Running Commentary: Labour tries again (1983)

The Running Commentary column from the May 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Labour tries again

Loud and nostalgic fanfares sounded along the Walworth Road when the Labour Party recently revealed its super new programme called The New Hope for Britain. Loud because Labour needs to be optimistic and it is promising nothing less than the secure prosperity of British capitalism, unemployment down to one million, everyone leading a much happier life and so on — and in any case because they are hoping that if they can compose an attractive programme enough workers will be deceived by it to put them back into power. Nostalgic because this sort of event has happened so many times before — the unveiling of a clutch of new fashioned slogans, new pledges, new futilities, often by the same old hands.

On nuclear disarmament, which both Labour and Tories seem to want to make a prominent issue in the next election, the programme offers a very sticky piece of fudge:

  We must use unilateralist steps . . . to secure multilateral solutions on the international level. Unilateralism and multilateralism must go hand in hand . . . we are against moves that would disrupt our existing alliances, but are resolved on measures to enable Britain to pursue a non-nuclear defence policy.

This craftily worded passage means everything or nothing, according to taste; read in one way it would satisfy Denis Healey, in another it would reassure a member of CND. A future Labour government which kept British nuclear arms, remained in NATO, supported an American war such as in Vietnam (as happened with past Labour governments) could claim that it had followed the programme to the letter.

A similar duplicity, not to say audacity, is evident when the programme comes to industrial relations and wages. A Labour government, it says, ".  . . will not . . . return to the old policies of government- imposed wage restraint” — without acknowledging that those "old policies” were imposed by Labour governments, usually after they had promised not to impose them.

Labour is again setting its hopes on being able to control wages, as the British capitalist class requires of any government, through the voluntary co-operation of the unions and the employers in yet another gimmicky-titled proposal — the New Economic Assessment. There is no reason to believe that this would be any more successful than previous gimmicks. Its failure is assured by the fact that, like its predecessors, it rests on the assumption that there is a unity of interests between capitalists and workers. If only both sides can be brought to a rational acceptance of this unity (by a Labour government, of course) then it can be cemented into economic order and prosperity for everyone.

There is only one problem in this; there is no such unity. Capitalism is a society of class conflict. New Hope for Britain? No hope for Labour.


Arms for sale

Since the world was plunged from war to peace in 1945, millions of people have died in armed conflicts. Of all parts of the earth nowhere has been more plagued by tension and war than the Middle East. But the victims can take consolation that they did not die and suffer in vain. For war is always good news for those capitalists who have investments in the arms trade.

The Ministry of Defence recently chartered a cross-channel ferry, converted it into a floating exhibition hall, had it loaded up with tanks, guns, armoured cars, shells, uniforms and the like and sent it on a sales-promotion tour to the Middle East. The ship visited Kuwait. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf States. As is usually the case, a war is in process there at present but this did not deter the sales effort; the very instability of the region makes it a fertile market for weapons and the states where the ship called have a combined arms budget of some £15 billion.

Any twinges of doubt about the venture (weapons sales people are human, like the rest of us and therefore also liable to such lapses) were put to rest by a representative of the trade organisation, the Defence Manufacturers’ Association:

  It went to that part of the world because there is still money out there and they need to get their armed forces in shape . . . I can say categorically that our members were extremely satisfied with the number of contacts they made.

Arms manufacturers have often been accused of causing war but in fact the roots of this scourge are in the basis of capitalist society. The makers and sellers of weapons merely (merely!) take their chances to exploit a market, to realise a profit, to accumulate more capital — just like the makers and sellers of any other type of commodity. People may die in extra abundance through this activity, but of what consequence is that when the overriding priority is to ensure the books balance on the side of profit?


Doctor, Doctor

The tentacles of this recession reach out to grasp many people who not so long ago might have consoled themselves that they were unreachable by its effects. There are plenty of ex-managers, ex-“white collar” workers, on the dole now and they are looking like being ex-whatever-it-was for a very long time.

As a case in point. Department of Health and Social Security figures published in March showed that over 2000 doctors are now out of work and the figure is rising; a year ago there were 1000 and in 1981 between 500 and 700. In their enforced leisure, the unemployed doctors might reflect on what this tells them about their class position in capitalist society. Their prospective patients might also ponder some important facts.

Doctors are not out of work because there is no demand for them, through the fact that everyone is getting rapid and effective medical treatment whenever it is needed. In cities like London there can often be severe problems in finding a doctor who can fit you into an already crowded caseload. Unless it is an emergency, few people who need to see their doctor can do so immediately. Young, newly-qualified doctors have to shoulder a fearsome burden of overwork and long hours — which can’t be to the benefit of the patients.

So what about the standards of health care? In March the Lancet published a league table of the various Health Authority Areas, based on the numbers of deaths from diseases which with proper treatment would not have resulted in death. From this evidence, anyone who is ill would do well to keep away from Walsall, Bolton, Sandwell and Wolverhampton in that order. The deficiencies in health care which the survey shows up could be eased by an injection of doctors but health authorities, like everything else under capitalism, have to work to a budget.

What it amounts to is that people suffer illness unnecessarily, and when they are ill their discomfort is prolonged, or they die, unnecessarily, because it is uneconomic to provide adequate care and treatment. The fact that this exists alongside thousands of doctors who have been trained and are humanly useful is comment enough on the grisly, inhuman priorities of capitalism.

War, glorious war

All war is glorious, with exciting battles and charges and explosions and when the warriors come home there are bands and celebrations with pretty uniforms and shiny medals for them for being so brave. And Thatcher and her henchmen keep telling us that the Falklands was an especially glowing example of this, of courage and professional militarism.

Of course there is also the little matter of people getting killed but when that happens their remains can be laid out in green cemeteries with neat, parade ground rows of crosses which make war seem bloodless and controlled and really rather tranquil. The sort of place their families can visit and observe and, through the very peace and order of the place, feel that perhaps it is not so bad after all.

When the families of servicemen who were killed in the Falklands went to visit their graves last month, the government took good care to remove an object which gave ample evidence that war is horrifying, agonising and obscene. The burnt shell of the Sir Tristram, the troopship which caught fire from Argentine bombs and where 51 men died and many others suffered fearsome burns and injuries, had lain at Port Stanley. It served as the rat-infested home of a couple of hundred soldiers and it was one of the first sights to greet anyone coming into the harbour there.

If the bereaved families had seen that ship, they would have had it brought home to them that war is not glorious. They might even have asked themselves what it is all about, why it happened, whether there were reasons for it other than Thatcher’s crude jingoism. They might have wondered whether those men died for the interests of one side in a wider strategic and political struggle and to protect the interests of the few who really own the Falklands.

Such doubts strike at the very basis of workers’ support for the wars of capitalism. Leaving nothing to chance, the authorities had the Sir Tristram towed out of Stanley to a hidden destination, where the families could not see it. This was no act of humanity. The excesses of capitalism are such that they can be defended only by a continuing deception.

Getting it wrong

George Schwartz, who was Economics Editor of the Sunday Times for 27 years, probably felt at home in Thatcher's Britain since it claims to operate on principles which Schwartz propounded as near sacred. For Schwartz was a simple believer in capitalism and thought, tenaciously, that the profit motive was one of the great rationalities of the human race. Left to itself, without the state barging in with subsidies, quotas, taxes and the rest, it would work to provide prosperity everywhere, if rather more of it in some places than others.

To mark his death in April, the Sunday Times (a very different newspaper now from the one which Schwartz worked on) republished one of his pieces, which first appeared in November 1949:

  To quarrel with accounting is to quarrel with economic calculation, and that is to quarrel with Providence itself for not having supplied everything in such abundance that it can be had for the asking. In a world conditioned by scarcity, accounting is the tool of rational choice and action.

These cosy beliefs were once put to the rigorous test of a debate with the Socialist Party of Great Britain — at about the time Schwartz wrote that article. It took place at the old Kensington Town Hall, which has now been partly demolished, to the anguish of preservationists but strictly in accordance with the principles of cost-effectiveness of which Schwartz was such a firm defender. A large audience heard Schwartz attempt to defend capitalism by attacking the Labour Party and its nationalisation schemes. At the time the Attlee government were deeply in trouble, wrestling with the problems of reviving British capitalism after the war.

