Reformist (2022)

Book Review from the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Failure of Vision: Michael Harrington and the Limits of Democratic Socialism. By Doug Greene, Zero Books, 2021. £15.99

This is a political biography of Michael Harrington (1928-1989) who was the best known ‘socialist’ in the US after the death in 1968 of Norman Thomas, the perennial presidential candidate of the Socialist Party of America. Harrington was first associated with the Catholic Worker Movement but then became a ‘Shachtmanite’, an offshoot from Trotskyism based on the ideas of Max Shachtman whose difference with Trotsky was over ‘The Nature of the USSR’. Trotsky maintained that it was basically a ‘workers’ state’. Shachtman could see that this was an untenable position and argued that Russia was best described as ‘bureaucratic collectivism’, a new class society ruled by a new ruling class exploiting the workers. To begin with, he had held that Russia was more progressive than capitalism, but later that it was the other way round and he became a staunch ‘anti-communist’.

Taking this position, in 1958 Shachtman, Harrington and the others joined the Socialist Party of America. This was the nearest equivalent in the US of the Labour Party in Britain and held the same ideas as, at the time, that party did (except that it paid more lip-service to Marx’s ideas, in fact to ideas in general) – that the state capitalism that it called ‘socialism’ would come about gradually as the outcome of a series of nationalisations and social reforms introduced democratically; basically, reformists who wanted to humanise capitalism.

Not getting anywhere as a separate party, in 1973 Harrington and the others (Shachtman had died in 1972) decided to enter the Democratic Party and work to get it to adopt and enact progressive policies. Their political descendants today are the ‘Democratic Socialists of America’ which has recruited tens of thousands of members and succeeded in getting some of its members elected (as Democrats) to the House of Representatives, the most well-known of whom is Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.

Greene argues that, despite this posthumous relative success, Harrington’s entry into the Democratic Party with a view to ‘realigning’ it was a mistaken strategy; as the Democrats were a capitalist party beholden to capitalist interests, it led to Harrington and his group becoming its tail-end, working to ensure the election of Democratic Presidents and other officials to run the political side of American capitalism. On this point Greene is right. He also argues, again correctly, that capitalism cannot be gradually reformed so as to work in the interest of the working class.

However, he writes as a member of one of the 57 varieties of Trotskyism (a group called ‘Left Voice’). To be fair, he has confined his alternative strategy to get to state capitalism to an appendix in which he criticises Harrington’s ‘Democratic Marxism.’ This was a wise move on his (or his editor’s) part as his ‘vision’ of an insurrection and his defence of the idea that even under Stalin Russia was some sort of ‘workers’ state’ would have led to his criticism of Harrington’s gradualist reformism being taken less seriously.

Adam Buick

Michael Harrington quotes (1977)

From the April 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Count Bismarck was the first of the anti-socialist “socialists”. In 1878 he outlawed any organisation advocating socialism. In 1882 he was telling the Reichstag: “Many of the measures we have adopted are socialistic and we need more socialism in our state”. He had shrewdly understood that the socialists had mass appeal and was determined to use socialist slogans to fight socialism.

Socialism by M. Harrington (Bantam Books)

Man has socialised everything except himself. He has rationalized his work and nature and the very planet in every respect save one, and just as the socialists predicted more than a century ago, he is in conflict with an environment that he has brilliantly and thoughtlessly created. His genius threatens to overwhelm him.

Socialism by M. Harrington (Bantam Books)

Economics: the Marginalist Fallacy (2020)

From the June 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

What is ‘value’ (economically speaking)? It is a good question and one that has often generated controversy. Classical economists like Adam Smith maintained that a commodity’s value depended on how much labour went into making it. This argument was taken up and refined by Marx. Then, in the late nineteenth century, partly in response to Marx’s own labour theory of value and the perceived threat it posed by exposing capitalism’s exploitative character, a new approach emerged. The ‘Marginalist Revolution’ in economics ushered in the idea of marginal utility – the satisfaction you get from consuming an additional unit of a good which declines with each additional unit consumed along with the price you are willing to pay. As the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises put it: ‘It is ultimately always the subjective value judgments of individuals that determine the formation of prices’ (Human Action, 1940)

However, Von Mises’ explanation won’t wash. The ‘subjective value judgement’ a hungry beggar makes about a three-course meal contributes nothing to its price while they lack the money to afford it but there is, additionally, an obvious epistemological flaw in Mises’ thinking. ‘Subjective value judgements’ are something only individuals can make – not society – but prices are the emergent outcome of millions of individuals interacting, each of whom are external (objective) to everyone else. Furthermore, as social phenomena, prices clearly influence our valuation of a commodity by making us more – or less – inclined to buy it. So the subjective theory of value is based on circular reasoning. Prices are supposed to be determined by subjective valuations which, in turn, are determined by price.

Does this mean that subjective valuation – the utility or ‘use value’ of a good – has no role to play in price formation? Of course not. As Marx himself noted ‘nothing can have value, without being an object of utility’ (Capital, Vol. 1, Ch. 1). However, while the subjectivists conflate ‘use value’ with ‘exchange value’ he insisted they be distinguished. Use value could not account for exchange value even though it was a precondition of market exchange. Fundamentally, only labour could provide a sound explanation of value under capitalism.

Why? Drawing on Aristotle’s observation that ‘exchange cannot take place without equality, and equality not without commensurability’, Marx reasoned that this ruled out utility as the basis on which commodities exchanged. This was because the utilities of chalk and cheese (or anything else) are essentially incommensurable. Commodities can only exchange on the basis of something they have in common.

What jackets and pairs of shoes have in common is the fact that they are both products of human labour. Exchanging one for the other presupposes each took roughly the same amount of labour to produce. After all, no one would exchange something worth more for something worth less.

Equivalence is assured by adjusting the ratios in which commodities exchange. So if our jacket takes more labour to produce than a pair of shoes this may mean exchanging it for, say, three pairs of shoes to ensure equivalence. Of course, today we don’t normally exchange jackets for shoes – barter. Instead, we use money as a universal equivalent with the ‘exchange value’ of a good being expressed in price.

The relationship between price and value in Marxian theory often gives rise to misunderstandings. Largely, this is because critics fail to grasp Marx’s method. As Michael Harrington notes:

  ‘Therefore the reader must be warned that the opening pages of Das Kapital – or, for that matter, the entire first volume – contain conscious simplifications. Marx, like everyone else, actually began with the “chaotic whole” of immediate experience, but in his masterpiece he follows a logical rather than an experiential order. So in understanding any part of the Marxian analysis one must carefully ask: Under what simplifying assumptions is it subsumed’ (Socialism, 1972).

