Sting in the Tail: The Herd Instinct (1991)

The Sting in the Tail column from the May 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Herd Instinct

Suddenly for no apparent reason, the herd was off in a panic-stricken stampede. Possibly it had heard something but nobody really knows.

A scene from a Hollywood cowboy movie? No, only the London stock market last month when “panic buying" by investors sent share values soaring by over £11 billion in one day.

And the cause? Various pundits thought that the equally mysterious rise in share values on Wall Street was responsible; others put it down to the “feel good" factor following victory in the Gulf war, while some suggested that falling interest rates had fuelled hopes that the recession was ending — the Director General of the CBI had “anecdotal evidence" of an upturn, and so on.

The fact is that big investors, especially the Institutions, all have vast amounts of cash seeking ways of earning rent, interest and profit The cash HAS to go somewhere so any hopeful sign, real or imagined, was enough to send those investors stampeding to buy, buy, buy, because, as one report put it, "they were afraid of being left behind".

£11 billion on nothing more substantial than rumour, hope and follow-my-leader. Who says capitalism isn’t a crazy old system?


A Happy Thought

Back in the 1960s and 1970s Labour leaders like Gaitskell, Wilson, Callaghan, etc., were forever being attacked by the grossly misnamed "Young Socialists" for being "right wing".

Top Tories used to laugh at this and give thanks that the Young Conservatives were more interested in ping-pong than politics. This situation changed in the last decade when the YCs became "radical" and their actions and utterances more and more embarrassing to the party leadership.

Now Murdo Fraser, National Chairman of the YCs, has denounced none other than John Major for scrapping the poll tax, being indecisive and having no sense of direction (ITV's Oracle 6 April).

Tory leaders were outraged at this attack but they're not the only ones feeling angry, for Major was the very one the "radicals" happily claimed was the man to "carry through the Thatcher revolution" when he became PM!

The fact is that it doesn't matter that Major is a dithering wimp, even if he was Rambo he wouldn't be able to make capitalism work except as a system that puts profits before needs.


Marx's Raw Deal

The Guardian has really got it in for Karl Marx. An article on 10 April outlining Albania's new draft-constitution appears below the headline "Tirana abandons Marxism". The article then reveals that what has been abandoned is "Marxism-Leninism" which is the Leninist distortion of Marxism.

This is typical of the Guardian. No opportunity to misrepresent Marx and his ideas is missed with every Eastern European or banana-republic dictatorship dubbed "Marxist" and without even a shred of evidence to support this.


Hard Times

Many workers are experiencing the full blast of the recession. Some are having to settle for less than the inflation rate in their annual wage negotiations. Some are even being told they will get NO increase at all this year.

Pickford's Travel have gone one worse by proposing that their employees take a 7.5% wage cut. This is bad enough but spare a thought for Gene Lockhart, the highest-paid director of Midland Bank. He has suffered a 41% reduction in his salary. Mind you that still leaves him £429,216 per annum to keep the wolf from the door.

Lockhart's salary is performance-related and the Midland Bank has experienced a particularly bad year only making £11 million profit in 1990. All is not gloom In banking circles however, because Sir John Quinton, chairman of Barclays bank managed to get a rise of 21% to £404,000.

This must be a great consolation to the bank clerks at Barclays who are being asked to accept a 6% increase. Hard times indeed — but only for some it seems.


The Military Mind

The splendid insanities of the military mind are a constant source of astonishment to socialists, but we have recently been sent a newspaper clipping that had even your old battle-scarred Scorpion gasping.

It seems at least one facet of capitalism's inglorious military paraphernalia may be due for the dustbin of history — The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

  On future battlefields unknown soldiers may well be identified by the genetic structure of cells found in the blood which vary with each Individual. The technology is so precise that the Pentagon plans to develop a kind of "DNA Dog Tag" for all military personnel. Major V. Weedn, Chief of the Armed Forces DNA Identification Lab. says, "In the future there should not be any more unknown soldiers.”

(Herald Tribune 11 March)

We suggest that the best way to ensure that we have no more Tombs to the Unknown Soldier is to get rid of the cause of war — world capitalism!


A Familiar Tale

"Fame is the Spur", shown on Channel 4 on 5 April, is the film based on Howard Spring's novel about Hamer Radshaw, a product of the Manchester slums in late Victorian England.

Radshaw used his talent as a spell-binding orator first for the rising Labour movement and then to become a cabinet minister in both Labour and National governments.

The story charts his unprincipled progress from street-corner agitator to "statesman" and finally to the House of Lords. Who was he based on? There's a bit of Victor Grayson there and Ramsay MacDonald too, but the Labour Party has spawned dozens of Radshaws, men and women who used the working class in their single-minded climb to power and privilege.

Eventually, workers will discard the naive notion that their fate can be left to labour politicians, but in the meantime there are many more Hamer Radshaws patiently awaiting their opportunity.


Prize Specimen

After the Oscars and the Tonys comes the Maggies. This is a prize that the Thatcher Foundation will award annually to the person whose work has best "identified free enterprise with freedom".

The first recipient is Professor David Marsland and he is a worthy winner of this Creep of the Year award. He recently declared "We must get rid of the social worker". He also wants to abolish unemployment benefit and he has great plans for our kids:

  He has also called for lessons in patriotism and civil defence to be put on Britain's academic timetables, with encouragement for children from the age of 11 to join "voluntary defence training corps in schools"

(The Observer 21 April)

Give him the Maggie — give us a bucket to be sick in!

Why you should be a socialist (1991)

From the May 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why are there so many social problems?

Because present-day society is not organised primarily to serve human needs. We all live in a world economy which is based on the competitive accumulation of wealth, and this has some bizarre consequences. Food is not produced directly to be eaten, houses are not built directly to accommodate people and clothes are not made directly to be worn. They are provided, if at all, through the market to be sold at a price and for a profit. And our access to them depends on our ability to pay.

To get the things we need, most of us are compelled to sell our working abilities to an employer. We have to get the best price (wage or salary) we can on the market. But our employers have an interest in getting as much out of us for as little expenditure as possible during our time in employment. So our present-day organisation of society is founded on conflict, and this gives rise to specifically capitalist problems of society.


Don't recent events in eastern Europe show that socialism doesn't work?

No, they don't. Many people in eastern Europe and elsewhere are unhappy for much the same reasons as we in the West are. They too live in countries based on conflict. But they had the additional problem of living in police states. Now those countries are being organised more along the lines of Western liberal-democratic capitalism.

We, as socialists, have always maintained that centrally-controlled economics have nothing whatsoever to do with socialism. We argue that Lenin and his followers set up dictatorships to develop stale-run capitalism. Those countries were — and still are — all part of the world economy. There too human needs come second best, behind a parasitic ruling class.

