Sting in the Tail: Institute of Dementia (1994)

The Sting in the Tail column from the May 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Institute of dementia

One of the influences on the thinking of Downing Street is the Adam Smith Institute. This organization is the so-called “think-tank" of the Tory Party. Their latest foray into the brave new world we can all expect under a Tory government is typical of the Tory Utopia they have in mind for all of us.

Britain, which at present is covered by five percent of forest, will have a forest covering 65 percent of the total land mass. Mines, factories and farmland will be given over to forests with wolves and bears.

Presumably these creatures will be shot, trapped and maimed by champagne-swilling landlords assisted by forelock-tugging peasantry.

"Private security firms will patrol villages and housing estates and surveillance cameras will cover the bulk of Britain. " (Guardian, 5 April)

In the Tory Utopia there will be major breakthroughs, in a privately-run Health Maintenance Organization, in dealing with dementia, cancer and AIDS.

We can only hope that scientists, seeking a cure for dementia, start their research in that dementia-ridden pocket of human stupidity called the Adam Smith Institute.

Land of hope and tory

A Tory Party Conference is a festival of unreality. The stirring chords of Land of Hope and Glory are struck as the leader emerges to thunderous applause.

The themes are loyalty, nationalism, toughness and realism . . . but most of all loyalty. The leader is everything. Mindless devotion . . . and loyalty are pledged. In reality it is all an empty sham. John Major is now finding out just how empty.

Take the case of Sir Nicholas Fairbairn, the former Solicitor General for Scotland, bon viveur and wearer of tartan trews, tartan waistcoats and for all we know tartan boxer shorts.

Speaking on BBC Scotland (4 April) he called his leader a "ventriloquist’s dummy" and a "softie".

Not that Major’s rivals fared much better. "I don’t like Clarke and I don’t trust Heseltine — I   think he’s a spiv and Clarke’s a bounder."

In the nasty world of capitalist politics, loyalty is a conference illusion. These horrible job-hunters are all falling out as they try to get their snouts deeper into the Westminster trough of power and wealth.

Another ego trip

The Detroit summit involving the seven leading industrial nations (G7) set about the impossible task of solving capitalism’s unemployment problem.

Needless to say, the attending finance ministers were less than unanimous about what should be done. America wanted Germany to relax its monetary policy in the hope that this would get economic growth moving again, but this was angrily rejected: Britain was all for a free-market approach but Japan warned of the social consequences of this, and so on.

However, numerous "Think-tanks" were not slow to offer their solution. These included the inevitable work-sharing, the spread of "wise taxes" and one which really boiled down to the jobless taking in one another’s washing.

But the summit did succeed in achieving its primary aim — to provide the opportunity for some political peacocks to strut their stuff on the world stage, and they enjoyed it so much that they agreed — and here they were unanimous to do it all over again in July in sunny Italee!

Go for the big one

 

"Paying For Our Crimes" was the title of an article by Joan Bakewell (Guardian, 21 March) in which she highlighted various groups throughout the world who want restitution for the wrongs they have suffered.

There are those British prisoners of the Japanese during World War Two who want compensation for their ordeal; American indians and Australian aborigines who demand the return of lands stolen by white settlers, and an African organization which wants an apology for slavery along with the cancellation of all Third World debt on the grounds that "We don’t owe them anything. They owe us"!

All of these claimants, or at least their ancestors, have been treated abominably, but so has the world’s working class. They have been robbed, murdered and degraded by capitalism for two hundred years but socialists do not encourage them to ask for compensation. Instead, we urge them to forget about crumbs from the table of their masters’ banquets and to take the whole feast for themselves.

Benn’s glad tidings

That big lead over the Tories in the opinion polls may seem to point to a rosy future for the Labour Party, but an article by Tony Benn in Tribune (8 April) paints a different picture.He says that the party is in an alarming" position in the constituencies:

"Party membership is down . . . young people seem uninterested in joining . . . and our historic link with the unions has been weakened. "

If this last bit means that trade unions are at last putting the interests of their members before those of Labour politicians then it is good news. Even better is that any youngsters who dislike capitalism are less likely to have an entanglement with Labour standing between them and a consideration of the case for socialism.

Levelling-up

"Socialists believe in levelling down while Conservatives believe in levelling-up" has been the oft-repeated claim of trie Tories down the years.

Of course, by "socialists" they mean the Labour Party, but how valid is that claim? One feature of the past 13 years of Tory rule has been the huge pay-outs that top business people award one another. The latest example is the £1.4 million Barclay’s Bank paid to the head of its broking business while offering staff in its branches a two percent pay rise. Is this levelling-up?

Then there is the Tories’ insistence that if British capitalism is to be competitive workers here will have to accept the low level of wages and conditions prevalent in Asia and eastern Europe, and they actually boast to prospective overseas investors about how this is already happening.

If “levelling-up" means bringing the wages and conditions of workers here more into line with those of the world’s sweatshops then the Tories are living up to their claim.

An old tradition

A Glasgow Tory councillor has predicted that Tommy Sheridan, leader of the council’s Militant group will be in the House of Lords thirty years from now: 

"There was nervous laughter from the Labour benches when Councillor Young reminded them: "We've seen it all before and we will see it again". Presumably, the Militant leader would be re-absorbed into the mainstream of Labour ranks on his journey to the right. And respectability. ’ (The Glaswegian, 7 March)

Well, perhaps, but that Tory councillor does have history on his side. Bigger rebels than Sheridan, "Red Clydesiders" such as Manny Shinwell and Davie Kirkwood, ended up in ermine, so maybe some of that nervous laughter was coming from Sheridan and his Militant cohorts.

What a nerve!

Several orthodox Jews jeered the Dalai Lama during a visit to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem yesterday, calling the Tibetan spiritual leader crazy. "You look like an intelligent man, but you're stupid, fleeing from reality," shouted one worshipper.

No, this wasn’t one of the media’s April Fool jokes because it appeared in the press ten days earlier, but shouldn’t religious people be the last ones to accuse anyone else of ‘fleeing from reality"?

Sadly — we were right (1994)

From the May 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

With the acknowledged failure of state-capitalism world-wide, the futility of Labour's traditional policy of nationalization has been exposed. At another level, the policy of "demand management", on which rested Labour's claim to he able to control capitalism and deliver full employment has, also, been generally abandoned as capitalism has now clearly destroyed the illusion that it can he made a compassionate society. History has vindicated the socialist argument for the abolition of capitalism and the urgent establishment of a truly democratic system of production for use. As we look at the growing misery of the working class and, because we are workers, as we feel these miseries, we may confess that:

SADLY . . . WE WERE RIGHT!

The British Labour Party was born in 1906 — two years after the Socialist Party. The latter had a clearly-defined objective, the attainment of Socialism, and a distinctive, democratic strategy for achieving that objective.

The Labour Party, on the other hand, was, to use the words of some of those who delineated its changing strategies, a "broad church". Its membership was diverse in their aspirations: the trades unions, who provided the purse, saw it as a burgeoning political force that would represent their interests in parliament; a multiplicity of reform groups saw Labour as a potential promoter of their varying causes and there was even a minority political element, perhaps the most vociferous in the new party, that aspired to the eventual achievement of a "fairer" society. Some of the latter defined that fairer society as Socialism.