As Marx’s argument unfolds, one ‘conscious simplification’ after another disappears. The purpose of this procedure is to arrive at a progressively closer approximation of capitalist reality. Hence the initial hypothesis that commodities sell at their values gives way to a new hypothesis that commodities sell, not literally at, but around, their value and that their price is influenced by other factors apart from value – such as the interplay of supply and demand.

That does not invalidate the theory, however. Though there is a constant disequilibrium in capitalism, there is also a constant tendency for supply and demand to adjust to each other via the price mechanism. In the long run, argues Marx:

  ‘If supply equals demand, they cease to act, and for this very reason commodities are sold at their market-values. Whenever two forces operate equally in opposite directions, they balance one another, exert no outside influence, and any phenomena taking place in these circumstances must be explained by causes other than the effect of these two forces’ (Capital, Vol. 3. Ch. 10).

Thus, after balancing out supply and demand we have still to explain why, say, a Berlingo van consistently costs so much more than a Raleigh bicycle. It is at this deep structural level that the law of value exerts a powerful gravitational pull on prices. This is buttressed by the fact that prices cannot fall below a business’s costs of production for any length of time which has the effect of keeping them firmly within the orbit of value.

One should bear in mind also that Marx’s theory does not equate ‘value’ with the actual amount of labour it took to produce a good – ‘concrete labour’. If that were the case there would never be any incentive to introduce labour-displacing technology since this would mean less value being produced. Rather the metric of value is ‘abstract labour’ – the socially necessary labour time it takes to produce a good, from start to finish, under average industry-wide conditions.

Socially necessary labour-time is not something you can measure with a stop watch – like concrete labour. Moreover, it can only express itself through market exchange. As Marx explained in the same work:

‘Social labour-time exists in these commodities in a latent state, so to speak, and becomes evident only in the course of their exchange. Universal social labour is consequently not a ready-made prerequisite but an emerging result’.

This means that the value of a product can change even after it has been produced as a result of ongoing technological and other changes.

Robin Cox

Radical politics (2019)

Book Review from the July 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Manifesto. The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality. By Bhaskar Sunkara. Verso, 2019.

Sunkara is the founder of Jacobin, the US left-wing magazine, and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, an offshoot founded by Michael Harrington of the old Socialist Party of America that, when this broke up in 1973, decided to work within the US Democratic Party. His book sets out to explain what he sees as socialism to American readers who up till recently regarded it as a dirty word.

He describes himself as a ‘democratic socialist’ as opposed to a ‘social democrat’, the difference in his mind being that the latter seek to introduce reforms from above while the former want to see them introduced as a result of mass popular pressure. But this is a distinction without a difference. He is, then, a left-wing social democrat. His rather confusing conception of socialism is an economy of worker-run firms producing for the market with a free health service and a basic income scheme.

Despite this, his book makes a good criticism of capitalism and provides a useful history of those who, in the last century, called themselves socialists, the chapter on the German SPD in particular. It could serve as a basic introduction to the background to the debates about the meaning and best way to achieve socialism that we ourselves engage in.

Of course his point of view is not ours, but that of a social democrat who regards himself as a Marxist. He could be worse. He could have been a Trotskyist or some other member of the Russian Revolution re-enactment society. In fact he recognises that it is not possible to establish socialism unless the conditions for it exist, which they didn’t in Russia, China or the other economically backward countries governed at one time by people claiming to be Marxist:

 ‘The Third World’s experience with socialism vindicates Marx. He argued that a successful socialist economy requires already developed productive forces and that a robust socialist democracy requires a self-organized working class.’

He is aware of the criticism we have always made of the Labour Party and its Social Democratic equivalents abroad as, in discussing the failure of the 1929-31 MacDonald Labour government, he quotes both what we said before (‘No matter how able, how sincere, and how sympathetic the Labour men and women may be who undertake to administer capitalism, capitalism will bring their undertaking to disaster’) and after (‘it is not possible for the Labour Party or any other party to administer capitalism in such a way that the workers’ problems can be solved within the framework of the existing system’).

He seems to take this on board as he writes later on that ‘administering a capitalist state requires maintaining business confidence and corporate profits’ and that ‘Social democracy’s dilemma is impossible to resolve: even when nominally anti-capitalist, it is reliant on the continued profitability of private capitalist firms.’ And in his verdict on European Social Democracy:

 ‘Even with the more modest ambition of just humanizing capitalism, no national left government in Europe has been able to carry out its program in at least forty years.’

The one example of success, albeit temporary, he gives is Sweden until the 1970s, where the government and the trade unions reached an agreement with the private capitalists, leaving them to pursue profits in return for them handing over a part of these to be used for welfare and other reforms. With the end of the post-war boom in the 1970s, however, this collapsed.

He still thinks the best way to replace capitalism is via the election of a Social Democrat government, backed by a mass movement which, when the government comes up against the economic constraints of the profit system, can pressure it not to retreat (as all such governments have done) but to go on to break with capitalism. As he puts it, ‘we will probably only be driven down the path to socialism by practical necessity, by the day-to-day struggles to preserve and expand reforms.’ This is the old, discredited theory that socialist consciousness will emerge from the pursuit of reforms.

Sunkara quotes Michael Harrington (who wrote a passable book on Socialism himself) as saying that socialists had to ‘walk a perilous tightrope’ between being ‘true to the socialist vision of a new society’ and ‘bringing ‘that vision into contact with the actual movement fighting not to transform the system, but to gain some little increment of dignity or even just a piece of bread’. True, socialists are on such a tightrope and cannot be indifferent to the sufferings of workers under capitalism. However, history, specifically that of the political perspective Sunkara wants to revive, shows that to pursue reforms leads to falling off into the bog of reformism and forgetting all about socialism.

Adam Buick

The Future of Capitalism (1979)

From the Spring/Summer 1979 issue of The Western Socialist

The Christian Science Monitor, in five issues (13-19 April, 1977) published a series of articles by their business and financial editor, Mr. David R. Francis, on “The Future of Capitalism.” In them he told of capitalism’s present difficulties and the discontents created, summarised the views of numerous businessmen and economists, and outlined the changes already taking place and proposed for the future.

In one important respect the exercise was bogus. While pretending to give an objective and comprehensive account of the arguments for and against competitive private capitalism government planning and nationalisation, reforms of capitalism and alternatives to capitalism, nothing was said about the Marxist-socialist alternative to capitalism. There was indeed no indication that Mr. Francis and the people he quoted had ever even heard of it; and this includes Mr. Michael Harrington, Chairman of the Democratic Socialist Party, U.S.A. All of them accept continued production of commodities for the market and for profit, the existence of an owning class and a working class, and the division of the world into capitalist nation-state competing against each other — in short, capitalism.