Now at almost every SPGB meeting, in those days, speakers had to spend a lot of time disabusing the minds of people who thought the party either was, or had some connection with, the Labour Party. The economics guru of the Sunday Times had no more original an opposition to offer than socialists could get at any street corner, any night of the week. When the socialist speaker firmly removed this sole prop of Schwartz’s argument, the famous man adopted the tactic of trying to put it back in place, refusing to accept the weight of evidence against him. It was a pathetic performance and Schwartz left the hall with his ignorance and prejudices obviously intact.

He may have felt at home in Thatcher’s Britain but, if he ever bothered to check, he must have been disturbed to realise that the socialist case is as relevant and forceful today as when he avoided facing it over thirty years ago.

It was reported . . . (1983)

From the May 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

The same offence, at the same store, tried at the same Court

“A young woman who stole another woman’s handbag whilst in Harrods was given a suspended sentence at Horseferry Road Court. Miss Cathleen Mullins, 24, unemployed, admitted stealing a handbag and contents worth together £268. The Officer told the court that Miss Mullins had been jobless since 1979 due to illness. . . Explaining why Miss Mullins had not worked for such a long time, the lawyer said that she had been the victim of a ‘vicious knife attack’ in which she had received 380 stitches and that as a result she still suffers from headaches.”

“Charges against a High Court judge’s wife of shoplifting have been dropped following a hearing held in camera. Lady Lavinia Dorothy Nourse, 39 years old wife of Mr. Justice Nourse, was arrested at Harrods . . . She was bailed to appear at Horseferry Road Magistrates’ Court last week, but before the court was opened to the public, an application was made in camera and the charges were withdrawn . . . Lady Lavinia had been charged with stealing two handbags, two pearl necklaces and five belts, worth together £358.40 from Harrods. She had also been accused of stealing two carpets worth together £190 from the store on the same date. It is believed the charges were dropped on medical grounds."

Marylebone Mercury

The rich widen the gap

“'The gap between rich and the unemployed has widened dramatically over the period of Sir Geoffrey Howe’s five budgets. This is shown by a special study commissioned by the Sunday Times from the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies. A typical company director on £45.000 a year has enjoyed a £120 a week rise in his real take-home pay under Howe, an increase of a quarter. By contrast a typical man without a job is worse off by £15.30 a week, a 21.3 per cent fall in his real income. . . The company director’s good fortune continues with this Budget, which gives him an extra £11.64 a week, compared with a gain of only 58p for the unemployed man," Sunday Times. 20 March, 1983

“Referring to reports that a woman earned less than 78p an hour for cleaning the home of Mr. Ian MacGregor, chairman of British Steel, Mr. Bottomley said ‘With his British Steel salary of £48,500, you would have thought there would be a little more flexibility in what the market could pay for her services’.”

Yesterday in Parliament,  Daily Telegraph, 19 March, 1983.

Not amused (1983)

From the May 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Human beings have the capacity for historical hindsight. We can look back critically at the slaves of ancient society and agree that they were misguided in believing that their situation was “natural” and “proper". We now know that there was nothing innately inferior about slaves, that they were simply born into servitude. We have also passed that phase of society where the social structure was a rigid hierarchy in which the serf looked up to the knight, the knight to the Lord of the Manor and everyone looked up to the monarch, though few would ever see one. We can watch Upstairs, Downstairs and laugh when Hudson the butler speaks about the need for everyone downstairs to be aware of their “station in life", so that a bedroom servant could be rude to a scullery-maid but not to the cook. If we look at our own period in history with the same awareness of change and the impermanence of social ideas, we can see that there is nothing natural or necessary about the wage-slave status of the majority.

The Tories have been particularly vocal about denying this idea. They say that there must always be rich and poor. Many supporters of the Conservative Party claim that they have “no political philosophy”; they insist that if you desire change in one form or another you are “political" but if you merely happen to agree with the way things are, and accept the prevailing, popular ideas, then you are apolitical. But look at the political ideas on which conservatism is founded.

Conservatives believe in “Self-reliance". This amounts to equating poverty or insecurity with inadequacy, being unable to make your own way. Margaret Thatcher has spoken about her support for “Victorian values". What does she mean? The values of a society where the abject destitution of the majority and the sickening conditions of the workhouses were kept in being by indoctrinating the workers with docility and humility from birth? The values which said that it was the job of the masses to work hard and keep quiet and the right of the minority to enjoy great wealth and remain idle?

In its 1979 Election Manifesto the Conservative Party said:

  No one who has lived in this country for the last five years can fail to he aware of how the balance of our society has been increasingly tilted in favour of the State at the expense of individual freedom. This election may be the last chance we have to reverse that process, to restore the balance of power in favour of the people.

It was Disraeli who referred to a Conservative government as an "organised hypocrisy” and that may be a fairly appropriate term when it comes to this business of democracy. You could perhaps imagine Margaret Thatcher choking on her champagne if there was any immediate prospect of the people actually taking power away from the wealth owners who now exercise it. And you can't help but think it peculiar, that the government which has recently guided the Police and Criminal Evidence Bill through Parliament (dramatically to increase police powers of arrest and forced searches) should be so concerned with weakening the power of the state. “Individual Freedom” is a phrase which often sounds good, but in fact boils down to the freedom of the poor to suffer their lot, the freedom of the unemployed to get a job if they wish, and the freedom of the majority to fantasise about becoming millionaires while the wealth owners are left free to enjoy their parasitic status.

What else are the Tories in favour of? They listed “five tasks" in their 1979 Manifesto and we can see now how far these tasks have been completed and what the consequences have been.

The first task was "to restore the health of our economic and social life by controlling inflation and striking a fair balance between the rights and duties of the trade union movement". Although price rises have tended to flatten out, wage rises have been largely below this rate and workers have sustained a drop in their standard of living. We have seen this government give a smiling thumbs up to the Polish workers who were trying to augment their trade union powers against the wishes of the bosses of Polish state-capitalism, while at the same time introducing the Employment Act to restrict trade union power. What was it Disraeli said about hypocrisy? During the water workers’ strike at the beginning of this year Thatcher, speaking in Glasgow, said that “honesty, thrift, reliability and hard work and a sense of responsibility for fellow men are not simply Victorian values but part of the enduring principles of the Western World". She urged the striking workers to respect a “puritan work ethic" instead of trying to “deprive the community of one of life's essentials". You might wonder whether Thatcher ever pokes her head through the doors of Buckingham Palace, or the Hilton lounge or the gentlemen’s clubs to lecture the inhabitants about the puritan work ethic. When the government spends money on bombs, telling us that nurses and kidney machines are not as important, does she berate herself for attempting to "deprive the community of one of life’s essentials”? The similarity between the right-wing Conservative and Kremlin attitudes to free trade unions is, if you'll pardon the expression, striking. The recent report of the Tory Centre for Policy Studies recommending legislation to prohibit strikes in essential industries is just the recipe for keeping the workers down which is favoured by Andropov and Jarusekski.

The second task was to “restore incentives so that hard work pays". As you know, working hard for the boss all your life means not only that you are left with next to nothing to spend at the end of your days, but that you are usually too exhausted to enjoy what little you have. The only way hard work pays is when you happen to have a lot of people working hard for you. Hard work pays? Elizabeth Windsor gets £3,260,200 a year. She must work hard. R.V. Giordano, the director of BOC, gets £450,000 as a salary. He must work hard. The Duke of Buccleuch owns 258,000 acres so he must have worked pretty hard, plus he’s got all that gardening to do.

It is an old dodge of politicians to blame the cause of social problems on the government of the day and then, if those carping politicians ever themselves become the government, to switch the blame (correctly) on the uncontrollable forces of the market. Tory politicians are no exception to this rule. We find them in 1979 blaming the Labour government for social problems in Britain: “Their favourite but totally false excuse is that their appalling record is all due to the oil crisis and the world-wide economic depression.” After a couple of years they were themselves using exactly the excuse they had found unacceptable coming from Labour: "There’s been a world recession, not our fault — Germany, France. Europe are suffering as well — some suffering even worse . . . there are other countries that have even worse unemployment than we have, some less, all are struck by world recession” (Guardian. 7 March 1983).

