Unhappy Anniversary (1995)

From the May 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

 

The end of the second world slaughter was characterised by a belief that the future would be one of peace, jobs, good homes and free, best available health care for everyone and that unemployment. poverty and want were going to be eradicated forever through state control of resources . . . 

Waiting for the unimaginable to happen, we were in a state of eerie suspense for a short time before VE-Day. Of course we had had time to prepare for the end of the war, as the stress factors were eliminated one-by-one. With the Luftwaffe beaten out of existence the air raids stopped and the blackout was lifted. We had endured the flying bombs and the rockets more easily because we knew they were Germany's last gasp. But then it seemed that all there was to do was to wait, wondering whether there was still enough military fanaticism smouldering in Germany to burst into flame again. So when the date was announced it had some elements of an anti-climax In fact this was partly due to an official bungle; originally May 9 was to be the day, with a dramatically-staged ceremony in Berlin, but the plan was upset by a leaked news report.

A couple of nights later we had our street party, when we fêted the street’s one war hero—a man who had landed at Arnhem but who had then, from his own account, rapidly sought out some Germans to surrender to. At the cross-roads we lit a huge bonfire and another soldier—who had been the local milkman—played an accordion and the grown-ups danced. Well not all the grown-ups actually because the ex-milkman got involved in a dispute with a man whose job as a builder had exempted him from conscription. In the light of the bonfire, the argument expanded into a scuffle and then a fight. The next night each of the men lit their own bonfire with its music and dancing and shouting. I was not best placed because I needed my sleep, to get up early for my paper round which was symbolic because after the war and the celebrations there was still the matter of being on time for work even for fourteen-year-olds.

Never again

When the fires died down and the milkman and the builder shook hands and I went out to deliver the papers we faced the post-war world. The Daily Mirror published a Zec cartoon of a wounded soldier holding out a wreath labelled Peace And Victory in Europe and saying “Here you are: don't lose it again.” There were gaps in the houses and shops where bombs had fallen and gaps in families where people had been killed. A local greengrocer’s son had been caught in a burst of shrapnel from an anti-aircraft shell which had failed to explode in the air and landed in front of him in the street, the butcher’s boy had gone down in a troopship torpedoed in the seas around Borneo; an old boy of my school, we were told one morning in assembly, had been killed in a bombing raid on Germany—a couple of days after he had visited the school to show off the navigator’s wing he had just been awarded.

But as we faced the future we were quite certain that things would be different—better—from now on and that it was up to us to make sure of this. “Never again” was an overworked phrase. Never again unemployment, poverty, racism, slums, malnourished and ill-educated children, never again people denied proper medical treatment because they couldn’t afford it. Never again politicians who promised a land fit for heroes to live in, or those who did deals with dictators while the world slid into war.

The energising of a political will to build a better world from the ruins of the war began some time before VE-Day. In August 1940 Duff Cooper, who was Minister of Information (a job title about as valid as Gcorge Orwell’s Minister of Truth) persuaded the Cabinet to set up a committee on war aims, among them “to consider means of perpetuating the national unity achieved in this country during the war through a social and economic structure designed to serve equality of opportunity and service among all classes of the community”. Duff Cooper in his ministry was not the only one to think on these lines. In January 1941 the magazine Picture Post gave up an entire issue to its feature A Plan For Britain, which included “a job for every able-bodied man . . . a state managed company to make community investment . . . a minimum wage for all able-bodied adults . . . everybody to live in cheerful, healthy conditions . .. " and so on "through medical care, education, agriculture. . . ’’ This Plan, said an editorial: “ . . . is not something outside the war, or something after the war It is an essential part of our war aims. It is, indeed, our most positive war aim.”

State influence

The timing of this was significant because in 1940 and 1941 about the only war aim which would have seemed relevant was survival. But one thing the tenaciously surviving British ruling class had learned from 1914-18 was that in wartime the workers, when they are needed to fight and kill and die and suffer, must be encouraged with promises of a rewarding future. When Ernest Bevin, the wartime Minister of Labour, went with Churchill to visit troops embarking in Portsmouth for the D-Day landings he was asked whether “when we have done this job for you, are we going back on the dole?” Both Bevin and Churchill replied "No, you are not.” Well, they would, wouldn’t they? What else could they have said to those men, whose first worry was not about facing the channel in those boats and then the German forces wailing for them on the beaches, but about going back on the dole? Coming from the extremities of poverty, those soldiers asked little more than employment—exploitation by a ruling class and in return they were willing to fight and die for that class.

It was not surprising that there should be a popular assumption that the management of the economy to provide for full employment could not be left to private interests. Such things had to be the concern of the state, which during the war had come to be seen as a benign manipulator of our lives. In order to organise British industry and working power for victory the state had taken massive and widespread powers, for example to direct anyone to work at any job anywhere in conditions and at a pay prescribed by the state. Most imported goods were bought through the state, which controlled about half of consumer spending. In other fields the government laid down regulations about the rate of extraction in the flour and in our bread, it supplied children and pregnant women with free orange juice and cod liver oil, it set up the beginnings of a national health service.

Benefits for Labour

The case for state control was given an added impetus by the course of the war in Russia. The fact that that country had survived such an unspeakable ordeal was taken as evidence that the total organisation of a country's resources for a common aim had to be the responsibility of the state. There was not much publicity, then (socialists were among the very few who were consistently giving out the facts) about the famines, the gulags, the show trials and the rest of the Stalinist terror which had wiped out millions of people. In 1944 George Orwell’s Animal Farm, which satirised the Stalinist regime, was rejected by Faber and Faber—by T.S. Eliot—on the grounds that it did not put “the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time”. In June 1942, celebrating the anniversary (yes, celebrating) of Russia’s entering (even if it had been forced on them) the war, the Bishop of Chelmsford prayed “May God bless Russia.” This was asking rather a lot of God, who would surely have remembered what Stalin had done to organised religion in Russia even if the bishop had forgotten it.

This conception of the state as an all-powerful, benevolent parent who could magic away unemployment and poverty while bringing in good health care and community spirit worked against the Conservative Party, who were in any case widely considered to have helped bring the war about. The Tories were in any case in some disarray, after having been forced to accept as their leader a man they had hated so much so recently. Churchill’s assumption of power had more-or-less deposed the established Conservative oligarchy, intensely professional election winners, and replaced them with his own, rather eccentric cronies like Beaverbrook and Brendan Bracken. One Tory MP was so gloomy about his party 's situation that he wrote to the chairman of the 1922 Committee, after a meeting in 1942, that "throughout the country the Conservative Party has become a cheap joke: the press and the BBC treat us with the contempt that we have earned and deserved”. In contrast the Labour leadership had remained intact and had grown in political strength, partly by their role in making Churchill prime minister and partly by their disproportionate power in the coalition government. A series of wartime by- elections had measured how unpopular were the Tories, with swings against them as much as 28 percent. In the general election of 1945, in which the Conservative persisted in nominating some strikingly incompetent candidates, the Labour Party’s victory signalled how anxious the voters were to have made VE-Day the beginning of the end of a discredited party.

Atomic Bomb

We had been told about the heavy water plant in Norway where the Germans were working on an atomic bomb and we were relieved that the plant had been put out of action in a commando raid. That, we thought, was the end of that nightmare, "our” side was much too civilised and humane to use terrible a weapon on warm, living human beings. When we learned otherwise it was among the first in a history of disappointed hopes and discredited visions which have characterised the past fifty years.