We have always been opposed to the opportunist and dangerous ideas and practices of Lenin and Trotsky. We welcome you to check our record on socialist opposition to all regimes that call themselves socialist.


Why do we keep having booms and slumps?

Because they are necessary and inevitable given the way present-day society is organised.

A slump or depression does not mean that something has "gone wrong" with the economy. What happens is that industries go into a boom period when most of them are working to full capacity and unemployment is correspondingly low. Encouraged by high profits, however, some industries produce more than can be profitably sold in their particular market. A crisis may then occur. And, if the combined effect is large enough, it is followed by a slump as other industries get sucked into the downward spiral of unsold products and falling profits.

Industries then curtail production, or close down altogether, and lay off workers. Eventually the conditions for profitable production are restored and business booms . . . but only to repeat the cycle.

No theory of the free market or of economic management, when put into practice, has been able to prevent a slump. Given the profit-seeking nature of the economy, slumps are as necessary to capitalism as hell is to Christianity.


What is the cause of war?

Capitalism is the cause of the rivalries that lead to war in the modern world. In general, these struggles between states are over property. Specifically, it is competition over markets, sources of raw materials, energy supplies, trade routes, exploitable populations and areas of strategic importance. Within each state in the world there is a conflict of interest over social priorities. But all over the world there are conflicts of interest between states which lead to war when other means fail.

Of course wars took place before capitalism existed. These wars, however, can be attributed to the absolute shortages of the past. Of food in particular. In our own age the problem is a different one. Now the means exist for producing enough to supply the needs of all. In world capitalism, however, we have the problem of artificial scarcity created by the capitalist form of production. Social production takes place for profit, not directly for human need. It is this global system of competitive accumulation that creates the rivalry which leads to war.

How did our environment become so polluted?

Because under the present world economic system, states, enterprises and even individuals are encouraged to dump their unwanted waste products into the environment. It reduces costs. Moreover, not only are basic needs far from satisfied but much of what is produced is pure waste from a rational point of view. For example, all the resources involved in commerce and finance, the mere buying and selling things, and those poured into armaments. The whole system of production, from the methods employed to the choice of what to produce, is distorted by the drive to accumulate wealth without consideration for the longer-term and global factors that ecology teaches are vitally important.

The overall result of an economic system governed by blind economic laws is a pressure on decision-makers, however selected and whatever their personal views or sentiments, to plunder, pollute and waste.

Are there too many people in the world?

No. There are those who argue that population growth tends to exceed the increase in food supply. The result, it is claimed, is a periodic check in population growth by famine, disease and war. Of course, this is a very popular apology for the poverty of capitalism. However, since the industrial revolution technological developments in the means for producing food have allowed for a growing population. The continuing existence of famines focuses attention on population size rather than on food production. It has long been technically possible to adequately feed every man, woman and child on this planet. At the same time we have butter mountains, milk lakes and so on. Why, then, is there poverty amidst plenty? Because the poor do not constitute effective demand in the market place. They simply cannot afford enough food.

The real issue is not overpopulation, nor is it really a question of poverty but whether the organisation of society can allow people to produce the wealth they need.

What can I do about these problems?

Before anything practical can be done there needs to be a majority with a working knowledge of how capitalism operates, and an understanding of what the change to socialism will mean. Social problems such as those above are the result of a divided society. They arise and persist because there are different interests at work. If you agree with what we say, help us to bring about a society based on common interests, with production directly to meet human needs. It is only on this basis that we can all set about solving social problems. If you disagree with what we say, tell us why.

A policeman's lament (1991)

From the May 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

“I see around me a great sea of wrongdoing that seems not to lessen”. So declared Sir James Anderton, the Chief Constable of the Greater Manchester Police, announcing his forthcoming retirement. Anderton often claimed he was moved by god to act as a scourge to the sinful. This was something he shared with Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. Anderton may be in serious need of professional help but the essence of his view, that society is plagued with the problem of crime, is held by many people.

Crime, there is no doubt, occupies the imagination. It takes up a great deal of the column inches of newspapers. We are routinely bamboozled with documentaries, soap operas, films and videos about crime. We hear radio broadcasts and read books about it. There is now in Britain even a magazine dedicated entirely to morbidly poring over famous murder cases. The level of crime and the so-called “law and order debate” are major policy issues amongst political parties at election times.

Yet what is commonly understood by "crime” is much less extensive and less deep a social problem than is often portrayed. Research in Glasgow has recently demonstrated that over 30 percent of news stories in several national newspapers are about crime, but this does not reflect the actual level of criminality in society. As Nick Ross always comforts his scared late-night viewers in “Crimewatch UK", the chances of actually being the victim of crime are infinitesimally small.

One reason for the high profile coverage is that news about crimes helps support a picture of humanity as being eternally and necessarily dogged with the prevalence of crime.

But what is "crime"? It is tempting to quickly interpret the word as meaning wrongdoings associated with violence, especially homicides. In fact, probably the best definition is that a crime is any type of conduct or event or state of affairs designated as criminal by the state. What states designate as crimes will vary with the times and the historical circumstances. There is nothing intrinsic in criminal behaviour that runs commonly through all crimes for all times. Anything can be made into a crime.

93 per cent of all crime is property-based.

But crime, as defined by the state, is not even principally about random and brutal violence delivered in a haphazard way. Most so-called crime is about people in the working class trying to alleviate their poverty. According to recent Home Office figures. the police in England and Wales recorded 4.5 million offences in 1990, of which 94 per cent were non-violent crimes of property (Independent, 28 March). So even in a world of institutionalised violence—a society of the legitimate violence of the police truncheon and the prison cell, of the recruitment of people as trained killers in the military forces—even in this brutalising environment, people on the whole arc resistant to the use of violence.

What causes crime?

Historically there have been a great many and varied accounts of what causes crime. Thus in 1746 Cesare Beccaria, who was later to become a professor of Political Economy in Milan, wrote An Essay on Crime and Punishment in which he opposed "capricious justice and barbaric punishment". Punishments, he argued, "should be certain, prompt and only just in excess of the gain to be had by the crime”.

He regarded humans as essentially rational beings who only opted for crime if there was a good chance that it would pay. Aristocrats whose ancestors had acquired their original wealth through plunder and merchant explorers who had negotiated their gains with powerful arsenals could only agree. Beccaria’s book was condemned by the Catholic Church in 1776 for its rationalistic ideas but the basis of his theory has had an enormous influence, especially its implication that if you fix the punishment at the appropriate level this will deter crime as the potential criminal will then rationally opt not to commit it. This type of reasoning is still very popular with governments: the Home Office is forever playing around with the system of punishments and finely tuning them so that it can "beat crime".

There are a number of things which can be said about this theory but one thing is clear: it has not worked. The level of crime in Britain and in several other countries which have used this theory has not significantly altered in any respect.