The third task was to "uphold Parliament and the rule of law”. The upholding of the law usually has different results depending on your class. Take two examples: “An unemployed woman who stole a purse containing 50p was jailed for eight months” (Daily Telegraph, 28 February 1980), whereas "The Duke of Westminster’s cousin William Grosvenor was given a 12-month suspended sentence and fined £1000 for conspiring to defraud the Inland Revenue . . . he admitted helping to hide the £8.500 cost of champagne and whisky, grouse shooting party at Glenfiddich in otherwise genuine tax-deductible bills" (Daily Express, 24 January 1980). Wealth is produced by labour. Yet those who are most productive own least. This society works on the basis that those who produce do not possess and those who possess do not produce. All legal systems legitimise the massive institutional theft of wealth by the ruling class. The wages system is legalised robbery because we get back less than the value of what we put in. Apart from this primary purpose, the law has to be used to control the frustration which is a daily occurrence in capitalism. With a worsening recession and austerity the Tories are condoning greater police violence to cope with riots and a proliferation of brutal robberies. But a point which is not fully comprehended by those salivating Tories at their annual Conference who speak about the need for harsh punishments and more discipline is that you cannot create content with a truncheon.

The fourth task was to “support family life, by helping people to become home owners raising the standard of their children’s education and concentrating welfare services on the effective support of the old, the sick, the disabled and those who are in real need". This sounds sincere. In fact it does not altogether match up with what the Tories did in practice. Family life. well yes, unless you are in an Asian family in which case you may come a cropper of the Nationality Act which limits the entry of parents, grandparents and fiancées to live with the rest of their family. Own your own home. yes. but they forget to mention that paying the mortgage does bear certain similarities to paying the rent. Last year 27,000 people lost their homes as a result of being unable to keep up the mortgage payments. Today 87 per cent of the population own only 9 per cent of the land. 60,000 families are officially homeless and about 1.5 million families are waiting to be rehoused (Shelter). We are living in a society where property company boss Sir lan MacTaggart can sit in one of his £1000 a week marble-floored penthouses (Daily Express, 24 June 1981), pick up a newspaper and read about 18-year-old Linda Jackson who gave birth to a stillborn baby because of freezing conditions while she was having to live in a tent on the banks of the River Dee in Chester (Daily Express, 4 December 1980). You cannot have such a thing as a property-owning democracy because the idea of property (“This is mine, the rest of you cannot have it”) is opposed to the idea of democracy. By the same token, “equal opportunities" in a property society do not count for much. Anyone is free to send a child to Eton (for about £4,000 a year) for that child to have a prosperous life. Anyone is free to pay £250 a day for private hospital treatment. It is just that the majority of us begin this unnecessary competition for "success" with the handicap of being in the working class.

The fifth task was to "strengthen Britain’s defences and work with our allies to protect our interests in an increasingly threatening world”. What the Tories, like the other pro-capitalist parties, fail to make clear here is the precise nature of "our interests”. The only interest most of us have in Britain is that this is where we pay rent, receive dole, or sell ourselves to the boss. Where we consume the culture of Terry Wogan, Crossroads and baked beans. The economic interests of Charrington-Coalite, who virtually own the Falklands. were scarcely mentioned during or after all the unnecessary bloodshed in the South Atlantic. The Tories are emphatic about the need for bombs "to keep the peace" and about the need to protect ourselves against our enemies. Norman "on-your-bike" Tebbit is a man who cannot really count logic or consistency as among his strengths. While spending much energy arguing against the heavy-handed interference of the state, Norman recently urged parents to keep their children away from school when plays about the Hiroshima bomb and the need for peace were due to be performed. He presumably considers that young minds should not really become acquainted with what happened at Hiroshima and why we should take steps to avoid travelling down the same road again. Negligently overlooking the government propaganda anti-Russian leaflet for schools, How to Deal with a Bully, Norman then further confused his opposition to the peace plays by saying "I prefer politics to be kept out of schools”. With such a clear liking for having his head in the clouds, Norman would have perhaps done better to have remained an airline pilot.

The solution to the social problems of the majority is a dramatic change of social organisation to socialism. This is not the decoy duck which the Tories set up to shoot down. It is not “Less freedom . . . Nationalisation . . . Levelling down . . . high spending . . . high taxes . . (Fifty Questions & Answers, What Socialists Believe In. Conservative Research Department). Neither is it Labour’s "new” plan to re-organise capitalism, with "a priority to create jobs (more exploitation) ... a five-year national plan (Stalin would have been proud) . . . and plans to abolish the legislative powers of the House of Lords" (Labour's Plan, The New Hope for Britain).

Socialism means the common ownership and democratic control of the means of producing and distributing wealth. It means acting to put an end to the need for wars and starvation. An end to eating synthetic food, living in inadequate accommodation. An end to the culture of tension, television-trances and Tcscos. Thatcher says "stand firm” as she harangues us about Victorian values. We are not amused.

Gary Jay

What can we do about crime? (1983)

From the May 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

First things first: the law exists to defend the capitalists not the workers. Laws are social rules to ensure the dictatorship of King Capital. By voting, in a majority, for the continuation of the profit system, workers hand social control on a plate to the class which exploits us. Law equals coercion for the defence of capital — but such coercion could not exist for one minute if the victims refused to go along with it:

There is not today any force in Britain capable of maintaining indefinitely a government not enjoying the support or tolerance of the overwhelming majority of the people. (The Police We Deserve, Sir Robert Mark, 1972.)

They talk about law and order as if it was such a desirable state of affairs. But what does law and order mean? It means hungry people starving without daring to take food from the supermarket shelf; it means homeless families — tens of thousands of which exist in this “property-owning democracy" — being refused access to empty houses and flats, many of which are the second or third homes of affluent parasites; it means locking people up for being too poor to pay rents, rates or other debts; it means "Keep Out" signs surrounding the vast private lands owned by the parasite class; it means keeping frustrated kids with toy guns away from the Queen, while making sure that she is surrounded by medalled thugs who carry real guns which they fire at anyone to order. Law and order means deferential wage slaves. Law and order means the morality of working class inferiority. Law and Order means that those who work are usually poor and those who exploit are rich. It is capitalism's law and order: law to defend the social disorder which puts their profits before our needs. The Tory. Alliance and Labour parties are all concerned to preserve law and order because they are all in the dirty business of keeping the profit system intact.

In a capitalist Utopia everyone would obey the law. Indeed, everyone would be so stupidly submissive that law enforcement would not be necessary. Tory politicians appear on TV and bemoan the fact that their Utopia has not arrived: why can’t the proles behave themselves and do as they’re told? Let us try to consider why the perfect law-abiding society does not exist.

The most common form of criminality is petty theft. The worker who has never stolen a pencil from school or some note pads from the office or some goods from the factory is a statistical exception. Without having the slightest conception of Marx’s theory of legalised robbery (the appropriation of surplus value), most workers know that the employer is getting as much as he can squeeze out of us and, if it is safe, we are going to get back some of that stolen wealth from the bosses. The transport services lose millions of pounds each year as a result of "fare frauds": why pay their price to travel if you can get away with less? Some workers — although far less than is implied by the gutter press — defraud the DHSS. As a fraction of the money fiddled by the capitalists in "tax evasion", social security frauds are negligible. But who needs the money most, the millionaire who saves hundreds of thousands of pounds by not paying a share to the state, which exists to protect private property, or the claimant whose schemes provide a few quid to which there is no legal entitlement? Most working class theft is petty — negligible inroads into the massive property-holdings of the capitalist class. More often than not petty theft involves more risk than gain. Socialists certainly do not recommend workers to obtain a ticket to the local prison by engaging in such piecemeal expropriation. But in a society in which workers have no real stake in the wealth surrounding them, and in which deprivation breeds the temptation to take whatever you can get “by fair means or foul", petty transgressions against the law of property are inevitable.

