50 Years Ago: Revolution and Violence (1975)

The 50 Years Ago column from the November 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

In war and in so-called peace times the property-owning class have never hesitated to use force to gain their ends. In fact, violence has often been promoted in the workers’ ranks by agents of capital to make the butchery or defeat of the workers easier.

* * *

Hence the talk about revolution meaning violence is pure hypocrisy amongst the supporters and reformers of capitalism.

While stupid anarchists and direct actionists have also talked about force, the fact remains that those who seek to replace capitalism by Socialism do not play the capitalist game of advocating violence.

Force and violence are not revolution. Revolution to a Socialist means the complete change from capitalism to Socialism, achieved by the control of political power by an organized and informed working class. Not a revolution of a section of workers; not a seizure of government by a few intent on dictatorship, but an organized action on the part of the majority of the workers who see the necessity of becoming politically supreme in order to transform the economic system. The revolution is made necessary by economic development, and it can only be successful if the working class understands the Socialist position. Therefore the educational work of the SPGB.

(From an unsigned editorial The Real Meaning of Revolution, Socialist Standard, November 1925.)

Rude Words (1975)

Book Review from the November 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

95 per Cent is Crap: A Plain Man’s Guide to British Politics, by Terry Arthur. Liberation Books Ltd., £3.50.

If nothing else, this is a handy compendium of extracts nonsensical, contradictory and self-revealing from politicians and “leading authorities”, with derisive comments made from the stance of “the man in the street”.

No partisanship is shown — the subject-matter comes more or less equally from Labour and the Conservatives, with the Liberals, Communists and National Front in tow. The author writes in a bluff saloon-bar style like that of the title (we hardly need to be told he is a Rugby player): “bloody” abounds. This is an obvious Christmas present for the person who thinks all politicians are on the make.

Anyone else, including serious students of Association football, would have reservations. Terry Arthur’s advice to all is, at every election, to put a big cross right across the ballot paper, “preferably with a short rude message . . .  If you feel dissatisfaction, register it, rather than help to keep these lunatics in business.” His view is that if we did so “we might even see a few sensible ideas sprouting up”.

Angry and impotent as many people undoubtedly feel, is this the answer? Of course not. Using the author’s own rough-and-ready kind of argument, the dangers from a government which was free of any electoral mandate would be considerably greater than from governments which have (however unsatisfactorily) to answer for themselves. To throw away one’s vote is no step towards the freedom whose lack the book laments.

The real trouble, however, is that it never leaves the surface of things. There is no sign that Terry Arthur has ever asked “Why?” — why politicians do perennially dissemble, why ineptitude is the hallmark of every policy. The same kinds of observations were being made forty years ago by “Beachcomber”: “. . . the Prime Minister, that sheep in sheep’s clothing, rises to depths undreamed of in our history. The rumour that one of his sentences at Leeds was intelligible is a gross libel. Yet the maddest thing of all is that he can find people to go and listen to him . . .”

There is an explanation, and also a positive alternative. All the politicians and spokesmen he quotes have one thing in common — they support capitalism, and are endeavouring to run it (or suggest ways of doing so). The problems capitalism produces are organic, i.e. part of its nature. Whoever sets out to solve them has, therefore, a task which cannot be accomplished. Hence their politics present the spectacle of continual floundering from one quagmire to another, and the speeches are its rationale.

The alternative is to end capitalism and establish a sane society.

Robert Barltrop

Crisis 1975: A Parable (1975)

A Short Story from the November 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Once upon a time some people were persuaded to join a pleasure cruise to an Island Paradise in the South Pacific, on the liner SS Capitalism: Captain Harold Wilson, First Mate Denis Healey.

After being at sea for some time they ran into dirty weather and asked the captain if there was anything to worry about. He confidently dismissed their fears. “Remember”, he said, “my own sterling character, my past successful cruises, and above all that I learned seamanship from the world’s most famous navigator”. Leading them into the captain’s cabin he pointed to a well-thumbed Manual. It was "How to Navigate a Ship — Smooth Voyages Guaranteed” — Author, John Maynard Keynes.

But a few nights later there was a terrific crash and the ship lurched to a standstill. Some passengers rushed up on deck and hurried back to tell the captain that as they could see icebergs they were beginning to doubt whether the ship was nearing the sunny beaches that had been promised.

