Standard Leeds OK (1979)

Party News from the November 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

After unsuccessful attempts to sell socialist literature in Bradford two members of West Yorkshire branch switched their attention to Leeds City. Sales were slow at first but now persistence has paid off. We sell between fifteen to twenty copies each Saturday. We have found that our “special offer” deal of the current Socialist Standard plus a back-issue, for “only” 20p, also pays rewards.

The main reasons for the increased sales of the Standard in Leeds are our perseverance, the new design of the journal and our gradually acquired “selling technique”. The latter consists of shouting our message like a couple of political barrow-boys: “Labour No, Socialism Yes!”. . . “Abolition of the Wages System! . . . “Capitalism No, Socialism Yes!” . . . “Labour-Tory; same old story!” . . .

Selling socialist literature in the streets is often illuminating and amusing. We frequently get abuse from fellow workers, ranging from a basic “Eff off, mate”, to a “Go back to Russia”. The first type of insult receives the reaction it deserves—we ignore it. The latter type of advice usually gets the reply: “If we tried to sell our communist literature in Red Square we’d be arrested”.

Recently, the Tories have ventured forth in Leeds selling their new comic, which they have the nerve to call Democrat. One member approached one of these lackeys of the ruling class and, respectfully touching his forelock, asked ‘”Ow’s life up at the ‘All, Sire?” He defiantly replied that he was a worker, lived in a council flat and had six kids to support. Clearly a case of ragged trousered philanthropism.

Also selling their wares in the precinct are the predictable group of “Socialist” Workers, sporadically shouting about the “Right to Work” and the need for a minimum wage. This contrasts sharply with the neighbouring shouts of “What bloody Right!” and “Forget minimum wages, support their abolition!”

The final rival group we usually is the Young National Front, looking menacingly militaristic in their bovver boots, cropped hair and sun glasses. Recently, we approached one of the Aryan Race asking him if he wanted to buy a Standard. He proudly referred to the fact that he and his mates “smacked up” the SWP paper sellers every Saturday. However, after a wasted attempt to explain the gist of Socialist thought, he abruptly ended the conversation stating that the SWP were hardly “democratic”, which was a true enough statement, but somewhat ironic coming from him. Finally, before he went on his way, we entered the worst deal of out and swopped the last Standard for National Front News (price 8p, for pages of racist rubbish) whose presentation resembled the Socialist Worker paper in layout and design, as did their complete lack of understanding of the cause of social problems.

However, despite such aggressive competition, literature selling in Leeds has recently left us with a greater sense of satisfaction as we leave for home with all our Socialist Standards sold.

If you are one of those people who buy the Socialist Standard from us in Leeds and you sympathise with the Socialist case, then please follow up your interest by getting in touch with us to find out more about Socialism. If you agree with the ideas you’ve read, don’t just sit there, get up and join!

RB (West Yorks)

Lewisham and free speech (1977)

From the September 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

The nineteen thirties were resurrected on 13th August, when the fascist National Front held a march through Lewisham in south London. This area was selected by them because it has a high proportion of black people. The march was claimed to be a protest against mugging, and carried placards which said: “80 per cent of muggers are black, 85 per cent of victims are white”. Implication obvious.

Opposition to the march was organized by the Socialist Workers’ Party, and the result was an afternoon of violence with 214 arrests and 110 people taken to hospital. There was further violence in Birmingham, where the National Front had a candidate in a by-election, and several indiscriminate attacks in London. The SPGB was among the objects of it. Though we oppose both the National Front and the Socialist Workers’ Party and condemn everything which happened in Lewisham, the front window of our premises was smashed by a brick on 16th August.

The question raised is of democracy. Should the National Front be tolerated when they are preaching intolerance? Why cede free speech to them when everything known about them indicates that their aim is to suppress free speech? In the same terms, is there any justification for the Socialist Workers’ Party trying to prevent forcibly the expression of views they object to? The word “fascist” is both definite and indefinite; in the early ’thirties the Communist Party used “social fascist” as a self-granted licence to break up any opponent party’s meetings, and the SWP and its predecessor International Socialists have done the same.

The SWP produced two curious arguments. First, Paul Foot was quoted in The Times (15th August) as saying 98 per cent. of his party are against violence. Since the SWP now claim 4,500 members, this means only 90 support violence and 4.400 are against it. In a democratically-run party a minority accepts the view of the majority. Why are not these 90 expelled from the party? Second, Duncan Hallas said on TV (18th August) the National Front is outside the rules because “it is not a political party”. That is absurd. A political party is a group which aims to win or participate in control of the state machine, and that is the nature of the NF.

The SPGB’s attitude is quite clear. We are against violence as a political means because it denies democracy; we are for the expression of views, however pernicious they are considered to be. The way to defeat the National Front is to expose its policies fully (most of its supporters either do not know or do not understand them). The SWP and others play into its hands by seeking to make superior force the issue. It is not a matter of “should be allowed”. That means, again, some forcibly superior body — in this case the government — deciding what views may or may not be expressed. Most people take it as a question of “right” and “wrong”, but governments do not act on ethics.

The legal “rights” of free speech, publication, assembly and voting are permissions given by the state for historically or immediately practical reasons. They can be withdrawn, as has happened many times and is suggested now; The Times had an editorial on 15th August saying the citizens should not mind losing “these nebulous rights” in the interests of public order. Socialists understand the value of these facilities which capitalism has to allow, and at the same time see them in perspective. We link democracy with Socialism, as an essential of the means for a democratic society to be established.

Democracy depends on knowledge, and that is why we are for all views being expressed, questioned and debated. We do not, however, join with non-Socialists to demand legal rights for them as a stepping-stone to run capitalism. Under existing conditions it is always possible for the bully or would-be tyrant to use democratic procedures which he wants to stamp out. Why should we help them? The application of democracy in the true sense, as part of the demand for Socialism, is the only realistic way to deal with fascism—and all the other evils produced by capitalism.

A related matter is the myth which has grown up round the “Battle of Cable Street” in 1936. Here, the Communist Party and other groups organized opposition to a march by the British Union of Fascists; the street was barricaded, there was fighting, and the BUF leader Mosley agreed to divert his march. This has led to the legend that the fascists were defeated, and the SWP today are trying to emulate it. In fact the fascists marched again in East London, and continued their activity and contested elections until the outbreak of war in 1939. According to Martin Walker in The National Front they gained about 2,000 members in the East End in the two months after the battle of Cable Street.

Finally, it should be noted where the National Front gets its support. Its policies apart from racism are a miserable ragbag which would not in themselves elicit votes on any useful scale. But, like the Nazis and other fascist parties which have won political power, in a depression it attracts workers who are discontented and misdirect their resentment — and, in particular, think parliamentary democracy has been no good to them. The rise of fascism since the first World War is due above all to the failure of the social-democratic parties who consciously rejected Socialism. The policies and activities of the SWP do nothing to alter that.

Robert Barltrop

The Politicians and the crisis: Part 1 (1977)

From the July 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

On Sunday May 8th, in London the seven-nation conference of heads of state ended. Present with their aides were the Prime Ministers of Canada, Italy, Japan, UK, the Presidents of USA and France, and the Chancellor of West Germany; and on the final day Roy Jenkins in his capacity as President of the EEC.

The Conference was the latest of a series of similar conferences to appraise and look for solutions to the very real and increasingly dangerous problems facing the West European industrial countries, North America and Japan, and the rest of the avowedly capitalist world, i.e. Australasia. Latin America and so on, plus and by no means least the primary producing countries of the “Third World”, who are themselves at various stages of industrialization.