If we had been told them that on this anniversary of the end of the war there would be millions in this country in the deepest poverty, tens of millions elsewhere dying of starvation, millions homeless and life a noxious cocktail of drug abuse, crime and despair, we would have called it a betrayal. The thing we cannot say on 8 May 1995 is Happy Anniversary.

Ivan

Blogger's Note:

The illustration on the front cover of the May 1995 Socialist Standard was by longtime Socialist Party of Great Britain member, George Meddemmen. For more information about George — and, ironically enough, his wartime experiences — you can check out this recording of him being interviewed at the Imperial War Museum where "he discusses his life, artwork and 2nd World War experiences serving in the Royal Artillery in Africa and Italy".

Classic Reprint: Victory and then What? (1995)

A Classic Reprint from the May 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

This month the British State celebrates its victory over
 German capitalism in the last world war. They have even
 abolished—without a protest from the unions—the traditional 1 May holiday and replaced it by their own festival of
 militarism a week later. As Socialists, who opposed the last 
world slaughter as yet another war between rival
 imperialisms, we are taking no part in these celebrations.
 Instead, we reproduce below the lead article from the June
1945 Socialist Standard on the end of the war.

Another preventable tragedy is drawing to a close. The War that has spread death and destruction over a great part of the earth has come to an end in the western countries, and men and women in the fighting forces are anxiously awaiting the signal to go home. Home! Back to the old monotonous life in the office, the shop and the factory, toiling like beasts of burden for the enrichment of those who own the means of production, and with the constant dread of unemployment and penurious old age.

Europe is strewn with cities of the dead, the demented, the hungry and the homeless. Wonderful products of man's age long ingenuity, constructed by the labour of slaves, ancient, mediaeval and modern, have been reduced to shapeless heaps of rubble in a wild orgy of destruction unparalleled in any other period of human history. The unbridled savagery of the uncivilized Vandals and Huns of Antique and Mediaeval times has been surpassed by the calculated savagery of the highly civilized nations of to-day. War is always brutal and when the result of decades of scientific discoveries are centred upon means and methods of carrying on warfare, the brutality and cynical destruction is correspondingly colossal. And even so the last year of the War has shown us that we have only had a taste of things to come if the cause of war is left untouched by the only people who can abolish it—the working class.

The tragic aspect of the last six years is the fact that war solves no working class problem; it even throws up more problems and makes old problems more pressing On the one hand it gives an impetus to methods for reducing the amount of labour required to produce a given amount of wealth, on the other hand it converts thousands of ordinary workers into highly skilled technicians to compete with each other for a relatively reducing number of jobs. Many a trained specialist in different fields of industry will be walking the streets looking for a job in the not far distant future, just as their lesser skilled brethren did a year or two after the last War. And yet it is just the working class that bears the overwhelming burden of War, does nearly all the fighting and makes the principal sacrifices.

We now learn that the new world for which so many were called upon to struggle, and for which so many laid down their lives, is not yet. Food in the world is short, transport is ruined, the destruction of bomb and gun must first be made good before any improvement can be expected. We are exhorted to forgo the alleged fruits of “victory", tighten our belts and produce as voluminously as possible so that industry may get on its feet again.

The glowing promises of the early days of the War have gradually dimmed and in place of them we are urged to think of the starving peoples, of the vanished trade, and of anything else that can fob the workers off demanding the beautiful world of dreams by which they were seduced to the battlefields and the bomb devastated workshops. Not for them the type of dinner given by Mr Eden to a select party of diplomats at San Francisco which, according to the Daily Express (3/5/45) consisted of: Martini cocktails or tomato juice; oysters; sirloin steak; new peas, asparagus, potatoes au gratin; ice-cream ring with chopped fresh strawberries, small cakes, champagne. Yes, we must think of starving Europe, deny ourselves and work, but the exalted emissaries of our masters are permitted to forget—and eat.

In the meantime the capitalists of the different nations are completing their plans to fight each other in an economic war for markets, sources of supply and lines of traffic. Already British and American interests have fallen foul of each other over oil and airlines, shipping and island bases. And the scramble is only beginning.

In spite of the curtain of exalted sentiments behind them the Yalta Conference, the Frisco Conference, and all the other conferences past and future, have only one fundamental object—the enrichment of groups of capitalists out of the labour of the international working class. What we are witnessing now is simply a jockeying for place in this race for enrichment. The capitalists of each nation are asking themselves: “What point of vantage can we get out of the spoils of victory. Hurry or the other fellow will get there first.” Thus among the “United” nations and their friends, the late-comers, there is seething distrust. France tries to hang on to Stuttgart and growls; Yugo-slavia does the same at Trieste; Russia adopts an amenable Polish and Viennese government and the others do the growling; Turkey licks its lips and pounces in for a share; and so on and so forth. Hence another “War to end all wars” with still greater catastrophic results is already in the making, even before the present battlefields have been cleared of their broken human debris.

Working class memories are short and the spokesmen for the capitalists are cunning. The horrors of Buchenwald are trumpeted around the world because it suits the present interests of our masters whilst other misdeeds of capitalist civilization, equal in fiendish cruelty, are overlooked. It was not only Germans who transported hundreds of thousands of negroes in coffin ships from tropical Africa to work as chattel slaves under appalling conditions in the United States; who forced thousands of children of tender age to work in the factory hells of this country and America; who suppressed with ruthless ferocity the French Communards of 1871; who brutally exploited the native populations in every part of the world for personal enrichment. Capitalism drips with blood and tears wherever it raises its ugly head and flaming youth treads the ghastly path to the grave in defence of it. It is not only dictatorships, but capitalism itself that represents the spirit of ruthless unbridled domination.

In these days of “Victory” we remember what capitalism was and is. The relief at the lifting of the war clouds is apt to inspire in many an understandable desire to get back to work and forget, like a bad dream, the horrors they have been through. But the workers must not forget. They must remember, and remembering search for and apply the only remedy for wars and other social ills from which they suffer. The real enemy of the working class is, and always has been, at home. That is the capitalist class of every country and the system of wage-slavery it represents.

The workers must grasp the real meaning of the facts presented to them, and find and apply the only remedy or once again pay the penalty for allowing a privileged class to direct the course of events. They must recognise that they are the producers and distributors of the wealth of the world, but an idle class lives on the results of their toil because the workers allow that class to retain the ownership and control of the means of wealth production although constitutional means are at their disposable to dispossess that class.

Modern wars are not caused by human frailty, but by the greed of capitalists for profit out of the labour of the workers. When the population of the earth owns in common the means of production the product of human labour will be distributed to each according to the needs of each. Then no one will make profit out of another’s labour and the scramble for markets will disappear. This is Socialism, and it is for this alone that Socialists are struggling. When the workers have made up their minds to build a Socialist society, and have set about doing so, war and its causes will disappear from the earth.

Gilmac.

Conscientious Objections (1995)

From the May 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard 

 

Not everybody supported the War. Now portrayed as a fight against the Absolute Evil of Nazism it was in fact a conflict between rival imperialist powers over markets, trade routes, raw materials and colonies. It was opposed by pacifists of various sorts, but also by members of the Socialist Party on the grounds that war was not in the interest of the working class, would not solve any of their problems but was itself a problem caused by capitalism. We publish below a statement by an SPGB member before the conscientious objectors tribunal.

I registered on March 9th as a conscientious objector, and now furnish my statement giving my reasons for my objection to war.

According to my dictionary the word "conscience" means:- mental sense of right and wrong. As a sane being I must claim to have this sense. The word ‘object' meaning: - to feel dislike or reluctance to something. Therefore I find that I have the right to term myself "a conscientious objector", despite the fact that I do not base my objections on religious grounds.

