"National liberation is a trap" (2026)

Blogger's Note:

The following text is from the SPGB discussion forum, and is in connection to the SPGB contesting the local elections in Lambeth.

"The campaign group, Vote Palestine 2026 "asked candidates if they would sign a pledge, the first point of which was to: “Uphold the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people.”  [The BrixtonBuzz website has published a list of those who agreed to sign the whole pledge.] 

Our candidate added a published comment explaining why he couldn’t:

“I did request a better wording of the pledge at the campaign launch but those running the campaign didn’t take my advice so this, regrettably, must be my answer.

I can’t help but feel those who have a vested interest in passing off national liberation wars as somehow socialist had a hand in this."

“I did request a better wording of the pledge at the campaign launch but those running the campaign didn’t take my advice so this, regrettably, must be my answer.

I can’t help but feel those who have a vested interest in passing off national liberation wars as somehow socialist had a hand in this.

Reply from Anya Krycek

Dear Vote Palestine 2026,

Thank you for your email. I must respectfully decline to sign.

As an anti Zionist Jew and socialist standing in Brixton North, I share your horror at the suffering in Gaza and the West Bank. But I cannot endorse a pledge framed around national self determination.

The nation state, whether Israeli or Palestinian, is a prison house of nationalities. It tells workers to wave flags and forget they have no motherland to defend. Israeli and Palestinian workers alike are exploited by the same global system of wage labour and capital.

National liberation is a trap. A new state means new masters under a new flag, while wage labour, property rights, and class rule stay intact. Council divestment treats symptoms, not the disease.

My goal is not another state but the abolition of the state itself: a classless, stateless, wageless, moneyless world community where people cooperate freely. Real self determination means workers recognising their shared enemy across all borders.

I stand with working people everywhere. I cannot sign a pledge that reinforces the nationalism keeping them divided.

Yours sincerely,

Anya Krycek

Socialist Party Candidate for Brixton North, Lambeth”

Another candidate, Eduardo Salgado, who is standing for Shake it Up in the same ward, also commented, expressing a “Marxist-Leninist” (Maoist) point of view:

“I think historically, things happen in stages. According to Marxism-Leninism (ML), national liberation often must precede, or be strategically aligned with, workers’ liberation because imperialism makes national independence a necessary first step to create the conditions for a successful socialist revolution. Lenin viewed the national struggle in colonized or oppressed countries as a key component of the overall world socialist revolution. The core reasoning is that national liberation acts as a necessary step to “clear the decks” for direct class struggle, as it removes the foreign oppressor and allows the working class to battle its local bourgeoisie. Lenin says on this issue:

* Support the national liberation struggle against imperialism unconditionally.

* Maintain independent working-class organization and leadership within that movement.

* Use the liberation struggle to raise demands for socialist transformation (land reform, workers’ rights).”

There is also a Trotskyist candidate standing in Brixton North but he has not intervened yet.

Here is our candidate’s reply to Eduardo Salgado:

The stageist model, national liberation as a necessary prelude to socialist transformation, is not merely strategically mistaken but theoretically incompatible with the abolition of capitalism. The historical record of national liberation movements demonstrates a consistent pattern: the “stage” of national liberation does not clear the decks for proletarian revolution it institutionalizes a new form of capitalist state. The foreign colonizer is replaced by a national bourgeoisie that maintains wage labour, commodity production, and extraction. The nation is not a proto political reality waiting to be liberated, but a category produced by capital itself a way of organising populations into manageable units. To prioritise national liberation is to reinforce the very abstractions; nation, citizenship, the state that capital requires to function.

“The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got.” The Communist Manifesto (1848)

The Socialist Party (GB) position is that the proletariat has no stake in which bourgeoisie administers its exploitation. Anti-imperialism that stops at the nation state leaves exploitation intact. The state form itself prevents the direct social relations that would constitute a break with capital. Socialism cannot proceed through stages it must begin immediately in the content of struggle, as the practical activity of breaking with wage labour, money, and the state. National liberation changes the flag and people in government, it does not interrupt the reproduction of capital. To make it a “necessary step” is to permanently defer the only act that could end exploitation: the immediate social transformation of society by and for the working class. We don’t seek the people’s commodity production we seek abolition of the proletariat.

Anya Brixton North SPGB candidate

The South African snake pit (1963)

From the June 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Repression and bloodshed are no strangers to Africa.. Even so, what is happening now in South Africa will make a black page in the history of that unhappy continent.

South Africa lives now under a cloud of fear, in resigned acceptance of the fact that widespread violence is inevitable in the near future. Both the Government and the Africans are ready. Both have done their share of violence. The record of the government is well enough known; now an African terrorist movement has emerged, and has already carried out its first “execution.”

Behind the political dispute there is the mass of everyday crime, the gang warfare, the murders (2,610 of them in 1961—twenty times many as in Britain, which has a population three times that of South Africa) and the intimidation. This is South Africa. It is a scene savage enough to belong to a distant, primitive society.

Yet in many ways the Republic is a modern country, with strongly developing industries and considerable natural wealth. It has mines which have turned out over £16 million worth of gold in one month. It has uranium—a by-product of the gold mines. It has silver, manganese, asbestos and diamonds.

Over the ten years 1952 to 1962, South Africa more than doubled the value of her exports, from £376.2 million to £778 million—in impressive increase, even after we have allowed for currency inflation. Vital production, such as steel, has bounded upwards.

With her economic power, and with a ruling class which is possibly the most sophisticated in Africa, South Africa could become the workshop of its continent. But the policy of its government is firmly denying the Republic its chance of becoming an advanced, developed capitalist nation.

This policy is apartheid—euphemistically translated as “separate development’’—which the South African government has followed single-mindedly since the Nationalists came to power in 1948. Because apartheid is essentially a repressive policy, it needs widespread coercive laws to enforce it.

The Pass Laws, for example, forbid an African to stay outside his allotted area for more than a certain time. The Laws are designed to keep the Africans out of the towns, and confine them to the rural areas. There are frequent round ups of Africans in the towns, to ensure that the Pass Laws are not flouted. One thousand Africans a day are being arrested in this way.

South Africa has established Bantustans, or areas reserved exclusively for coloured people. Nobody goes voluntarily to a Bantustan—100,000 native families have already been forcibly moved into them and the government plan to move a total of five million families in the same way. This has meant that one-third of the Africans now have no legal right to live anywhere.

It means that eventually South Africa will be split into two nations, with the white one having 87 per cent. of the land.

The Pass Laws are not the only repressive legislation at work in South Africa. The Africans—the vast majority of the population—have no legal right to strike, nor even to negotiate through trade unions. And in case opposition to the government threatens to become too vocal, there are Acts like the recently passed Security Bill, which allows the indefinite detention of an opponent of the government and which can, of course, be used against a European as easily as against an African.

As the screw has been tightened upon the African, his desire to hit back has been intensified. The Luthuli tactic of passive resistance seems likely to be forgotten, as the violence from one side inevitably provokes further violence from the other. The immediate outlook for South Africa is not happy. 

Why does the South African government stand out against what seems the inevitable progress of its country into the ranks of the world’s capitalist powers? In South Africa there are eleven million Africans as against three million Europeans. If the country’s industry is to develop it needs a stable, contented working class to draw upon for its labour requirements. The bulk of this working class must come from the Africans.

But a stable working class is one which has the sort of political and legal rights which workers in this and other capitalist countries have. If the Africans had these rights, there would almost certainly be no compromise with the Europeans. The country would become, like Ghana, Nigeria, and so on, politically African.

To the industrialists of South Africa, this is not so fearsome a prospect. They are confident that they could do a deal with an African government and in any case they know that their future expansion depends upon the freeing of the native labour force.

