Letters: Crypto-Leninistic? (1970)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Crypto-Leninistic?

It is difficult to avoid the impression that the Socialist Party of Great Britain is Crypto-Leninistic when it claims that capitalism was necessary to build up the organization of production until it could be replaced by democratic control of society. If people are inadequate to develop their economy communally and co-operatively, then by what means does competence magically descend on them after elitist-controlled growth. It takes blindness to ignore the achievements in voluntary collectivization (free sharing of talents and resources) of the Spanish anarchists in the 1930’s and to disregard the potential of the Mahknovites in the Russian Revolution. Again on what grounds does the SPGB condemn the Bolshevik usurpations when it alleges that capitalism is necessary in primitive countries (see p.45 Russia 1917-1967). I am very disappointed in the Companion Parties (WSP. SPGB. et al). This lack of faith in the ability of the people to control their own destiny was certainly not shared by Rosa Luxemburg who is otherwise favourably regarded by the WSP. 1 regret having to be so critical and I hope this disagreement is based on a misunderstanding.

Yours for Socialism.

Roger Lee.

Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.A.

Reply: 

Roger Lee will be pleased to know that he has misunderstood us. When we say that the development of capitalism was necessary before Socialism could be established, we are thinking in world terms. By the end of the last century capitalism had performed this task of building up the material basis for Socialism. From then on it has been a reactionary system everywhere. We reject the view that the coming of capitalism to the backward countries now (or to backward Russia after 1917) is necessary before Socialism can be established.

When we wrote on page 45 of our pamphlet Russia 1917-1967: “That Russia had to follow the capitalist road and employ capitalist methods was inevitable”, we meant this to be understood in the context of the conditions then existing, i.e., that Russia was economically backward and that a majority of the workers both there and in other countries of the world did not want or understand Socialism. In fact we specially spelt this out on the previous page of the same pamphlet:

  . . . in the conditions that existed in Russia and the absence of a strong world socialist movement no other development was possible. Russia had to go through the stage of capitalism (emphasis added).

The land area of Russia and its people could have formed part of a world socialist community after 1917 had there been a majority of Socialists in the industrialised parts of the world. The brutal Bolshevik industrialisation of Russia was not historically necessary, whatever “crypto-Leninists" might say (if that is what they do say).

We are aware that throughout the history of capitalism there have been examples of workers (and peasants) organising themselves democratically to produce wealth. These however were not examples of Socialism but they do confirm that ordinary people can run society's affairs without a boss class — an argument we have always put forward.

Editorial Committee.

Remember Labour's record (1970)

From the October 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

During the general election Mr. Wilson said he was the lesser of the two evils (or the least of the three evils, as he later told Mr. Thorpe). Although this is no valid argument for voting Labour, Mr. Wilson was right on one point: neither Labour, nor the Tories, nor the Liberals are any good.

First let us recall just what were (to use Mr. Wilson's choice of terms) the “evils” of the present Labour government:

• Labour strengthened the immigration colour bar and, in keeping out Kenya Asians with British passports, put the nearest thing to a Race Law on the statute book.
• Labour, while hypocritically proclaiming their ultimate aim of abolishing all health charges, increased them all round, even bringing back the prescription charges they themselves abolished in 1965.
• Labour made provision for the rents of controlled tenants to be increased beyond even what “the wicked Tory Rent Act" allowed.
• Labour encouraged big business mergers and praised profit-making, while proclaiming that there must be more unemployed.
• Labour tried to restrain and freeze wages and salaries while encouraging prices to rise, in a deliberate bid to cut our living standards.
• Labour kept nuclear weapons and sent troops to protect capitalist interests in Malaysia and Aden. Labour supplied Nigeria with the arms to reconquer oil-producing Biafra.

In view of this black record it is not at all surprising that Labour chose to fight the election on the negative plea that at least they were not as bad as the Tories. After all they could no longer claim to stand for the brotherhood of man. They could no longer pose as the party trade unionists should support. They could not even claim to be the party of mere anti-capitalist reform (they have long ceased even pretending to be a socialist party — which of course they never were). In words as well as deeds Labour was, and still is, clearly an ordinary capitalist party. It is Tweedledum to the Tories’ Tweedledee.

There is a good reason for this. The “lesser evil” argument is invalid because it assumes that what a government does depends on the good or bad intentions act, and their priorities, is the workings of the capitalist system. Capitalism is based on the concentration of wealth in the hands of a privileged few. Under it production is carried on for profit. The world is divided into a number of capitalist states (including Russia and China) all of which are competing against each other to sell their goods on the world market at a profit. How successful a state is in this is what of the leaders of the party in power. In fact what determines how governments limits its government’s actions. This is why it does not matter which party forms the government; in the end all governments are forced by economic circumstances to pursue basically similar policies. It is because the Labour Party accepts capitalism that it has become so unlike the Conservative Party.