In my earlier days I was conscious of an absolute horror of war. It seemed to me to be quite contrary to common human decency. and I regarded it as murder on a par with the slaughter of one's fellow countryman. It appeared to me that in war man destroyed the life of men with whom he had no quarrel and consequently war was an absurdity from the common people's point of view. Convinced as I am now of the gross indecency, absurdity and barbarous nature of war I have resolved to have no part with it. I realise that the common people (the working class) by similarity of their class position, by poverty and their common suffering have a mutual interest. I realise that in war the British working class, suffering as they do from the evils of the present economic system, must maim and slaughter fellow sufferers, the so-called “enemy", with whom they have no quarrel, gaining nothing in victory and losing nothing in defeat of sufficient importance to justify the shedding of their blood.

It is my firm conviction that this war will not bring peace, just as previous wars, designed to bring peace and security to the “conqueror" (so the common people were told) have not brought peace, only quiet ensured by force.

I believe war to be the greatest example of human folly. I abhor barbarity but I am convinced that we cannot banish barbarism by being barbarous; wrecking the homes and lives of our fellow men. slaughtering, burning and gassing their women and children is no way to solve any of our mutual problems.

Humanity has I believe a choice; to continue along the present road of capitalism and war suffering the disastrous consequences or seek the only alternative which is Socialism. In seeking this alternative I cannot support or sanction war. I contend that NO SOCIALIST WHO ACCEPTS INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM CAN POSSIBLY GO TO WAR any more than can a person who accepts the Sermon on the Mount as the law of life. A Socialist or a Christian must acknowledge that all wars are civil wars and consequently a crime against humanity itself.

H.C. 1940

Blogger's Note:

My educated guess is that H.C. was Harold Cottis.

Press Exposure: Private parts (1995)

From the May 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

What would you do. if your home was suddenly besieged by a mob of complete strangers with cameras and tape recorders and notebooks, who were trampling up to your front door, shouting at you through the letterbox, trying to get in through the windows and the backdoor, offering you loads of money just to talk to them or be photographed by them?

Well the first thing you ought to do is find out whether you were a notorious sex criminal or having an affair with a member of the royal family or had won the national lottery. Because those raucous strangers would be newspaper reporters desperate for an exclusive story from you. And to get it they are perfectly willing to do something called Invading Your Privacy.

Which has caused a lot of fuss lately—so much that Tory MPs who have been caught out in some extramarital adventures or financial jiggery-pokery have defended themselves by saying that the evidence against them was accumulated only by the media intruding on their private business. That is why so many of them are suddenly so strongly in favour of a law to protect their privacy. Of course their panic is understandable when we remember how many reputations have recently suffered by exposure of the facts which privacy was supposed to hide—the "cash for questions" MPs. junior ministers like Tim Yeo, Lord Caithness and Michael Mates and—most prized, most exposed, of all—David Mellor.

Hospital and royalty

But none of this is new. One member of the Calcutt Committee, set up in 1989 to look into the media and privacy and related matters, commented that "Many of the most appalling cases that were sent to us . . . came from way back in the 1930s and even earlier than that. . ." In June 1988. as Russell Harty was dying in hospital, reporters working on the well-tried principle that there’s nothing money won’t do, bribed a window cleaner to take pictures of him. They posed as doctors, in white coats, and tried to persuade a nurse to hand over Harty’s medical records. In January 1990, when the TV actor Gorden Kaye was in intensive care, seriously injured and not expected to live, two reporters got to his bedside, took photographs of him and tried to interview him.

In all this it would be unnatural if the privacy of the greatest media stars of them all were left unviolated. Prince Charles in August 1990 was photographed by a long-range camera seemingly canoodling with a woman. This apparent triumph of the papparazzi's art turned out to be a massive embarrassment because Charles was comforting the woman, in the presence of her husband, when they told him their child had cancer. The People lost its abhorrent editor—Wendy Henry— when it published a picture of Prince William urinating in a park with the headline (a typical Wendy Henry one) "The Royal Wee". When the Press Complaints Commission, set up on the recommendation of the Calcutt Committee. opened for business in January 1991 one of its first calls was from Sandringham—a complaint about press harassment from the Prince and Princess of Wales.

Double standards

This was in fact an example of hypocrisy such as the sleazier tabloids would be proud of. One thing which has been clear about the current turmoil in the lives of the royals—their affairs, their crumbling marriages, their nervous disorders—is the eagerness of some of them to use the media to publicise their side of the story. Apart from specific episodes like Charles’s selective television soul-baring in interview with Jonathan Dimbleby there has been a steady leak of carefully constructed information to favoured journalists. People who manipulate the media in this way can’t be taken seriously when they also complain about it invading their privacy.

Neither can those MPs. who scream about the unfair violation of their personal privacy when the press spotlights one of their sleazier activities. To begin with, as upholders of capitalism's morality about the sanctity of property they shouldn’t do the things which lay them open to such exposure. And when they are exposed they should remember that it’s all in the day’s work to a social system where what is profitable is good and what is unprofitable is bad. Newspapers make profits by being bold and those which produce the scoop-stories about scandalous politicians, or hypocritical royals or whatever, are likely to sell more.

Humiliation

The politicians tell us that this system is the most effective way of running human affairs. In fact they say there really is no other way. Of course there is the matter of what capitalism and its profit motive does to us—its prisons, weapons, pollution, the indignities which people like journalists will endure in order to obey the law about the production of goods for sale. Under that law the working class—who clamorously vote for those politicians—suffer massive humiliation and abuse, so that they don’t ever have what might properly be called any privacy to be intruded upon. 

Ivan

Rochdale local election (1995)

Party News from the May 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Below is the election address of the Socialist Party candidate 
in the 4 May elections, in Rochdale, Lancashire:

You are once again faced with a bunch of local politicians who can only be distinguished from one another by the colour of their rosettes. These politicians will be promising to provide better local services, improvements in sport facilities, rubbish collection, or in some cases, council housing. Each party and their candidate will be blaming the other parties for the things that are not right. Labour will blame the Tory Government and the Tories will blame Labour because they are in power locally.

For the first time in Central and Falinge, the Socialist Party is contesting a local election. Most of you will not know much about the Socialist Party, this may be the first you have heard of us. Certainly many people have heard the word “Socialism” but imagine it has something to do with nationalised industries, or the form of State Capitalism in the former Soviet Union or China. So it is understandable if you regard Socialism as just another political cliche, used to win votes for Labour politicians and hence having little to do with working class interests.

The Socialist Party is different from ail other political parties because the Socialist Party stands solely for Socialism. Why do we make this principle our aim and objective? Because we do not think that the present social system, capitalism, can be made to work in the interests of the majority of people.

You do not need the Socialist Party to tell you there is something badly wrong with the way society is organised at present.

WHY should tens of thousands of workers be homeless and poorly housed when there are thousands of empty houses and large numbers of unemployed building workers?

WHY must vast numbers of workers suffer and even die waiting for hospital treatment while there is no shortage of resources being allocated to the armed forces, which exist to kill people, not cure people?

WHY is food locked away in cold storage or dumped in the sea while around the world 40,000 starve to death daily?

WHY?

BECAUSE we live under a capitalist system where profit for the few who own and control the means of wealth production and distribution is more important than the needs of the majority.