More serious than petty theft is "mugging” — assault and robbery. There are arguments about whether muggings are on the increase (as the sensationalist media claims) or whether "mugging" is simply a new statistical category to cover a crime which has existed for years. Regardless of the rate of muggings, nobody living in the streets and council estates built for wage slaves will deny that the fear of being mugged affects millions of people, restricting the times when they can walk the streets and the areas they can visit. Many old people in the poorer areas of London speak of the inadvisability of walking out alone at night. There is clearly something very wrong with a society that is too unsafe to walk in. Needless to say, in the capitalist Utopia muggers would be as rare as contraceptives in a nunnery. So, why mugging? The hard fact is that in the law of the jungle the most ferocious brute wins. In international war the superpowers boot the smaller nations in the metaphorical groin; in business, the multi-nationals wipe the floor with the struggling “small business man". Mugging simply reflects the vicious competitiveness of a society which condones violence and robbery when it is carried out on behalf of the ruling class. Many of the old-established titled landowners obtained their wealth and power by a process of “mass muggings” which over the centuries have become glorified in the name of heroic military conquest.

In the jungle of capitalism worker will attack worker in order to survive. Mugging is a rejection of the principle of class solidarity and, in the end, it is a game for mugs. After all, to transfer poverty from one worker’s pocket to another’s, by means of callous violence, is pathetic and undignified. Nevertheless, dignity does not fill an empty belly and it is not for socialists to moralise against those politically ignorant workers whose only way of responding to their poverty is to steal the crumbs from members of their own class.

The existence of mugging does not prove that "man is naturally aggressive, predatory and anti-social”. The despicable moralists of the profit system blame mugging on to the myth of “human nature". No: mugging is a product of property society. For approximately 40,000 years, prior to the emergence of private property or the state, there were no muggers. If “human nature” managed without muggings for four hundred centuries, we may expect that society would be able to exist without them in the future. Mindless racists say that muggings are caused by blacks. In fact, both black and white workers exist and the factor which unites them is not the colour of their skin, but their particular poverty. (Ever seen an Arab prince convicted of mugging?) Muggers tend to come from the most deprived sections of the working class. That is why the street crime figures for the poorest urban areas are always noticeably higher than those for the more affluent suburbs. Sociologists and criminologists tend to see mugging in terms of justice: either it is unjustified because it is morally anti-social or else it is justified because muggers are impoverished. Morality has nothing to do with it: mugging is an effect of poverty which is an effect of property and there is no point complaining about the effects while the cause is ignored.

What about the more “serious" crimes — in capitalist terms — like house burglaries, bank robberies and raids on Securicor vans? Capitalism only regards these crimes as being more serious because the value of wealth involved is greater than the petty theft of workers’ property. In general, the police treat the latter cases as being insignificant and unworthy of much of their time:

  In Bromley a uniformed policeman will turn up, but unless the crime is out of the ordinary the householder will merely be handed a form to complete for claiming against the insurance company. As in Kent, the reason is a lack of policemen and the need to concentrate on more serious crime — although a special unit will try to pick up habitual thieves. At present fewer than one in ten burglaries is solved. (Sunday Times, 6 July 1975.)

Sometimes there are guns used in “serious crimes" and the defenders of property are killed. But how can a class which uses trained armies and nuclear weapons in order to expand their property ownership object to “criminals" who are merely seeking the same end, but by relatively less violent means? The only difference between the Mafia and the American government is that the latter passes laws to justify its activities, whereas the former survives despite the law. Big crime, which is often controlled by men who are themselves capitalists, is a way into the property-owning class. Those who succeed in the underworld of illegal robbery can then graduate into legalised exploitation; for those who fail, capitalism has its “penal dustbins” (the term used by the ex-Governor of Wormwood Scrubs prison) to lock away those who offend against its “order”.

Penal dustbins

The smooth rule of capitalism depends on the constant threat of punishment. Britain has more people in prisons, being punished by the state, than most other European countries. The vast majority of prisoners are incarcerated for crimes relating to property. Even prison officers now admit that the “penal dustbins” are dangerously overcrowded. Criminologists generally agree that prison sentences do not tend to prevent people from committing further criminal offences — on the contrary, as most prisoners will testify, prisons are “schools of crime” wherein the naive first-time offender can pick up the more sophisticated skills of the trade. Any society which makes even the pretence of being civilised could not tolerate the continuation of institutions like Wandsworth, not to mention even more horrific establishments like Broadmoor and Long Kesh. Prisons can only survive in a society which cannot face up to the consequences of its own structure.

The capitalists’ crimeless Utopia is unrealisable because crime arises inevitably from capitalism. Those who disrupt the orderly robbery of the working class by the exploiters, which is legalised as the very basis of the wages system, are labelled as criminals. In many countries criminality extends to the realm of ideas, and those whose thinking conflicts with the state are imprisoned, tortured, murdered or, as in Russia, labelled insane. Thought policing is not confined to the state capitalist countries or to the “free enterprise" dictatorships, such as Chile, Argentina or South Africa. In Britain there are hundreds of laws which exist solely to enforce moral conformity and to punish behaviour considered deviant by the old feudal relics of the judiciary whose job is to defend the system for the master class. The fact that the law of Britain cannot tolerate freedom of thought is proved by the imprisonment of socialists who refused to be conscripted to kill their fellow workers during the last world war. In the event of a nuclear war civil servants would be given legal powers, including shooting on sight, which demonstrate the ultimate force that would be used by the capitalists in a civil emergency.

The hard task of enforcing the law is not carried out by the class for whom the law exists; it is the workers who guard the property, chase the (illegal) thieves and smash up the picket lines when ordered to do so. Quite a few of these “law-enforcers” are attracted to the job because they are vicious thugs who enjoy throwing their weight around. It is not only in South Africa that innocent people are killed by over-zealous police and prison officers — and it is not only in South Africa that the murderers walk free and well rewarded for their brutal work. There was a time when police recruits had to learn by heart the following principles of duty:

  . . . the constable will be civil and obliging to people of every rank and class. He must be particularly cautious not to interfere idly or unnecessarily in order to make a display of his authority: when required to act he will do so with decision and boldness . . . There is no qualification so indispensable to a police officer as perfect command of temper, never suffering himself to be moved in the slightest degree by any language or threat; if he do his duty in a quiet and determined manner, such conduct will probably excite the well-disposed bystanders to assist him if he requires them. (Quoted in A Force For The Future, Roy Lewis. 1976.)

One only has to recall the notorious television interview of a rape victim by detectives from the Thames Valley Police in a BBC documentary series to understand how outdated the above quoted passage is. Wage slaves in the police force do a hard, dirty and dangerous job and it must be recognised that, in general, the offensiveness of their activities is not because the individuals in it are nasty people, but because the law is an instrument of class oppression. Many police think that they are doing a good job; some join in the belief that they are going to be uniformed social workers, making society orderly so that decent folks can live in peace. In a different social context such aspirations could be put to good use. Hatred against the police as individuals is like hating the workers in the DHSS because the system of public charity stinks.

Reformists confine their criticisms of the law to the effects of the capitalist state machine. Their targets are bent coppers, sadistic screws, the Special Patrol Group, plastic bullets, SUS laws: if only we could organise laws, police, courts and prisons without these unappealing extras the reformers would be satisfied. The latest reformist outcry is against the Police Bill which gives police powers resembling those enjoyed by the law enforcers in fascist regimes. The power of the state to coerce the majority is growing with frightening rapidity, but that trend will not be reversed by Labour MPs calling on the police to act like gentlemen or Trotskyist fantasists demanding the creation of a People’s Militia. Like the reformists, socialists oppose the brutality of capitalism’s law and order. But our aim surpasses the reformist Wonderland in which the police lock workers up “without distinction of race or sex", the judges wear denim jackets and the prisons have one man to a cell rather than three.

Socialists stand for the abolition of a social system which requires laws and coercion in order to survive. The alternative to all that — a revolutionary one, to be sure — is the establishment of a system based on conscious social co-operation. This will only be achieved when the earth and its resources belong to its inhabitants and not to a privileged minority. Abolish property, in all its forms, and you end the need to protect wealth, which is owned by those who do not produce it, from those who do. In a society of common ownership and democratic control, where everything belongs to everyone, who could — or would want to — steal from whom?