A century after Beccaria another Italian, Cesare Lombroso, wrote a book in 1876 called The Criminal Man in which he claimed that criminals were a race apart from ordinary people. Lombroso had been affected by Darwin's theory of natural selection (much of which he didn't seem to understand) and saw criminals as throwbacks to an earlier age. Criminaloids could be detected by how hairy they were, the shape of their nipples and the type of eyebrows they had.

This theory was popular with the ruling class because it meant that if criminals were pre-programmed to be that way in any event then there was no need to spend money on expensive social reforms designed to stop people being forced to turn to crime. A stack of theories built on the foundations of Lombroso's basic concept of the criminal as a person set apart from ordinary people persist to this day.

There is no proven evidence for this view that criminals have a particular biological or psychological make-up. Hundreds of experiments of various scientific methods, including "endocrinological profiling" and "encephalographic screening" of so-called known criminals and normal people, have failed to discover any defining characteristic which is indicative of criminality.

Property is theft

Most crime, as noted, is property crime—offences like theft. So, over the course of a year, we are really just looking at a small number of members of the working class aiming to get goods worth a few hundred or a few thousand pounds. We should not get too engrossed in all these petty cases and the moralising obsessions of the Daily Express but should see things in their wider context.

Today a few men and women live in unbounded. extravagant luxury' gaining £100,000 per day or even hour. They do not do any work in order to acquire their wealth. It would go to them whether they were awake or asleep, in Manchester or Malibou. They are socially parasitic on the energies of the working class of wage and salary earners. Ninety percent of the population create all the wealth—excavate, mine, construct, design, service, clean, maintain, teach, nurse, cook and grow. We build the luxury houses and then go home to live in cramped accommodation. We build the Pullman coaches and then pay to travel second class. The wealth we produce, in other words, is appropriated by the ruling class with intent to permanently deprive us of the goods (to quote the Theft Act 1968). That process, however, is flattered with the name of “the wages system". If we try to get back some of the wealth we have produced, then that is called theft and is a crime.

Apart from the routine way in which the social system robs people, it also kills and maims. Each year hundreds of people are killed by companies who have knowingly taken calculated risks with people's lives. Some of these deaths have been carefully documented by the Health and Safety Executive. The London Hazards Centre has estimated that 600 to 700 people die every year from occupational injury caused by the recklessness of their employers— about the same number as personal homicides.

We are living in a class-divided society where a minority of men and women between them own and control most the the world’s wealth. Production is not run for human needs; it is run for profit, so if there’s no profit in allowing someone to work or produce food for starving people then these things won’t be done.

The radical transformation of society that socialists propose is to put the means of producing and distributing wealth in the hands of the whole community and to let the principle "from each according to ability to each according to need” be put into practice. In these circumstances, crime as it is commonly conceived (petty theft, muggings and the like) will no longer have a reason to exist.

Anderton thought he could change the conduct of individuals by personal pressure and the force of the law:

  I did have a kind of dream that I might, by example and protest, change the course of things so powerfully, and influence society and the country in the matter of rightful conduct, that they would turn away from crime and disorder and wilful criminal behaviour. Sadly, this has not happened. (Guardian.,15 March).

Marx, by contrast, pointed out that people get their ideas and types of conduct from the world around them. The economic structure of the rat race makes people behave like rats:

  . . . so what has to be done is to arrange the empirical world in such a way that man experiences . . . what is truly human in it . . . Crime must not be punished in the individual but the anti-social sources of crime must be destroyed. If man is shaped by his environment his environment must be made human. (The Holy Family).

Gary Jay

Caught In The Act: A Matter of Timing (1991)

The Caught In The Act Column from the May 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Matter of Timing

As if he has not got enough on his mind already, with all those unkind press comments about him being a vacillating nonentity, John Major has the additional pressing worry of when to call the next general election. From all sides he will be advised that the timing can be crucial in deciding who wins; a month or two either way can mean defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.

Warning stories are told about Harold Wilson's mistake in 1970 and Jim Callaghan in 1979. Wilson assumed that Labour's position was impregnable and treated the election as a blip on the unruffled business of running British capitalism. If he had waited we might never have had Ted Heath as prime minister. Callaghan, on the other hand, should not have waited; he gambled that things were getting better for his government and would continue to do so. Instead they went on getting worse and the winter of discontent sealed Labour's fate. If Callaghan had not waited we would not have had Thatcher and life would have been a lot less interesting for the people who produce programmes like Spitting Image.

After Thatcher's victory the timing was, apparently, a lot simpler. According to Cecil Parkinson, who was Conservative Party chairman at the time, in 1983 it was so simple as to be a matter of common sense. All the opinion samples indicated that a sweeping Tory victory was in prospect. They had ridden over their crisis of unpopularity and had picked up a lot of support from the more seriously deluded workers over the Falklands War. To help them on their way the Labour Party had elected Michael Foot as their leader and then ran a campaign notable for the ineptitude of their attempts to mislead workers into voting for them. In 1987 the Labour Party ran a much craftier campaign but they had too much ground to make up. The local election results that year persuaded Thatcher that the Tory vote was holding so the time was ripe to allow the great British people to make their democratic choice — which actually means to have Saatchi and Saatchi unleashed upon them.

Mr Nice Guy

For John Major it is not so simple. He is in trouble. One Tory supporter recently wrote to the Daily Telegraph to complain about the prime minister abusing the sartorial standards of all British gentlemen by buttoning up his jacket as he steps out of the official limousine — and you can't get much deeper into trouble than that: Major's image as Mr Nice Guy, unbuttoned jacket and all, is all very well except when your party is hungry for a parliamentary Rambo. It is all very well except when it seems to paralyse your decision-making and reduces your party to a rabble of squabbling back benchers and rivals for your job. It is all very well except when it encourages your supporters to question whether they did the right thing when they got rid of your predecessor.

These things must weigh heavily with Major as he toys with his calendar, his slide rule and his crystal ball. If he decides on an election this summer — which probably means June — and the Tories do badly their conference in October is likely to be historic for the ferocity of the fighting behind the desperately played down smoke screens. It will be the Conservative Party in its element — scheming and intriguing about how to win, or hold onto, power. All gentlemen in attendance are advised to keep their jackets buttoned firmly into place.

One thing which is never mentioned is the presumption at the base of all the calculations about the best date for the election, that workers are particularly susceptible to political deception. In the ease of Callaghan, for example, it is argued that he should have gone to the poll in late 1978 because at that time the voters thought, in spite of all they had experienced, that Labour could control capitalism into a docile, caring and progressive system. After the strikes and disruptions of that winter they were not so sure — and the Labour leadership were not able to offer any bribes attractive enough to cover up their woeful failure. Callaghan is criticised, not because he deceived the working class but because he miscalculated about the best time to exploit their political naiveté.