The lead-in to the first article set the tone of everything that followed. It told the readers that those who challenge capitalism say “it is outdated and unresponsive but see the standard alternatives, communism and socialism, as too old-fashioned and conservative, too bureaucratic and inefficient.” This is a grossly misleading statement because, as Mr. Francis spelled out in his articles, the “communism and socialism” referred to are state capitalism with dictatorship, as in Russia, and the mixture of private and state capitalism administered by Labour governments, as in Britain.

No doubt Mr. Francis would offer the usual defence of this misuse of terms, which goes like this. Since the great mass of people (never having studied or thought about the matter) accept that capitalism means only private capitalism; that socialism means nationalisation, and communism means the Russian dictatorship, he, Mr. Francis, is merely following common practice in doing the same. An ingenious disclaimer of responsibility which, however, fails for several reasons.

In the first place, what has happened to the claim always made by columnists and economists that it is their elevated purpose to inform their readers, not encourage their misinformation?

Secondly, the Monitor articles include numerous references to Marx and Marxists (though without quotations of anything Marx actually wrote) so why didn’t Mr. Francis recognise his obligation to see that Marx’s own case against capitalism and Marx’s own alternative should be represented?

Or did he perhaps shop around to find someone to put that case and fail to find one? That is easily remedied. The W.S.P. of the United States would be delighted to put the case in the Monitor’s columns against the whole lot of Mr. Francis’ defenders of reformed or unreformed capitalism.

For the record, and in case Mr. Francis still believes that he dealt with Marx’s case, may we remind him that, for Marx, Socialism/Communism involves, among other things, the abolition of production for the market (“the abolition of buying and selling” — Communist Manifesto) and the abolition of the wages system.

A word here about the “socialist,” Mr. Michael Harrington, whose views are quoted by Mr. Francis. The New York Times (5 May) reported a speech made by Mr. Harrington on the question of the future of capitalism. He associated himself with Marx (“my friend Karl Marx”), then went on to show that his own "alternative” to capitalism includes the continuation of production for the market — that is, capitalism:

  "Mr. Harrington indicated that he was a friend of the market, as preferable to bureaucratic controls — provided that income was distributed equally.”

It is clear enough that when Mr. Francis uses the term socialism he does not mean what Marx and socialists mean. But what he actually does mean Is left in doubt. First to wrote:

  “Socialism, if the word is taken to mean state ownership of the most important means of production . . ."

Then (also in the first article) he quoted from Mr. Peter Drucker: “The United States is the first truly socialist country”; but added “whether it is socialism is a matter of definition” — so why did not Mr. Francis give us his own definition?

What seems to be happening in the U.S. is what happened long ago in Europe. If the workers are becoming increasingly disillusioned with capitalism, why not distract their attention from socialism by offering them state capitalism labelled socialism? Bismark did it in the 1870’s, which led Engels to dub nationalisation “a kind of spurious socialism.” In England, a little later, a prominent capitalist politician, Sir William Harcourt (and his friend the then Prince of Wales later Edward VII) played the same game with the slogan “we are all socialists now.” It would not have mattered much except for the fact that, both in Germany and England, men who had called themselves socialist lent themselves to the deception. People of this type feature in the Monitor articles.

Several misconceptions of Marx occur. His materialist conception of history turns up in the guise of “determinism” and ‘inevitability”; with the assurance that “even confirmed Marxists” now reject that (as indeed they should).

The labour theory of value is misrepresented as holding that “manual labour” is the sole source of wealth. It has, we are told, been replaced by recognition that wealth is produced by “applied science” and “the level of thinking.” Are we to suppose that “thinking,” studying, and applying science, are provided from outside the members of the working class? If so, by whom?

In the article on April 19 Mr. Francis made the statement: “Marxism has proved to be a dead end in the development of economics.” No explanation was offered but we may assume that it refers to the “old-fashioned” “conservative” “bureaucratic” and “inefficient” state capitalism, promoted, for example, in Britain by Labour governments. For the information of Mr. Francis, Marx’s economic theories have had no influence whatever on the British nationalised industries, either in their formation or their operation. How could it be otherwise since the British Labour Party has been wholly and blindly Keynesian for 40 years? In their leadership, as in the Universities, ignorance of Marxist economics is almost total.

The articles contained a formidable list of suggested remedies for the ills of capitalism — more nationalisation, the development of state-operated health and welfare services, workers to sit on boards of directors, workers’ pension funds to extend their ownership of corporation stocks and seek control of corporation policy, government curbing of the freedom of action of big companies, encouragement of small companies, government management and planning of the economy, and so on.

With the exception of worker directors (now being borrowed from Germany by the British Labour Government) nearly all these expedients have been tried in Britain — with total failure. They have not provided “jobs for all,” or eliminated depressions, or abolished poverty, or brought industrial peace and contentment to workers in state capitalist industries. What they have done is to raise prices to 900 per cent above the 1938 level, with a faster rate of inflation than ever before in the history of British capitalism and with living standards falling in the last three years. (Mr. Francis could learn from Marx how and why this happened).

Application of all these “remedies” has not materially affected the character or operations of British capitalism and recent elections have shown that the majority of workers do not feel that their problems have been solved thereby.

The Monitor articles have a certain interest for what they do not contain. Mr. Francis and many of those whose works he quotes seem to think that it is only now that capitalist spokesmen are fearful that their system has an uncertain future. On the contrary, in every big depression in the past century and a half, certainly in Britain, businessmen, politicians and economists have seen collapse and revolution round the comer, and wondered what they could do to be saved.

It is also curious that the last great saviour of capitalism, J. M. Keynes, does not present a remedy in the articles. Forty years ago he was supposed to have revolutionised economics to be unscientific and without application in the modem world. So why the need for Mr. Francis to go looking high and low to find a new saviour? What he is tacitly admitting is that Keynes has proved to be as helpless as all his predecessors to turn capitalism into a social system satisfactory to the working class.

Edgar Hardcastle

On April 17, 18, 19, 1979, the Christian Science Monitor had another series on socialism.

1. Lavatory of British, Swedish and German socialists; 2. Their success in outanswering communists; 3. Those socialists are hungry for new ideas.

Their summary: “Most Americans would be jolted if toe told them that two European leaders were socialists" — Need we say more?