But surely, it will be claimed, even a propertyless system will need some laws and some police and some prisons. People will still need to be kept in order. No: in a socialist society the people will democratically keep themselves in order or there will be no genuine socialism. Anti-social individuals will still need to be punished, will they not? Let us consider these “anti-social individuals". Let us assume that there are going to be people in a socialist society who insist on defying the will of the community. It will be the community itself, within whatever area is affected, that will have to deal with such anti-social behaviour. How it responds will be entirely up to the people at the time to decide. There will certainly be no need for a special, permanent force of men and women to ensure that the common will is respected. It is often said that there are certain crimes which will always exist. Are there? We can agree that some murders are committed by sick people, as are many acts of rape, child molestation and gratuitous violence. Psychiatric knowledge regarding the origin of mental disorders which cause such behaviour is presently under-researched and confused. It is doubtful whether such characteristics would exist in a society freed from the repressive psychological conditioning of capitalism. However, it is possible that there will be homicidal lunatics in a socialist society. If there are, they will require compassionate help, not punishment. You do not need prisons to deal with major personality disorders. Of course, those who believe that “human nature" is inherently anti-social will say that conscious social control is a dream. If they are correct, then the uncontrollable violence of the profit system will be with us forever. But all of the available evidence — psychological, biological, anthropological, historical — points to the fact that human behaviour is not natural, but adaptable and, given a different social environment, the thugs of today could be the consciously co-operating social beings of tomorrow.

Conservative minds will be filled with trepidation at the thought of a lawless, policeless, prisonless social order. How could they sleep safely in their beds at night without the prisons being full of frustrated men and women and the streets patrolled by human guard dogs? How, we might ask them, can they sleep safely with potentially devastating nuclear missiles aimed at all parts of the globe? We have law, but it does not protect the millions of people across the world who are mugged, burgled and beaten up each day. The conservative answer is to have more laws. The reformist answer is to have softer laws. The only practical alternative is to have no laws.

Conservative minds may rest contented that Law and Order will be preserved for ever more. But there are others who are becoming aware that the existence of crime has something to do with the kind of society we have. In his Annual Report for 1974, Laurence Byford, the Chief Constable of Lincoln, stated that

  All the signs are that there will be an even greater increase in violence, terrorism, industrial unrest, and crime in the future . . . this may sound pessimistic and even alarmist, but I prefer to think of it as a realistic forecast . . . and in my view anyone who seriously considers the position is bound to have at least some apprehension of where society is going.

The authorities are getting worried. They know, perhaps more than most workers do, that a movement to oppose the status quo could never be crushed by the force of minority-class law. It is up to us, the wealth producers of this society, to decide “where society is going". Conflict or co-operation; police or peace; the world run by us for them or by us for us?

Steve Coleman

A badly crumpled man (1983)

From the May 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

A thick skin is necessary to all politicians and this government abounds in rhinoceros figures. Some of them revel in an acknowledgement of their popular caricature — Thatcher the quick-tempered autocrat, Tebbit the parliamentary bovver boy, Howe the dead sheep of Westminster. But there is an exception; a minister who functions rather like a problem child, plastering its family into a false unity through itself carrying the burdens of their fractious confusions. Sir Keith Joseph, Secretary for Education, is liable to flog himself publicly with statements like: “You can't possibly blame Geoffrey Howe, he’s been marvellous. And the prime minister too. It’s me. It’s people such as me who are to blame.” Demonstrators who are unable to impress ministers like Tebbit sense that with Joseph they are close to a kill and they do not spare his feelings. "Sir Keith," read a placard which greeted him in South Wales. "You are mad and we hate you."

So it should be remembered that Joseph emerged as a government minister to a mixture of wonder and gratitude that so clever a man should spare us the time to take over a ministry and solve all our problems. (One hack was so excited that he likened Joseph's carefully argued opinions to fine sherry.) He came into the world with his mouth crammed with silver cutlery. His family, owning the Bovis building firm, were rich enough to send him to Harrow and Oxford University, where he so impressed everyone that he became a Fellow of All Souls. In Oxford, this is very significant; there are no undergraduates in All Souls, which is inhabited by Fellows who are reputed to be very superior people, the highest authorities on law, history and the social sciences. After a short spell being superior as a barrister. Joseph got into Parliament and was eventually given some inferior jobs in the government until in 1959 Macmillan made him Minister of Housing. A few years ago he was regarded as at least a future Chancellor of the Exchequer, possibly the next Conservative Prime Minister — a man who had left the most cloistered environment to put to rights a few trivial matters like slums, war and poverty.

Joseph made a consciously impressive start at the Ministry of Housing by going to look at some slums and then making a speech about them, even mentioning one — London’s notorious Cable Street — by name to show how he had got to grips with the problem. Perhaps in an effort to expand his knowledge, some people who actually lived in slums called round to Joseph’s expensive Chelsea home to tell him what the dirt and the drains and the rats were like. To the sound of Fleet Street’s busily clicking cameras, a bravely smiling Lady Joseph admitted a few scruffy children. One result of Joseph's investigations, for which Cable Street should not be held responsible, was the encouragement of local authorities to build a lot of new slums in the form of tower blocks, although Joseph did not actually intend to avail himself of this remedy for the housing shortage. Councils who followed his policy soon regretted it; the economics did not work out as Joseph had assumed and they found they had erected concentrations of neurosis, disease, crime and drug misuse.

There were few mourners for Joseph, when his time at the Ministry of Housing was ended by the Labour Party victory in the 1964 election. So anguished were the Tories by that defeat that they decided not only to ditch their leader, the amiable, aristocratic buffoon Alec Douglas-Home, but to elect another by ballot. This was an historical change since up to then the Tory leader had been expected to emerge after a bout of vicious in-fighting which Harold Macmillan called "the customary processes of consultation". Joseph was a Heath supporter and was rewarded for this, when the Conservatives came back to power in 1970. Through another customary process Joseph, having failed to make any impression on the housing problem, was given the rather more demanding job of abolishing sickness and poverty. He was put in charge of the Department of Health and Social Security, where he soon got down to an investigation which was to lead him to a discovery even more startling than the slums in Cable Street.

In June 1972 Joseph announced his suspicion that children born into poor, deprived families stood a good chance of growing up into parents of their own poor, deprived family.

  Much deprivation and maladjustment persisted from generation to generation. Many of today’s deprived children were doomed not only to stunted lives themselves but to become, unless they could be helped, the parents of a further generation of doomed children. (The Times, 30 June 1972.)

Joseph called this “the cycle of deprivation" and social workers and teachers were excited at the prospect of lavish official research into a problem which they had been despairingly aware of for a very long time. But the excitement died, when Joseph decided the research showed the cycle of deprivation did not exist, that he had invented it and the whole thing was. in his words, "a pretty negative piece of analysis". It was difficult to decide whether it was more worrying to have a Minister for Social Security who was surprised to find that impoverished families produced impoverished children than one who thought this didn't happen. A year later a positive piece of analysis by the National Childrens' Bureau reported that one million children who were living in squalor and deprivation, educationally crippled from birth, were “doomed to failure".

Sir Keith

Joseph lost his job when the Heath government went down to defeat in the disarray of the Three Day Week. He had made some elegant speeches, as befits a former Fellow of All Souls, he had made some promises and, as is expected of government ministers, he had juggled the figures a bit — in his case by introducing reforms like the Family Income Supplement which are supposed to substantially reduce poverty. Lord Carrington was annoyed with him because he had “given away a lot of money” without securing any benefit for the Conservative Party and the poor might have been annoyed with him because there had not been much benefit for them either; as the Heath government left office there were nearly four million people depending on Supplementary Benefit and nearly one and a half million living at or below the official poverty line.