This crazy way of running society only carries on because the majority have been persuaded to vote for it. Conned into believing that there is no other way, that capitalism run by leaders of left, right and centre, is the only option. The present social madhouse will not last forever. Workers whose political support has upheld the system can be persuaded to withdraw that support.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

Unlike the political promises being thrown at you by our political opponents, the Socialist Party promises it will do absolutely nothing for you. If you want to change society you can do it yourself. Socialism is about people—all of us— regardless of age, race, gender, owning and controlling the resources of society, for use, not profit. At last the world will belong to the people who inhabit it, with all of us having free access to the abundant goods and services which society can produce.

If you think the Socialist objective is worth registering your support for, rather than casting another wasted vote for capitalism, or not voting at all, then vote for Roger Chadwick, the genuine Socialist candidate in this election. Do not vote for him if you want a leader to put things right for you. The Socialist Party wants only Socialist votes and plenty of them, so we can show those who uphold this rotten system that there is a growing number of workers seeing through it. 

DON’T JUST VOTE—THINK • DON’T JUST THINK—ACT.

Europe's new rear gunner (1995)

From the May 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

For years Turkish politicians and the capitalist elite they curry favour with have dreamed of entry into Europe and of the new markets that this would open up to them. Two obstacles had always stood in their way—the opposition of Greece, stemming from Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus in 1974 and. arguably less importantly, Turkey's abysmal human rights record.

In early March of this year Greece finally abandoned its opposition to Turkish entry into Europe, in return for a guarantee that the EU would initiate membership negotiations with Cyprus within six months of the 1996 Conference to review the Maastricht treaty.

The customs union Turkey would from now on enjoy would “benefit everyone" reported the Economist:

  "The EU would get improved, tariff-free access to a market of 60 million, with which in 1993 it enjoyed a $6 bn trade surplus. Turkey would get access to 36 7 million customers . . . Turkey would get access to 1 billion ecus ($1.2 bn) in aid blocked by Greece's veto . . . [and] ... the European Union's eastern flank would be guarded by a prospering Turkey, a NATO ally" (11-17 February, 1995).

The deal couldn't have come at a better time for a country facing economic ruin. Prices have risen by 150 percent in Turkey in the past 12 months while wages have only increased by 30 percent. Unemployment is soaring and the trade unions claim 500.000 have lost their jobs in the past year. Furthermore. Tansu Ciller's government, with the help of an IMF loan is struggling to reduce a huge national deficit in the wake of years of overspending and economic mismanagement.

Within a week, the ink on the customs union agreement hardly dry, Turkey sent 35,000 troops across its border with Iraq in pursuit of the separatist rebels of the PKK and into the Kurdish “safe haven" set up by the allies after the Gulf War.

It was a move that immediately brought international condemnation from European governments, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and from the International Committee of the Red Cross. While international law was cited as having been breached, the Turkish government argued the invasion complied with international law because it was intended "to exterminate a threat to the lives and security of Turkish citizens" (Independent, 23 March).

Operation steel

Operation Steel, involving troops, tanks and war planes can, however, be seen in a different light. For one thing. Turkey's war against the 10,000 members of the PKK accounts for 25 percent of the national budget annually—some 315,000 troops are stationed in southern Turkey. With the country experiencing severe recession, and with the prospect of an economic boom on the horizon, the decision to invade the Kurdish safe haven can be seen as a last ditch attempt to rid Turkey once and for all of a major obstacle to recovery.

Again. Turkish intellectuals are pointing to what cognisant British workers have come to regard as the "Falklands Factor", seeing the invasion as an attempt to bolster national pride and to deflect attention from domestic ills. Indeed, the Independent (29 March) recently reported that "the sense of national pride is higher than at any time since the invasion of Cyprus in 1974".

Ciller’s attempt to crush resistance in northern Iraq can also be interpreted as a consequence of her desire to stabilise relations with Saddam. UN sanctions on Iraq have severely interfered with the flow of crude oil into Turkey, costing Turkey over $20 billion since 1991. The unsanctioned oil reaching Turkey nowadays ($800 millions-worth last year) does so by lorry via the Kurdish-controlled safe haven, from which a sizeable levy is extracted by the controlling KDP (Kurdish Democratic Party).

While the European Parliament frowned upon the invasion, threatening to block the EU customs union between Ankara and Europe if there were resultant human rights abuses, and while Germany's Chancellor Kohl was freezing a $107 million military aid package in protest, support was to be found in the good old US of A.

For the US, the Kurds, and for that matter the Turks, are but pawns in the international game of political chess (see Socialist Standard, November 1994). The Kurds have lost their interest and more importantly their strategic value to the West. For Adrian Hamilton, writing in the Observer "the reality is that the west is looking to a well armed Turkey . . . to contain both Iraq and Iran" (26 March). Ferhat Azizi was to say as much a few days later, believing that "the Americans . . . are still haunted by the 1979 Iranian revolution and are unwilling to upset an ally they see as a bulwark against Islamic fundamentalism" (New Statesman and Society, 31 March).

Strategic value

Evidence now suggests that Iraq is rearming and that Iran is once again flexing its muscles, massing forces on its Gulf coast. In recent weeks newspapers have run scores of headlines regarding Iran's war readiness, with alarm bells ringing all that more poignantly in the light of rumours concerning its nuclear capacity. From the West’s point of view, the Gulf states are armed to the teeth and trigger happy. Ironically it was the West that armed them when the Gulf War ended, providing $55 billions-worth of military hardware. Turkey, therefore, is ideally situated from a strategic point of view. Not solely because of its close proximity to unpredictable Middle East regimes. but increasingly lately because it also straddles the Balkans and the Caucasus—further potential flashpoints of Islamic fervour.

Neither can Britain claim to have merely a passing interest in Turkey's affairs. It is now no secret that the RAF has provided Turkish military chiefs with aerial photographs of the Kurdish safe haven taken by allied warplanes. Nor that allied warplanes based in Turkey suspended their policing of the safe haven while Turkish bombers took off from the same bases to bomb PKK positions twenty-five miles south of the Turkish border.

Britain and the US know only too well the debt Turkey, a NATO ally, will owe the West should Turkey become a full European member. In the meantime they make their hackneyed token protests while turning a blind eye to human rights abuses, while Turkey allows itself to become a bastion against the spread of Islamic fundamentalism, guarding capitalist Europe's eastern flank like a rear gunner with a full swing on the Balkans, the Caucasus and the Gulf region where "ignorant armies clash by night". None of which surprises the socialist, all too aware of the hidden agendas, the corruption and barrel-scraping stunts capitalism must continue to pull in its endless pursuit of profit.

John Bissett

The Labour Party Supports Capitalism (1995)

From the May 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Labour Party stands for capitalism:

“A dynamic economy, serving the public interest, in which the enterprise of the market and the rigour of competition are joined with the forces of partnership and co-operation to produce the wealth the nation needs and the opportunity for all to work and prosper, with a thriving private sector and high quality public services, where those undertakings essential to the common good are either owned by the public or accountable to them. ” 

The Socialist Party stands for socialism:

"The establishment of a system of society based upon the common 
ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for
producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole
community."

Clause Four is dead. Long live Clause Four! The Labour leadership has decided that it must at all costs win the next election, and that the best way to do this is to modernise, to fudge, to adopt a new credo, to waffle, to change, to water down, to reform, to flannel. All of these words—and many others—have been used by friends and foes of the Labour Party to describe the intent and effect of its new Clause Four

All the discussion, the evaluation, the commentary, the prolix prose would seem to suggest that something really significant has changed in Labour Party policy. It hasn't. To amend slightly the observation of Michael Mansfield QC, it took the Webbs 60 words to say that the Labour Party offers only the reform of capitalism—it takes Blair 300

The new Clause Four mentions “socialist” once (as a label for the Labour Party) and capitalism not at all. The “socialist” label is transparently a con because the new version makes it clear (insofar as it makes anything clear) that the money and profit system will remain under labour: “the enterprise of the market . . . the rigour of competition . . . a thriving private sector". No matter that such guarantees of free-market capitalism are accompanied by references to co-operation and public service—this kind of mixed economy is offered by the other parties supporting capitalism, too.