It is a different matter for the landowners. Their future hangs upon them preventing the Africans asserting their numerical superiority. So they have done their best to prevent the Africans developing into a perceptible working class. They have tried to keep them out of the towns. And now, as they split the country in two, they are in fact trying to stop South Africa entering the twentieth century.

South Africa's industrialists—her capitalists—aspire to become the continent’s dominant economic power. The policy of apartheid stands in their way, while the smaller, newer states do their best to catch up and take the lead. Unless the industrialists can match their economic power with political power, their ambitions will become an empty dream.

They have a hard struggle ahead. At the moment, as the country slips ever deeper into the pit of violence, of crime and xenophobia, it seems that the landowners may win.

And there is a massive irony in this situation, which should be remembered by everyone who, for one reason or another, takes up the stand against apartheid. The very people who are administering the policy—the dour, ruthless men who are obstinately turning South Africa into a mad dictatorship—are the heirs of the men who were once the darlings of the “progressives.”

When, at the turn of the century, British capitalism was reaching out for the new-found mineral wealth of South Africa, the Boer farmers were the world’s favourite underdogs. Many people thought that they were gallant defenders of liberty against a powerful bully. What was called the “morality” of what was called “ England's last imperialist war ” was a hot political issue.

Well, the Boers made their point. Out of the early struggle of their nationalism has grown the dictatorship which oppresses South Africa today. There is nothing surprising in this. Most struggling nationalist movements pose as the champions of freedom; when they come to power, freedom is often one of the first things to be thrown out of the window.

True as this is of the Boers, it is equally so of the Africans who are now suffering under apartheid. There is no reason to assume that if they ever get power in South Africa they will be any better than some of the other African governments, who have allowed only as much political freedom as their particular brand of capitalism needs. There is no reason to assume, in fact, that the African nationalists would be any better than Verwoerd himself.

This is the irony and the bitterness of nationalism and indeed of property society. South Africa is but one corner of a world which, by its very fundamentals, can only live by denying human priorities.

Ivan.

Letter: Will anything good come out of the war in Israel? (2024)

Letter to the Editors from the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

I remember dancing and singing Hava Nagila with my two Jewish roommates in our college dorm in 1978, when Israel and Egypt signed the Camp David Accords. Time has shown how naïve we were to rejoice. Sadly, decades will pass again, and it will probably not matter whether or not the current fighting ended with the signing of a major ‘two-state’ accord.

The broad mass of the public is not galvanized either way by what is happening in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. The weak and underprivileged, the working poor and the lower middle class aren’t taking sides. They know that the wars are taxing their pockets and that nothing positive can follow if they balloon into regional wars and the price of oil exceeds 150 dollars a barrel.

The ideological battle lines around the wars in Israel and Ukraine do not follow class lines. Most people on either side are white. This is an identity crisis at the top of society. These fissures and divides reflect the declining international strength of the United States and its inability to guarantee that Globalization 2 does not crumble and collapse. This is a conflict between those who support Palestinians against Israeli apartheid, and those who are attracted by Israel’s apartheid treatment of non-Europeans (never mind that most Israelis today are Mizrahi with origins in the Middle East and North Africa rather than Ashkenazi, or European Jews). Incidentally, the supporters of Palestine must be very careful around their new political bedfellows. A person carrying a Pride flag at a recent pro-Palestine rally in London was angrily chased away by other demonstrators.

Proponents of the idea of statehood for Palestine are drawn to the cause as one of ‘national liberation.’ They forget that the bourgeois revolutions ended in the mid-nineteenth century and that although numerous new nations emerged in the twentieth century, their significance was no longer a struggle against a pre-capitalist mode of production. The so-called ‘national liberation struggles’ and ‘anti-colonial’ or ‘anti-imperialist struggles’ of the twentieth century all turned out to be wars between capitalist powers. Every ‘liberation’ movement since the early 1920s has been harsh on all forms of democratic and autonomous groups, particularly among workers. And ‘liberation from imperialism’ always seems to involve subjugation to the imperialism of another superpower (in today’s world, that is the United States on the one hand, and China, Russia, and Iran, on the other).

The backers of Netanyahu’s Israel tend to be connected with the military industrial complex and traditional sectors of the economy. Among them are radical conservatives like Elon Musk and Donald Trump, who do not want to succumb to the authority of the politically correct supporters of Palestine. Also supporting Israel are far-right groups. Who would have thought this possible? Does this mean that anti-Semitism—racism in general—is a biproduct of the disease, and not the disease itself? Holocaust or no, right-wing fanatics around the world are openly voicing their support for Netanyahu’s government because they appreciate the harsh way it deals with non-whites. But doesn’t a class aspect usually lie behind any manifestation of racism? The Nazi hatred of the Jews, for instance, can be seen as a socio-psychological transformation and generalized expression of the fear the German middle class had for both large capital and labor.

What advantage can simple Palestinians derive from the existence of a homeland for themselves? The worst calamities befall simple people during periods of enforced national unity in war. What can they gain from the existence of a Palestinian state other than more war, death, and destruction? The champions of a two-state solution— which includes many liberal Jews, particularly in North America—are unwittingly supporting the freedom of simple Palestinians to be exploited by their Hamas masters or whatever replacement is found for them in the future.

Is a lasting peace in the Middle East possible? Theoretically speaking, yes. It’s a long shot, but it’s out of the box and obvious. It requires no war, no blood, no creation of a Palestinian state, and no Israel as we know it. Naturally, the starting point would have to be the ouster of the Netanyahu government in Jerusalem and the end of the rule of Hamas in Gaza. Peace will remain a pipe dream until the corrupt monster states in the region—and that includes Netanyahu’s government—fall and are replaced by something new and truly democratic. Only resistance by the people of the Middle East (and Eastern Europe) against their own governments can lead the way to permanent peace. It is impossible to predict what exact form this new ‘people power’ might take. Who knows? Perhaps it might be something along the lines of a unitary republic of workers’ councils. That might work.

Evel Economakis, 

Greece.

Reply: 

Yes, but only if we are talking about democratically elected popular councils on the basis of the common ownership of the means of living; which of course couldn’t exist just in one province of the former Ottoman Empire. 

Editors.

Vietnam-again? (1972)

From the December 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

If one war can be more depraved and dehumanising than another, then only in these terms is there a winner in Vietnam. For more than thirty years, virtually non-stop, Vietnam has been ravaged by the modern military hardware of rival armies. Back in 1941 the Japanese; then the British, then the French, the Vietnamese themselves, and finally the Americans. The wholesale slaughter and destruction, and the indifference to human suffering has been common to them all. The lying and hypocrisy of the politicians on all sides has been outstripped only by their gory deeds.

In the name of peace, the war steadily escalated for eight years. In the name of freedom, brutal dictators were installed and people whose “freedom” was denied burned themselves alive in protest. In the name of democracy, elections were suspended. In the name of liberation, many hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children have been blown to pieces or burned alive with napalm. On the ideological pretence of stemming “communism” every conceivable horror and outrage has been practised. Regardless of how many Vietnamese were killed in the process, they had to be “saved”. The utter ruthlessness of governments purporting to be champions of the “free” world could hardly be surpassed by those of police-state dictatorships.

Humiliation & Protest

America has suffered the humiliation of having to bring members of her armed forces to trial, accused of atrocities against the people they were supposed to be defending, while those atrocities were condoned by the then deputy leader of British Labour government. We have witnessed the spectacle of returning military personnel denouncing the war and their own brutal conduct. The American Army has had to face the desertion of tens of thousands of its men, while the scale of drug-taking was so vast among those who remained in the war, it had to be virtually ignored.

