been used to mean “violent overthrow” and in fact most of the political and social revolutions of the past have been violent. We deny, however, that there is any necessary connexion between revolution and violence. Here we endorse Williams’ comment on the revolution versus reform controversy (which he calls, confusedly, “the distinction between revolutionary and evolutionary socialism”):

From one point of view the distinction was between violent overthrow of the old order and peaceful and constitutional change. From another point of view, which is at least equally valid, the distinction was between working for a wholly new social order (socialism as opposed to capitalism) and the more limited modification or reform of an existing order . . . The argument about means, which has often been used to specialize revolution, is also usually an argument about ends.

Peaceful change

This is an important point, and one we have always made ourselves. In our view the distinction between revolution and reform is not between violent overthrow (insurrection) and peaceful change (using elections and Parliament), but between those who want to replace capitalism by Socialism and those who seek merely to re-form capitalism in one way or another. We claim to be revolutionaries because we stand for a fundamental and rapid change in the basis of society following the capture of political power by the working class, even though we hold that the working class can capture political power peacefully through elections and Parliament. On the other hand, there are many who believe in the violent capture of political power but who would use it merely to re-form capitalism (generally into State capitalism). We deny they are revolutionaries, irrespective of their commitment to violent tactics.

In other words, there is no necessary link between revolution and violence: there can be revolution without violence and violence without revolution. The criterion for revolution is the end envisaged (a change in control of political power, a change in the basis of society) not the means advocated (peaceful or violent).

Adam Buick

Russia's Tolpuddle Martyrs (1978)

From the May 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Guardian of March 3 devoted a lot of space to a report about some stirrings among would-be Russian trade-unionists and to a leading article and a letter on the same subject. Obviously the paper considers the matter to be of some importance and—who knows?—for a change they may have got something right.

The cause of all this was that there is now emerging a new kind of dissident, namely ordinary workers demanding genuine trade-unions. The majority of dissidents up to now, it seems, have been 'intellectuals' of the Solzhenitsyn type demanding freedom to write and speak what they wish, this being of course a rather more nebulous aspect of democracy than the freedom to organise trade-unions with the power to strike for better conditions. The new tendency is certainly to be welcomed by socialists, even though apparently only a minute proportion of the Russian working class is at present involved. Nobody can deny the heroism of the dissidents who have taken on the might of possibly the most oppressive dictatorship in history and who, in many cases, have suffered grievously in the process.

Gangsters
In the early days of British capitalism, membership of trade-unions could be dangerous and heroic workers, like the Tolpuddle martyrs, suffered the British equivalent of banishment to Siberia, namely transportation to Australia. In 1978, however, more refined punishments are available to the ruling class and the heading of an article by Simon Hoggart—Insane to Complain—shows what happens to Russian workers who, sixty years after the fall of the Tsarist tyranny, are brave enough to complain about appalling conditions of work, including such "delights" as outrageously long periods of compulsory overtime and being forced to work in coal mines with a horrendous record of fatal accidents. The dictatorship over the proletariat now finds murderous psychiatrists to rule that workers who want to combine in order to fight against such conditions are, by definition, insane. And the treatment appropriate to such "insanity" is to be confined to prison hospitals, there to be forcibly treated with unending doses of mind-shattering drugs until the offenders change their minds about the condition of the proletariat in Leninist Russia. The whole thing is, of course, like some nightmare science-fiction, and it is clear that the gangsters, who have the nerve to call themselves socialists and communists, have decided not to wait till 1984 to bring about their Orwellian society.

The leading article in the same issue of The Guardian is headed "Russia's Cruel Union Farce" and rightly stresses the fact that the International Labour Organisation have actually always recognised the so-called trade-unions run by the Russian state as being of the same calibre as the trade-unions in countries like Britain. (It is true that trade-unionists here do not sufficiently avail themselves of their power and leave matters far too much to so-called leaders, but that of course is another subject.)