It is instructive (or at least amusing) to read the reactions of some Tories to Clausc Four Mark 2. Douglas Hurd is reported as warning Conservatives to be ready to repel piratical labour boarders: "Mr Blair is trying to board the Conservative ship and run up his own flag on our masthead. ”

This picture of a swashbuckling Blair contrasts with his bleak record of selecting questions to the prime Minister. According to Matthew Parris (Times, 14 March) Blair has "never backed any public sector pay demand. . . not supported the teachers . . . never once complained about welfare benefits for the poor: about poverty; or about homelessness . . . never directly contested any past privatisation . . . never touched the subject of labour relations or trades unions ". Instead he has most often made points about fat cats, European unity and Tory sleaze.

The real question for electors is not whether Bambi’s blather is more likely to win votes for Labour than the Webbs’ more concise but antiquated Clause Four. It is whether any party that, openly or by inference, promises only the reform of capitalism is worth supporting Previous Labour governments were elected on programmes that were manifestly much less conservative than Blair's—but they still froze workers’ wages, broke strikes, cut welfare benefits, and deployed weapons of mass destruction against the populations of other countries.

Labour leaders need to have followers, as indeed do the leaders of all the other, anti-socialist, parties. The tragedy is that the followers, against their best interest, want to be followers. Until they decide to think and act for themselves, we can expect the clauses of the policy statements to get longer and the vision of the leaders to get shorter.

Stan Parker

Football Bungs & Sleaze (1995)

From the May 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is so much money involved in football nowadays — not only from takings at the turnstiles but from sponsorship of everything from trophies to televised matches — that the actual playing of the game seems to be a by-product. Is it any wonder that capitalism's business 'ethics' has permeated every aspect of the sport?

It barely makes the headlines if politicians are involved in bribery or corruption, and certainly no-one reacts by saying how unexpected or out-of-character it all is. But rumours of bribery and back-handers in sport still bring out shocked responses of the “I can’t believe it” type. People just don’t want to admit that sporting stars could stoop so low as to accept under-the-counter payments or even fix results. They are supposed to be on a pedestal, role models for the young and modern-day folk-heroes. Yet the last few months have seen a parade of accusations, arrests and sackings, all centred around sporting sleaze and corruption of one kind or another.

Salim Malik, former Pakistan cricket captain, risks being banned for life after being accused of attempting to bribe two Australian players to lose. The biggest scandals, though, have been in football— and this is in addition to players appearing in court on assault charges or admitting to drug-taking. In February Arsenal manager George Graham was sacked for allegedly receiving £425,000 as part of a transfer deal (paid by a mysterious “agent” out of the difference between what Arsenal paid for a player and what the selling club received), and there are many rumours about other managers expecting such pay-offs as a matter of course. In March three Premiership footballers were arrested and questioned about match fixing, though not charged. The story runs that bookmakers in Malaysia, where gambling is illegal but big business, have attempted to rig matches (including even a couple of World Cup games) so as to engineer results or scores favourable to themselves. It is hardly surprising that two of the arrested players are goalkeepers, who are naturally best-placed to affect results by letting in an easy goal or two. Even if all the rumours and scandals turn out to be baseless—and it has to be stressed that at the time of writing nothing has been proved—football’s image is bound to be tarnished.

The shock felt by football supporters is no doubt based on two considerations. One is that footballers and managers earn what are, by most people's standards, fairly high wages. If you are getting £100,000 or over a year anyway, why should you look to dishonest ways of making even more? But one thing that is always at the back of players’ minds is the relative shortness of their careers, the ever-present risk of serious injury, and the prospect of a drastic fall in earnings, once their playing days are over. And as the world of business and politics will show, however much you may have, you can still want more. A taste for the high life can easily develop among those who weren’t born to riches. The other point is the feeling that how dare anyone who has the privilege of playing professionally, something that millions aspire to but few achieve, betray their sport, their club and their supporters by throwing a game. Those who follow a team through lean years and downpours, spending considerable sums of money in the process, expect the players always to be doing their best, even if they can’t all be great players. But sport of course is a business and its practitioners sell their skills just like other workers, so selling a game is really only part of the same logic, the logic of capitalism, where everything, including sincerity and commitment, is for sale.

Nor can it be argued that in the good old days such things never happened, that before the days of the Premiership, live TV, sponsorship, replica shirts and so on, there was a time of innocence untainted by commercial considerations or any whiff of bribery. In the mid-sixties a dozen players, including some internationals, were convicted of match-rigging and banned for life. In 1927, the chairman of Arsenal was suspended for illegal inducements to players to join the club. Back in 1905, Billy Meredith of Manchester City was suspended for attempting to bribe an Aston Villa player; it subsequently emerged that City had been making illegal payments to players: several were suspended for a year, and two directors banned for life. There never has been a golden age when football was just football.

Professional sport is part of capitalism, and cannot be expected to operate on a different basis from that of society as a whole. If it is run by money and considerations of profit. It’s because that is precisely the basis on which capitalism works.

Paul Bennett

A Disturbed Sunday (1995)

The A Word in Your Ear column from the May 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sunday morning at nine o'clock and the day begins. For some this is the Lord’s Day. Like calves on a day trip to Calais they make their weary ways in ever-decreasing numbers to the Houses of Ignorance where they close their eyes, fall to their knees and heave the impotent sigh of the oppressed in the face of a heartless world. Having sacrificed Saturday night to the brewers' profits (“And before the Lord’s Day it was the landlord’s day ") my head was in no state for spiritual interference. But what was this? Thump! Thump! Thump! It felt like Cantona had entered my cerebral cortex for a quick round of training: my head had been invaded by the shit hitting the fan. Boing! Clash! Thud! Help—I've become trapped in a Batman movie with sound effects provided by the Ministry of Love . . .  But wait a minute, speaking of love . .

“Jesus Loves You!" The awful, invasive, torturous, untuneful thumping “music" has stopped and now a man is shouting in the street about sin, love and the Big Man beyond the clouds. Not content to wake up an entire street with his boring bawling, he then proceeds to sing (solo) about how Jesus wants us for sunbeams. He has a voice which is not quite heavenly, but certainly like nothing on earth. By now—several of us are staring out of our windows, rubbing our eyes and cursing the bassoon player who is rubbing his mouthpiece in preparation for eternal damnation, otherwise known as the next tune. The head nutter has finished his harangue and deposited a pile of War Cry newspapers into the hands of little children who run up and down the street stuffing them through letterboxes. I contemplate the parole conditions for justifiable homicide: “What are you in for, mate?” “I impulsively slaughtered an entire Salvation Army band by battering them with their own instruments.” At least the Krays only tortured their own.

There is something depressingly ugly about hymns. The men who wrote these dirges to god must have been possessed by a degree of melodic dysfunction unequalled until Bros went on their first world tour. There is nothing intrinsically bad about religious music (Mozart's Mass is the best work he composed and cantorial tenors can put Pavarotti through his paces), but hymns are relentlessly miserable in their transparent propagandist!). In the early part of this century militant American workers (known as Wobblies) were refused the right to advocate socialism from street platforms while the Salvation Army (referred to by them as the Starvation Army) were left alone by the cops. So the Wobblies took on the Army at their own game (Why should the bosses have all the bad tunes?) and Joe Hill, their greatest songsmith, wrote some of the most joyful workers’ songs ever sung. Only the barmiest socialist would favour standing in residential areas on Sunday mornings with loud wind instruments and a megaphone singing Wobbly songs. So what gives these Christian manic street preachers the right to try and drive us all mad.