There have been massive demonstrations against the war, throughout America’s largest cities, with the added irony that the same coercive State apparatus which carried on the war was frequently used against the demonstrators. In Britain, as in other parts of the world, there were also demonstrations. The British “left” which organised the protests here were not opposed to the war as such, but were anti-America, and favoured a Northern victory. They dragged out all the anti-working-class arguments about national independence and home-rule to justify their support for the bloody butchers on the other side. As with CND before them, the protest reached fever pitch and then fizzled out. Since October 1968 there has been hardly a peep out of them. Such movements inevitably dissipate the enthusiasm of the workers who support them. Capitalism mocks all such limited objectives when its vital interests are at stake. The tragedy is that this same enthusiasm coupled with Socialist ideas could rid the world of the scourge of capitalism itself.

Amazing Gracey

As the misery and the bombing drag on towards the end of another year, it is worth remembering that it was the post-war British Labour government who restarted the war after taking over from the Japanese in 1945. In September of that year 20,000 British troops arrived, and General Gracey was set up as military dictator.

Despite the fact that the Vietminh (the forerunners of today’s Vietcong) had control of Saigon, the Labour government co-operated with the French ruling class, who wanted their colony back. The Labour government helped ship back French troops. General Gracey closed down the press and used the Japanese army to post a proclamation saying: “I hereby warn all wrongdoers, especially looters and saboteurs of public property and those carrying out similar activities, that they will be summarily shot.”

After arming former French prisoners who immediately started shooting up the Vietminh, Gracey disarmed them, and used Japanese forces to put down the guerrilla war he had sparked off. He ordered British troops: “Always use the maximum force to ensure wiping out any hostiles we may meet”. Like the Americans, the British had no way of knowing “hostiles” from innocent people. A British and Japanese military operation followed before the British left it to the French to continue the slaughter in March 1946. It was thus that “liberation” came to the people of Vietnam. Even the great American butcher General MacArthur (who wanted to use A-bombs in Korea) condemned as “ignoble” the conduct of the British Labour government in Indo-China.

With Friends Like These …

The French government carried on the war for eight years with financial aid from America, and the active support of the French Communist Party, whose deputies consistently voted for increased arms expenditure, in full knowledge that the arms were being used for killing their own “comrades” in Indochina. During 1946 Charles Tillon, a Communist, was in fact Minister for Armaments. These same deputies including Thorez, the C.P. Vice-Premier, voted unanimous congratulations to General Leclere after the bombardment of Haiphong where 6,000 civilians were killed.

On the other side, Ho Chi Minh wasted no time proving himself at least as treacherous and murderous as his adversaries. After running phony elections in January 1946, where 70 seats were promised to non-Communists (provided they did not compete in the election) he spent the next ten months liquidating 202 out of 444 elected representatives. The Vietminh carried out wholesale murder of opponents, in particular Trotskyists. One popular Trotskyist leader Ta Tu Thau, had three trials and three acquittals before he was shot. As a result of Cardinal Spellman’s campaign of propaganda half a million Catholics left North Vietnam in the mid-1950’s. This helped create serious food shortages, which led to peasant uprisings in late 1956. Ho Chi Minn’s army crushed the “rebels” and killed or deported 6,000 farmers.

. . . who needs the Enemy?

The Chinese ruling class whilst pouring military aid into the North and conducting a propaganda war against “American Imperialism” has supplied steel for American army and air bases. The Russian bosses have done much the same thing, trading with both sides, and there have been the usual hypocritical accusations and counter-accusations hurled between the Chinese and Rusian rulers.

If Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon have been the wililng tools of American capitalism in prosecuting the war, (backed up by Wilson and Heath on behalf of British capitalism) Mao Tse Tung, Brezhnev and Ho Chi Minh were as soaked in the blood of the working class as their western counterparts.

Wilson’s Labour government supplied some of the napalm which American forces used to burn alive so many thousands of men, women, and children. They also trained South Vietnamese forces and built bases for the U.S. air force.

Workers Have no Country

If anyone doubts that the sordid economic motives of capitalism lie behind the war in Vietnam, the U.S. News and World Report for the 16 April 1954 said: “One of the world’s richest areas is open to the winner in Indo-China — tin, rubber, rice, key strategic raw materials are what the war is really about” (quoted in Solidarity Pamphlet, The Rape of Vietnam, from which other material in this article has been taken).

The fact that the world has absorbed the emotional shock waves of the war in Vietnam, and a generation has lived with the stock-piling of H-bombs, is a measure of the terrifying extent of capitalism’s conditioning. It is also a damning indictment of this system of society.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain and its companion parties including the World Socialist Party of the U.S. have consistently opposed all wars. Taking our stand on the basis of the interests of the world’s working class, we condemned the two world wars as thieves’-quarrels of rival capitalist classes. We declared that no war is worth the shedding of a single drop of workers’ blood. We re-affirm that attitude. Vietnam is likewise a thieves’ war. The workers and peasants own no country on either side. They will find themselves as firmly shackled to the juggernaut of exploitation, whoever emerges as their new masters. Neither can “peace” be long secure, for fresh conflicts and future wars are inseparable from continuing capitalism. Vast air bases and thousands of planes stand in readiness to continue the war, despite the much-trumpeted withdrawal of ground forces. More than three million dead for nothing. And how many more millions will be slaughtered before the working class gets rid of the slaughter-house, remains a very open question.

Harry Baldwin

Socialism or Chinese Nationalism: A Criticism from Australia. (1928)

From the March 1928 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the March, 1927, issue appeared an article under the title “Socialism or Chinese Nationalism.” In it was set out the Socialist attitude towards the plea of the patriot that all citizens ought to defend the independence of the country in which they live. Our answer—the answer we gave in 1914—is plain and definite. Under capitalism all the workers in every land are wage slaves. They have, under capitalism, no means as a class of escaping from wage slavery. Victory or defeat, in wars between capitalist nations, each leaves their position in society unchanged. Even the standard of living of the workers in both the “victorious” and “defeated” countries has altered little or not at all since 1914. The abolition of capitalism and the establishment of Socialism is the only first-class issue for the Socialist. The enemy of the working class is the capitalist class.

Therefore to urge the workers to fight for Irish, or Indian, or Chinese, or English, or German national independence, is to ask them to neglect the problems and the interests of their class. Such propaganda under capitalism, on whatever pretext, is anti-Socialist.

The Communists, like other reformist organisations, urge the workers on various tactical pleas to take this anti-Socialist course of action. The Irish workers, having been told to fight for Sinn Fein, are now told to support their equally capitalist opponents in De Valera’s party. German workers were urged to resist the French occupation of the Ruhr. Communists in Alsace are now agitating for independence. Indians and Chinese workers are told by the Communists to support first one and then another of the various capitalist nationalist parties in the respective countries.

The Australian Communist journal, The Workers’ Weekly (Sydney, 15th July, 1927). angrily attacks the attitude of the Socialist Party. They are angry first of all because the article in question referred to a “possible war in China.” This, says The Workers’ Weekly, is “opportunism” and is “traitorous,” because in fact hostile acts were being committed even if war had not openly been declared. The criticism is pointless and childish. Our attitude is the same whether hostilities are veiled or open; we tell the English workers and the Chinese workers that the attack and the resistance to attack are alike not deserving of the support of the working class.

In comparison with the loss of working class life and limb in war the difference between exploitation by Chinese capitalists and exploitation by foreign capitalists matters nothing at all to the Chinese workers. (The Kuomintang Party estimates that already 100,000 lives have been lost in the Chinese wars of the past year or two, in the Nationalist Army alone.)

The Workers’ Weekly goes on to state the hypothesis of a bombardment of Southampton, Liverpool and London, and asks whether we would refer to that as a “possible war on England.” Our critic forgets the fact that during the war 1914-1918 we did consistently maintain the attitude we now place before the Chinese workers, the attitude of unqualified hostility to capitalist wars. (It would, incidentally, be interesting to know if our critics can offer as consistent a record.)

