Voice From The Back: Ain’t Science Wonderful? (2001)

The Voice From The Back column from the May 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ain’t Science Wonderful?

Good news for police forces and repressive regimes throughout the world, those wide-eyed men in the flapping white coats have come up with a new anti-demonstration weapon, that must delight “all of us right thinking people”:

  “Riot shields and water cannon may soon be made obsolete by a revolutionary weapon that can stun a hostile crowd with invisible microwaves. The US Vehicle Mounted Denial System (VMADS), a radar dish mounted on the back of a tank or jeep, is interesting British police forces. The VMADS, or ‘people zapper’, uses a ‘directed energy beam’ according to a Pentagon spokesperson, ‘When it comes into contact with skin it causes a sensation of heat to an uncomfortable level.'” Observer, 25 March.

Good Riddance

There probably wasn’t a dry eye in the House of Commons when Tony Benn, 75, MP for Chesterfield gave what was probably his valedictory address to the House. He recalled that members of his family had sat in the Commons since 1892 and that he “loved the place”. It was obviously an emotion-packed occasion, because one Tory talked the most arrant nonsense about Benn:

“John Bercow (Conservative, Buckingham) called him the country’s greatest living socialist and reatest living parliamentarian.” Times, 23 March.

Of course, Benn never was a socialist. He is a life-long supporter of the Labour Party whose anti-socialist, indeed anti-working class record has been well documented in this journal. But, don’t take our word for it; Benn once wrote in a rare moment of lucidity-“We must add . . . a clear recognition that the Labour Party is not—and probably never was—a socialist party” (Independent, 17 May 1989).

Child’s Play

Mrs. Thatcher, wrong as usual, called them “the real wealth creators of this country”—she was referring to a small section of the population who were wheeling and dealing in the City of London. We have often pointed out that the actions of stockbrokers and investors produce no wealth whatsoever. But defenders of the financial sector have argued, that even if that was true, it is still true that these men and women are highly skilled. Now, even that claim looks indefensible:

“A four-year-old girl proved the stock-market was child’s play yesterday by winning a share prediction contest against an investor and an astrologer . . . Tia picked her shares at random, financial astrologer Christeen Skinner studied the heavens and Mark Goodson used his experience as a private investor. Ms Skinner lost 10 percent of her £5,000 shares while Mr. Goodson lost 7 percent and Tia lost 4.5 percent.” Guardian, 27 March.

Carefree Days?

Those happy TV ads that feature carefree school kids enjoying their teenage years in security and comfort have always looked a bit phoney, but a recent report by the TUC has revealed just how phoney they are for a large section of working class children:

“At least 500,000 schoolchildren are working illegally with many playing truant to do so, according to a report . . .The report by the TUC revealed that a quarter of those under 13-289,000-worked, even though it is against the law for them to do any kind of paid job . . . The report, Class Struggle, revealed that one in ten children played truant to do paid work. Almost one in five received less than £2 per hour and around a third were on £2.50 or less an hour. It also found that almost half of children under 16 worked after 8pm and 23 per cent worked before 6am, despite the law stipulating that they are not allowed to work before 7am or after 7pm .” Daily Telegraph, March.

Major surgery needed

   “British GPs are offering kidneys for sale from living donors in the Third World to wealthy patients who want to jump the queue for a transplant. The illegal kidneys-for-cash trade involves dozens of British patients who travel to India to receive kidneys from impoverished donors, who are paid up to £3,000.One doctor claimed last week he could arrange for a kidney to be bought and transplanted in London . . . Dr. Jammail Singh, who works at Hellfields health centre in Coventry, told an undercover reporter that £2,000 was the ‘general’ price for a kidney. ‘Although it is a lot of money for them, they’re doing an extraordinary thing,’ he said. ‘They are generally manual workers. Just imagine if something goes wrong with the remaining kidney—they will be crippled for life.'” Sunday Times, 1 April.

Try and imagine the desperation of a £15 a month labourer in India who has to sell a kidney in order to feed his family. The whole system is an abomination, and the sooner the working class surgically remove the cancer of the profit motive from society the better.

Why vote for politicians? (2001)

Editorial from the May 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Since the last election capitalism has to begun to become a dirty word again. All over the world people are protesting against the profit system and the effect it is having on the environment and the poorest parts of the world and on the quality of life generally. There have been anti-capitalist protests in Britain too. Maybe you’ve taken part in them, but what to do in the coming election?

Vote Labour-you must be joking!

Needless to say, Labour wants nothing to do with these protests. They are as committed to the profit system and to serving the interests of Big Business as are the Tories. In fact, at the moment, they have more support in business circles than do the Tories. This is not surprising since Labour has never aimed at anything more than managing the capitalist system-which inevitably means putting profits before people-and business judges that they have done this well enough over the past four years.

So, no self-respecting anti-capitalist can vote Labour.

Vote Green?

The Greens are not anti-capitalist either. Certainly, they criticise Big Business and some of the ways the profit-driven market system works, but from the point of view of small business. For them, Big Business is Bad, Small Business is Beautiful. But a return to smaller businesses is neither desirable nor in fact possible, and it wouldn’t help the environment either. And Green Party Ministers in Germany, France and Italy haven’t made any difference to the way capitalism works.

So, voting Green is out too for the consistent anti-capitalist.

Follow the Leaders?

But what about those calling themselves socialists, such as the Socialist Alliance and the Scottish Socialist Party, surely they deserve the votes of anti-capitalists, don’t they?

Do they? We think not.

First, there’s the people involved. They’re mainly Trotskyists from the SWP and the Militant Tendency who see the Russian Revolution as a model to follow and who have appointed themselves a “vanguard” to lead “the masses”. The Russian Revolution as a model? No thank you. It only led to state capitalism, and anti-capitalists shouldn’t want to go down that road again, not that many of you do anyway.

Second, look at their programme. It doesn’t even go beyond private capitalism. “Tax the Rich and Make Them Pay” sounds anti-capitalist, and the capitalists certainly wouldn’t like it, but it assumes that the rich continue to exist. It’s the old illusion that you can use taxes and government intervention to make the capitalist system work for everybody’s benefit. You can’t, as has been proved time and again and not just by the failure of Labour governments in this country.

That those behind this alliance of would-be leaders should encourage this illusion is not surprising because, up to now, they’ve always told us to vote Labour. For them, the “Socialist Alliance” is just a tactic to get disillusioned Old Labourites-who still think capitalism can be reformed-to join their ranks.

If we can see through this tactic, then hopefully so can you.

Don’t Vote?

So what’s left? Not vote at all. More and more people are doing this, and it’s not as bad as voting for one or other of the parties that stand for keeping capitalism going. But it’s a bit of a cop-out. The anarchists like it, but they don’t believe in elections and have threatened “direct action” to disrupt this one. We don’t agree. Our ancestors were right to struggle for the vote. The fact that up to now it hasn’t been used properly is no reason for rejecting it as useless.

Write-in vote for Socialism

We suggest something else: a write-in vote for socialism. Real socialism, that is, not the failed state capitalism that collapsed in Russia ten years ago, but a society where there’s common ownership and democratic control of the means of production, where goods and services are produced for use not profit, and where the principle “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” applies.