And come to think of it, who needs the nauseating tintinnabulation of their wretched Sunday bells? Why must our children having morning assemblies were holy hog wash is forced upon their innocent minds? And why can’t you switch on the TV on Sundays and national holidays without choirs recruited from The Addams Family imposing their lousy liturgies upon us?

Cartoon by George Meddemmen.

These thoughts were passing through my throbbing head when the rat-tap-tap of an unwelcome visitor propelled me to the cave door with a club in my hand (a rolled- up War Cry was the only weapon available in the frenzy of eagerness to settle scores with the Salvationists.)

“Do you believe in a world where there will be no more wars and everyone will live as one like brothers and sisters?" The question was posed in unison by two young women (possibly sisters, possibly from the planet Belch) who both held tracts in their hands. “Yes, I do." I said. This was not the answer for which they had been pre-programmed. They looked at each other and prayed as they panicked. "So you’re a Christian?” said the first one, divinely guided in her quick wittedness. I responded by giving them a lengthy lecture on why religion is a reflection of humanity’s former ignorance of causation, how the world we live in is unmistakably material and why my head was by now severely aching from the Salvationists’ cacophony.

"But we’re nothing to do with them " they asserted in one voice, as if they had just been invited to associate themselves with the BNP's Satanic Section. “They’re not real Christians,” they reliably informed me, "although we respect them for what they do and hope that one day they will come to see . . .” Go forth and multiply, I proposed, as the door accidcntally slammed on their noses. Let them fight their sectarian disputes in the afterlife while we of mortal flesh provide useful nourishment for worms.

I went back to my bed, but sleep eluded me. It’s hard to sleep after the brain has wakened. The thought was sobering and unintendedly inspirational. “And it came to pass that the brains of the religious did awaken and they did deliver their minds from the delusions of god. . ." Meanwhile, back in Iran, the mullahs’ torturers attach electrodes to the genitals of those who deny the faith and the evangelical fascists of the US Bible Bell plan which book to ban or burn next.

Steve Coleman

These Foolish Things: Taking off (1995)

The Scavenger column from the May 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

  The basic contradictions in capitalism cause widespread death, destruction, pollution, poverty and waste. But this is to take the world view. Most of us experience day-to-day capitalism as a series of small stupidities, irritations and frustrations. Here are a few. If you encounter any worth a wry smile, please send them to The Scavenger who will publish the best.

Taking off

"Selling the nation’s family silver” goes on with all haste to keep the present government’s budgets within tolerable balance. To add to nearly £800 million raised through the sale of Ministry of Defence properties in the last ten years, a further £300 million is expected from the twenty airbases due to be put on the market before the end of the century. However, flying of a sort may still continue at Bentwaters in Suffolk. The Maharishi Foundation is said to have bought the 1,000-acre site for a university of Natural Law.

Nearer the bone

There must have been a few smirks of satisfaction among British capitalists at the tail end of March. Dewhursts the butchers went bust. Surely a cause for sadness? Vesteys, the family which became super-rich through providing meat from the ranch to the customer, clocked up debts of over £400 million. Their family fortune shrank from about £1.5 billion to a mere £600 million. But Sam and Edmund Vestey were not only keen businessmen—they were also keen tax-dodgers. They did not pay their share for being (fairly new) members of the ruling class of Britain. Back in the 80s they managed to pay just £10 tax on a year’s income of £2.5 million. Now Union International, the family firm, will have to let the Receivers sell the 300 shops trading under the names of Dewhurst, Matthews, Baxter and Cobb in order to pay the debts.

Grinding the poor

At this time next year Unemployment benefit will be replaced by the Jobseeker’s Allowance. This will require a person applying for state benefit to state the lowest wage they would accept in taking a job.

Blanket solution

Meanwhile, staff in Job centres are facing the threat of increasing violence from clients—a 400 percent rise in the last five years. This has followed the instructions to staff to conduct far more rigorous checks. After a particular attack on staff by a man with a knife in Handsworth, Birmingham, the staff have been issued with blankets They are not sure what they are meant to do with them.

A suggestion

At Lucas, John Pocock was an enthusiastic contributor to the firm’s suggestion box. One of his ideas saved Lucas £36,000 a year. Another will probably save over a quarter of a million in five years. He has been paid £3,750 for this—and given the sack because he is fifty. It is all part of the new Lucas boss’s regime. Who says, "For the company to achieve its goals in 1995 and beyond, it will require an enhanced contribution from you all.”

On the other hand

At Christmas, six men got together for a meal at a hotel. There is no record of the amount they spent on food—perhaps because the amount they spent on drink dwarfed it. They bought 12 bottles of Chateau Petrus claret at the Dorchester at £960 a bottle. Apparently they were unable to finish the last half-bottle and graciously left it for the waiter. What is the connection between this and the previous items?

The Scavenger

Letters: Let them eat meat (1995)

Letters to the Editors from the May 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Let them eat meat 

While substantially agreeing with Adam Buick’s analysis of the question of animal rights in the April Socialist Standard and in particular with the view that in a non-profit socialist society of production for use cruelty to animals can be expected to stop, I cannot agree that in such a society most human beings are necessarily going to continue to eat meat, as the article states. They may of course, but then they may not. And it is not a good argument to say, as the article does, that they will because they always have done. History shows perpetual change in human ideas and practices and one of the main points about socialism is that it will allow people to transform many aspects of the societies they have lived in.

Furthermore, it is not part of the Socialist Party’s agreed case that in socialism people will eat meat. This is a detail one can only speculate and express a personal opinion on. It should not therefore appear as other than a personal opinion in a journal whose articles express the agreed view of the organisation.

And how different in the end is what Adam Buick says from a recent anti-vegetarian letter in the Western Mail which stated: "In truth, it [an end to the farming of animals] will never happen because you want your chicken and chips, your lamb cawl and your Sunday roast."? 

Howard Moss,

Swansea

Reply:

The article wasn't "anti-vegetarian". It didn’t criticise people for being vegetarians. Quite the contrary. It said that vegetarianism was a perfectly legitimate personal choice (which had been made by some Socialists) and that the debate would continue into socialism where individuals would make their own choice as to whether or not to abstain from eating meat.

As you correctly point out, the Socialist Party as an organisation has no policy on vegetarianism; we are neither for it nor against it. We don’t presume to tell people what they should eat and what they should not eat; that’s a purely personal decision, it's entirely up to individuals as individuals. This implies, however, that some will choose to abstain from meat while others won’t. We equally respect both decisions.

Will this diversity of decision continue into socialism? You say that to answer "yes" is merely to give a personal opinion, but it can also be seen as—and was meant to be so taken—a reasonable assumption that can be made equally by a vegetarian as by a non-vegetarian.

But if some people are going to eat meat in socialism then animals are going to have to continue to be raised to be eaten in socialism. Not to have faced this, in an article on animals rights, and to have replied "the problem probably won't arise because by then we could all be vegetarians" would have been a cop-out. Besides, it would have infringed the neutrality we as an organisation maintain between vegetarians and non-vegetarians.

Editors

Hunting and killing at Tescos

Dear Editors,

As a Socialist Party member and a vegan, I'm afraid that I am forced to take issue with some of the points raised by Adam Buick in his article "Do Animals Have Rights?" (April Socialist Standard).

