Letter: The miners’ strike & the Socialist Party (1984)

Letter to the Editors from the November 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard  

 

The miners’ strike & the Socialist Party

Dear Editors,

Naivete is not what one expects from the columns of the Socialist Standard but the article on the miners’ strike (September, 1984) comes very close to it in stating that the SPGB will support any strike between the robbers and robbed, except when they are political. It is implied that this strike is more than just a political action, thus qualifying it for SPGB support.

Well, as I think that it is just a political strike, and you think it isn’t the score is now one all, a draw. The article goes on to say that 120,000 miners can't all be wrong, to which I must reply that 60,000 other NCB workers say that they are. As you can't produce a ballot to show what the 120,000 think, and my 60,000 can, you lose on the re-count because you cannot substantiate your case.

You enter a very dangerous minefield in trying to decide what is a political strike and what is not. The SPGB has been explaining for eighty years that politics is but an expression of the economic facts of life, then, all of a sudden, hey presto . . . we have the purely political strike. The two examples given, "dockers against immigration" and “Labour’s day of Action” had their roots in economic problems confronting the working class and being directed to political ends. This is exactly how I see the miners’ strike. So what is the exact mix which will trigger off SPGB support for a strike? 85 per cent political and 15 per cent economic? Or 60 per cent and 40 per cent? Or even perhaps 51 per cent and 49 per cent? May we be informed please?

So, is the strike political then? Messrs. Scargill and Co. have made it very plain indeed that the mere mention of Thatcher gives them all indigestion and sleepless nights, and they want to bring down the government immediately. This strike was called when coal stocks were at an all-time high, summer time just round the corner, plenty of nuclear power and oil about and no ballot. It was either "daft" (Lord Gormley) or politically motivated. In your article you state that the Labour Government did exactly what the NCB now proposes but there was no strike. So, if given exactly the same conditions, the miners didn’t strike under Labour, and are striking under the Tories, what other reasons except political reasons can there be?

Will the SPGB support any strike? I can't believe that it would be so stupid. The Socialist Standard in the recent past has quoted items from the "propaganda press" showing that certain strikes are welcomed with gratitude and delight by the bosses and are pleased to prolong them to bring the workers to heel. Support for this kind of strike brings only extra poverty and extra subservience to the workers involved. You indicate that the miners’ strike may well be in this category.

The word "support” in my working class dictionary means "to hold up — assist - sustain”. Would the SPGB assist in the prolonging of these strikes? Did the early SPGB back the Hansom Cab workers in their struggles against the encroachments made by automobile manufacturers? Would they have backed the Sword-Pikestaff and Bow and Arrow Makers Union against the encroaching Rifle. Gunpowder and Bullet manufacturers? I think not. The kindest thing to do is sometimes to advise people to leave a dying industry and not support their unavailing efforts? If nuclear power eventually takes over from coal will the SPGB be there sustaining the last striking miners in the last pit?

Mr Scargill and the NUM Executive and their bully-boys remind me of an embryonic Hitler and his storm-troopers gagging the union and menacing those who disagree. The SPGB finds fault only with the gagging, keeping a respectful silence on the activities of Scargill’s storm troopers. Activities well known to everyone in England except the SPGB. This policy of putting all the violence down to police brutality can best be described as fifty per cent SPGB and fifty per cent Trotskyist. As the gagging of the union. the split in the union and the mass violence of the striking miners are all part of the same coin, your article betrays a dangerous naivete, the implications of which need to be debated. Working Nottinghamshire miners must be wondering who the SPGB thinks is harassing their homes, property and families if it isn’t the bully boys . . . maybe it’s the police. What is certain is that working Nottinghamshire miners will regard the SPGB as a party to shun, which is a very great pity, for even Mr Kinnock has come out of his mouse-hole and condemned all violence.

S Levitt

London NW3

Reply:

Against Capitalism

It is a clear sign that a critic is standing upon thin ice when he resorts to distortion in order to make a case. Consider these examples: 1) Levitt claims that the article in the September Standard states that the Socialist Party supports all strikes, except for those motivated by political intentions to reform capitalism. He then bases a large part of his criticism on the use of the word "support". If he re-reads the article he will see that the term he objects to is not even used. 2) Levitt claims that the article suggests that "120.000 miners can’t all be wrong". No such statement is made. Clearly, it would be foolish to say that because a number of workers are taking an action they must be right. 3) Levitt — whose silly hysteria about "storm troopers" we deal with below — claims that the Socialist Party has kept “a respectful silence” on the question of violence by picketing strikers (unlike Mr Kinnock whose moral stand wins the approval of our critic). As a subscriber to the Socialist Standard, our critic will have read the article "An Open letter to the Miners” (July, 1984) in which it is stated that "insofar as the reports of workers persecuting those who disagree with them are not false or exaggerated, socialists condemn unreservedly the anti-working-class intimidation of fellow miners”. Of course, this condemnation might not satisfy Levitt, whose own exaggerated description of the picketing resembles some of the most ignorant comment of the gutter press. 4) Levitt claims that the Socialist Party attributes all the violence to the police, whereas no such point is made in the article. In fact, the Socialist Party is not in the business of blaming one group or another for the violence which is endemic to the class war. So, four distortions in eight paragraphs: now let us try to make sense of the other fifty per cent.

Our critic suggests that it is difficult to determine what is a political strike, in the sense in which the term was used in the article. The difficulty does not trouble the Socialist Party: as far as we are concerned, the role of trade unions is to defend and improve the wages and conditions of workers under capitalism. In short, they have a defensive, economic function. Strikes intended to use working-class combination for the purpose of affecting the overall administration of capitalism are politically reformist and socialists oppose them. For example, when miners went on strike to oppose immigrant labour being introduced into British pits this was not an economic action; neither was Labour’s Day of Action, which was an attempted strike designed to show that a Labour government of capitalism would be better for workers than a Tory one.

Of course, no strike is entirely economic because there is no separation of politics and economics under capitalism. So, while the miners' strike is an economic strike, not very different from others conducted by other unions, it has a political dimension insofar as its result can affect the balance of political strength between organised labour and organised capital. It may well be true that the officials of the NUM want to get rid of the present government (so does the Socialist Party), but it is naive of our critic to think that 120,000 strikers have somehow been hoodwinked into striking for such a purpose.

Levitt cannot believe that socialists would be so stupid as to support any strike. We cannot believe that Levitt can be so stupid as to think that we might, when only four paragraphs earlier he acknowledges our opposition to strikes designed to reform capitalism. As for the question of "support" — a term not introduced by us — let us be clear that, as early as 1905, when the Manifesto of the Socialist Party of Great Britain was published, the socialist view has been that trade unions are a necessity under capitalism and “any action on their part upon sound lines should be heartily supported". We do not exist as a party to advise unions on how to conduct their necessary struggles within capitalism, although, as socialist trade unionists, we do our best to ensure that our unions act on sound lines and that we support union action to the best of our abilities. We might add that socialists within the NUM have done precisely that during this miners’ strike. The role of the Socialist Party is to advocate socialism and to point out that beyond the sectional, limited and repetitive struggle of trade unions there is a revolutionary struggle to establish world socialism which is both urgent and more important than mere defensive actions.