We are branded as “henchmen” of our “Imperialist masters” because we tell the workers that rule by one section of the capitalist class does not differ in essentials from rule by another section. We are asked to enthuse over the “aspirations of subject peoples such as India, Egypt or China.” Instead we tell the truth, which is that Indian or Chinese “independence” matters no more to the workers there than does English “independence” matter to us. They are all capitalist movements. Just as we told the English workers in 1914 not to support the war against Germany, so we tell the Chinese workers now. Perhaps our critic will enlighten us by explaining what the Chinese workers stand to gain by defending Chinese capitalism against European capitalist Governments, and what the English workers stood to gain in 1914 by defending English capitalism against German.

The Workers’ Weekly repeats the familiar Communist arguments about supporting nationalist capitalist movements for tactical reasons.

The national movement should be supported, they say, 

“not as an end in itself, but for the weakening of the might of the Imperialist State, the getting of our propaganda to the broad masses, the gaining of their confidence, their acceptance of our leadership, the prerequisites for the Social Revolution.”

China is an excellent example of the suicidal nature of that policy. Capitalism as a world system is not weakened but strengthened by the emergence of new and powerful independent or semi-independent capitalist nations like Ireland, China, India, Egypt, etc.

The entry of Communists into nationalist parties like the Kuomintang in China did not aid Communist propaganda. Communist propaganda was in the first place inevitably subordinated, as it was in Ireland, to nationalist propaganda in the interests of the so-called “national crisis.” And as soon as the various Chinese nationalist leaders, whom the Communists supported in turn, had no further use for their Communist supporters, they got rid of them by execution and other means. Literally thousands of lives of politically active Chinese workers were needlessly sacrificed in this way.

In fact the Communists in China have not succeeded in winning the confidence of the masses, or in getting positions of leadership, but if they had it would not materially help Communism. Teaching Chinese workers that the “national independence” is a working class issue is not Communist propaganda. Winning positions of power and eminence as Chinese patriots, or Irish or English or German patriots, is playing the capitalist game. It is not destroying but building up the dangerous illusions of patriotism. For the Russians it may well prove an exceptionally dangerous double-edged weapon. China is rapidly moving towards the position of an independent capitalist republic, and it may very well be that the Chinese nationalism fostered for “tactical” reasons by Russian Communists will provide the screen behind which the Chinese capitalists will prepare to enforce their class interests should these conflict with Russian territorial and other claims.

In conclusion, let us remind the Communist Party of Australia that the Socialist Party of Great Britain can boast that it has never urged the workers to fight in or prepare for capitalist wars, and has never, directly or indirectly, aided any party doing so. The Communist Party of Australia, on the other hand, actively supports the Australian Labour Party, which is notorious for its support of the last war and for its “big navy” and air force programme.

Edgar Hardcastle

Socialism or Chinese nationalism? (1927)

From the March 1927 issue of the Socialist Standard

Although our attitude towards Chinese Nationalism has been stated several times, there are still readers who do not understand it or cannot reconcile it with what they supposed to be the socialist point of view.

Let us first separate two quite distinct questions which have unfortunately been confused in the agitation carried on by various wings of the Labour Party : First, ought the workers to support wars waged by capitalist States, including a possible war in China? Secondly, should the workers support nationalist movements, aimed at securing national independence, including the struggle to rid China of foreign control?

The only socialist answer in both cases is an unambiguous no ! We support no capitalist war and we support no nationalist movement.

Where the capitalist economic system exists (whether the government is Conservative, Liberal or Labour) armed forces are maintained for the protection of capitalist private property and capitalist interests generally. Foreign trade is one of the forces constantly creating friction with other capitalist competing countries and with “backward” races which are unfortunate enough to dwell in parts of the earth endowed with rich natural resources. When the governing sections of the capitalist class think their interests seriously menaced they set the armed forces in motion either at home or abroad. Those armed forces are organised and controlled by these governing sections and THEY ARE NEVER USED FOR ANY OTHER PURPOSE THAN THE PROTECTION OF CAPITALIST INTERESTS. Wars waged by capitalist State involves, therefore, no working-class issue, and on no account would socialists support them. The Socialist Party alone in this country consistently opposed the last war on socialist grounds, and opposes any and every capitalist war. The particular circumstances are to us a matter of supreme indifference. The German invasion of Belgium, the French occupation of the Saar, the Chinese threat to Shanghai, the Russian attempts to damage the British Empire, Irish or Indian or Egyptian demands for independence, Mexican threats to the property of oil companies, each and every one leaves us cold. In every instance the driving motive is the desire to seize or to protect captalist private property. Capitalist States fight only over the division of the loot obtained by the exploitation of wage workers. We are wage workers and are only concerned with the abolition of exploitation.

But to come to the second question, if we will not fight to prevent the German capitalist class from plundering the Belgian and British capitalist class, we most emphatically will not assist Irish, Indian, German or Chinese captalists against British capitalists. We are interested in one kind of struggle only, class struggle, and primarily in that phase which consists in the endeavour by wage earners to overthrow capitalist private property and all forms of the wages system. The national movements blazing away in different parts of the world are not working-class, but capitalist, in their aim. We therefore oppose them. Patriotism has the effect of binding together the classes in each geographical area. Socialists desire that conflicting class interests shall be recognised, not obscured.

Socialism and patriotism are irreconcilably antagonistic. Patriotism is anti-working class and Chinese nationalism is no less so than is British. The one encourages the other. We wish to strangle both.

The Labour Party leads the workers to believe that hostility to a war with China implies the necessity of supporting Chinese nationalism. This is an anti-socialist attitude. Nationalism is merely an aspect of the rise of capitalism. Its history is a tragic record of working-class lives lost, working-class energies wasted and self-sacrifice betrayed. It has no relieving feature; it has brought no material gain to the workers. Nationalism has ever in the long run proved a treacherous basis for working-class organisation. In the capitalist French Revolution the great majority of the victims of the guillotine were not aristocrats but workers. The French commercial class did not hesitate to slaughter the misguided wage-earners who interpreted Liberty as meaning the Liberty of themselves.

In the revolutions which swept over Europe in 1848 under the twin capitalist cries of Democracy and Nationalism, the workers who fought under capitalist leadership were invariably betrayed and their hopes disappointed whenever the demands of the capitalists against their Feudal enemies were wholly or partly conceded. What have Italian or Balkan workers gained by the blood they poured out winning “freedom” from Austria and Turkey? In our own day, what have Irish workers benefited by the years of assassination and guerilla warfare against the armed forces of the British capitalist state? Does any intelligent observer believe for one moment that Irish, or Polish, or Indian, or Egyptian, or Chinese capitalists are one whit less brutal in their exploitation of their workers than are British, or German, or American, or any other Imperialist capitalist class?

The Chinese workers will be no better off when they have exchanged British and Japanese for Chinese masters. The Chinese workers are few in comparison with the enormous mass of peasants; they are not, or at best only weakly, organised. They cannot impose their will on the Nationalist Movement and, if they cannot do so now, much less will they be able to do so when Chinese Capitalism, flushed with victory over its foreign enemies, turns its attention to the paramount home problem of keeping the, workers in subjection. After generations of struggle and experience, the British and other European trade union movements are impotent to control their own sections of the capitalist class, yet their leaders do not hesitate to assume that the Chinese workers have done this or will succeed in doing so in a year or two.