The problems discussed were primarily the world trade recession, with its unemployment. particularly amongst the young, inflation, energy, imbalance in international payments, the expected $45,000 million surplus of the oil-producing countries grouped in OPEC, the debts of the developing (non-oil producing) states, the “necessary” increase in nuclear energy (and its attendant dangers, political and military), “aid” to developing countries in which the Eastern (Soviet) bloc trade organization Comecon was urged to follow suit.

Carter, the US President, also raised the question of illegalities which had hitherto been condoned in certain banking, multi-national business and political circles. (The former Japanese Prime Minister, Mr. Tanaka, in relation to bribes from the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation was very involved.) This latter matter was not mentioned in the final declaration of “7 Pledges” to revitalize capitalism’s ailing economies, possibly because although not unimportant, it was regarded as peripheral to the major problems. To raise it officially would have also meant an explicit reference to companies and individuals. But does the conference have any significance for the working class of the world?

It can be safely said that modern society rarely appears to have stability for more than about two consecutive fortnights at a time, and that countless conferences and meetings have come and gone. Like many things it is all relative . . . and yet the newspaper headlines must at least have indicated something of magnitude — e.g. “7 Pledges to stop chaos” (Daily Telegraph, 9th May) and the politicians’ view on what could happen if these problems are not solved, must mean something. Put it this way: Carter, Callaghan and the rest wish to present as good a face as possible on the existing system whether they choose to call it capitalism, the “mixed economy”, a “free market”, a “social market” economy, the “free world” (i.e. capitalism with some sort of parliamentary democracy), partly because they are obliged to continue with it and also perhaps because they like the trappings of political power. As Carter said at the end of the conference: “We have to remember that making decisions, even unanimously, is not a guarantee that our decisions will be consummated. In many ways our own reputations are at stake.” As an article in the Daily Telegraph on Friday 6th May (the day before the beginning of the heads-of-state meeting) under the heading “Outlook for the World Summit — Hidden Threats to the World Economy” stated in its opening paragraph:

Chancellor Schmidt probably expressed the inner thoughts of all the European leaders when he said on Wednesday that he was looking to the London summit this weekend, mainly to bolster confidence. By this he meant the leaders' self-confidence and their electorates’ confidence in them, both of which are indeed at a low ebb.

Why this dual lack of confidence then? Because the politicians always aim to convince themselves and in turn the electorate that the capitalist system has found a way of stabilizing itself, and that despite its many imperfections it could at least avoid a catastrophe of the 1930s’ slump dimensions. They imagined that with their versions of Keynesian economics they had eradicated the deeper troughs of the business cycle.

However, from the mid-sixties onwards their policies have been demonstrated to be futile and unsound. It has been a gradual process, this dawning on the part of capitalism’s politicians.

Perhaps more to the point, among their advisors in the corridors of power, the higher echelons of the Civil Service, this bewilderment was exemplified in an article entitled “Whitehall at its wits’ end” (Sunday Telegraph, 24th April):

‘Everyone is baffled’ confesses one Permanent Secretary. “The old levers just don’t do the trick any more. We’re living in a world we didn’t make and don’t understand’. The Treasury has according to one senior Labour Minister (unnamed) ‘a very marked loss of confidence’, which reveals itself ‘to the discerning eye’ by the presence of competing economic ideologies. Before the Treasury served up only the pure milk of Keynesianism; now Keynes and Friedman are both on offer.

Graham Turner, the author of the article, states that “Whitehall is at its wits’ end . . . like the rest of us — they have not the faintest idea where Britain is going”.

The British politicians, their advisors and their counterparts in other countries may not know where the British and world economies are heading, but they do know, from personal experience and from the reading of history, where the 1930s’ crisis led.

The fact that they spoke at the Summit conference as candidly as they did demonstrates the seriousness of capitalism’s present difficulties.

The Japanese Prime Minister said “the world economic situation was now as serious as that of the early 1930s when leading industrial nations failed to act in time to prevent a slide into the 1939-45 war. History should not be allowed to repeat itself. Western nations had to co-operate more energetically in tackling economic problems” (Sunday Telegraph, 8th May).

He also recalled the fiasco of the 1933 London Economic Conference when no agreement was reached and a communique not even issued. “The difficulties today are greater and are compounded by new problems”.

The French President, Giscard d’Estaing. recalled that the ending of the 1977 conference coincided with the anniversary of the end of the 1939-45 war! “Sombre and pessimistic pictures were sometimes drawn of the present state of the world, but the cooperation at such conferences make it possible to avoid the mistakes [!] that helped to bring on that war.”

Helmut Schmidt of West Germany spoke on similar lines and “thought that they had avoided the results of complete selfishness” — by avoiding the “traps of the 1930’s.” President Carter like the other heads of state was concerned that decisions reached should not be merely pious, but recognized that making decisions and implementing them was not one and the same thing. "Sometimes heads of State tend to over-emphasize their own importance,” he said.

Callaghan considered that continuing unemployment carried political risks, not merely by the replacement of one party by another (naturally he does not want to lose his job) in Parliament — but that political democracy could be threatened. He is obviously concerned regarding the growth of the National Front, with racialism as the main plank of its support, and it is obvious there is a parallel here with the Nazis’ anti-semitism, which was copied in this country by the pre-war British Union of Fascists (although in recent years Sir Oswald Mosley has tried to obscure his organization’s former position on this subject).

It would seem inconceivable that the British working class could en masse support an organization tainted with fascism. Some of NF’s leaders were given to dressing up in Nazi-style uniforms before the organization was formed, and their arguments for economic nationalism — “self-sufficiency” — were advocated by the Nazis. However, it seemed improbable at the time that the Nazis would make much headway.

It can be justifiably argued that Britain in the 1970s, even with inflation and high unemployment is not the same as Germany in the early 1930s at the height of the depression with 6 million unemployed and the dire poverty it meant. However, in spite of the lower percentage of unemployed compared with that period and the lesser relative hardship of today’s unemployed, there is apathy and cynicism to politics and politicians generally, which though understandable is far from healthy — and also a good deal of resentment on the part of some of the young. This is why the established politicians are concerned wondering whether, if the crisis continues irrespective of the party in power, some of the youngsters might transfer their violent support from football teams to organizations like National Front. After all most of the workers of today know little of the 1930s; they make comparisons within this period, and as to whether the politicians’ promises and policies ring true. Over 400,000 of the present unemployed in Britain are in the 16-to-25 age group. In the rest of Western Europe the percentage is a little lower, and in the USA it is higher than in this country.

The major parties of British capitalism are discredited and the growth of the National Front directly arises from this. It is a particular indictment of Labour-style reformism and its inability to deal with capitalism’s problems, heightened as they are in times of crises.

Frank Simkins

(To be continued)

50 Years Ago: Fascism, violence and the Left (2024)

The 50 Years Ago column from the July 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

On Saturday 15th June in London the National Front held a march to a meeting to protest against an amnesty for illegal immigrants. An attack on the march was made by left-wing groups, culminating in a battle with mounted police in Red Lion Square, and a young student was killed.

The inevitable accusations of “police brutality”, the headlines and questions in Parliament ensued. All this followed the National Union of Students’ resolution to prevent “fascists” and “racists” speaking. On 18th June the International Marxist Group announced that unless a July march of Orangemen supported by National Front is banned, it will attack that too.

The policies and attitudes of the National Front are detestable. So are those of the International Marxist Group and its collaborators. The latter include the Communist spokesmen for the National Union of Students who have expounded its policy of forcible suppression, and the Labour fools in the scarcely-known but ill-named “Liberation” group.

Their assertion is that unless “fascism” is crushed we are in danger of the rise of a dictatorship party, which would suppress democracy and persecute its opponents and those it did not favour. If that danger exists it is represented equally by the IMG, the Communist Party and other organizations of the left. What is THEIR aim? To suppress democracy and put down rivals.