Labour was forced to do the things we have listed, not because they are incompetent or insincere or weak-willed, but because they undertook to govern capitalism and capitalism is a class system that can only work for those who live off profits, and never for those who work for wages. Any party, as the present Labour government’s record confirms, which takes on the government of capitalism is bound to act against wage and salary earners.

The Labour Party, which set out to gradually change capitalism, has instead itself been gradually changed so that it is now little different from the Tories, the traditional rich man’s party. Judged even by its own standards, the Labour Party has been a complete and utter failure.

Adam Buick

A correction (1970)

From the October 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Malthus and overpopulation

There has always been some confusion about what Malthus thought about the possibility of over-population, even in his lifetime. It arose partly because he used ambiguous phrases and partly because after the first edition of his book on population, he shifted his ground. By the time he reached the third edition his considered view was that overpopulation could never happen because it is always prevented. He wrote:

  For undoubtedly, as long as this continues to be the law of his (man’s) nature, what arc here called the natural checks cannot possibly fail of being effectual. (Appendix to Third Edition and page 488 in Eighth Edition).

In his view there was in an average year never any appreciable surplus of food and as population, if unchecked, always increases faster than food supply the checks on population operate immediately. So there never could be “too many people on the earth” as we misleadingly suggested he held in the August Socialist Standard.

When he wrote his first Essay on the Principle of Population his aim was to show that the ideas of Condorcet, Godwin and others about the perfectibility of society were unsound because population is and must always be held in check by means which produce vice and misery (war, poverty, pestilence, etc.) Faced with the argument that population could also be held in check by abstention from marriage or postponement of marriage he had to contend that this too leads to vice and constitutes misery.

In his second edition he abandoned the latter argument and admitted that “moral restraint” does not lead to vice and misery. Having to find another case against Condorcet and Godwin he now maintained that such “moral restraint" is possible only in a society based on private property and the incentive of “individual interest”. Therefore it could not operate in an anarchist or communist society.

By this time he had largely lost his interest in Godwin and was more interested in population laws themselves. He was forced to admit that food supply could never increase as fast as unchecked population but in face of all the evidence he continued to maintain his general proposition that population is held in check.

Editorial Committee.

The case for industrial unions (1970)

Book Review from the October 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

British Trade Unions and the Problem of Change, by Will Paynter. (George Allen & Unwin. 16s.)

In the case of trade union development the unions have taken many forms—craft and grade unions, general unions of “unskilled” workers, local and national unions, local federations (Trades Councils), industrial unions, and so on to the international federations of “Trades Union Congresses" and the international trade secretariats of unions in the same trade.

Alongside these practical adaptations to the needs of the workers and to changes in the organisation of industry there has been a continuous flow of ideas propagated by groups of enthusiasts designed to harness the unions to wider aims going far beyond wages and working conditions; from the short-lived Grand National Consolidated Trades Union of the eighteen thirties, to the IWW the One Big Union Movement and Syndicalism.

When they wrote their History of Trade Unionism over fifty years ago, the Webbs hoped and believed that the Unions were moving towards the idea of one union for each industry, both on grounds of greater effectiveness and in pursuit of the Webb’s doctrine of workers’ control. Will Paynter, former member of the Communist Party and General Secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers and now a member of the Commission on Industrial Relations, set up by the Wilson Government, carries on from the Webbs. He presents an argued case for the Unions to remodel themselves on industrial lines in order to meet the growing concentration of capitalist industry and what he believes to be the permanent tendency of governments to intervene in wage fixing in the form of income policies and possible changes in Trade Union law. He supports his ease with much evidence of the harm resulting from the fragmentation of British trade unions, and from inter-union rivalries.

The Webbs hoped that one Union for each industry would emerge from amalgamations but in fact very little progress has been made since they wrote. The amalgamation have indeed taken place; in 1900 there were 1244 separate trade unions, now reduced to about 500, while T.U.C. affiliations have dropped from 184 with a membership of a million and a quarter to 155 unions with a membership of 9 millions. But the biggest growth has been in the conglomerate unions such as Transport & General Workers, the General and Municipal Workers and others with membership spread over numerous industries, with the result that from the standpoint of industrial unionism the position is as far as ever from what the Webbs expected. The TUC has on many occasions studied the problem but has always shied away from the task of trying to compel its affiliates to remodel themselves, knowing well that it cannot hope to compel the biggest unions to give up members. The TUC has also stressed the practical difficulty of defining what is an industry.