The Reformism of the Hard Left (2018)

From the October 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

The social revolution to replace minority class monopoly over the means of production by common ownership finds a formidable barrier in the guise of reformism to which the Hard Left, every bit as much as any mainstream capitalist political party, is fundamentally wedded. It is important to precisely define what we mean by this term. It is very easy to conflate reformism with other forms of activity, notably trade unionism, on the grounds that both seem to have in common the aim of improving the welfare and wellbeing of workers.

However, it would be a gross error to see trade unionism as a type of reformism. In the Introduction to her pamphlet Reform or Revolution (1900) Rosa Luxemburg, for one, seemed to commit this very error:

 ‘Can the Social-Democracy be against reforms? Can we contrapose the social revolution, the transformation of the existing order, our final goal, to social reforms? Certainly not. The daily struggle for reforms, for the amelioration of the condition of the workers within the framework of the existing social order, and for democratic institutions, offers to the Social-Democracy an indissoluble tie. The struggle for reforms is its means; the social revolution, its aim’.

What underlies this thinking is the understandable fear that the revolutionary goal might seem somehow divorced from the ‘daily struggles of workers’ if it did not appear to endorse the latter. But this fear is misplaced for reasons that have already been touched upon

Reformism is distinguishable from trade unionism by virtue of the fact that it is essentially political in nature. That is to say, its field of operation – like revolution itself – is political whereas the field of trade union struggle is bargaining with employers.

Reformism entails the state enacting various legislative measures that are ostensibly designed to ameliorate certain socio-economic problems arising from the capitalist basis of contemporary society – without, of course, posing any kind of existential threat to the continuance of capitalism itself. In other words, reformism seeks to mend capitalism. As such it runs completely counter to the socialist goal of ending capitalism.

The futility of reformism was no better summed up than by the revolutionary socialist, William Morris, more than a century ago in How We Live and How We Might Live (1887):

 ‘The palliatives over which many worthy people are busying themselves now are useless because they are but unorganised partial revolts against a vast, wide-spreading, grasping organisation which will, with the unconscious instinct of a plant, meet every attempt at bettering the conditions of the people with an attack on a fresh side’.

Capitalism by its very nature has to operate in the interests of capital, which interests are fundamentally opposed to those of workers. The accumulation of capital, whether in the hands of private corporations or the state, expresses itself in the remorseless drive to maximise the amount of surplus value – ‘profit’ – extracted out of the labour of working people and is, thus, firmly predicated on the exploitation of the latter. This is not a matter of choice but of economic necessity. It is the very condition of commercial survival – not to mention, expansion – in a world of ruthless economic competition. Quite simply, any business that did not make a profit out of its workforce would soon go out of business.

Were the Hard Left ever to secure political power it would soon enough find itself politically imprisoned within the constraints imposed by the non-socialist outlook of the majority and thus forced to continue with the administration of capitalism in some form. This follows logically from the very premise of its own vanguardist theory of revolution. Vanguardism is defined as the capture of political power by a small minority ostensibly acting on behalf of the working class majority in advance of the latter having become socialists. Since socialism cannot come about without the latter becoming socialists this means that, for the time being, a Hard Left government would have no option but to continue by default with the administration of capitalism.

The Hard Left may protest that this is to overlook the whole point of a socialist minority capturing power before a majority had become socialist – namely, to be in a position to be able then to counter the enormous weight of capitalist propaganda in order to infuse workers with a socialist consciousness. How can you do that without this minority first capturing the state?

Actually, this is yet another example of the Hard Left shooting itself in the foot. While it is all too ready to scornfully characterise the so-called ‘abstract propagandism’ of the Socialist Party as ‘idealist’, arguing that ‘practical experience’ is the way we become socialists rather than through the dissemination of socialist ideas – as if these two things can ever really be separated – it conspicuously chooses not to apply this very same argument to itself and in its own theory of vanguardism.

What, for instance, does it imagine would be the result of the ‘practical experience’ of a Hard Left government having to administer capitalism? Since capitalism can only really be administered in the interests of capital, and not wage labour, such a government, like any other capitalist government, would be compelled to come out and oppose the interests of the very workers it claimed to represent. In other words it would be compelled to abandon any thought of inculcating socialist consciousness into workers since to do that would defeat or, at least, seriously impede, the very purpose to which it had resigned itself – namely, the effective administration of capitalism. You can’t effectively administer capitalism with millions of people beginning to question, and oppose, the very basis of capitalist society – class ownership of the means of wealth production.

The Hard Left, while fond of rebuking others for their philosophical ‘idealism’ shows its own attachment to ‘idealism’, in its utterly lame attempts to explain away the all too obvious shortcomings of the so called “proletarian states” to which it has historically pledged allegiance – from the establishment of the Soviet Union onwards. Even today Leftist supporters of such transparently obnoxious anti-working class regimes as Maduro’s Venezuela or Kim Yong Un’s quasi-monarchical North Korea will perform political gymnastics to justify this craven, not to say cringing, support. Their gullibility seems to know no bounds.

For the regimes in question a few petty, token pro-worker reforms or the ritual bombastic denunciation of that ogre of ‘American imperialism’ (as if imperialism is limited to just the US and its European allies) will suffice to have the Hard Left meekly eating out of their hands and sycophantically trying to rationalise every twist and turn of policy designed to tighten the screws on the workers in these countries.

When evidence of the anti-working class nature of these regimes becomes too overwhelming to ignore, the excuses offered will be couched in terms that do not – and dare not – question the basic tenets of vanguardism itself. The failure of the ‘proletarian state’ to make good its promises to the workers will be attributed to the various character flaws and the betrayal of the Leadership in its ‘drift to the Right’. If only Trotsky had got into power and not Stalin, exclaims our fervent Trotskyist, then things would have been so different and so much better. The irony of rebuking socialists for being ‘idealists’ while endorsing this idealist ‘Great Man’ theory of history could hardly be richer.

Reforms and Reformism

Part of the reason why the Socialist Party comes in for so much criticism for its opposition to reformism is that it seems to suggest an attitude of callous indifference to the plight of fellow workers. Is it not clearly the case that certain reforms can be beneficial to the working class or at any rate, certain groups of workers?

Well, yes, of course some reforms can be of some benefit to workers. This is not denied. Socialists are not opposed to particular reforms as such but, rather, to reformism – that is, to the practice of advocating or campaigning for reforms. Once you go down that road there is technically no limit to the number of reforms you might then want to push for. Sooner or later in your bid to push for reforms, the revolutionary objective of fundamentally changing society will be overwhelmed, side-lined and eventually forgotten altogether. The entire history of the Second International, and of the Social Democratic and Labour parties of which it was composed, unequivocally shows this to be the case.

