Ideology and Revolution pt.2 (2017)

From the November 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Part 1

In the second part of this three-part series we look at the French Revolution

On the 4th April 1727 a leading French intellectual was present at the state funeral of Sir Isaac Newton in London. His name was Voltaire and what he found most impressive about the grand occasion was that although Newton was born a commoner his work had gained him such prestige as to warrant so high a national honour. Such a thing could never have happened in France at that time where only members of the nobility could hope to provoke such national recognition. This was a testament to the complete political domination of the English bourgeoisie who, after their revolution in the 1640s, had fought off an attempted counter revolution in 1688 and installed a constitutional monarch, an act of religious tolerance, free trade and even a ‘bill of rights’; something which the French middle class could only dream of. The new English ruling class embraced the symbiotic relationship of science and technology which was soon, through the immanent ‘industrial revolution’, to make them far wealthier than many of the petty European feudal monarchies. Isaac Newton became one of the first icons of the intellectual movement that turned its focus from religious faith to scientific reason in what we now call ‘The Enlightenment’. Newton presented society with a universal natural mechanism that had the potential to explain everything – including, in the hands of philosophers and political radicals, the perceived intellectual and moral progression of human cultural activity through history. It was to be the French intellectuals who were to transform this radical philosophy into a political ideology with which to fuel their own bourgeois revolution.

We have seen that it was the Protestant Reformation that enabled the English bourgeoisie to intellectually challenge the might of reactionary international Catholicism and which, in turn, informed the ideological propaganda used in their revolutionary struggle with their king. In France the Reformation was only ever partially successful and eventually almost entirely succumbed to the ‘counter reformation’. As a result the capitalist mode of production was continually handicapped by the very same feudal economic relationships that had so frustrated the English middle classes in the first part of the 17th century. This underlying class struggle was simmering and waiting to burst into revolution in France by the mid to late 18th century. As we have seen, it was the French intellectuals’ use of Enlightenment philosophy which was to reflect this remorseless economic and political tension. Foremost among these was Dennis Diderot’s Encyclopaedia which attempted the complete reformulation of knowledge through an enlightenment perspective. Together with writers such as Rousseau and Voltaire they began work on this monumental undertaking which was immediately recognised as a threat to the establishment by those who sought to defend the ‘Ancien Régime’. Another surprising element that served to weaken the paradigms of continental Catholicism came from a most unlikely source. Portugal had always been devout and, like its neighbour Spain, a bastion of reactionary autocracy. In 1755 a mighty earthquake hit its capital Lisbon destroying most of the city including many churches together with their congregations. A reciprocal tsunami augmented the devastation and death toll. Many believed this to be a breach of the covenant with the Christian god and served to seriously weaken belief in traditional religion and the social structures that went with it. All of these uncertainties, new intellectual paradigms and the manifest injustices of feudal autocracy were about to find their political expression as part of the explosion that was the French Revolution.

Action replay
It all started, as almost an action replay of the English revolution, when the French king was forced to call a parliament (Estates General) to deal with a financial crisis. France was near bankruptcy as a result, ironically, of Louis XVI helping to finance the American republican struggle against England. This parliament was composed of three ‘estates’: nobility, clergy and the commons. Although the deputies of the commons represented over 90 percent of the French people they only had a third of the votes, the other two thirds belonging to the nobility and clergy. This made it inevitable that they would be out-voted by the other two estates on most issues of contention. Upon being called to Versailles the members of the commons produced a book of grievances which addressed, together with many other problems, this profoundly anti-democratic arrangement. Unsurprisingly the other estates prevaricated and the commons lost patience and proclaimed itself as a National Assembly which represented the entire population of France and on its return to Versailles, some days later, to begin its work the delegates found themselves locked out of their former meeting place. Undeterred they proceeded to the nearest large interior space within the massive palace complex (a tennis court) where they took an oath not to separate until they had produced a political national constitution.

Thus began the revolution on 20 June 1789. Despite a provocative build-up of reactionary military forces the Assembly quickly got to work abolishing feudalism and producing a Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (again very reminiscent of the English parliament’s Petition of Right and then its revolutionary ‘Grand Remonstrance’ of some 150 years before). In Paris, meanwhile, the decades of oppression of the poor had exploded into violence which culminated in the storming of the Bastille and the subsequent arming of the ‘sans culottes’ (proto working class) who were to defend the revolution against both traitors within the country and then to fight the revolutionary wars against the other nations which sought to destroy the new regime. The French bourgeoisie originally, as had the English, wanted a constitutional monarchy rather than a Republic but when Louis, like Charles I, was proven a traitor he was executed. By now the Assembly had moved to Paris where it came under the influence of a radical republican group (the Jacobins) and their most prominent member Maximilien Robespierre who, arguably, took the revolution in a direction that the moderate members of the bourgeoisie had never intended and which certainly did not correspond with the values of the Enlightenment.

These radicals would have been unable to take control of the revolution without the confluence of a series of events; civil war, international war, inflation and sectarian rivalry all contributed to what we now call ‘The Terror’ and the reign of Madame La Guillotine. In some ways this goes to prove that the ideology of the Enlightenment was, at best, only an idealistic aspiration and, at worst, merely empty propaganda to motivate those who did the fighting. Certainly when Napoleon Bonaparte came to power during a coup d’état in 1799 and subsequently ‘exported’ the revolution to most of continental Europe it was seen eventually for what it really was – an empire of exploitation and plunder. Oliver Cromwell had preceded Napoleon in this by his violent imperial activities in Ireland and both individuals represented the realities of bourgeois rule, stripped of its high minded rhetoric.

Since the days of these capitalist revolutions many millions of workers have continued to kill and be killed in the name of high ideals such as liberty, fraternity and equality. This does not, of course, invalidate these ideals and the integrity of those like Rousseau and Diderot who believed in them but, like the radical Christian ideals of the Puritans, they captured the ‘zeitgeist’ of their time, and as such, were open to manipulation by the powerful. That power, in the end, derived not from ideals but from economic and political forces which were little understood at that time. Both the French and English revolutions had the same result – the coming to power of the capitalist class despite the use of seemingly opposite ideologies (philosophical reason as opposed to religious faith); dialectically speaking such ideas are taken up because they seem to contain, however vaguely understood, antithetical elements with regard to the prevailing paradigms that rationalise the existing system. Such ideas always find an audience because of the oppression and exploitation necessary to sustain any private property system. These ideas are catapulted into the political spotlight when economic and historical circumstances make revolutionary change inevitable. Socialists, with the invaluable help of Karl Marx, have understood this for over a hundred years but, ironically, this political insight also fell victim to the manipulation of a new ruling class – namely the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution. Does this imply that Marxism/socialism is merely just another form of idealism that can be manipulated and used as propaganda by power elites?