We have already in these pages given the evidence of unprejudiced observers as to the essentially capitalist origin and aims of the Cantonese movement. To reply, as some of their apologists do, that the organised Chinese workers support this movement, is evidence only of the political inexperience of the Chinese workers. We have hardly had time to forget that in 1914 the organised workers in Europe rushed madly into the slaughter under their respective national flags. Will anyone now suggest that this is proof of the non-capitalist origins and objects of that war? And, further, can anyone assert that the working class gained anything whatever by their support? Many of those who were preaching hatred then in the name of Nationalism and in the service of the capitalist class, are now parading the same anti-socialist principles on behalf of China. Ben Tillett “hailing the new spirit in China” on the platform of the Albert Hall (Daily Herald 7th February), and being rapturously cheered by workers, is as pitiful a spectacle as was shown during the war, when similar unthinking people were misled by the same Ben Tillett, while he was earning an honest penny on the music halls, devoting his oratorical gifts to inflaming bestial passions with filthy lies about German atrocities.

Merely to assume that the enemies of British capitalists are necessarily the friends of socialism is too shallow to need refutation, but another cause of confusion about China is the fact that the Russian Government is actively supporting the Kuomintang Party. What must be remembered is that the Russian Government has other reasons for its activity besides its direct working-class sympathies. Russian foreign policy, for instance, led to some kind of tacit understanding with Fascist Italy, because, for a time, both Russia and Italy happened to be at loggerheads with Rumania. And, in China, while the Bolshevists have no illusions about the Nationalist Movement, they do urgently want a strong independent China, able to resist European and particularly British influences in the East.

Lewis S. Gannett, writing on his visit to China in the New Masses (New York, February, 1927, an “unofficial” Communist journal), has the following :—

“The Russians …. want to see in China a strong National State which will resist the encroachments of those Western States which Russia perforce regards as enemies; and they know full well that a semi-bourgeois Nationalist China, if strong, will mean far more help to Soviet Russia than a struggling little Communist nucleus, pure but ineffective,”

and again

“They [the Russians] know perfectly well that there is no more chance of a Communist revolution in China to-day than there was in America in 1776.”

According to Gannett there are only some 3,000 Communists in China.

A recent Thesis of the Communist International on the Chinese question, states that no less than five out of six of the Commissars of the Kuomintang Party belong to the right wing, i.e., represent purely capitalist interests, recognising, however, that at present they cannot dispense with working-class support.

(For extracts from Thesis, see Manchester Guardian, 14th February.)

Further, leaders of the daily press will have noticed that various religious organisations are supporting the Nationalist Movement. The Executive of the National Christian Council, “which represents the vast majority of Protestant Churches in: China and the great majority of Missionary Societies, British, American and Continental,” has issued a manifesto declaring that they “share in the Nationalist aspirations . . . They are prepared to accept risks and even to face persecution rather than: oppose the most hopeful movement in modern China.” (Manchester Guardian, 14th February). A working-class movement, whether in China or England, would not move organised religious movements to such enthusiasm.

There is a last and fairly powerful argument in favour of supporting Nationalist Movements. It is true that the existence of foreign control enables capitalist politicians to blame the evils of their system on to the “foreigner.” Thus it was not until Ireland became “free” that Irish workers fully learned what Irish capitalists are capable of. Against this, however, must be placed the great harm wrought by the exaggeration of national feeling, and hatred of foreigners. This breeds a state of mind quite unsuited to working-class organisation: and saps the solidarity of members of the working-class to each other. It cannot be doubted that the virtual suspension of organised trade union activities in Ireland during the Civil War and in England during the “Great” War, enormously weakened the strength of the organisations concerned, and buried their avowed objects under masses of the vilest war propaganda.

True, it is not easy to oppose mass patriotic movements, whether in Ireland, or England, or China, but that difficulty is not removed by closing one’s eyes to it, nor is it lessened by postponing it until “after the war.” If those who wish to organise and educate the Chinese workers lend themselves to Nationalist propaganda now, they will find it immeasurably more difficult to return to working-class principles after they have won for their masters the reality and for themselves the illusion of Chinese independence. Our advice to the Chinese workers is to build up organisations to fight their own capitalist class—they will need them soon enough. Our advice to British workers is to acquaint themselves with their own class interests and get rid of the two illusions that organisations which have suffered for five or six years an almost unbroken series of defeats at home at the hands of the powerful British ruling class, is able, by passing resolutions, to dictate foreign policy to its masters, or wise to urge young movements like the Chinese, to follow the disastrous British policies, which have wrought such tragic results.

Blogger's Note:

This article was unsigned but it was the case that other substantive articles that were written on China in the Socialist Standard during the 1920s were usually written by Edgar Hardcastle. There's a strong case that Hardcastle also wrote this article.

50 Years Ago: More Trouble in Africa (2009)

The 50 Years Ago column from the April 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland was set up in 1953, it was known to be against the wishes of most of the African population in Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia. They did not want to be taken out of the control of the British Colonial Office to be handed over to domination by the white settlers, whose attitude, as shown particularly in Southern Rhodesia, is much like that of the South African Government. Opponents of Federation, including the British Labour Party, foresaw that tension would increase and were not surprised by the recent disturbances in which a number of Africans were killed by Government forces. Among the Africans the idea of early independence for Nyasaland has been given a powerful stimulus, associated by some of them with more ambitious ideas of a wider nationalism, taking in all Africa.

Are they right? Will “independence” make them better off and happier? Their African leaders tell them there is no doubt about the matter. And it is quite obvious that most Africans would prefer to put up with a lot of inconvenience, even hardship, to escape living under a government which operates or tolerates a colour bar against them. Africans are only behaving like other people, for history is full of examples of resentment of, and revolt against, the imposition on subject groups, or racial, national, religious and language barriers. And because it has happened so often we have plenty of information about its consequences: nobody need please ignorance.

What then has national independence done for the mass of the population, whether we take the European nationalist movements of last century, such as the Italian struggle against Austria or the Balkan countries’ struggles against Turkey, or the quite recent new States set up in former Colonies? Without going into details we can say that national independence is good for local politicians, lawyers, army officers, manufacturers and business men; it opens up careers and money-making opportunities for them, as also for local holders of government civilian posts who may have found their advancement hindered while a foreign administration had control. Sometimes the achievement of national independence helps to speed up industrial development where this has been deliberately limited by the governing Power and may make it rather easier for workers to form trade unions.

(From front page article by ‘H’, Socialist Standard, April 1959)

News in Review: Take-overs and Big Money (1962)

The News in Review column from the June 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Take-overs and Big Money

In big business, in many spheres, the mergers go on, involving sums of money large enough to be quite remote from any working class reality.

Beer. Whitbreads is bringing off a £47 million merger with Flowers, one of the first firms to go into the keg beer market. Whitbreads already hold some shares in Flowers and have a trading agreement with them. In the past, they seemed content to leave it at that. But last December, in similar circumstances, they took over Tennants: that, and the latest merger, seem to indicate a change of policy at Whitbreads. Month by month the brewing firms get fewer and bigger. The Flowers take-over might be followed by a hot battle for the remaining independent companies.

Food. Nestlé, the big beverage and chocolate firm, have set up a £16 million company by taking over the Swedish frozen food group Marabou-Findus-Freia. Nestlé already own the Crosse and Blackwell tinned food concern and the Maggi soup business. The latest merger puts them into the British frozen food market, to challenge the sixty-four per cent. hold which Unilever have on it at the moment. The sales of frozen food in this country have leaped from £13 million in 1956 to £57 million a year today. Nestlé will be hoping that they will live up to expectations and reach £100 million by 1964. If this does not happen, Nestlé will not go broke: The Guardian reports them as one of the ten largest companies in the world.

Building. Twenty million pounds was involved in the merger between the Rugby Portland Cement Company and Eastwoods, the brick firm. Rugby, who have subsidiaries in Australia and the West Indies, have not taken over any firm for the last sixteen years. Their latest profit of over £2 million was a record for them, although like so many other companies their margins are under pressure

As Capitalism gets older it gets bigger and more concentrated. As it does so. the worker grows more remote and personally insignificant. This is what Karl Marx, said would happen, over a century ago. Nobody listened much to him then and nobody listens much now.

