Your vote means power . . . Don’t waste it on the profit system (1979)

From the May 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

1979 General Election Manifesto

What They Offer
For the past year a General Election has been expected and you, the voters, have been blasted from every direction by the crude sales tactics of the power-hungry political leaders. The Tories have directly conducted an estimated £l-£l¼ million campaign to sell their second-hand policies, while the Labour party have enlisted trade union leaders and union funds to convince you, the voters, to accept policies that would be intolerable coming from the Tories. Now that the election is here the political leaders grovel for your vote. THE SOCIALIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN’S election address is different for three reasons.

1. The Socialist Party does not ask you to vote for a would-be leader but to consider the merits of a serious idea. While the other parties consider the voters too stupid to do their own thinking, we recognise and depend upon, your ability to understand our case. In fact, the Socialist Party of Great Britain asks you not to vote for us unless you are convinced by what we say.

2. The Socialist Party does not speak the same language as our political opponents. They talk about “the balance of payments problem”, “the nation”, ‘‘the good of the economy”, “law and order”. Theirs is a system in which able workers are thrown on to the scrap-heap when it periodically becomes unprofitable to employ them; in which houses stand empty while homeless families live in misery because they can't afford to pay for a home; in which food is destroyed while millions starve; in which Christian morality is preached while governments store up piles of arms to destroy the world in the quest for markets.

Socialists speak the language of class struggle; that there is a working class who produce the wealth of society in return for wages or salaries, and a capitalist class who reap the profits simply because they own and control the means of producing and distributing wealth. For Socialists the important issue in this election is—Who is to own the means of life; the wealth producers or a minority of rich parasites?

3. The Socialist Party does not offer you promises of “higher wages” or “ more welfare facilities” or “greater security”. The sad but indisputable fact is that as long as you go on supporting capitalism, its problems will be with you. A system which produces even the necessities of life for sale on the market at a profit causes poverty and insecurity for the majority alongside luxury and power for the few.

Many workers will agree that everything we’ve said so far is only too true. Yes, the other political parties ARE opportunists; yes, there IS class inequality; yes, the real problem IS capitalism. But what's the alternative?

What Socialism Is
The only alternative is Socialism. A society in which the whole community will own the means of production mid distribution of wealth. Class divisions will cease to exist, because instead of the separation between owners and producers of wealth, everyone will own and produce in common. Authoritarian leadership will give way to genuine democracy in which people will really have a say, because no longer will a minority possess power and privilege. Production for profit will be replaced by production for human needs, whereby goods will be freely available for people to take according to their needs. Work will be carried out on the basis of free co-operation instead of the coercion of the wages system. The division of nations will give way to the unity of one world. Inequality based upon possessions, status, race or sex will vanish as human beings create, for the first time ever, a sane society geared to the fulfilment of human needs. Critics of Socialism claim that given free access, people will act irresponsibly. This we dispute. It is perfectly possible for people to act sociably when a Socialist majority puts an end to the rat-race.

THE SOCIALIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN is the only party in this election to stand unequivocally for Socialism—although there are others who pay lip service to the idea. Labour says that Nationalisation is Socialism, but state intervention is just another way of managing capitalism. The Communist Party says that Russia is Socialist, when it’s simply a state-capitalist dictatorship of one party. There arc even some trade union leaders who say that Socialism means “responsible wage restraint” when in fact it means the abolition of the wages system.

For the working class, the vast majority of the population, Socialism is the only alternative to the chaos of the profit system.

YOUR VOTE MEANS POWER . . . ARE YOU PREPARED TO GIVE IT ONCE AGAIN TO ONE OF THE PARTIES OF CAPITALISM . . . OR WILL YOU JOIN US IN TRANSFORMING THE SOCIALIST IDEA INTO REALITY?

An Irish rose which smells (1979)

From the May 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

  Thirty years ago Eire became The Republic of Ireland. What has happened to the promises made then?

Over a hundred years of direct British rule in Ireland ended in 1921 when, by agreement between representatives of Irish nationalism and the British Governmnt, on the one hand, and the representatives of that portion of Irish Unionism dominant in north-east Ulster and the British, two separate Irish ‘Home Rule’ governments were set up in Ireland.

The decade immediately preceding this British-enforced compromise had been fraught with political and religious violence which, though deliberately manipulated by the contenders for political power, had its roots in the uneven development of native capitalism.

The ‘settlement’ of Twenty One offered an excellent solution to the owning class in Northern Ireland. Their struggle was waged with the weapons of bluff and religious bigotry. Aside from the slogans, their real aims were their continued access to the British market and avoiding inclusion in an all-Ireland political entity controlled largely by the political representatives of their fledgling class brethren in the south, whose development required protection from the more highly developed competition of British capitalism.

Equally, the ruling class in the new Irish Free State could be jubilant. They had won sufficient political freedom to legislate for their own immediate needs: tariff walls, import quotas and such other devices as would allow for the undisturbed domestic nourishment of ‘competitive free enterprise’. But more, separation from the industrial capitalism of the North eliminated the possibility of opposition to protectionism and had the added bonus of ensuring a useful clerical control over the working class.

The only black spot on this otherwise cloudless horizon were the ‘politics’ that had been fashioned in the struggle. In the South, some of the republicans remained victims of their own propaganda; they continued to believe in their notions of ‘freedom’ and had to be disabused of such nonsense in a short, sharp civil war in which the new Irish Government demonstrated how much they had learnt of the art of military butchery from the departed Black-and-Tans.

In the North, too, the Protestant workers, who were being primed with blood-curdling bigotry in preparation for a possible war against the Catholic nationalists, put their teaching into effect with a murderous assault on their class brethren who were Catholics.

The ‘settlement’ of Twenty One, and the ensuing internecine struggles, set the political pattern for the future. In the Irish Free State the pro-Treaty party became Cumman na nGaedheal (now. Fine Gael) and formed the government. Later, in 1926. the anti-Treaty party became Fianna Fail and established itself as the main opposition party. What passes for stability in capitalism was finally established in the Irish Free State and the way prepared for the illusionary ‘free choice’ offered by capitalist ‘democracy’.

Northern Ireland, on the other hand, had been deliberately fashioned demographically and geographically in such a way as would ensure the permanence of Unionist rule. There, even the illusion of change was to be denied ; there was to be no ‘swing of the pendulum’ to lull the working class into the belief that things, even if they didn’t actually improve, were improvable.

It is amusing, when members of Fine Gael or Fianna Fail condemn their modern counterparts of the IRA as ‘mindless gunmen' and gangsters, to reflect on their own beginnings. The State that the new government took over in 1922 had been established with the bomb and the bullet; by deeds, if we allow for the heinous development of arms manufacture and military strategy, every bit as violent as those we witness today in Northern Ireland. For example, in the first three months of 1921 the ‘old’ (and, now respectable) IRA shot 74 ‘informers’ after trial by what Irish Ministers now refer to as ‘kangaroo’ courts. During the last six months of the Civil War, the new Irish government executed almost twice as many republican ‘irregulars’ as had the British in the previous six years.