Levitt suggests that the Socialist Party — in a spirit of kindness — should advise the miners to leave their dying industry. Having issued such advice, does he propose that we urge them to buy some bikes and travel the country looking for thriving industries? The Socialist Party does not exist to urge workers to fit in with the absurd economic priorities of capitalism. What we can say to the miners is that, with an estimated 300-years’ supply of coal underneath Britain, there is no reason why a socialist society need let the coal industry die. Of course, a socialist society might decide that there are other energy sources which are preferable to coal; if so, such a decision would neither be based on profit calculations nor cause hardship to men who had been miners in the past. We think that the growing rejection of the profit-based priorities of capitalism, which has led mine workers to challenge the NCB’s definition of “uneconomic", should be regarded with enthusiasm by socialists. Our task is to show the miners that only in socialism can the economic priorities which offend them be eliminated.

The remarks about picket-line violence are stale and naive. Certainly, socialists have emphasised time and time again, both in our propaganda and in our unions, that violent tactics should be avoided by workers who can win by force of numbers. But the state, which is an institution of legalised violence, will not simply sit back and let workers picket as they please. Laws allowing pickets to persuade non-strikers have been largely ignored during this strike — vans carrying strike-breakers (‘‘rebels”) have driven through picket lines at such speeds that it has been impossible for pickets to speak to their fellow-workers. So, mass picket lines have been formed in order to ensure that the strike-breakers either stop and listen or stay out of the colliery.

Does our critic really think that the condemnation of picket-line violence by Neil Kinnock will make any difference to the class struggle? After all, Thatcher. Kinnock and the other hypocrites who are appalled by picket-line violence are the same leaders who support the creation of war machines designed to murder civilian populations. The Socialist Party does not issue moral condemnations of selective acts of violence — we are busy advocating the case for the abolition of the social cause of such behaviour. We did not notice the Fleet Street propaganda rags condemning the picket-line murder of seven striking miners in South Africa (reported briefly on BBC’s Newsnight on 18 September).

Our critic is concerned that the working miners of Nottinghamshire will shun the Socialist Party because of what we have written about the strike. Well, they were shunning us before the strike started, but that did not stop us from trying to convince them of the validity of our case, which applies to all workers, whether unionised or not. striking or working, militant or conservative.

Editors.

Letter: A sane society (1984)

Letter to the Editors from the November 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

A sane society

Dear Editors,

May I be allowed to say a few words on the miners’ strike of the kind I have not yet seen clearly expressed in the columns of the Standard?

Can I first of all get back to socialist basics and say that disputes like this one are inevitable in a social set-up in which the interests of one group of the population (wage and salary earners) are inherently opposed to the interests of the other group (employers, private or state). When the first group gains, the other loses, and vice versa. That is why even when workers say they don’t like other people’s strikes, they will always go on strike themselves if they consider it necessary.

Can I add that if strikes are, therefore, inevitable in the present society it is very much in the interest of the workers involved in them to see to it that their action is as democratically based as possible. Otherwise they play into the hands of their employers making it easy for the latter to use public opinion, the media and the forces of the state (police, judiciary, etc.) to make sure they come out on top — as in the present miners' dispute.

But there is of course no glory in strikes — not even in successful ones. They are an unpleasant necessity in a society divided into two groups with irreconcilable interests. And even if, in the present case, the NUM got its way, all it would be doing would be reserving for yet another generation of young men a future no sane society would reserve for any of its members — a future which consists of spending most of your waking hours during your whole working life in a hole under the ground. This is what "preserving mining communities" really means.

A sane society would use the technology now available to bring coal up from the ground solely by automation. As an article in the New Scientist magazine in September showed, the robot mine is a perfectly feasible proposition. The main reason it has not yet been developed is because, in the words of Tom Carr, director of the NCB's Mining Research and Development Establishment, "it’s too damn expensive to automate completely”.

And there we have it. What counts isn’t human wellbeing but cost and profit — which are of course at the crux of the present strike as well.

The alternative to this — and the one for which socialists stand — is a world in which cost and profit are not the criterion by which judgements are made. The alternative is a world in which human needs come first, in which there is no buying and selling, no employees and employers, and no strikes. This is the lesson to be drawn from the miners’ strike, whatever its outcome.

H. Moss 

Swansea

Corporal punishment (1984)

From the November 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Most inner-city High Streets have an army-recruiting office where the raw are taken in (literally) to find themselves in plush surroundings; where the harvesting recruitment sergeant patronises the newly-germinated with smarmy small-talk about ski-ing and discos on far-off shores, using all the underhand skills and techniques of a sales representative for Cannon Fodder Incorporated. The process of recruitment from the High Street Office to the training camp can be as little as two weeks. During this period there is hardly enough time for the recruits to read the large-print in the glossy magazines, let alone the small-print surrounding their twenty-two-year contracts.

At the High Street Office the unsuspecting windfalls are tested in Arithmetic. English and Physical fitness, after which there is an interview. The Arithmetic and English are to ascertain the recruit's degree of simplicity. The medical decides whether the next in line can walk or hold a gun. The interview is perhaps more sinister. This is when the would-be soldiers are asked — prior to taking the Oath of Allegiance — if they are Communists. Have they ever been a Communist? Do they know any Communists? Answering "No" to these questions. they receive their one-way tickets to the training camp. Recruits are then trained like animals in a circus, with tit-bits for the good dog and a crack of the ringmaster’s whip (the Regimental Sergeant Major's pace stick) for those who don’t sit up and beg.

To obtain discipline and control the Army has more subtle methods than boot bulling and potato peeling. They have a long history of expertise in military psychology on which they can draw. The tools they use for processing the recruits are Conformity, Alienation and Competition.

Conformity

To impose Conformity the recruits must first be robbed of their individuality. This is done by inflicting uniformity of looks and behaviour on all soldiers. Uniformity of personal appearance is achieved at the first stop in camp, the barber's shop. The haircut and the clean-shaven look strips many young people of a part of their identity. If they were a little green in joining the Army in the first place, they become greener with a visit to the Quarter-Master's stores where they are issued with about six suits of varying sizes, just as many hats and the obligatory identity tag. informing them of their new name: an eight-figure number. Loaded with more new clothes than they have ever had at any one time, they set off to their accommodation having almost forgotten their frightening new hairstyle.

Impressed by the self-confidence of the reception Corporal, the new recruits are under the misapprehension that all they need to do is put on one of their new suits and they will be transformed into the new macho man. The dormitories each house twelve to twenty and are furnished in the most basic fashion — one bed, one locker and one chair for each person, laid out in a military style which is about as welcoming as a nuclear winter. With so little furniture you could think it easy to keep clean. The recruits soon discover that this isn't the case. For the forthcoming weeks they are cleaning the floor and removing dust from 5am to breakfast and then later from 5pm until lights out. with short breaks in between to clean their kit. Complete uniformity of behaviour is hammered into those with any remaining personality of their own during square bashing. Here marching, saluting and rifle drills are choreographed to such a degree that Lionel Blair would be envious.

Alienation

Alienation is another wrench in the mechanism of the military machine, used to twist the squaddies away from social interaction and to tighten the nut of docile acquiescence. Few of the trainees have much experience in letter-writing and many of their families cannot afford a telephone. so it isn't too long before they become isolated. This separation from family and friends, coupled with the confinement to barracks that most training camps impose. make it impossible to make new friends in the local community. The new soldier becomes so lonely and introverted, bullied helplessly into shape. For the smallest mistake the recruits are humiliated, bawled at and in some cases physically beaten.