Gruesome Reality 

Workers swing from one discredited party to another, under the unblinking observation of the opinion pollsters, because they lack a sound understanding of how this social system works and why. So they are deceived into giving a major importance to issues which are in fact trivial or irrelevant and it is on that basis that votes change from one side to another. Issues such as the poll tax or the level of state benefits or whether John Major is an irresolute wimp have no real effect on how capitalism operates or what the system does to its people. Subtle advertising campaigns — which is what elections really are — persuade millions of voters that such matters are history-forming and they go to the polls arguing about them, to emerge convinced that with their cross on the ballot paper they have changed things. It takes a little time for the truth — that nothing has changed — to sink in and so set the votes swinging again, to the excitement of the political experts.

In gruesome reality what the workers have done is to surrender their power to make a real change in society. They have made themselves vulnerable to the schemes and calculations of the politicians and they have encouraged the tricksters of the advertising world in the belief that the workers are pliable to the point of ignorance. If this is degrading and insulting to millions of people — well that is a fair description of capitalism and its cynical propaganda.

Questions

Meanwhile the people at the sharp end of all this — the voters — should ponder a few vital questions. Are they satisfied to have their votes, through which they could fashion a free and humane social system, treated with such cynicism? Are they content to put themselves at the disposal of a bunch of ruthless manipulators whose only object is political power? Are they really impressed by the succession of bribes dangled before them by parties who are desperate for their votes? Are they worried whether John Major got any O levels, treats his family well and does his jacket up properly? Are they happy as the world reels under the disasters of that "successful" war in the Gulf, that this should be the limit of their political involvement? And are they going to do anything to change it?

Ivan

50 Years Ago: Stalin's Capitalist Foreign Policy (1991)

The 50 Years Ago column from the May 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have had Hitler sending birthday greetings to Stalin. Stalin being photographed in a friendly party with Ribbcntrop. Molotov all smiles with General Goering, now comes Stalin and Matsuoka, the Japanese Foreign Minister, who was in Moscow late in April. Here is the story from the Evening Standard of what is reported to have occurred when Stalin saw Matsuoka off on the train:

  According to Mr. Hasegawa. the two statesmen were then apparently overcome with emotion and embraced one another to the amazement of the foreign diplomatic representatives present. (Evening Standard, April 28th. 1941.)

It sounds too touching to be true, but no doubt “dialectically considered", as the Communists would say, it is a further piece of Socialist propaganda designed to clarify the ideas of the world’s workers and show them which of the representatives of capitalism are their true friends.

Those who still imagine that the Russian Government's foreign policy is governed by internationalism should note the following, reproduced from the Bolshevik journal Pravda:—

  The foreign policy of the USSR is guided exclusively by the interests of the USSR, exclusively by the interests of the peoples of the USSR. This policy dictates to the USSR the desire to develop as widely as possible trade and economic relations with those of its neighbours who correctly appraise the importance of these connections with the USSR for their own interests. The Soviet-German Treaty and Agreements of 1941 confirm with perfect clarity the absolute truth of this proposition. (Reproduced in the Anglo-Russia News Bulletin. January 18th. 1941.)

[From the Socialist Standard, May 1941.]

End of the road (1991)

From the May 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Hungarian uprising of 1956 is generally considered to mark a watershed in the history of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Although the CPGB lost about one quarter of its members—from 33,095 in February 1956 to 26,742 by February 1957—a decline had been evident from the early 1950’s as a result of the “cold war” and the waning of the comparative popularity which had been achieved during the Second World War as anti-fascists.

Like all other minor parties, the CPGB had difficulty making progress within the British electoral system which favours the two major parties. But in the 1966 election the Communist Party candidates could only obtain 3 per cent of the votes in the seats they contested compared with 1945 when they obtained two MP’s (Willie Gallagher and Phil Piratin) and Harry Pollitt, their general secretary, nearly unseated the sitting MP at Rhondda East

Eurocommunism

In 1956 when Pollitt retired, the CPGB had to come to terms not only with the Hungarian uprising but also with Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin and the “Cult of personality” and the growing conflict between Russia and China. Its 1977 programme sought an alliance of all sorts of reformist groups and sectional interests including consumer groups and Scottish and Welsh nationalists. This new strategy, coupled with the end of uncritical support for Russia, came to be known as “Eurocommunism”.

In the mid-1970’s the CPGB started to show divisions within its ranks over trade union strategy. In a pamphlet entitled Advanced Capitalism and Backward Socialism Bill Warren and Mike Prior demonstrated their ignorance of Marxist theory by arguing that inflation was related to wage militancy. The arguments raged over the next few years: the hardliners who had remained within the Party to fight for a return to traditional methods, and the Eurocommunists disagreed violently over trade union strategy. When Tony Lane wrote an article in Marxism Today (the Party’s theoretical journal founded in 1957 which adopted a more and more trendy stance after the appointment of Martin Jacques as editor in 1978) criticising shop stewards, Mick Costello, the CPGB’s industrial organiser, was incensed and replied with an article in the Morning Star (as the Daily Worker had been renamed in 1966), for which he was sacked and replaced by Peter Carter, a former official of UCATT, the building workers union.

During the 1985 miners’ strike the gulf between the different wings of the CPGB widened. For the first time the Party actually lost members during a campaign. Criticism of the miners’ strike, and Arthur Scargill’s leadership in particular, came from Marxism Today and Peter Carter wrote a deeply critical pamphlet of Scargill’s leadership which was suppressed for the sake of unity. Scargill, a former member of the YCL national committee in the late 1950’s, was deeply resentful of the “line” taken by Marxism Today and accused Carter of compromising with the class enemy and vilifying the NUM.

Morning Star

The group around the Morning Star has been in conflict with the CPGB since 1981 when the conference criticised the paper for failing to give sufficient prominence to the 1977 programme. This group sees the traditional emphasis on the working class and industrial strength in the trade unions as the correct way forward. Eurocommunism is seen as a liberal fad which should be dropped.

In 1983 the 38th congress of the CPGB voted to dismiss Tony Chater, the editor and David Whitfield, the assistant editor, by 155 votes to 92. They refused to relinquish their posts. In June of the following year the paper’s shareholders voted to support Chater and Whitfield in defiance of the Eurocommunist leadership. The Morning Star is not owned by the CPGB. When its forerunner, the Daily Worker was founded in 1930, an independent co-operative, the People’s Press Printing Society, was set up to avoid accusations that the paper was simply a mouthpiece for Communist Party policy. Now this strategy rebounded with a vengeance.