Nobody expected that Joseph’s inability to introduce social security to the people of Britain would harm him in the Tory Party and when, in their bout of anguish after their 1974 defeat they threw out the leader they had chosen in the last bout, he became a strong candidate for the leadership. He might be sitting in Number Ten now, except that he made yet another memorable speech. The occasion was at Birmingham in October 1974 and his audience of Conservatives received an early warning of what was to come. “Let us,” Joseph advised them, “take inspiration from that admirable woman. Mary Whitehouse . . .” He then moved relentlessly on, to the kernel of his speech:

  The balance of our population, our human stock, is threatened . . . a high and rising proportion of children are being born to mothers least fitted to bring children into the world and bring them up. They are born to mothers who were first pregnant in adolescence in social classes 4 and 5 . . . Some (of the mothers) are of low intelligence, most of low educational attainment . . . They are producing problem children, the future unmarried mothers, delinquents, denizens of our borstals, subnormal educational establishments, prisons, hostels for drifters . . . Why do I talk about birth control for the unmarried girls in socio-economic groups four and five? Because . . . this group makes far less use of birth control than the other social classes. (Daily Telegraph, 21 October 1974.)

Whatever had once been expected of his theory of the cycle of deprivation, it was not that it would resurface in the form of a crude, class-biased blunder into the perilous field of amateur eugenics. His louder opponents compared Joseph to Hitler; perhaps more damaging was the sort of quieter dismay expressed in Cecil King’s Diaries: “. . . surprising that what was obviously meant to be a major affair was not more carefully considered”.

As he could no longer expect to be Tory leader himself, Joseph threw his support behind Margaret Thatcher, who gratefully foisted him on to the Department of Industry after the 1979 election. It was here that Joseph began to show the first clear signs of serious disintegration. The Tory defeat of 1974 had converted him to the conviction that the happiest way of running capitalism was to ensure that the market, shaped by the profit motive, should be allowed to operate in simple purity. If an industry or a company were not profitable then it should not survive, like a brainless human body on a life- support machine, through financial aid from the government:

  If the government were to put money into industries that are losing jobs, the result would simply be that an equal number of jobs would be lost in other industries. All we would do would be to wreck other industries that arc doing moderately well by overtaxing them or their workers.

Few people expected Joseph actually to believe this argument and any who did expect him to would have had problems explaining what he did as Secretary for Industry. He decided to double state support for companies like British Leyland; he sanctioned £1.5 billion a year in subsidies to industry and £3 billion a year to state industries. One example was in March 1981, when he announced a government guarantee for a £200 million loan facility for ICL. This state-backed computer company had just announced a three-month loss of £20 million, which qualified it to have Joseph switch off the life support machine. To the dismay of the Tory Dries, he kept it going; a home-based computer industry is too vital, for economic and military reasons, to British capitalism to allow it to be damaged by draughts of intellectual sherry from All Souls.

Joseph is now Secretary for Education, which he says he regards as the peak of his career but where he does not have a happy time. He has a reputation as the Mad Axeman of the schools and the universities and everywhere he is hounded by angry demonstrators, who perhaps thought his “cycle of deprivation" speech implied a commitment to step up investment in education. In a recent White Paper he declared his intention to turn the screw on the teachers, as the demand for them falls, by stiffening the qualifications required of them and to make it harder for the teacher who is not up to scratch to keep a job. Joseph’s plans were not well received; a failing teacher may be due to sickness or a weariness with decades of struggling with educational, personal and social problems and in any case Joseph himself does not rate high in the efficiency tables: a chairman of the National Enterprise Board once described him as “hopeless” and in May 1981 the Bow Group journal Crossbow condemned him as “. . . by universal consent the most dismal disappointment of this administration". At uproarious meetings Joseph hears what people think of him, standing as if on the gallows, unable to make himself heard, unable to understand why these clamorous tormentors obstinately refuse to accept the crystal logic of his policies.

But the fault is not in his personality (in private, he is said to be kindly and witty); if he has crumpled it is under the strain of trying to do the impossible. His famous brain has not protected Joseph from the delusion that this social system can be made to work to the benefit of us all. Other politicians, who wear better than Joseph, are under the same delusion and so are the demonstrators. They are all looking for a missing ingredient through which capitalism’s ailments can be put to rights — the demonstrators say this ingredient is human compassion while Joseph says it is cerebral power and purity. All are driven by a common madness which sets experienced reality at nought. The choice is not to bury the likes of Joseph or to praise them. If we are to defeat what he represents we must not only know him for what he is but why.

Ivan

Letter: The Rise of Nazism (1983)

Letter to the Editors from the May 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors

Clifford Slapper’s account of the rise of Nazism in Germany in your March issue is true — up to a point. He says: “Fifty years ago, Hitler and the Nazis came to power with the support of more than ten million workers”. Is he saying that over ten million wage-workers voted for the Nazi Party? And was the "election" of 5 March, 1933, a genuinely free election anyway? First, a few statistics (figures in millions):

Between 1923 and 1933, the votes for the Social Democrats and Communists remained fairly constant; in the March, 1933 election the Communists receiving nearly 5 million votes and the Social Democrats 7.1 million votes, despite the SA terror mainly directed against the Social Democrats. No one has ever denied that the vast mass of wage-workers consistently voted for these two parties from 1924 until Hitler crushed all opposition.

So, who voted the Nazis into power? In the main, it was the petit-bourgeoisie (a much larger group than in Britain), the peasants (also a group which did not exist in Britain), the lumpen-proletariat or semi-unemployable who, even before the advent of mass unemployment in 1932-33, numbered about 1.5 million and. lastly, the capitalist class itself. In the main, these groups — together with some “white collar" workers — tended to move away from the traditional capitalist “right-wing” parties to the Nazis who, as Slapper correctly points out, used the Jews and others as scapegoats — and made even more promises than the "left-wing” reformist parties, such as the Communists and Social Democrats

There are, of course, no socialist histories of "the birth of Nazism”; but readers might find the two following books of some interest: Der Fuehrer — Hitler's Rise to Power, by Konrad Heidcn (Gollancz, 1944); and Hammer or Anvil, by Evelyn Anderson (Gollancz. 1945 and Oriole Editions/Journeyman Press, 1973).

Peter E. Newell

Colchester. Essex

Reply:

The article in question stated that over ten million workers gave their electoral support to Hitler and the Nazis. This refers to people who did not possess substantial productive resources and who therefore had to work for others in order to survive. Their problems of insecurity and poverty applied regardless of whether they were paid by wage, salary or commission, and irrespective of the colour of their collars. According to the German census of 1925 (as interpreted by Lenz in “Proletarian Policies", Internationaler Arbeiterverlag, 1931) nearly 41 million of the total German population of 62.4 million were industrial workers, agricultural wage-labourers or lower paid "white collar" workers, including their families and the unemployed. It is clearly incorrect therefore that, as Peter Newell claims, the "vast mass” of wage-workers consistently voted for the Communist and Social Democratic Parties, when those parties only polled 13 million votes between them at their peak.

In March 1933, the Nazis and their allies, the Nationalists, polled between them over 20 million votes, an absolute majority (51.9 per cent) of the votes cast. Peter Newell attributes this support to the petit-bourgeoisie, the peasants, the “semi-unemployable" and the capitalists themselves. But according to the census figures referred to above, there were only 2 million capitalists, and about 9 million small farmers and peasants, many of whom were in the process of being transformed into agricultural labourers. The petit-bourgeoisie or small property holders were also a dying breed as their savings were eaten into by inflation. It is true that much of the Nazis’ support came from the white-collar workers, shopkeepers, students and professionals who formed the remaining 10 million of the population; but the frustration which drove them towards the Nazis was that of the dispossessed, of workers who felt they had some stake in capitalism but who were compelled to accept their economically dependent and impoverished position.