Like the Communist Party when it made a policy of attacking British Union of Fascists marches in the nineteen-thirties, IMG hope to obtain support by posing as the defenders of freedom. But the CP’s policy then did not apply only to fascists. At one period Labour Party meetings were ordered to be broken up. At other times our own meetings have been shouted down and disrupted. Make no mistake about this: these protesters are not Marxists or liberationists or democrats, but power-seekers wanting to suppress whoever disagrees with them. (…)

The problem for the working class is not fascism but capitalism. Racism and other forms of oppression are symptoms of it. Socialists feel as strongly as anyone about them; and we know the solution of them to be the abolition of the capitalist system and its replacement with Socialism.

[from Editorial, Socialist Standard, July 1974]

50 Years Ago: Students against democracy (2024)

The 50 Years Ago column from the May 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Liverpool was proud of The Beatles and its connection with that Cunard Line. What the city thinks of the conference of the National Union of Students held there early April is another thing. Hundreds of delegates from universities, polytechnics etc. assembled for their annual jamboree. Over the years, this conference has endorsed some pretty queer ideas, but 1974 will go down as a vintage year.

This assembly debated students’ grants; elected a new President (a political loner we are told) by 21 votes; didn’t agree to send a delegation to Czechoslovakia to see if the Czech students’ union were democratic enough to form links with the NUS (would their journey have been really necessary?). Then came the body blow to democracy and the right of people to express their views. The outcome of this debate intimated they had a lot in common with the Communist-Party-dominated Czechoslovakia.

A majority of the delegates “voted yesterday to take whatever measures were necessary, including disruption of meetings, to prevent members of racialist or fascist organizations from speaking in colleges” (Guardian, 5th April, 1974).

(…)

The Socialist Party of Great Britain has personal experience of what happens when such a decision as that of the NUS is operative. We arranged a debate in North London against the National Front. An opportunity for the audience to weigh up the two conflicting schools of thought — socialist or nationalist. We were of the opinion that the audience would be able to judge for themselves the validity of the arguments. But our dear “lefty” types thought otherwise. They broke up the meeting. Did they consider the audience to be such a bunch of morons that they could not judge? Obviously they did, and this might just be the reason why these “revolutionaries” wish to appoint themselves as leaders of the masses. They know what is good for us — they know what we should hear.

Democracy, never a favourite word in their vocabulary, means a method of conducting affairs where a majority decision is reached on the basis of all information being readily available. Who are these self-styled dictators, who in the name of democracy, wish to decide what we shall or what we shall not hear? The suppression of “unpopular views” by violence does not eradicate these ideas. This can only be done by a free exchange of ideas.

(From the Socialist Standard, May 1974)

Letters: Insularly aloof? (1974)

Letters to the Editors from the September 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Insularly aloof?

It appears that in this society you are either meek and humble, or aggressive. There is no other, no middle road under capitalism, in the world at large.

Which of the above categories do socialists come? What do socialists do outside the political arena? Do they stand insularly aloof within?

(Unsigned.)

Reply:

Socialists oppose the capitalist system uncompromisingly. Many have undergone hardships through doing so, particularly in wartime but also through adherence to their convictions at any time. We leave to our correspondent to decide whether that makes us “meek and humble” or “aggressive”.

We oppose reformist and direct-action activities which mean the banging of heads against brick walls. Addicts of those policies have accused us of “standing aloof”: we say anyone can get a sore head.

“Outside the political arena” Socialists go to work, are trade-unionists, read, watch tv, and do other common-place things.

Editors.

Lenin and lies

We have had enquiries about the source from which an article in February Socialist Standard stated that Lenin advocated “lies, trickery and deceit” as methods for Communists to use in the trade unions.

The version of Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism published by the American Communists (“Workers’ Party of America”) in the early nineteen-twenties with the title Should Communists Participate in Reactionary Trade Unions? contains the following passage:

Communist must be tactful 

There is no doubt but that the opportunist leaders of the unions will resort to all the dirty tricks of bourgeois diplomacy, invoking the help of the capitalist governments, priests, police, judges, etc., in order to prevent the Communists from penetrating into the trade unions, to force them out of the unions, to make their work within the unions as dangerous as possible, aiding the police to persecute and run them down. But we must be able to withstand all that, to be ready for any and every sacrifice, and even if necessary, to practice trickery, to employ cunning, and to resort to illegal methods, to sometimes even overlook or conceal the truth—all for the sake of penetrating into the trade unions, to stay there and by every and all means carry on the work of Communism.

This publication led to strong condemnation of Communists in America, and they found it difficult to defend these intentions laid down for them by Lenin. Consequently the Communist Party of Great Britain’s edition of Left-Wing Communism had a watered-down version of the passage, as follows:

It is necessary to be able to withstand all this, to go the whole length of any sacrifice, if need be, to resort to strategy and adroitness, illegal proceedings, reticence and subterfuge, to anything in order to penetrate into the trade unions, remain in them, and carry on Communist work inside them, at any cost.

Editorial Committee

"Isolated itself from the real world"

Once again the Socialist Standard has aligned itself with the most reactionary elements in society. The article “Fascism, Violence and the Left” in the July edition was not only factually incorrect but also dangerously wrong in its analysis.

Firstly, the various left-wing groups involved in the Red Lion Square demonstration were not attacking the National Front. The left-wing groups were marching to a meeting to protest against the neo-Nazi N.F.’s march. You ignore the fact that the police only took action against the left wing demonstration. This ignoral of the police’s tacit support for the right wing and repression of the left is sadly not an isolated incident but in complete accordance with the S.P.G.B.’s record of no comment on the increasing state repression of socialists and trade unionists.

Secondly, the article gives the impression that the death of Kevin Gately was the result of the “violence of the Left”. In fact it was the police attack on the march which caused Kevin’s death. .This attack began before the N.F. had entered the square, the police were not protecting the N.F. against left-wing violence but engaging in a senseless action that even the liberal capitalist papers such as the Guardian were forced by the facts to admit was unnecessary.

The unwillingness of the S.P.G.B. to face the reality of the state’s repressive role is not an isolated phenomenon. Rather than become involved in class struggle the S.P.G.B. has remained on the outside producing a series of dogmatic dismissals of partial economic struggles, women’s lib, gay lib, fights against racism and fascism, student politics, etc.

In its rejection of any partial demand the S.P.G.B. has isolated itself from the real world and developed an internal conservative inertia. It has failed to answer the question of what should revolutionaries do in a non-revolutionary period by completely failing to intervene in such a way as to develop revolutionary consciousness and to strengthen the organisation and self-confidence of the working class. As such the S.P.G.B. has not developed in the last seventy years, degenerating into a group of philosophical utopian socialists incapable of bringing their ideas into relevance to non-socialists, only by achieving this by relating the struggle for socialism to the day to day struggles of the working class can socialist conscious develop.

G. Wright,

Wirral.

Reply:

Thank you for so ably confirming everything in our article “Fascism, Violence and the Left”.

Your rebuttal of allegedly “factually incorrect” statements consists of not facts but inferences — “tacit support”, “gives the impression”, and that we "ignore” this and that version. As a fact, we did not attribute Gately’s death to anyone. The article said: “and a young student was killed”.

It is strange you should say the SPGB does not “face the reality of the state’s repressive role” and, earlier, “increasing state repression” of socialists (so-called) and trade unionists. These events took place under a Labour government for whose return the left-wing groups in the demonstration had all worked at the last election. Who does not face reality?