Following the special congress in May 1985 the Eurocommunist leadership carried out a systematic purge of borough committees, branches and industrial organisations. In less than two years 3,000 members were expelled or left because they were demoralised. Industrial stalwarts such as Ken Gill, president of TASS (now joint general secretary of MSF), Bert Ramelson and Mick Costello, former CPGB industrial organisers, and Derek Robinson, the shop steward who made news after he was sacked by Michael Edwardes at British Leyland’s Longbridge plant, were all expelled.

It is rather surprising that with all the purges and demoralisation the Morning Star group did not break away and form the Communist Party of Britain until 1988. This party is centred around the Morning Star, with Mike Hicks, an executive member of Sogat, as its general secretary and Derek Robinson as its industrial organiser. It rejects Stalinism but supports Russia, though not unconditionally. Chater had criticised the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Last year the CPGB still had about 6,000 members but its bases in the trade unions had been badly damaged. In addition Marxism Today, with a circulation of 10,000 is likely to be sold off soon. In January 1990 Nina Temple had the unenviable job of taking over from Gordon McLennan as general secretary of the CPGB. She soon stated the CPGB might be disbanded and form a club within the Labour Party. Last month the Party’s executive committee announced the end of the Communist Party and its transformation into an amorphous group to be known as the “Democratic Left”.

Disbandment was the only course open to the CPGB. It had lost all credibility. From a party of 46,000 members [56,000 members]  and two MP’s in its heyday and 60 full time workers—a much higher ratio than either the Labour or Conservative parties—it had shrunk to a rump of an organisation that only polled 0.8 per cent of the votes in each constituency that it contested.

Historians may lament the demise of the CPGB but workers should not. The CPGB has stood for every shabby compromise, has mislead generations of sincere workers, has been vanguardist, conspiratorial, undemocratic and dishonest. It has purported to oppose capitalism whilst supporting state capitalism. It has criticised imperialism whilst condoning and defending Russian imperialism. [It has supported nationalism and at times even xenophobia.] And, worst of all, by posing as Marxist it set back the cause of socialism by several decades.

Carl Pinel

Rise and Fall of a Pitboy (1991)

From the May 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

A great future was once forecast for Michael Eaton, not least by himself. He might have made it to the top, to become a recognisable man of power and influence. Instead he is someone dominated by a feeling of “gloom and failure", of no longer being in charge of his life. Once he was a firm supporter of the professed free market principles of the Thatcher governments. a disciple of the creed that hard work, ingenuity and experience were enough to build a fortune. Now he complains bitterly about the government which undermined him. with policies which brought the recession and his own failure and which, he says, could and should have been changed a long time ago.

Eaton’s finest hour was during the coal strike of 1984-5, when he was called in to run the Coal Board’s public relations. His appointment was widely welcomed in those places where the defeat of the miners was seen as an urgent need. Eaton came of a family of colliers and he himself was a pit boy at the age of 15. He took a degree in mining engineering and, as he climbed the managerial ladder, was sent by the Coal Board to the Stanford Business School in California, where they aim to hone their students' techniques of worker exploitation. Only the highest of high flyers get that kind of schooling; at 50—seven years ago—Eaton was in the top flight, the youngest and longest serving Coal Board area director.

Rough—hewn

When the strike started Eaton was in charge of the mines in North Yorkshire. He soon showed his hand by stopping the pay of mine officials who declined to supervise the few miners who went in to work— a policy which, had it been applied nationally, would have been disastrous for the employers. But the blunder did not dent the Eaton reputation as Mr Fixit, a boss whose direct style and rough-hewn Yorkshire opinions ensured that he was "good at dealing with people”—which really meant cunning at screwing the maximum possible profit out of the labour of others.

When it became clear that Coal Board chairman Ian MacGregor was unable to put the case for making useful and productive workers redundant without threatening the Saatchi brothers with simultaneous heart attacks, Eaton was given the job of trying to repair the Board’s public relations. MacGregor, as we all remember, had been taken on by the government mainly to devitalise the unions, at first in the steel industry and then in the coal mines, and to slash the industries back to a size more in keeping with their profit-making capabilities.

He was very good at that, as Arthur Scargill will agree, and anyone who doubts his abilities need only consider what has happened to the mines since the strike. What MacGregor was not good at was putting himself across as other than someone imported to impose lower standards of poverty on selected groups of workers. His low point came when he appeared in public with his head in a carrier bag; it was never completely clear why he did this but what was clear was that it was conduct unbecoming the holder of a high public office in the midst of a savage struggle with his employees.

Eaton was very different. He had known Scargill, in one way or another, for over 12 years and had played a large part in working out the government’s strategy which eventually beat the miners. But things did not turn out as planned because he clashed with MacGregor on many issues and his presence was resented by the man whose job as communications chief he had taken. His career was more or less stopped in its tracks; he did not. as many people had expected. get to be chairman of the Coal Board and had to be content with the award of the QBE for his services to British capitalism. In 1986 he resigned from the Board and with his family bought a building firm which, as the economy boomed, grew into an employer of nearly 200 workers and a valuation of about £6 million.

Bankrupt

So far so good—at least for Eaton as he contemplated this apparent proof of the adage, which the striking miners had regarded with such scepticism, that hard work and initiative must bring success. Whatever Eaton had learned he had missed the fact that we live under a social system of economic rises and falls, a system which will not be controlled by any skill or industriousness and which takes no account of the predictions of the experts. Eaton’s business suddenly collapsed, with debts of about £2½ million and likely, when the receivers have chewed it over, to be left owing about £700,000.

This blow to Eaton’s self-esteem, and to all he believed in, has been worsened by the fact that he and his family may be made homeless by the crash. And he is not happy about it:

What most upset me was when I heard John Major as Chancellor say. "if it isn't hurting it isn’t working". People like him don't appreciate—they can’t appreciate—the abjectness of failure and the consequences on your family.

He seems to have forgotten that during the miners’ strike many miners were describing the effects of the pit closures in similar terms. They talked fearfully about the depression of unemployment, about the stress of getting by on the dole, about the feelings of being worthless when they could not find an employer to exploit their labour. They, like Eaton now, felt out of control of their own lives.

The official response, which Eaton was employed to announce, was that the miners must face economic reality—that if the pits were not profitable they had to be closed, whatever the effect on the miners, because only the profitable deserves to survive. And if the miners argued for changes in government policy to keep the pits open they met the kind of implacable opposition to subsidising the unprofitable which Eaton's company got from the firms it owed money to.

An idiot

There are probably quite a few miners, redundant or still in work, who are gloating at how things have turned out for Eaton. It would be more helpful if there was a better understanding of what happened to the miners, and to Eaton’s business. Capitalism does not operate from sentiment or from any obligation other than to produce wealth—like coal, like houses— for sale and profit. The market where goods are sold is neither predictable nor controllable but when it is booming people like Eaton, and millions of workers, misinterpret this as the results of their own skills and hard work. When it slumps they assume this is the fault of the government or the City or foreign financiers or whatever. Remembering how different he saw things during the strike, Eaton said:

If anyone had suggested then that the country would he in the position it is now, they would have sent you to the Tower as an idiot.