The new Government of Cumman na nGaedheal commenced its presidency over general poverty and mass unemployment (which latter, it claimed, was no concern of the State) and ensured that its full support was given to strike-breaking activities. For example, no sooner had the hated British been driven out of the country than the new Irish government was appealing to the British Postmaster General to lend blacklegs to break the Irish postal workers’ strike and when, in the following year, the farm workers struck against the ranchers, the Government obligingly arrested and interned their union leaders.

In 1926 de Valera, who had been the political leader of the ‘Irregulars’ in the Civil War, forsook the bullet and the bomb and entered the Dail. By 1932 his party, Fianna Fail, had won a majority and formed a government. Fianna Fail were to hold office for sixteen years during which it distinguished itself by introducing anti-trade union legislation such as the Wages (Standstill) Order, the Trade Union Bill and the Industrial Relations Bill—all peripherally associated with the social doctrine of Corporatism, the economic infrastructure of fascism and the social gospel of the Roman Catholic Church.

It all worked well--for the class Fianna Fail represented ; known in Ireland as ‘gombeen men’ who had, as yet, to learn the carrot con trick practiced by their more sophisticated brethren in most other European countries. In the eight years between 1940 and 1948 the taxable profits of this upstanding breed of Catholic businessmen rose by some 200 per cent. In the same period, by skilful use of the legislative weapons placed at their disposal by Fianna Fail, they were able to reduce real wages below the level obtaining a decade earlier.: So successful, indeed, were the capitalists and their pensioned government in reducing wages that even the capitalist-orientated International Labour Office drew protesting attention to the fact. Almost 8 per cent of the population escaped in the emigrant ships during this period of Fianna Fail rule; still, deep in their Celtic twilight, the political hacks of capitalism carried on governing for the rich and privileged and the priests prayed their thankfulness for the virginal state of Irish capitalism and the ‘innocence’ of its wage slaves.

Fianna Fail introduced a new Constitution enshrining the power and the privilege of the priests and the gombeen men and, by implication, constitutionalising the misery and poverty of the great majority. In the meanwhile, the political scum who had ruled before De Valera took over, underwent many vicissitudes. After their electoral defeat in 1932, these ‘democrats’ flirted with the Blueshirts, an openly fascist organisation started by their ex-police chief and they changed their alias to Fine Gael. Time, and political manoeuvering, laundered the reputation of Fine Gael somewhat and, in 1948, Fianna Fail were kicked out by the electorate. A coalition, headed by Fine Gael, formed a Government. A new Republican Party, led by an ex-IRA leader of the Thirties, Seán MacBride, and the particularly gutless Irish Labour Party, were Fine Gael’s partners in crime.

It was to be a real change this time! A change guaranteed by the presence of ‘socialists’ and ‘republican-socialists’ actually in government. A change spelt out in the glossy posters of rivers and forests that were going to belong to ‘the people’. It was a time for singing and the people sang: ‘How Can You Buy Killarney?’ Oh, the promises! the hope! the frenetic dedication to the struggle for real change! And, to be fair, there was change: the Government dropped the official title ‘Eire’ and became the Republic of Ireland.

For the Irish workers there was still grinding poverty in all its forms; unemployment, low wages, slums. Only drunken patriotism had a respite in the partial realisation of a dream—and an American businessman did buy part of Killarney—with dollars! But still . . . wasn’t there an enfant terrible in the Government? A real ‘left winger’—and no less a person than the Minister of Health! Sure enough, the Minister introduced a Bill in the Dail to allow ‘free’ medical care for expectant mothers and children up to the age of five years. The Bill would have brought the new republic a small part of the way along which most other European countries had already travelled.

The Catholic bishops, however, would have none of it. It was rank ‘socialism’! The virtue of Christian charity would be endangered and god would be displeased! They ordered the government—the government of the Republic of Ireland—to abandon the Bill. The Government apologised to their lordships and dropped the Bill.

Since 1948, of course, there have been changes. The most significant of these have been brought about by a later, Fianna Fail, Government decision, in the early Sixties, to abandon the economic doctrine of protectionism—which was the lynch pin of Sinn Fein policy before and after the Easter Rising of 1916. It was a final and callous acknowledgement of ‘The Cause’ for which politically ignorant members of the working class had earlier died or suffered imprisonment or maiming.

The history of The Republic of Ireland, which was Eire, which was The Irish Free State, should be studied by those latter-day Republicans who think that their policy of ‘Eire Nua’ offers ’the people’ a real change. Is ‘Eire Nua’ any more ‘revolutionary’ than the ‘Proclamation of 1916 offering all the wealth of Ireland to ‘the people’ of Ireland? We all know what the outcome of that was.

Richard Montague (Belfast) 

World Socialist Party of Ireland

Beanos with cheesecake (1979)

From the May 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

  There are now three almost identical tabloid newspapers competing in their efforts to misinform workers in Britain. 

Capitalism — the accumulation of wealth through the exploitation of working-class labour-power—is the inevitable social development of commodity-production to the point where abundance becomes possible; and where only the circumscriptions of the profit-system itself prevent society from freely producing and enjoying wealth.

But where—an innocent inquirer might ask—does all this leave us when we turn our attention to such seemingly useless ephemera as the popular—some would call it ‘gutter’—press? And in particular, Fleet Street’s undistinguished and indistinguishable troika. The Sun, the Daily Mirror and The Star. A cooker, after all, is a cooker; a car is a car; and although these commodities are coming off the production-lines even tinnier and more unreliable than their tinny and unreliable predecessors, they do have their practical uses—their more tangible qualities.

A moment’s reflection, however, should be sufficient to convince us that, despite its tawdry and fleeting characteristics, a tabloid—or a so-called “quality” newspaper— is no less a commodity, produced for sale with a view to profit, than those other more substantial items. (Last year, for instance, The Sun produced a profit of more than £13 million— a considerable figure by any standards).

Here, however, the analogy ends; for a newspaper, unlike the cooker and the car. has little material value. (If, that is to say, we except its undoubted uses as wrapping-paper for fish-and-chips, or as fire-lighting material). Its qualities are self-evidently abstract and representational and, under capitalism, on a par with those of a megaphone in the hands of a political huckster. For what we buy from our newsagent is, after all, merely what the capitalist press-lords think is ‘good’ for us and, of course, for them: their own political opinions, to begin with. And what is ‘good’ for us often includes their idea of the type of material which can most successfully seduce us from the dangerous exercise of thinking for ourselves. Hence, the acreage of easy-on-the-eye illustrations ("We liberated the nipple”, roared The Sun, recently) and the column-miles of trivial rubbish which occupy most of what remains. Those few journalists—and there are some, no doubt—who are allowed to submit meatier copy are either chosen for their relatively uncontentious political and economic views or kept well away from such delicate areas. (When, for example, can we expect to see the likes of Marjorie Proops discussing family or marital distress within its proper context—that of a class-based society in which, given the intolerable pressures to which millions of us are subjected, it is astonishing that many more of us do not succumb to breakdown and despair!)