The captain was as confident as ever. He gave them his personal assurance that there was nothing wrong, there were no icebergs and the ship was still on course. He said the whole story was a malicious invention by the Press.

But when daylight came the icebergs were still there and the captain admitted that the ship was not in the Pacific at all. Though he could not be sure, he thought they had run on to a rocky coast in the Arctic Circle; he had set up an urgent committee of enquiry to discover who had been responsible.

When some passengers wanted to hold the captain responsible he said he was deeply hurt — it was obvious that everyone else was to blame but not him. They could surely not be serious in suggesting that the captain of an ocean liner ought to know something about such an absolutely unprecedented event as a storm at sea.

He blamed the passengers for their selfishness and want of foresight and the crew for being a mutinous lot, overpaid and overmanned. But it was, he said, time to make a new start. Let them all forget their differences and be one happy band of brothers thinking only how to help each other. It was in this spirit of unity that he had drawn up his new plan, “Attack on Inflation”.

Two chief items in the plan were to reduce the pay of the crew, and to take five per cent of them and throw them overboard; this would lighten the ship and help to refloat it. It was all to be done democratically and in full consultation with the TUC.

Captain Wilson laid some part of the blame on former Captain, Ted Heath. Though he had studied navigation in the same Keynesian Manual he was only a yachtsman, knew nothing of handling sailors and had left the ship in a most unseaworthy condition.

He also blamed some pirates who had cut off the ship’s oil supplies. When this was reported in the world’s Press the captain received a radiogram: —

NOT PIRATES. JUST ORDINARY GREEDY CAPITALISTS LIKE ALL THE OTHERS. RESENT YEARS OF BEING PAID FOR OIL IN FUNNY MONEY THAT KEEPS ON SHRINKING. NOT THINKING OF OURSELVES BUT OF OUR POOR DEAR WORKERS.

(Signed) TEN OIL MILLIONAIRES.

The captain called a meeting of passengers and crew so that he could explain to them how they had nearly wrecked the ship and to hear what they proposed about putting things right.

A ship’s officer, Wedgwood Benn, offered a simple change which would refloat the ship and prevent it ever running on the rocks again. It was to re-name the liner SS State Capitalism. This was received with rapturous applause by “left-wingers” among the crew.

The First Mate said he had been unhappy about throwing redundant sailors into the sea. He thought they should now be fished up again and put on the payroll, along with any other unemployed sailors they could find.

Two sailors, Hugh and Clive, while professing undying loyalty to their captain, rejected his Plan. They said it was self-evident that to refloat a ship you had to put everyone’s pay up, not down, and that this was what Harold used to say before he became captain.

The passengers also had their say. One group thought that the crash (and the similar one under the previous captain) would never have happened if they had had as captain, a woman, Mrs. Thatcher.

There was loud laughter at this point when Jeremy, a cabin boy, said that the only safe and democratic way was to have three captains.

Mrs. Thatcher, wearing her new see-through chiffon cape top over a strapless dress, gave an interview to the ship’s newspaper. She said that with her well-known housewifely shopping skills she would never have let the ship’s oil tanks run low. She thought there was too much equality about, so that while supporting the reduction of the pay of the crew she thought that shareholders’ profits should go up.

Another passenger, Geoffrey Howe, suggested lowering the luxury class fares to induce millionaire pop stars to join the cruise.

Mrs. Thatcher was seen to wince when Sir Keith Joseph thought they ought to go back to the tried and trusty sailing ships of the nineteenth century.

The captain entertained the ship’s company with his lectures on navigation, but in the bar there was entertainment of another sort. A ship’s steward was telling of strange goings-on in the captain’s cabin. Hearing noises he had peeped through the keyhole and saw the captain, looking very worried agitatedly turning over the pages of the Manual as if he was looking for something. He was muttering to himself: “Keynes never told us about storms”.

On another occasion the steward saw the captain trying to make a speech while standing on his head, and at the same time stuffing bits of paper into his mouth, looking like torn-up election pledges.

After his lectures on the arts of navigation the captain handed out a pamphlet to passengers and crew. It turned out to be a prospectus for a new cruise. Not a pleasure cruise this time but a rough, tough voyage lasting for years, though the first year would be the worst. This time it was to be a Treasure Hunt, diving for Fools’ Gold in the North Sea.