There are of course examples from other countries of what can be done. The Swedish Trade Union Confederation manages with only 37 affiliated National Unions and in Germany, where the trade union movement was rebuilt from scratch after the second world war, the Trade Union Federation has only 16 unions to cover the whole of industry.

Paynter accepts that what he advocates would be possible only if the TUC General Council acquired controlling authority over the Unions, something on the lines of the Swedish model which makes the central body the effective one for negotiating with the employers’ central organisation; at present the British TUC has no such powers.

What Paynter advocates comes up against two major problems. The first is that if trade unions are to be democratically controlled by their members, it is the members who have to be convinced that it is in their interest to adopt a new industry- based structure with effective authority handed over to the TUC, i.e. to a body ever more remote than their own union executives and officials.

The second is that any idea of trade unions pursuing wider social aims is limited by the fact that the great majority of members have, as yet, no revolutionary outlook embracing a complete change in the structure of society.

Paynter warns against what he thinks is another possibility, that the Unions, through close involvement with the employers and the government, may find themselves more or less government controlled, with, as its ultimate end, the corporate state of Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany, and Franco’s Spain. (For some reason he does not mention Russia, where the “unions” are also in effect government agencies.)

Which brings us to the interesting question of Paynter’s own outlook. He makes many references to the class-struggle basis of trade unions, and the “socialist” aims of himself and some unions, and he chides "left” trade union leaders who are die-hards in their resistance to change. Yet he confines his proposals to “unionism under capitalist conditions in Britain”, though in the same context he writes of the purpose of trade unions applying “equally in a capitalist or a socialist society”. What he really means when he uses the term “socialism” is nationalisation, or state capitalism as in the nationalised industries. He supports the Labour Party.

He admits that coal nationalisation has made little difference to the miners:

  “The relations between management and worker remained the same, the union still had to fight hard to get improvements in wages and conditions and little in the daily lives of the men reflected the change that had taken place.”

He admits too that nationalised industries are “expected to operate as commercial undertakings, generally on strictly business principles characteristic of capitalism”.

He is however candid enough to confess that he was one of the people who understood so little about what was going on as to display “a naive and immature judgement” at the time the mines were nationalised. He writes:

  I remember the morning of January 1st 1947. the first day of operations with nationalised mines — standing on the top of a train of coal at one of the collieries. I served as a union agent, making an enthusiastic speech about ‘the dawn of a new era’, of the significance of the day being one where the ‘workers were moving forward to the control of their own destinies’, and that we were at the beginning of the process where capitalism would be replaced by Socialism.

The Communist Party now has no time for Paynter but it is interesting to see that at a time when he was one of their trusted leaders he had no more comprehension of what capitalism and Socialism are all about than he has now.

Edgar Hardcastle

Letters: “Peacefully if possible, violently if necessary” . . . (1970)

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

“Peacefully if possible, violently if necessary”

Dear Sir.

‘Peacefully if possible, violently if necessary’. This was quoted in the July issue of the Socialist Standard as The Socialist Party of Great Britain's viewpoint on the overthrow of the capitalist system (Debate with IS Group). In the same issue the Standard also makes its readers aware of the logical thought that Socialism could not be introduced, nor indeed function properly, unless the majority understood it to be the obvious method of organising society in absolute equality and freedom (About Ourselves). It is to this end—opening the eyes of the majority—that the SPGB surely works? How then could the SPGB actively ever work forward into a situation that would give rise to violence? It obviously knows that men who are forced to comply with an imposed system, not understanding that system, are of no value to that society, and are not helped or liberated themselves.

May we then see a published affirmation that the SPGB docs not agitate for that brand of struggle that requires violence? Or otherwise an explanation of that phrase which must grate on so many: ‘violently if necessary'.

R. Molony.

Bridport, Dorset.

Reply: 

“Peacefully if possible, violently if necessary” only applies when once the vast majority of society are already in favour of the establishment of Socialism. The Socialist Party of Great Britain has always said that Socialism cannot be established unless and until it has majority support and has always emphatically rejected minority violence. We are actively working to avoid violence by seeking to persuade in an open, democratic and peaceful manner a majority of the merits of Socialism.

The socialist revolution will be essentially peaceful precisely because it will be the act of a conscious majority. Unfortunately, whether isolated incidents involving violence may occur does not depend on the majority, but on the anti-socialist minority.