Ironically enough, some insight as to the true nature and purpose of the tabloid press may be gained by comparing titles with content. The very last qualities one may expect to find within the columns of The Sun, the Daily Mirror and The Star are enlightenment or a reliable reflection of the truth; certainly about those matters which could be of any conceivable value for working-class consciousness—and all three journals claim to reflect or illuminate our aspirations and interests. At best they are shallow and uninformative and. particularly when it comes to news of world affairs, as prone to sins of omission as of commission. At worst they are vicious exploiters of personal grief and human weakness, their editors and reporters trawling for salacious gossip, cheque-books in hand, in the murkiest of waters; always ready, of course, to justify their miserable activities with hypocritical references to ‘the freeflow of information in a democratic society’. In between these two fairly approximate poles we have the more conventional forms of entertainment—pages and pages of it, crammed with sensational trivia masquerading as the truth about showbiz and sports personalities, together with exaggerated accounts of the latest gladiatorial contests in the boxing-ring or on the sports-field. (The Romans had a phrase for it all: “panis et circensis”—bread and circuses!—very useful for keeping the otherwise restless plebians from overturning the patricians’ apple-cart)

Finally, there is the inevitable commercial advertising of a type which is deliberately aimed at what is sometimes revealingly termed the ‘down-market’ consumer.

Naturally the three doughty and almost identical warriors are busily tearing each other’s throats out in the interests of what they would euphemistically describe as ‘healthy competition’. The circulation of The Sun, for example, has now substantially overhauled that of the Daily Mirror which—or so The Observer (8/10/78) would have it—has cheapened (how? one wonders!) its product in its efforts to re-capture its market. The Star seems to be wallowing in the wake, not only of its main competitors, The Sun and the Daily Mirror, but also of its sister-publication, the Daily Express. (This latter newspaper and the Daily Mail constitute the remaining prime sources of mis-information in tabloid form). And this despite a truly heroic effort to outdo them all in journalistic mediocrity. (Perhaps Victor Matthews, its proprietor, was hoping to emulate the remarkable success of The Sun, the title of which had been acquired by Rupert Murdoch in 1969 for £600,000—IPC. from whom he bought it, are still licking their wounds, no doubt!) But there must surely be a limit to the amount of junk-journalism which an already-overloaded market is able to absorb.

However, all newspaper owners do share one overriding interest: the preservation of the political status quo; whether that be under the ‘chairpersonship’ (how appropriate that ambiguous word seems in this context!) of Margaret Thatcher (currently championed by The Sun and The Star) or James Callaghan (favoured by the Daily Mirror). Nobody can accuse Victor Matthews and Rupert Murdoch, or the owners of IPC, of timidity when it comes to the defence of the capitalist system. And it is increasingly apparent that they will go to any lengths in terms of journalistic incontinence in order to succeed.

Given this assumption we can safely draw a veil over that all-too-familiar nonsense we still hear from time to time about so-called editorial independence. By way of confirmation we have on record the words of no less a personage than the editor of The Sun himself, the aptly-named Larry Lamb. He is reported as saying (Observer, 8 October, 1978):

  Mr Murdoch and I had a long discussion about the kind of newspaper we envisaged. It emerged, fortunately, that we had virtually identical concepts. We have never had a prolonged discussion about the policy of the newspaper since that night.
 The venal Larry—self-styled ‘leftist branch secretary of ‘NALGO’ in his youth—has evidently found his true vocation.
  And at shop-floor level? It is reliably reported that the Sun’s sub-editorial and other staff, working under that redoubtable editor, sneeringly dismiss their own product as “The Beano".

Richard Cooper

50 Years Ago: Unemployment and the General Election (1979)

The 50 Years Ago column from the May 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

It has been agreed by the Conservatives, the Liberals and the Labour Party that the main question on which the election is to be fought is unemployment and the possibility of finding a cure for it.

Mr Baldwin in a speech at Bristol on April 25th was content to point out that even if some 10 per cent of the workers are unemployed there is great comfort to be derived from the knowledge that the other 90 per cent are working and “are enjoying a higher standard of life than has ever been enjoyed before.” He also expressed a modest hope that given freedom from social "hurricanes and cataclysms” unemployment will be “reduced to normal by a natural process in three or four years”.

The Liberals, knowing full well that they are not in the least likely to receive a majority of seats in the new House of Commons, are fighting on Mr Lloyd George's schemes for providing work for the unemployed.

The Labour Party have pointed out that neither in principle nor in details, is there anything new in Mr Lloyd George’s schemes. The Labour Party, with a much better prospect of securing a majority than the Liberals, are equally confident that their development schemes, coupled with nationalisation of various industries and transport services will secure even more than a mere reduction to normal. They will not be content with anything far short of total abolition.

What all three parties and their advisers on economic questions persistently ignore is that the “natural process” referred to by Mr Baldwin operates not in the direction of reducing unemployment; but in the reverse direction.

(From an unsigned article “The parties and the Election”, Socialist Standard May 1929)

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

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

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

Jack Cohen is dead — Long live Jack Cohen

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

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

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

People's Democratic Prisons

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

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

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

Exploitation without discrimination 

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

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

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

The Moronic Martyr

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

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

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

Steve Coleman

The stonewaller's end (1979)

From the May 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Several MPS have retired from Parliament, with the General Election. We look briefly at the high spots of the career of one of them.

Listening to the proceedings of the House of Commons can be interesting but also very puzzling at times. Does anyone, one wonders, ever mean what they say there? Does the merest tinge of sincerity ever enter any of the speeches? Is the whole place just an excuse for a few hundred ambitious people to scratch each others’ backs, to treat each other to a drink?

Such doubts were especially insistent, as the last Parliament broke up and the Members went off to their constituencies. Not a few of them were aware that they were sufficiently out of favour with the voters to make their return to Westminster about as likely as Halifax winning the FA Cup. And quite a few others knew that they would not be coming back because they were retiring from the House.

As might have been foretold, this event provoked some gushing sentiments, as the Speaker assured the retiring Members that he hardly knew how Parliament would run without them and they, in their turn, deluged him with some startling descriptions of how vital he had been to their parliamentary life. Had they been hiding all these feelings from each other, for so long?

Even by the standards of Parliament, it was pretty sickening stuff; the Members were lucky the Speaker did not call them to order for contempt of the House. (Traditionally. Parliament is very sensitive about such things. They have men with funny names like Serjeant-at-Arms and Black Rod who, although they look on the verge of senility, can do terrible things to anyone who treats them with contempt.)

One prominent, and retiring. Labour MP who did not join in this fulsomeness was Michael Stewart, whose craggy, generously eye-browed features are constructed for silence. They rear above his body like some granite cliff-face and they resist the elements of Parliamentary weather just as stubbornly.