It is all very well being anti-capitalist but if this is to mean something more than merely protesting against the effects of capitalism, it has got to also mean having an idea of an alternative to capitalism. Ours is a world without frontiers in which the natural and industrial resources of the Earth become the common heritage of all humanity and are used to provide enough for everybody in an ecologically-acceptable way.

Because we think that, in future, the election system could be used in a constructive way we shall be exercising our right to vote. We shall be going to the polling stations and casting a write-in vote by writing “SOCIALISM” or “WORLD SOCIALISM” across the ballot paper.

Global reformists (2001)

Book Review from the May 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘On the Edge: Living with Global Capitalism’. Edited by Will Hutton and Anthony Giddens, (Vintage 2001)

This is a collection of essays by various “lefty” and centrist writers on aspects of global capitalism. The essays are sandwiched between an opening dialogue between the editors and a concluding chapter curiously titled “Fighting Back” (against whom or what?—certainly not global capitalism).

Manuel Castells outlines three sources of unsustainability for what he calls info-capitalism. One of these is “the social, cultural and political rejection by large numbers of people around the world of an Automaton whose logic either ignores or devalues their humanity”. Unfortunately he follows this by suggestions for taming the Automaton (global capitalism), not for getting rid of it.

Vandana Shiva is scathing about global capitalism and its effects on poor people and the environment: “Instead of getting rid of pollution, systems are being evolved which allow the rich to sell their pollution to the poor . . . The proposal to give market values to all resources as a solution of the ecological crisis is like offering the disease as the cure”—good diagnosis, pity about the lack of treatment.

Arlie Russell Hochschild describes how a Philippines mother-of-five migrates to the US to work as a nanny to the young son of a wealthy Beverly Hills family. The family pay the nanny the going rate, and the nanny pays her domestic worker the going Philippines rate. The nanny would have preferred staying home to look after her own children. The Beverly Hills family are satisfied with the deal. So Hochschild asks: are that family getting emotional surplus value?

In the face of this and much other evidence that global capitalism is destroying or severely damaging human relationships and values, you would expect the editors to condemn the system and urge its replacement. Not a bit of it. Hutton does not go beyond recognising the driving force behind global capitalism: “Its overriding objective is to serve the interests of property owners and shareholders, and it has a firm belief . . . that all obstacles to its capacity to do that-regulation, controls, trade unions, taxation, public ownership, etc—are unjustified and should be removed.”

Giddens, seeking to magnify the minuscule differences between himself and Hutton, claims that “Capitalism, at least for the moment, has hardly any critics.” Not true. Capitalism has plenty of critics, but none of them (except socialists, of course) carries their criticisms to the point of advocating the removal of the system whose deficiencies they eloquently describe. Instead they accept the myth that There is No Alternative.

The editors say in their concluding chapter “the task, surely, in the absence of alternatives, is to keep the current system going and improve it.” It doesn’t seem to occur to Hutton and Giddens that this “task” is effectively to condemn us to endure some form of capitalism for ever. Echoing Fukuyama, we really have, according to this scenario, reached the end of history.

Stan Parker

Reformist excuses and Labourite deceit (2001)

Pamphlet Review from the May 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

It was with some amusement that this socialist picked up a copy of the recent Fabian pamphlet The Case for Socialism. Published by an organisation that has never been committed to socialism, I wondered at what the contents might be. I didn’t expect too much as the Fabian Society as now constituted has been described as “Blair’s shock troops” and has been at the forefront of trying to “redefine” socialism. As I read I realised that what “redefinition” meant was the wholesale bastardisation of the term to justify a century of attempts by the Labour Party and its affiliates to tweak capitalism by use of the state.

To some extent socialists have to acknowledge that the “welfare” state, the NHS and so on, made living standards for some sections of the working class better than they had been under rampant capitalism and its early ideology of laissez faire, although these ends should never be confused with socialism. However, the pamphlet justifies the developments of the last twenty years whereby the Labour Party, and the labour movement generally, has abandoned even these limited aims. Socialists appreciate the honesty that this has brought about, with members of the Labour Party no longer claiming to be able to bring about a qualitatively new society through nationalisation and so on but seeking only to make capitalism’s worst aspects slightly less bad. What socialists don’t appreciate, however, is the century of deceit of the working class that Labourism has involved. Promising crumbs off the master’s table has diverted attention away from the attempts by definite socialists to secure the whole loaf.

The pamphlet’s author, Paul Richards, suggests that “socialism is about more than visions; it is about the practical steps to get there”. Given his later claim that “Revisionism is the political method whereby socialists ensure the policies they espouse reflect the times they live in”, or, to paraphrase, socialism is a great idea but will it get us elected, it is no surprise that he concludes that the “transition to socialism is like walking towards the horizon: no matter how long the journey, you never arrive”. That the Labour Party has nothing to do with socialism as a practical end is summed up in his view that in politics “It is the journey that matters, not the destination.”

The main thrust of the pamphlet is a weak theoretical justification for the Blairite “modernisers” who are asserting in the name of socialism a humanistic communitarian philosophy which has as its basis the new Labour Clause Four and Paul Richards states that this replaced the old one constructed by Sidney Webb in 1918 because the old one could mean “whatever you wanted”; but if the old one could mean anything, the new one means nothing at all to anyone apart from the new governors of “cool Britannia”. Pluralism is the order of the day, there apparently being “as many socialisms as there are socialists”.

In this pamphlet and in another by the Fabian Society Radicals and Reformers: A Century of Fabian Thought (ed. Mark Thomas and Guy Lodge) the new left in the Labour Party is trying to justify its actions in two ways. Firstly, by trying to establish itself in the tradition of socialist revisionism and, secondly, by suggesting that structural economic and social change has made new revision necessary. It is quite true that politicians seeking to be elected to run capitalism, albeit to try to reform it, must be concerned to appeal to the widest number of voters. What this has nothing to do with of course is socialism, which is the desire to establish a qualitatively different social and economic basis. “Socialist” revisionism has never been concerned with the establishment of socialism but merely with the operation of so-called socialist parties in the politics of the capitalist state.

Founded in 1884 it, with Sidney and Beatrice Webb and Bernard Shaw among its prominent members, was initially a body for socialist discussion and meetings. The influence of Sidney Webb in particular, however, quickly led to a view of socialism quite at odds with socialism. For the Fabians all progress must be by slow, gradual struggle, reform-by-reform, within the law and over a lengthy period of time. “The inevitability of gradualism” became its well-known phrase and was outlined in the Fabian Essays (1889). Thus for socialism to become a reality, for the Fabians, meant an evolutionary process and not revolution. Also, its vision of the society of the future was akin to some sort of efficient state bureaucracy rather than the world of free access and possibilities for human happiness depicted by William Morris’s News From Nowhere (1890).