Edgar Hardcastle

Obituary: Jack Holford (1975)

Obituary from the November 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Jack Holford died at the end of September, after being ill since last Christmas. Knowing he was dying, he wrote the following message:

“Here is my own obituary which, without any further comment I would like printed in the S.S.:— ‘In bidding farewell to all my Socialist Comrades I leave them my best wishes in their progress towards the elimination of this rotten system of Capitalism and the establishment of Socialism.—Comrade Holford, Brighton’.”

We will not let him get away with that. Jack was a fine type of Socialist, resembling in his independence and persistentness some of the early members of the Party. He had been a member for very many years and was one of the founders of the Brighton branch some years ago. When the branch ceased to exist he carried on and did much to keep members scattered along the south coast in contact with one another. He came to London regularly for Party Conferences and Delegate Meetings, where he always spoke with clarity and zest. During his last illness his interest in the Party never decreased. The news of his death has come as a sad blow to all of us, and our sympathy goes to Susan Holford.

Why I joined the SPGB (1975)

From the November 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

During the nineteen-thirties it was commonplace for meetings to be held at street corners. Many sites became well-known. There were fewer cars and no TV. The audiences were attentive, asked questions and took part in discussion. Many workers became interested in politics at such meetings. I was an example. Apart from a critical attitude to Religion, as a youth, I took most things for granted.

It was in 1933 that I first stopped to listed to a meeting. I was eighteen years old. When I heard the speaker say we were "slaves" I stayed to hear more. I may have heard words like "capitalism", "socialism", "wage-labour" before but never thought much about them. The speaker urged workers to organize themselves as a class and end the system that exploited them and was the cause of their poverty". This impressed me as I had often wondered what gave other people the right to order me about, so I was in the right frame of mind. I stayed until the end. I bought a pamphlet for 1d called From Slavery to Freedom and that title suited me fine. I could use a bit of freedom. It gave me an inkling as to what Socialism was all about. I went back to Rushcroft Road time and again. Meetings began to act like a magnet. I was drawn to them. I was out every night listening and learning. I was soon familiar with the various parties. Amongst them the SPGB and I listened to their speakers. It was one of them that I heard the first time. I had become a "Political Animal".

However, if there was a wrong turning, I took it. I was going to have to learn the hard way. I was attracted by the rallies in Hyde Park and Trafalgar Square which were always "Against Fascism". I got the idea that this was helping Socialism. This was unfortunate as I was going off at a tangent. But I wanted action. I wanted to be in the middle of things.

At the time of the Spanish Civil War, whilst crossing Westminster Bridge, our long rambling columns were confronted by arm-raised lines of BUF (Mosleyite) supporters. There were thousands in our demonstration and we outnumbered and out-shouted the "Blackshirts". We held up clenched fists in reply to the "Hitler salute". With our chanting and banners proclaiming "Arms for Spain" we felt we had won a victory for the forces of "peace and socialism".

In 1936 I joined the Labour Party because I considered it "the mass party of the working class". I was not sure what they meant, but it sounded fine at the time. Anyway I was only joining to help turn it into a genuine socialist party. My fellow members were reformists and I was going to win them over to socialism. I now regarded myself as a sound revolutionary. I did not entertain any doubts on that score.

I soon found myself engaged in other activities. Soon after becoming a member of the LP I came into contact with the "Militant Labour League" and joined. They were one of several Trotskyist factions. I was in fact a member of a party within another party. The atmosphere was very conspiratorial. Secret meetings were held regularly to decide strategy. The object was to try and get control of local Labour Party Branches. The so-called Communist Party was playing a similar game. According to the MLL the basis of socialism had been laid in Russia in 1917 by the Bolshevik Party under Lenin and Trotsky, but Stalin had betrayed the October Revolution, usurped power and built up his bureaucracy. The USSR was a "degenerated workers' state". The object of the League was to defend the basis of this "workers' state", build up a fourth International, work for world revolution and overthrow Stalin, at the same fighting against the Labour leadership in Britain. We sure had plenty to get on with. But we were not deterred: we were Bolsheviks ready for any task. With the "deepening of the crisis of world capitalism" the working class would rally to the Vanguard of the Masses. That was us. We were all set to win the "leadership" stakes.