The same can be said of your reiteration that through not supporting “partial economic struggle” and reformist movements the SPGB “has not developed in the last seventy years”. If — as you say — the working class now lacks revolutionary consciousness, organization and self-confidence, and — as you say — reformists and trade unionists are being repressed under the Labour government they elected, that is the outcome of seventy years of the struggles and activities you nevertheless still advocate. If it were not pernicious it would be laughable.

Editors.

Other letters and replies held over to next month through pressure on space.

Political Notebook: Boo, Hiss (1979)

The Political Notebook Column from the December 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Boo, Hiss.

In politics it is like panto time the whole year round, with all the capitalist parties having their demon king for the others to boo and hiss.

Tony Benn, for example, is guaranteed to cause nervous Tory ladies to have more nightmares than The Exorcist. Rhodes Boyson has the ability to reduce keen Labour supporters to a small cloud of indignant steam.

Each of these demons plays the part; Benn has a formidable stare, to convince all the spinsters of Bournemouth that he will have them raped under their beds. Boyson’s high dome and jungle of side- whiskers are straight out of Dotheboy’s Hall; quite clearly, he is plotting to starve all schoolchildren and to bring back hanging for theft of a hankerchief.

But the pantomime tradition has a habit of undermining itself, as the political bogey men become respectable — even loved — and sometimes in power, Churchill, for example, was once hated by many committed Tories. Aneurin Bevan, as he died, had almost cast off the diabolical image and seemed about to mellow into Gaitskell’s compliant right hand man. And Wilson, who was once thought to have ambitions to serve notice to quit on the fiddling business men of British capitalism, ended up by giving many of them honours, at the same time as he took one himself.

One of the uses of the demon kings is to draw the opposition’s fire and to become a personalisation of the popular misconceptions of their party’s policies. And if they are very clever, they can judge correctly when to stop being the demon king and start being the good fairy.

The danger in all this is that, like the panto, it is a diversion: it attracts attention away from the real political issues. Whatever the guise of the people who get into power over capitalism at any time, their basic function is the same—to try to run the system and survive politically. The workers who vote for or against them because they are entranced or frightened by the spectacle are living a fairy tale—and one with no happy ending.

Teddy Bares His Soul.

Edward Kennedy has everything—or almost everything. He is rich, famous, handsome, atheletic; and now, in a dramatic baring of his soul, he has revealed that he has the added quality of generosity.

For years he has been resisting the efforts of his friends who want him to take over running American capitalism. At one time Kennedy protested that, with a glut of fatherless nephews and nieces, his family commitments were too pressing. It was also hinted that, not surprisingly, he was reluctant to end up being assassinated like his two brothers.

But now the pressure has proved too strong; Kennedy has relented and will contest the Democratic nomination— and he is doing it all for the good of the American people. Having originally supported Carter for the presidency, Kennedy has suddenly found out that American capitalism is in an awful mess—and he has decided that Carter is to blame.

Even more, he is persuaded that only he can sort the mess out, although it is unusual, to say the least, for a sitting President to have to fight for re-nomination. At times, Kennedy’s enthusiasm seems to be getting the better of him; on a recent campaign tour in Carter country in the Deep South he was rash enough to promise that he would “roll back” rising prices (how many politicians have lived to regret that one?)

And, even more enthusiastic, Kennedy has persuaded his wife, who was driven to alcoholism by the stress of his life style, to totter to the platform to support his candidacy.

If such open cynicism succeeds, it will be because the Carter administration is so thoroughly discredited; even the media have stopped showing him to be a nimble, active man and have begun to put out pictures of him stumbling and falling to the ground, just like they used to with Gerry Ford.

None of this promises that it will be a dignified, analytical election campaign. Carter’s government has had no more success in doing the impossible—controlling capitalism so that it works in the interests of the American working class than has any other. The Kennedys are famous now as ruthless operators of a political ambitions machine—and Edward Kennedy is perhaps the most ruthless, ambitious and unsavoury of them all.

So it seems the campaign will be a savage, cynical affair. The best man may or may not win (if there is a best man) but in any case it will not matter—the victor will carry on trying to do the impossible and capitalism will come out on top.

Stormy Front.

Like some malignant tumour, the National Front took root and flourished through a sort of cellular subdivision among other racialist organisations in this country. For some years, it has led the field in this particular brand of anti-working class propaganda, trumpeting its object of making racism respectable. It has had some ominously successful election campaigns.

But behind this facade—and behind the dramatic, flag-forested parades, the strutting leaders, the hooligan rank and file all has not been well with the NF. It has gone through a succession of leadership crises and has seen its votes fall away.

Now the Front is experiencing yet another schism from which, perhaps, another equally obnoxious party will emerge. This schism is reported to revolve around the objectionable personality of the NF propaganda specialist Martin Webster, who has indeed never gone out of his way to cultivate a reputation as a sensitive artist in human relations.

There is a certain irony in this struggle. If the Front were in power it is likely that the losers of the battle within its ranks would suffer a consequence a lot less gentle—and a lot more final—than that of simply being expelled from the organisation. So perhaps they have something to be thankful for, in those poor election results.

If there should be an open split in the Front, there will probably be rejoicing among such bodies as the Anti-Nazi League and the Socialist Workers Party, who will see this as a triumph over racism. In fact, the pernicious ideas put out by the NF and the like will always find a receptive audience among workers who are degraded, exploited, poverty-laden and confused about the reasons for their condition.

Racism is the nomination of a scapegoat for the evils which capitalism brings. The most effective weapon against it is not in violence or repression but in a clear, consistent analysis of capitalism and of how it causes workers’ problems. No banners are waved in that but it is more enduring—because it answers to reality—than any parade.

Our GLC opponents (1977)

From the June 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

The fact that all other parties are reformist is fundamental to the case of the SPGB. This means they seek not to abolish capitalism with its class division, wages system, state and frontiers, but to modify it a little this way or that in a futile effort to legislate away its problems and inhuman consequences. It follows that there can be only one party seeking to end capitalism and to establish democratically an entirely different world system, called Socialism. The abolition of the wages system, the end of trade, profits and frontiers follows naturally from the new basis of common ownership of the means of production and distribution. These unique principles of the SPGB can be amply demonstrated by reading the manifestos of all or any of our opponents, and then reading ours. Though our opponents may differ on what they see as most important in the continuing evils of capitalism the common approach of them all is reformist. Doctor the effects — leave the cause alone.

The Labourites

After their abysmal efforts at running capitalism they still have the audacity to present themselves to the workers and seek their votes. They were even brazen enough to charge 20p for their manifesto. This offered the usual reforms aimed at making poverty more tolerable, instead of seeking a mandate to end the system which generates poverty. In their clash with the Tories over “free” bus rides for old people they cynically exploited the poverty of the elderly to gain votes. If workers would only see the contradictory position of the Labour Party they could understand that ministering to poverty pre-supposes its continuation. After fifteen post-war years of Labour government old people still cannot afford bus fares. One of Labour’s own leaflets quotes a Mrs. Kitchener of Leatherhead on concessionary fares: “The passes are rotten value, and people can’t afford them anyway.” Can anyone imagine Wilson, Callaghan, Foot or Castle, or the head of any nationalized industry, spending their last years of life worrying about cheap bus rides in off-peak periods? These people have done quite well out of capitalism. They posed as your champions, to fight for you. Now they are well off and you are still poor and needy!

The same with housing. Where they find workers willing to be photographed smiling outside those little boxes of bricks called working-class “dwellings”, shown in the Labour candidate’s address, is hard to imagine. They called them “decent homes”. The blurb underneath should have read “good enough for workers but not fit for Labour leaders". Labour’s boast on education included:

  “We are now doing much in the education field for the training of young people for industry . . ."