It is instructive to read an analysis of the early Fabian Society by a contemporary party with definite socialist aims, that is the Socialist Party, the only party then as now committed to the establishment of socialism, and nothing but:

  “The Fabian Society also [as well as the SDF] poses as a Socialist organisation for we are told that this Society ‘consists of Socialists’. It is indeed composed of middle-class men who naturally deny the class struggle, profess to believe in permeating the capitalist class with Socialism, and hold that the tendency of society is towards government by the expert. Fabianism therefore tends towards the rule of the bureaucrats, or that section of the educated middle class. The Fabians are the cult of the civil service, and are Socialists neither in name nor fact . . . Fabianism, that peculiarly British product, is merely a manifestation of the intellectual bankruptcy of the capitalist-class” (Manifesto of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, 1905, p.11).

The rejection of Marxist theory in all its aspects by the Fabian Society has resulted in an organisation committed to producing idea after idea concerned with reforming one aspect or another of capitalism. Noticeably, after over a century of reforms and not a few Labour governments, the Fabians, if they stopped to seriously reflect, would find that, like a dog chasing its tail, reform has been followed by a fresh attack by capital on a new front or the reverse of past reforms by the avowed representatives of capital.

As to claims that social and economic change in the late twentieth century has made past class experience and socialist thought irrelevant, one glance at world governments’ own current statistics will reveal the greatest concentration of the means of production amongst the smallest proportion of the population in the history of human relations and consequently the most iniquitous social and economic system in the history of humankind. Whether the bulk of that part of the population that works for a wage works in a factory or a call centre, with its hands or brains, works for the same firm or “flexibly”, rides the bus or owns their car, rents or owns their houses, buys from a shop or over the internet, thinks of itself broadly as a homogenous class or not, works for a “foreign” firm or not, makes no difference. The fact is that all those having no access to the means of living, the working class, must work for those who have, the owning or capitalist class, at a rate less than the value of labour contained in their work. Thus “globalisation”, incidentally no new development, is not a recent phenomenon for the working class, just an acceleration of an existing process.

The Fabian Society may have ridden the roundabout of reformism and, having enjoyed the ride, want to go round again, but socialists want no part in this fraud. Social happiness, common ownership, free access, democratic control; all can be achieved by the working class. The interests of the owners of the means of living dictates, on the other hand, that profits, obtained from the labour of those with no access to the means of living, are the end to which society shall be organised. And this class, having at its disposal the power of the state and the means of communication, succeed very well in presenting their own interests as those of us all, despite the fact of a fundamental clash of interests between capital and the vast bulk of the world’s population, the working class, which has no interest in the continuance of the minority ownership of the means of production. Humans can then begin their own history, free from the constraints of profit and class struggle, but must, as a precondition, firstly abolish the current decadent capitalist system and replace it with the new society, socialism.

The concept of class struggle and of revolution is alien to the rose-tinted reformists of the British left characterised by the Fabian Society and the Labour Party. This means they will be content to see every gain as the building of barriers against the tide of capitalism only to see them smashed down with the next tide. The Socialist Party, on the other hand, knows its task well; to carry on the political struggle against capitalism and its political representatives and, so doing, to bring about its rapid demise. Only by recognising the intrinsic struggle between capital and labour, and acting to bring about the victory of labour, of the working class and its interests, can classes once and for all be abolished, common ownership be established, and real human interests and relationships begin.

Colin Skelly

Unreasonable Faith (2001)

Theatre Review from the May 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

God Only Knows. Vaudeville Theatre, London.

A number of critics have taken against Hugh Whitemore’s new play, a thriller set in Italy which questions the basis of Christian belief. They argue that Whitemore doesn’t handle the thriller elements well, and that he has loaded the dice in favour of the atheist.

I found myself, not for the first time, very much in the minority. I thought the play compelling and intelligent, and if the narrative line depends upon the telephone failing mysteriously, then I think it fair to say that such mishaps are at the heart of many/most thrillers. Indeed judged by, for example, the naïve standards of The Mousetrap—Agatha Christie’s murder mystery which is still packing them in after 50 years—Whitemore’s text is Olympian in its sophistication. And crucially, I just don’t accept that the debate about belief and Christianity is managed in a one-sided fashion. Rather I would argue that if audiences have occasion to wonder about their own beliefs as they leave the theatre, this is because, unusually, the sceptic’s position has been examined scrupulously, fairly and reasonably comprehensibly.

The plot is simple. Four British holiday-makers playing an Italian version of monopoly in their rural retreat in deepest Tuscany, are surprised when after the sounds of a nearby car crash they are confronted by a bleeding Englishmen, played by Derek Jacobi, wearing pyjamas and bedroom slippers., Jacobi says he is an academic who is being employed by the Vatican to scrutinise an obscure archive and that, following a cocktail party, he was handed a 2000-year-old document which shows that the resurrection of Christ never happened. When his employers discovered this, Jacobi claims that he was drugged and forcibly detained in hospital. He escapes by stealing the keys of the car belonging to a central heating engineer, and is being pursued across Italy by agents of the church and state, who are fearful that he might reveal that Christianity is a gigantic fiction.

Perhaps the story seem comically implausible. But when Jacobi tells us about the evidence found in the document and uses this to demolish the substance of Christianity, his actions, and those of his pursuers, become increasingly credible. And the four holiday-makers wonder, “Has he escaped from a lunatic asylum or might he be telling the truth?” The dramatic events at the end of the play point to the latter rather than the former conclusion.

Socialists will find the play interesting as the following examples might confirm.

Amongst the “evidence” supposedly offer in the document is mention of the realisation, by the Roman state, that there might be mileage in supporting one of their critics whose particular message is that people should “love their enemies”. A perceptive politician suggests to Pilate that they should encourage the Jews forming around Jesus, and then arrange to fabricate his resurrection after he is crucified. (Normally the custom was to leave crucified corpses hanging until they were eaten by birds, but on this occasion permission was given for the body to be placed in a tomb.) The resurrected Jesus—a Galiliean who looked like the dead man and was bribed to impersonate Jesus—wasn’t recognised at first. People thought he was an angel or a gardener. The resurrection is crucial to Christian belief. At St Paul has it, “If Christ is not risen, then our faith in vain.”

Explaining why Christianity became such a popular cult the Jacobi character offers:

  “In the early days, the Jesus cult had a great sense of urgency. When the first Christians spoke of a Kingdom to Come, they weren’t talking about some event in the far distant future, but something that was going to happen in the next few weeks—months at most. They believed that the end of the world was sell and truly Nigh. People became Christians because they were scared. Also—wonderful simplicity. There were so many cults, so many different gods—Christianity swept all that away. One God—one road to salvation and life everlasting.”

But the moment I enjoyed most was when the nature of “faith” was analysed and evaluated. The Jacobi character questions its utility:

  “Would you give cash in advance to a man who promised to meet you on the street corner with a brand new Rolls-Royce? Do you have faith or . . . do you tell him to bugger off and find some other sucker?”

And later:

  “It says in the dictionary that faith is unquestioning confidence. Is that something to be admired? Is it? Not in my book it isn’t. It sounds like plain stupidity . . . The door opens and in walks Jesus. ‘I’ve died but here I am again.’ It seems a perfectly reasonable response to day ‘prove it’ . . . What’s so blessed about unquestioning evidence? . . . People still go in believing in astrology, in statues that weep, alien abduction, Our Lady of Lourdes, scientology, mystical stigmata and the whole wretched farrago of fairy tales and wishful thinking . . .”