Agitational fodder

While the unions provided the day to day agitational fodder of the party, it was the most coherent strain within the political element, the Fabian group, that gave the organization its underlying philosophy. Whereas the Socialist Party argued that the achievement of Socialism necessitated a conscious democratic mandate, which, in turn, imposed the need to clearly define socialism and gain majority support for it, the Fabians took the view that capitalism could be transformed over time by a process of gradual reforms and, thus, made to function in the interest of the working class.

Effectively, the argument in support of gradualism was based on the belief that administrative changes, brought about by ongoing reforms, would allow capitalism to operate in the interest of society as a whole. Indeed that is probably overstating the case since the concept of real social equality would have been regarded by most Fabian thinkers as an impractical ideal. As opposed to this philosophy, the Socialist Party maintained that capitalism was a system structured on the systematic exploitation of the working class and could not, therefore, operate in the interest of the class it exploited. Today the question underlying that debate has been resolved by the history of the last seventy years but the events that made up that history should be recalled and remembered for, as we know now, the long flirtation of the working class with the Labour Party have been wasted years. They have been costly years in terms of disillusionment and frustration and. especially so for the legions of sincere workers who sacrificed so much for the Labour Party.

Between the two world wars the Labour Party gained power on two occasions. Both were minority governments and both proved dismally ineffective. Not only did Labour in government cause a general reduction in wages by reducing the pay of the civil service and the armed forces but it established the precedent followed by all future Labour governments of seeing unemployment rise during its term of office.

Beating the drum

The outbreak of World War Two saw Labour beating the recruitment drum for British capitalism while its leaders took places in government with the Tories and Liberals. As far as economic policy was concerned, Labour had never really promulgated anything more substantial than good intentions allied to a doctrinaire fixation with nationalization — which latter form of state capitalism its leaders misrepresented to the workers as common ownership and socialism.

In fact the real pioneers of what was to become the foundation stone of Labour’s economic policy came from outside the Labour Party. In the mid-Thirties, a group of banking theorists originated an economic philosophy that was to take its name from the most prominent of the group, John Maynard Keynes. The central theme of the new doctrine was that the cyclic nature of capitalist production, involving booms and slumps, identified by Marx and validated by the continuing history of capitalism, could be planned out of the system by a deliberate policy of "demand management".

It is not our purpose here to examine Keynes’s theory but, instead, to look at whether it proved effective in controlling the crises of capitalism. If the new formula did work, it would not, of course, resolve the problems of capitalism. Poverty, while it is aggravated by unemployment, is really a result of employment — the fact that the majority class in society has to sell its mental or physical ability to an employer. Many other of capitalism's endemic problems exist irrespective of whether there is a slump.

Nevertheless, the promise of being able to establish a means of controlling the economy would represent a tremendous step forward and would enable government to fashion its social policies on a foundation of full employment. It was this particular aspect of Keynesianism that appealed especially to the Labour Party. All the political parties of the Left, the Right and the Centre adopted Keynes and it was the apparent validity of that theory that made the subsequent provisions contained in the Beveridge Report for a post-war "Welfare State" appear realistic.

To all but the socialist the rise of welfare capitalism appeared to be a gargantuan leap forward. Looked at from the perspective of capitalist Britain in the ’90s, it might seem that the period following World War Two, when not only Labour but the Conservatives fought elections around promises of improved social welfare, were good days for the working class. Closer examination reveals otherwise. Both Labour and Tory governments struggled to keep public spending in check for, despite Keynes and the more important massive post-war rebuilding programme, capitalism limped along in a series of mini-slumps.

Industrial mayhem

These, then as now, led to increased public spending, as government (both Labour and Tory) tried the Keynesian formula of spending as a means of avoiding recession. This forced government into monetary policies that fed inflation and the net result was mayhem on the industrial front as workers fought to maintain the value of their wages against a background of rising prices and a multiplicity of legislative schemes for freezing pay.

It is arguable if the Keynesian strategy delayed the onslaught of slump but it failed to check unemployment nor could it disperse the storm clouds of capitalism’s crisis. In fact, it was Labour's last Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey, who was forced into making major assaults on public spending. In effect, though governments of both complexions had previously imposed welfare restrictions, it was Healey, at the behest of the International Monetary Fund, who inaugurated that phase of capitalism’s counter-attack on the entire concept of the welfare state that subsequently become known as "Thatcherism".

While socialists saw the post-war social security package as planning for the permanence of poverty, and while we pointed out that supporters of the Beveridge Plan in Parliament had argued their case largely on the basis of the benefits of the various parts of the Plan for British capitalism, nevertheless we accepted that a slice of bread was preferable to hunger. We oppose reformism not because we see all reforms as bad or undesirable but because they are promoted as a means of making capitalism secure and because even the mean reforms that the workers do win can, as we are all now well aware, be reduced or abolished.

Misrepresentation

Today, of course, the Labour Party doesn’t even pretend to champion nationalization or any of the other schemes which they lyingly misrepresented as socialism. They have made it clear that it is not their intention to revoke the anti-trade-union laws which the Tories introduced nor to undo the privatizations that this government has used to enrich its friends. Their principal preoccupation is to convince "business" — the visible face of capitalist parasitism — that they can help to improve profits and limit taxation.

Sometimes, of course, when we read the horror stories that attend on poverty, housing and sickness today, we are tempted to regret that we were right. That knowledge, however, must make us redouble our efforts to build a party offering a genuine socialist alternative to capitalism.

Richard Montague

Between the Lines: No sense in censorship (1994)

The Between the Lines column from the May 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

No sense in censorship

The government is currently proposing an amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill which seeks to ban videos which present what is termed "an inappropriate model for children". This follows allegations that the behaviour patterns of children are being adversely affected by violent video films which are sometimes "cut" for TV or are shown at times that children aren't supposed to be watching.

The Liberal intelligentsia, ever-watchful of further moves towards censorship, is already on the attack, as well it might be. The idea that "video nasties" are a prime mover in causing psychological disturbance is being seriously questioned, particularly — as today seems to be the case — if it is being put forward as virtually the sole explanation of rising violent crime today, by the government. One letter-writer to the Guardian (7 April) repudiated the government’s analysis well enough:

"I eagerly await the archaeological and historical evidence that Caligula and Nero were regulars at the local XXX-rated "adults-only" cinema, that Torquemada was a closet Texas Chainsaw Massacre fan, that Genghis Khan's bloody rampage across Asia and Europe was a search for more horror movies, that the Waffen SS ’s idea of a good night in was a few cans and some video nasties, and the discovery of the VCR from Mr and Mrs Stalin '.v living room on which young Josef watched pirated copies of I Spit On Your Grave. How else can we explain the atrocities committed throughout the history of the human race?"

Clearly, violent and other anti-social behaviour did not begin with the advent of such external factors as television and video. But this still leaves another question unanswered — do TV and video on occasion exacerbate tendencies that are already extant in society? They may not be the cause of psychological disturbance and violent behaviour, but this doesn’t mean they play no part at all.

The warp factor

If videos and TV have little influence over children — and adults for that matter — why do the bosses spend billions every year in advertising? Their research shows that TV and video footage can have a major influence on the way people think and act. Other research backs this up. The British Medical Journal in February this year reported the (separate) cases of two teenage boys who were diagnosed as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after watching a spoof BBC1 horror documentary. Regular viewing of violent TV shows and so-called "video nasties" may, therefore, have more deleterious effects than some may wish to think.

This entire debate on the role of TV and video has been given another airing recently with the arrival of a new general of violent cartoon programmes from the United States. In the forefront of this new craze is a cartoon series about two delinquent American teenagers called Beavis and Butt-Head.