A recent case of bullying was that of a new boy, or “sprogg" who, after a kangaroo court in the barrack room, was found "guilty” of not polishing his floor space to the required standard and was sentenced to be hung. He was beaten up by a dozen others, stood on a chair, blindfolded and a noose was tied around his neck. After a lengthy pause in which he broke down pleading for mercy, the chair was kicked from under his feet. Fortunately for him the rope was not secured to the rafters above.

Black balling is common among recruits. and many of the dangers they face in training are from each other, as each tries playing at soldiers with little more than an Action Man comic to go on, plus the stories learned from dad down the pub the night before they left. The recruits show a willingness to participate in any community pursuit and try to to impress anyone and everyone with their mixed-up league of priorities. They will take part in the humiliation of others, pleased that it is not happening to them. They have the childish notion of one who does not know right from wrong; if everyone else does something then it must be right. The alienating process has them so frightened that when they do join in group pursuits they often show their insecurity with violent reaction. 

Competition

Competition is the third bracket that straps the cogs to the tank tracks. Recruits are told from the outset that they must shape up to perform with team spirit in an endless cycle of competition that ends up like a game of snakes and snakes. Those who fail to perform well enough at individual and team skills are made to go back in training (back squadded). Competition strains at every level of the Army. At Battalion level there are about 600 men divided into four Companies, each of which has four Platoons of 30-40 soldiers. They are divided further into four sections of 8-12 and competition is intense for promotion and the cushy life. The sections are at loggerheads to be the best section in the platoon. The platoon is rife with the obsession to be top in the Company and the Company, predictably, is all-out for the coveted Battalion premiership. Of course the Battalion has its role to play at Garrison level and every Garrison goes all-out to be the best in the Army. The question is. where you go with the best Army in the world? Afghanistan? Grenada? or the Falklands?

Armies compete on behalf of the nation-states they represent for strategic positions on the trade map, areas rich in mineral resources and trade routes. In the name of defence they are often sent by governments to embark on expansionist imperialism. The sporting competitions of football and rugby, much advertised in the glossy brochures that could well have been composed by Saatchi and Saatchi, fall by the wayside when the Army enters the big league of politics at its sickening best. With such an extensive conditioning attack it is little wonder that the trainees soon appear to be the unthinking patriotic morons that the drill sergeants, non-commissioned officers and officers have set out to make them. The Army has disrupted everything that was important to the ex-civilian and imposed a new set of values. It is by treating the recruits in this way that governing them becomes easy and so effective.

The Queen's Regulations (the bible of the British Army) make interesting reading. For example, under Section 69(a) of the Army Act 1955 are listed offences against their god — good order and discipline — under which it is possible to charge someone with anything, including breathing. It is not uncommon for soldiers to be charged with “dumb insolence” when there is no better excuse than the face not fitting. Soldiers are caught by the jankers under these Acts. 'Frying to quote from the Queen’s Regulations in their defence can lead to another charge of insolence.

The ranks above are continually reminding the soldiers that they are not paid to think, with the old cliche:

Yours is not to reason why;

Yours is but to do or die.

This is shortly followed by a reprimand for not using their initiative. In recognising that the soldiers go through a very severe conditioning process we ask ourselves a few questions: Does it work in every case? Are there any long-term effects? and Is this conditioning a barrier to socialism? The answer to the first question must be that the conditioning of the soldier does work in most cases, proof of which can be found at the graves of Verdun or the Somme or Arnheim and the countless millions of nameless graves across the world where worker has killed worker for countries in which they had no stake. There are a few trainees who get out of the Army in the first few weeks but the majority feel compelled to stay, under the misbelief that it would be cowardice to leave. Secondly, are there any long-term effects? The sad answer is yes. We are familiar with the war wounded who were never hit by the enemy’s bullets, but were struck by a life in billets and camp songs for whom the last war has never ended. Many workers, however, have learned that no workers' interests are at stake when the capitalists make battle. Thirdly, what about the conditioning process? This is not a barrier to our achieving a socialist society. We have seen American soldiers conscripted to fight in Vietnam desert to the safety of Sweden. We have recently seen a film of the Russian soldiers defecting in Afghanistan and must conclude that as the individuals mature, so do the ideas and vice versa.

Jimmy Bob

Messenger boys (1984)

From the November 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

The various Christian churches seem to be hitting the secular headlines recently with the Catholic church, by far the biggest, taking the lead. For the last year or so it has been deeply embroiled with the larger than life moneylenders of the international banking world. But it isn’t (as the innocent Catholic might think) the Children of Christ condemning the moneylenders, calling on them to “Store up their riches in Heaven and not on earth where they will rust and be eaten up by moths.”

A collection of about 120 foreign banks and other creditors want to know what has happened to £916 million of their money which was last seen passing through an intricate network of companies and subsidiaries from Liechtenstein to Peru, mostly owned by the Vatican Bank (IOR). Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, ex-head of the Vatican Bank, has been intimately linked with this mysterious affair. A one-time diplomat in the Vatican, Marcinkus seems to have been unwise in the company he kept while head of the Vatican Bank, for two of his closest associates were Michele Sindona and Roberto Calvi. Sindona, a successful Sicilian banker, has been convicted of fraud and misappropriation of funds while Calvi. ex-member of the infamous masonic lodge P2. belter known as “God’s Banker”, recently slipped secretly out of Italy. He crossed the Gulf of Trieste to Yugoslavia and London, apparently to hang himself from Blackfriars Bridge, first taking the precaution of filling his pockets with stones and placing half a brick down the front of his trousers.

As with any good story, the plot thickens. In July 1978 Pope Paul VI died and was succeeded by a Pope John Paul I. Pope John Paul I died a few months later in September 1978. Allegations have been made that Pope John Paul I was poisoned because he had uncovered the financial wheeling and dealing of the Vatican Bank and objected to it. Contradictory statements by the Vatican about the circumstances of the death only encourage suspicion. Who really did discover the body? What was the Pope really reading when he died in bed?

All this has cast some doubt on the infallibility of the papacy. How could the Vatican get itself into such an embarrassing mess? Even if Pope Paul VI didn't know what was going on under his very nose (Marcinkus’s office was directly beneath the Papal apartments) you would have thought God would have had a quiet word in his ear. After all the Pope, so they tell us, is our direct link with God.

Of course, the Vatican hasn't admitted to making a mistake. It never does. Nevertheless, Archbishop Marcinkus has applied for immunity from prosecution by the Italian Judiciary. The Vatican Bank has also agreed to pay creditors £180 million. confidently expecting to recoup the loss from contributions by working class catholics.

While the Vatican is uneasily wearing the cloak of infallibility the Church of England has attributed falling attendances to the rigidity and inflexibility of ideas, which haven’t changed much in centuries. It has realised that the mumbo-jumbo of the past that worked quite well is seen to be more and more ridiculous. To counter this it has decided to invent some more modern mumbo-jumbo, adapted from the old stuff. Oxbridge theologians have been telling us that a lot of the Bible isn't strictly true, that the meaning and symbolism of what is written in the Bible is more important than whether or not it actually occurred in history. This innovative bit of philosophical sophistry has not gone unnoticed by the more conservative members of the clergy.The result has been a bitter debate about whether the Virgin Mary was or wasn’t.

In July David Jenkins, a leading advocate for change, was consecrated in York Minster as the Bishop of Durham amid protests and interruptions. A few days later there was an unhappy coincidence when the south transept of the Minster was struck by lightning and burnt down. Not surprisingly some of the clergy put this down to a divine thunderbolt, sent by a merciful God as an act of retribution. Fortunately, York Minster was insured by an ecclesiastical insurance company even if it is paradoxical for the church to be insuring itself against acts of God.