Terrorism

The official peace in Algeria hangs upon a slender thread.

The FLN control the countryside except for the oilfields, where the Europeans strongly support the Secret Army Organisation. In the cities the OAS continue to run riot, killing and provoking.

The popular theory, that if the French government could capture Salan they would finish the OAS. has been disproved. Events have shown that the nationalism of the colons has deeper roots. The colonels, said to be more ruthless than Salan, have taken over with reported sighs of relief that the ex-general no longer impedes them in the business of really serious terrorism.

The Moslems are suffering fearful provocation and strain coupled with chronic unemployment and. for some of them, near starvation. So far their obedience to the FLN policy of restraint has been remarkable, but it is anybody's guess how long it will hold out. The FLN leaders are themselves divided on the issue, with some of them sticking out for moving the Algerian army into the cities to clean up the OAS.

Algeria, in short, is a horrible mess. The original reasons for the conflict seem to have been somewhat blurred. Basically, they are: the Algerians want to run the country themselves, under their own ruling class, who will own the country's resources and exploit its workers. The French, who used to do this themselves, want to hang on to their possessions and rights.

For the workers on both sides no interests nor benefits are involved in this struggle. It should not concern an Algerian worker, nor a French one, that there is about to be a change in the nationality of the class which owns and exploits Algeria.

But nationalism, patriotism and simple ignorance can persuade workers all over the world to join in Capitalism's bloodbaths.

They can persuade them to perform disgusting acts of terrorism. They persuaded the FLN to do this and they persuaded the OAS as well.

Homeless

It is a long time since the late Aneurin Bevan promised that the housing situation would not be an issue at a future general election.

As usual with a politician’s snappy phrase, it is difficult to get at Bevan's exact meaning. He may have been saying that, whatever hardships the workers met in their housing, they would forget them when the election came along. This is not an unsound assumption; working class voters forget many worse problems. That is one of the reasons they keep Capitalism in existence.

But perhaps Bevan meant that during the few years after 1945 the housing problem would be solved. If he did his promise, like so many others, has been discredited by the social system he tried to administer.

The London Council Council now has seven hundred and eighty-two homeless families, made up of 3,726 people, in its care. This is the most ever. The figure has been climbing steadily since the turn of the year; at the end of January the homeless families numbered six hundred and forty-seven.

This situation has forced the LCC to go back on its decision to close the emergency accommodation provided in places like Newington Lodge and Luxborough Lodge. These buildings came in for some heavy criticism a few months ago: they are old and exceedingly depressing places. The emergency centres will take only women and children, which means that, on top of their other worries, the homeless families are split up.

Here is a very bitter problem, which is not untypical in the sense that it is at the very heart of the degradation which poverty brings to the entire working class.

This is the class with a housing problem, because their living, and their

standards of living, depend upon their wages. Capitalists, who get their living from their ownership of society's means of production, are simply too rich to suffer bad housing.

Working class poverty is an inescapable part of Capitalism, which means that housing will always be a sore spot for the workers

Lots of well-meaning reformers have tried to solve this problem and have been beaten by it. So have quite a few, perhaps less well-meaning, politicians.

Letters: What about Vietnam? (1970)

Letters to the Editors from the June 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

What about Vietnam?

Dear Sir,

As a practical expression of my personal disgust and repugnance I ask you to take the name of this organisation off your mailing list.

This protest is brought about by your article in your January issue which carries the odious title “The Issue at Pinkville”. To give to a Vietnamese village the same name as was given to it by the American aggressors is completely unforgiveable in a magazine which purports to be socialist. The lunatic right fringe may dub My Lai thus, they presumably know no better. You are supposed to be on the side of freedom and justice, yet you stoop to the same level as those who carried out the massacre.

Your references to the “Viet Cong” are also in bad taste and reflect the limitations of a mind which has been successfully brainwashed. “Viet Cong", for your information, was a term coined by Deim — a contemptuous term which dubbed anyone who opposed his bloody and dictatorial regime as “communists”. It is on a par with the name “Pinkville”.

You have the gall to speak of “ferocious Viet Cong atrocities". And who, may I ask., was responsible for this war which has forced the freedom fighters to defend their very existence? Do you equate the actions of a rapist and a murderer with a person who is being raped and murdered, and solemnly conclude that it is all a matter of which side you are on? Pity help the Vietnamese people if they have to rely on people like yourself for their moral support.

I cannot decide if your paper is a bogus front, unintelligent or lamentably ill-informed on the facts about Vietnam. I do not know if the writer is consciously reactionary or merely a poor deluded fool who has read too many Time magazines.

Not that I care very much. People who are ignorant enough to think in terms of "Pinkville" and "Viet Cong” atrocities may enjoy your paper. Those of us who are concerned with freedom and justice have better things to do than read it.

Stanley Moore 

(Minister, Melbourne Unitarian Peace Memorial Church. Melbourne. Aust.)

Reply:

When we have sifted out the abuse from Mr. Moore’s letter we find that it has only one serious point. In the fourth paragraph he more or less argues that any atrocities committed by the Viet-cong are justified because it was the Americans who started the war. This is of course a very old argument — it was used to excuse the obliteration of Hiroshima and in fact has always been used by capitalist states as part of their war propaganda.

It is true that the Americans interfered in Vietnam — in the same way as the North Koreans did in the South, and as the Russians did in Czechoslovakia, Finland and so on. In each case the inference has been justified by counter-accusations of threats from the subject of the interference. And so we go on — all the time avoiding the real issue, which is why wars, invasions and international interference take place. Why are they sometimes (not always) resisted? What interests are at stake? In Vietnam, we are seeing a struggle between rival capitalist groups for the control of an area of great economic and strategic importance. The interests in the war are those of capitalism; the people on both sides stand to gain nothing from the war and their interests are in keeping out of it as far as they can. Whoever wins, the people of Vietnam and of America will lose.

Mr. Moore, who accuses us of being deluded fools, thinks the North Vietnamese are fighting for freedom and justice. Is it part of freedom and justice to commit mass murder among the Vietnamese people? In war no one side is alone responsible for all the atrocities and this is widely accepted, with only a few people like the John Birchites on one side and Mr. Moore on the other closing their eyes to the evidence.

We thought the names “Pinkville” and "Vietcong” had passed so finally into common usage as to be acceptable to even the most touchy lefty. After all, there are plenty of protest banners which carry the slogan "Victory to the Vietcong”.

Two last points. First, why does Mr. Moore get so upset about trivial matters and ignore the main argument of the article in question, which was that capitalism is the cause of war and since war and atrocities are inseparable it is capitalism which causes the atrocities? Second—and here we probably find the answer to our first question — why is Mr. Moore so anxious to avoid reading the Socialist Standard, when his only complaint against it is that he disagrees with it?

Editorial Committee

Chomsky

Dear Sir,

In the February issue of the Socialist Standard Noam Chomsky is accused of confused, muddled and wishful thinking. This description would be more aptly applied to your writers.

  “Principled opposition to capitalism necessarily gives rise to principled opposition to war, which—and this should always be made clear means hostility to both ‘sides’ in every war.”
  “Whatever the outcome the workers will have gained nothing on either side”
  "In part it (this confusion within the shell of Chomsky’s glittering erudition) is due to his overpowering abhorrence of the war, and the sense of urgency he feels about it. Everything must be subjugated to the task of stopping the war."

May we examine these statements in the light of some of the facts?