Not only that, any benefits that particular reforms might provide are likely to be transient and provisional and dependent on the current state of the market itself which is always subject to fluctuation. Reforms that can be given with one hand can also in effect be taken away with other – that is, withdrawn in the interests of ‘belt tightening’ or simply honoured in the breach, particularly in the context of economic recession

Furthermore, insofar as some reforms provide some benefit to some workers they can sometimes be at the expense of other workers. Also, it is not only some workers that might benefit but some, if not all, capitalists too. It is, after all, mainly through the taxes paid by the latter to the state that reforms are financed. Increased taxation can undermine the competitiveness of the businesses concerned unless the advantages accruing to them from the resultant increase in state spending outweigh the costs. This places a structural limit on what reformism can hope to achieve. Tax the capitalists too heavily and you kill the goose that lays the golden eggs that provides the state with its revenue.

In short, then, opposition to reforms as reforms is not at all the position of the Socialist Party though, surprisingly enough, such opposition is something that has, in the past, attracted support in certain quarters. In his book, Socialism (1970), Michael Harrington cited the curious case, in the late 19th century/early 20th century, of the American Federation of Labour, at that time led by the colourful figure of Samuel Gompers.

Gompers espoused a ‘voluntarist’ philosophy and ‘was hostile to all social legislation on the part of the government’. This stemmed from a quasi-Marxian conviction that the state inevitably governed in the interests of the ruling capitalist class and, consequently, any legislation emanating from it was bound to have the interests of that class in mind and thus be injurious to the interests of workers concerned. For that reason the AFL went out of its way to campaign against health and unemployment insurance, old age pensions and even helped to defeat referenda in favour of the eight-hour day.

Now this was obviously a ludicrous position to take but it also provides a salutatory warning of the dangers of blurring the distinction between economic and political struggles. As far as political struggle is concerned, the position of the Socialist Party is quite simply that it opposes reformism, not reforms, on the grounds that this is incompatible with the goal of achieving a socialist revolution.

Transitional demands

While the Hard Left goes through the motions of paying lip service to that revolutionary goal it is, nevertheless, fully committed to the struggle to reform capitalism. One of the ways in which it strives to rationalise this basically incoherent strategy in doctrinal terms, and thereby appear to give some credence to its revolutionary pretensions is by advancing the Trotskyist concept of ‘transitional demands’.

By this is meant a set of reforms that are supposed to differ in kind from the sort of reforms that, for instance typified, the so called ‘minimum programme’ espoused by the Second International. They are deliberately advocated by the Hard Left, on top of the minimum programme, in the full knowledge that they are unrealisable within capitalism. So, for instance, instead of pushing for a minimum wage of ten dollars an hour, you double, treble or even quadruple that figure. Yet even though such demands are unrealisable (since their implementation would spell commercial bankruptcy for the businesses involved which would, in turn, rebound against the workers employed in these businesses), they are still advocated. Why?

According to this crackpot theory what these so called transitional demands are supposed to do is to whet the appetite of workers for more ambitious change and so ultimately pave the way for the socialist transformation of society itself. In other words, they are supposed to bridge the gap between reform and revolution. Strangely enough, campaigning for the socialist transformation of society is considered ‘utopian’ by these theorists yet campaigning for a hopelessly unrealistic and unrealisable reform is not.

What this illustrates is the fundamentally manipulative and elitist outlook of the Hard Left. You cannot cynically engineer a socialist transformation of society behind the backs of the workers themselves. Apart from anything else that will more than likely backfire against you.

Workers are a lot savvier about the workings of capitalism than the Leninist vanguard seems to give credit. They are quite capable of sniffing out an opportunist politician offering pie in the sky when they meet one and the Hard Left, seemingly, will not be outdone in the size of the pie they offer.

Robin Cox

Nationalism—an enemy of the workers (1977)

From the May 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

The nation state was created as the political unit for capitalism in a series of changes which began four or five hundred years ago. It was accompanied by the growth of national consciousness. People were half encouraged and half forced to identify themselves with the countries they lived in, not simply in a territorial sense but as “subjects”. The national myths appeared — Saint George and his ilk, the idea of special traditions and virtues which other countries did not have. In a remarkably short space of time each nation produced its exclusive dedication to “my country, right or wrong”, and has sustained it as an active force into the present day.

The overt symbols of nationalism — flags, slogans and silly songs — are by no means the only ones. Because it is made a general outlook, it intrudes in almost all fields and pervades the upbringing of the young. At random from boyhood can be recalled the cigarette cards which showed British wild flowers, birds and butterflies (as if foreigners were, rightly, denied such beauties); the Scout game called “British Bulldog” in which the players battered one another in increasing numbers (native durability and grit); the depiction in comic-books and school-books alike of other nations as “types” comic or villainous, or both. And the casual pejoratives incorporated in everyday speech—“double Dutch” for incomprehensibility, “French” for whatever smacked of indecency, “Chinese torture” for diabolical and unjustly-inflicted suffering.

If none of these is very sinister in itself, all produce a condition of mind. Moreover, the other nations all have their own equivalent versions. Each country has its popular account of history which would be startling to people who have learned the rival views: transposing victories and defeats and presenting saintly heroes as infamous rogues. A recent German work showed Queen Victoria not as a dotty old lady, which is sentimentality tolerable in Britain, but as a drunkard. The nearest thing to a foreign account of history that can be read in English is a Roman Catholic textbook, where a good many episodes appear altogether different.

The fiercest jingo nationalism today is to be seen in the new nations. In crude militaristic and patriotic preaching the Tory Party in Britain is almost outclassed by the Russian and Chinese governments; and their language is echoed in turn by the leaders of the “third world” countries. Clamouring for a place in the capitalist world, these new ruling classes vie for whatever gives prestige and is good for business. At the same time, they have to impress the natives with the importance of nationality: history is rewritten, “alien” defined and condemned.

The Social System
Before the nation-state, partisanship was related to small-scale economic interests. Wars were fought between cities, tribes and the proprietors of rival domains. The peasant population took part only to the extent that it was tempted or compelled to. The armies and mailed knights of the Middle Ages were mostly mercenaries — an outstanding example was the Janissaries of the Turkish Sultans: as youthful captives from Christian provinces they had no attachments to the Muslim empire, but they nevertheless provided its military strength for several centuries.

Capitalism has existed as a fully-developed system for two hundred years. Before that, for another two hundred years, the growing capitalist class struggled — consciously — towards political power. Commodity production forced the nation-state into being, on the lines of good-sized geographical units in which the powers of government were to legalize private ownership and ensure the freedom of the commodity. Capitalism means the ownership by a single class of all the means of producing and distributing wealth, and the directing of all activity to the single end of sale at a profit.