Firstly, it is highly debatable whether humans "have always eaten meat". There is a good body of evidence to suggest that early humans lived primarily, if not solely, on nuts, fruits and berries—a reasonable assumption, given that we are descended from herbivorous primates. The length of the human intestine, as compared with the much shorter bowels of obligate carnivores in, say the cat family, suggest that it is designed to deal with slowly digested vegetable matter rather than fibre-free meat.

Secondly, it is disingenuous to compare a human being eating meat to a fox eating a rabbit—as I have already stated, certain animals are obligate carnivores who cannot derive sufficient protein from plant sources. Human beings are not—and we are capable of making moral choices regarding our diet. In any case, visiting the meat counter at Tesco scarcely equates to hunting and killing one’s own food!

Adam Buick is, of course, quite correct to state that animals are cruelly treated largely because of the need for farmers to produce profitably. However, does he seriously believe that sufficient meat can be produced to satisfy the world's population even under socialism without the need for some kind of factory farming? Readers are doubtless familiar with the arguments that land can be used far more efficiently to produce plant proteins than to raise animals—that's even allowing for the intensive farming of animals which we all know takes place under capitalism. How much more inefficient in terms of land use would it be to attempt to farm only free-range animals?

Further, I would suggest that, just as farmers are compelled under capitalism to try and make a profit, so most of those who work in the meat industry do so in order to survive rather than because they enjoy it. With the need to work for a wage being removed by socialism, how many people will be prepared to continue killing animals when other essential and more rewarding work needs to be done? Those who wish to eat meat will of course be free to do so—however. they may well find that's this necessitates killing it themselves as few other people will be willing to do it for them.

Finally, Adam Buick is doubtless aware that vegetarianism is already growing at a rapid rate— particularly among young women. This means that’s more and more children are being brought up as vegetarians, which will almost certainly accelerate the trend. I feel that’s Adam Buick's comment that's "most humans are obviously going to continue to eat some meat" will be proved wrong quite soon— possibly even within his lifetime. 

Shane Roberts,

Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex

Reply:

Have humans "always eaten meat"? That depends on what you mean by "humans". Members of the existing—and only surviving—human species. Homo sapiens, have always eaten meat. We evolved not more than 100,000 years ago. but preceding species of Homo had been eating meat for many hundreds of thousands of years before that.

Going back even further, it is indeed true the now extinct species of upright-walking apes from which we are descended would have been mainly, but not exclusively (since even today chimpanzees eat meat, when they can get it), eaters of nuts, fruits, roots, etc. But at some point our ancestors began to add more and more meat to their diet. Most anthropologists see this changed diet as a key factor in the evolution of pre-humans into humans. Richard Leakey, for instance, writes in his book with Roger Lewin, Origins Reconsidered: 

  “Although some anthropologists argue that regular meat eating was a late development in human history. I believe they are wrong. I see evidence for the expansion of the basic omnivorous hominid diet in the fossil record, in the archaeological record, and. incidentally, in theoretical biology . . .
   "The initial expansion of brain size in hominids. which established the genus Homo, was more mundane. It concerned an adaptation that required more complex behaviour: the hunting-and- gathering way of life in embryo. But it also fueled itself, in a kind of positive feedback. Part of Bob Martin’s thesis about a species' ability to afford a large brain is that it must have a stable environment. stable in terms of food supply. Stable and nutritionally rich. The robust australopithecines managed to stabilise their food supply in the new prevailing environment 2.5 million years ago but their tough plant foods were not rich nutritionally. By broadening the diet to include meat, early Homo achieved both stability and rich nutrition. Meat represents high concentrations of calories, fat and protein. This dietary shift in Homo drove the change in pattern of tooth development and facial shape. The links in the chain join up yet more closely.
  “Our ancestors achieved this dietary shift through technology, and thus opened the road to the potential—but. remember, not inevitable—development of yet bigger brains."

In other words, modern anthropological research and theory confirms the 19th century view, as summarised by Engels in The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, that “with all due respect to the vegetarians, man did not come into existence without a meat diet”.

This is not a reason, we hasten to add. why people should not be vegetarians. One of the features of human behaviour is flexibility and we could all become vegetarians if we chose to. even though our distant ancestors had to eat meat for this flexibility to evolve. If this happens. as you seem confident it will, then Engels would no doubt see this as a neat example of the negation of the negation. 

Editors

Socialist cops & prisons?

Dear Editors,

Having read Adam Buick’s "Do Animals Have Rights?", I now know why so many animal rights activists so deeply distrust socialists. Of course neither human workers nor animals are born with natural rights. Such rights as they enjoy are the results of centuries of bitter struggle; by virtue of its power the capitalist class has the right to do anything it can get away with including exploiting animals and workers on a massive scale. Just as socialists want an end to the exploitation of workers so the animal rights movement wants an end to the exploitation of animals. Many want both as is evidenced by the slogan “Animal Liberation. Human Rights—One Struggle. One Fight!"

Adam Buick appears to oppose suffering and cruelty, but what can be more cruel and involve more suffering than raising an animal with the utmost care and kindness and then killing and eating it? If a socialist world is to be one without suffering and cruelty then the imposition of suffering and cruelty on animals by humans must end! And the debate isn’t just about the higher land mammals—it’s about sea mammals, insects, fish, reptiles and amphibians all of which appear on somebody’s dinner table. And “eccentrics" is a term of abuse not a scientific Marxist category, many people regard socialists as eccentrics but that does not invalidate socialism anymore then the alleged eccentricity of the animal rights movement rules out its argument.

On what evidence does Adam Buick base his claim that humans have always eaten meat and will continue to do so? The shape of our teeth, our lack of claws, the length of our get. the tiny genetic difference between ourselves and the vegetarian great apes, indicates the diet of the first humans was vegetable and that meat eating was a fairly late development caused possibly by food shortages resulting from climatic changes. Furthermore. many people do not associate the burger on their plate with the animal from which it comes. Many become vegetarian when they discover the shocking truth. And when was Adam Buick last on a farm? Farm animals aren't fed on vegetation and scraps unacceptable to humans—they’re fed on grains and beans which could be used far more efficiently by being eaten by humans. And it makes better economic sense to rear goats and sheep on marginal land for their milk rather than their meat.

It’s nice to know vegetarians will be free to put their case in a socialist society. But what if we employ civil disobedience? Will socialist cops kick and baton us and throw us into socialist prisons? And what of blood sports, vivisection and the trade in fur, skins and shells? Will such horrors continue in a socialist society?

Adam Buick is right when he says the problem is capitalism and socialism is the answer. But if he is to convince animal rights activists of this his critique needs to be far more informed and sympathetic.

Terry Liddle

London SE9

Reply:

What are you talking about? There won't be any cops or prisons in a socialist society. Nor will there be any trade in furs or anything else.

Editors

Calling an old comrade

Dear Editors,

I admired Paddy Small (Letters. March Socialist Standard) for his craftsmanship, his steadfastness to his principles, his support of his union and of the Socialist Party. I owe him a personal debt for guiding me to the Socialist Party and for helping me to acquire a Socialist library and helping me to understand it.

I would like to contact him again, so would it be possible to insert the following appeal in the Standard:

"Dear Paddy. 

Your recent letter to the Standard has really opened the floodgates of my memory. I would dearly like to write to you and share our experiences since last we met. Please write to me at: 26 Fig Street. Dromana. Victoria 3936. Australia.

Yours Aye. Joe Richmond." 