Kicking butt

Like a dog that has returned to lick its own vomit, Channel 4 puts out Beavis and Butt-Head late on Friday nights as a replacement for The Word, presumably under the false impression that this will stop children watching it. For those of you who don’t already know', Beavis and Butt-Head are quite an anti-social pair. Their only apparent skill is for starting fires, and in one episode, censored for British TV, they blow up a cat by placing a firework up its backside. They are violent, sexist and only have respect for teenage gangsters older and more daring than themselves.

The supposed intention of this programme’s makers has been to satirize the low-culture world of modern American youth, and by and large, they succeed. But as with other forms of satire, there is a danger. Many viewers, enveloped in the same sort of dire culture as Beavis and Butt-Head, may simply see it as glorification of their lifestyle, just like the Tory racists who thought all along that Alf Garnett was a really good bloke.

Attempts were made to ban Beavis and Butt-Head in the UK for precisely this reason. But banning and censoring programmes doesn’t work. Time and again it has just driven them underground - if the market is there that is all that matters. In any case, censorship — no matter how repellent the programme under consideration — is the reactionary’s way out. Who has the right to do the banning and censoring of things other people might want to watch?

The real problem is not so much that violent, horrific and anti-social programmes and films get made but that capitalism provides such a ready market for them. A society based on cut-throat competition, where everything is to be bought and sold, including humans, degrades and brutalizes us all.

The "no future" nihilism of Beavis and Butt-Head is a particularly worrying manifestation of this and it has to be countered by socialists in open debate. One thing is for sure — capitalism will not be able to tame the horrors it has so far unleashed. Only a socialist society dedicated to peace and co-operation can do that.

Dave Perrin

Socialist Party Meetings (1994)

Party News from the May 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

50 Years Ago: The International Basis of Socialism (1994)

The 50 Years Ago column from the May 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

That Socialist society must, by its very nature, be of an international character, is a truism that the Socialist party has persistently stressed. This, not out of any pious sentiment, but through a recognition of the fact that production in the world to-day is based on a systematic division of labour which integrates and interlocks the whole world, or, at any rate, in wartime, large geographical sections of it. But, unfortunately, side by side with this international division of labour, or. more correctly, resting on it. there exists the capitalist system which rends society in twain by its class division, rendering impossible harmony and peace in the production and distribution of the necessities of life (. . .)

The most important factors in the closer welding of the world to-day. and the future, are undoubtedly air transport and radio. Both of these have succeeded in annihilating space (in the sense of time) to an unprecedented degree, and have brought the peoples of the world into closer contact with each other. To-day, of course, the contact is somewhat painful, but eventually it must play a great part in inculcating an international consciousness into the minds of the world's workers and bring home to them their essentially common interests.

(From an article by M. Judd in the Socialist Standard, May 1944.)

The Nature of Work Under Socialism (1994)

From the May 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

To some Mrs Thatcher was the anti-Christ, and there is some justice in this reprobation. But above all she was the arch anti-philosopher, the ultimate philistine, the unthinker, the stagnant pool of accumulated prejudice, a museum of reactionary forces. Yet the chord was struck, and the nation chimed to the note, as indeed the world even now still resonates from the impact of the seismic disturbance that swept through its economy, forcing all before it, and of which Thatcherism was a parochial part, neither particularly significant nor powerful in itself. But of true significance was the historical trend towards the fundamentalism of market theology, and the concomitant trend away from the values of human interaction and rational assessment and evaluation.

Socialist Thought
The re-evaluation of the present system of relations between people we may call socialist thought. Socialism asserts that the world changes in the sense that the currently-prevailing concept of human nature is not after all the absolute truth, but merely an historically contingent consequence of the equally contingent political and economic systems for the production and distribution of "goods".

Perhaps the most crucial component in all the socialist credo of alternatives is the radically utopian concept of work. All work in socialism will be voluntary. Voluntarism is to be extended not only to the choice of occupation but the the duration, intensity and all aspects of the organization of work. It is a curious fact that the greatest advocates of "freedom of choice" consider it the greatest affront to suggest that the producers of goods should have any choice in the matter of their own occupation.

Despite the oft-deployed transparent sophistry' calculated to show that Venezuelan gold miners and production-line workers in Eccles have freely entered into an open partnership with their employer, it is plain enough that starvation in the one case and insidious coercion in the other (e.g. the cheerful "back to work programme", the scheme for officially persecuting the unemployed) have been the most persuasive clauses in the arguments of employers.

No defence
For the most part capitalists do not even attempt this defence: the worker must do what is necessary for the market and for profits, and the individual choice must subserve this higher need. In this world, the luxury of choosing a life of fulfilling vocational work is the reserve of the lucky few; it is not the normal condition.

How has it come about that the most essential part of existence, that of what a human person is to do with their life by means of work, has been refused admission to those things that are left to choice? In a nutshell the received wisdom states:

1. work must be done to furnish need.
2. work is hated by all, therefore,
3. work must be obtained by compulsion.

Concerning premise (2), the history of work has indeed been a succession of misery, drudgery and oppression.

Hell of toil

It may indeed be historically true that in certain stages of human development, it was absolutely necessary that the great majority of humans had to be cast into a hell of unremitting toil. But for socialists, work is not inherently unpleasant. On the contrary, the "hardship" of labour, or the production of goods, is no longer even to be sharply separated from their consumption, or the "reward" of labour, since both are necessary for the harmony of the human being. The mastication of food, the exertion of muscle and brain, are not only equally important for life, but equally desirable for any balanced person.

Work may have hitherto been extracted by a species of social contract whose terms are ones of coerced servility, where "the elevation of the few is founded on the degradation of the many" (T.H. Green 1881). But these terms are not characteristics of work itself, only of the contemporary capitalist arrangement and are insisted upon in order to ensure the pliancy of the workforce. Consequently, the socialist rejects the punitive attitude towards work, for in socialism work is to be made pleasant. And if work is pleasant, then the main objection to it being made voluntary is removed.

Curse of work?

Yet nearly everybody seems to agree that work is a curse rather than a gift, but they confuse the nature of work with the nature of capitalism. The capitalist conception of work is founded on a philosophy of human nature, according to which a human is a "rational" creature whose greed and idleness direct them respectively to consume as much, and do as little, as possible. The absurdity of this position is obvious (try to consume without doing, or try doing without consuming), but despite its falsity it is a powerful image, sustained from above by sinecured intellectuals, and from below by a credulous proletariat. The first are sustained in their belief by a mixture of fear and vested interest, the second by inarticulation and institutionalized stupidity. However in fairness, intellectuals have never been merely the paid propagandists of mill owners, rather along with the owners of the means of production they shared an interest in perpetuating the financial institutions that supported them, and a trepidation concerning the permanent threat of revolt. The comfortable bourgeoisie seems to have long felt disturbed by the possibility of herdish multitudes rising up and wresting their comforts from them, a fear no doubt exacerbated by the feeling that the "working classes" were essentially alien, devoid of refinement or the potential for moderation.

Grovelling animals
These Morlocks, the "other" species, were just a kind of animal "with sensual desire and grovelling thought; foul of body and course of soul" (Ruskin, Ad Valorem 79).