Training workers for wage-slavery. Not a word about closing down teacher-training colleges, slum schools, and crowded class-rooms. No mention of the class-divide in education. The children of the ruling class are not trained “for industry”. The typical Labour leader is educated at Oxford. Lady Falkender, for example, was reported in the Daily Mirror (22nd April 1976 to be choosing Westminster public school for her two sons. The fees were £1,254 per year for a boarder and £789 for a day boy.

The Tories

With seventeen post-war years of Tory government and four years at County Hall and all the horrors of capitalism remaining to testify to their political bankruptcy, the Tories tried to counter Labour reformism. It is easy for them to make capital out of workers’ misery by saying “the GLC is probably the largest slum landlord in the world”. It was no different with them in power. In Lambeth Central the Tory candidate was Roy Hatter; he drew attention to two thousand houses in Lambeth boarded up, and seventeen thousand people on waiting lists. His claim to working-class support rested on having broken the world record by making a political speech that lasted over twenty-nine hours. If only words could build houses! Like most Tories, Mr. Hatter has the habit of calling Labourites “Socialists”. If he does not know the difference his long speech must have been painfully boring. He is himself an employee, a member of the working class, yet he embraces the system of his masters which exploits him as well as the rest of us.

The "Communists''

The election address of the so-called Communist Party followed similar reformist lines to the rest. Full of platitudes, promises and catch-phrases. A typical example was:

  "Pensions. End the scandal of poverty, neglect and deprivation for the elderly. They fought for and built London for us”.

Poverty! Neglect! Deprivation! Yes, under a government they urged workers to vote for. Poverty is produced by capitalism. It is glib and cynical nonsense to promise to end it while retaining the system.

These political commotionists can never resist the chance to pose as patriots. They might do better to ask themselves whether slums and poverty are worth fighting for? If by “us” they mean the working class, London was never built for them but for the capitalist class who own it. Much of London is so old that no elderly worker suffering poverty today had anything to do with its building.

Those former intrepid “revolutionaries” who used to train with broom-sticks for “heavy civil war” have become law-and-order men. They are now demanding that the Metropolitan Police should be under the control of the GLC instead of the Home Secretary. What relevance that has to “Communism” is impossible to conceive. They also demand “More Democracy” — a prime piece of hypocrisy for a Party built on reverence for Russian State-capitalism, the biggest and longest-running police-dictatorship in the world.

National Front

With the flag of British capitalism appropriately upside-down, the National Front leaflet, launched a tirade of bunkum about immigration. By “immigrants” they mean black people and ignorantly gloss over the fact that most immigrants are of white skin. Blaming the blacks for everything is a favourite get-out for the simple-minded. They claim that “Inner London is now a multi-racial slum”. Much of London has always been a slum. National Front only recognize slums when they are “multi-racial”. Black people did not create the slums. Many of them live in them, as do many of their “white” fellow-workers. Slums arise because capitalism produces cheap housing for workers. Overwhelmingly, slums are built as slums.

They seek to “immediately repatriate” any immigrant convicted of a crime. What an idiotic idea. Nearly half the black people in Britain were born here. If every country adopted the same policy, then all those Britons who have emigrated would be sent back here if convicted of a crime. As the emigrants outnumber the immigrants, there could well be a higher “criminal” population here at the end of the process! Their attitude betrays complete indifference to the social causes of crime.

They advocate segregated education. Anything that further confuses and divides the working class. As we have seen in dealing with the Labour Party there is already class-segregated education.

The “village pump” narrowness of the National Front is a snare for unthinking workers. Nationalism is an ideological disease. The Labourites, Tories, Liberals and “Communists” all sponsor nationalism. National Front merely carry the nonsense further.

The I.M.G.

This group makes the fraudulent claim to be Marxist and Socialist. Their manifesto sought only to outbid the others in the number and range of their reform proposals. They openly set out to gain “protest votes” from Labour. The fact that the National Front draws much of its support from disillusioned Labour voters did not seem significant to them. Such voters are politically muddled, and having despaired of the Labour Party are looking elsewhere for easy answers within capitalism. Nothing lasting or worthwhile can be built on such a base.

The IMG wants capitalism without its economic consequences. Their concentration on wages, prices and jobs shows they are void of any ideas beyond the present system of buying and selling and wage- labour. They seek to ‘nationalize all firms creating redundancies”. They have forgotten the redundancies in British Rail, state education, the mines, etc., and have yet to learn that state-capitalism works no differently from private capitalism. Far from being extreme in any way, IMG stand roughly where the Labour Party stood sixty years ago, still demanding a “national minimum wage”.

Their policy of “No platform for National Front” is absurd. False ideas cannot be banished by such methods. IMG linked up with the Communists and various Constituency Labour Parties in a group called alarm (All Lambeth Anti-Racial Movement). With each affiliated party seeking votes at the others’ expense, this can be only a very tenuous alliance. “Alarm” invited our candidate for Lambeth Central to address a meeting in support of their limited objective, jointly with the other candidates, excluding National Front. We circulated an open letter giving our reasons for not joining them to fight the effects of capitalism and arguing the need to end this system. In opposition to the platform our candidate was allowed to state the Party case from the audience. Copies of their invitation and our reply were sent to the South London Press but were not published. The Guardian also failed to publish a similar letter dealing with the rival demonstrations in North London on 30th April despite the publicity they had given the event for two days before.

The SPGB stands alone (in this country) as the one party which rejects the system the others want to reform and retain. Socialism depends upon understanding. Only a conscious majority gaining political power can achieve a world of common ownership where production will be solely for use with free access. Class rule and subjugation will then be replaced by human society.

Harry Baldwin

Letters: Not So Obvious (1979)

Letters to the Editors from the May 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Not So Obvious

I am writing to ask if you have ever thought of participating in an alliance of left-wing parties to the left of the Labour Party. I am thinking of the Communist Party, the International Marxist Group, the Socialist Workers Party and the Workers Revolutionary Party. Such an alliance, based on areas of common agreement which I am sure can be found, could become a very strong force in British politics. Opposition to capitalism— both national and international—is obviously the most important common denominator between your various parties. It seems to me that the time has come to accentuate what you all have in common, and to put aside the differences until the struggle against capitalism is won.

Tom Rubens,

Leicester

Reply

The object of the SPGB is the abolition of the wage labour and capital relationship and its replacement with socialism, a society of common ownership and free access. Such a revolution can only be brought about by the democratic political action of a majority of class conscious workers.

The end of private and state ownership of the means of production, and hence of production for the purpose of exchange and profit, is not part of the left’s programme. Far from envisaging a society in which classes, buying and selling, employment and politics itself are absent, the parties mentioned campaign for the capitalist Labour Party at election time. They also confuse nationalisation (state capitalism) with socialism, support the ‘Right to Work' movement (there is no such right), dismiss our insistence upon the capture of the powers of government and the state machine and generally follow the anti-Marxist views of Lenin on questions such as leadership, nationalism and democracy. Needless to say, they have a wide variety of reforms on offer too.

For a socialist party, only one course is open: unceasing hostility to all parties that administer or lend their support to the capitalist system. This includes the left, whose militancy and spurious theory they cloak in the name of socialism, making our task that much more difficult. As to an alliance, the Pope will take up ballroom dancing first.

Editors.

Shallow Reporting

Following a recent article in the Socialist Standard entitled “Media Harlots" another example of shallow reporting showing effect rather than cause could be seen on one of the Tonight programmes during the week.

A reporter from CBS showed us all the effect of drunkenness on the Indians of NW Canada. We had the typical view of drunken apathetic Indians reeling about the streets while their young children plundered the local schoolmistress’s house for food and bedding. Another man was interviewed in his meagre house where he tried to feed up to fourteen children before he too went "under the influence”.