It has been our intention to stress that fascism, like the capitalist system of which it is one form, is not some kind of conspiracy forced on the workers from "above" by a minority of capitalists. Domination and inequality depend upon acquiescence and acceptance by the majority. It is on this basis that socialists seek to persuade a majority of our fellow workers to establish a system of society based on common ownership and democratic control. It is a common but dangerous myth on the Left that Nazism was not supported by workers; it is historically incorrect and implies a disdain for the democratic process of persuasion and voting. The German Communist Party, with 5 million votes in 1933, shared with the Nazis not only its nationalist campaign against foreign debt repayments, but also an anti-democratic contempt for the idea of a majority of workers deciding consciously to end capitalism. Their support for minority armed insurrection and street-fighting, like the modern claim that the workers didn’t really support fascism, begs the question why, in the words of Wilhelm Reich, “It was precisely the wretched masses who helped to put fascism, extreme political reaction, into power” (The Mass Psychology of Fascism). The short answer is that as long as workers are persuaded, contrary to our experience, that we should continue to support a system based on our exploitation, there will be no safeguard against a recurrence of the more brutal aspects of class rule.

Editors.

For The Socialist Alternative (1983)

SPGB advert from the May 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

50 Years Ago: Labour Party Capitalism (1983)

The 50 Years Ago column from the May 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism means the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution. In spite of a superficial similarity of words, the Labour Party is not aiming at common ownership, but at State control with private owners. The Capitalist class are not, according to the Labour Party, to be dispossessed, but are to remain as a property-owning class, but are to be deprived of their immediate control over the management of industry. The country is to remain the same in all essentials. There will still be a working class and a class living on property incomes. Goods will still be produced for sale and profit-making, but the management will be in the hands of a series of so-called public utility corporations, directed by highly-paid business men like Lord Ashfield. This is a grotesque representation of Socialism. It is capitalism in a thin disguise. It solves no working class problem. It is not Socialism and as such docs not bring Socialism one day nearer.

(From an article, “Socialists and Working Class Unity”, Socialist Standard, May 1933.)

Power struggle in Zimbabwe (1983)

From the May 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

The recent massacres in Zimbabwe have shown more clearly than ever that the real choice facing black workers in Africa is not between “white” and “black" rule. The issue runs deeper, and is a question of power itself. Zimbabwe, like Russia, is a capitalist state masquerading under the name of socialism. The rich resources of gold, chromium, tobacco, asbestos, copper and diamonds are controlled by a minority, including private shareholders and state bureaucrats both within and outside its artificial national boundary. The majority of the people are wage-workers, earning under £25 a month in many cases, so that their “national” bosses can accumulate capital.

At the end of March, the government stepped up a campaign of terror aimed at “dissidents” supposedly associated with Joshua Nkomo’s opposition ZAPU party. The Fifth Brigade, a government force of specially trained ex-guerrillas, were reported to have slaughtered whole villages in Matabeleland, in a series of horrific atrocities. Thousands were detained without trial, opponents were tortured and trade unions suppressed. Government denials of these barbaric examples of a capitalist state in action rang very hollow. For example, in the Assembly on February 3, Nkomo accused the Fifth Brigade of having raped "masses of teachers” near Tsholotsho. The Deputy Minister for Education hotly denied this, pointing out that it was six teachers who had been raped, not “a mass”. Brigadier Garver, in charge of National Army operations, was sent to instruct the Fifth to be less brutal in future. Food aid and drought relief to Matabeleland was cut off by the government as part of its "anti-dissident" campaign. Thousands are on the verge of starvation and relief was resumed in some parts only after some ministers said they had seen local people eating grass.

There is a long-standing animosity between the Shona and Ndebele tribes, with the Shona forming the great majority, except in Matabeleland. There, former members of Nkomo’s Z1PRA guerrillas had imposed a brutal reign of terror "on behalf’ of the Ndebele agricultural workers, whose white farmer employers are protected by the government. This was the reason given for sending in the Fifth Brigade, known to many as the “Shona hitmen". But the real issue is one of class, not tribe. The tribal divisions are to some extent being bridged. The new head of ZAPU, since Nkomo’s departure is himself a member of the Shona tribe. At least one government minister (Mark Dube) is of the Ndebele tribe. Clearly, neither the self-appointed "dissident" guerrillas of Matabeleland nor the government shock troops can serve the interests of the majority who are excluded from all power and property. The new black and white élite  drink in the exclusive Harare Club (known as the Salisbury Club under the previous regime) and dine extravagantly at La Fontaine. They know that their wealth is secure as long as their wage-slaves kill and maim one another over past divisions and diversions, instead of rejecting political violence and demagoguery and uniting for socialism.

News reporters from various foreign newspapers have been expelled or banned from working in Zimbabwe for revealing the details of the government campaign. The slogans of peace and freedom on which Mugabe won support have been rapidly abandoned. It is just one of many ironies of the situation that one of the banned journalists was Nick Worrall of the Guardian, whose father was banned by the Ian Smith regime in 1969 when working for the same paper. There are many other examples of continuity between the former “colonial” and white-racist regime of Smith and the "black nationalist” rule of Mugabe. The Central Intelligence Organisation is run directly by Mugabe, as it was by Smith, and the Ministers for Security and Defence are now answerable directly to him, rather than to the Cabinet. The notorious Emergency Powers Act, under which some members of the present cabinet were once indefinitely detained, has been renewed every six months since independence three years ago. The traditional tortures of electric shock and suffocation by water have been kept in use for opponents of the state, and some claim to have been tortured by the same white officers as during the war for independence. The Law and Order Maintenance Act has never been repealed, and there has been a renewed use of Smith’s Indemnity and Compensation Act, which prevents any prosecutions from being brought against state forces. Ministers have even complained publicly that the judges are not as keen to enforce these oppressive laws as they were under the previous regime. Political rallies can now only be held with government permission, and Mugabe has been pressing for the abolition of the Senate and the further consolidation of state power for his party.

For many workers in Zimbabwe, 1980 was a year of great hope. After years of poverty. violence and institutionalised racism, there was at last a chance to vote for a black leader of the newly-established independent state. The election was hardly democratic, with widespread intimidation. Mugabe (ZANU) called himself a "Marxist" and promised wide-scale nationalisation and social reform in contrast to the “free market” capitalism of Bishop Muzorewa. He also depended to a large extent on Shona tribal loyalty. The government now claims that it has had to resort to all the oppressive actions of its predecessors because it has come under pressure from multinationals, white farmers, armed dissidents, militant socialists, drought and world recession. But this is merely a rather belated admission of what Mugabe could not afford to admit during his election campaign. Without democratic revolutionary action by a majority of workers, the system of production for profit remains, with all its violent contradictions. Mugabe is not a Marxist, but a Leninist. Although he opposes the Leninist state dictatorship in Russia, nevertheless he stands not for workers freeing ourselves by taking over the world’s wealth democratically, but for the control of society by a bureaucratic elite who “charitably” grant crumbs of reform “if conditions allow".

In this he represents a continuity with the history of oppression in Africa, rather than radical change. Like the rest of the continent, Zimbabwe has passed under the control of one band of parasites after another over the last hundred years, while the impoverished majority of black workers have worked to produce wealth which they do not own. In 1890, the British South African Company used armed force to invade Matabeleland (Southern Rhodesia) and take from King Lobengula its rich mineral and agricultural resources. The natives were herded into “reserves” and the fertile land was handed over to white European settlers. Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland were taken at the same time, and these states were linked by Britain in 1953 into the Central African Federation. This was an attempt to form an enlarged and lucrative market area under the control of the “settler” government. The Federation was broken up under African pressure in 1963 and Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland became independent as Zambia and Malawi.

Rhodesian state racism

The white settlers in (Southern) Rhodesia had ruled from their own parliament in Salisbury (now Harare) since 1923, but the British government refused to grant them full independence until the Africans who formed 19 out of 20 of the population were given more of a share in the government. This the colonial government refused to do and in 1965 Ian Smith made a Unilateral Declaration of Independence. The resulting United Nations sanctions were widely broken, but it took fourteen years of negotiations, culminating in the Lancaster House talks, before independence was granted to the new state of Zimbabwe. From 1973 a violent guerrilla war had been waged by the Patriotic Front, representing the forces of native rather than settler nationalism. Through all these struggles since 1890, there is one common factor. Developments in the productive forces of the region have produced a succession of propertied interests competing for state power. It may appear strange to trace a line of descent from Mugabe, through Ian Smith to Cecil Rhodes himself, but each of these has stood for a particular sectional interest, always dressed up as something with more popular appeal. Mugabe represents a trend which is already prevalent in Africa, in which the traditional capitalist exploitation of wage-labour for the accumulation of capital is organised to a large extent by the state, rather than by private individuals. This nationalisation, often referred to as “public" ownership, is popular with would-be rulers of states which are not highly industrialised. since it allows the rates of profit and the pace of capital accumulation to be rapidly increased by organising industry in larger units.