Among nineteenth-century thinkers who were human enough to be moved by the condition of the working people, yet not so moved to overcome their prejudices towards them, were Charles Dickens and John Stuart Mill. Dickens, the author of Hard Times, effectively quarrels with the characters Bounderby and Gradgrind for reducing workers to economic and material factors of production, but would he allow those workers the helm of society? The unrestrained multitudes that run amok in A Tale of Two Cities reveal the beast Dickens believed to lurk in the common man. Animals deserve an understanding protector rather than emancipation. J.S. Mill had a similar attitude. Mill’s own life of arduous creative work did not soften him to the view that a fulfilling active life was for the lower orders:

"It is a common error of socialists to overlook the natural indolence of mankind; their tendency to be passive, to be the slaves of habit, to persist indefinitely in a course once chosen . . . they . . . will not exert themselves to improve, and letting their faculties rust, will lose even the energy required to preserve them from deterioration." (Principles of Political Economy, 1848)

Mill was not stupid, but intelligence is a weaker force than prejudice.

Brilliant stupidity

The history of thought is littered with examples of brilliant men thinking stupid things. Another great philosopher who was twisted by bigotry was David Hume:

". . . the poor labour more, and really live better, than in years of great plenty, when they indulge themselves in idleness and riot". (Political Discourses, 1752)

A lesser figure, Arthur Young, preached the orthodoxy as follows:

"Everyone but an idiot knows, that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious." (A Farmer's Tour Through the East of England, 1771)

The most remarkable thing about these insights into the forces governing the behaviour of the toiling classes is how easily the authors exempt themselves from their operation.

Selfless devotion

"Human nature" is for others, not for the sons of the aristocracy who toil at art or criticism or at philosophical tracts on human nature, not for the aspiring middle-classes who devote themselves selflessly to public service or career. No, only the incontinent masses seem to be subject to the universal laws of the human species.

Yet the socialist, perhaps surprisingly also has allies amongst these comfortable intellectual classes. Strangest of them is John Ruskin (1819-1900), ("I am a Socialist of the most stem sort — but 1 am also a Tory of the sternest sort"). Ruskin, cloistered academic and critic, nevertheless had the intellect to challenge the received concept of human nature and labour.

That concept of the guzzler, the idler is the target of Ruskin's biting satire:

"It is proposed to better the condition of the labourer by giving him higher wages. He will either drag people down to the same point of misery at which you found him, or drink his wages away. He will, I know it. Who gave him this will? Suppose it were your own son of whom you spoke, declaring to me that you dared not take him into your firm, nor even give him his just labourer’s wages, because if you did he would die of drunkenness, and leave half a score of children to the parish. ’Who gave your son these dispositions — I should enquire. Has he had them by inheritance or by education?’ By one or the other they must come; anti as in him; so also in the poor. Either these poor are of a race essentially different from ours . . .  or else. . . we make them as continent and sober as ourselves — wise and dispassionate as we are " (Ad Valorem 79)

The notion of the shirking, propagating, drinking, working classes survives down to the present.

The Child Support Agency is clearly a descendant of the fear of feckless scroungers leaving "half a score of children to the parish". For "parish" read "income support" and nothing has changed.

The idea that better wages for workers will not ensue in a riot of drunkenness and fornication receives most surprising support from that guru of laissez-faire economics, Adam Smith (1723-90):

"A plentiful subsistence increases the bodily strength of the labourer, and the comfortable hope of bettering his condition, and of ending his days in ease and plenty, animates him to exert his strength to the utmost. Where wages are high, accordingly we shall find the workmen more active, diligent and expeditious, than where they are low. " (Wealth of Nations, 1776)

This is not a description of an inherently lethargic creature. The tendency of humans to remain endlessly motionless has been greatly exaggerated. A life-time of meaningless slavery and overwork indeed gives an appealing aspect to the possibility of its permanent remission. But we look at life from a distorted position, one of battered submission and a routine of pointless drudgery.

The point of socialism is to remove the malignant influence of capitalism which poisons our attitude to production and alienates us from its purposes.

Satisfaction

The essential purpose of work is not to make profits, and consequently the act of labour is not essentially vile. Labour may indeed be a devil while encased in Mammonism, but freed from that prison, the purpose of work is revealed in a truer light, and is two-fold: firstly to provide the goods of life, whether food, tables, transport, health, books, music or knowledge; and secondly to provide satisfaction in the process of producing these goods.

No work which does not satisfy both these requirements will be considered necessary in socialism. The act of producing goods (as opposed to profits or "bads") is precisely what ensures this satisfaction. This being so, coercion, punishment or persuasion is not necessary for the securing of those human activities essential for the products of civilization. It is not beyond human wit to devise a system to combine our need to work, our need to be valued, our need for regard and for self-regard, with those things which need to be done. It is not beyond our wit to combine our freedom, i.e. our voluntarism, with our needs.

The paradigm shift required to understand the transition from capitalist work to socialist work may however be beyond many a great philosopher. Unfortunately many elderly philosophers suffer from a severe ease of hardening of the categories, and would rather stick to fox hunting than consider a novel idea. In many ways children are better philosophers than their long-robed superiors, since they have not yet become set in their ways.

Higher understanding

One small boy in particular, albeit a fictional one, demonstrates a higher understanding of people’s relation to work than a flock of Oxford dons:

"Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it, namely, that, in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers, or performing on a tread-mill, is work, whilst rolling nine pins or climbing Mont-Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service that would turn it into work, then they would resign." (Mark Twain: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer).

Norman Armstrong

The TV Boss Takes Power (1994)

From the May 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

The victory of Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia in the recent Italian election should be read as a warning. A year ago neither Berlusconi nor his party existed. The three biggest commercial TV networks in Italy are owned by Berlusconi. These, combined with huge financial resources, were used to sell the hard right, free market ideology which won the election. It is like Murdoch deciding to make the odious Andrew Neil the next Prime Minister of Britain — or Maxwell having used his media power base to do the same for himself: from Labour MP to media tycoon to national leader. The power which can be utilized by those who own and control the media is not to be underestimated.

Media imagery

This was not just the victory of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, with its smoothly designed media imagery and appropriation of the Italian football song as its theme tune; in coalition with Berlusconi was the ultra-nationalist Northern League, led by the Yeltsin like chauvinist yob, Umberto Bossi, and the cleancd-up neo-fascist party, Alleanza Nationale, led by Gianfranco Fini. The latter is on record as stating that "Mussolini was the greatest statesman of the century”. There is no way that the neo-fascist right would have been able to achieve the respectability of government office without Berlusconi's front to work behind. It was the freshness and media potency of Forza Italia which persuaded many voters to turn a blind eye to the unpalatable historic origins of Fini’s party. As it is, we are now seeing for the first time since 1945 a group of neo-fascist politicians taking their place in the government of a major European nation state. It did not take very long for capitalism to recreate that horror, despite claims that the military victory in 1945 had defeated such an ideology once and for all.

Cartoon by Peter Rigg.

But this was not just a spectacular act of trickery by a media tycoon. Nor was it a relapse of millions of Italian workers into the idiocies of the Twenties and Thirties. Once again, the real stimulus to this retreat into right-wing callousness was the utter failure of the left-wing reformists to show any signs of being able to tame the effects of capitalism. Like all reformists everywhere, the PSI and PCI, running in the recent election as a so-called Progressive Alliance, were complete victims of the iron economic laws of the profit system. And like their counterparts in the British government, Craxi and his fellow political leaders were not only extremely corrupt but — sin of political sins — they were caught. So, a discredited left-centrist political tradition provided the very soil in which the simplistic messages of the hard right grew.

In itself, neo-fascists sitting in a government created out of the media power of a would-be President is not of great moment. But it is part of a political trend. In the last US election the rise of Ross Perot, a transparently right-wing crackpot, was based quite simply upon the fact that he was a billionaire with money to buy as much media time as he wanted.