After showing all these effects we were then given the cause of this wanton drunkenness amongst the Red population. Apparently research has shown that due to their diet, the red man’s blood does not withstand as much alcohol as the white man’s.

This report concluded the case by suggesting even by some of the Indians themselves that the only cure was to ban alcohol. Only one man came near to a more realistic conclusion when he suggested that perhaps the Indians were being unfairly treated as he stated that the Government subsidies only extended to alcoholic drinks and not to such "luxuries” as housing, food and transport.

Surely a community forced to abandon their own beliefs and live in an alien society i.e. the capitalist society, will be left to subsist on handouts the profiteers choose to pass on to them thus ensuing their second class way of life.

I would be interested to know how far the Socialist Party has become established in Canada and ‘free’ America and how it stands in regard to such minority groups as the Indians and Eskimos.

Dorothy Williams, 

Mablethorpe, Lincs.

Reply

In a sense. Dorothy Williams has answered her own question. She points out that the alcoholism of the Indians in NW Canada is largely due to deficiencies in their diet, which in turn is an effect of the pressure of property society.

There are many such examples of the alienating and destructive effects of capitalism, beginning in the process of industrialising large areas and forcing people to abandon a rural way of life, only to be herded into the slums of the cities.

Socialists are not indifferent to such suffering; indeed as members of the working class we ourselves experience, day by day, the indignities and demoralising effects of capitalism. What distinguishes us from other political organisations is that we insist that it is futile to concentrate on just a part of capitalism’s problems— slums, poverty, war, the plight of the Eskimos and so on.

Since capitalism is responsible for all these problems—and many others—it follows that the only effective policy is to campaign exclusively for its abolition and replacement with socialism.

There is a Socialist Party of Canada, companion to the SPGB and other socialist parties in the world. But the difficulties of the struggle for socialism are even more formidable in Canada than in this country, and the SPC remains small. Its offices are in Victoria. British Columbia.

Editors.

Do We Oppose NF?

Regarding On Banning the the National Front — Socialist Standard January issue.

Because the opportunity to discuss their racist policies with them, either at their meetings or otherwise, is not often possible can I ask whether you agree that your members and supporters should also assist to make the elector aware of those policies by the issue of anti-NF explanatory leaflets as issued constantly by the Anti-Nazi League?

Yours hopefully.

FD (Essex)

Reply

It is not only the National Front who are shy about discussing their policies. The Socialist Standard has recently written twice to the Anti-Nazi League, asking Peter Hain if he would agree to being interviewed by a socialist as part of an article we plan to publish on the ANL. Both letters were ignored.

As far as our resources in terms of membership and money permit we publish a great deal of literature analysing all aspects of capitalist society. Articles on racism appear regularly in the Socialist Standard and we have published two editions of our pamphlet on the Racial Problem.

What we don’t get involved in is a preoccupation with any one aspect of capitalism’s problems, be it racism, sexism, unemployment or whatever. We argue that anyone concerned with any of these problems should be concerned with the abolition of them all — by the abolition of capitalism.

We analyse and attack the ideas of racism just as we oppose all anti-working class theories, including the reformism of organisation like the Anti-Nazi League.

Editors.

Berk of the Month

January’s “Berk of the Month Award" must go to the Sunday Mirror columnist Mr. Wardrobe Wyatt. From "Britain’s most influential columnist" comes this little gent "We have strikes because some people enjoy the excitement of them’’. Our friend Woodrow has obviously not experienced the “excitement” of standing in sub-zero temperatures, for hours on end with only the pittance of strike pay in their pockets, with about as much action as the Queen’s garden party.

Rob Bishop

Pudsey, Leeds, 

W. Yorks.

Students against Democracy (1974)

From the May 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Liverpool was proud of The Beatles and its connection with that Cunard Line. What the city thinks of the conference of the National Union of Students held there early April is another thing. Hundreds of delegates from universities, polytechnics etc. assembled for their annual jamboree. Over the years, this conference has endorsed some pretty queer ideas, but 1974 will go down as a vintage year.

This assembly debated students’ grants; elected a new President (a political loner we are told) by 21 votes; didn’t agree to send a delegation to Czechoslovakia to see if the Czech students’ union were democratic enough to form links with the NUS (would their journey have been really necessary?). Then came the body blow to democracy and the right of people to express their views. The outcome of this debate intimated they had a lot in common with the Communist-Party-dominated Czechoslovakia.

A majority of the delegates “voted yesterday to take whatever measures were necessary, including disruption of meetings, to prevent members of racialist or fascist organizations from speaking in colleges” (Guardian, 5th April, 1974). Mr. Steve Parry, the union’s Communist national secretary said: “It was all very well to talk about principles of freedom and democracy, but if people had known, in the days when Hitler was campaigning, what they know now, would they have let him speak? One or two individuals disrupting meetings was not enough. There had to be mass action.”

Another presumably intellectual and would-be working-class leader, Mr. H. Feather, wanted to drive the racialist and fascist organizations off the streets — you must pulverize them. All good emotional stuff to warrant a standing ovation, which of course it received.

But let us leave the heady atmosphere of the conference hall and look soberly at what has been suggested. Ideas not popular with students must be suppressed. At the conference these ideas are listed as fascist or racialist, but of course in reality it doesn’t stop there.

The Communist Party who now urge the working class to vote for the Labour Party took a different point of view in 1930. The following is taken from the Daily Worker 29th January, 1930:

  Workshop meetings should be called . . . and resolutions in the support of our Party should be carried, but the mere passing of resolutions is not enough. There should not be a Labour meeting held anywhere, but what the revolutionary workers in that district attend such meetings and fight against the speakers, whoever they are, so-called "left”, “right” or centre”. They should never be allowed to address the workers. This will bring us in conflict with the authorities, but this must be done. The fight can no longer be conducted in a passive manner. We must lead the masses in struggle against this Government and the time has arrived to use every conceivable means of political agitation. The 'Communist Party and its organ, the "Daily Worker" will lead the working class, fighting boldly and openly, against this government of scoundrels and agents of capitalism.

The government of "scoundrels” was the Labour government elected in 1929 whose Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald had been supported by the C.P. for many years. Is further comment necessary?

In 1943 the West Ham branch of the Socialist Party of Great Britain challenged the local branch of the Communist Party to debate the respective objects of the parties. A reply from their branch secretary dated 23rd February stated that "the Communist Party has no dealings with murderers, liars, renegades or assassins. The Communist Party of Great Britain refuses with disgust to deal with such renegades. We treat them as vipers, to be destroyed.” Methinks they protest too much but we leave our readers to form their own judgement on this outburst from the "holier than thou” brigade. Time and time again, the Communists have tried to break up our outdoor meetings — if not by violence, by concerted hooliganism.

And when it comes to the "Hitler campaign”, might we remind Mr. Parry that the Communist Party were prepared to do a deal with the Nazis in 1939? No question then of violently suppressing the Nazi ideas, but the fêting of Ribbentrop with champagne toasts. The Daily Worker (now Morning Star) had a headline of August 23rd, 1939: The German-Russian talks are A VICTORY FOR PEACE AND SOCIALISM. You could have fooled us.

During the 1939 war the Government shut down the Daily Worker for printing views which were considered to be against the war effort (during the CP spell of opposition to the war). The national press and politicians approved this suppression, and whilst the Daily Worker did nothing to enlighten the workers about Socialism (they were proud of their horse-racing tips), the Socialist Standard (Feb. 1941) stated that the SPGB has its own point of view. True to our basic principles we do not support suppression of opinion, however false we believe that opinion to be.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain has personal experience of what happens when such a decision as that of the NUS is operative. We arranged a debate in North London against the National Front. An opportunity for the audience to weigh up the two conflicting schools of thought — socialist or nationalist. We were of the opinion that the audience would be able to judge for themselves the validity of the arguments. But our dear "lefty” types thought otherwise. They broke up the meeting. Did they consider the audience to be such a bunch of morons that they could not judge? Obviously they did, and this might just be the reason why these “revolutionaries” wish to appoint themselves as leaders of the masses. They know what is good for us — they know what we should hear.