This was the end of barons, domain-holders and twopenny princes (though, development being uneven, some of them held on until the 1914-18 war). But the rise of capitalism meant also the creation of a vast single class of non-owners: the “free” working class, with its own commodity labour-power to sell, and indeed unable to survive as persons in any other way. On one hand the working class was (and remains) doomed to insecurity and varying degrees of poverty by the economic laws of capitalism. On the other, production for market in a world of nation-states has led inexorably to national and international crises and to wars on a different scale from any in previous history.

It is a world-wide system into which more and more regions and peoples have been drawn swiftly throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. In each one, that class division and the associated problems have been reproduced because they make the organic structure of capitalism. This is the fundamental issue in modern society — yet it is obscured by the banners of nationalism. It can be seen as a test for those who say they believe in Socialism. When the choice has to be made, do they declare for the working class or “the nation”? In all the wars of this century the world’s social democrats and “radicals” have chosen the latter without hesitation. In the present economic crisis they are all talking about getting “the country” out of trouble. It is logical, because they support capitalism.

Frauds of Nationalism
The Germans were hated and caricatured in Britain before 1914 because they were rivals in trade. Through nationalist eyes all other nations are different from “us” and actual or potential rivals. Every event is in some sense a contest, demonstrating that one’s own side is better than some or all of its rivals. “Our” country is superior to all the others in art, literature, sports, military power, inventiveness, the character and physical beauty of its inhabitants, climate, scenery and cooking—and must remain so. Plenty of working people hold this belief; “my country, right or wrong” was parodied by G. K. Chesterton as “my mother, drunk or sober”.

The political claims of nationalism build on this. They argue that the problems of workers in a given country will be solved, and a golden age for them begin, by recovering or enlarging the country’s supremacy. This is the promise of nationalist leaders in new countries, and is also being made by the Scots Nationalists with reference to the oilfields off the Scottish coast.

Unfortunately there is not a shred of evidence that this could be or has ever been so. In The Other America, published in Britain as a Penguin Special in 1963, Michael Harrington investigated the assumptions of Galbraith’s The Affluent Society. Using figures from the Bureau of Labour Statistics, he estimated that the poor—families with “inadequate housing, medicine, food and opportunity”—numbered between forty and fifty millions, or between 20 and 25 per cent of the population of the United States. “As technology has boomed, their share in prosperity has decreased.” The period when Britain was industrially and commercially supreme was also the time of Marx’s indictment of capitalism, of Engels' Condition of the Working Class, of horrifying reports by reformers like Chadwick and Booth.

Nationality is an accident, and national causes are frequently accidents too. In February this year The Guardian published reports on a possible “trade war” between the EEC and Japan. On 8th February it said the Japanese Prime Minister was “strongly inclined to draw parallels” with the 1930s, and went on: “Last week he gave warning that efforts to restrict Japan’s export flow could create the same chaotic conditions that led to World War Two. If there was a ‘trade war’, as he predicted, the blame would be with Britain and every other country contemplating limits on Japanese imports." It must have been surprising to many to learn that, if war with Germany had not broken out in 1939, war with Japan was on the cards.

A further example is Namibia, which is due to become an independent state in 1978. The present collection of tribes and ethnic groups are about to become Namibians; they will have a flag and a national anthem, and the nationalist “ours” will centre on diamonds—it is one of the richest parts of Africa in minerals.

Whose ?
“Ours” is the deceitful word in nationalist propaganda the world over. In a newly developed country, nationalism is the demand of native capitalists to exploit the workers and peasants lest somebody else should do it and have the profits. What kind of “ours” is being talked about? In Britain and other industrialized countries workers talk about “our” trade, “our” reserves, “our” jobs allegedly taken by immigrants. They are not. They are all at the disposal of those who own the means of living. The worker has no claim on them: he owns nothing but his labour-power.

The working class have no country. By persuading workers that they have a stake in “the nation”, capitalism obtains their support at critical times. What they should bear in mind is that the nation-state is the political institution of the capitalist system: its raison d'être is to keep the working class propertyless. Nationalism can do nothing for the workers except confirm or worsen their position. Pleasure in a locality or its culture has nothing to do with the matter; it is a reasonable sentiment on which nationalist fraud builds, but which capitalism will destroy without compunction.

There is a different affinity to recognize. This is the identity of interest of all those who live by selling their labour-power. The working class is worldwide, and as members of it become conscious of the nature of capitalist society and their position in it, they open the way to a different social organization based on common ownership. Just as capitalism has produced a world of nations in conflict, Socialism will mean the end of nationalities and frontiers—and classes. What will bring it into being is you thinking for yourself instead of letting them think for you.

Robert Barltop

The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1977)

From the August 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. Speaker! You claim that yours is a Marxist party aiming to establish Socialism by peaceful means, i.e. elections. And yet Karl Marx advocated “the dictatorship of the proletariat”, which, whenever it has been established, has always resulted in a reign of bloody terror. Now then—answer that one!

Okay, pal. We’ll have a go!

★

Your first point is quite right. The SPGB does work for the establishment of Socialism by peaceful, orderly, sensible means, i.e. elections (Parliament).

Next, wherever K. Marx used the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat” he could only have used it to mean the conquest of political power by a majority of the people. Implicit in the whole concept of Socialism is democratic operation, because it can only be run by a majority. There is overwhelming evidence to show, from the whole of Marx's and Engels’s writings, that Marx’s meaning for this phrase (or slogan) was democratic taking of power by a free majority.

We all know, of course, that this question had been enormously complicated by the Russian Bolsheviks, especially Lenin. Finding themselves unexpectedly in power in 1917—in a vast backward country where public administration (due to the disastrous defeats in the 1914-18 war) had collapsed—Lenin and Co. were faced with the problem not of the “proletariate” but the stubborn, obstinate, ignorant Mujik, the mass of the population: peasants.

Confronted with this dilemma, Lenin adroitly invented “the dictatorship of the proletariate and peas- antry", which would have made poor Marx spit blood. Marx’s perfectly sensible straightforward proposition that capitalism converts peasants into a majority of wage-workers, who then democratically assume political power, became a complex mumbo-jumbo of the Party leading the workers, leading the peasants, leading nowhere!

In the sixty years since then, the question has settled itself because the European Communist Parties (including the British one) have all renounced the "dictatorship” rubbish—it loses votes! Another little paradox the Commies have never explained is why you have to run election candidates to establish illegal dictatorships.

The SPGB has never advocated or even used this phrase “the dictatorship of the proletariat”. Its Declaration of Principles stipulates the capture of the political machinery by conscious democratic vote.