Since 1890, most workers in Zimbabwe had suffered not only the poverty and insecurity of all those who depend on selling their daily ability to work in order to live but were seen by the colonial government as barely human, because of the colour of their skin. Almost inevitably, the constant fear and terrible indignity of this second-class existence was assumed by many to be simply the result of white rule and foreign domination. By the 1970s many black workers had gained the political confidence and strength to challenge that rule, and the arguments for “self-determination" and "democratic national independence" gained many committed supporters for the Patriotic Front. But the vote for Mugabe in 1980 was a vote for state capitalism. The informal apartheid of Rhodesia was to become a thing of the past, but the pervasive contradictions of world capitalism were to be allowed to flourish, under the enthusiastic leadership of Robert Mugabe. We do not just make these observations with hindsight. Before the election, the Socialist Party of Great Britain stated:

Whoever gains power, we may be sure he will be hell-bent on building up the capitalist economy and on training his citizens to become hard-working, obedient wages slaves, regardless of whether his advice, investment and technical assistance comes from the Soviet Union. Great Britain, South Africa or wherever. The hollow phrase “Victory to the Patriotic Front", beloved by the left-wing, means for African workers the victory of a different style of exploitation. (Socialist Standard, March 1980.)

Many lives were lost in the war for "self-determination" and "majority rule”. It is now clear that even with a black figurehead in Zimbabwe to represent international capital, the problems of class division and violence persist. Events in Zimbabwe have shown that capitalism, as a system of production, is truly world-wide. Seventy per cent of industrial and commercial assets there are owned by multinationals. I.onhro controls over a million acres of ranchland, and the South African-based Anglo-American corporation dominates the sugar, mining and banking sectors. Any notions of national self-sufficiency are unrealistic and backward-looking in a world of rapidly growing interdependence. The capitalist class ignore national boundaries when they are seeking profitable investments. The nationalist response to the oppression of imperialism is its mirror image and leads to further oppression on a local scale.

The pressure of global uniformity is so great today that it has not been possible to implement even Mugabe's cynical programme of state capitalism. As early as 1980, his party policy-makers encouraged "the continuity of private enterprise in Rhodesia" and accepted “the need for a close commercial and logistic relationship with South Africa". (Guardian, 28 January 1980.) Now Bernard Chidlero. Minister for Economic Planning and Finance, has produced a National Development Plan which stresses the importance of foreign companies:

Government recognises the need to stimulate private sector investment by creating a favourable investment climate and taking necessary fiscal, monetary and other financial measures. (Guardian, 24 March 1983.)

Nationalisation has been held back for fear of losing the particular capital and technology tied up with European interests and the Western trade which is linked with them. There is also the fear of military interference from South Africa, which has occurred in Angola and Mozambique. Land reform has been held back for fear of alienating the 4,600 English commercial farmers who own 38 per cent of the land and receive 47 per cent of foreign currency earnings. A clause in the Lancaster House agreement threatens that if any land is seized, British land resettlement funds would be withheld; 700,000 African families are still struggling to survive on the poor soil of the old Tribal Trust Lands, which have simply been renamed the Communal Lands. The overwhelming point which arises from this is that a small minority, of whatever colour, monopolise the resources of Zimbabwe, as in the rest of the world. The shareholders of the Anglo-American Corporation are of a great variety of nationalities and colours.

In a speech in the Zimbabwe Assembly in July 1982, Robert Mugabe said of dissenters:

Some of the measures we shall take are measures which will be extra-legal . . .  an eye for an eye and an ear for an ear may not be adequate in our circumstances. We might very well demand two ears for one ear and two eyes for one eye. (Guardian, 23 March 1983.)

The time is long overdue for us to turn with disgust from this vicious talk of murdering workers for opposing one of the national state governments of capitalism. This is where the "practical politics" of administering the profit system lead. The suffering of black Africans at the hands of white colonisers was often beyond description, so that a great deal of emotional energy has gone into the forming of the newly independent states. Similarly, the Jews who formed the state of Israel after their experience of Nazi Germany were committed to the idea of the Jewish national state. But all these nationalist movements whether Irish. Polish or Pan-African. are tragically caught within the net of capitalist social relations. As such, they have no future except as administrative units for the profit system.

Socialists are engaged in the enormous task of persuasion and organisation to build a powerful world-wide movement for democratic revolution. There can be no socialism without a majority of socialists. One of the most popular strip cartoons in Africa in the 1970s was Seraphina in Jeune Afrique, in which the heroine fights against Octagone. headquarters of the “Soviet-American Republic”. Many Africans are aware of how the Warsaw Pact countries merely mirror the West in their capitalist policies of profitable investment, military expansion, state oppression of dissent and, above all, the persistence of the exploitation of wage-labour for the accumulation of capital. At the moment, Africa is still itself reflecting the same domination of the world by the interests of private and state property. The political leaders are looking for sheep to follow them to the semi-realisation of their empty, divisive dreams. But the power of class consciousness has been accumulating for centuries, and the African workers know what has happened to them. They have only to take the next step towards human liberation, and the arrogant élitism of Mugabe and the others who offer to act “on our behalf" will be broken forever. There are not three worlds — just one, and it is ours for the taking.

Clifford Slapper

Harnessing the wind (1983)

Book Review from the May 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capturing Energy from the Wind. by James L. Schefter (NASA. 1982).

Generating energy from the wind is an old proven technique which became obsolete as capitalism developed. Now in an updated form it is the subject of some renewal of interest in view of the uncertainty about oil supplies and the problems currently surrounding nuclear fission power. This NASA publication carries a certain amount of useful historical and technical information but little conviction when it tries to show that the American authorities really are making determined efforts in this direction. Concern with the profitability potential is evident, leaving the impression that this publication is not much more than window dressing. Admittedly, it does not take too much imagination to envisage a situation in which the ruling class might regret their present uncommitted attitude, but capitalism is not conducive to long term planning which involves a long, anxious wait between investment and return. To the socialist, however, wind power is of interest because it offers an ecologically benign method of energy generation in keeping with the co-operative society.

Wind machines are as old as civilisation. Persian writers of several hundred years BC described gardens irrigated by wind-driven water lifts. It is believed that this ancient technology may have been carried by returning Crusaders, as it was about this time that windmills appeared in Northern Europe. In America a different, small design extended agriculture and ranching into previously barren land. In the forty-years before national grids became established, the windmills took on a new role as generators of electricity.

These early windmills were mechanically inefficient. The wind is a fitful thing, one moment too weak to be harnessed, the next so potent that the best wind turbine has to be shut down in self- preservation. The nature of the loading leads to fatigue problems on the rotor blades and shafts. The Department of Energy/NASA programme which this booklet claims to describe is, within its constraints, trying to apply modern technology to these problems.

Four aircraft companies have been contracted to design wind turbine components. Not only does this bring sophisticated technical expertise on the scene, but it also provides the capitalist owners with a potential alternative product. (It is quite possible that aircraft sales, both civil and military, will dip permanently in the future.) This powerful sectional interest should not be ignored, but the author makes clear that profitability, in particular the cost of energy produced is the overriding consideration. To quote Schefter: “So important is the factor that a predetermined cost of energy goal is written into every wind turbine development contract". This philosophy, inherent to capitalism, tends to favour wasteful, polluting methods of production over environmentally conservative alternatives because generally speaking the conservation element puts a non-profit making block into the loop.

Under socialism different, socially oriented criteria will be employed when democratic decisions are made about what technology should be used for given tasks. The profit-led economic considerations of capitalism will be a thing of the past. It is however encouraging to hear of the progress being made despite limited financial support to overcome the technical problems associated with this environmentally satisfactory method of energy production.

E. C. Edge