Who loves you, baby! (1995)

TV Review from the May 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

This last month has been enlivened by the government's recent attempts to shoot the messenger, alias the media. For not content with alienating a normally docile and compliant press, the Conservative Party hierarchy has now turned its attentions to television and, in particular, the BBC— the newly christened Blair Broadcasting Corporation. The most immediate result was unexpected. A temporary thaw in relations ensured between the Tories and the BBC as they joined forces to protest at the Prime Minister being banned from BBC television in Scotland by the ruling class’s own judges, who accused the BBC of misconduct during a local election campaign.

Jonathan Aitken, a man who knows a thing or two about how to manipulate the media, and Jeremy Hanley—a man who despite his theatrical connections evidently doesn't—have been in the forefront of attacks on alleged BBC bias against the government. Their onslaught has been assisted by Michael Howard, the Home Secretary, who is responsible for such matters. With Hanley acting like a demented cheerleader at a Cup Final Aitken and Howard have alleged that BBC journalists Jeremy Paxman and John Humphrys adopt an overly-aggressive manner when interviewing government ministers, so much so that the BBC's own supremo John Birt has seen fit to give them a public warning. In particular, Humphrys occasioned Conservative wrath for chairing an allegedly “anti-government” education rally debate in Westminster (although the Tories neglect to mention that a government spokesman was invited to participate and that Humphrys was paid for taking part) and this was compounded by an incident which led to Newsnight presenter Kirsty Wark to be officially censored for using a "hectoring tone" in an interview with the absurdly coiffured Michael Portillo.

This all tells us something. Not that the BBC really is biased against the government, for all governments think that, especially ones that are going through a rough time. What it does tell us is that somewhere in the twisted minds of the Tory party leadership plans are being made for a General Election.

There are many historical precedents for this sort of behaviour. In the late 1960s Harold Wilson, who had previously enjoyed a rather convivial relationship with the television media, launched a series of attacks on the BBC and ITV for biased news reporting as he made plans to renew Labour's mandate. Throughout her long reign Thatcher did the same for the Conservatives, most famously and successfully under the direction of Norman Tebbit. He set up a monitoring unit before the 1987 election to keep an eye on precisely the amount of coverage each of the main parties were getting and to ascertain the percentage of that coverage which was positive, neutral or damaging.

It would appear that the Tory leadership is now again in General Election mode, and they don't want unduly favourable coverage of Blair and his cohorts at the expense of their own boys and girls.

Bong!

It was thought for many years—and not just in the Tory Party—that the BBC had a rather pro-left wing bias in its news reporting and current affairs coverage and that ITN, under the guidance of that cringeworthy Tory Alistair Burnett, veered in the other direction. In the 1992 election, there were signs that the roles were reversed, perhaps as a result of political pressure and memories of the 1987 campaign with Tebbit’s attack on the BBC and Labour’s counter-attack on ITN.

In reality, the major capitalist political parties have little to fear. Coverage of them is remarkably neutral between them most of the time in Britain— unlike say Spain or Italy, where news channels are dominated and even sometimes owned by the major political parties, or the US. where the size of your campaign chest speaks loudest. The real losers, especially in Britain, are those organisations that currently represent "minority opinion", unable even to receive a five-minute Party Political Broadcast unless they have the funds and desire to stump up enough money for fifty parliamentary candidates. Between elections coverage is little better. Just how many smaller parties get represented on Question Time or other current affairs programmes? Are we really to believe that they have nothing interesting to say or is it that the news corporations simply dance to the collective tune of the mainstream political parties and the values they represent? They are, after all, values which largely coincide with their own.

And finally . . .

Let us know how you feel, for one thing is certain. If socialists are not to be marginalised on the fringes of the political process television news coverage is vital and so is access to current affairs programmes where the upholders of the capitalist system can be directly challenged. If political intervention on the subject of television coverage is left to the Peter Mandelsons and Jonathan Aitkens of this world, we will only have ourselves to blame—although admittedly our task is much harder than theirs. We, after all, cannot bank any assistance from the sharp-suited executives at Broadcasting House or the doughty old buffers in dusty wigs. Through the strength our ideas if not presently force of numbers we can but try. and try until we succeed.

Dave Perrin

It's a question of property (1995)

Book Review from the May 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Marxian Concept of Capital and the Soviet Experience by Paresh Chattopadhyay (Praeger, 1994.)

Some writers are unlucky. They start to write a book on some subject and are then overtaken by events before it is published. This has been the fate of Paresh Chattopadhyay whose book on Russia—and how, despite the various claims, it was neither socialist nor non-capitalist nor post-capitalist or whatever but capitalist in a strict Marxian sense—was overtaken by the collapse of the state capitalist system there, the changes of “is” into “was” at the proofreading stage notwithstanding. It is to be hoped that this won’t put people off reading the book on the grounds that this is all now ancient history, since Chattopadhyay’s analysis of Russia under Bolshevik rule is excellent. His basic argument is that Russia during this period was capitalist because the economic system there was based on wage-labour and that, as Marx pointed out, wherever wage-labour exists so does capital and so capitalism.

Capital is not a thing but a social relation, one that comes into being whenever the producers are separated both from the means of production and from the products of their labour; this means that they can only get a living by selling their mental and physical energies, their productive skills, for a wage or salary. This is why the fact that one class in society has to work for wages is in itself evidence that capitalism exists; it is a sign that the producers are separated from the conditions of production, irrespective of who controls these conditions and how.

Chattopadhyay points out that Marx distinguished between two kinds of property—what Chattopadhyay calls “economic property” and “juridical property”—only the first of which is essential to capitalism. “Economic property” describes the actual social relation whereby one class holds and another class is excluded from the means of production; it is a factual situation. “Juridical property” is where this social fact is recognised by the law in the form of legal individual private property rights. These existed before capitalism—in Roman law for instance—and capitalism can exist without them. In this sense they are the icing on the capitalist cake not its essential ingredients.

The mistake, says Chattopadhyay, made by those who saw Russia as socialist (the Stalinists) or non-capitalist (the Trotskyists) was to identify the abolition of capitalism with the abolition of “juridical property” instead of with the abolition of “economic property”. At no time after 1917 was this latter abolished, as was demonstrated by the continued existence and indeed general expansion of wage-labour there.

Some dissident Trotskyists and Stalinists have been prepared to go some distance down this road, but Chattopadhyay goes all the way. He argues that the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917 was not even an attempt to establish socialism in the Marxian sense. Lenin in fact had a quite different conception of socialism from Marx’s:

  “Socialism, even as a concept, appearing in Lenin’s State and Revolution, contains elements such as ‘state’ and ‘hired employees’ earning ‘wages’, that are alien to Marx’s socialism, conceived as free association … Socialism, according to Marx, is a free association of producers without state, without commodity production and without wage labour.”

What Lenin and the Bolsheviks aimed to establish—and did in fact establish—was a state-run capitalism in which the role of Marx’s “functionaries of capital” was played not by individual private capitalists nor by paid directors of joint-stock companies but by Party/State officials. It follows from this that the Bolshevik seizure of power was not a socialist or proletarian revolution. It also follows that, as capitalism (the exclusion of the producers from the conditions of production and their having to work for wages) was never at any time abolished in Russia, all theories of “the restoration of capitalism” there—and there are people who would date this from the coming to power of Stalin or Khruschev or Yeltsin—were wrong; in fact nonsensical.

As can be seen, the approach of this book is very close to that of the Socialist Party. Certainly, it is now a book about history rather than the contemporary scene but it is yet another nail in the coffin of Leninism.

Adam Buick