Wonderful stuff, full of insight and humour.

Michael Gill

Corrections. (2001)

From the May 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Unfortunately the gremlins were at work in our computer system last month, resulting in a number errors in last month’s Standard. Particularly affected was the article “Inside the Sports Industry”, though we trust it was still intelligible and also the editorial where readers will have automatically reinserted the “not” in “as long as this happens it does not matter which party is in office”. Our apologies.

There were a couple of minor human errors last month too.

In “Who Are the Socialist Alliance” we said that the SWP “has always been fiercely against standing in elections”. In principle this is true as the SWP is an undemocratic, Leninist organisation that believes in minority led insurrection rather than democratic action. However, during the last Labour government in the late 1970s they adopted the temporary tactic of fighting parliamentary by-elections. It was a transient and cynical manoeuvre that they are repeating under another guise now.

And in the article “Make A Difference” we commented that before the last election Blair had so impressed Viscount Rothermere, proprietor of the Daily Mail, that “the Tory press baron swung his newspaper into support for ‘New Labour’ on the grounds that they were the ‘new Conservatives'”. While it is true that Rothermere crossed the floor and joined the Labour benches in the Lords, and also true that the Daily Mail‘s support for the Tories at the last election was the most muted in history, the paper still reluctantly backed the Conservatives. It was its Associated Newspapers stablemate, the London Evening Standard, which switched to Labour.

Beyond Their Empty Promises (2001)

Party News from the May 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party is standing one candidate in the general election, in Jarrow. Here is our manifesto

By now, you will have had the chance to hear the various politicians in this General Election put forward their views as to how they intend to make our lives a lot better if we elect them. At every opportunity they will have quoted facts and figures, belittled their opponents and made the usual mundane promises.

Well, we may quote a few facts, but we’ll not attack our opponents or make you rash promises. All we will do is ask you to think, and perhaps encourage you to begin using the most subversive word in the English language-“why?”

This is the first General Election of the 21st century and the first real chance you will get this century to send a local MP to Parliament to fight for issues you think are important. So, is it not worth just pausing to recall the previous century and the empty promises it is littered with.

In spite of continual promises of peace from politicians, the last century witnessed two world wars and over 400 smaller conflicts, resulting in 220 million deaths. Some 30 conflicts still rage.

With great advances in food production in the 20th Century, politicians, in the 1970s, promised a world food summit that global hunger would be eradicated within 10 years. There are now over twice as many chronically malnourished people on the planet—800 million—and the World Health Organisation estimates that more people died of malnutrition between 1999 and 2000 than were killed in the two world wars.

In spite of breakthroughs in medical science and technology, UNICEF can still report that 1000 children die every hour from easily preventable disease.

In truth, we have entered the 21st century taking with us every social problem that plagued us in the previous one, yet still we give our support to a system in which a majority of these social ills are rooted. Crime, unemployment, drugs, war, homelessness, and environmental decay—these are still with us and in many cases accentuated, despite the myriad promises to solve them.

All the politicians will tell you they have the answers. But their answers continually fail to solve the problems society faces. Socialists say that if the politicians’ answers are worthless, perhaps they are answering the wrong questions. Maybe we are asking the wrong questions.

If we ask politicians why there is crime and unemployment, war and strife, homelessness and starvation, pollution and environmental destruction, they’ll prevaricate, change the subject or give an answer a mile off the mark. Very few will locate the problem in a wider social and economic context-in the way our society is organised for production : profit before needs.

But this is what the vast majority of our problems boil down to-the undemocratic control and distribution of the world’s natural and industrial resources and the fact that every aspect of our lives is subordinated to the requirements of profit. The golden maxim of our age is “can’t pay-can’t have". It is the logic that finds hundreds of millions living lives of abject poverty in a world of potential abundance.

In socialist society, the artificial constraints of profit will be removed and the productive processes will be used to their fullest potential and with the aim of satisfying needs first and in an environmentally friendly way.

Socialist society will mean a world without borders or frontiers, states and armies, exploitation and oppression. It will be a world devoid of monetary transactions in which people give of their abilities and take freely according to their needs.

We are not demanding the impossible. Our case is simple: our world would be a much better place to live in if we had a real democratic say in the decisions that effect us and real control over the means and instruments for producing and distributing the things we need to live in comfort.

We are not demanding the impossible. Our case is simple: our world would be a much better place to live in if we had a real democratic say in the decisions that effect us and real control over the means and instruments for producing and distributing the things we need to live in comfort.

John Bissett, Socialist Party candidate for Jarrow

A sixth form essay (2001)

Book Review from the May 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Karl Marx: Hero or Zero?’ By Professor Colin Francome. (Carla Francome publications, 2000)

It’s almost trendy to write about Karl Marx these days and Francome’s book is an example of this genre. However, quite why this particular book was written and moreover who it was written for, is anyone’s guess. It fails to break new ground, has a weak sixth-form-esque narrative and contains a number of factual errors and omissions. It truly reads like a book without any real sense of purpose or originality.

This said, Francome gives Marx a favourable reassessment and this is to his eternal credit as, unlike many seasoned ‘experts’, he does not hold Marx’s ideas as being responsible for those tyrannical so-called ‘Marxist’ regimes which:

“did not have the kind of lifestyle that Marx proposed”(p8).

and

“it is ironic that a person whose work was directed towards producing freedom became identified as the enemy of freedom”(p6)

However, some of Francome’s mistakes are quite glaring. Perhaps from our point of view, the most significant one is the quote on page 1 allegedly from this very journal – only do not get too excited, it is actually from another organisation.

Another example includes the rather pathetic discussion of contemporary British ‘socialist’ history. He cites “four distinct major Marxist groups” (Communist Party, International Socialism/Socialist Workers Party, Workers Revolutionary Party and the International Marxist Group) completely omitting Ted Grant’s Militant group.

Francome then refers to the WRP splits which one should definitely never do unless painstaking research has been undertaken. Clearly this was not the case and in the throes of confusionism, Francome manages to mix up the notorious Redgraves of the Marxist Party with the faction still producing the Newsline paper. Not the crime of the century, but even so – do your homework Professor!

At the risk of labouring the point, his account on the rise of Trotskyism in the USSR borders on the banal and in discussing the destinations of certain sixties radicals it would be more accurate to describe a one Chris Harman as the editor of Socialist Worker rather than just glibly saying that he now ‘writes books’.

Indeed, this is a very disappointing book.

Dave Flynn

Medicine under capitalism (2001)

From the May 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

  Politicians will be after your vote again soon, so they’ll be promising to save “your” NHS. Is it yours? Where did the NHS come from? And can politicians really save it?

With the general election looming, representatives of the various pro-capitalist parties will be grubbing about for your vote. The NHS is always a political battleground, and the major political parties often focus their campaigns on the issue because they think it is a potential vote winner. All politicians – whether Liberal, Tory, Labour or the Socialist Alliance candidates – agree, it seems. The NHS is in a dreadful state, and something must be done. What they propose must be done varies – spend more, move over to private healthcare, cut red tape, etc – but the unspoken assumption is that the NHS is a good thing in and of itself.