★

Many very well qualified scholars have rigorously examined the whole of Marx’s writings on this question, and come up with indisputable proof that his use of the phrase was for the proletariat as the majority.

Lucien Laurat in his book Marxism and Democracy wrote: “The phrase ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ is to be found in three places in the works of Marx, and two in those of Engels . . .  it is quite clear that for them, this ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ was synonymous with democracy.” Laurat gives an example from Engels, written on 29th May 1891:

If anything is certain, it is that our Party can only come to Power under the form of the democratic Republic. Precisely this is the specific form for the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariate’ as the great French Revolution has already shown.

Since Laurat’s book was written some other examples have been found, but the use of the phrase by Marx and Engels was very scanty. Michael Harrington, who is chairman of the left-wing committee supporting Jimmy Carter and therefore (like Laurat) could not be accused of supporting the SPGB, says in his book Socialism:

It was during this ‘ultra-left’ period that Marx used the fateful phrase 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat’. It is, alas, of little political moment that it can be demonstrated that when Marx wrote this he did not mean ‘dictatorship’, at least, as the word is now commonly employed.

★

Whatever Marx did or did not say, the position of the SPGB is the only feasible one for 1977: Socialism through democratic political action. Regarding the questioner’s third, and last point: apart from Lenin’s and Brezhnev’s Russia, regarded by most as a phoney today, the only place and time claimed to have been ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ was Paris in 1871.

The majority party in the Commune were followers of August Blanqui, the secret conspirator and godfather of dictatorship. “They started out from the viewpoint that a small number of resolute men would be able to seize the State, and draw the mass around a small band of leaders.” (F. Engels, Introduction to Civil War in France.)

And yet, when these same “Blanquists” issued proclamations to the rest of France, what did they propose? The free-est, most democratic administration France had ever heard of. In the words of Engels: “They proposed a free Federation of all Communes with Paris.” Marx added, in Civil War in France: “The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage, responsible and revocable at short notice.” That is obviously what he called the proletarian dictatorship.

Even the correspondent of the London Times reported that the change in Paris was astounding. For the first time since 1848 the streets of Paris were safe at night without a police force, therefore no dictatorship.

If the questioner wants to blame the working men’s City Council of Paris for the reign of terror which followed its bloodthirsty suppression in 1871, he might just as well blame the unfortunate street girls of London for being murdered by the psychopath Jack the Ripper.

★

And the NEXT question, please . . .

Horatio

The Mind of a Social Democrat (1966)

Book Review from the 1966 - number 5 issue of The Western Socialist

The Accidental Century by Michael Harrington (New York: Macmillan Co., 1965)

Next to the world-wide Moscovite movement, the largest phony "socialist" tendency is that which is frequently referred to as "social democratic," or, unfortunately, as "socialist." The Scandinavian social democratic parties, the Labour Party of Great Britain and the Socialist Party of America, are all of this tendency. At some time, social democracy could boast some able theorists. Now, however, it has a very low theoretical level. A recent illustration of this theoretical weakness is Michael Harrington's book, The Accidental Century.

The author is known for his book, The Other America, the fame of which is attributable to its stimulation of the discovery of poverty by the liberal press and mass media. The Accidental Century presents the author's general evaluation of the social developments of the last sixty years.

In the preface, the author acknowledges the inspiration of Norman Thomas, Max Shachtman, and Bayard Rustin. It seems incredible that this trinity of social democracy can be openly acknowledged as theoretical mentors. This in itself speaks volumes on the primitive level of social democratic theory.

The book seems addressed to an audience of "liberal liberals," that is, those who are so very, very liberal. In trying to appeal to this type, the author tones down the more radical implications—conclusions are gently suggested rather than boldly pursued.

One somewhat amusing aspect of the book is that the author has taken on the posture of a literary essayist in an apparent imitation of ex-radical writers like Irving Howe, who have landed jobs as professors. As a man of letters and serious literary critic, Harrington is a flop. His pretensions to scholarship are quite  "mid-cult." For example, there is not even a bibliography provided; nor are any citations given for the plethora of quotations. Literary allusions plus a hodgepodge of synopses of men and ideas do not add up to anything profound. Of course, no doubt,, Harrington makes some correct summaries of literary themes, but his whole process is reminiscent of the term paper of the college sophomore mercilessly carried to great length. Clever phrases, comments and thumbnail sketches are not enough justification for writing a book, let alone one that purports to present a serious political perspective.

The theme of the book is the decadence of traditional capitalism along with the institutions and ideas associated with it. Harrington sees some of these ideas as valuable and he laments the dangers to these ideas from the forces unleashed by capitalist development. The cause of this decadence is the undirected and unintended byproducts of technological changes. This "revolution," as he calls it (his terminology is imprecise), has "unsettled every faith and creed in the West."

This, one would think, would be generally welcomed by Harrington. Yet there is a definite note of ethnocentrism and cultural imperialism in his designation of useful ideas as "Western." He is really expressing sorrow for the decay of social democracy. Had social democracy presented a real alternative to capitalism, its decay would not have been so complete.

Harrington tells us " . . . the one set and undeviating principle of socialism is its commitment to making the . . . free choice of the citizen the principle of social life." A hundred and fifty years ago this expression of the ideals of bourgeois democracy would have been progressive. But today it ignores the recognition that democratic theories must be related to a social context. The social democrat never understood that the science of political economy is the heart of the matter. Democracy cannot exist on thin air; it refers to a social context. Specifically, where the social relations of wage labour and capital exist, democracy cannot exist. It is not that more planning is needed but that outmoded social relations must be abandoned. Socialism is not just that people get what they want; it refers to what can be done when people want and get a different society with different social relations.

William Jerome 

Michael Harrington's The Other America (1964)

Book Review from the March 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Other America. Michael Harrington, Penguin, 3s. 6d.

There is a pretty little myth that America is the land of milk and honey and the place where everyone, but everyone has his own car and lives in ease and comfort. It is difficult to escape the picture handed down to us by Hollywood that spacious houses and gracious living are the norm, perhaps because like so many stories from across the Atlantic, it is put over in such a big way. But it is false, nonetheless.