So while the Catholic church is grappling with financial corruption and infallibility, the Church of England is trying to reinterpret the work of God. A church that isn't as burdened with outmoded ideas and traditions inherited from previous centuries is Billy Graham's Evangelism. Everybody living in the English provinces must have noticed Big Brother Billy staring down at them from bill boards. His square set jaw. menacing smile and piercing eyes encourage the question “Would I buy a second-hand car from this man?”, especially in view of the personal testimony from ex-President Richard Nixon: “Billy Graham is one of the giants of our time”. But Dr. Billy isn’t the man he was in 1949 when he terrified all those who would like to sec 1950 with Christian threats like “Communism is inspired, directed and motivated by the devil himself. Either communism must die or Christianity must die”. A couple of years ago he went to preach in that nest of demons and devil worshippers, Moscow. Having been well treated by the puppets of Satan, he returned to cause a storm with some inane comments about the benevolent nature of the Russian state.

For a few months this year Graham was on Mission England. Backed up by technicians, campaign managers, thousand-voice choirs, security heavies and the all important $40 million business machine. Billy visited Bristol. Norwich, Sunderland, Birmingham. Liverpool and Ipswich. It must have been quite a spectacle to sec him preaching from the hallowed turf of Anfield. to hear the stadium echoing to the songs of praise, though not the usual irreverent and profane type. No doubt there was a deathly hush as Billy asked the spectators if they could hear Jesus knocking to come in. Jesus certainly wouldn't have been the first to be locked out of Anfield anyway.

Billy is not, as some might think, a man of peace, for when our masters’ property and profits are threatened he believes in the necessity of defence — of killing people and not turning the other cheek. Although he has gone to great pains to appear concerned about the problems of his flock such as unemployment and poverty, these are problems that God has spared Billy, who lives in a converted log cabin on a 200 acre site in America and receives a salary of $55,000 a year.

It’s all very easy poking fun at the Church now that the age of inquisition and witch burnings is over, but it is beside the point. Why do these ridiculous people and institutions exist? Why do so many people believe in what they say?

It is not possible to prove or disprove the existence of God. who exists only for people who have "faith”, a belief in something for which there is no material evidence. The evidence that Christians will give for the existence of a God is their faith. How could they believe in something of which there is no material evidence (except a book of dubious origin and authenticity) unless that belief was inspired by God himself? Their god is supposed to give them faith and this explains, for them, why they have faith. To break this circle of "God exists because 1 believe in God", it is necessary to understand why Christianity is so appealing to many people.

We live in a friendless society of competition. insecurity and. for many of us, absolute poverty. We live in a cruel and impersonal world, over which we seem to have no control. Most Christians would refer to all this as "suffering”. But they offer a unique "solution” to those who arc suffering, which is most of us — a philosophy, a set of ideas, that turns this suffering from something pointless and wasteful into something worthwhile. If we believe in God and Jesus Christ and accept the suffering doled out to us by the world, so they tell us, we will go to a much better place at the end of it and there live forever. The meek acceptance of suffering is a sort of lest and the better we do. the better the chance that we will be rewarded.

This, in essence, is very much like working for a wage. You graft for eight hours a day in a job you hate for the promise of a wage packet at the end of the week. The difference is that there is no pie in the sky at the end of your stint down here. Only worms and maggots. The idea of Christianity also gives you a sense of control over your ow n life for you can participate in the kingdom of Heaven. In every sense Christianity is masochistic, it dupes you into enjoying pain and suffering. It anaesthetises you against the stresses and strains of society. Once accepted, it becomes more difficult to face up to the real horrors of society

DB

Profits before food . . . (1984)

From the November 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

In June a Danish MEP, Jens-Peter Bonde, put down a written question in the European Parliament to the Common Market Commissioner for Agriculture, asking him to state what proportion of fruit bought by the Common Market to maintain price levels “was distributed free of charge, processed to make alcohol, used as animal fodder or destroyed in 1983” and adding, “when does the Commission intend to stop destroying people’s food?”

In his reply the Commissioner, Poul Dalsager, tried to argue that no food had actually been destroyed; it was just that some of the food bought to maintain prices “became unfit for use” before it could be turned into alcohol or used in other ways. This is pure hypocrisy: the food was deliberately allowed to rot — destroyed — because as Dalsager went on to explain, “an increase in the number of possible uses cannot be achieved without the risk of interfering in the normal distribution channels or of distorting competition between the various commercial operators”. In other words, if too much is given away to hospitals and other institutions or used as animal fodder or turned into alcohol, the profits of food merchants, animal feed producers and other alcohol distillers would be threatened.

The figures quoted by Dalsager allow us to work out how much food was destroyed in the ten Common Market countries in the year 1982/83 (April to April). For comparison we also give the figures for the amount given away free as this very neatly illustrates capitalism's priorities.

Adam Buick

South African time-bomb (1984)

From the November 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

South Africa has recently experienced the bloodiest conflicts between rioters and police since the 1976 Soweto uprising. Several dozen people were shot dead by police, who used live rounds in addition to rubber bullets and teargas. The conflict was concentrated in the Vaal Triangle, in Sharpeville, in Sebokeng, Boibateng and Evaton. More than a hundred people were seriously injured in the rioting, which coincided with the introduction of a new constitution upholding the apartheid regime.

In 1976, the state response to the Soweto uprising left more than five hundred dead across the country. Clearly, not very much has changed since then. At the time of the more recent riots, those who boycotted the elections to the new system of assemblies were beaten up by van-loads of police and some of the candidates themselves. Some reporters sympathetic to those not voting were also attacked. However, the intense discontent felt by the majority of South Africans relates to far broader issues than the new Constitution.

There have been protests at rent increases, increases in bus fares and over the high level of indirect taxation. As in 1976, it is children who have led the protests, organising widespread school boycotts as a protest against conditions in those prison camps for the young. During last month's elections to the tricameral parliament these boycotts reached a peak, with 500,000 staying away from school.

The fact that hand in hand with the racist oppression of apartheid goes an underlying class division has not escaped the notice of the rioters. The black majority are turning against black councillors because of their association with unpopular measures such as rent increases, and the government's attempt to distance itself from the discontent by giving some power to black councils in the townships is certain to backfire in the end.

In South Africa today there is an explosive undercurrent of resentment and discontent among the black majority, who are treated like beasts of burden by the ruling class. But the actions of this reactionary white elite are part of a wider conflict which directly involves us all every day: the power struggle between a propertied and privileged minority, and the majority on whose backs they prosper. Of one thing there can be no doubt: the majority in South Africa will defeat those who today sit smugly entrenched in Johannesburg. Victory will set the end of a class division between a powerful minority and the dispossessed majority and the ownership of the means of life by the world’s inhabitants without distinction of race or sex.

50 Years Ago: Armed revolt in Spain (1984)

The 50 Years Ago column from the November 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

From a working-class and socialist standpoint the revolt was a piece of criminal irresponsibility. The overwhelming majority of Spanish electors are not socialist, and do not understand or desire socialism.