The NHS and public health are understandably and rightly matters of major public concern. They are the subject of public debate – to the extent that such a thing exists – precisely because they are of such vital importance to our present and future wellbeing. But this debate on the future of the NHS entirely focuses on how scarce resources should be allocated. It is accepted that the NHS and the practice of modern medicine is a “good”, but that, unfortunately, there is not enough of it to go round. Which leads to another assumption: that whatever the concrete problem, it is possible to resolve it within the contexts of the system, via parliamentary “democracy” and/or pressure group politics. All that needs to be done is for some trade union, for example, to “call on the Government” – to demand that the Government do something. But what could they do, and for whom?

No one doubts that the NHS has, for some time now, been in a state of crisis. This is not because of the failure of politicians. It is not the case that individuals are sabotaging what would otherwise be an all-right system. The crisis in the NHS is a reflection of the growing recognition that the increasing costs of medicine are not producing a commensurate increase in labour productivity – what the medical journals euphemistically refer to as “cost effectiveness”.

Contrary to popular belief, the NHS is not dedicated to satisfying the human need for health care, or the eradication of disease. Medical practice and research in capitalist society is strongly influenced by its role in maintaining a healthy labour force, and in socialising and controlling people in a class-divided society. The NHS keeps us fit for work so we can produce profits for our bosses. It is an integrative mechanism that helps hold class-divided society together.

The need of individual bosses to make as much profit as they can from us has to give way, to a certain extent, to the long-term needs of capitalist society as a whole. This is the basis for the idea that the state and the NHS are forces for “socialism”: legislation that protects workers from too much overwork and stress, provides education and basic health care, etc, came to be identified with “socialism”, rather than with the needs of developing capitalist society. (This view is defended to this day by the leftwing of capitalism, such as leftwing labourites, trotskyists, etc.)

In order to cut through this sterile debate, it is necessary to take a historical view. One cannot understand the NHS, or make sense of the waffle of politicians, by looking at a snapshot of it at one point in time, but by looking at how it came into being, the social context within which it operates, in whose interests it operates, and so on. Hospitals don’t fall from the sky.

In defence of capitalism?

From about 1870 onwards, there was a huge increase in the standard of life of most workers. Mortality rates fell, largely due to improvements in public health – such as clean water, effective sewage disposal and sanitation – and working class living standards improved. The widespread use of more complex machines over this period made possible an intensification of the labour process – workers were made to work harder – but on the other hand, this required a fitter and therefore more reliable work force. During the 20th century, mortality rates continued to fall. Capitalist development led to an increase in life expectancy for the whole population. It is facts like these that provide powerful support for the idea of the rationality and benevolence of capitalist society.

But at the same time, capitalism had to restructure if it was to survive. In the first decade of the 20th century, the Labour Party and the trade unions were vociferous in demanding social reforms. This increased level of working class organisation formed the background to the social legislation enacted by Lloyd George’s liberal government in the period from 1906 onwards. These reforms were not a gift from a benevolent state, nor were they merely a ploy to buy off working class discontent. They were an important element in the attempt to restructure British capitalism. It was starting to become clear that the quality of human labour was a crucial factor in capitalist development, and that capitalists must therefore invest in it just as they invested in the maintenance of machines.

Reorganising poverty

It was against this background that plans for a state-organised medical service were formulated during the interwar period, culminating in the publication of the Beveridge Report in 1942. This was received enthusiastically by almost everyone, from people calling themselves socialists and communists, to the Archbishop of Canterbury, to some of the leading capitalists of the day. One group that wasn’t so impressed was the Socialist Party. We published a pamphlet at the time entitled Beveridge Reorganises Poverty (a photocopy of this is available by contacting our Head Office), which made, rather brilliantly, many of the points I will make again here. As the pamphlet makes clear, Beveridge gave expression to a broad section of hardheaded opinion in the ruling class of his period. Beveridge was for social reform, so long as the existing structure of society remained fundamentally the same. As Harold Macmillan later put it:

  After 1931 many of us felt that the disease was more deep rooted. It had become evident that the structure of capitalist society in its old form had broken down, not only in Britain, but all over Europe and even in the United States. The whole system had to be reassessed. Perhaps it could not survive at all; it certainly could not survive without radical change … Something like a revolutionary situation had developed, not only at home, but overseas.

Increased state intervention came to be seen as crucial in the struggle to save capitalism – it was not the struggle for socialism, but its opposite. It was part of the postwar settlement between capital and labour.

To summarise the basic argument in Marxist terms, medical care is important for the reproduction of the forces and relations of production. The reproduction of labour power is provided for through the payment of wages – which enables us to feed, clothe and house ourselves at a historically and culturally specific level – but also through the state, which has, to an extent, taken responsibility for the collective reproduction of labour power by providing education, social security, and other welfare services. The development of the NHS was in part a recognition that a shift away from unskilled manual work to other forms of employment would require a healthier workforce and a more stable and qualitatively superior one. To put it more plainly, the NHS helps keep us fit for work so that we are forced to keep on selling the only thing of real value we own – our creative abilities – to our employers.

To recognise this is not to dismiss modern medicine as completely irrelevant or useless. Large-scale sanitation in the developed world, vaccines, and even the NHS itself, must be seen as gains for the working class in some aspects. It is, rather, to see through the “each according to needs” socialist rhetoric surrounding the NHS. The whole process of the foundation of the NHS was a contradictory one, serving the interests of capital and, as a byproduct, that of the workers.

The NHS also serves different sections of the capitalist class. This is to say that the medical field is itself a large and growing arena for the accumulation of capital, the most obvious example of which is the hugely profitable pharmaceutical industry, and the potentially hugely profitable emerging biotechnology industries. (Since the publication of the human genome project, speculative capital has been pouring into biotech industries, even though no one yet knows if anything will come of it.) The pharmaceutical industry justifies its huge profits by reference to the cost of the research and development it carries out, but it tends to remain silent on the amount it spends on advertising. Most of the information about drugs that doctors rely on comes, directly or indirectly, from the drug industry itself.

So what do we suggest? Although we cannot specify in advance a utopian blueprint for a socialist health policy, we can state that in socialism profit would no longer be the criterion for making decisions about production. Very different goods could then be manufactured, possibly using alternative technologies, with work organised in different ways, so as to reduce the possibility of ill health arising in the first place. And although it would be absurd to say that all disease would be abolished, we can assume that a real concern for the health of the population would be reflected in planning and decision making. Such a society is not a pipedream, but the logical outcome of the working class taking control of their own struggles against the current system, and redirecting their energies into an explicit attack on it.

The demand for a healthier society is in effect a revolutionary demand, since health-damaging aspects of production cannot be removed in response to political reform. This is because it is an inherent feature of capitalism that the interests of capital accumulation ultimately determine social and economic priorities.

But at the election, that is not the sort of message that you can expect to hear. Plenty of blather about spending on the NHS. Plenty of promises. The Socialist Party, however, doesn’t make promises. Instead, it can give a guarantee. Voting for a capitalist party, whether Labour, Tory, Liberal, or Socialist Alliance, will make no difference to your quality of life. Only your own actions – the “self-activity of the working class” – can change the world.