We did not bother to explain to other workers what socialism was. That was a waste of time. The workers would trust and follow us. We would raise the right slogans at the right time and we were the right leaders. Had not the mantle of Lenin and Trotsky fallen on us? The tasks in the "coming period" was immense. Programmes dealing with "perspectives" were constantly issued. We would be dealing with world-shattering events. Hitler came to power because of false leadership of the German workers. Victory for the world working class would come, under the Banner of the Fourth International. Each of us saw himself as a potential Trotsky directing Red Armies all over the world. We did not have long to wait for events to start moving. "The death agony of capitalism" started getting under way, or so we thought, when World War Two began in 1939.

During the war, at a conference, all the groups united to form the "Revolutionary Communist Party". We listened to a recording of Trotsky's voice. Delegates were overcome and had tears in their eyes as they heard the "Old Man's" voice. We, the self-appointed leaders, then all shook hands and sang the Internationale. The ruling class did not have time to tremble, however, for this new party sank soon after this emotional launching. All the "perspectives" were wrong. None of the forecasts of world revolution materialized. It was the RCP that collapsed and not capitalism. There was no turning of the masses to the vanguard, and there was no death agony of capitalism.

Disillusioned, it came to me in 1945 that the workers of the world were not class-conscious. They did not want Socialism. I had to adjust my thinking. After the dust settled it was clear the post-war world was not going to be different. The working class supported capitalism and it was going to continue. At the end of the war it was "back to work" as usual for wages. The only crisis that occurred was if workers could not get their old jobs back.

My pipe-dreams were coming to an end. I could not agree with the Trotskyist slogan "For a Third Labour Government". I refused to vote for it at the 1945 General Election. I left the Labour Party and, at the same time, broke with Bolshevism although this was regarded as "impossible". It was like breaking out of a stifling prison and coming back into the real world.

I avidly started reading the SOCIALIST STANDARD again. In the light of bitter experience, I had to re-learn all the fundamentals of Socialism. I listened again to what the SPGB had to say. Hearing their speakers was like a breath of fresh air. I went to their lectures and classes. I was thoroughly routed in arguments about Russia. I felt confused when members of the SPGB asked me what a "workers' state" was; why did the Russian workers pay themselves wages? Did Karl Marx write a book called Capital or a book called "Dialectical Materialism"? And much else besides. Understanding, at last, the materialist conception of history I was able to refute the "workers' state" nonsense, and beginning to see the Trotskyite so-called "theories" were ridiculous.

I never met one Trotskyite who advocated the abolition of the wages system or understood its implications. No-one ever spoke about production solely for use. They do not know the difference between the common ownership of the tools of production with democratic control by the whole of society and what they call "nationalization under workers' control". The followers of Trotsky are anti-working class because they distort the meaning of Socialism. They hinder the spread of genuine Socialist knowledge.

I could see now how wrong I had been been, and I had much to learn. Despite my mistakes I had not turned sour about Socialism. I applied to join the SPGB and was accepted in 1946. Socialist understanding expands when you become a member. I recall meeting again in the Camberwell branch our late Comrade Frank Dawe, whom I had known very slightly over the years. He had asked me what I had been up to, and I told him. He gave me a quizzical smile and said: "You have been doing what I call 'boring' in the Labour Party. All you do in fact is to 'bore' in at one end and then 'bore' out again at the other, without achieving anything. Put it down to experience!" That just about sums it all up.

J. C. Gormley

Disappearing Man (1975)

Book Review from the November 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Strange Case of Victor Grayson, by Reg Groves. Pluto Press, £2.

The tale of Victor Grayson's disappearance used to appear regularly in such series as "The World's Strangest Stories", flavoured by the possibility that somewhere he might still be alive. The idea can now be dismissed — it is ninety-four years since Grayson was born; this book assembles the facts of his life and political career.

Grayson was one of the figures thrown up by the pre-1914 Labour movement. Beginning in chapels and street-corner meetings in Manchester, he emerged as an outstanding young orator. The Colne Valley Labour League chose him as their candidate in the by-election of 1907; to everyone's astonishment Grayson was elected to Parliament, at twenty-five. The ILP and the Labour Party had refused to endorse his candidature, because it crossed their arrangements with the Liberals. Preaching a fiery radicalism which centred on demands for measures to deal with mass unemployment, he was continually at odds with the parliamentary Labour leaders.