No minority, whether in Spain, Russia, Austria or anywhere else, can impose socialism on a hostile or apathetic majority. Forced, therefore, to abandon the idea of introducing socialism, the new rulers sooner or later accommodate themselves to the job of administering capitalism. Finding power sweet they develop the century-old technique of intrigue, deception, bribery, and arbitrary violence in order to keep themselves in power. Unable to give the reality of socialism they learn a new propaganda, which consists, crudely put, of calling the unregenerate capitalism by a new name — socialism.

Knowing this the Socialist Party of Great Britain refuses in any circumstances to countenance the policy of minority armed revolt. That road does not lead to socialism. In truth it leads nowhere, for workers who head that way must sooner or later retrace their steps if they are to play their part in achieving socialism.

[From an article, “A Vain Sacrifice” published in the Socialist Standard, November 1934.]

World Socialist Party - Belfast Branch (1984)

From the November 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

SPGB Meetings (1984)

Party News from the November 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

The March 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard carried a report of the SPGB's debate with Tom Sackville, the Conservative MP for Bolton West. The SPGB speaker in that debate, Howard Moss, revisited that debate in his Life and Times column in the November 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard.

SPGB Meetings (1984)

Party News from the November 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

A recording of one of the meetings from the Islington Branch Weekend Educational Conference on Working For Socialism is available in the audio section of the SPGB website. Click on the following link for more information:

How to organise a branch 

Islington Branch meeting

Date: 9th December 1984

Speaker: Clifford Slapper

Trouble at t'Mint (1984)

From the November 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

As a medium of exchange, money symbolises a means to an end: the production of surplus value by the working class — the foundation of capitalism. However, money has another role, also important, and that is to convey the ideology of capitalism. For instance, a fifty pence coin proclaims in its design the need for leadership, false notions such as nationalism and patriotism and all the claptrap that goes with them. To reinforce these ideas in the minds of the working class, special coins and medals are minted to celebrate such insignificant non-events as royal weddings, births and jubilees. On a more dangerous level they are also struck to glorify the butchery of misguided wage slaves in capitalist adventures like the Falklands War, where many members of the working class were killed and maimed in the interest of the Coalite Company and other concerns both British and Argentine. This conveys the idea that class dominated society is the natural order of things and was, is, and ever shall be forever and ever and ever, amen. But if coins and medals showed the reality of capitalism — people starving in a world of plenty while the bloodsuckers grow fat, the soldier bleeding his life away in the interests of Capital, rivers polluted by the industrial filth poured into them, that would encourage its demise.

Numerous skills are employed to perpetuate these deceptions. For example, it is the die designers and engravers who are the creme de la creme in producing the images we see when money changes hands. For those ignorant of such matters, the Queen's head symbolises a caring monarchy and embodies the idea of the nuclear family and the maintenance of the delicate balance between state machinery and "democracy”.

However important all of this is, the prime motive of mints the world over is to make profits for their owners, be they state or private and. as with all other processes subject to the laws of the market place, they are forced to compete world wide for a share of the market. The Royal Mint at Llantrisant is no exception, and this was one reason it was moved from the site at Tower Hill. But why Llantrisant when London is considered the hub of the financial world and has all the prestige associated with it? It must be remembered that at the time Big Jim Callaghan was Chancellor and, by some coincidence, his constituency was (and still is) only a few miles away. Another coincidence was that the Labour Government was taking a battering from the Welsh Nationalist Party over its attacks on the living standards of the working class. Also, since the Labour Party had decimated the local coal mining industry, there was a ready supply of cheap labour power.

Initially, the Mint's fortunes soared, with high demand for its products, both at home and overseas. It even won a Queen's Award for Export. However, after this initial euphoria, things began to turn sour, despite the cheap labour and automated plant and inflation making paper money less valuable. Apart from the recession, which was bad enough, the competition has refused to go away. Indeed some of the Mint’s major competitors have invested in new plant, forcing the Mint to do the same again. Added to this, many of the old customers have started to produce their own coinage and to export it. The introduction of more automated plant means more "voluntary” redundancies and, with the commitment to "a quantum leap in technology” [1] over the next three years, even more can be expected. With wages kept down and productivity increased the remaining workforce face even more ruthless exploitation.

Coinage production faces competition from the use of credit cards and increasing numbers of people using bank accounts and cheques, which has led to a decrease in the amount of small change in circulation. However capitalism will always need a form of exchange, be it plastic tokens, metal coins, or sugar-coated sweets, and so the Mint is attempting to overcome the rising cost factor by introducing the manufacture — as have their competitors — of base metal coins clad in non-ferrous metal such as brass, nickel and copper. It is hoped that this process will give a saving of 30 per cent over the cost of the standard coin. With these coins the Mint hopes to win back many of the customers it has lost to the competition. This loss is reflected in figures that show that overseas sales, once 80 per cent of output, have dropped to 50 per cent. To the workforce, these trends of a shrinking market and more competition mean that the Mint has not passed the point where . . . “we can chip away at productivity through more flexibility in manpower and smaller numbers". [2] . . . for obviously, by producing a coin with a longer life, the market shrinks still further and only serves to prolong the cycle of international competition.

It is worth mentioning that despite the "Royal" tag the state is in firm control, setting financial and production targets, hiring and firing. Other coin producers in this country such as IMI, De la Rue and Birmingham Mint Products also come under the indirect control of the state. It is not for nothing that the workforce have cynically coined the phrase "The Mint with the hole”, with a few members of the workforce playing a cat-and-mouse game with the Ministry of Defence Police in trying to supplement their meagre resources by helping themselves to the product which they have produced. But the MOD Police — sometimes called the dole in uniform — and the forces of law hold all the aces. For as well as preventing unwelcome visitors getting in, they can be deployed to stop the workforce going out. Under the logic of capitalism, taking advantage of international fluctuations of commodity prices is considered legal, but it is illegal for the workers to try to take what they have produced.

As well as producing coins, the Mint also turns out "Mintos” — not a sweet, but someone usually found among management — workers who run the system on behalf of their masters — and who is imbued with the work ethic, believing it to be an honour to be exploited at the Royal Mint. These people typify the way workers are conned into a blind acceptance of capitalism. However when the workers decide to rid themselves of their masters they too will be active participants in a society of their own choosing. Whereas in the words of Dr DJ. Gerhardt, Deputy Master and Comptroller: "you are probably concerned to know whether we can now look forward to a prosperous future free from worries about job losses and redundancy. I have to reply that much will depend on circumstances outside our direct control, notably overseas demand for circulating coin, on the amount of money available to our customers for the purchase of collectors' coins”. [3] Even the capitalists cannot control their own system. It is time for the working class to organise a society where money, not people will be redundant.

Gravediggers

References

[1,2] : Sunday Times, 15 April 1984.

[3] : Personal letter to Mint staff, July 1982.

Miners and the law (1984)

From the November 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who can now doubt the existence of the iron fist of the state? With the miners' strike now in its seventh month, the velvet glove of rhetoric about justice and the rule of law has been revealed as thread-bare. At each stage of the policing and judicial process the liberal concepts of justice and equality before the law have been cynically abandoned in the case of striking miners. We should not, of course, be surprised since the tactics used by the police and courts have been tried and tested in Northern Ireland and during the inner city riots in St. Pauls. Toxteth and Brixton — Dip-lock courts where judges sit alone without juries are paralleled in the use of stipendiary magistrates; internment without trial has its counterpart in the use of bail conditions which severely curtail freedom of movement even though criminal charges may not. in the end, be brought; and the militarisation of the police in recent years.