In part three we investigate the relationship between the revolutionary events in Russia in 1917 and the political theory of socialism and what both owed, if anything, to the Enlightenment.

Wez.

Part 3

Rear View: Corbynism or socialism? (2017)

The Rear View Column from the November 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Corbynism or socialism?

Real socialism has recently been the subject of two articles in mainstream media in as many weeks. Such occurrences are very rare even during elections in which socialists campaign, leaving us to agree with Oscar Wilde when he stated ‘the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about’. Neither thesun.co.uk (28 September) nor nationalreview.com (6 October) score top Marx for accuracy, but many of their readers will have been shocked to see excerpts from our twitter account – @OfficialSPGB – such as ‘outdated failing capitalism must be eradicated and replaced with socialism and forget about wanting to manage capitalism to make it nicer’. The Sun is as superficial as ever, but National Review’s Jonah Goldberg tries harder. His best effort at critique invokes John Rawls: ‘any attempt to create a “true socialist” society runs into the Iron Law of Oligarchy. Every organization requires some small group of people to make important decisions.’ But no leadership has emerged since our formation in 1904 and our structure is based on democratic accountability and delegated function. Our registered ‘leader’ for electoral purposes is no different from any other member – other than that he had the misfortune for his name to be drawn from a hat!

Premier league parasites

Revolutionary change can only come about as a result of, as Marx and Engels put it, ‘the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority’. Until then, capitalism with its wars and want will remain. Until then, leaders and social parasites will continue to parade their privilege. ‘The Sultan of Brunei celebrated his 50 years on the throne of the tiny oil-rich nation in typically understated style. Dressed in gold brocade and festooned with medals, the sultan entered the capital – with his wife Queen Saleha and their children – on a gilded chariot pulled by 50 members of staff. The five-kilometre procession through the streets of Bandar Seri Begawan was part of a month-long celebration of his golden jubilee… Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah Mu’izzaddin Waddaulah ibni Al-Marhum Sultan Haji Omar Ali Saifuddien Sa’adul Khairi Waddien Sultan and Yang Di-Pertuan of Brunei Darussalam is… the world’s wealthiest monarch and was once the world’s richest man, with a personal wealth estimated at £15 billion ($20bn) in 2008. He lives in an 1,788-room palace and owns one of the world’s most valuable collections of high-performance supercars’ (ibtimes.co.uk, 5 October). Two others playing in the same league, Russia’s dictator Putin and the Saudi king, met recently. ‘Asked about ties with Riyadh during a panel discussion at an international energy conference Wednesday, Putin responded that Moscow doesn’t see close US-Saudi relations as an obstacle for closer cooperation with the Saudis, and added that alliances tend to shift. “Is there anything in the world that stays unchanged?” Putin said. “I think that all things change”‘ (abcnews.go.co, 4 October). Which for the 99 percent means the more things change, the more they stay the same.

ICAN! UCAN’T!

Unsurprisingly, ‘NATO gave a chilly reception to nuclear disarmament group ICAN’s Nobel Peace Prize win Friday, saying efforts to end the atomic bomb must take into account the “realities” of global security.’ The reality is that nations compete over natural resources, trade routes and areas of domination. Such competition can and does result in war. ICAN, ‘the Geneva-based organisation, recognised by the Nobel committee for its decade-long campaign, was a key player in the adoption of a treaty symbolically banning nuclear weapons, signed by 122 countries at the UN in July. NATO, which has three of the world’s nuclear powers in its ranks, strongly criticised the treaty, saying it risked undermining the international response to North Korea’s atomic weapons programme. Jens Stoltenberg, the alliance’s secretary-general, welcomed “the attention given to the issue” of disarmament by the Nobel Committee and said NATO was committed to creating conditions for a world without nuclear weapons’ (en.prothom-alo.com, 6 October). UCAN’T expect peace in a capitalist world where war is endemic. Why focus on one type of weapon of war when the solution is to get rid of them all, and war itself by establishing socialism? ‘Our house is burning because it is made of inflammable materials—and people will keep dropping lighted matches. It is useless to tackle each fire as it breaks out. We must build ourselves a new house’ (A Message for Aldermaston Marchers, April 1960).

Proper Gander: Music For The Masses (2017)

The Proper Gander Column from the November 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

The most oppressive regimes of the last century didn’t only use their military strength to maintain a hold over people. As the documentary Tunes For Tyrants: Music and Power with Suzy Klein (BBC4) shows, both the Russian and German states used music to reinforce compliance. The series’ three episodes cover the years between the end of the First World War and the end of the second, when both states were moving towards totalitarianism, reminding us of the similarities between the extreme left and right wings of capitalism. They endorsed and encouraged particular styles of music, but the styles they suppressed reveal just as much about politics and culture during this turbulent era. In the programme, alongside archive footage and performances by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Klein talks with experts and people who played music at the time.

In the first years after the Russian Revolution, its state used music to try and engineer a cultured and united working class, such as through the appropriation of The Internationale as an anthem. Another approach was the founding in 1922 of the Persimfans orchestra to bring classical music to the populace. The orchestra played without a conductor to emphasise its collective approach and egalitarian principles, a method which Klein snippily compares to communism itself: ‘a good idea in theory but hard to achieve in practice’. Around the same time, avant-garde music was used to promote Russia as forward-thinking and experimental, such as the Lenin-sponsored tour by Leon Theremin of his eponymous electronic musical instrument, and composer Arseny Avraamov’s Symphony of Factory Sirens, which also incorporated car horns, machine guns and foghorns. Avraamov called for the destruction of all pianos, as they were a symbol of the old order, and because the Russian word for ‘grand piano’ also translates as ‘royal’. These lofty ideals quickly became corrupted as the Russian state solidified its power. In a more brutal way than Lenin, Stalin wanted music to be infused with the state’s values, and those outside this narrow vision risked being sent to the Gulag. The careers of composers like Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev hinged on whether their work met with Stalin’s approval. Theremin moved out of Russia before the end of the 1920s, while Avraamov fell out of favour with the elite and died in poverty.