Stuart Watkins

Letters: Whose welfare? (2001)

Letters to the Editors from the May 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Whose welfare?

Dear Editors,

It seems to me the majority of workers are unable to see through the smokescreen of misleading language used by the “popular press”. I would love to see people such as us adopt simple accurate definitions instead of using their terminology.

Welfare is most discriminatory and applies only to the diminishing pittance of basic subsistence money reluctantly rationed out by government to the most needy. But all government spending benefits some group of people in our society. Although categorised under such heading as “defence, subsidies, grants, aid, law and order, etc, etc they are all really “welfare for the capitalist class”. As we all know, even education and health would never have been on any government agenda if a reasonably fit and literate workforce had not been required to exploit,. Cuts now on both health and education merely coincide with the decrease in demand for workers. It is uneconomical to bother keeping such a surplus in existence. However, all this government expenditure should be referred to as Welfare for the Rich.

In the West Australian newspaper of 23 October it was reported that Welfare for the Poor is being methodically cut by a government policy of penalising and fining recipients for trivial infringements . . . real or imagined. Three hundred thousand workers throughout Australia have been affected this past year and $17 million has been collected from the unemployed in Western Australia alone!

A recent Western Australia Telethon TV charity boasted that over 33 years the endless effort of any army of charity workers have collected a total of $55 million. Most of the money has provided special equipment for children’s hospitals. Not a penny of government welfare money spent here.

However, government expenditure for the two-week Olympic event in Sydney totalled $8,000 million (eight billion). Most workers were delighted with this circus and are still delirious over the 16 gold medals Australia won . . . costing $500 million each. Even more delighted must surely be the business world . . . raking in vast amounts of income while all the outlay was paid by the government. Sounds like Welfare for the Rich to me!

Ron Stone, 

Gelorup, Western Australia

Dictatorship

Dear Editors,

As you know, socialists always have been fighting for proletarian dictatorship. When “Socialists” in Russia, Poland, Cuba, China, etc have got political power, they called it proletarian dictatorship. Nowadays people have not any good experience from the “dictatorship of proletariat” in Russia, etc and they hate any kind of dictatorship. Can you explain real “proletarian dictatorship”? I would like to know what did Karl Marx think about proletarian dictatorship? Is there any democracy and freedom for all social classes and all people under rule of proletarian dictatorship?

K. Jahandideh, 

London W8

Reply: 

Marx took the term “dictatorship of the proletariat” from the French revolutionaries he met when he lived in Paris in the mid-1840s. Only, whereas they saw this as being a minority dictatorship supposedly on behalf of the working class (or proletariat) Marx gave it a democratic content and saw it as the unlimited exercise of political power by the working class by and on its own behalf.

What existed in Russia, etc had nothing to do with what Marx envisaged, but was a naked dictatorship over the working class. No wonder they hated it—and they were right.

What Marx envisaged was a period between the end of capitalist political rule and the establishment of socialism (or communism, the same thing) when political power would be exercised by the majority working class within a democratic context. So, yes, he did envisage democracy and freedom of speech for all people, even capitalists and former capitalists, under his interpretation of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”. Engels referred to the Paris Commune of 1871 as an example of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and, although we can doubt that it really was a beginning of a transition to socialism, it was an elected council with competing parties—quite unlike Russia under Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin.

Having said this, although we say that the working class should still organise to win control of political power and use it in the course of establishing socialism-and would call this the “dictatorship of the proletariat” if really pressed-we don’t envisage this as lasting for any length of time and think the term “dictatorship of the proletariat” to be so open to misunderstanding as to be counter-productive. We prefer to speak simply of the (very short-term democratic) exercise of political power by the working class.

Editors.

Marx’s lapse

Dear Editors,

It’s ironic that you (“What is Capitalism?”, Socialist Standard, December) admonish protesting reformers for not knowing “exactly” what capitalism is, when you make an inexcusable error. Yes it is true that production under capitalism is motivated by profit. However, profit is not “the difference between this [the price of the products sold] and what they [the capitalists] pay, as wages and salaries, for the working skills they [the capitalists] purchase on the labour market”. Scientifically speaking, surplus value is the correct term. Saying that surplus value is profit is like saying that 11 is 12.

Thomas Alpine, 

Grand Rapids, 

Michigan, USA

Reply: 

If you want to be pedantic, surplus value and profit are not the same since surplus value is divided into rent and interest as well as (industrial and commercial) profit, but in being lax we are in good company. In his own popular explanation of his theories in Value, Price and Profit, Marx writes (Chapter XI):

“The surplus value, or that part of the total value of the commodity in which the surplus labour or unpaid labour of the working man is realised, I call ‘Profit’, and “In the remarks I have still to make I shall use the word Profit for the whole amount of the surplus value extracted by the capitalist without any regard to the division of that surplus value between different parties.”

Editors.

Flying, spying and a new Cold War (2001)

From the May 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

For two weeks at the start of April, an American spy plane and its crew were held in China following a mid-air collision with a Chinese jet. The Chinese pilot crashed and was killed, and is now being hailed as a national hero, while the US plane was damaged and had to land at a military airfield. After a war of words, the crew were eventually able to return home, though the plane itself was left behind as a prize capture (and the US are demanding it back). The precise details of what happened in the skies are still not clear, but they certainly matter much less than what this whole incident shows about US-China relations and the possibilities of a new Cold War.

Many people may have been surprised to learn that the US was still spying on China in this way. In fact, up to a thousand surveillance flights, using aircraft packed to the rafters with sophisticated technology and electronic specialists, spy on China every year, mainly in order to find out what they can about China’s nuclear capabilities. This is in addition to satellite surveillance, listening in to radio transmissions, and the use of American agents on the ground. It is widely believed that China has infiltrated various US nuclear installations and so acquired a great deal of knowledge about how to design and construct nuclear missiles. Bush’s plan to build an anti-missile screen to defend the US is, at least in part, a response to this.

The incident graphically reveals the extent to which the US is the virtually-unchallenged world superpower. One can hardly imagine the furore in the US if a Chinese plane spying on American nuclear weapons had caused an American pilot to crash and then been forced to land in California. The US, however, believes it has the right to do as it pleases with regard to spying on other countries, and of course in capitalist terms it does have that right, i.e. it possesses the requisite military force.

A complicating issue in these matters is that of continuing US arms sales to Taiwan, the island regarded by China as an integral part of its territory. US-Taiwan military cooperation is also increasing. China’s security needs imply that Taiwan not have the military capability of attacking or threatening China, or of mounting a serious resistance if China were to invade.

In fact, it was not in the interests of either China or the US for the aircraft incident to develop into a major stand-off. Although so-called “hawks” in both ruling circles may have wanted to engineer a confrontation, both sides have good reasons for keeping on fairly friendly terms-or at least as friendly as rival capitalist states can ever be. For the time being, China is a useful trading partner for the US, while China needs overseas investment. As the Chinese Foreign Ministry puts it,

  “the development of friendly relations and cooperation between China and the US serves the interests of both sides and is of vital importance to peace and prosperity of Asia-Pacific and the world as a whole.”