First, here is a description of North Vietnam (‘no paradise” as you insist) in the time when it was a French colony:

   "Translated into the policies of empire, the French presence made of Vietnam at once a prison and a museum. Exquisite French scholarship explored the ancient history and archeology of Vietnam; exquisite French cruelty made it the most savage colony in Asia. In my youth in Asia, I remember it as the place where I first saw grown men strike other grown men and watched the stricken cringe —white Frenchmen had the right to slap awkward native waiters who spilled the soup, or slap native rickshawmen who argued about the fare. It was a place where the state monopoly’s purchase of opium exceeded by five times French expenditures on schools, libraries and hospitals combined . . .”

It is from Theodore White’s The Making of a President. But it is mild in comparison to Edgar Snow’s reports of Vietnam under French domination where there was a guillotine in every village.

One does not even need to go to communist sources—one has only to read The Peasants of North Vietnam by Chaliand—Mission To Hanoi by Atheker, or Cameron's or Burchett’s accounts to see that although it is not paradise, it is a new and better life for the people since Vietnam won independence from the French.

Would you have the Vietnamese still exploited by the French because we must oppose both sides in every war and the workers gain nothing on either side ?

Would they have the Vietnamese remain slaves under the French because in struggling for indpendence they might not achieve paradise and might fall under the influence of China or Russia? (Incidentally Jean Lacouiure in his study of Ho Chi Minh has described the diplomacy of Ho and his government in keeping a middle course between these two communist powers).

And what of South Vietnam:

  "The Army’s area handbook for South Vietnam (1967) says 2.5 percent of the landowners held half of the cultivated land, and more than 80 per cent of the land was cultivated by peasants owning no land at all whom the landlords could dispossess without cause . . . Former Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman told a reporter recently (Richard Critchfield in Washington Star March 16 ’69) that the US Embassy in Saigon ‘informed Washington it opposed land reform on the grounds that it would create political instability’.”

The NLF may not be creating paradise but it is doing something about land reform for the land hungry peasnats. Left in peace it would be able to do more. Are you aware of the corruption, exploitation, oppression and terror resulting from the series of Saigon regimes which America has backed financially and militarily? Were the people of the South to accept this because all wars are equally wrong and therefore both sides equally bad—all governments equally corrupt and all leaders equally bad?

Meanwhile, to have any sense of urgency about opposing the war, which we see as American aggression—to have any sense of guilt about what is being done to Vietnam is to have been hypnotized by some ‘immediate’ issue and to have indulged in the guilt of the flagellant!

The trouble with your writers is not that they are looking for paradise but that they think they have found it in their pure principles which are totally removed from realities. These socialists of Great Britain are very British in their outlook. Fair play, chaps—never take sides, and whatever you do, never get ruffled! This is the same attitude which permeates the British Government, the BBC, television and press whenever the war is mentioned. In the face of what Chomsky has rightly called "an enormous pattern of devastation which, if seen in its entirety, would have to be described as one of the most evil acts committed by any nation in modern times”, it is simply not done to take sides.

Yours sincerely

Jo Janet

Reply:
Of course we would not have the workers and peasants of Vietnam exploited by French colonialism. Nor do we say that the people of South Vietnam should put up the series of corrupt American-imposed governments there. We are fully aware of what the world capitalist system has done, and is doing, to the people of Vietnam. The question is, however, how to deal with this: Is it by supporting the rise to power of a new state capitalist ruling class or is it by struggling to establish world Socialism?

The Socialist Party of Great Britain argues that capitalism (including the state capitalism of Russia and China) as a world system has become reactionary and that it has no progressive role to play anywhere in the world. This is because Socialism, the next stage in social development which will involve the emancipation of all mankind, is possible. Only Socialism is progressive, and this alone is what workers everywhere should strive to establish.

We do not deny that the NLF in Vietnam as carrying out land reforms and other changes necessary for the development of (state) capitalism there. What we do challenge is the assumption that, now Socialism is possible, Socialists should support this. What workers everywhere should be striving for is Socialism, not national state capitalism.

Our correspondent’s final paragraph is typical of the self-righteousness of many of our critics. Because Socialists do not support their pet struggles we are accused of being unconcerned about the suffering capitalism causes human beings. We could turn the tables on them by saying that in concentrating on single issues it is they who are prolonging the suffering capitalism brings by diverting attention from the struggle to over it.

Note also that our position is to oppose both sides, not neutrality as our correspondent suggests.

Editorial Committee

50 Years Ago: What about Vietnam? (2020)

The 50 Years Ago column from the June 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Of course we would not have the workers and peasants of Vietnam exploited by French colonialism. Nor do we say that the people of South Vietnam should put up with the series of corrupt American-imposed governments there. We are fully aware of what the world capitalist system has done, and is doing, to the people of Vietnam. The question is, however, how to deal with this: is it by supporting the rise to power of a new state capitalist ruling class or is it by struggling to establish world Socialism?

The Socialist Party of Great Britain argues that capitalism (including the state capitalism of Russia and China) as a world system has become reactionary and that it has no progressive role to play anywhere in the world. This is because Socialism, the next stage in social development which will involve the emancipation of all mankind, is possible. Only Socialism is progressive, and this alone is what workers everywhere should strive to establish.

We do not deny that the NLF in Vietnam is carrying out land reforms and other changes necessary for the development of (state) capitalism there. What we do challenge is the assumption that, now Socialism is possible, Socialists should support this. What workers everywhere should be striving for is Socialism, not national state capitalism.

Our correspondent’s final paragraph is typical of the self-righteousness of many of our critics. Because Socialists do not support their pet struggles we are accused of being unconcerned about the suffering capitalism causes human beings. We could turn the tables on them by saying that in concentrating on single issues it is they who are prolonging the suffering capitalism brings by diverting attention from the struggle to overcome it.

Note also that our position is to oppose both sides, not neutrality as our correspondent suggests.

(from a reply to a letter, Socialist Standard, June 1970)

Algeria: Who has won? (1962)

From the April 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

The cease fire in Algeria is likely lo bring neither peace nor relief to that unhappy country. Those who oppose a treaty with the Algerian nationalists — the settlers and the soldiers — are numerous and powerful enough to keep Algeria under the dark cloud of fear which has hung over the country for so long. The O.A.S. seem to be everywhere that matters. If one of them is singled out for arrest by the French Authorities, as like as not the men who have to fetch him in are O.A.S. sympathisers and can easily be persuaded to let him go. If the O.A.S. don't like what foreign journalists write about them, they can force the newspapermen to go home. They can virtually take over the centre of an important town like Oran. And all this is done by fear; fear of the plastic bomb, of death by a multitude of stab wounds or by the bullet from a passing car.

It is as well to remember here that the O.A.S. came into existence only after some years of guerrilla activities by the Algerian nationalists, which the French government had seemed powerless to stamp out. During those years, French policy seemed settled upon staying in Algeria. There was little organised retaliation from the Europeans, who put a rather shaky trust in their government. The O.A.S. burst to the surface when it seemed that de Gaulle was about to abandon the policy of a French Algeria. What the F.L.N. had won by their terrorism, the colons would try to regain by theirs.

Now, the O.A.S. outstrip the Moslem guerrillas in ruthlessness and brutality. On a typical day in Algeria, between twenty and thirty people are killed by them. Sometimes they kill indiscriminately, as when they drove two cars into the packed Moslem shopping area of Oran and left them with time bombs ticking inside. Sometimes they are diabolically selective; they recently tried to provoke a postal strike by killing several harmless Moslem postmen. President de Gaulle is reported as saying that the O.A.S. is a minor problem. which he will deal with when the cease fire is out of the way. This seems to be rather optimistic—the problem is surely much more complex and delicate.