The ILO is a body under the auspices of the United Nations which has withheld recognition from state controlled trade-unions as in Franco Spain or Chile, but with the normal display of double standards which has been part of the scene for many years now, the same criteria have not been applied to Russia. Indeed, it may even be that there are some bemused people who imagine that somehow Russian workers are different from their counterparts in England, and do not have to resist exploitation. These are the same kind of people (and liberal papers like the Guardian fall neatly into this camp) who argue that African workers do not need the same kind of democracy as their European brothers. However, it is not likely that anyone would seek to show Russian workers are somehow different in kind from their brothers in the neighbouring workers' paradise, Poland. But some of the news that has come out of that country, over the last decade or so, has thrown a lurid light on the position of the working class in that ludicrously named People's Democracy.

Intolerable act
Some years ago, the then Bolshevik boss of Poland, Gomulka, decided on a dramatic rise in the prices of foodstuffs without any comparable rise in the workers' wages. This intolerable act resulted in serious riots, particularly among the dockers in Poland's Baltic ports, like Danzig (Gdansk). The tyrannical Polish "communist" party was quick to reply. It sent in the tanks and hundreds of dockers were killed. It is worth noting at this point that this same Gomulka was not a hardliner by reputation, but on the contrary was the leader who had come to power by defying Russia in 1956, showing that if you have a situation consisting of a dictatorship over the proletariat in any country, then repression is the order of the day, no matter who is in charge. Gomulka was superseded as a result of these events by the present boss Giereck, who had learned so little from them that only a year or two age he tried the same trick which resulted in, amongst other things, the workers of Warsaw tearing up the railway lines and those of the industrial town of Radom showing their loyalty to their communist government by burning down party headquarters. Unfortunately it is quite obvious that a lot more suffering of this nature in Russia, Poland, China (not to speak of Chile etc., of course) will be needed before the workers in these countries can at least get some semblance of trade unionism. And there is precious little that socialists in places like Britain can do, other than admire the necessary heroism of the oppressed workers in these other countries.

L. E. Weidberg

After eight (1978)

Film Review from the May 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Alain Tanner's Jonah who will be 25 in the year 2000 centres around eight people, all of whose names begin with the letters "Ma"—presumably a reference to May 1968, which in another sense is that the film is really about.

Max is a Trotskyist, and for him everything since 1968 has been an anti-climax. He is brought back into political activity when he finds out about a scheme by some bankers to force some farmers off their land and later sell it at a huge profit. Max persuades the farmers not to sell, and thereby becomes friends with two of them, Marguerite and Marcel.

Although the film is not clear about this, it seems that this act of resistance to the profiteering businessmen is successful. But attempts by the other characters to behave differently—however slightly—from the way that society expects them to all come to nothing. Marie works at a check-out in a supermarket: she undercharges customers who can't afford to pay for all their purchases, but gets sent to prison. Marco is a history teacher and tries, with the help of some of the other characters, to teach his students about crises and inflation — and is sacked for his pains. Mathieu organizes his own school for the farmers' children, until he is eventually stopped by Marguerite, who tells him that she employs him to shift manure not to teach her children (she already pays taxes for that purpose, she says). The only character who achieves some kind of contentment is Madeleine who deceives herself in religious mysticism.

So at one level the film shows the pointlessness of individual tinkerings with the social set-up. But what it doesn't do, at least not directly, is to indicate any positive solution. True, there are a few references to class struggle (but also quotes from Rousseau about man being "everywhere in chains"). The background of inflation is emphasized at the beginning and the end of the film, while Marcel is concerned with ecology, especially the preservation of rare species of animals. But the pervading influence of 1968 suggests that this is what is held up as a model to follow. In fact, the events of May of that year were in sense revolutionary, just an instance of popular working-class action on the industrial front, aimed at wage increases.

Mathilde is pregnant with the Jonah of the film's title. The film contains some well observed scenes and in places is very funny but a major weakness is that nothing is said to point the way towards marking the year 2000 (or—let's be optimistic—well before then) one in which the frustrated dreams of its characters are no longer necessary.