In Germany of the 1930s, the Nazis also began controlling what music was considered acceptable. They devised the notion of ‘degenerate music’, that which was judged to ‘contaminate’ German ‘purity’ because it was influenced by other traditions. Jewish musicians were all branded ‘degenerate’, and the Jews and Music ABC directory blacklisted thousands of people, from prominent composers like Felix Mendelssohn and Gustav Mahler to part-time pianists. Other ‘degenerate music’ included the avant-garde and modernist, cabaret music (which had embraced satire, pacifism and gay rights in its lyrics) and jazz. This music provided an outlet for expression and a sense of community for those who played and appreciated it, these groups being targeted by the Nazis. So, the notion of ‘degenerate music’ is more about oppressing others than any abstract idea of ‘pure’ art. Perhaps surprisingly, music was permitted in concentration camps, as long as it helped subdue or control the prisoners. Camps had their own orchestras (Auschwitz had 12), and footage of the concerts they performed was used as propaganda to downplay the holocaust.

The classical music of which the Nazis approved gave them ‘a veneer of respectability’, according to Klein. Hitler admired Richard Wagner’s operas for conveying fantasies about nationalism, heroism and mythology, and ordered performances of them to be staged before rallies, and even as a show of strength as the Nazis were close to defeat. For Klein, the toxic spirit of the age is summed up by Carmina Burana by Carl Orff (1937), popular with both Nazis and later aftershave advertisers. For Klein, this tune has become a ‘cliché of macho apocalyptic glory’.

A state – especially a totalitarian one – needs its citizens to accept an ideology and situation that isn’t in their best interests. Trying to convince someone to do this through rational arguments isn’t likely to work, so states have capitalised on how music affects us on a non-rational, emotive level. Strident, passionate music like Carmina Burana and Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries is undoubtedly rousing to hear. As Professor Erik Levi says in the documentary, Wagner’s music can be overwhelming, bypassing thought to seduce the audience. The effect is amplified if music is part of a rally, with thousands of people marching in time, the scene dressed up with flags and banners. Such an imposing spectacle could sweep someone up, deafening them to the vile ideas behind. The same process applies to the patriotic anthems sung by organisations like the Hitler Youth and Pioneer Movement; a choir of people all singing the same song implies and forges unity. In Britain, music encouraged by the state reflected the stoicism and respectability seen as the values which would win the war; Vera Lynn’s songs were judged to be too ‘slushy in sentiment’ by the BBC. Radio programmes like Workers’ Playtime and Music While You Work were broadcast to and from factories, intended to boost morale and improve productivity among the workforce.

Although states no longer use music to manipulate to the extent they used to, the same kind of bombastic marching songs are still played at military parades, whether in Russia, America, North Korea or Britain. Music’s power to stir our emotions has instead largely shifted to the market, where it’s been commodified, whether through advertising jingles or Ed Sheeran albums. The working class has still kept a hold on music’s ability to reinforce a message, through protest songs, punk, rap, rave, even through the chants heard at football matches. As Tunes For Tyrants usefully explores, it’s the message, the ideology behind music that we should listen out for.

Mike Foster

Lenin the Democrat? (2017)

Book Review from the November 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Lenin the Dictator: An Intimate Portrait'. By Victor Sebestyen. (Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 2017)

Lars T. Lih in his 800 page 2009 work Lenin Rediscovered: ‘What Is to Be Done?’ in Context argues that Lenin ‘must be thought of as a Russian Social Democrat because his fundamental project was to help build a party in Russia that was as much like Western social-democratic parties as conditions allowed – and where conditions did not allow, to change them to the revolutionary overthrow of the Tsar.’ Victor Sebestyen’s new book is the antidote to this.

Sebestyen observes that Lenin’s first published work was a bitter attack on the Populists, and Lih admits that What Is to Be Done? though ‘enshrined … as the founding document of Bolshevism’ ‘was written to score off some very specific opponents’. Sebestyen comments that Lenin’s style of argument ‘was nearly always domineering, abusive, combative and often downright vicious’. He battered opponents into submission with the deliberate use of violent language which he acknowledged was ‘calculated to evoke hatred, aversion, contempt … not to convince, not to correct the mistakes of the opponent, but to destroy him, to wipe him and his organisation off the face of the earth.’ ‘Those who disagreed with [Lenin] were ‘scoundrels’, ‘philistines’, ‘cretins’, ‘filthy scum’, ‘whores’, ‘class traitors’, ‘silly old maids’, ‘windbags’ (one of his favourite epithets found frequently in his writings) and ‘blockheads’. In modern Leninist parlance this could be criticised as ‘sectarianism’.

Sebestyen claims that ‘after looking over Lenin’s [1903 resolution on party membership criteria, Martov] told him ‘but that’s dictatorship you’re proposing’. Lenin replied ‘yes, there’s no other way.’’ ‘Without doubt Lenin was the main cause of the bitterness. … He was constantly on the offensive, cajoling, hectoring and abusing delegates.’ ‘When Lenin at this time referred to the ‘enemy’ he meant his old friend Martov and the Mensheviks – ‘when you see a stinking heap you don’t have to touch it to know what it is. Your nose tells you it's shit and you pass by.’’

Although Lenin ‘never wore anything resembling a military uniform as so many dictators favoured’ he did argue that ‘those who do not prepare for armed uprising must be ruthlessly cast out … to the ranks of the enemies as traitors or cowards.’ And he once rebuked ‘how can you make a revolution without firing squads?’

Once in power Lenin censored the press and threatened to close down opposition newspapers. He ruled by decree setting up the Cheka secret police. The Soviet became a rubber stamp body and remained so.

Social Democrats fundamentally support free elections. Lenin did not and demonstrated this as soon as he was in a position to do so. The Bolsheviks failed to win a majority in the January 1918 elections to Russia’s first freely elected parliament, the Constituent Assembly ‘which made a nonsense of the claim they were supported by the masses’. ‘Lenin fired the neutral electoral commissioners… a 1918 demonstration for ‘All Power to the Assembly’ was fired upon by Red Guards.’ Thereafter Lenin then gave the orders to dissolve the Assembly.

Actions, as always, speak louder than words.

DJW

Cuba: No ‘New Man’ (2017)

From the November 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Seen in its most favourable light (and not just as a theory of political dictatorship that it is), Leninism can be seen as the view that the way to socialism is for a minority of socialists to seize power at the head of a discontented but non-socialist working class and then using this power to educate this majority into becoming socialists.

This accepts that socialism is a classless, stateless, wageless, moneyless society based on common ownership and with voluntary work and free access to goods and services, and also that such a society can only function with majority support and participation. (Leninists call it ‘communism’, confusingly reserving the word ‘socialism’ to describe the state-capitalist regimes they establish when they come to power.)

This view is based on the premise that, due to capitalist control of the idea-forming apparatus, a majority can never come to be socialists while capitalist rule lasts; only a minority can and therefore it is their duty to seize power to liberate the majority. Lenin did not invent this view; he merely followed a tradition that went back to Babeuf’s ‘Conspiracy of the Equals’ in the French Revolution.