Intellectually bankrupt

Against him were two discredited and intellectually-bankrupt opponents: Bush and Clinton. The most important point about the Perot campaign was not that he lost, but that there was a chance that he could have won. In the USA today the right wing ravings of the media star, Rush Limbaugh, are all the rage. Is he to be dismissed as a future Presidential hopeful? And if not a lunatic like him, what about some other smoother media created demagogue? In Russia the ultra-nationalist ravings of Zhirinovsky and his Liberal Democratic Party are such that even the thuggish Yeltsin is regarded by political commentators as the most respectable option. In France Le Pen is still on the loose, still winning a fifth or quarter of the votes in the South and around Paris, and still forcing the more legitimate parties of French capitalism to adopt more racist positions so as to compete with the neo-fascists.

Schindler’s List

Anyone who has seen the new film, Schindler’s List, which in the view of the present writer is the finest film to be made by an American director in decades and should be viewed by everyone with a functioning brain, will know what happens when political instability gives way to political crisis and implosion. After the sighs of resentment at useless politicians will often come the desperate rush towards demagogic leaders and the politics of simple hate. In a century which has seen concentration camps, electoral victories by fascistic forces are to be taken seriously.

Mussolini and Hitler won the support of workers on the basis of an economic system in severe crisis and a political system which fewer and fewer people any longer believed in. Both of these factors are clearly present now. But Mussolini and Hitler won power through ritualistic techniques of persuasion essentially more typical of the last century than this one: mass rallies, flag-waving, anthems and military stunts. Today any potential dictator could do no better than obtain control of the electronic media and the press. These "barons” are elected by nobody and accountable to nobody. They are the most obvious sign that capitalism is not essentially a democratic political culture. They should be watched very carefully.

Steve Coleman

Join - don't just applaud us! (1994)

From the May 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

There are two ways of looking at birthdays: they are either one more step in the onward march towards death and oblivion or part of the process of growth. For most individuals, ninetieth birthdays are passed on the geriatric scrapheap reserved for those who can no longer be milked for profit.

Balding sales reps might try to convince themselves that "life begins at forty", but only the senile are sanguine enough to think it starts at ninety. So, if your date of birth was 1904 or earlier about the best you are likely to hope for is that you can remember it’s your birthday.

On 12 June 1994 the Socialist Party will be ninety. This is neither cause for ecstatic celebration nor embarrassed bitterness. To be sure, our party has much to be proud of. We have stuck to our principles with a consistency that has alarmed our opponents, most of whom have disappeared over the years, despite their pragmatic "something now” opportunism. We started out as, and remain today, the only genuinely democratic political party in Britain. We have no leaders, no secret meetings from which our fellow workers are excluded, no hidden agendas. We are a party run by its members and answerable to no millionaires or union barons.

We have no blood on our hands, having never once supported a war for capitalist interests. Every war since 1904 has been exposed and opposed, even when our comrades were thrown into prison cells for their principles. We have never collaborated with any capitalist government, unlike the tacticians of the Left who have accepted our view that the Labour Party is anti-working-class until election times when they have consistently told workers to vote Labour. Never once have we made any concessions to racist or nationalist sentiments, and from our inception declared against racism and sexism in all their forms. We have not lied about the possibility of reforming capitalism so as to make it tolerable to live under.

Whilst never opposing reforms which might alleviate the lives of the wealth-producing majority, we have consistently and. at the risk of unpopularity, stood firmly against reformism and the illusion that capitalism can somehow be made decent. We have kept alive the great socialist vision of common ownership and democratic control, never once confusing that with the state capitalist proposal for placing the profit system under new management. We have stood out not for fair wages but for the abolition of wage labour; not for more money for the poor but for the abolition of money and thereby the end of poverty; not for the welfare crumbs but free and equal access for all to the abundant resources of this rich and fruitful planet. And we have never flinched from advocating revolution as our goal. Ours has never been to ask the bosses for a share of the loaf; only when conscious and democratically organized workers take the means of life will the world be ours. The Socialist Party has stood alone and with iron principles throughout these ninety years and for that we have reason to be proud.

But there will be no celebrations next month. That we have survived is an achievement. It has not been without effort and personal costs to those who have stuck to their commitments. Indeed, we have done more than just survived: when our party was formed in London on 12 June 1904 it comprised a group of few more than a hundred workers, mainly in London. Today, though still a party of hundreds rather than thousands, we are organized in many parts of Britain and Ireland; we have companion parties in other lands and new ones forming as we write, translating our literature into languages which we have long wanted to see our words published in. This is not mere survival, but growth indeed. But still no celebrations. There is far too much work to be done for us to bathe in the lethargic complacency of nostalgic self-congratulation. We are a movement, not a monument.

It would be embarrassing if the best that we could hope to do at ninety is remember how good it was when we were twenty. Wc will not let our political enemies forget how we, in opposition to both Right and Left, refused to be taken in by the Leninist claims of having introduced socialism in one country a backward, peasant economy at that. But remembering the past is no substitute for making the future.

What better way could the Socialist Party mark its anniversary than by looking forward with unprecedented energy rather than looking back and giving two minutes silence for the dead? In June 1994 our party will be in the midst of its biggest publicity campaign ever. Thanks to the fine support which has been given in response to our "Go For A Million* initiative the Socialist Party will be standing in four of the British Euro-constituencies: the equivalent of thirty-seven parliamentary constituencies. Over a million manifestoes will be distributed to workers in those four areas and that will mean that several million people will have a chance to read them. Thousands more manifestoes will be distributed in other constituencies where, although we have no candidate, we shall be urging voters to mark their ballot paper for Socialism. Hundreds of specially-prepared Media Files are going out to British and European newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations.

Many socialists have thrown their energies into this biggest-ever campaign — and many more are called upon now. Indeed, if ever there has been a good argument against the Socialist Party (and all of the criticisms of our principles fall flat upon investigation and debate) it has been that we don't do enough. To this we have always replied that if we are doing too little it is up to those who agree with us to support us. Never has there been a more propitious time to do so. For, not only are we on the move with a great and active campaign, but the capitalist system which we are against is looking more and more discredited, exhausted and bankrupt of ideas for its own future as each week goes by. If now is not the time for socialist fellow travellers to arise from their armchairs and join the fight, when will be?

That is the way to mark ninety years for socialism: by doing our utmost to ensure that we will not be here for another ninety years - to remember our past so that we can abolish ourselves in the future. For we are the only party in existence which seeks its own abolition; nothing would please us more than to be able to shut up shop because there is no more need to advocate the socialist transformation of society. We look forward to the day when the absurdity of having to argue in favour of producing food for people to eat and not for it to be sold with a view to profit will mystify historians of our movement. Our purpose is not merely to dream, but to make real our vision by destroying the nightmare which is the system of production for profit.

So, look out for no anniversary anthems in the next issue of the Socialist Standard (which will itself have been published continuously, without a single month having been missed, since September 1904). We will have more pressing matters on our minds. Wc intend for the next issue to reach thousands of new readers — a small step perhaps, but one which will lead to greater strides. How excited would have been our comrades in 1904 to think that the principles of socialism, which they had to advocate by walking and cycling to open-air platforms at which a few hundred might gather, can now be put to over a million workers within the space of a month? Are we downhearted? What do you think?