President Bush is due to visit Beijing in October, and in March he met Qian Qichen, the Chinese Vice-Premier, in Washington – Qian’s visit was described by the Chinese government as “a great success”. But as its economy grows, China will become more and more a real competitor for global power, probably the only country really able to challenge the US.

Trade

This all comes as China is preparing for entry into the World Trade Organization. Most of the potential obstacles to entry have now been overcome, but it is still up to WTO members to decide on the exact timetable for China’s entry. Joining the WTO is bound to increase China’s integration into the global economy, in terms of both overseas investment in China and the growth of Chinese-owned companies abroad (of which there are over 6,000).

Military spending in many major countries is rising. The “defence” budget for 2002 submitted to the US Congress is for the staggering sum of $318.9 billion. China’s military spending is not in this sort of league, but the figure for 2001 still represents an increase of 17 percent over 2000. The Chinese rulers, mindful of the effect that ever-increasing military spending had on the economy of the Soviet Union, will surely not want to get involved in an arms race or a new Cold War. But on the other hand, they will not want the US to have it all its own way.

One big difference between the current situation and that between Russia and the US during the Cold War is the extent of economic involvement in China on the part of American and other multinational companies. China has more so-called export-processing zones than any other country, that is, areas where overseas companies, often via local intermediaries, employ workers in sweatshop conditions, with tax breaks and little if any regulation on working conditions. At least 18 million Chinese workers labour in such zones, producing goods for corporations such as Nike and Adidas and working upwards of sixty hours per week for appallingly low wages. At the same time, many global corporations are expanding Chinese retail operations: Wal-Mart intends to open a further eight superstores in various parts of China this year, while the French-owned company Carrefour, which is second only to Wal-Mart in world retailing, will be doing likewise. Coca-Cola, to take another example, have enormous sales in China, which they will not want to see jeopardised. In some ways, the Chinese market is still relatively underdeveloped: Wal-Mart’s total sales exceed US$200 billion a year, which is about half of the retail sales in the whole of China. So there is plenty of scope for expansion. Despite the readiness to welcome inwards investment, though, the Chinese economy remains in something of a mess, with increasing unemployment, largely caused by the reduction of government subsidies to industry.

So it is not a matter of which plane flew in the most irresponsible way or of whether the US apologised or merely expressed regrets. The current global boss and its most likely future rival have good reasons for now to work together (or at least not in blatant antagonism) at the governmental and economic level. Yet the rulers of both China and the US want to maintain and expand their respective positions, power and influence, and spy flights are just one sordid aspect of their mutual suspicion and hostility. The vast sums spent on the military are just another indication of capitalism’s waste and priorities.

Paul Bennett

Getting nastier (2001)

Book Review from the May 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The Age of Access: the New Culture of Hypercapitalism Where All of Life is a Paid-for Experience’. By Jeremy Rifkin, (Penguin-Putnam, 2000, New York)

Rifkin is a writer, teacher, president of the Washington Foundation on Economic Trends, and has the reputation of being a trenchant critic of capitalism. The reputation is undeserved. He reports many unsavoury features of capitalism much as any capitalism-compliant journalist reports a natural disaster or an accident. He clearly has his preferences for, and aversions to, different types of capitalism, but he nowhere expresses any opposition to it as a system.

Rifkin’s main theme, briefly, is that markets are giving way to networking, sellers and buyers are replaced by suppliers and users and virtually everything is accessed at a price. Spelling this out, he writes:

  “We are making a long-term shift from industrial production to cultural production . . . commerce in the future will involve the marketing of a vast array of cultural experiences rather than of just traditional industrial-based goods and services. Global travel and tourism, theme events and parks, destination events and centers, wellness, fashion and cuisine, professional sports and games, gambling, music, films, television, the virtual worlds of cyberspace and electronically mediated entertainment of every kind are fast becoming the center of a new hypercapitalism that trades in access to cultural experiences.”

Much of this isn’t new. Rifkin spends a good deal of his book quoting the findings of others detailing the trends. But, like most reformers, he makes a show of seeking to set limits to the penetration of capitalism into every nook and cranny of our lives. He does this by inviting us to envisage what will happen if we don’t “imagine a world where virtually every activity outside the confines of family relations is a paid-for experience”. The way capitalism is going, this doesn’t take a lot of imagination because in many ways it’s already here.

Rifkin piles on the flesh-creeping pressure a bit more. “Think of waking up one day only to find that every aspect of your being has become a purchased affair, that your life has become the ultimate shopping experience.” Again, we don’t have to think too hard. Examples are all around us-thus a “common-interest development” (gated community) in South Carolina charges non-members $3 for the right to walk on its streets.

With all the chapter and verse of a nasty system that is getting even nastier, Rifkin could have outlined a plan for something fundamentally better. But he doesn’t. He anticipates an Age of (paid-for) Access which in many ways is already here. Socialists look forward to the Age of Free Access, which unfortunately isn’t here, but could be if enough of us resolved to work for it.

Stan Parker

Greasy Pole: Ted Heath—A disappointed man (2001)

The Greasy Pole column from the May 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

So. Farewell then, Ted Heath. You are leaving Parliament at the next election. Long-serving MP for Old Bexley and Sidcup, Father of the House, ex-Chief Whip, Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury. We shall miss you sitting in your traditional seat below the gangway. All true-blooded English people know how important traditions are when it comes to Parliament. Where would we be without the Despatch Box and the Mace and the MPs using parliamentary language instead of swearing at each other. It was symbolic of our grand old country that you had exclusive use of that seat, where you could sit glowering and sounding off with opinions, like you did recently when you were overheard to say that William Hague is “a ghastly, vulgar little man”.

It is 50 years since the young Ted Heath, thrilled to bits, was welcomed to Westminster by the policeman at the door. He had been in the Army and at Oxford and then in the Civil Service. But his ambitions were always for a career in politics and at the appropriate time he set about wooing constituencies in his home county of Kent. Three of them turned him down (one told him bluntly that they were only interested in someone who would be in the Cabinet and clearly that wasn’t him) until he was successful at Bexley.

If any of those committees had doubts about him being a bachelor, at a time when having a wife was supposed to be pretty well essential to a man’s successful career in politics, they did not give voice to them. In fact there had been a woman in Heath’s life – “…a delightful girl… we shared many interests…” But soon after the war “…she suddenly let me know that she was marrying someone else. I was saddened by this”. Such a defended attitude would have been useful to him in later years, when his sexuality was not only a fertile source of malicious ribaldry but at times almost a political issue in itself.

Whips

Barely a year after he got into Parliament Heath was invited to become a Whip – his first move up the greasy pole. He had some doubts about this; it was promotion of a sort but it did not necessarily lead in the direction he wanted. The whips were under a pretty strict discipline; for one thing they were not allowed to speak in the Commons which, if the Tories won the election as they were expected to, was likely to hamper his prospects. Reassured by Churchill that such devotion to duty would not go unrewarded Heath took the job. He probably had no difficulty with the necessary personality change; no longer the convivial new Member with many friends, he appropriately displayed all the open-handed charisma of a Trappist monk. His preoccupations were party management, unity and the discipline needed to wage the phony war against a Labour government tottering towards its end.