What is the "sanity” of capitalism worth, when a man who once personified it admits the idiots got it right after all?

Ivan

The Communist Party—It's All Over (1991)

Editorial from the May 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Communist Party of Great Britain is dead—officially. The old Leninist house of illusions is closed for business. Throughout Europe the absurd myth of “the socialist countries” has been seen to be a fraud. The Russian Empire—“the socialist motherland” to those naive pseudo-communists—stands in ruins and rushes in panic towards the full embrace of the so- called free market. What point was there for the weary old CP to stay alive? Its principal illusion is exposed; its seventy-year purpose of proclaiming the existence of socialism in the state-capitalist countries of Eastern Europe has disappeared.

In the heady days after the Bolshevik coup of 1917 the CP was formed to propagate the elitist and undemocratic cause of Lenin's policy. The apparent success of the Bolsheviks and the huge claims about what was being done in Russia made the CP's appeal strong and intoxicating for the enthusiasts. Here at last, it seemed, was a party which not only talked about socialist revolution, but could point to one which had succeeded. All the British workers needed to do was to copy down the Leninist recipe.

In the excitement of those early days one thing stood out against the folly of Leninist faith. This was the voice of the Socialist Party. From day one we pointed out that the Bolshevik policy could not lead to socialism but to state capitalism. It could not lead to democracy but to the dictatorship of the vanguard. The Socialist Party did not need to wait until the years of Stalin when it was acceptable for Leftists to criticise the crimes of the Russian dictatorship—although even then the CP refused to say a word against “Comrade Stalin”, accusing the Socialist Party of being “fascists” for stating our hostility to him and his regime.

Over the years many sincere and dedicated workers’ lives have been thrown behind the CP cause. We do not deride or mock the sincerity and dedication of such workers—they thought that they had an answer. What remains of such militancy should not be allowed to evaporate into despair. Socialism has not been tried and failed. The truth is, as it always was, that socialism has yet to be tried. It is a vision of a new social system which the workers have yet to take up. The task of all socialists is to win over our fellow workers, of all lands, to the true cause of socialism: a world-wide community based on the common ownership and democratic control of everything in and on the Earth by all the inhabitants of the Earth.

The CP decided last month to fold up its tents. It is to continue as a pressure group called the Democratic Left. The shelf life of this new brand name is unlikely to be a long one. Several of the old-time Leninists refused to give up the ghost. They will continue to exist in some form or other, mouthing their Leninist cliches like monks reciting the Roman Catholic catechism.They will be the museum keepers of a dead ideology. Leninism R. I. P? No Leninism—the Red Fraud of the Twentieth Century.

The Socialist Party continues, continues its work, our principles as clear as ever. With the wars, the mass hunger, the environmental destruction and the urban decay of the profit system as our backing track, we are still singing the same tune.

Alcohol accounting (1991)

From the May 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Recent TV documentaries on Australia’s ABC have shown the scientific evidence of severe damage to the brain and other organs caused by alcohol abuse. There is no doubt that it is a very serious problem affecting a significant portion of the population.

It would be nice to think that this concern about the effects of excessive alcohol consumption was motivated by humanitarian feelings for the wretchedness of ruined lives. However, it doesn’t require much digging to reveal the real concerns of the nation’s accountants and politicians—it is costing a great deal of money in lost lives, hospital bills, social security payments, property damage and lost production.

Who has to pay for this? Ultimately it costs the class whose income is derived from their ownership of the means of producing and distributing wealth; for the size of the tax bill is a major factor affecting the profitability of their businesses. The Melbourne Age (10 July 1990) ran an article confirming that, as usual, human lives and misery have been debased and alienated by measuring them in terms of money:

Mr Staples [Federal Minister for Aged, Family and Health Services] says a conservative estimate of the yearly cost of alcohol and associated problems to the community is $5 billion. (The Royal Australian College of Physicians puts the figure at between $5 and S12 billion).

Of course the owners of the breweries and liquor and hotel outlets are against any moves to reduce alcohol consumption, while the owners of other businesses are unimpressed with having to pay for the damage caused by alcohol abuse. Who said the capitalist class are united?

The capitalist class are anxious not to overdo the anti-alcohol-abuse campaign. After all alcohol helps keep the workers sedated between working and sleeping. Can’t have the workers doing too much serious thinking—they might just wake up to the whole rotten system and throw it out!

Drug abuse is a direct result of the system of society we live in. Not only is there profit to be made out of supplying the drugs be they legal or otherwise, there is also a willingness to “get out of it” on drugs by many. Is it any wonder that people want to “escape” from their unhappiness which is a result of alienation from the means to life? Poverty, wage-slavery, powerlessness, menial and repetitive work, and the whole sick social environment of capitalism will grind down the most resilient of people.

Drug abuse and the human suffering it causes will not go away while the conditions which are its cause remain. Capitalism will not go away until the majority of us have become convinced of the urgent need for its immediate abolition and replacement with the only alternative—free access socialism.

Dave Tildesley
World Socialist Party of New Zealand 

Between the Lines: Forbidden moments (1991)

The Between the Lines column from the May 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

FORBIDDEN MOMENTS

Under capitalism the best things are forbidden. Access to the best things in life are denied to most of us because of lack of money. Other things are removed from us by the forbidding state. News and information, plays and films, jokes and songs: any of these images of life can be censored if they are considered liable to disturb the passivity of the wage slaves' minds. The Banned season on Channel Four has shown a number of programmes previously censored for TV audiences and has produced some first class discussion on the theme of censorship in its many forms. It has been a revealing few weeks of TV. Pathetic little voyeurs, hoping for a bit of naked flesh in their living rooms, will have been disappointed by the Banned season; the majority of censored TV is denied to viewers on grounds that to show it would be politically insensitive. The ruling class can live happily with the daily Page Three, but when it comes to exposing scrutiny of its precious, oppressive values it is time to pull the plugs.

The Truth About Lies (C4, 9pm, Monday, 8 April) offered a valuable survey of how the British ruling class has used censorship to keep workers in the dark. It documented how the BBC was used to attack the 1926 strikers, to serve as an appendage to military propaganda in the Second World War, to ban numerous programmes about the Army's current operations in Ireland, and to prevent life and death information — such as the coming of US Cruise missiles to British soil — from being communicated to the public. The liars who rule Britain came across as very scared people. They are afraid that the workers might see too much of what they are up to. They forbid speech on certain mailers because they know that they could not win the argument if they discussed them openly. In short, they confirm the socialist claim that when the working class understand what is going on in society it will be an explosively and unstoppably potent force.