He was an MP for a long time, sitting for constituencies in Hammersmith and Fulham from 1945. When he started his life in the House he was fresh out of the Army, and was known as Captain Michael Stewart, which allowed him to be addressed as the Honourable and Gallant Member instead of just an Honourable one. This is another important thing about which Parliament is very sensitive.

Stewart came up through the teaching profession and he never lost his precise, schoolmasterly manner. At times, when he was under especially fierce criticism, he seemed to long to control his tormentors by giving them all a hundred lines—“I must not say nasty things to Her Majesty’s Minister of Education/Foreign Secretary/First Secretary of State . . .”

For during his time he held all those big jobs, and a few others as well. Harold Wilson thought highly of him, as well he might; his comment, when he moved Stewart from the Foreign Office to George Brown’s old job in charge of the Department of Economic Affairs:

  Michael Stewart . . . readily accepted the move and brought his great administrative talents to his new task. He was listed at No. 3 in the Cabinet order of preference, which aroused great press interest.

It is not difficult to understand how Wilson came to this admiring opinion. During his periods as Foreign Secretary (1965-66 and then 1968-70) Stewart stonewalled as single-mindedly on the issues of Vietnam and Biafra as Geoff Boycott in the Roses match. Any man who can lisp out precisely the cold-blooded interests of British capitalism to an audience aware that as he spoke thousands of people were being killed, is clearly worth bringing on.

Stewart loyally carried this task out, when the Wilson government was under fire from its slap-happy left wingers over its support for the Americans in Vietnam. When he was Foreign Secretary for the second time, Vietnam was draining America in terms of both lives and economy. Deaths averaged a hundred a week, with peaks of over five hundred during 1968 and the war was costing 300 billion dollars a year. Both sides had settled into a policy of attrition, the Vietcong chipping away with their guerilla tactics and the Americans blasting and burning with their napalm. Such horrors were a lesser concern for Stewart; he deserved a medal for his stubborn justification for it all—for medals are what capitalism awards for such outstanding devotion to duty.

A lesser known, but equally horrible, feat was Stewart’s policy on the Nigerian/Biafran war, which was notable for the Nigerian government’s genocide against the Ibos and for the savage famine which Biafra suffered. The Nigerians were supported by the supply of arms from Britain, which again provoked much opposition— sometimes not just from Labour’s left wing but also from the Tories.

A million Biafrans were killed in the crushing of their rising. There were some three million refugees, whose plight was such that they were dying in their thousands—the relief agencies estimated between five and ten thousand—each day. Yet Stewart thought it appropriate to justify the arms on the grounds that it would be wrong to cut them off just when the Nigerian government needed them to kill the Biafrans, to suppress the rising. (House of Commons, 12.6.68.)

Nine months later, he was just as adamant, saying that to have stopped the arms going to Nigeria would have caused

  . . . a profound estrangement of ourselves from Nigeria and from Africa as a whole. It would have involved a great increase of Russian influence in Nigeria, and it would have involved a great risk to British people and British interests in Nigeria. (House of Commons. 13.3.69).

And there Stewart knew what he was talking about. Nigeria is a source of rubber and tin and was at that time among the top ten oil producers in the world. Of course the British capitalist class were anxious to keep Russian influence at bay there. The Americans backed British policy, partly in return for British support for the atrocity of Vietnam. So, in terms which politicians like Stewart and Lyndon Johnson understood, it all made sense. Only the starving refugees in Biafra, hounded and massacred, or the terrified people under the napalm in Vietnam, might have been forgiven for failing to grasp the nice rounded logic of it all.

That was a long time ago now and Stewart has passed through the back benches into retirement. He served capitalism. and in particular the British ruling class, well. Only one thing can be said in his favour—he did not try to hide what he was doing. Like any teacher spelling out an equation to a backward class, he explained it all in grisly detail.

Any confusion about him was hardly his fault. In his manner and his appearance he served admirably as a bogy man for the left wing, which allowed those senseless romantics to enjoy their customary illusion that capitalist politics, and the horrors of this society, are a matter of personality. Get rid of Stewart, they once shrieked, and there will be no more Biafra. no more Vietnam.

Well Stewart was got rid of but the world is no more peaceable a place. And he has been replaced by new bogy men to be subjected to the left's hysteria. It would be tedious, except that the blood still flows and it is the blood of the people who will be needed to live, to change society.

Ivan

Socialism and scientific advance (1979)

From the May 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

What has been called “the problem of production”— how to produce enough to satisfy the needs of every man, woman and child—was solved by about the turn of the century. From then on scientific knowledge and technological ability could have banished for ever all human misery resulting from a lack of material resources: starvation and malnutrition, unhealthy living conditions, disease and ill-health, ignorance and superstition.

This knowledge and this ability has not however been applied to benefit Mankind in this way. Instead, production has remained geared to profit-making and the accumulation of profits as capital. The result has been not only continuing material poverty and misery but two world wars— and many lesser ones—during which millions of human beings have been massacred and mutilated. As the problem of production had already been solved all this human suffering was unnecessary and could have been avoided. It is the price Mankind has paid for the maintenance of capitalism into the Twentieth Century.

Scientific advance did not, of course, stop in 1900 but has continued ever since, making the production of enough wealth to adequately feed, clothe and shelter the whole of the world’s people ever less of a problem. In 1900 electricity was only beginning to be applied to production and the internal combustion engine and aeroplanes were just about to be developed. Since then we have seen the coming of (and we make no apologies for this list, as we hope it will help to ram home the extent to which the problem of production has been solved): radio, plastics, TV, jets, radar, rockets, electronics computers. nuclear power, transistors, artificial satellites, men on the Moon.

Every scientific advance makes capitalism even more obsolete and socialism even more practicable. But there are more advances to come in the near future. The popular science and science fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke, in his book Profiles of the Future (reprinted by Pan books last year), mentions as the next two major technological advances: the application of nuclear fusion to produce electricity and the invention of an efficient system of electrical storage.

At the moment there are a number of ways of generating electricity but not of storing it efficiently. Today's batteries are clumsy and so prevent the development of clean, electrically-powered vehicles. Existing petrol- and diesel-burning internal combustion engines continually pollute the atmosphere and would be phased out as rapidly as possible in a rationally-organised society. This lack of an efficient way of storing electricity is also holding back the development of solar and other clean sources of energy like wind-power, although the latter have the disadvantage of dependence on natural conditions. But this would not matter so much if an efficient system of storing electricity existed since the electricity generated on sunny, or windy, days could be stored for later use; the electricity generated in summer could be stored for use in winter.

Clarke gives the 1980s as the date for the invention of an efficient system of electrical storage. Fusion power he puts in the 1990s. Existing nuclear power stations are based on nuclear fission. On splitting atoms of heavy elements like uranium. In this process a radioactive “waste” is produced. Society may well eventually find a way of using the energy this radio-activity represents; it will then cease to be waste and become a “by-product”. At the moment, however, it is dangerous waste which no one knows what to do with. People are right to be concerned about this; the priority capitalism gives to making profits leads to the adoption of inadequate safety measures.