Democracy, never a favourite word in their vocabulary, means a method of conducting affairs where a majority decision is reached on the basis of all information being readily available. Who are these self-styled dictators, who in the name of democracy, wish to decide what we shall or what we shall not hear? The suppression of "unpopular views” by violence does not eradicate these ideas. This can only be done by a free exchange of ideas.

It is obvious that a university education can turn out just as stupid and dangerous people as the ordinary elementary school.

C. M.

United they stand (1978)

From the April 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Like the man who is going to be hanged in a fortnight, the politician finds that an approaching general election concentrates his mind wonderfully. All over the country, there is a buzz of activity, as envelopes are addressed, supporters canvassed, programmes drafted and speeches written. The great task is to convince the voters that your party is better than the other lot, that your leaders will keep their promises and that in general you possess a greater store of energy, dedication and mindpower which can all be at the service of the electors.

Or at least it was once as simple as that. In the days when the Labour Party was in apparently endless opposition it was possible for them to argue that they had some real differences from the Conservatives. They could put forward programmes which, because there was small chance of them ever being put to the test, could be suitably adventurous. They could even, in a controlled and qualified way, talk about something they liked to call socialism. A substantial number of workers were impressed by it and voted, for or against Labour, under the notion that they were making an active choice between two basically differing points of view.

But now that we have had a substantial experience of Labour government, under a selection of Prime Ministers who have been left wingers in their time and who have “changed” just at the moment when their panting followers were rejoicing that at last the Promised Land had been reached, the task of the propagandists is rather different. Now, it is not so much to convince people that it is worth making a choice between Labour and Tory as to get them to think that there are any differences to make the choice about.

So we might expect to witness, over the next few months (assuming, as many political observers are, that the Callaghan government will not be able to hang on much longer than this autumn) an intensifying effort to find, and then emphasise, the smallest of points of dispute between the two big parties.

Customary campaign

In fact this has started already; the direct attacks on Margaret Thatcher by Denis Healey, in the Ilford North by-election and by Callaghan soon after the Labour defeat there, are part of the customary campaign all capitalist parties wage, to convince us that their leaders are better than the others. In this case, though, there were pointers to a possible trend in Labour Party propaganda in the election.

Both Callaghan and Healey accused Thatcher of stirring up trouble on the issue of race (Healey said she was acting as a recruiting sergeant for the National Front). The inference we are invited to draw from this is that the Labour Party would never fish in such dangerously muddy waters, that they are unsullied by the slightest touch of racism and that on this issue—emotive, explosive, destructive as it is—there is a genuine difference between the two parties. And the inference we are invited to draw from this, again, is that the Tories stand for a compromise (or perhaps even agreement) with racism and the Labour Party stand against it.

But this would only deceive a Rip Van Winkle, someone who had been unconscious of the recent history of British politics. It was, of course, the Conservative government who introduced the first Immigration Act, in 1962, in an effort to assuage the racist ideas which were growing as the early immigrants came to this country, to settle in places like Brixton and Smethwick and Southall. At that time the Labour Party thought the Tories had delivered to them a golden opportunity to scoop up votes and Hugh Gaitskell, who was then the leader of the Labour Party, immediately launched into a fierce assault on the Act, on the grounds that whatever excuses were made for it, it was a piece of racist legislation.

Well Gaitskell did not live to see the results of his campaign but it was pretty clear that they were not at all what he had hoped for. In the next general election, in 1964, the name of Smethwick was written into British political history when the Tory candidate overthrew Wilson’s prospective Foreign Secretary—Patrick Gordon Walker—largely by playing on the prejudices of the workers in the constituency who objected to the inflow of immigrants.

Readjustment

This, and the even worse blow when Gordon Walker failed to get into Parliament at his second attempt at a staged by-election, was enough to persuade the Labour Party that a little readjustment was needed in their policies. Naturally they would still mention things like the brotherhood of man and equal rights for all whatever the colour of their skin and so on. But at the same time they worked to implement, and to tighten up on, the Immigration Act which they had previously condemned in such forthright terms.

It was predictable, that they would eventually come out in the open with their own racist laws and sure enough, in the panic over the Kenyan Asians in 1968, frightened for their miserable lives at the polls by the rabble rousing of Enoch Powell and Duncan Sandys and the hysteria of the moment, Labour gave birth to its own Immigration Act which, to all intents and purposes, finished the argument that they had differences with the Tories over the matter.

The situation, as the military are fond of reporting, has now stabilised. Both the big parties, in their concern to hang onto their votes, are now ready to introduce further discriminatory laws and, as the hysteria grows, to think up new variations on them. These laws have nothing to do with easing pressure on resources like housing, social services, available employment; there were problems in these fields long, long before the first West Indian walked the streets of Brixton or the first Asian gazed at the gasworked landscape of Southall. They have everything to do with a desperate attempt to stop the sliding away of votes to the more openly racist organisations like the National Front.

Both Labour and Conservative Parties are trying to pre-empt the National Front, to undermine its progress by appearing almost as discriminatory as the discriminators. At the very best this is a dangerous gamble, as the Nationalists found to their cost in Nazi Germany. And it leaves the all-important question: when Labour or Tory have got power by pandering to racist prejudices, what do they do with, how do they control, those prejudices?

The essential unity of Labour and Tory over immigration controls will not prevent them, when the time comes, pretending to the voters that they have differences in principle on the issue. This should deceive nobody with any kind of memory for recent history and there are plenty of other examples to remember. It has long been a point of Conservative propaganda, that the Labour Party is a revolutionary party which, knowingly or not, would be responsible for overturning capitalism and substituting something like the state organised society of privilege (in fact, a variety of capitalism) which exists in Russia.

Myth

Part of this myth is that the Labour Party is dominated by the trade unions and allows them to have a decisive say in the government of British capitalism. And runs the argument, capitalism run under the influence of the likes of Hugh Scanlon and Joe Gormley is almost like capitalism in the Kremlin.

The reality is a lot more sober. By a mixture of threats, force, determination and negotiation this Labour government have shown that, far from the unions running riot under them, they are the party with the most hope of controlling wage claims. And all this without a head-on confrontation like the pitched battle of 1973 and 1974, between Heath and the miners or even the clashes which have marked the history of previous Labour governments. Perhaps Labour has learnt, since the days when they prosecuted striking dockers, the facts of life and economic power under capitalism—and have done a deal with them.

One of the important facts of capitalist life is that it is a class divided system, in which two groups of people, between them making up the population of the developed world, face each other in conflict over the ownership of wealth. The parties of capitalism try to hide this fact, by talking about a unity of interests, about everyone working for the national good as if the interests of the coal miner are the same as those of the stock holder.

But while they are saying this those same parties are themselves fighting the class war, but on the other side of the line. They stand for the interests of the ruling class, for the propping up of a social system in which a minority own and control the means of living with all that follows from that in terms of poverty against privilege, freedom against repression.

Any differences they may have are over the tactics to be used in that propping up and in fighting that class war. At times, as in 1973, a government may decide on the tactics of confrontation; at others they may use the policy of conciliation, of trying to persuade the workers on the other side of the struggle not to use any power they may have, to negotiate rather than use force in the sense of a strike or something similar.