From the very start of the strike the police have implemented contingency plans that had been formulated long before the beginning of the present dispute. The “intercept” strategy — attempts by the police to prevent miners getting to the collieries to picket by setting up road blocks — was put into operation despite the fact that the police have no powers in this country to set up road blocks under existing laws. (The Police and Criminal Evidence Bill currently being enacted does give the police this power, but at present it is not law.) Suggestions have also been made that the police have removed, or tampered with road signs with the intention of confusing miners travelling to picket lines outside their own areas. So much for freedom of movement!

For those workers who do manage to get to the picket lines with the intention of trying peacefully to persuade their fellow workers to join the strike, there is the risk that they will be subject to indiscriminate arrest by police “snatch squads”; cavalry charges by police in riot gear on horses carrying batons; and verbal and physical abuse. Allegations by miners that during certain picketing incidents they have been subjected to physical mal-treatment by the police both during and after arrest are too numerous and too consistent to be disregarded. These policing tactics are being implemented by what has become a national police force organised by the National Reporting Centre. In order to avoid outraging local councillors — both Tory and Labour — who are implementing its penny-pinching policies on public expenditure, the government has now decided to pay for the extra cost of policing the strike. “Law and order" has once again been shown to be exempt from the cash limits imposed on other areas of public spending like health care, housing or education.

After their arrest striking miners are frequently subjected to political questioning by “plainclothes policemen" on areas wholly unrelated to the spurious offences with which they have been charged. The types of questions asked clearly reveal the intentions of the interrogators and those who have deployed them. Miners are commonly asked to reveal who organised the picket, how much they are paid for picketing, how their action is co-ordinated, whether they are union officials, what are their political affiliations, what their views are on the trade union movement, unemployment and related topics. Miners who refused to answer such questions have then been subjected to threats that they would continue to be held in police custody until they came up with the information required.

Once they have been charged miners go through the farce of appearing in court for the purpose of getting bail. At this point in the process the political use of the courts is at its most blatant. Under the terms of the Bail Act magistrates should decide whether or not bail is appropriate given the circumstances of a particular individual and whether conditions should be imposed. In the case of striking miners bail has been almost universally conditional upon the accused not attending NCB property in connection with the dispute, except their own place of work. In some cases the conditions imposed — that the accused should not go out between the hours of 11.00pm and 9.00am, or that he should not enter a specified area such as the county of Nottinghamshire — have amounted to a curfew.

Early in October a High Court hearing began concerning this issue. The NUM allege that Mansfield Magistrates Court, in particular, has been operating a blanket policy of bail conditions in flagrant disregard of the Bail Act. Evidence was given to the court that pre-prepared printed bail conditions were merely stapled to the bail form as pickets were brought before the courts, whether or not the miner was of “previously good character” and whatever his circumstances. It is unlikely that the NUM will win the action since the dice are loaded against them; however, their failure to do so will add to the considerable evidence that is accumulating to show that the courts are not impartial.

There can be little doubt that bail in these cases is being used as a means of social control, as a way to keep miners away from picket lines. This contention is given extra weight when the rate of successful prosecutions is considered. The conviction rate in magistrates’ courts is usually very high (around 90 per cent), but in the case of pickets there is evidence to suggest that the rate of successful prosecutions is much lower. The charges brought are frequently vague (behaviour likely to cause a breach of the peace; obstruction) or derived from obscure and archaic legislation. They are also often based on the flimsiest of evidence, with the result that the police are. in a significant number of cases, dropping the charges (sometimes the night before the case is due to be heard) or not offering any evidence at all. Although it is too early to give firm statistics — the cases are only just beginning to be heard in large numbers — a preliminary survey of cases from the South Yorkshire area showed that more than 60 per cent of miners charged have been subject to bail conditions curtailing their freedom of action and movement for considerable periods of time (on average 124 days in the cases in the survey referred to) only to have the charges against them either withdrawn, dismissed or not proven.

It is possible that this pattern will alter now that the government has sent in stipendiary magistrates to deal with the backlog of cases. These are professional, paid magistrates who sit alone and who are not noted for their leniency. Again the liberal notion of judgement by one’s peers has been shown to be an expedient that the ruling class will dispense with when it is under threat.

Members of the working class arrive at an understanding of the contradictions of capitalism and the case for socialism through a variety of means, one of the most important of which is their own experience. To expose the rotten core of capitalism and its coercive arms — the state, the police and the criminal justice system — will not necessarily result in a socialist consciousness, but making the nature of the state transparent can only contribute to the undermining of the belief — still prevalent among significant sections of the working class — that the administration of justice in capitalism is impartial. The miners’ strike, whatever its outcome, will have demonstrated that the liberal rhetoric of justice and equality before the law is meaningless given the basic inequality of capitalism. The remedy is not to try to make the courts and police fairer or more impartial but to do away with the need for them altogether; and that can only be brought about if the working class collectively and co-operatively work together for socialism.

Janie Percy-Smith

Running Commentary: Poverty today (1984)

The Running Commentary column from the November 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Poverty today

When members of the Thatcher government are questioned about their policies their programmed response is to trot out some esoteric statistics which are supposed to prove that success is imminent and that it would, therefore, be foolish for them to change course now. They have been arguing like this almost since they came to power in 1979, ignoring the other, strikingly non-esoteric, statistics which undermine their case.

In September a report produced for the government's Office of Population Censuses and Surveys showed death rates among unemployed men to be at least 21 per cent higher than might be expected and of women in their families to be 20 per cent higher. A few days later two doctors at the Ruchill Hospital in Glasgow stated that children in the more deprived parts of the city are up to 100 times more likely to suffer illnesses severe enough to need hospital treatment than those in the less deprived areas. And a few days after that a campaign launched to improve conditions for people whose only home is a bedsitter claimed that about half a million people are living in squalid and dangerous accommodation and that some 600 of them have been killed in fires in bedsitter houses between 1978 and 1982.

Poverty is a matter of stress and stigma; it is a degrading, repressive, distorting pressure on the lives of millions of people, making them emotionally crippled for life. But it is also a direct, physical threat; it makes us bodily sick, it kills us through what coroners call accidents and through avoidable diseases.

No capitalist party has the answer to poverty; it is the badge of capitalism and its cure is a matter beyond any debate about the trivial differences between Labour and Tory.

Nationalisation failure

Roy Hattersley is the half of Labour’s dream ticket to Westminster who has recently been falling down on his job of trying to please all of the people all of the time. In fact he has cast doubt, as others have been doing for some time now, on the once-sacred policy of nationalisation. This upset the lefties in the party and it made others ask why. if Hattersley thinks like this, he should be in a party which was once responsible for so much state control.

One response to Hattersley’s unoriginal and panicky musings came, as might be expected, from Ian Mikardo, who is one of those eternal guardians of the Labour Party’s conscience, which means that he still believes state-run coal mines, railways and steel works don’t shut down "uneconomic" units and do not sack "redundant” workers.

Scornfully rejecting Hattersley’s advocacy of private industry, Mikardo said: “Eighty per cent of productive capital is privately owned . . . Most of the productive capacity has its organisation decided by 200 or 300 people whose principal incentive is to the dividend they pay themselves or their shareholders and not the dividend they pay the community”. (The Times, 1 October 1984.)

This situation, which Mikardo complains about, exists after 17 years of Labour government during the past 40 years — a period long enough for them to have redeemed their original promise to abolish capitalism and to so transform social relationships that production would be carried on in the interests of the community.