One Leninist who took this seriously was Che Guevara who was a minister in the Cuban government in the early 1960s. He liked to quote from a review Lenin wrote in January 1923 of a chronicle of the Russian Revolution written by the non-Bolshevik Russian revolutionary Nikolai Sukhanov:

'You say that civilization is necessary for the building of socialism. Very good. But why could we not first create such prerequisites of civilization in our country by the expulsion of the landowners and the Russian capitalists, and then start moving toward socialism? Where, in what books, have you read that such variations of the customary historical sequence of events are impermissible or impossible? ' (MIA Link.)

Answer: in everything that Karl Marx wrote.

Guevara wanted Cuba to ‘start moving towards socialism’ straightaway by, among other things, creating ‘the new man’. This meant the 'revolutionary vanguard', as the government, educating people into becoming and behaving like socialists, in particular getting them to participate in the running and work of society on a voluntary basis because they realised this had to be done in the common interest. Hence he favoured ‘moral incentives’ over ‘material incentives’.

In Socialism and Man in Cuba Guevara said that creating 'the new man' had to involve moving away from commodity production (production for sale):

'The commodity is the economic cell of capitalist society. So long as it exists its effects will make themselves felt in the organization of production and, consequently, in consciousness.' (MIA Link). 

Castro took the same view, declaring in an interview with a French magazine in 1967:

‘I am against material incentives because I regard them as incompatible with socialism . . .  What we want is to demystify money, not rehabilitate it. We even intend to abolish it completely’ (Nouvel Observateur, 17 September 1967).

Quite apart from considerations of how voluntary for some workers’ ‘voluntary work’ really was, this was never going to succeed because people in Cuba were not living in socialist conditions. Socialism presupposes that plenty for all is being produced. People can’t be expected to behave in a socialist way in conditions of continuing scarcity, such as existed in Cuba. Marx and Engels pointed this out in a passage in The German Ideology which is the perfect answer to Lenin’s question (though Lenin was not aware of it since this work wasn’t published until 1932). Discussing ‘the alien relation between men and what they themselves produce’ when there is private property, they wrote:

'This “alienation” (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an “intolerable” power, ie. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity “propertyless,” and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced .'

Moral exhortations cannot overcome the economic reality of material scarcity. Scarcity means that people are obliged to try to get as much money as they can, not for its own sake but to get access to what they need to live. In other words, ‘material incentives’ will prevail.

There was a rather less appealing side to the attempt to create ‘the new man’ as it also involved the 'revolutionary vanguard' stopping people hearing further the capitalist-individualist ideas that had been inculcated in them before the revolution. In practice this meant suppressing these ideas and the parties and individuals (imprisoning some) deemed to be advocating them, including some of the original Cuban revolutionaries who thought that the revolution’s aim was political democracy rather than socialism (actually, this had been Castro’s view at the time too).

Castro and Guevara were of course well aware that socialism (or communism as they called it) was not possible in isolation on the island of Cuba, but they did believe that progress towards it could be made. Fifty years later, however, there is still production for sale, money still exists, and ‘material incentives’ prevail.

The fact is that Lenin could not have been more wrong in imagining that progress towards socialism could be made where its essential prerequisites did not exist, neither objective (a sufficient development of productive capacity) nor subjective (a working class with a sufficient degree of culture wanting and understanding socialism). All a socialist minority that seized power in the absence of these conditions could do would be to preside over the further development of capitalism in one form or another; which, granting that Castro and Guevara did want socialism, was what happened in Cuba. State capitalism was supposed to be a step on the way to socialism but that's where it stopped.

Adam Buick

50 Years Ago: Scarborough Follies (2017)

The 50 Years Ago column from the November 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Another year, another autumn, another Labour Party conference. We have, by now, got the message. In 1963, again at Scarborough, Labour heard Harold Wilson say that a better life was just around the corner, as soon as we had a Labour government to set the scientist free.

In 1964 they heard Wilson—then Prime Minister—assure them that, with Labour in power, better times were definitely on the way.

In 1965 Wilson was on the defensive, struggling to justify his government's incomes policy and what he called redeployment—not, he insisted, unemployment. All of this was, he said, a necessary preliminary to the better days which everyone knew lay ahead.

In 1966 it was an outright wage freeze, credit restrictions—in fact everything which under the Tories had been stigmatised as stop-go—which Wilson said must be endured before we could come into Labour's Promised Land.

This year it was the same old story. Better times are coming—in fact, Wilson can actually see the hoped-for improvements which prove to him that we are almost round the corner. But before that, there is a little matter of wage restriction, unemployment and cutting the unions down to size which must be gone through.

So it goes on, year after year.

Party conferences, as everyone now knows, have little meaning other than as exercises in public relations. This year the Labour leaders used their gathering to defend their records and, with one or two exceptions, they did it with diabolical skill.

The delegates accepted it. The wonder is that they never tire of hearing the same weary promises, the same cynical justification of broken pledges, the same old visions of prosperity just over the horizon.

Labour Party members, it is clear, are content that they will never arrive at the Promised Land. But surely even they must see that they are not even travelling hopefully?

(from Review, Socialist Standard, November 1967)

Death by Consultation (2017)

From the November 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Monday 2 October, 8.00am: 2,100 Monarch Airlines staff woke up to learn on BBC News that they had no job. Monarch had maintained complete secrecy until midnight on Sunday when the final rescue deadline expired with the Civil Aviation Authority and the company went into administration. Monarch destroyed thousands of holidays, and two thousand working lives, with zero notice and zero decency. But mass redundancies aren't always so brutal. Sometimes they are done on the sly.

Things seemed to be looking up recently in my area when a long-derelict piece of ground overgrown with scrubby weeds was invaded by a small army of diggers and 'dozers and men in hard hats and neat stacking portacabins. The recession was over, this hive of sudden activity seemed to say. Banks must be investing again. Capitalism is moving out of slump towards its boom phase.

As if to confirm the excitement, there was around the same time a flurry of mail through the door offering credit cards sweetened with zero-interest loan periods. What did it all mean? Where was all this new cash coming from?

But this isn't new cash, it's old cash that's been in hiding. Recessions aren't times of no money, they are times when the people who have money don't want to lend it. Idle money may not earn them anything, but with firms going bust every day the risk of not getting their money back is just too great. Nor is there any incentive to lend, because the central bank will have floored the interest rate in order to keep people spending and borrowing and thus keep the economy moving. But it's a Catch 22, because the same trick also means that nobody wants to lend.