Whether a minority of anti-socialists, faced with an overwhelming democratic decision in favour of the establishment of Socialism, would dare to take up arms in a futile gesture against the Socialist majority is very much open to question. But if they do, the Socialist majority must have a policy for dealing with them. We think it reasonable that steps should be taken to restrain them, even to the extent of using actual physical violence if need be. After all it will be they who began the violence and acted in an anti-democratic way. Not to act against them would be to allow a few fanatics to hold up the establishment of Socialism.

Editorial Committee

" . . . false and sterile position."

The April issue of the Socialist Standard throws an interesting light on the theory of state capitalism as supported by the Socialist Party of Great Britain and also as supported by the leadership and majority of the International Socialism group.

The concept of slate capitalism as put forward by the Socialist Party of Great Britain is based on essentially contradictory premises. The article, “Just a Russian Revolutionary”, shows this. You, in contrast to Menshevism, admit that the Russian capitalist class was incapable of carrying out its bourgeois democratic tasks. This would lead one to conclude, in accordance with the theory of Permanent Revolution, that the working class would have to carry out the tasks of the bourgeoisie as well as creating a socialist state. Instead you are forced to say that the intelligentsia is a class, which could take state power and institute a bourgeois revolution! The intelligentsia is not a class per se, having no specific relationship with the means of production. It generally forms part of the petit-bourgeoisie, a class which, due to its peculiar economic position, tends to vacillate between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. As an intermediate class, it cannot exist independently in capitalist society and thus cannot take state power.

To add to this confusion, the intelligentsia also became a bourgeois class when it assumed power and ruled over a “capitalist state” in Russia. They managed to do this, despite the fact that the Russian capitalists “were dependent both on Tsarism and on foreign investors”, both of which would have liked to crush Lenin's “state capitalism”!

In the article on IS's position on the Soviet Union, you correctly state that IS failed to see all the implications of the state capitalist theory. Yet for all its faults (and I accept many of your criticisms but draw different conclusions) IS’s concept comes a hundred times closer to the correct interpretation of the Russian Revolution than the Socialist Party of Great Britain’s false and sterile position.

Bruce Robinson.

London, N.W.1.

Reply: 

We did not say that “the intelligentsia” were a class; we said they were “a social group peculiar to the Russia of that time”. Intelligentsia is in fact a Russian word and “the intelligentsia of diverse ranks,” composed of professional people of non-noble origin working mainly for the government, was one of the legal orders into which Tsarist society was divided, the others being nobility, clergy, merchants and peasants. This social group — or feudal order, if you like — is not at all the same as those who in modern capitalist society are loosely called “intellectuals”. Those employed for a wage or salary to do mainly intellectual work today are members of the working class as much as those employed in factories or down coal mines.

The Russian revolutionary intelligentsia were inspired by the ideals of the French bourgeois revolution. They wished to free the Russian “nation” from the yoke of Tsarism and to establish a democratic, and even a “socialist”, republic. These revolutionists knew that they could not overthrow Tsarism on their own; they knew their revolution needed a mass basis. At first they looked to the peasants. Then, as the development of capitalism in Russia produced a class of wage earners, they turned to the working class. Most of the Russian Social Democrats, and especially the Bolsheviks, shared the assumption of the peasant-oriented Narodniks that they, the revolutionary intelligentsia, were to be the general staff of the coming Russian revolution with the workers and/or the peasants as the rank and file.

Bolshevism — with its theory of the vanguard party and of the inability of the working class to evolve beyond reformist ideas — was an adapting of the Russian revolutionary tradition to the conditions created by early capitalist development in Russia.

Everywhere in the early stages of capitalism the workers incline towards blind violent revolt. It is a sign of their immaturity. It was Lenin’s genius as a Russian revolutionary, helped by some understanding of social forces he had gained from Marxism, to realise that this revolt could be harnessed to overthrow the Tsar, and to establish a democratic republic (the Bolsheviks' aim till 1917). In contrast to Menshevism and correctly, Lenin realised that Russia's bourgeois revolution would have to be carried through without the bourgeoisie.

The Bolshevik military coup of November 1917 was not a working class or socialist revolution (as IS, whose views on this Bruce Robinson commends, claim). It was essentially a stage in the revolution that cleared away feudal obstacles to the development of an economic system in Russia based on production for profit, money, the wages system and the accumulation of capital — Russia's capitalist revolution.