Steve Coleman

Europe - or the World? (1994)

European Election Statement from the May 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Most people would agree that the results of elections make very little difference to the way we live. Our problems stay the same. Governments can't keep their promises because they are out to run a system which is not for our benefit. It is a system that puts profit and money before everything and it is run for the benefit of a few.

As producers we create the things we need but we don't own them. We have to buy them - we have to pay, pay and pay again. We are forever in debt - paying the mortgage or the rent, the council tax, the gas, water and electricity bills. We can't have food and clothing unless first we pay - so someone can get a profit.

We don't build the hospitals we need and we don't clean up the environment and always it's for the same reason - there isn't the money. In Europe there are 40 million unemployed because there is no profit in giving them jobs. Food is withheld in store whilst people go without. Building workers are idle whilst families are homeless. This is the system of economic oppression that controls our lives and makes us slaves to money and profit.

It's no use electing people to run this mad system - we have to get rid of it. This can only be done by a majority of people who want a world run solely for our needs and are prepared to work for it. It depends on our ability to cooperate with each other in our mutual interests. All of us have this ability so the urgent and vital work of building a sane world is the great challenge in front of us.

The aim is to take the land, factories, resources, energy and transport systems out of the hands of those who own and control them. We depend on these means of life, we produced them - and now we must take them back. They must be made freely available to the community as a whole and used solely for the benefit of everyone.

We can only achieve a world of unity by working in voluntary cooperation. Not working for wages, which is part of the present system of economic exploitation, but working together producing the things that each of us needs. This is the only way to live as a true community and we can do it.

With the entire productive system made freely available to the whole community and brought under its democratic control; with cooperation and production solely for needs, the economic burdens which cripple our lives will be immediately removed. For example, with housing, all rents, mortgage debts and council taxes will be abolished. Every person will have security of tenure in the place where they live and from this basis the building industry will be geared to providing every person with decent housing. Similarly, with the abolition of the market and its buying and selling, food, clothing and all other goods and services will become freely available.

• If you agree that everybody should have an equal say in the ways things are run;

•  If you agree that building hospitals, schools and amenities, and cleaning up the environment should be free from the constraints of the money profit system;

•  If you agree that stored up food should be distributed to those who need it, and that stockpiled building materials should be used for the construction of homes;

•  If you agree that we should run the world democratically and in each other's interests through voluntary cooperation, then you should not only vote for the Socialist Party candidate to express your agreement, you should contact us with a view to finding out more and to joining us help build a new sane society.

The four seats in which Socialists are standing in the June 9 elections to the European Parliament are:

BIRMINGHAM EAST (covering Edgbaston, Erdington, Hall Green, Hodge Hill, Northfield, Selly Oak, Small Heath, Sparkbrook and Yardley).

Candidate: Ron Cook.

Contact address: Ron Cook, 11 Dagger I.ane, West Bromwich B71 4BT (Tel: 021-533 1712).

GLASGOW (all Glasgow).

Candidate: Jim Fleming.

Contact address: Dick Donnellv, 112 Napiershall Street,

Glasgow G20 6HT (Tel: 041-333 0822).

LONDON CENTRAL (Camden, Islington, Westminster, Kensington, Chelsea and Fulham).

Candidate: Clifford Shipper

Contact address: Gavin Sinclair, 78 Park Avenue South, N8

8LS (Tel: 071-278 6676).

LOTHIANS (Edinburgh, Linlithgow, Livingston, Bathgate and Dalkeith).

Candidate: John McGregor.

Contact address: Derek Devine, 1 Lochrin Place, Tollcross,

Edinburgh IT 13 8QX (Tel: 031-228 1347).

If you want to help, or want more information about the campaign in your area, write to or phone the contact above, or write to 52 Clapham High St, London SW4 7UN.

Against the market? (1994)

Book Review from the May 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Against the Market: Political Economy, Market Socialism and the Marxist Critique. By David McNally. Verso. 1993.

The title of this book is wrong. David McNally is not against the market. He is only against the regulation of the production and distribution of wealth by the free play of market forces. He goes out of his way to deny that he is suggesting "that markets can be eliminated overnight" and states that "the issue of contention, therefore, is not the use of market mechanisms within the framework of socialist planning". So, despite his repudiation of so-called "market socialism" as an absurd contradiction in terms he too is one, seeing "a continuing role for some market mechanisms within a socialist society".

This sort of position only makes sense if you conceive of socialism as being the state ownership and operation of the means of production, which, as a Canadian academic who supports the SWP in Britain (he has written a pamphlet for them), McNally does. But of course this is state capitalism not real socialism.

If this is your idea of socialism then the market can be seen as one possible way of allocating consumer goods and services, and it is here that McNally sees a continuing role for the market. He is, however, informed enough to know that Marx envisaged socialism as being a society entirely without markets, money or any buying and selling, but gets round this by arguing that a "socialist" government should pursue "the logic of demarketization, decommoditization and demonetization of economic life". In other words, that these basic economic categories of capitalism should be abolished but only gradually.

What he has in mind is the progressive introduction, as economic circumstances permit, of free services such as health care, education, nurseries, water, heating, lighting, electricity, local transport and housing. In addition people are to be given coupons which they can exchange for a growing range of basic foodstuffs and clothes as well as an increasing supply of free tickets to the theatre, sports matches and long-distance transport; individuals would be able to swap with other individuals coupons they don’t want ("eg transport coupons for cultural events"). Finally, they would be paid a sum of money to purchase luxuries and non-basic items which as today would be produced for sale.

Whatever this is, it isn’t socialism and in some respects would be worse than today. Imagine the extra paperwork involved in administering the coupon system, and why give people coupons that they can only use to get certain goods? Why not give them the money to buy them? As for swapping coupons . . . 

What this is in fact is a proposal that the government, as virtually the only employer, should pay people partly in kind, partly in coupons — increasingly in kind and coupons — and partly in money. Socialism does indeed involve the disappearance of money, but not in this way, which would replace the limited choice people now have in being paid in money rather than in goods.

But it wouldn’t work anyway. Implicit in the idea of the state ownership and operation of the economy is that this is established on a national scale. Which means that the state is not at all the free agent in economic matters that McNally’s scheme assumes.

Today there is a world economy on which all parts of the world are dependent for some of their raw materials, components and consumer goods. So a national statified economy would have to purchase these; to do this it would need money and the only way to get this would be to offer some of its products for sale on the world market. But to find a buyer their prices would have to be competitive, and this could only be achieved by cutting costs through investment in the up-to-date machinery and methods of production.

In this way the world market would restrict the amount of resources the state could allocate to the consumption of its workforce and so impede McNally’s cosy image of a steadily expanding provision of free goods and services. If, alternatively, the state decided to try to isolate itself from world market conditions by trying to produce substitutes for the needed imports, this would raise its costs of production and so, once again, restrict the amount available for consumption.

The fact is that there is no way-out on a national scale. And if McNally is not convinced he should read the two latest books of his fellow (but more independent-minded) SWPer Nigel Harris (The End of The Third World and National Liberation).

Despite this, most of McNally’s book is genuinely interesting. He describes now the ruling class in Britain took measures, through enclosures and abolishing the old poor law system, to create a working class that was entirely dependent on working for an employer for their livelihood. He also discusses the views of Adam Smith (apparently he wasn’t as bad as his present-day supporters make out), Malthus (who was) and of the early 19th century critics of capitalism.