In a recession businesses can't get loans so they go to the wall, sometimes taking whole supplier networks with them, while new businesses can't start up. To people on the street with nothing but fluff in their pockets and negative figures in their bank accounts, it will look as if there is no money anywhere, as if it's all mysteriously vanished into some cosmic black hole. Which in a way is true. The banks have sucked all the money out of the system and are sitting on huge piles of it, stashed away in their credit ledgers.

Eventually things change, if only because things can't stay that way forever. People with money need to lend almost as much as the rest of us need to breathe. They dare to become confident again, or at least their venality finally overcomes their caution. The economic lights turn from red to amber. The green light is coming, and engines start to rev.

Looking back on the start of the recession is like looking at an elephants' graveyard, a mass culling of under-financed and over-exposed businesses including the shock collapse of seemingly-invulnerable giants. In this late period one might still see the odd outlier like Monarch, but mostly it's a long tail of rasping last gasps drawn by small and medium businesses which had somehow hung on grimly under the radar and, cruelly, started to believe they were going to make it.

Death of a company

You don't hear about these small deaths because they don't reach the news. Their passing is marked by barely noticeable details. Boards go up, tombstone-like, across windows which yesterday were alive with deals and special offers. Workers in a car park manoeuvre large numbers of used office desks and other furniture into a removal van. A skip is piled high with rain-soaked office jumble: filing shelves, brochure containers, birthday cards and old Christmas decorations.

As in nature, businesses don't necessarily enjoy a serene passing. Smelling blood, the sharks close in, and there is a feeding frenzy of takeovers, asset-stripping and closures. It is a wonderful chance for those with money to pick up plant, equipment, patents, licences and customer databases, all at rock-bottom prices.

Cannibalising a company is not straightforward though, and buyers must be careful to step gingerly through the regulations, known as TUPE, which relate to takeovers. Specifically, you are not allowed to buy a company and immediately sack its workforce, because you will be successfully sued at a tribunal for unfair dismissal. Neither can you get around this by offering, or appearing to offer, similar employment in some distant city, as this will fall foul of the rules around constructive dismissal.

Instead, the clever thing to do is to buy the company and tell the nervous staff that you have no idea what you plan to do. You issue a 'Letter of Measures' which includes an innocuous clause suggesting that 'some redundancies' may not be ruled out. You then embark on a period of 'Consultation' with the staff in order, supposedly, to determine the best way forward for their company. You encourage them to open up honestly about systemic problems in the company and when they do, you are all ears and sympathy. You want to find solutions. You are here to help. If staff want to know what the future holds, you answer helplessly that nobody can predict how the Consultation will turn out. If staff are tempted to desert the company before you are ready to let them, you encourage them to stay and assure them that there is no reason to fear the worst. You beg them for the sake of everyone's future to maintain business confidentiality and not divulge any information to business associates, or even to their friends. You maintain an impenetrable air of fairness and open-handedness.

When the consultation period is over you can announce 100 percent redundancies, citing systemic problems and confident that you have followed TUPE procedures to the letter if not the spirit. The devastated staff know that they do not have a legal leg to stand on. However you are still not in the clear, because you now have to abide by Part IV, Chapter II of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992, which stipulates that you must represent your intention to close the business as a 'proposal' and allow a further minimum 30 days for more 'Consultation' with the staff. You duly do this, inviting the staff as per regulation to come forward with any alternative suggestions (e.g. not getting sacked) which they may be able to come up with. Of course you have no intention of seriously considering these suggestions and when they materialise, you destroy them comprehensively by any means necessary including using financial data which is confidential to the business and to which the staff have no access. The proposed closure is at this point a 'proposal' in name only, a fact evident to everybody but which you must continue to deny at every point. With no other recourse, the staff sit at their desks pretending to work and await the inevitable. When the staff fail to produce any further suggestions to avoid their fate, you can regretfully proceed with the closure. The staff have had every opportunity. Procedures have been followed. No chance of ACAS becoming involved.

Working lives trashed

When the bottom line demands it working lives get trashed, either brutally and all at once, or slyly and through a prolonged pantomime of consultations. Workers ought to understand this and some do but somehow many don't. Instead they insist on believing in decency and fair play, not realising that these are only found among the working class and in fairy tales but not in business or among the rich. First comes the hope, then the shock, then the bitterness. Too late comes the cynicism.

But the knife twist is worse than this, if one considers how the business came to fail in the first place. Like the captain of a ship who runs it aground or into an iceberg, the boss of a company may refuse to take good advice from their officers and crew. Such bosses, emotionally attached to their own authority and deeply distrustful of those around them, may refuse to delegate and attempt to micro-manage every part of the business until, exhausted and unable to tell good decision from bad, they make a final and fatal error. The 'wisdom of crowds' is not a concept understood by bosses. Democracy is anathema in business and reviled as 'mob rule'. So even when the enterprise is sinking the workers are kept in the dark for reasons of confidentiality, to maintain authority and to avoid early desertions. They are victims of capitalism's obsession with hierarchies, in which pecking orders matter more than rational decision-making and corporate status alone decides whether a worker has a voice.

So the ship goes down and the workers then discover, if they didn't know it already, that debt is an ocean it's easy to drown in. They flounder in this ocean, holding their families up and trying to hail passing boats, but the boats are all full or not looking in their direction. If a boat approaches with a spare seat, there's no question of being automatically hauled on board. Instead, the worker must go through the interview process. Why this boat, and not some other boat? What can you bring to this boat? Are your skills a match for what this boat needs? Why should we rescue you and not someone else? Describe a situation where you helped a boat row faster. Describe a problem involving boats which you solved. The worker concentrates hard on playing the game and giving the clever answers while trying to tread water and look cheerful. Nobody wants you when you're desperate.

And that is not even the final twist, which is that the boss has meanwhile got a handsome pay-out by the takeover company and an executive job on their board. When the captain of the Costa Concordia ran his ship aground in 2012 and fled before bothering to see his passengers safe, he got 16 years in jail. When similar things happen in business nobody thinks anything about it. It's nothing personal. It's just business.

Gradually the global recession lifts. New companies start up and new job opportunities will appear. Eventually a new generation of wage workers will also appear to fill these posts, brought up to aspire to better things than their parents had, but inevitably facing all the same groans and gripes and office politics that wage slavery engenders. And they will persist in the cruel delusion of their forebears, that if you work hard for a company, the company will work hard for you, and that if you defend capitalist society, that society will defend you. One would like to think that workers can learn from their mistakes, but some never recover from the experience of being scrapped like a rusty hulk, and sink into the murky depths of self-worthlessness and nihilism.