Nuclear power is an obvious future source of energy, helping replace the relatively wasteful burning of non-renewable fossil fuels. Arthur C. Clarke puts this well:

  Today, there can be little doubt that the long-term (and perhaps the short-term) answer to the fuel problem is nuclear energy. The weapons already now stockpiled by the major powers could run all the machines on earth for several years, if their energies could be used constructively. The warheads in the American arsenals alone are equivalent to thousands of millions of tons of oil or coal.
   It is not likely that fission reactions (those involving such heavy elements as thorium, uranium and plutonium) will play more than a temporary role in terrestrial affairs: one hopes not, for fission is the dirtiest and most unpleasant method of releasing energy that man has ever discovered. Some of the radio-isotopes from today's reactors will still be causing trouble and perhaps injuring unwary archaelogists, a thousand years from now.
   But beyond fission lies fusion—the welding together of light atoms such as hydrogen and lithium. This is the reaction that drives the stars themselves; we have reproduced it on earth, but have not yet tamed it. When we have done so, our power problems will have been solved for ever—and there will be no poisonous by-products, but only the clean ash of helium. Controlled fusion is the supreme challenge of applied nuclear physics: some scientists believe it will be achieved in ten years, some in fifty. But almost all of them are sure that we will have some fusion power long before our oil and coal run out, and will be able to draw fuel in virtually unlimited quantities from the sea.

Deuterium, the isotope of hydrogen which is a raw material for the fusion reaction, exists in the sea in the proportion of 1gm per 30 litres. So much, then, for the dire predictions of the scaremongers about running out of resources and the sick justification of poverty as the result of inevitable scarcity.

Society has not yet mastered the technology of nuclear fusion but is on the way to doing so. Its coming won’t lead to the breakdown of capitalism as the wages-prices-profits system becomes clogged up by an abundance of very cheap goods, as is sometimes suggested. But it might lead to people realising that capitalism is an utterly irrational way of organising the production and distribution of the world’s wealth. For, once nuclear fusion has been shown to be a practical and efficient way of generating electricity—once society has acquired the practical ability to apply it to the production of wealth—it will be more than ever obvious that poverty, misery and deprivation are quite unnecessary. We must move on to socialism.

With the means of production the common heritage of all the people of the world, the scientific knowledge and technological skill which society now possesses can be used for the one purpose of satisfying human needs in accordance with the long-standing socialist principle “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”.

Adam Buick

Violent genes (1979)

From the May 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sociobiology is a new science, a hybrid of sociology and biology. Harvard zoologist Edward Wilson in his latest work On Human Nature claims that man is endowed with behavioural genes and that these genes “hold culture on a leash”. He attacks Marxism for arguing that human behaviour is conditioned by social environment and asserts that “the mind will always create morality, religion and mythology . . . the predisposition to religious belief is the most complex and powerful force in the human mind and in all probability an ineradicable part of human nature”.

Any argument based on a view of “human nature" as something defined and unchanging is seized on with enthusiasm by those who assert that humans are, by nature, greedy, selfish and violent. Without fear of prison or Hell- fire, social or divine retribution, society would inevitably disintegrate. What evidence, if any, is there to support such claims?

In the slow cold dawn of pre-history, humans — like other hunter-gatherer primates struggling for biological survival — evolved the capacity to react aggressively both against intruders if they posed a threat, and against individuals in the group whose behaviour violated its social code, thereby endangering the group’s survival. However, humans could never have survived as a species without learning to co-operate. The ability to cooperate was a prerequisite for making stone tools and hunting animals for food, which bipeds were doing three million years ago. Co-operation is at the root of all human culture. While close social bonding is a feature of all primate species, co-operation is carried furthest in humans.

Language and Religion

Wilson’s argument that language is “pre-programmed” does not hold water. For instance, a wolf child found in the forest in India “could not talk or utter any very articulate sound” (Sunday Times, 30 July 1978). A child’s innate potential for learning language is useless if he is not in contact with people who use language as a social skill. Like aggression, language-learning results from the interaction between inherited potential and actual life-experience.

The assertion that humans are born with some sort of genetically transmitted religious instinct does not explain how it is that religion is normally learned, like language or science. As part of human culture, religion has developed in different forms under changing social conditions. Now, all beliefs in the supernatural are decaying in the light of science. yet our “religious genes" are not causing this change in our outlook. "It is not religion which makes man, but man who makes religion”, wrote Marx. In rejecting religion, we do not cease to be human..

Adaptation

Since the human species has adapted successfully to almost every conceivable environment — from popular regions to the tropics, from hunter-gatherer bands of 30-50 people to conurbations of more than 10 million, from nomadic herding to city commuting — it seems clear that an outstanding characteristic of human beings is their adaptability. As Marx pointed out. "by acting on nature outside himself and changing it, man simultaneously changes his own nature”.

Above all, man is a learning animal whose progress is not restrained by the slow pace of biological evolution but moves at the rapid pace of “cultural evolution”. Culture combined with mankind’s inherent adaptability mean that Wilson’s thesis of genes controlling our behaviour-patterns is unsound.

The effect of environment on the genetic endowment of the individual is incalculable. Already in the womb, the embryo is exposed to environmental influences. Also, the penetrance of genes varies greatly. “Behaviorally the human being is highly flexible, and the penetrance of any ‘behavioral’ gene would be subject to strong environmental and cultural modification" (Alexander Allend. Evolution and Human Behaviour).

Thus a clearer understanding of what is meant by "environment” diminishes the heredity factor, so that all traits are products of a complex interaction process. We all have the potential for aggression and like other primates, we tend to become violent when under stress.

The capitalist system forces us to live in overcrowded slums, competing against one another for the necessities of life, fearful of shortage. In the worst city slums, all forms of violence are endemic — mugging, wife-beating, baby-bashing, murder and mindless vandalism. Social, not biological, factors are responsible for the problem of violence.

Mercenaries and other paid armed forces can only exist in a property society where nation states compete for resources, with expensively-armed forces manned by wage-workers. These are easier to recruit in times of bad unemployment. In such a context, genetic factors are hardly perceptible. If army recruiting relied on humanity’s "innate aggressiveness”, there would be few wars. Since men are apparently not sufficiently aggressive, conscription was used in both World Wars, and the USSR like South Africa has permanent conscription, forcing men to do what Wilson claims they have a natural tendency to do anyway.

Human behaviour can only be understood in terms of social relationships. Our ability to learn and to conceptualize make us uniquely able to transmit what is learned in one generation to the next, and it is this factor which has made man’s social, cultural and technical development over the last 10.000 years increasingly rapid. It is our unique flexibility which enables us to adapt to the changes in the physical and social environment which we ourselves create.