The Labour Party did not carry this through because it was not their policy; instead they stood for tinkering with the capitalist system. Their failure to establish socialism has nothing to do with the betrayal of original principles. They kept faith with their nature as a party of capitalism and they left power with the system as firmly entrenched as ever.

Hands down

By the standards which count — meaning by the number of votes they attract or repel - the 1984 conference contest was a hands-down win for the Tories. The Labour Party were in their customary disarray and did nothing to dispel the popular image of them as subverting the gallant police effort to stand against savage pickets and to protect the freedom of the British workers to be exploited only when it pays the employers. The Liberals' votes on the issue of nuclear weapons gave them the appearance of a bunch of disorderly, if innocent. dupes of the Kremlin.

In contrast the Tories were on the offensive as the party who will defend to the last drop of our blood the freedom of the British ruling class to impose the capitalist rationale — no profit, no production. The bomb attack on Thatcher’s hotel served only to heighten the Tories’ heroic image. As the representatives flexed their knees and their wrists in the endless standing ovations, an important fact was ecstatically obscured. With 3½ million unemployed and an intensifying burden of misery for the workers, the Thatcher government is proving to be no more successful at running British capitalism than were their discredited opponents.

But of course the conferences are not meant to be much more than propaganda exercises. No one in their senses really expects a government to take any notice of what party activists get up to in their annual seaside beano. Capitalist political parties cannot operate in a properly democratic way: the demands of the system cannot allow open, full and informed participation in decisions. The conferences are all part of an elaborate, sordid game, in which the one effective rule is that the majority of the people are losers.

Editorial: Wage-slave blues (1984)

Editorial from the November 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nine-o’clock on a Monday morning, and the next five days yawn ahead like an endless chasm. Whether it is the toil of manual work, the drudgery of pen-pushing, or the desolate pointlessness of signing for the dole, the great majority do not find their lives thrilling or even satisfying. Why is this? Does the running of society have to mean a boring and second-rate existence for the vast majority and exclusive comfort and luxury for a small minority?

Why is it that for most of us the working week is something to get through, something we wait with baited breath to see finished and behind us . . . only to start the same process again, with just a day or two to recover in? It is because our productive lives are being subjugated to needs which are alien to ours. We do not live for our work, cherishing every creative moment of our co-operative efforts to produce and distribute wealth. Instead, we are forced by the most crude form of bribery to work for a living, to sell our abilities on the labour market for a price, called a wage or a salary. The entire world today is organised on the basis of property, and its accumulation by a small minority of shareholders or state bosses.

What does it mean to be in the working class? It means that you possess no property substantial enough to yield an unearned income to enable you to avoid seeking employment. Those who are not in the working class are able to live secure and comfortable lives on the backs of others by owning companies, shares, government bonds, land, finance-houses and so on. Their income, in the form of dividends, interest on loans and rent, represents the unpaid labour of the workers they employ, directly or indirectly. The owning minority are in no doubt about which class they belong to. The wages we are paid cover only part of the value of wealth we create. The surplus is grasped out of our control by the legitimised robber-class, under the protection of the state, and accumulated by that robber-class. This is how the richest one per cent in Britain today have come to possess more accumulated wealth than the poorest eighty per cent of the population put together.

Having said that we are paid for only part of the wealth we collectively produce and distribute, it might be suggested that the answer is to insist on being paid the full value of what we produce. This, however, would be a nonsensical proposition, for one simple reason. The capitalist system of society which prevails throughout the world at the moment is not based on “fair deals” of that sort. A wage is not offered as the price of the goods a worker might produce; it is the price of hiring that worker’s energies for a week, regardless of how much might then be produced. And it is the role of the employing class within capitalist society to try always to maximise the difference between the price at which they hire us and the amount of wealth which we produce for them. Faced with their determination to cling on to their precious profit margins in this way, there are two things which workers can do about these social parasites we are subsidising so heavily. First, we can use the power of trade union association as a bargaining weapon to prevent the bosses from depressing our standard of living as much as they would otherwise do. Second, and more importantly. we can use our organising ability (which cannot be taken from us), and the time we have managed to keep free from wage labour, to build up a movement which stands for running society on a different basis.

What must that different basis be? Complicated utopian schemes to try to make wages equal or to try to raise wages high enough to put every boss out of business are simply attempts to run capitalism along modified lines — and crackpot attempts at that — which capitalism will not be able to accommodate itself to. and which socialism is above. Socialism, when it is established, must be a democratic and worldwide society in which the wages and profits system has itself been abolished.

In place of selling our working capacity to the highest bidder in the labour market, we could freely co-operate to produce the things that society needs. The basis of production must be human needs and the direct, free use of the world’s resources by all the people of the world. The institution of wage and salary employment served a relevant function for a particular historical epoch, but is a transitory phase in human history. Now that technological advance would allow us to produce an abundance of the necessities of life for all, the rationing system of class division between owners and non-owners serves no useful purpose, but merely holds back human advance. Every scientific innovation, however useful it might appear to us, is having to be measured in the distorting scale of profitability. But before we can change all this and start to produce wealth purely for human use according to our self-determined needs, we must democratically dispossess the minority in whose interests production is currently organised.

Finally, then, what about that sinking feeling which is a weekly ritual for us within the present system? As soon as the productive resources of the world are owned in common by the whole human race and democratically controlled and administered there can at last be a true harmony of interests. If the work you do is for the benefit of the community as a whole and if you, a member of that community, have an unlimited opportunity to share in the benefits which you and others are helping to provide, then the most uplifting and exciting emotion known to us will be released in abundance: the reality of global unity and human solidarity. It is then that human history will begin.

Darwin and socialism (1984)

From the November 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

The viewpoint that discerns and identifies an historic linkage between Charles Darwin and Karl Marx in regard to their respective, earthshaking theories seems not to be obvious to scientists, generally, in our times. Most scientific people, to the extent that they do attempt analysis of our social system, are no more cognisant of the traditional Marxist critique than is the bulk of the population. When it comes to political science, their thinking is dominated by the ruling class approach to the extent of permitting their political views to influence, or colour, their research efforts. In any case, a century and a quarter after the publication of Darwin's Origin of the Species it would not be easy to find scientists, other than an occasional Marxist, who do see a connection between scientific evolution and scientific socialism.

This was not always the case and in the decades immediately following the publication of Darwin’s monumental work in 1859. there was frequent and heated debate among scientists over the question. For example in 1877, Ernest Haeckel, the famed German embryologist, delivered an eloquent address in which he defended and propagated Darwinism which was, at that time, under violent attack. A few days afterwards Virchow, the noted pathologist, assailed the Darwinian theory of organic evolution raising a terrible cry of alarm: “Darwinism leads directly to socialism".

The German Darwinians, headed by Haeckel and Oscar Schmidt, immediately protested, insisting that Darwinism is in direct, open and absolute opposition to socialism. In the words of Schmidt, writing in the Ausland of 27 November 1877

If the Socialists were prudent they would do their utmost to kill, by silent neglect, the theory of descent, for that theory most emphatically proclaims that the socialist ideas are impracticable.

And Haeckel wrote (in Les preuves du transformisme, Paris, 1879. p. 110 et seq):

. . . there is no scientific doctrine which proclaims more openly than the theory of descent that the equality of individuals, toward which socialism tends, is an impossibility; that this chimerical equality is in absolute contradiction with the necessary and, in fact, universal inequality of individuals . . .