Some workers do get over it though. Maybe they talk to other people, maybe they just figure it out for themselves, but they understand where the real blame lies. Underneath the corporate courtesies and the glossy paintwork is a submarine class war that's as deep as it is dirty, a war that could not exist if all the oceans of power and money were drained right out of the world. Those workers know that the class war is being won today by the bosses because workers don't even realise they're in a fight. And they also know that doing nothing about the class war is the same as giving in.

That's why there are socialists in the world.

Paddy Shannon

Whatever Happened to 'The Viet Cong'? (2017)

From the November 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the 1960s leftwing demonstrators used to chant 'Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh' and 'Victory to the Vietcong'. We look at what sort of society emerged following their victory in 1976.

In 1956, during a brief relaxation of censorship, a Vietnamese literary journal published a story by Tran Duy entitled The Giants. The giants in the story are created by God to help mankind fight the devils, but they end up trampling and killing more people than devils. The allegory was readily deciphered: the giants were the 'communist' party leaders, while the devils were the hated French colonialists, recently defeated at Dien Bien Phu (1954).

The history of the 'communist' movement in Vietnam cannot be summarised in a short article, but the timeline will help the reader place events in context.

Top-down organisation

    

The Vietnamese 'communist' movement emerged from the struggle against French colonial rule as a top-down organisation. The leadership was a self-appointed and self-perpetuating group from the very start. The process of party formation began among Vietnamese emigrés in Canton – the French Sûreté (security police) made it too risky to place the central leadership inside the country. In 1925 Ho Chi Minh, backed by the Comintern, put together a group called the Vietnam Revolutionary Youth League, personally recruiting its members and deciding which of them should sit on its Central Committee (CC). In 1930 the League merged with other small groups to form the Indochinese Communist Party, later renamed the Vietnam Workers' Party or Lao Dong.

As with other vanguard parties of the Bolshevik type, the internal functioning of the Vietnamese 'communist' party has always been guided by the principle of 'democratic centralism'. Lower bodies are strictly subordinate to higher ones. Debate is allowed only until a definite policy is adopted, after which all members must support and implement that policy.

In practice, local party branches in Vietnam in the 1930s seem to have had considerable autonomy due to the difficulty of maintaining communication between them and the CC in China. However, once the leadership returned to Vietnam in 1945 control was tightened.

The activity of rank-and-file party members has almost always been confined to tasks assigned from above. On training courses they might be invited to raise objections to the policy of the leaders, but the purpose of this is merely to convince them that the leadership is right. Only during the brief thaws of 1956 and the late 1980s have they had greater freedom to criticize party policy.

At higher levels there has been freer discussion at certain periods, permitting the emergence of conflicting factions. (The most persistent though not the only important factional division has been that between supporters of a pro-China orientation and advocates of closer ties with European 'socialist' countries.) Such periods, however, alternate with others in which a narrow clique imposes rigid control. Thus the 'anti-revisionist' purge of the mid-1960s, in which hundreds of critical party and government officials and military officers were imprisoned without charge, inaugurated the 'rule of the two Le's' – Le Duan (general secretary) and Le Duc Tho (head of the CC's Organisation Department, in control of appointments, and negotiator at the Paris talks). This was just one of recurrent purges that frighten people and inhibit debate.

Relations with other political groups

The 'communist' party was not alone in fighting against French rule. There were also various 'bourgeois' nationalist parties, Trotskyist organisations and religious sects. At times the 'communists' judged it expedient to cooperate with this or that group. At other times they ruthlessly suppressed rivals who did not seem susceptible to their control, even resorting to assassinations and betrayal to the Sûreté (also a source of funds).  

Especially dramatic were relations between Stalinists and Trotskyists. In the early to mid-1930s the 'communists' in Saigon cooperated with local Trotskyists – a practice denounced by the Comintern in 1937 and Ho in 1939. After the Vietminh took power in Hanoi in 1945, Trotskyists were hunted down as 'traitors' and they were almost all killed.

A sole survivor, Ngo Van, escaped just in time to France, where he wrote a valuable memoir (In the Crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary, AK Press, 2010). His political views evolved in exile: he rejected Bolshevism and became a council communist.

The 'communists' again cooperated with other 'patriotic' forces in the fight against the Americans. Most members of the National Liberation Front (NLF) in the South were not 'communists' (the moniker 'Vietcong' – Vietnamese Communists – is misleading). After victory the NLF was suppressed (see: Truong Nhu Tang, A Vietcong Memoir: An Inside Account of the Vietnam War and Its Aftermath, Vintage Books, 1986). NLF veterans remained a disgruntled group in society. Taking advantage of the thaw of 1986, they set up a Club of Former Resistance Fighters, with a journal entitled Spirit of Resistance.    

   

Outer and inner power elites

Within the party we can identify an outer power elite of 150–200 members of the party's Central Committee (CC) and an inner power elite of 15–20 top leaders – members of the Politburo and occupants of important positions in the CC apparatus. The top leaders have chauffeur-driven cars and live in luxurious villas with guards, servants, and personal libraries. Other members of the CC have lesser though still substantial privileges, such as use of a special store in Hanoi stocked with goods not available to ordinary mortals and a spacious apartment (most people live in very crowded conditions).

There is also a graduated system of access to information. Certain periodicals are published specially for the power elite. A digest of the world press has a fairly wide circulation. Some documents like Politburo minutes, however, are restricted to the inner elite.

Ho Chi Minh

A few words on 'Uncle Ho'. He was the creator and symbol of Vietnamese 'communism' but he was not a dictator like Stalin or Mao, nor did he have any pretensions as a theorist. His power declined over time. In her novel The Zenith, Duong Thu Huong portrays the aging Ho as virtually a prisoner of his colleagues. Like Lenin, after death he was embalmed and placed on public display in a mausoleum in defiance of his expressed wishes (he wanted to be cremated, just as Lenin wanted to be buried). His last testament was published but in censored form (thus his call for a moratorium on the land tax was deleted).   

Doi moi

After Le Duan's death in 1986 the Vietnamese leaders embarked on a policy called doi moi, meaning 'renovation'. Initially, like Gorbachev's perestroika, this was envisaged as a process of political as well as economic reform. Later, wishing to avoid the fate of the Soviet elite, they switched to the Chinese strategy of encouraging private enterprise and foreign investment while consolidating the power structure.

As we have seen, the old state-capitalist system had its inequalities. However, the new mixed system of state and private capitalism has generated inequalities that are more extreme and, perhaps above all, more conspicuous. This has given rise to feelings of nostalgia for the old days. In particular, the period of the war against America, for all its hardships and suffering, is recalled as a time of sharing and mutual aid.