John Pilger's excellent Frontline - The Search For Truth In Wartime (C4, 8pm, Saturday, 13 April) presented a survey of how TV coverage has been used to drive the millions into the frenzy of war fever. Pilger, whose own journalistic standards are in marked contrast to most of his cringeing, knee-bending colleagues, showed how war reporters, from Vietnam to the Gulf, have simply served the propaganda needs of the militarists who gave them the briefings.

News is not the only victim of the censors. Numerous films and plays have been censored from TV audiences. For years The War Game, which was commissioned by the BBC, was banned from being shown on the grounds that it depicted loo realistically what the effects of a nuclear bomb would be. In the late 1970s the BBC commissioned a play on the legalised brutality of the borstal system: the play Scum, was banned from being shown to us until it appeared in the Banned season (C4. 10.30pm. Sunday, 14 April). Even comedy has been the victim of the censor. No TV station would show Monty Python's Life of Brian (C4, 10.30pm, Tuesday, 16 April) and in several British cities local government outlawed the showing of the film which superbly sends up the myths of Christianity. Only Joking? (C4, 11pm, Friday, 12 April) was about comedy and the limits of "public taste". To be sure, there are lots of comedians, notably in the current US "comedy of hate" vogue, whose unfunny racist rambling! can appeal to to those with Sun-reader mentalities. The documentary showed a performance by a racist creep called The Dice Man whose New Year's Eve show in the USA attracted an audience of 17 million cable viewers. But who needs the state to tell us what is unacceptably unfunny? If we are unamused by Bernard Manning or Gerry Sadowitz, then we need not watch them. The price of any kind of free speech is that you cannot set up a dogma called Good Taste and then ban those who transgress it. The alternative price to be paid was well illustrated in two documentaries about Christian bigots and their efforts to "clean up" (for which read censor) TV output: Damned in the USA (C4. 10.30pm, Sunday, 14 April) and Dancing With the Devil (C4, 11pm, Friday, 19 April). When the superbly produced Thirtysomething showed a scene with two male lovers in bed together fifteen major advertisers pulled their money out of the network making the programme, resulting in millions of lost dollars as a result of the homophobic bigotry of a handful of rich marketing directors. Under capitalism it is these people who decide what is good for us to see.

Socialists oppose censorship. Ironically, C4's Banned season was itself censored: in the hitherto unshown Mother Ireland the voice of the IRA woman shot by the British troops in Gibraltar had to be dubbed over by an actress lest we be contaminated by her authentic voice; a Yugoslav film-documentary about Wilhelm Reich had to be changed so that the male genitals in it could not be seen by the highly-corruptible late-night audience.

A more significant irony was that C4 did not once in its season give any consideration to the ultimate ban which it seems to find quite compatible with its own liberal values: the ban on serious TV exposure to those ideas which are considered "way out" or "utopian". In short, the ban which we socialists have experienced when trying to obtain more than a two-minute chance to explain our ideas on Channel Four. Perhaps now is a good lime for the C4 gang to ask where they draw the line. And why. And who might lose their jobs if the boundaries were redrawn.

THE LONGER VIEW

You can never be depressed in the company of a geologist. Why hasn't socialism been established after all these years? After all what years? Clive James interviewed Stephen Jay Gould, the eminent and very worth reading Harvard palaeontologist (BBC2, 6pm, Sunday, 7 April). "What would happen if a nuclear holocaust destroyed the whale of human life?" asked James. It has happened before, responded Gould — in fact, there have been three wipe-outs of life over the past 260 million years. "We'd just have to wait a few million years and it would all start again" replied Gould. And the struggle for socialism is hardly a century old. Come to think of it, when they banned The Life of Brian less than twenty years ago the censor probably thought that it would never ever be shown - the fools.

Steve Coleman

Class struggle (1991)

From the May 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

The class struggle is a very real historical fact within capitalism arising from commodity production and exchange. At the very heart of this transient social system, there exists an antagonistic struggle between a majority class of workers who administer, design, produce and distribute all the social wealth of society as commodities and a small minority which, although playing no part in the productive process, has the major advantage of owning and controlling all the resources of the planet—the factories and the distribution and communication systems and also what the workers produce.

Since workers do not own and control the various forms of property found in capitalism we are, as a class, cut off from deciding what should be produced, how and for whom. “No profit, no production" is the rule. If profits are to be protected by deliberate under-production, burning of foodstuffs or the taking of farming land out of production, then under capitalism this has to be carried out. Ownership and control of property with a view to profit means that the facilities required to meet social needs and aspirations are going to he severely restricted.

Exploitation

Excluded from ownership and control, workers are forced to trade their mental and physical abilities (their labour power) as a commodity to capital for a wage or a salary. The class struggle has its origins in the exploitation of the workers’ labour power by employers during the production process. The origin of profit is an excess produced by workers over the value of the goods which sustain and reproduce their labour-power. This surplus is taken by the capitalists on account of their monopoly as a class over the means and methods of production and distribution. On the one hand there are the employers trying to extract as much surplus value out of the workforce as possible while, on the other hand, workers are struggling, usually in trade unions, to gain higher wages and better working conditions at the expense of profit.

These conflicting class interests between an oppressive class and a subject class cannot be balanced harmomiously. If profits are threatened then it is the standard of living of the working class which is attacked. If there is an accidental over-production of commodities which cannot be sold on the market then it is the jobs of workers which are at risk with all the hardship and worry that unemployment brings.

Naturally the existence of the class struggle is not to the liking of those who are paid to defend the economic interests of the capitalist class. Many academics and politicians try to get around the question of the class struggle by disputing its existence or blaming it on the writings of Karl Marx. But Marx merely found classes and the class struggle existing as a historical fact. In recent years these intellectual prostitutes have pointed to the low level of strikes during the late I980s compared to the mid-1970s as an indication of the class struggle’s demise. However, like the reported eclipse of Marx’s ideas and his scientific analysis of capitalism due to events in eastern Europe, this obituary is wholly premature. The critique of political economy and the class struggle only end with the abolition of capitalism by a working-class socialist majority not by the wishful thinking of economists or journalists.

Strikes and the state

Strikes, like trade unions themselves, are effects of the class struggle not the cause. The class struggle is due to the very class nature of capitalism. It is also a two-way struggle. In times of high profits when capitalism is booming, employers will generally concede to pay demands. The last thing they want is for profitable production to be curtailed through industrial action. But during depressions capitalists dig in their heels and resist, with workers defending previous gains from the encroachment of capital. At times of high unemployment trade unions lose effectiveness as membership declines and firms are unable to pay wage increases without going bankrupt.

The class struggle must become political if workers are to realise their class interests and ensure that production and distribution is undertaken to meet the needs of society rather than the anti-social pursuit of profit. But why? After all, the capitalist class play no role in the productive process. Why can’t workers just take what they need? This question overlooks one important feature of capitalism: the state.