The French came to Algeria in 1830, after a fleet under General Clausel had bombarded Algeria into surrender. This was the last of the expeditions which the maritime powers — England, Holland, Spain, America and France — had sent out to deal with the Corsair pirates, who from their base in Algiers were causing such disruption to the trade routes of the Mediterranean. Before the French conquest the country had been under, among others, the Phoenicians, the Romans and the Turks. The French established their word as law in Algeria and their colonisers settled along the coast, planting vineyards and developing, the cities. There was none of the incentive to penetrate the interior which other parts of Africa offered their European conquerors. The Congo, for example, had its rubber but for the colons the Algerian hinterland had only the Atlas mountains and then the pitiless Sahara. For over a century the great desert withheld the secret of its wealth from the French. And if eventually the Sahara's oil and gas have caused more suffering than joy—well, that is typical of capitalism's discoveries.

The Nationalists

The first rumblings of Algerian nationalism were heard in the 'twenties, when the Étoile Nord-Africaine plotted to overthrow French rule. This organisation's membership was mainly of Algerians living in France. After the Axis powers had been pushed out of North Africa an active nationalist movement was revived in Algeria. But it was one of bits and pieces, of sects who hated each other as much as they did the French and who often took time off from their war against the French to cut each others' throats. By late 1954 there were only two Algerian movements of any consequence and of these the National Liberation Front (FLN) was the more powerful and the better equipped to wage the long war for national independence.

The war against the F.L.N. has been a serious drain on French resources. One government after another tackled the problem without success. None of them could beat the F.L.N. and none felt able to bow before the storm of Algerian nationalism. The political instability for which France before de Gaulle was noted saw eight such governments off. In Algeria the Europeans were under a fearful strain and they grew impatient with their government's inability to stop the terrorism without surrendering the country. Once, they showed their exasperation by pelting a French prime minister — Guy Mollet —with tomatoes. His government promptly fell. It was this exasperation, pushed to the brink by the withdrawal from Tunisia and the apparent intention of the short-lived Pflimlin government to do the same in Algeria, that led to the 1958 revolt which put de Gaulle into power and ended the sorry tale of the Fourth Republic.

If there was one thing which de Gaulle was expected to do, it was to stamp out the Algerian rebels. In the event his policy has never been so bull headed. True, he has made some statements which contradict themselves. In his television broadcast during the uprising in January, 1960, he said:

  Frenchmen of Algeria, how can you listen lo the liars and conspirators who tell you that, in granting their free choice to the Algerians, France and de Gaulle want to abandon you, to withdraw from Algeria, and to surrender it to the rebellion?

But in fact de Gaulle was contemplating doing just that. Earlier in the same broadcast he said:

  . . . I have taken in the name of France this decision: the Algerians shall have the free choice of their fate . . . it will be the Algerians who will say what they wish to be.

Yet beneath this apparent confusion, de Gaulle has been firmly if slowly pushing a policy of independence for Algeria. Up to now he has dealt skilfully with the opposition to his policy. All this has earned him the hatred of the very men who put him in power.

The opposition to de Gaulle is indeed formidable. There are the European settlers, who grow the grapes and who run the banking and commercial life of the country. Many of these are poor — a settler working class, in fact. But some of them are rich and there are about a dozen landowners who we can call very rich. The Moslem farmers outnumber their European counterparts by nearly thirty to one, but they own less than three times as much land. The big farms and the best land belong to the colons. Settler interests are always in the thick of the trouble when a colonial power plans to hand out independence. The Europeans in Algeria—some of them French, some Spaniards, Maltese, Italians and Jews—are a pressure group which any capitalist government would find it hard to deal with.

French Army

Then there is the French army, which has built the roads, the railways, and the hospitals in Algeria, has supplied the doctors, teachers and engineers, and has looked upon the country as a tiresome but helpless baby. Take away the French army and running Algeria as capitalism says it must be run —profitably—is going to be a difficult matter. It is typical of French governments that they should have given the army its head in Algeria. For they have never really come to grips with their military and taught them that their job is to protect the general interests of the French ruling class. Other capitalist powers have solved this problem. Lloyd George took on—and beat—not only the generals, but the king as well, in the First World War; we all know what happened to MacArthur when he tried to dictate policy to his bosses in Washington.

But this is a difficult time to start tugging the rein on the French army. They have had no real victory since 1918; they were crushed in 1940 and have since been humiliated in Indo-China. It is easy to imagine the generals' mood when they learned that Algeria was to be added to their list of defeats. Here, it seems, is one war which the French army feel they cannot afford to lose.

To complicate matters still more, there is the mineral wealth in the Sahara. Perhaps the French would once have been willing to abandon Algeria, as they did Tunisia, if oil and natural gas had not been struck there. De Gaulle once said that when coal was the vital fuel, France had little of it and that when oil was vital she had no oil. The Sahara strike was looked on as something of a miracle find and it has bedevilled the situation ever since. It has also added to de Gaulle’s headaches by landing him with problems of distribution and international competition. The French have tried to attract capital to Algeria by offering tax concessions and other incentives, but there was not much hope of success for that policy while the situation remained so unstable.

So it all came back to the basic fact that somehow Algeria had to be settled. De Gaulle is only facing a fact of capitalist life when he recognises that a nationalist movement cannot be held down for ever. When he tries to hang on to the naval base at Mers El Kebir, the nuclear test area at Reggan and the interests in the mineral fields he is only trying, on behalf of the French ruling class, to make the best of a bad job. This sort of thing has happened many times since 1945, in Africa and in the Near and Far East.

De Gaulle has been warned, by the settlers and the army, of the possible consequences of his policy. There is a striking likeness between the French President’s difficulties and those of President Kennedy when he is trying to deal with segregationist towns in the American South. In both cases, the very people who are employed to carry out their government’s orders have simply ignored them. There is a clue here for those who are looking for the source of the power of the capitalist class. Ironically, the O.A.S. are showing us that capitalism’s coercion depends upon the acquiescence of its underdogs.

The Future

If history is worth anything, the O.A.S. cannot win in Algeria. However much fuss they manage to kick up when the country gets its independence, it seems certain that the army and the settlers will be put in their place. Algerian nationalists will rule the country and perhaps one by one the colons will be forced to leave. The oilfields and the gas may be nationalised so that the profits go to the Algerian ruling class instead of to the French. The Algerian peasant will blossom into a worker just like the Frenchman and the Briton. He will take on a mortgage, worry for his job, console himself with an H.P. telly. He will read of—and click his tongue over—colonial wars in other parts of the world. One day he may, like the South African, forget his past and himself support the brutal suppression of some racial group. The F.L.N. and the O.A.S. will fade into history. Capitalism’s grisly wheel will turn another full circle, lubricated by the blood and tears of countless ordinary, useful human beings.

Ivan

The War in Vietnam (1970)

From the November 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

American troops are not in Vietnam to defend Peace, Democracy, Liberty or any other high-sounding ideal. They are there for the same reason they are in Korea, Okinawa, Formosa, the Philippines, Laos and Thailand : to defend American domination of the Pacific Ocean. This was why America fought the second world war, but no sooner had one rival, Japan, been beaten than another, China, arose. The Vietnam War, like the Korean War, is just an aspect of the conflict between American imperialism and Chinese imperialism for control of the Eastern Pacific. Not an issue in which Socialists take sides.

Nor do Socialists support the many demonstrations that are said to be “against the Vietnam War”. The organisers of most of them do not try to disguise the fact that they are for a continuation of the war until the so-called National Liberation Front, the side they support, has won. In other words, these are pro-war, not peace demonstrations.

In any event, given the balance of power in South East Asia, “peace” would only be an armed truce which would give both sides the chance to start fighting somewhere else, in Laos or Thailand perhaps Whichever side wins the poor people of Vietnam will lose as the war is basically over who is going to govern and exploit them.