I was told of a man who was surprised one day to find on his doorstep someone who had served with him in the same unit. His pleasure turned into shame when his old comrade-in-arms told him that he was destitute and begged him to take him in as a servant. He said that he was not asking for money: he would be satisfied with food to eat and a roof over his head.

The more things change...

The Vietnamese Revolution certainly brought changes in the composition, structure and ideology of the ruling class. But what changes did it bring to working people?

Many changes were more apparent than real. Here are a couple of examples.

One of the main demands raised by 'communists' and others under French rule was abolition of the corvée – a feudal institution that made peasants toil without pay on public works for a certain number of days per year. Under the Vietminh the same practice continued under a new name – citizen labour service.

Again, after 'land reform' (1954–56) peasants no longer had to pay rent to a landlord for the land they tilled. But instead they had to pay a land tax to the state. And the amount of the land tax happened to be about the same as the rent previously paid to the landlord. Later, after the collectivisation of agriculture, the same surplus was extracted by the state from the collective farms.

As the proverb says: 'The more things change, the more they remain the same.'

The French colonialists and their American successors placed little value on the lives of the 'natives'. But the 'communist' leaders too placed little value on the lives of their people. Even if one accepts the dubious propositions that the country had to be reunited and that this could be achieved only by war, the goal could have been reached at a much lower price in blood. For instance, the 'Easter offensive' of 1972, which cost the lives of almost an entire cohort of poorly trained 16-year-old boys, served no rational strategic objective. It was already clear that the US was withdrawing – all that was needed was a little more patience.

Impoverished by decades of war and devastation, Vietnam now lies alongside Bangladesh on the bottom tier of the global economic hierarchy, with wage levels only one half of those now prevailing in China. Chased out at such vast cost, the 'imperialists' are welcomed back to exploit Vietnamese workers and resources as foreign investors.    

Stefan

VIETNAMESE 'COMMUNISM' TIMELINE

1880s French complete conquest of Indochina

1925 Ho Chi Minh sets up Vietnam Revolutionary Youth League (VRYL) in Canton

1930 VRYL merges with other groups to form Indochinese Communist Party (ICP)

1941 Ho creates Vietnam Independence League (Vietminh)

1945 Japan surrenders. Vietminh takes power in Hanoi. Ho proclaims Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). ICP officially disbands

1945–54 Resistance War Against France

1951 ICP reappears as Vietnam Workers' Party (Lao Dong)

1954 Geneva Agreement divides Vietnam into northern zone (DRV) and southern zone (Republic of Vietnam)

1954–56 'Land reform' in DRV

1959 Collectivisation of agriculture begins in DRV

1960 National Liberation Front (Vietcong) established in South

1960–75 Resistance War Against America

1969 Ho dies. Le Duan becomes general secretary of party Central Committee

1976 Country reunified as Socialist Republic of Vietnam

1977 Collectivisation of agriculture begins in South

1978 Vietnam invades Cambodia

1979 Border war with China

1986 Le Duan dies. Start of doi moi (renovation)

1988 De-collectivisation of agriculture legalized

Throw Away the Stick (2017)

From the November 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last month's headlines were dominated, to the surprise of many, by the revelation that a Hollywood producer was in the habit of using his position of power and influence to get aspiring young hopefuls to have sex with him.

This can't have been news to anyone but the naive. Theatre like everything else in capitalism has been reduced to a squalid money business where the rich exploit the efforts, and sometimes the bodies, of young people desperate for advancement and not rich enough to say no. Actors are workers and workers have to sell themselves as commodities on the labour market. That labour market is nearly always a buyer's market, and when the buyer is a man who has sex instead of scruples on the brain, it's not hard to grasp what is likely to happen.

Some of the online comments from readers of these news stories accused the women who had spoken up of being prostitutes, who had been willing to sleep their way to riches and were now hypocritically whingeing about it. Many of these comments were from women. The anger and bitterness behind such trolling is all too obvious. To poor people, there's no such thing as a rich victim. The fact that male actors can get ahead without supposedly resorting to prostitution didn't enter the debate.

What became plain, as the story grew, was how widespread the problem is. Women often experience harassment in some form, whether it's being whistled at, groped, or inappropriately chatted up. They generally keep silent because they feel powerless. Society generally keeps silent because it doesn't care. And this is just the everyday stuff. Underneath this culture of silence lies a nightmarish landscape which includes rape, domestic abuse and murder. Any woman living in this terrifying landscape is almost bound to think that the world is primarily defined by male power and dominance.

Historically there's no question that this has been true, and still is in many parts of the world where the hangover of the pre-capitalist past still hangs heaviest. In advanced capitalist countries the trend has been more towards political, legal and economic parity, partly so that employers can cherry-pick exploitable workers from the largest possible bowl. But these limited freedoms have been offset by an intensifying commodification of women through advertising, the media, and the film and music industry, a commodification now also turning its attention to men. We are not even human beings anymore, just products with a package and a price and a sell-by date.

If society is primarily patriarchal, as some think, then most men are doing astonishingly badly out of it. This is really because they, along with women, are ultimately in thrall to a higher power, a tiny fraction of people who own and control all of society and most of the world. What is decisively important about this power elite is not actually their gender at all but their property portfolio.

To socialists, it doesn't matter what colour or gender you are. What matters is that you are a worker. The politicisation of gender, like ethnicity, helps keep the working class divided and thus too weak to break out of its own misery. Capitalism is a master at instilling its oppressive and divisive structures at an early age. The task of revolutionaries is to identify and break those structures. And we can do it, so long as workers are willing to try to understand each other. Women have been speaking out, and must continue to do so in order to lift the veil of silence. For their part, men need to understand that ignoring women's subjective experience of patriarchy is the same as perpetuating it. Either you are fighting oppression or you are complicit in it. When a man suffers rage, helplessness and frustration, he is experiencing what it means to be a worker. But when he takes his rage out on a woman he is doing the bosses' dirty work for them and he is a class traitor. A class that wants to be free also has to know how to take responsibility. Socialism is not possible otherwise.

There is, incidentally, nothing in the rules of capitalism that forbids it from being gender-neutral. In a gender-neutral capitalism, workers would still be poor, overworked, exploited, powerless and bitter.  And capitalism would still be hell-bent on self-destruction through war and environmental damage. The identity of the oppressor can and has changed among and between cultures and over time. What hasn't changed, and what will never change in capitalism, is the ability of some to oppress others. This is one reason why socialists call for the abolition of the property-owning principle. Private ownership is a big stick, whoever wields it. If you don't want to be beaten, you need to throw away the stick.