After losing his seat, he joined with H. M. Hyndman and Robert Blatchford in forming the British Socialist Party — it was only a change of name by the Social Democratic Federation. However, personal failings had already taken hold of Grayson: in particular, drink. He still attracted large audiences, but it was never certain he would turn up. In 1915 he went to New Zealand, where eventually he joined the army and thus returned to England. His disappearance followed some dabbling in Irish politics and in the question of the sale of titles by Lloyd George; Reg Groves links it with a political agent named Maundy Gregory, who was in the latter affair.

One interesting aspect of the book is its account of the wheeling and dealing by Keir Hardie, Snowden and others to preserve their alliances or their ambitions, or both. It is a pity that Reg Groves has let his own political romanticism run away with the story in respects which are not essential to it, such as claiming that Grayson was "the first and last man ever to be elected to Parliament as a socialist". He was nothing of the kind: he was a brilliant and passionate demagogue, but a reformist who ended by supporting the 1914-18 war as did the men he condemned.

Likewise, Grayson's criticisms of the House of Commons are extended into a theory that he was destroyed by the "fraud" of parliamentary action and would have been saved by syndicalism. This is absurd, and the writer should think again about the implications of facts he himself gives. Nevertheless, the book is worth anyone's reading for its picture of a curious and tragic political figure, his contemporaries and times.

Robert Barltrop 

Voice of the People (1975)

From the November 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Every week the London Broadcasting Company invites listeners to 'phone in suggestions for dealing with various problems.

The other week it was Inflation. The listeners had a ball! Funnily enough, not one listener or the jockey on the receiving end even mentioned Harold Wilson's £6 limit, or his expensive pamphlets. They all had their own ideas - and what ideas! None of that silly Socialist rubbish about the Government which is saying it wants to stop inflation printing the millions of banknotes which cause it; or the articles in the Socialist Standard making out that deflation (before the war) was just as bad.

No, the People's ideas were all solid, practical, down-to-earth: right down! Not one said that the real trouble was the capitalist system - that inflation, deflation or reflation, the working class was always in the same boat. Oh no! Or that rigmarole about the capitalist system working regularly through booms and slumps.

Unfortunately we cannot spare the space to report every brilliant suggestion, but a brief re-cap of the main ones should suffice to show that the spirit of pioneering initiative which made Britain great is not dead but still flourishes. One bright lady kicked off with the suggestion that everybody should buy secondhand clothes at jumble sales: "I haven't bought a new coat for years." (How everybody could be second without any firsts, she did not say.)

Another had discovered that although football-pool promoters ask for 14p a go, it is possible to get a coupon accepted for 8p. He'd had quite a bundle with them over this, and they had finally succumbed. We commend this to Denis Healey; after all, it's no sillier than his Budget proposals. One other suggestion was that everybody should refuse to pay their rates - although when this is to start he did not say.

The only point which was argued about was a proposal for a 100 per cent tax on all foreign goods - in fact, this listener said "no foreign goods at all". Even the simple-naive disc-jockey had to point out that inflation worked in favour of exporting countries, of which Britain has always been one.

Someone else weighed in with a master-stroke. He had observed that most voluntary societies - anglers, cyclists, bird-watchers, etc. - have, in addition to an annual subscription, a "life" one. He had worked out that quite a sum could be saved here (if you live long enough). Them of course, we were bound to get the old wartime chestnut: "Dig for Victory!" Why don't we all grow our own spuds, etc? Very good! Thank you for calling! Call again! Another wanted the Government to subsidize mortgages. A real heart-cry, this one: poor devil!

But the cream was reserved to the last. Even the imperturbable "public ear" got aerated over this one. One listener had discovered that if you write "OHMS" on letters you get away with it, because the Post Office can't collect on them. As was pointed out, what happens of it costs the Post Office 50p or £1 to collect a few pence from the Ministry of Power or the War Office?

And so it went on and on for an hour. What finally emerged was that most of those 'phoning in were so desperately anxious to save a penny or two somewhere that they had no time to think about inflation. They were all too concerned with their own dire poverty, and literally beating their brains out to try and save a couple of coppers somewhere by doing without something or other. Still, it's nice to know that the London Broadcasting Company is giving "the People" the opportunity to have their say and make their proposals.

As Harold Wilson says in his pamphlet: "Democracy works best when it relies on persuasion and consent". Armed with suggestions like these to add to the appalling mess it is already in, Wilson's Labour Government can now march confidently forward to further disaster - as they always have done.

Harry Young