At the risk of being accused of being pedantic, we must point out that someone who presumes to give "the Marxist critique" ought not to make the elementary mistake, repeated three times, of saying that "capitalists pay the full value of labour as established on the market". What workers sell, and what capitalists normally pay the full value of, is their labour-power, which is capable of producing a greater value than its own. If capitalists paid "the full value of labour" they wouldn’t make any profits.

Adam Buick

From Methodism to Marxism (1994)

From the May 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Socialism? Nice idea. But too much like hard work!"

I used to be a Christian, once upon a time. A Methodist, no less, and a preacher to boot.

This is not some kind of confession or personal testimony – we have all had to make some sort of intellectual journey to call ourselves socialists. It is just that I called myself a Methodist – and yet I enjoyed a drink then, as I still do, regularly indulging myself, sometimes to excess.

The time at which John and Charles Wesley, the founders of Methodism, were preaching – the mid-18th century – was one in which there was widespread disquiet among the chattering (and, more importantly, the employing) classes of the day about the effects of the "demon drink" on society. Thus, Methodists were, for many years, encouraged to sign the pledge, and constantly railed against alcohol and those who consumed it. It was a theme that other sects picked up on. including, in the 19th century, the Salvation Army.

But it did not worry me that abstinence was – or had been – one of the central planks of Methodism. Indeed, it did not seem to worry many Methodists of my generation. "Well, we understand that there used to be a point to it." they would say, "but alcohol's OK in moderation, the problem's not the same now!" – ignoring the fact that there are many more alcoholics, and alcohol-related deaths, now than there ever were in the Wesley s' day.

That kind of selectiveness with ideas or creeds is common enough in Methodism, but it is by no means exclusive to it.

Many die-hard cold warriors, and sundry other tinpot armchair militarists, still sit in churches, praying to their god, in spite of the fact that, according to the New Testament, their god had enjoined his followers to "love their enemies" and to "turn the other cheek" when wronged.

The Queen – the richest woman in the world, or thereabouts – apparently has her god to thank for her position. Yet Jesus told his disciples that it was "harder for a rich man to enter through the gates of heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle"; called the love of money the root of all evil; and instructed his disciples to give away all that they owned before they could follow him. (Anyone tempted to think, at this point, of Jesus as some sort of proto-communist would be well advised to remember his injunction to "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's").

Various apologists for the exploiters in our society have tried to soften the blow of Jesus' apparent rejection of the rich. I remember reading one "explanation" which argued that the Eye of the Needle was, in fact, a small gate in Jerusalem's city wall; and that while it was difficult for a camel to get through, it was not impossible. But the fact remains that Jesus apparently took the view that one could not serve two masters at once: to serve the interests of one's personal fortune detracted from one's service to, and contemplation of, God.

I spent a lot of time making that kind of point from the pulpit. But in truth I was just as guilty of ignoring inconvenient parts of the doctrine. The Bishop of Durham and I both questioned the literal truth of the biblical miracles, the Virgin Birth, and the Resurrection. In my case I rejected them completely. I even came to the conclusion that Jesus was not the Son of God – an idea which, while it may not be central to the Gospels, is certainly central to the Nicene Creed, the statement of faith adopted by all the Western Christian churches.

And yet, for quite a time, I still continued to consider myself a Christian.

Most, if not all, Christians down the ages have tended to ignore bits of the creed that did not suit them. To a great extent this is because whole chunks of the Christian bible, at any rate, are contradictory, so a Christian has to decide what kind of Christian he or she is going to be. But also it is, in part, because many people's religious beliefs are inherited, rather than considered. As they get older, if they retain any religious faith at all, it is likely to be in a bastardized, even unorthodox, form.

Socialists, on the other hand, one might expect to be rather clearer about what principles they hold dear. People calling themselves socialists, or Marxists, should have no difficulty in thinking through logically what their credo is.

And yet, ostensibly socialist/Marxist groupings and political parties seem to have real problems with identifying their principles and sticking to them.

The Labour Party, taken as a whole, has never really had any principles, at least none that it was not prepared to sell in exchange for public office. It has long been what it calls a "broad church" of reformists, opportunists, and sundry ideologically-challenged bleeding hearts. As such, it has never really known where it wants to go, or how to get there. For a while, a majority of the party thought that nationalization was the way forward. But it was never clear where that way was supposed to go, whether public ownership was a means to an end or an end in itself. And now in practice, even Clause 4 has been abandoned in a bid to make the policy-less party attractive to voters.

But one thing that the Labour Party has always maintained is that it is a socialist party, albeit that the word has stuck in the throat of some of those party leaders using it. Socialism, in the Labour Party dictionary, is a vague, woolly catch-all word: anyone can be a socialist in the Labour Party. There are no central ideas there to embarrass voters or activists, be they never so egotistical, opportunistic, or venal. Or indeed as rich as Croesus. This non-definition of "socialism" is deliberate. The main objective of the Labour Party is to get elected, not to change society. So the fact that nothing substantive ever gets done to justify the use of the word "socialism" – that the Labour Party has not advanced the cause of the working class one jot, despite several terms of parliamentary office – is viewed as unimportant.

Marx existed

It is, perhaps, possible to view the word "socialism" as a nebulous term that can mean a variety of things. But not the word "Marxism". After all, unlike with Jesus, we can be sure that Marx existed. We know much of what he did and said. And, again unlike Jesus, we have books, letters and articles that we know he wrote himself. So there should be no problem with deciding what may legitimately be termed Marxism, and what may not.

And yet, astoundingly, there are groups, inside and outside the Labour Party, who call themselves Marxist and Trotskyist simultaneously, despite the fact that the two words are a complete contradiction in terms. These include Militant, Socialist Organizer and the SWP, to name but a few.

It does not take a genius to work out that, however Trotsky himself defined his political views, his ideas were fundamentally at odds with those of Marx.

For instance, Marx took the view that the liberation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself. The implication of which is that the transition from capitalism to socialism will be, and must be, a democratic process. A good Trotskyist, on the other hand, will say that the revolution will be brought about by a dedicated (for which read "small") band of professional revolutionaries, who will educate the working class to want socialism after it has supposedly been established. Trying to persuade the majority of workers to understand and want and work for socialism, in order that it may – as it must – be established democratically, is impossible in the eyes of the Trotskyist.

Far too difficult, too much like hard work. So the Trotskyist falls into the trap of the "revolutionary vanguard" concept, an apparently easier route to socialism which is, in fact, a cul-de-sac, a route only to dictatorship.

All Trotskyist sects thus fall at the first fence of the route to a Marxian socialist/communist society (and Trotsky distinguished between socialism and communism in a way that Marx never did).

But they also seem to have problems with what it is exactly that they are striving for.

Marx defined socialism as a society wherein wages and money, private property and profit had all been abolished. But I remember talking to a member of Socialist Organizer who scoffed at the Socialist Party's vision of society as pie-in-the-sky idealism, at best only to be seen centuries from now.

The Socialist Party does not, of course, believe that Marx was a god, or a Pope, there to be infallible. He was a man, whose thought developed over the years, and who quite often was wrong. But with others, drawing on earlier ideas and on observation, he came to an understanding of capitalism and its alternative, which is clear and logical – and which, as a whole, the Socialist Party believes to be correct. The Socialist Party, like Marx, holds that a moneyless, propertyless society is feasible and desirable. It also holds that the only way to achieve such a society is democratically, by persuasion. There is no substitute for hard work, for "making socialists".

Marx said that we have a world to win. He never said it would be easy.

Paul Burroughs

The dispossessed (1994)

Book Review from the May 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin is a tale of future worlds. One is Anarres and clearly labelled "anarchist". The other, Urras, is less clearly described as "propertarian" and "archist". The plot is briefly but dramatically outlined in the blurb.