As the years went by his personality hardened, he became more and more private and awkward, unable to reel off the small talk so essential to politicians, royals and other redundants. He developed a tendency for gratuitously offending or insulting other people, treating his critics with contempt and operating on the assumption that he owed nothing to his supporters. It was not the most likely way of nurturing a political career. A typical example was his reaction to the standing ovation which predictably followed a rousing conference speech by Iain Macleod who was his Shadow Chancellor. As Macleod basked in the Tories’ adulation Heath sneered to those around him “Well, I’m sure you understand economic policy a lot better now”.

Ironically, although this attitude was not well received among the party activists in the constituencies or to MPs doing a bit of quiet back-biting in the Commons Smoking Room, it favoured Heath at a crucial time. His predecessor at Number Ten, Alec Douglas-Home, had emerged as Tory leader after a spell of savage infighting which the retiring Premier MacMillan described as “the customary processes of consultation”. Home was a landed Scottish toff, easy meat for Harold Wilson in what passes for debate in the Commons. His victory upset a lot of hopeful contenders like Butler, Macleod and Hailsham. Heath supported Home and it was rumoured that this was designed to keep those rivals out of the job on the assumption that Home would not last long, allowing him to try for it later. It was only necessary for Home to lose one election – which he obligingly did – for the party to begin to look for someone of a completely different style and background to replace him.

Election

In that situation the choice rested between Heath and Maudling and after the first leadership ballot Maudling withdrew. The Tories heaved a sigh of relief. Heath was the very model of a self-made man – the son of a small builder, who won a scholarship to grammar school and then went to Oxford where he became President of the Union. There was not a whiff of the grouse moor about him. What did it matter if he couldn’t glad-hand it in the bar, didn’t have a wife to embrace him after a conference speech. He was the future, a professional who would repair the damage done by the aristocratic amateurs.

It all seemed to be coming right when, against many expectations, the Tories won the 1970 election. This was supposed to be a new beginning for British capitalism. No more propping up “lame duck” industries with government subsidies, no more privileged access to Number Ten for the unions, and eventually no more attempts at controlling wages and prices either. It was all very simple: the market would be set free to rule how the economy would be run, everyone would be swamped in prosperity and the Tories would be in power for ever. Except that it was not that simple and Heath’s government was quickly exposed as no more able to deal with the crises of capitalism than those of the aristocrats. Under pressure, Heath’s personality was not so rigid as to prevent him modifying or abandoning the policies which had got him where he was. But it did stop him responding to the situation with the kind of nonchalance which had been so useful to people like Macmillan.

All that was needed was for Heath to lead the Tories to a couple of election defeats for the party to turn against him and, much as they had with Macmillan and Home, to decide that they needed a leader of a different style. “I don’t think,” said Willie Whitelaw some years later, “I’d realised quite the extent of the feeling against him in the parliamentary party. They’d had enough of him”. The time was ripe for the emergence of Thatcher, although before she became a real prospect she needed a little luck in the shape of a suicidal speech from Keith Joseph in which he effectively knocked himself out of the running. The Daily Mail thought that “…near panic has broken out amongst the party’s top people ” at the gathering momentum of Thatcher’s campaign. In the end only Whitelaw came within shouting distance of her.

Sulking

Heath did not go along with the political convention about congratulating a victorious rival and assuring them of your undying support. He submerged himself in a deep, unrelenting sulk. When Thatcher came to see him, soon after her win, to ask his advice about handling the press he more or less told her to work it out for herself. He might have been persuaded to take the job of Shadow Foreign Secretary but Thatcher gave that to Lord Carrington. He later contemptuously refused her offer of ambassador to the USA, regarding it as the snub it probably was; if anyone knew about snubs he did. After the 1979 election there were plenty of raucously triumphant Tory backbenches eager to patronise or insult him. His bitter jealousy erupted when Thatcher herself became a victim of yet another urge to change the style of the leadership. He also tried to establish a role of significance in capitalism in his dotage, to show the Tories what they had been missing – for example flying to negotiate with Saddam Hussain during the Gulf War, but his standing did not improve. As he leaves Parliament, that is where he is at.

So. Farewell, Ted Heath. No doubt there will be the customary events to mark your passing from the parliamentary scene, when the commentators and the hangers-on will do their best to celebrate your career. The truth is that the only thing special about you was your iceberg personality. But it is not all so bad. You come out of it as a rich man, living in one of the loveliest city houses. That is much, much more than can be said for the people who were misled into voting for you.

Ivan

Obituary: Harold Cottis (2001)

Obituary from the May 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Members will be saddened to hear of the death at the end of January of Harold Cottis, a stalwart member of long standing.

Harold joined Southend branch in 1941. Before that he had already been a conscientious objector to participating in the war, one of the few pre-war peace campaigners who actually did oppose the war when it came. At that time the declared war aims of Britain and France (America and Russia had not yet joined in) were openly admitted to be the defence of the empire and a dismantling of the autarchic trading practices of the Axis powers.

Harold, who worked for the Co-op, helped keep alive the branch there till the end of the 1960s, and was always active in the Southend area. Until recently he was also a regular attender at Conferences and summer schools. He had a Socialist Standard round in Southend which has now been taken over by his wife, Daphne. We express our sincere sympathies to her and to their daughter.

Kyoto Caput (2001)

From the May 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The US Government has abandoned its commitment to the Kyoto protocols for reducing greenhouse gases. As the US is responsible for 25 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, this puts the treaty in serious jeopardy.

The announcement was greeted by the usual protests from people and organisations that support capitalism but imagine that it can somehow operate in the interests of human beings and the environment.

“Without the world’s biggest polluter, the Kyoto protocol is in serious trouble,” said a spokesperson for the European Union’s environment commissioner Margot Wallstrom. Mark Helm, a spokesman for Friends of the Earth in Washington, DC said: “This is another incredibly short-sighted move on the part of the Bush administration, which is only concerned about wealthy contributors.” (New Scientist 29 March.) No doubt there is an element of pay-back by the present administration to wealthy political donors from the US fossil fuel lobby, the underlying cause however is the competitive nature of capitalism.

In view of this the Leader writer in the Observer (1 April) must have surely been struck by a particularly virulent form of April Fool Day madness when he wrote that the UK should combine with the EU to thwart US aims. “The EU with Russia, China, India and Japan could forge the climate change convention-without the US.”

“‘The President has been unequivocal,’ said George W. Bush’s spokesman Ari Fleischer on Wednesday. ‘He does not support the Kyoto treaty. It exempts the developing nations around the world, and it is not in the United States’ economic interest'” (New Scientist, 29 March).

The whole purpose of capitalist production is to make a profit, in order to do so you must cheapen production to get a bigger share of the market. The Bush administration is acting in the way that it thinks best serves US capital. They are being ruthlessly honest. Margot Wallstrom, Mark Helm, the Observer and their likes just don’t seem to get it, do they?

Richard Donnelly