Paddy Shannon

Cooking the Books: The Wages Trap (2017)

The Cooking the Books column from the November 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

In June we commented on a claim made by novelist Fay Weldon that women going out to work had halved the male wage (which she mistakenly blamed on feminism). We noted that, while this was a wild exaggeration, once married women going out to work became the norm this was bound to have some effect on male wages. Married women bringing in an income would mean that employers would no longer need to include in a man's wages an element to cover maintaining a wife at home.

Under the headline 'Single-earner families sliding into poverty as wages stagnate', the Times (10 July) reported on a study which lent some substance to this:

'The income of families with stay-at-home mothers is no higher than it was 15 years ago, with half now in relative poverty, new research reveals today. An analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that the incomes of two-earner families were 10 per cent higher than in 2002-03 but those where only the father worked had stagnated. It said that the discrepancy was due to the disproportionate increase in women's wages while men's wages had barely risen. Over the past 20 years earnings of working fathers have been growing at 0.3 per cent a year on average but mothers' earnings have grown by more than 2 per cent a year.'

Over this period, then, male wages, irrespective of whether the man's wife was working or not, stagnated. This suggests that the reason will have been that employers no longer needed to pay to maintain a wife as she was earning her own income. This would not come about by the male wage being directly reduced but by it not increasing as they otherwise would. With a wage-working wife the total family income goes up (though there are the extra costs of paying for child-minding) even if the part brought by the man doesn't. On the other hand, men – and their families – whose wife was, contrary to the norm, not working for a wage suffer. In fact, according to the study, had it not been for the subsidy to employers that tax credits represent then their standard of living would have actually fallen:

'Researchers said that the only reason single-earner family incomes had grown at all since the mid-1990s was that benefit and tax credit payments to this group had doubled in the same period. Without this the average earnings of a working father in a single-earner couple were 6 per cent lower in real terms than in 1994-95.'

This illustrates the same point that if workers get an income from some other source – for instance, because their wife is working or because the state is paying them something – then the employer is relieved of paying this element of the cost to workers of reproducing their labour-power. Women staying at home do of course work – quite a bit – but they are not bringing in an income. If they were paid for this work, as the 'Wages for Housework' campaigners want, this would have the same effect as married women getting a wage from an employer.

What capitalism giveth with one hand, it taketh away with the other.

Exhibition Review: Wyndham Lewis - Life, Art, War (2017)

Exhibition Review from the November 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Vorticism is sometimes seen as Britain’s only avant-garde art movement. It was founded in 1914 by Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957), who is now the subject of a sizeable retrospective at the Imperial War Museum North in Salford Quays, on until the end of the year.

The First World War inevitably limited the spread and impact of Vorticism, and Lewis himself fought in an artillery regiment before becoming an official war artist. After the war he produced a variety of art works, together with a series of books (novels, criticism, polemics), most long out of print. He seems to have been a contrarian with a rather prickly personality, and he disliked privileged cliques such as the Bloomsbury Set. He was vehemently against Bolshevism, and his experiences in WW1 made him very much opposed to war. Unfortunately, these considerations led him to some sympathies for Nazi Germany and to describing Hitler as ‘a man of peace’. He changed his mind on these matters after visiting Germany in 1937, but by that time he had already made himself rather unpopular in many cultural circles.

Many of Lewis’s paintings from WW1, however, contain significant and perceptive comments on the fighting. Drawings from 1918 show violence and death, with soldiers reduced to the status of machines. His 1919 picture ‘A Battery Shelled’ is an impressive work which depicts dehumanised figures running for cover as the shells rain down, while three more realistically-depicted men watch or simply ignore what is going on. This was considered too controversial to be an appropriate memorial painting, and it was passed from the Imperial War Museum to the Tate.

A Battery Shelled (1919)

‘The Surrender of Barcelona’ (1936) refers to the city being captured by Spanish forces in the fifteenth century, but surely relates to the Spanish Civil War as well. ‘Inferno’, dating from 1937, is a pessimistic presentation of corpses and the flames of hell, as Lewis combines his hatred of war with an expectation that another large conflagration is approaching.

The IWM publicity describes Lewis as ‘Britain’s original rebel artist’, and he did set up the short-lived Rebel Art Centre. Despite his  – to say the least – dubious political views, many of his paintings undermine the role of official war artist and reveal both the boredom and the horror of war.           

Paul Bennett

Long Time No Gods (2017)

Book Review from the November 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World'. By Tim Whitmarsh, (Faber & Faber £9.99)

The ancient Greeks and Romans believed not in god but in gods, and lots of them. There were gods of music, air, war, wine, love, the sea, and so on. But not everyone accepted the standard faith in gods, and there were advocates of atheism, discussed in this informative volume. There are many problems in interpreting the sources and coping with the chance nature of which texts have survived, but there clearly were people who not only questioned the existence of gods but indeed denied that they existed at all.

The gods of the Greeks had lots of human weaknesses, such as being sometimes stupid and certainly not omnipotent. They actually lived in this world, even if it was high up on a mountain, and those worshipped varied from place to place. There were no sacred texts, and priests just carried out sacrifices rather than making spiritual pronouncements. In the sixth century, Xenophanes pointed out that believers were just projecting human physical and behavioural characteristics onto the gods.

The classical period (fifth and fourth centuries BCE) saw many objections to blaming gods for human actions, and some saw human action as free from divine intervention. Protagoras (born in the early fifth century) said he could not be sure the gods existed at all, and Diagoras (who lived later in that century) may have been ‘the first person in history to self-identify in a positive way as an atheist’. This was the period when Athens rose to power, and heterodox religious beliefs came to be seen as a threat to the state’s foundations. The charges against Socrates may have included not recognising the city’s gods, though the sources are not clear on this.

In the Hellenistic era (fourth to first centuries BCE) there was religious worship of rulers such as Alexander. Then under the Roman Empire (from the first century BCE) there was claimed to be a divine mandate for Roman rule. A significant atheist ‘movement’ existed in the pre-christian Empire, and there were different gods worshipped in different locations. But in the fourth century CE Constantine provided financial support for christianity, and in 380 an imperial decree established it as the official imperial religion, which all subjects had to follow. Heresy now became treated as a crime against the state, and believing in a god other than the christian one was counted as atheism. Monotheism was far less tolerant than polytheism had been.

It is sometimes argued that atheism is a development of the last few centuries, but Whitmarsh shows that it is older than christianity or islam, and of a similar age to judaism. From a historical point of view, ‘what is anomalous is the global dominance of monotheistic religions and the resultant inability to acknowledge the existence of disbelievers.’

Paul Bennett