The causes of violence in human society, are overcrowding, inequality and scarcity. These can only be eliminated by ending capitalism, since the profit system creates and aggravates these conditions. Socialism, with its common ownership and free access, in a world of abundance, is in harmony with “human nature”.

Charmian Skelton

Letters: Not So Obvious (1979)

Letters to the Editors from the May 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Not So Obvious

I am writing to ask if you have ever thought of participating in an alliance of left-wing parties to the left of the Labour Party. I am thinking of the Communist Party, the International Marxist Group, the Socialist Workers Party and the Workers Revolutionary Party. Such an alliance, based on areas of common agreement which I am sure can be found, could become a very strong force in British politics. Opposition to capitalism— both national and international—is obviously the most important common denominator between your various parties. It seems to me that the time has come to accentuate what you all have in common, and to put aside the differences until the struggle against capitalism is won.

Tom Rubens,

Leicester

Reply

The object of the SPGB is the abolition of the wage labour and capital relationship and its replacement with socialism, a society of common ownership and free access. Such a revolution can only be brought about by the democratic political action of a majority of class conscious workers.

The end of private and state ownership of the means of production, and hence of production for the purpose of exchange and profit, is not part of the left’s programme. Far from envisaging a society in which classes, buying and selling, employment and politics itself are absent, the parties mentioned campaign for the capitalist Labour Party at election time. They also confuse nationalisation (state capitalism) with socialism, support the ‘Right to Work' movement (there is no such right), dismiss our insistence upon the capture of the powers of government and the state machine and generally follow the anti-Marxist views of Lenin on questions such as leadership, nationalism and democracy. Needless to say, they have a wide variety of reforms on offer too.

For a socialist party, only one course is open: unceasing hostility to all parties that administer or lend their support to the capitalist system. This includes the left, whose militancy and spurious theory they cloak in the name of socialism, making our task that much more difficult. As to an alliance, the Pope will take up ballroom dancing first.

Editors.

Shallow Reporting

Following a recent article in the Socialist Standard entitled “Media Harlots" another example of shallow reporting showing effect rather than cause could be seen on one of the Tonight programmes during the week.

A reporter from CBS showed us all the effect of drunkenness on the Indians of NW Canada. We had the typical view of drunken apathetic Indians reeling about the streets while their young children plundered the local schoolmistress’s house for food and bedding. Another man was interviewed in his meagre house where he tried to feed up to fourteen children before he too went "under the influence”.

After showing all these effects we were then given the cause of this wanton drunkenness amongst the Red population. Apparently research has shown that due to their diet, the red man’s blood does not withstand as much alcohol as the white man’s.

This report concluded the case by suggesting even by some of the Indians themselves that the only cure was to ban alcohol. Only one man came near to a more realistic conclusion when he suggested that perhaps the Indians were being unfairly treated as he stated that the Government subsidies only extended to alcoholic drinks and not to such "luxuries” as housing, food and transport.

Surely a community forced to abandon their own beliefs and live in an alien society i.e. the capitalist society, will be left to subsist on handouts the profiteers choose to pass on to them thus ensuing their second class way of life.

I would be interested to know how far the Socialist Party has become established in Canada and ‘free’ America and how it stands in regard to such minority groups as the Indians and Eskimos.

Dorothy Williams, 

Mablethorpe, Lincs.

Reply

In a sense. Dorothy Williams has answered her own question. She points out that the alcoholism of the Indians in NW Canada is largely due to deficiencies in their diet, which in turn is an effect of the pressure of property society.

There are many such examples of the alienating and destructive effects of capitalism, beginning in the process of industrialising large areas and forcing people to abandon a rural way of life, only to be herded into the slums of the cities.

Socialists are not indifferent to such suffering; indeed as members of the working class we ourselves experience, day by day, the indignities and demoralising effects of capitalism. What distinguishes us from other political organisations is that we insist that it is futile to concentrate on just a part of capitalism’s problems— slums, poverty, war, the plight of the Eskimos and so on.

Since capitalism is responsible for all these problems—and many others—it follows that the only effective policy is to campaign exclusively for its abolition and replacement with socialism.

There is a Socialist Party of Canada, companion to the SPGB and other socialist parties in the world. But the difficulties of the struggle for socialism are even more formidable in Canada than in this country, and the SPC remains small. Its offices are in Victoria. British Columbia.

Editors.

Do We Oppose NF?

Regarding On Banning the the National Front — Socialist Standard January issue.

Because the opportunity to discuss their racist policies with them, either at their meetings or otherwise, is not often possible can I ask whether you agree that your members and supporters should also assist to make the elector aware of those policies by the issue of anti-NF explanatory leaflets as issued constantly by the Anti-Nazi League?

Yours hopefully.

FD (Essex)

Reply

It is not only the National Front who are shy about discussing their policies. The Socialist Standard has recently written twice to the Anti-Nazi League, asking Peter Hain if he would agree to being interviewed by a socialist as part of an article we plan to publish on the ANL. Both letters were ignored.

As far as our resources in terms of membership and money permit we publish a great deal of literature analysing all aspects of capitalist society. Articles on racism appear regularly in the Socialist Standard and we have published two editions of our pamphlet on the Racial Problem.

What we don’t get involved in is a preoccupation with any one aspect of capitalism’s problems, be it racism, sexism, unemployment or whatever. We argue that anyone concerned with any of these problems should be concerned with the abolition of them all — by the abolition of capitalism.

We analyse and attack the ideas of racism just as we oppose all anti-working class theories, including the reformism of organisation like the Anti-Nazi League.

Editors.

Berk of the Month

January’s “Berk of the Month Award" must go to the Sunday Mirror columnist Mr. Wardrobe Wyatt. From "Britain’s most influential columnist" comes this little gent "We have strikes because some people enjoy the excitement of them’’. Our friend Woodrow has obviously not experienced the “excitement” of standing in sub-zero temperatures, for hours on end with only the pittance of strike pay in their pockets, with about as much action as the Queen’s garden party.

Rob Bishop

Pudsey, Leeds, 

W. Yorks.

Why you should join the Socialist Party (1979)

Party News from the May 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Rising crime — who’s afraid of the PNC? (1979)

From the May 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

When most people think of crime it is not the Lord Kagans or Richard Nixons of this world that spring to mind, but the burglars, robbers, rapists and muggers passing through the courts daily. And there is certainly no doubt about the statistical trend in these offences. The year 1977 (the last for which official statistics are available) showed a staggering 16 per cent rise on the previous year. Outside the London area the number of offences reported increased by 1,927,462, although figures for the London area for 1978 have possibly levelled out a little.