This much we can learn from Michael Harrington, who tells us in his book The Other America (Penguin Special, 3s. 6d.) that there are 40-50 million people in U.S.A. struggling along in conditions of direst poverty. It is no good trying to laugh this one off as just another Yankee story, because Mr. Harrington supports his claim with a wealth of data from government sources. Yet such is the competence of his style, that he manages to bring home to us in a frighteningly personal manner the human tragedy of these "invisible millions" as he calls them. Invisible, that is, to the superficial observer who is not prepared to probe the thin crust of surface appearances, and understand that poverty reaches much deeper than the shirt on your back. The author is careful to stress this very point early on, when he says:—

“In Detroit the existence of social classes became much more difficult to discern the day the companies put lockers in the plants. From that moment on, one did not see men in works clothes on the way to the factory, but citizens in slacks and white shirts. This process has been magnified with the poor throughout the country. There are tens of thousands of Americans in the big cities who are wearing shoes, perhaps even a stylishly cut suit or dress, and yet are hungry.”

Something else to note about this poverty is its catholic nature. Whites may despise Negroes, and Negroes in their turn spurn Puerto Ricans, and so on, but whether they like it or not, they are all in the same boat. Some may be affected worse than others, like the eight million aged poor, but the conditions of even the best off are deplorably low by any standards. They are all of them members of the working class—something which hardly needs stressing and which runs like a thread through the whole depressing picture.

We do not hear the argument so often nowadays that the poor are that way because they are lazy and enjoy living on the dole. Nevertheless, it seems to be sufficiently prevalent still in America for the author to deal with it at some length and to demolish it with withering, scornful logic. The crux of his reply is that the poor made the fatal error of being born to the wrong parents: —

“Once that mistake has been made, they could have been paragons of will and morality, but most of them would never have had a chance to get out of the other America.”

All sorts of notions get a knock on the head in this book. It is not so much that Mr. Harrington always makes strenuous efforts to demolish them, but that they just fall down under the weight of the evidence which he gives. One idea in particular is that automation and industrial expansion necessarily mean a better life for all. In fact, as he points out, some better paid workers (the middle class he calls them) have no doubt been able to improve their lot, but those lower down the scale, and even some of those further up the scale, have suffered a drop in their standards. For many this has meant a tumble into the ranks of the intensely poor.

Mr. Harrington is not a Socialist; his "solution" to the problem is "massive government action," although he does not go into details and the futility of such a policy should be apparent from the rest of his book. Still, we will forgive him this because in all other respects he is clearly master of his subject and constantly reminds us of the most appalling thing about poverty. That is, the poverty which it begets in every other direction so that the whole of our lives become permeated with its loathsome culture.

Read this book. It is truly a devastating condemnation of Capitalism.

Eddie Critchfield

A better kind of capitalism (1977)

From the July 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard "He is considered the most graceful speaker who can say nothing in most words." Samuel Butler, Notebooks. At a meeting of business men in San Francisco recently, two speakers put forward their views about the American economic system. They were Michael Harrington, author of The Twilight of Capitalism and the  widely-read Socialism, and Fletcher Byrom, chairman of the board of the Kopper Corporation, a thriving industrial enterprise. Their suggestions for solving American capitalism's problems turned out to be remarkably similar. Only their descriptions of their views were different. The debate was reported in the New York Times of 5th May. Harrington, described his standpoint as a "democratic socialist" one, while Byrom's word for his projected future society was "technocratic". The symmetry of their proposals makes clear that one or other was using words wrongly; or was it both of them? Harrington claimed that the American system has undergone changes away from "free-enterprise capitalism" and in the direction of "collectivism". Byrom argued that, with increased mechanization and automation, making people work hard was less important than organizing society better through government. Both speakers agreed that there is something wrong with the present management of American society. Both proposed, to solve America's problems, a better planned administration. In spite of Harrington's description of the present order as "welfare decadent capitalism", neither saw the cause of the problems as capitalism itself; both blamed the inefficient use of government resources. Thus, Harrington's "democratic socialist" programme included "increasing public sector employment, redistributing wealth towards the poor, and social control of investment in the United States". And Byrom's "technocratic" solution included the following measures: "longer terms in office for elected politicians, improvements in health delivery systems, inner city schools and other social programmes to reduce unemployment". The reforms suggested have nothing whatever to do with Socialism. On the contrary, increased state intervention is something required by capitalism. Harrington's ideas are those of a section of the Labour Party, who claim to be able to "reform away" capitalist evils; but they also belong to a school of thought whose roots lie in a book published in 1940 called The Managerial Revolution. Its author, James Burnham, claimed that capitalism was being superceded - it was no longer the owners of capital who controlled society but the "managerial class": salaried executives, engineers, managers and civil servants. None of these doctrines is correct or provides an understanding of what takes place in the capitalist system. It is based on the ownership - which may or may not be synonymous with control - of the means of living by a class. Wealth takes one form only: commodities, or articles produced for sale at a profit. In some cases distribution, including transport and communications may need to be centrally organized virtually from the outset: the roads and postal system were "nationalized" at a very early stage in capitalism. In others, the production of basic materials such as coal, electricity, iron and steel eventually appears too important to capitalism as a whole to be left to "free enterprise", and the state takes control of them; or, as with agriculture, provides money and lays down conditions to ensure production in line with national policies. All this is necessary capitalist practice. At the same time, the state is obliged to legislate in what are called "social" matters on behalf of the capitalist class as a whole, or dominant sections of it. The working class has to be educated. Beyond a minimum general standard, the introduction of more complex machinery requires workers with technical skill and scientific knowledge. The state has to intervene (e.g. the central aim of Polytechnics is to co-operate with industry and to serve its needs). Subsidies and controls are used to keep wage demands in check; medical welfare, to minimize the losses to industry through illness; and so on. The measures advocated by Harrington and Byrom are part and parcel of the profit system. For example, "increasing public sector employment" happens as a matter of course - at certain times. They have nothing to do with a change away from capitalism, and therefore (vis-a-vis Harrington's use of the phrase "democratic socialist") nothing to do with Socialism. One last question on Harrington's contribution. He argues for "redistributing wealth towards the poor". It sounds humane and unexceptionable, yet it betrays lack of comprehension of what capitalism is about. Why does he think they are poor? They are, of course, wage-workers and the dependents of wage-workers, or the unemployed ones. In a book called The Other America: Poverty in the United States, published in 1962, he spoke repeatedly of "cheap unorganized labour" as the basic problem. But the working class as a whole is condemned to poverty, differing only in the degree of it. Apart from charitable handouts, there is no means for workers to get wealth "redistributed towards" them (whatever that means). They can and will struggle for higher wages and improved living standards, and the capitalist class at times finds itself forced to pay higher wages for labour-power. The fundamental wage-labour relationship which is the cause of poverty remains. Attempts to redistribute wealth by reform legislation have been going on for for a lifetime in Britain - and the reformers now admit that they have failed. In The Other America Harrington calls poverty "needless", as if it were the result of carelessness or mismanagement. As long as he thinks that, he is not thinking of Socialism. Alison Waters