"Shevek, a brilliant physicist. . . single-handedly attempts to re-unite two planets cut off from each other by centuries of distrust. Anarres, Shevek's homeland, is a bleak moon settled by an anarchic Utopian civilization; Urras, the mother planet, is a world very similar to Earth, with its warring nations, great poverty, and immense wealth. Shevek risks everything in a courageous visit to Urras  to learn, to teach, to share. But his gift becomes a threat. . . and in the profound conflict which ensues, Shevek must re-examine his philosophy of life."

The book's thirteen chapters alternate between Anarres and Urras.

Invited to dislike

LeGuin tells us much that we seem to be invited to dislike about Urras, and just a few things that we are invited to approve (although, depending on your point of view, you may have a different ratio of approval to disapproval).

Urras is an "incredibly complex society with all its nations, classes, castes, cults, customs and its magnificent, appalling and interminable history". It is organized "hierarchically, from the top down". In education there is an examination system that involves "cramming in information and disgorging it at demand". "The state recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself." So there are secret police. And the state uses force, with police helicopters and machine guns, to put down demonstrations that threaten the status quo.

Life on Urras closely resembles, and somewhat exaggerates, life in the USA in the 1970s, when the author was writing (in two decades the general picture has changed little). They burn dirty clothes because new cheap ones cost less than cleaning. There are private cars, "splendid machines of bizarre elegance". Everything is "either useless to begin with or ornamented so as to disguise its use."

Rats and asylums

There are three competing mail companies. Everything comes "inside layers and layers of wrappings". The basic function of the radio "was advertising things for sale". Other delights on Urras included rats, army barracks, insane asylums, poorhouses, pawnshops, executions, thieves, tenements, rent collectors, the unemployed, and "a dead baby in a ditch".

In the realm of thought and ideas there is also much to dislike about Urras. There is religious bigotry ("He's a strict-interpretation Epiphanist. Recites the Primes every night. A totally rigid mind.") There are "birdseed papers", "written by semiliterates for semiliterates" which manufacture news. Shevek observes that Urrasti people always look anxious: "Was it because, no matter how much money they had. they always had to worry about making more, lest they die poor?"

Now to Anarres. the "anarchist country". It, too, has a system and has people doing things and thinking thoughts. Anarres is "an experiment in nonauthoritarian communism. . . (the people) are not only socialists, they are anarchists".

No law, no police

There are no laws, no governments, no police, no money. Or, to add a bit of positive qualification, there is "no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. . . no government but the single principle of free association". While "nominally there's no government on Anarres. . . obviously there's administration. . ." The network of administration and management is called PDC, Production and Distribution Coordination. "They are a coordinating system for all syndicates, federatives and individuals who do productive work. They do not govern persons; they administer production". Nobody is ever punished for anything, though sometimes "they make you go away by yourself for a while".

There is no distinction between men's work and women's work: "A person chooses work according to interest, talent, strength -what has sex to do with that?" The "dirty work" is done by everyone on one day out of ten on a basis of choice from "rotating lists" "People take the dangerous, hard jobs because they take pride in doing them".

Positive

Most of what we learn that is positive about Anarres is in terms of thoughts, ideas, even moral precepts. At a personal level, members of a community were not moved by mass feeling but "there were as many emotions as there were people". The status of religion on Anarres is ambiguous. There is no established religion in the sense of churches and creeds, but "you could not seriously believe that we had no religious capacity?" Takver "had always known that all lives are in common, rejoicing in her kinship to the fish in the tanks of her laboratories, seeking the experience of existences outside the human boundary". One character offers a moralistic judgment: "Having's wrong, Sharing's right." Shevek is described as having been brought up "in a culture that relied deliberately and constantly on human solidarity, mutual aid".

Anarres has a population of only 20 million compared with a 1,000 million on Urras. It was given to the Odonians (theoretical anarchists) as a means of "buying them off with a world, before they totally undermined the authority of law and national sovereignty on Urras". There was trade between the two worlds, but in practice Anarres was a mining colony of Urras. For an anarchist society, Anarres is remarkably centralized. Abbenay is the capital, "the mind and center of Anarres. . . There had to be a center. The computers that coordinated the administration of things, the division of labor and the distribution of goods, and the central federatives of most of the work syndicates were in Abbenay, right from the start".

Despite this the people of Anarres have to put up with many shortages and deprivations. Printing had to cover the whole page because paper was short. The economy would not support the building and upkeep of individual houses and apartments. People had to save up their daily allowances for a party. and had to fetch their letters from the mail depot because there were no postmen. However, the general picture is one of high morale despite the shortages and deprivations.

Clear aim

LeGuin had an aim in writing The Dispossessed. Fortunately, we have her own account of this. Responding to a question by Lynn McCaffery, she says:

"... The only trouble with an anarchist country is going to come from its neighbors. Anarchism is like Christianity – it's never really been practised – so you can 't say it's a practical proposal. Still, it's a necessary idea. We have followed the state far enough – too far, in fact. The state is leading us to World War III. The whole idea of the state has got to be rethought from the beginning and then dismantled. One way to do this is to propose the most extreme solution imaginable: you don 't proceed little by little; you go to the extreme and say, "Let's have no government, no state at all." Then you try to figure out what you have without it, which is essentially what I was trying to do in 'The Dispossessed'. This kind of thinking is not idealistic, it's a practical necessity these days. We must begin to think in different terms, because if we just continue to follow the state, we've had it. So, yes, 'The Dispossessed' is very much in earnest about trying to rethink our assumptions about the relationships between human beings." (Across the Wounded Galaxies)

Then McCaffery asked LeGuin why-she had set her anarchist Utopia in such a bleak environment:

"The way I created Anarres was probably an unconscious economy of means: these people are going to be leading a very barren life, so I gave them a barren landscape. Anarres is a metaphor for the austere life, but I wasn't trying to make a general proposal that a Utopia has to be that way."

For LeGuin what seems to be preventing people making a better fist of life on contemporary Earth is not so much capitalism as government and the state.

It follows that what she believes desirable is not so much socialism, a system to replace capitalism, as anarchism, a system to replace "archism". That last term isn't actually in the dictionary, not even in a large one. But so much of what LeGuin writes about Urras is also a fair description of capitalism that perhaps we shouldn't be too concerned about her choice of words for its alternative.

The important difference between LeGuin's view and the socialist view is surely about the means of changing from one type of society to the other. LeGuin is vague about these means. Like most anarchists, she doesn't think in terms of democratic political organization for the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by socialism. She is right to "see the folly of reformism ('you don't proceed little by little')". But organization is important – indeed it is vital. By allowing the "archists" to be well-organized in a favourable environment, and the anarchists to be a minority shipped off to a barren planet, she is not only giving the devil the best tunes: she is allowing him to take over the whole music profession.

One serious criticism of The Dispossessed is that we aren't told enough about the Urras "working class", and what little we are told is derogatory and disillusioning. We know they read "birdseed" papers and get massacred when they revolt, but that's about all. LeGuin sketches them in as semiliterates, as a kind of ancient Roman "bread and circuses" mob. There is something deeply pessimistic about a scenario that envisages the intellectual, material and political degradation of over 90 percent of the population.

This remarkable book stimulates the imagination and paints a picture of a future world that has a good many socialist features even if it doesn't deal at all adequately with the politics of how we can get to that world.

Stan Parker