David McNee, Metropolitan Chief Commissioner, wants the police to be given “a vast range of new powers with which to combat crime” (The Times 3.8.78.). He also wants to “clean up the force”, although that job was supposed to have been done by his predecessor Sir Robert Mark, hit back against the ruling class law that reinforces Mark put the blame on everybody but himself, singling out bent lawyers (sec Sunday Timex 13.3.78), and bemoaning a general “lack of discipline" in society. An equally stupid explanation by the Chief Constable of Merseyside, Kenneth Oxford, appeared in The Times. According to him “the cause of crime is fundamental— greed, selfishness and violence—and those three headings apply as much to society as a whole as to those with criminal propensities”. (26.4.78). What the fair cop did not explain is, why is there a society of greed, selfishness and violence? What is the fair cop doing to change it? All Oxford wants is to have more police (presumably themselves greedy selfish and violent) running after the people that the greedy, selfish and violent society produces.

Here To Stay

The Law Society’s Gazette (hardly a paper known for radicalism), pointing out that the country’s prison population is now over 42,000, commented that "we have to learn to live with crime. It seems almost as impossible to control it as it is to control our climate” (27.7.77). Sir Leon Radzinowicz, a well known criminologist, has commented ; “No national characteristics, no political regimes, no system of law, police, justice, punishment, treatment or even terror has rendered a country exempt from crime. In fact scarcely any can claim to have checked its accelerating momentum”. (The Growth of Crime)

So there you are, crime is here to stay. But these conveyors of conventional wisdom forget to add that crime is only here to stay while there is capitalism. Furthermore, no attempts by capitalist politicians or their strong arm men can do anything about it. Why? Because capitalism means a society where the majority do not own the means of wealth production ; where workers are in various degrees of deprivation, while a small minority grab most of the wealth that the wage earners produce. A life of luxury, privilege and case for the minority, a life of relative shortages for the majority. No wonder then that many people, from the dodger of the train fares to the large scale swindlers and bank robbers, try to hit back against the ruling class law that reinforces the system of exploitation of the majority.

PNC

One disturbing element in all this is that the police are trying to obtain further powers and further cuts in “civil liberties”. This is not just a question of bourgeois democracy being under threat; it is more a question of opportunity for open socialist discussion being gradually restricted.

For example, the right to silence is now being challenged by the police one step nearer to "guilty unless proved innocent’’.) More worrying is the “Police National Computer” (PNC). New Scientist (18.1.79) pointed out that police files are not only extremely comprehensive, but the type of persons listed has been extended. Even the change in driving licences was not quite the innocent administrative process it appears. “Production of a driving licence now automatically gives police all the information necessary (‘search factors’) to check on open computer records”. Furthermore, the range of “offences” which are likely to put you on a police file has increased. Included now are such activities as "wasting police time” (who decides that?) as well as a vast extension of those activities classified as subversive. Even the Anti-Blood Sports League are not forgotten. New Scientist comments:

  The figures given suggest an eventual aim to monitor about 10 per cent of the population, together with almost all vehicles and addresses. Since most police records will concern adult males, between one in three and one in four will likely eventually be on the system. Much of the information stored has little to do with crime per se. Twice as many "occurrences” (non-crimes) as crimes are to be recorded . . . Not unnaturally, what is recorded, and about whom, will reflect official views and prejudices; this includes a wide definition of subversives as well as criminals . . . the surveillance net of pre-emptive policing inevitably covers and affects many more than the impending criminals; mistakes are made; inaccurate and unsubstantiated information is recorded, information provided for one purpose is used for another; and so on.

Clearly, then, law enforcement agencies are not giving in to rising crimes. They seem to accept that they cannot win. but will continue the fight and extend the area of dirty work wherever they think they can get away with it.

Who's worried?

In the meantime, individual capitalists are not unduly concerned. Their property is insured and they generally do not live in mugging districts. But the state, as the representative of the capitalist class is worried. Many workers are worried too.

But crime is a result of an anti-social society and yet another reason why everyone should start to question the sanity of the existing social order. If crime is endemic to capitalism, so too are most other social evils. Instead of blaming people’s greed or selfishness, as the simpletons of the police force would have us do, it is time to question society as a whole. If crime is a result of capitalism, only a social revolution will eradicate it. Not because people will suddenly have become different in some mystical love-thy-neighbour sense, but because the reason for crime—property society itself—will have been abolished.

Ronnie Warrington

Obituary: David Boyd (1979)

Obituary from the May 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The death occurred in February of Comrade David Boyd, just three weeks short of his celebrating forty years as a party member. His son has provided the following obituary:

David Boyd was born in 1903 in Larne, Northern Ireland. Grandfather was a foreman at the local aluminium works and although a devout Presbyterian he supported Irish Home Rule—an unfashionable if not dangerous viewpoint. His was apparently the only copy of the Daily News to arrive each day on the ferry boat from Stranraer (the republican minority presumably taking more subversive journals). Dad remembered when the windows were tarred over and only my grandfather’s senior position in the local Masonic Lodge preventing real violence and loss of job. Amid the conflict and stupidity of the 1912 Loyalist gun-running, the War and the ‘Troubles’, Dad learned about socialism from a Scottish lodger at their home and from The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. The Depression came early to Northern Ireland and Dad came to London. He took a variety of jobs and was sacked in about 1930 by the Co-operative Insurance Society for helping to organise a strike of fellow agents. A flirtation with the CP was followed by Orwellian disillusion and a home in the SPGB which he never left. “I thought about things’’, he told us “that’s why I am a socialist". Dad's ashes will rest in the local cemetery looking towards Mugsborough.

Alright, Jack? (1979)

From the May 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

In modern society, the interests of the individual are indivisible from those of society at large. Socialism then can he seen as a matter of self interest. 

If society is organised as a capitalist jungle, the human animals who live in it will of necessity require tooth and claw in order to survive against the competition. To mix a couple of common metaphors—in a rat race nice guys finish last.

It follows from this that people must now set themselves to the task of cutting down the competitive jungle and establishing in its place an environment which will allow human beings to behave as such and not like rats in a rat race. And this task must be achieved by the non-angelic humans who compose society. But, it may be asked, why should men and women who are accustomed to living in the jungle bother to set their hands to creating a different kind of society and one which will give no scope or reason for all those qualities which religious people describe under the heading of original sin? If we don’t expect people to have a “change of heart,” how can we expect them to take upon themselves the task of building the new society of harmony and co-operation? Well, it will not happen out of altruism—but sheer self-interest.

First, it is necessary to say that the key to the history of the evolution of human society is that classes act in what they conceive to be their own interests. The immediate example of that is seen in the revolutions in various countries (classically France but also, of course, England and Russia) in which the rising capitalist class overthrew the feudal system. And the proof that that step really was in the interests of the bourgeoisie is readily demonstrated when one looks at today’s world and sees the unparalleled wealth which the capitalist class enjoys. The riches of an Onassis or a Rockefeller make the great feudal lords look like veritable “basket cases” (to use the term so often on the lips of glib politicians like Kissinger). But this answer is not sufficient for our purpose even though it is incontrovertible as far as it goes. It might be argued that the capitalist class did not have to think very hard to see where their self-interest lay. (Which is perhaps as well; capitalists do not need to be great thinkers. Just great money-makers.) The rising capitalist class did not have to think very hard to see that feudalism was fettering their efforts to amass wealth—which was the object of the exercise.