In the ever popular misconception of Marxist goals. Haeckel portrayed socialism as a demand for “equal rights, equal duties, equal possessions and equal enjoyments". And having erected this straw man (one need not elaborate on the vast difference between the concept of equality in work and rewards on the one hand and a society based on from each according to one’s ability to each according to one’s needs, the societal goal of socialism, on the other) the scientist demolished it with an outpouring of words calculated to demonstrate that Darwin’s theory of descent proved that there can be no scientific validity to the “socialist goal" of equality in work or reward. In fact it proved, he argued. that the tendency of society is not even toward democracy — let alone socialism — that it can only be evolving in the direction of aristocracy!

But that was all argued out a long time ago and little if anything seems now to be said about a relationship between Darwinism and human societies. The Darwin theory has long since graduated to the status of an accepted fact by all but a minority of die-hard fundamentalists whose effect on the machinery of capitalist society is minimal at most. The capitalist class has long since accepted Natural Selection. To them, perhaps, it also provides a logical explanation for their own status; they, the "fittest", have survived the no-holds-barred struggle.

In point of fact, Darwinism has nothing to do with democracy, aristocracy, socialism, or any other sort of social system. The theory of Natural Selection, no doubt, was somewhat applicable to primitive humans but once they got organised into civilised societies (slavery, serfdom, capitalism) their survival depended more on human-made factors than natural. True, there is a ferocious competition among members of the same class — for profits or for jobs — as well as relentless contention between the classes (workers against capitalists) in capitalist society. But that is a by-product of this social order and will become non-existent in a society based on common ownership and free access to all wealth.

But aside from this factor, scientists for the most part have gone overboard on Natural Selection. As Darwin also pointed out, human beings have always been social animals with the propensity for mutual aid. At the end of Chapter 11 of The Descent of Man he wrote:

The small strength and speed of man, his want of natural weapons, etc are more than counterbalanced, firstly, by his intellectual powers, through which he has formed for himself weapons, tools, etc, though still remaining in a barbarous state, and. secondly by his social qualities which lead him to give and receive aid from his fellow-men. No country in the world abounds in a greater degree with dangerous beasts than Southern Africa; no country presents more fearful physical hardships than the Arctic regions; yet one of the puniest races, that of the Bushmen, maintains itself in Southern Africa. as do the dwarfed Esquimaux in the Arctic regions . . . (p.333, Modern Library ed.)

So much for what Haeckel had to say — especially on that “pitiless" struggle for existence that supposedly has always taken place among the human race. Even among the most primitive it was not that pitiless — according to Darwin and Mutual Aid naturalists such as Peter Kropotkin. Populations among the more primitive have always been small — whereas in civilised societies, despite the most horrible hardships, death-dealing implements and pollutants unimagined by primitives, populations have continued to multiply. Mutual aid does play an important role, even under advanced capitalism.

But what of the socialists and their reaction to Darwinism? Beginning with Marx himself, there was tremendous enthusiasm. Darwin’s book was published in the same year as Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. In the words of John Spargo of the old Socialist Party of America:

. . . Marx regarded it as a fortunate coincidence that his own book appeared in the same year as that of Darwin. He recognised at once the importance and merit of Darwin's work, and at once brought it to the attention of his fellow radicals at their meetings. Liebknecht has told us how for months the Marx circle spoke of nothing except the value of Darwin’s work. With great frankness Marx likened his own work in the sociological field to that of Darwin in the biological field, and he was always manifestly pleased when others made the comparison Once, in the late sixties, when it had become commonplace in Marxian circles. W. Harrison Riley, editor of the International Herald, made the now familiar comparison and Marx replied: "Nothing ever gives me greater pleasure than to have my name thus linked with Darwin’s. His wonderful work makes my own absolutely impregnable. Darwin may not know it, but he belongs to the Social Revolution”. (Karl Marx: His Life and Work, B. W Huebsche, NY. 1910. p 200)

It did not take long for Darwin to indicate that he was not anxious to be thought of as belonging to “the Social Revolution". Isaiah Berlin writes, in his Karl Marx, His Life and Environment:

(Marx) offered to dedicate his Capital to Darwin, for whom he had a greater intellectual admiration than for any other of his contemporaries. regarding him as having, by his theory of evolution and natural selection, done for the morphology of the natural sciences what he himself was striving to do for human history.

But Darwin was apparently not interested in being identified with a revolutionary socialist. He must have realised that his own book would give him more than enough troubles as it was, so:

(he) hastily declined the honour in a polite, cautiously phrased letter, saying that he was unhappily ignorant of economic science, but offered the author his good wishes in what he assumed to be their common end — the advancement of human knowledge. (A Galaxy Book, NY, Oxford University Press. 1959. p.232)

We should also have a brief look at what Engels had to say on the subject. In his Anti-Duhring, he devotes some eleven pages to a defence of Darwin against the attack by Herr Eugen Duhring, a German “reformer” of socialism:

The main reproach levelled against Darwin is that he transferred the Malthusian population theory from political economy to natural science, that he was held captive by the ideas of an animal breeder, that in his theory of the struggle for existence he pursued unscientific semi-poetry, and that the whole of Darwinism, after deducting what had been borrowed from Lamarck, is a piece of brutality against humanity. (Foreign Languages Publishing House. Moscow. 1954. p.97)

A little later Engels writes:

Now Darwin would not dream of saying that the origin of the idea of the struggle for existence is to be found in Malthus. He only says that his theory of the struggle for existence is the theory of Malthus applied to the animal and plant world as a whole. However great the blunder made by Darwin in accepting the Malthusian theory so naively and uncritically, nevertheless anyone can see at the first glance that no Malthusian spectacles arc required to perceive the struggle for existence in nature — the contradiction between the countless host of germs which nature so lavishly produces and the small number of those which ever reach maturity, a contradiction which in fact for the most part finds its solution in a struggle for existence — often of extreme cruelty . . . the struggle for existence can take place in nature, even without any Malthusian interpretation. For that matter, the organisms of nature also have their laws of population, which have been left practically uninvestigated, although their establishment would be of decisive importance for the theory of the evolution of species. But who was it that lent decisive impetus to work in this direction too? No other than Darwin, (page 99)

In retrospect one can understand the excitement of revolutionaries like Marx and Engels, in the latter half of the 19th Century, over a book such as Origin of the Species. The basic message of Darwinian evolution, they were certain, would sweep the world and with the spread of scientific information superstition would be forced into swift retreat. The superstition of religion had been, historically, a major pillar of capitalism. Origin of the Species knocked the very props from under it. And the general acceptance of biological evolution must, they thought, lead inexorably to an acceptance of social evolution and the principles of socialism.

To put it mildly, the pioneers of scientific socialism were over-optimistic. On the one hand, in these last two decades of the 20th Century, we have a battle still being waged between so-called Scientific Creationists and Evolutionists while religions such as Roman Catholicism and various Protestant denominations are able to teach Darwinian evolution in their Church-owned schools of higher learning with no apparent damage to the future stability of their adjoining temples of superstition. On the other hand, some nations of state capitalism such as Russia. China and North Korea, have demonstrated that they are able to carry on the basics of a capitalist economy with little more than a limited toleration of religion — or no apparent organised religion whatever.

So the general acceptance of Darwinism in modern biology, even in the “communist" and “socialist" worlds has added little to the basic political understanding of the workers.

Harmo.