Paul Bennett

Lambeth By-Election Report (1978)

From the May 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Readers who watched the ITN News at Ten on Friday 14th April saw a film of Tory leader, Margaret Thatcher, walking the streets of Lambeth Central grovelling for a few by-election votes for her party. Suddenly a black girl rushed up to her and thrust a manifesto into her hands. "What's this?" says the vote-catcher, looking confused. "The Socialist Party of Great Britain?". The film stopped abruptly. The newsreader smiled and continued churning out the propaganda. What had happened to Thatcher had gone on throughout Lambeth Central in the weeks leading up to the April 20th by-election. For the first time in their lives thousands of people have been given the chance to consider our political alternative. Seven thousand manifestoes handed out or put through doors; thousands of election bulletins given away; about a thousand Socialist Standards sold; over a hundred posters plastering the area; three loudspeaker vans blasting the constituency with the case for revolution; six well attended public meetings. The workers of Lambeth Central were unable to ignore the impact of such a campaign.

Urban squalor

There are certainly some good reasons for them to give some thought to Socialism. Lambeth Central is a classical example of the kind of urban squalor which is the lot of the working class under a system which puts profits before need. Unemployment, especially severe amongst blacks, is the highest in London. In Brixton alone there are 7,456 unemployed according to the Department of Employment. There are 18,000 constituents on the housing list, which means they are either living in sub-standard houses or are homeless. As you tour the streets of Lambeth Central  derelict houses which the council haven't the money to renovate are in abundance—inhabited slums are even more frequent. After more than forty years of Labour representation in parliament by Marcus Lipton, the problems facing workers in Lambeth Central haven't gone away. No wonder there was a sense of political cynicism expressed by many people as the loudspeaker cars of the professional reformists once again descended upon them like ice cream vans, each offering a variety of flavours, all tasting the same. Many workers were unwilling to consider any political ideas, rejecting politics as being either too difficult to comprehend or else as an indecent game played at their expense. "Whoever you vote for the government wins" said one man. Because of despair with reformism some workers were attracted to the so-called extreme candidates, by which is meant those parties committed to the vigorous implementation of failed Labour and Tory policies.

Hard though some of the parties tried, racism was not raised as a major issue in the campaign. The openly racist National Front is weak in Lambeth Central, an area in which a quarter of the inhabitants are black and where black and white workers have a long tradition of living and working together. Our bulletin on immigration exposed the red herring that coloured immigration causes social problems, pointing out that racism and nationalism foster division amongst the working class.

With eleven candidates in the election, Socialist propaganda was not only up against the traditional parties of capitalism, but a number of parties claiming to be socialist. Excluding Labour, which by now has lost even the pretence of being anything but a boss's party, there were four parties other than the SPGB claiming to stand for socialism: the Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Unity, and Workers Revolutionary Party and the South London People's Front. Each claimed to be more revolutionary than the rest. What were they standing for? Common ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution? An end to class society? "Yes, well it's a good idea in theory", they all said, but in the "meantime" it was "pragmatic" to offer the workers a list of sterile reforms: the WRP manifesto promised that if Corin Redgrave was elected he'd smash NATO and restore wage differentials; Socialist Unity promised, amongst other "revolutionary" measures that would make your eyes pop out, that they would end spectacle charges. The ruling class must be trembling at the very thought. The WRP manifesto claimed that Corin Redgrave was standing in the election to show it be a "fraud and a sham". Rather like joining the army to strike a blow for pacifism.

Reformist rhetoric

Party members attended opponents meetings which were used to sell and give away literature. Members comprised a third of the audience to hear Tony Benn talk his way round the last six Labour governments; at the Liberal meeting we suffered Cyril Smith addressing an almost hall; we were prevented by the police from entering a so-called public meeting of the National Front; at the SWP meeting we cringed at the reformist rhetoric of Paul Foot. Large crowds attended our own meetings: workers who were treated as political adults instead of voting fodder.