The capitalist class needed, above all else, a working class to exploit. And the army of potential workers was not in the towns queueing up for jobs in the mills and the mines. They were tied to the land, eking out their existence being exploited for the benefit of the landowning aristocracy. For capitalism to succeed it was essential to get the peasants off the land and into the factories. So self-interest stepped in and the capitalist class staged their revolution—with the help of the masses who were prepared to assist the devil they didn’t know in preference to the one they did know.

The self-interest is not always clearly and immediately and individually apparent. Suppose we have an elderly worker who is convinced that all the social evils of capitalism (poverty, insecurity, unemployment, inferior housing and food, not to speak of wars and the threat of nuclear annihilation) can only be eliminated by the abolition of the system of private and state-owned means of production and distribution. He could be excused for thinking that he will not see socialism no matter how hard he works for it. Socialism will only happen, as already indicated, when the majority of the working class have consciously opted for it. And not even the most incurable optimist could imagine that being achieved in, say, the next ten years. So how will that worker be achieving his own self-interest, which is the motive force for the establishment of socialism? Will he not simply be working his way into the grave?

The rate of progress in socialist thinking of the working class is difficult to judge. But it by no means follows that because we are a tiny handful of socialists now, fewer than a thousand after seventy five years, that their progress cannot suddenly take off. And once a take-off point is reached, it is reasonable to expect that socialists’ efforts to convince their fellow workers will accelerate at a rather more encouraging rate than we have seen hitherto. But to our elderly worker, the self-interest we talk about is the self-interest of the class to which he belongs. When the majority of the working class can see the clear self-interest of the class as a whole, then the self-interest of the individual members of the class will be fulfilled.

When I jointed the SPGB in Manchester at the age of 19, the aged pillar of that Branch (I reckoned that he and his wife were about half the membership of the Branch) made it quite clear to me: “Don’t be a young man in a hurry. That way lies only disillusionment. No good for you. No good for the SPGB either. If you dislike the world around you, if you think that it is possible to make a much nicer world for you and your posterity to live in, then join us. But if you expect to see the new world by the time you are 30 or 40, then we certainly cannot make you any promises”.

I got the message, I cannot pretend that I am not disappointed that the working class has proved to be so slow in seeing their own class self-interest. But never having had illusions, I am spared the risk of becoming disillusioned. And what better way is there to spend one’s time than in trying to make a better world? And to make people see the futility of hoping that by putting a little cross every few years for the likes of Callaghan or Thatcher, these vile politicians (some of whom even have the impudence to call themselves socialists while actually running capitalism) will make the better world for them.

L. E. Weidberg

Eurocapitalism or World Socialism? (1979)

From the May 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The European Parliament which you, together with workers in 8 other countries, are being called upon to elect for the first time directly by universal suffrage is not really a parliament in the traditional sense. In view of its very limited powers it would more properly be called a "consultative committee". Real parliamentary powers - to make laws and to fix the budget - are exercised in the Common Market by meetings of Ministers from the nine Member-States. Nevertheless, since if a political institution is to exist it is better that it be elected rather than appointed, the Socialist Party of Great Britain and its sympathisers in other European countries are taking part in this election campaign.

WORLD SOCIALISM

We are using this occasion when people will not be thinking exclusively in national terms to put forward the socialist proposition that the only solution of today's social problems is the establishment of a world community without frontiers based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of wealth production and distribution, with production solely for use not sale or profit. On this basis the world-wide productive apparatus could turn out the abundance that it is technically capable of but which it is prevented from doing today by the restrictions of capitalism and its rule of "no profit, no production". This would permit society to implement the long-standing socialist principle of "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs". In other words, free access for every man, woman and child to what they need to live and enjoy life. This, we say, is technically possible; but first the means for producing wealth must become the common heritage of all mankind, the only basis on which the purpose of production can be changed from profit making to satisfying human needs.

Socialism cannot be established in one country. The very existence of the Common Market shows that even under capitalism the Nation-State has become too small a framework for the productive apparatus. Capitalism is already, and has been for many years, a world system; it exists in state capitalist Russia and China as well as in the West, and functions through the world market as a single economic system. This is why the new, higher social development. Socialism, which will replace it must be a world system too.

There are those who see the constant internationalisation of production and life, including the Common Market itself, as a threat to "national sovereignty". This reactionary position has been officially adopted by most of the Communist parties of Europe, thus showing that they have no right whatsoever to call themselves "socialist" or "communists". Socialism, as we have explained, can only be a world-wide system and socialists do not defend capitalist national independence. On the contrary, one of our criticisms of capitalism is precisely that it has divided the world into competing and armed "Nation-States" whose conflicts mean that war is always going on in some part of the world. What we want is not national independence but a socialist world without frontiers.

THE CAPITALIST COMMON MARKET

As to the Common Market itself, or to use the somewhat grandiose title it has given itself, "the European Community", it is a political and trading arrangement entered into by various European States in order to further the interests of their capitalists. Though an expression of the growing internationalisation of the world, it is not a step in the direction of world unity, nor was it meant to be. If anything, it is a step towards the creation of a new super-power to rival Russia and the United States, opening up the terrifying prospect that the wars of he future will be between continents rather than Nation-States. Already a three-sided trade war is building up between Europe, Japan and the United States.

This does not mean, however, that we are to be lumped with opponents of the Common Market. It merely means that we regard the whole arrangement, and arguments about it, as quite irrelevant from a working class point of view. What trading alliances a particular country makes concern only its capitalists not its workers.

CAPITALISM

The basis of capitalist society is the monopoly by a minority class of the means for producing and distributing wealth and the consequent division of society into two antagonistic classes: those who own and control the means of production and those who, excluded from such ownership and control, are obliged to sell their mental and physical energies for a wage or salary in order to gain a living. Under capitalism there is therefore no common social interest but a conflict of interest between these two classes over wages and working conditions, and ultimately over the ownership and control of the means of wealth production and distribution.

The interest of the working class lies in the abolition of capitalism and its replacement by socialism. Capitalism is a class society based on the exploitation and restricted consumption of the working class which can only work in one way: as a profit-making system in the interest of those who live off profits drawn from their ownership and control of the means of production. Despite repeated futile attempts, by Labour, Social Democratic and other governments in all countries, capitalism cannot be reformed so as to function in the interest of the majority. It is not the reform of capitalism that should be sought but is abolition.

The choice between capitalism or socialism is the issue that the Socialist Party of Great Britain and its sympathisers in other countries are raising in this election. Those who want and understand socialism can show this by writing "SOZIALISMUS", "SOCIALISMO", "SOCIALISME", as the case may be, across their ballot paper.

The workers have no country

Workers of the world unite.

Executive Committee

The Socialist Party of Great Britain