And when it comes to an election they are again united, in their respective appeal to the political naivety of the working class who are open to be convinced that minor differences on issues like immigration or trade unions are worth voting for or against. One result of this is that race is now in the forefront of British politics and promises to be a dominating factor in the next general election. This should be a lesson to anyone who thinks it possible to make progress towards Socialism with a policy of compromise with political ignorance or of winning support on day to day issues.

Labour or Tory, capitalism rules and that is not O.K.

Ivan

Racism and Nationalism, or Socialism? (1978)

From the January 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Living under capitalism with its attendant social misery, poverty and unemployment, where working-class housing and education are in a permanent state of chaos, scapegoats become an essential part of the set-up. Finding something or someone to blame is the easy answer for those who take a crude and superficial view governed by emotions rather than facts.

It is yet another contradiction of the system that the capitalist class cannot control the excesses and side-effects of their own propaganda. They din patriotic poison into workers’ heads in order to produce national conformity, only to find they cannot just switch those attitudes off when they want to recruit labour from overseas. National-mindedness is completely opposed to the real interests of all workers. It leads them to identify with the interests of the capitalist class and to line up behind the commercial ambitions of that class.

This means workers being willing to die in wars to maintain vested interests and profits. It means taking on the business worries of the owning class and, in times of crisis, regarding Japanese or Germans or any other rivals for world markets with resentment; and to prefer that Britain should be top dog and the others suffer the worst unemployment. Such loyalty, bolstered by fear and insecurity, is dangerously misguided. The ideology of nationalism is divisive and dehumanizing.

Struggle for jobs
How is a slogan such as the National Party’s “British jobs for British people” to be interpreted? Are they saying that immigrants are not British and should therefore have no jobs in Britain? Do they want these workers kept on so-called Social Security, or sent out of the country? It is a slogan for the slave.

What are “British jobs”? Working for American-owned Ford or General Motors, or for a British company overseas? Capital is international. The owning class get in wherever they can, so long as profits roll in, they care not from where. The workers of the world carry the capitalists of the world on their backs. They should concern themselves not with the colour or nationality of those who exploit them, but with ending exploitation.

Leftists like the Communist Party and “Socialist” Workers’ Party indirectly promote the same mentality as the NP and NF. Slogans like “Work not dole” and “The right to work” are taken up by the nationalists, who merely add: “If all these immigrants were not here we would all have work.” In fact repatriation—now called a fascist policy by the left—was advocated by the Communist Party itself. When the employment of Polish immigrants was discussed in the House of Commons in 1947, the Communist MP William Gallacher declared: “Let them get employment in their own country.” (Hansard Vol. 432, col. 1555.)

In the same year a booklet was published by the Communist Party called Looking Ahead. Harry Pollitt put the question:

  I ask you, does it make sense that we allow 500,000 of our best young people to put their names down for emigration abroad, when at the same time we employ Poles who ought to be back in their own country, and bring to work in Britain displaced persons who ought to be sent back to their own countries? We want our own workers to have confidence in their own land, to take a pride in building it up.

(Quoted in Questions of the Day, 1969)

Identical to the pernicious non-sense now being churned out by the National Front. Perhaps the CP would make the distinction that the NF direct their policy against people who are black? Then they might tell us where the same policy is different when directed against people because they are “displaced” or come from Poland.

Ends of the Earth
The whole of politics under capitalism, being built upon lies, twisting and the promotion of petty personalities, is pretty squalid, but the attempt to cash-in on the crudest class-ignorance in the form of racist ideas is the low-tide mark of that squalor. Enoch Powell gambled that this tide might sweep him into power. None of the trends he forecast has come about. Nothing he has predicted has happened. In one of his dark warnings we were threatened with “rivers of blood” as a consequence of black people continuing to come to Britain.

This appeal to the basest of emotions ignored the fact that the major tensions which exist (and not just between black and white people) are produced by capitalism. Powell, like all professional politicians and leaders, is prepared cynically to exploit the ugly effects of the system for his own advantage—having, in office, demonstrated his inability to control that system.

It is one of capitalism’s hypocrisies that socially useless people like professional politicians spend their time telling workers to work harder, while they and the parasite class they represent live well on the proceeds. Compare the contribution to society made by a black (or white) nurse with that made by Enoch Powell.

The British capitalist class in their quest for profits went to the corners of the earth with bible and gun, grabbing a vast empire. When the empire was at its “greatest”, the misery and the numbers of unemployed were also at their greatest. Extreme poverty was rampant, tuberculosis was endemic, and there were constant wars and crises. Today the killer diseases are different, but otherwise capitalism is the same. The British workers owned no empire; even the pawnshops and barrel-organs were not theirs. Today workers, whether black or white, British or “colonial”, still own no country.

Colour
In America, fear of the black man was (and remains) a direct outgrowth of the poverty inflicted by capitalism on “poor whites”. Under that pressure, with an admixture of ignorance, their conduct sank to a sickening level. The upsurge of the advocacy of “black power” in recent years can only be understood as the backlash. But separation, whether imposed by whites or sought by blacks, can solve none of the problems engendered by capitalism. Karl Marx, falsely depicted by the capitalist press as the architect of class hate, gave as his favourite maxim “I regard nothing human as alien to me”. The same propaganda machine which vilifies Marx spreads nationalist poison and justifies nuclear stockpiles.

In 1977 there was a sharpening focus on “racial” issues, particularly in the period of the County Council elections. The Labour Party’s loss of support through some workers turning to more extreme nationalist groups led to a demand in the Lambeth Labour Party to ban the National Front. Leftist organizations formed action groups to “fight racism”, and published leaflets containing much factually useful information (largely culled from the Office of Population censuses and surveys).

The way some of the information is used, however, shows that these groups either seek to calm nationalist emotions or share the same emotions themselves. They stress that only 11 per cent. of the population here are immigrants and compare this with higher levels elsewhere; only 1¾ million black people live in Britain, only 4 per cent. of Asians live in council houses. The note of apology is hard to miss. Yet while workers dispute with one another their “right” to move from place to place, the capitalist class own the earth.

A National Front leaflet ignores the official figure of 3½ million immigrants and claims there are 6 million. A photograph of four black faces is supposed to support the lie. In fact there are 1¾ million. Such statistics, on both sides, attempt to prove or disprove an irrelevance.

The Solution

The idea of banning or restricting the NF has gained further impetus with marches being outlawed in Manchester, the hire of civic halls to them forbidden in Islington, and the Labour Conference discussion of how to ban some marches and allow others.

The statement by Merlyn Rees typified the Labour Party fallacy that reform legislation can remedy the effects of capitalism. He favoured amending the Public Order Act (as if this Act has produced public order!). He pointed to the Race Relations Act which makes it an offence to say or do anything to incite race hatred. He seems to believe that racism is produced by the National Front. The reverse is true.

Wrong ideas cannot be banned, and trying to ban them is itself a wrong idea. It seeks to treat the effects, not the cause. Only in unfettered debate and open discussion can erroneous ideas be exposed and answered. The Labour Party fears that process as much as the National Front.

Nothing short of removing capitalism can get rid of its antagonisms. As workers gain an understanding of Socialism they will leave behind bigoted ideas about colour, race and nationality. They will pursue their own interest not as blacks or whites, Britons or "foreigners”, but as workers. In so doing, they will free themselves from the bondage of wage-slavery. When the system of exploitation and poverty is ended, the perverse ideology which supported it will also have disappeared.

Harry Baldwin

From the February 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Correction

An error occurred in typing the manuscript of the article 'Racism and Nationalism, or Socialism?' in our January issue. The point to be conveyed was that there are 3½ million immigrants, of which 1¾ millions are black. The NF photograph tried to convey the lie that there are 6 million immigrants all of whom are black.