The state is the instrument used by governments to protect the property ownership of the capitalist class whose general and particular interests they represent. This is done in a number of ways. First, governments formulate economic or social policies to attack wage levels like the ill-fated Incomes Policy of the 1960’s under Harold Wilson. Second, the government of the day, Labour or Conservative, can use state violence against workers, breaking strikes, imprisoning trade unionists or passing anti—working—class legislation. Third, the government finances a continual stream or propaganda via schools, universities and other institutions it subsidises.

The political power used to protect the property of the capitalist class is also vulnerable because it is dependent upon workers periodically voting capital's political parties into power to protect it anti further capitalist interests.

Death knell

If the working class is to create a society of free men and women in which social wealth production is held in common and democratically controlled, they must stop voting for the interests of capital. Instead, they must take political action as socialists in order to capture political power and gain control of the machinery of government. Since workers are the last oppressed class in human history it is only by their political action that socialism can be established. The failure of Leninism to impose “socialism” on society by a group of professional revolutionaries has shown that workers must freely accept the need for socialism and understand their active part in its realisation, rather than surrender their political thinking to leaders.

Socialists are in fact workers ourselves facing the same social and economic problems peculiar to our class. We know where our class interests lie and how our political objective is to be achieved, yet the only tool we possess to demonstrate to workers where their class interests lie is continual argument and persuasion wherever the opportunity presents itself. The contradictions inherent within commodity production can only intensify as the techniques and forces of production are continually subordinated to further the aims of profit. It is the very material conditions of capitalism, along with socialist argument, which convince workers to accept the need for socialism, and when enough workers do, the death knell of capitalism will peal across the six continents of the world.

Richard Lloyd

Marxism and Literature (1991)

Book Reviews from the May 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Engels once commented that he learned more about history by reading the novels of Balzac than the historians ever told him. Literature is part of history; it reflects and contributes to its struggles, even if that is not the writer's intention. In The Ideology of the Text (Open University Press. £8.99) Christopher Hampton launches a timely assault upon those who seek to explain literature purely in terms of the words contained within texts, as if these can be extricated from historical motion and converted into “pure” literary form. Hampton exposes such theories as being:

in essence a refutation of the Marxist position, which takes its stand on the assumption that there are pre-existent material conditions which we can identify and relate to. and which determine the ways in which we act and think and feel.

The “mystificatory detachment" of the post-modernist critics is seen by Hampton as an excuse by which critics opt out of the necessity of explaining the texts of literature in terms of their ideological status—the sense in which they express the class consciousness either of the oppressor or the oppressed.

He looks at a number of important writers (Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Arnold, Morris) and attempts to treat the crucial question of how to decide their ideological colour. Shakespeare, for example, is seen as so much a part of the established English cultural institutions that quite absurd readings of his plays have emerged; Hampton cites G. Wilson Knight's use of Cranmer’s speech at the end of Henry VIII as justification for his support of the Falklands War. A remarkably good historical contextualisation of Shakespeare's writings is offered, a reading of which alone justifies the purchase or loan of this book.

Again, the treatment of the poetry of William Blake is fought for against those who would confine such texts to the history of harmless Christian prophecies. Blake, it is argued, made the historically crucial and ideologically distinctive choice to reject the pessimism of so many other poets—many of whom justified their right to call themselves poets by their unceasing miserableness. In the case of Blake, writes Hampton.

Though his world did its best, callously and indifferently. to break him, it failed. He was not a pessimist. He saw the world as it was, but he was not content to accept it as it was; for he saw it as it could be.

Substantiation of this assertion is abundantly provided. More than most, a writer who saw the world as it could become was the revolutionary socialist, William Morris. Hampton concludes that:

Today, the kinds of questions Morris asked about the destructive conditions of his time have not lost their urgency. However changed the particular circumstances that govern our lives in the late twentieth century, we still live under the domination of a capitalist economy which functions by feeding off the common wealth of the people and by imposing restrictive and stunting conditions upon them.

It is a cause for celebration that a writer of Hampton’s ability is throwing his weight behind the cause of clear Marxian analysis, and that, in the spirit of Marx, his book serves not merely to explain literature but to use it as a springboard to political action.

Revolutionary writings

Too many people who think of themselves as “Writers” and “Authors" place themselves in the precious literary arena where they feel they must be insulated from the filth of political ideas. As Hampton says, this luxury is not available to writers: those who are not with us are for them. John Graham has edited an excellent anthology of writings by those who were not afraid to contaminate their pens with the stains of class struggle. Yours For The Revolution (University of Nebraska Press) is about The Appeal to Reason, a newspaper which was published in Kansas between 1895 and 1922. Graham offers an interesting historical introduction to the newspaper, although he over-emphasises the journal’s socialist claims. In effect, it was a mish-mash of mainly reformist alongside some highly revolutionary writings. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was first serialised in The Appeal To Reason and Debs was a frequent contributor. Compared to the more solidly Marxian writings of De Leon, the pieces by Debs are rather tame, although the equal of anyone in terms of fiery rhetoric. The anthology contains some truly moving pieces; from Helen Keller, Mother Jones, Jack London as well as the individualistic editor, J. A. Wayland.

There is one letter which particularly moved the present writer: from a worker who was poor and ill and resolved to end his life and send what remained of his money to the journal that he had spent years trying to sell to workers. In “His Last Letter’ (as the piece was entitled) the anonymous writer urges readers. "I pray and beg of you to be of good cheer and courage. Do not fear to own the cause or blush to speak the name. If you can’t talk (nearly all persons can if they will try) you can do a world of good by distributing literature. Don’t let'em rest until such barbarous customs are completely abolished . . . Our principles cannot be refuted, for Right is on our side and we are bound to succeed . . .” Of course, the movement which he died supporting did not succeed, and only on the basis of revolutionary consciousness could success come. Those interested in the all-too-frequently neglected history of the American working-class movement should read this anthology.

Far from succeeding, in many ways there have been years of awful failure following the days of the Wobblies and The Appeal to Reason. In the USA the trade union movement has fallen prey to the organised bandits who have used it for their own corrupt purposes. Dan La Botz’s Rank and File Rebellion (Verso) tells the story, which has been ignored by the British media, of the Teamsters for a Democratic Union and their efforts to wrest control of their union from bureaucratic leaders of the Jimmy Hoffa variety. The book makes compelling reading. If you did not think that there were militantly-minded wage slaves in the USA, then this book will open your eyes. The modern Teamsters’ movement understands the importance of democracy to working-class organisation and that is a vital lesson (not to understand only in theory, but in practical activity). They could do worse than to turn to Yours For The Revolution to learn that, as well as democracy, the workers need to be organised to a purpose: the abolition of the wages system.

Steve Coleman