Socialist Standard prize for the most irrelevant election meeting of the campaign has to go to the one held by the Maoist, South London People's Front, the title of which was "Why there is no inflation in Albania". About as useful as a meeting on why there are no Albanians in Brixton, Prize for the most unreasonable person to be canvassed goes to the man who said, "I'm voting National Front. Hitler did a good job in Germany. I should know, I fought against him in the last war". Prize for the silliest reform goes to the laugh-a-minute WRP who promise, if elected, to "put an end to the commodity market".

As in all elections, the workers of Lambeth Central were faced with a choice: more capitalism or social revolution. We call upon the few workers who cast a vote for Socialism to join the party and build the number of workers who will say YES to revolution at the next election.

Steve Coleman

Addendum

From the SPGB discussion forum, dated 03/12/13

1978 Lambeth by-election

This by-election, held on 20 April 1978, has come back into the news as a result of the Maoist cult "slavery" case because they (and us and the IMG, SWP, WRP and 6 other candidates, making 11 in all) contested this by-election. We contacted our candidate, Barry McNeeney (who is no longer a member), to see if he remembered the cult candidate. He didn't but sent us some interesting recollections of the election. Here's an extract (the full version will go into our historical archives at Head Office).

It was a snap election, called, campaigned, polled and the result announced within the university Easter vacation.

I was a second-year philosophy mature student under a professor who specialised in dishonest arguments [...] Richard Swinburne went on to become a professor of religion at Oxford University [...]

On the Friday morning of the Socialist Party of Great Britain conference at Conway Hall it was observed from the floor that the party headquarters were in the constituency. "But we have no candidate", the chairman replied. Harry Young asked me, "Do you want to stand, Barry?" "...Yes", I replied.

Harry then proposed  me as the party candidate, somebody else seconded me and the delegates agreed. I was taken away for the parliamentary candidates test. This was conducted at the head office in Clapham High Street. The examiners were Harry Walters, Harry Young and [Ron Cook]. There were a lot of questions about surplus value and the economics of exploitation, the materialist conception of history, the development of society through time and what the working class had to do to effect a socialist revolution through the ballot box.

I steered round such trick question as:

"Can the workers buy back with their wages all of the commodities they produce in a week?" (Short answer: exploitation takes place at the point of production, not consumption.) [....]

They passed me.

We set up a table on the pavement outside head office with literature and posters advertising our candidacy in the by-election and button-holing passers-by -- by telling them if they had read our literature and developed a socialist consciousness, they could vote for a genuine socialist candidate here and now.

"But who is he?" many asked. It was eerie to answer with my name; "We're not asking you to vote for a character, or celebrity, but for a way of reorganising society by democratic agreement", was frequently said.

Ronnie Weidberg had two public address systems with megaphones that could be attached to the roof of a car. We toured many streets in the constituency while I spoke into the microphone. The socialist case reverberated from the tower blocks, in snatches.

Harry Young and I teamed up from door-to-door canvassing. We encountered no hostility. A seventy-five year old and a thirty-two year old talking about a classless, moneyless world community are idealists, at a glance. We shook the loyalty of many die-hard Labour supporters and got invited in for coffee by a few floating voters.

There were a lot of candidates for the election. We met up with the Liberal and her entourage. I asked her to tell me her case. Then put the SPGB case to her, pointing out that "the science of the possible" can be expanded if the majority of people have knowledge and conviction.

We made enough noise to attract media attention. A BBC television crew turned up at head office while we were outside on the pavement. They filmed the bullet-proof window, then pushed the camera in my face, "Right you've got one minute", the director said.

Desperately, I grabbed the nearest passer-by, who happened to be a beautiful, black twenty year old woman. "You're on television. Do you have a vote in this election?" I whispered to her. "Yes", she said, terrified. I put the most charming and winning argument I could to her in a minute, while she smiled at the camera, nodded and answered in monosyllables. When it was over I pressed a copy of the Socialist Standard into her hand and thanked her.

The one-minute recording was screened on BBC six o'clock news, on the day before the election, I think. Afterwards the announcer smiled and shook his head.

I wrote an article for the local Caribbean newspaper recounting this and other experiences with black people over the years. They liked it but would not publish it until the election was over, lest it be seen as an endorsement. I don't know whether they did.

Barry McNeeney