Once in power the Bolsheviks had no choice but to develop capitalism since (given that the rest of the world was staying capitalist) this was the only way forward for Russia. Over time the top members of the Bolshevik party and their hangers-on (including those recruited from the working class and the peasantry) gained a solid privileged position on the basis of exploiting wage-labour through their State-run industries and became a definite Russian capitalist class.

Editorial Committee.

Need pollution be a threat? (1970)

From the October 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Despite the overwhelming evidence for man’s ability to produce an abundance of the means of life, including food, there is growing evidence that if man continues to ruthlessly plunder his environment in the way he has done over the last hundred years or so then the gloomy predictions of the ‘miserable parson’ Malthus may become true. Rivers, oceans, the atmosphere and the land may steadily become less productive as the result of the irrational drive to accumulate wealth on the part of a minority.

We would be committing a Malthusian error ourselves, however, if we claim that this is an inevitable process. Capitalism is nothing if it is not in ovatory and it can and will attempt to solve the worst of the pollution problems, especially if they endanger the growth of capital accumulation generally. Neither should we neglect the effects of the growth of movements supporting conservation. Once movements and institutions of this kind are in being they acquire a momentum of their own and justify their existence by forcing politicians and industrialists to change their policies even at the expense of profits.

The extent of their success will depend partly upon the growth of such movements in various parts of the world and partly upon the degree to which the aims of the conservationists will coincide with the imperative need to accumulate capital. It could well be that the competitiveness of industrial nations in the future will depend upon their ability to control pollution.

The conservationists themselves have produced some interesting and important works on pollution in the modern world. In his Reith Lectures Dr. Frank Fraser Darling gives some telling examples of the effects of the indiscriminate use of modern technology on our environment. He makes a serious blunder, however, in blaming population growth for this indiscriminate, criminal mis-use of technology :

  Population and pollution are the two great problems of our age, and pollution is a function of population increase, though it need not necessarily be so. (The Listener, 27 November 1969).

What he is saying is that in order to feed the extra millions we have to continually develop technology in the form of fertilisers, pesticides, insecticides and agricultural machinery, all of which will pollute the atmosphere in one form or another.

If we examine his analysis we can quite easily see the fallacy of his argument. Is it true to say that technology is continually advancing in response to increasing population? Technology advances and has a far greater polluting effect in advanced industrial countries where output is increasing at a far greater rate than population. On the other hand, areas like India and Latin America have tremendous population problems and technology is barely keeping pace with the growth of population, and pollution, as a side-effect of technology, is not serious.

It would be unfair to dismiss Dr. Darling’s arguments on this subject however because on several occasions he comes close to identifying what should be at the core of his argument:

  “The economic factor is enormously powerful, setting firm against firm in cutting down production costs and caring little about disposal of wastes. Country is set against country in getting the world markets, so the materialist’s creed is that once more industry' must not be handicapped by idealistic policies of pollution control.” (The Listener 13 November 1969).

It is not the materialist creed that is at fault; but the way humans are related to each other compel them to adopt ‘materialistic’ and inhuman attitudes.

He also realises that it is possible to organise ourselves so that the world becomes a fit place to live in through the intelligent use of technology:

  “There are examples of some correction through the advance of technology, for do remember that if the will of the people is ultimately that the environment of man shall be clean and decent, it will be technology that will be the handmaiden in achieving it.” (The Listener 27 November 1969).

It is a great pity that people like Dr. Darling do not realise that before the environment of man can become clean and decent a tremendous transformation in human organisations and institutions is necessary and that the main arguments he puts forward are holding up this transformation by offering false solutions to the wrong problems.

L. H.

The Marxist view of Russia (1970)

From the October 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Those who understand the Marxian theory of social development have no illusions about Russia. Even in 1918 it was obvious that Socialism, as a democratic classless society, could not be set up there. Economically, Russia was too backward. Politically, the mass of the people were either ignorant of or opposed to Socialism. In other words, Russia was not ripe for Socialism. Marx had concluded that it was not possible for countries to skip the necessary stages of their social development by “bold leaps or legal enactments”. The Bolshevik bid to do this, to avoid capitalism by leaping from backward Tsarism straight into Socialism by means of a dictatorship, was doomed to fail and led not to Socialism but to a brutal state capitalism in which the former professional revolutionaries turned into a new privileged and exploiting class. Russia has got nothing to do with Socialism or Marxism, though of course a Marxist analysis can be made of the class society there.

Many from Lenin to Mao and Guevara do stand for minority insurrection leading to minority rule and this is accepted by many, supporters and opponents alike, as “Marxism”. But this was not Marx’s own view of the socialist revolution. He held that Socialism could only be set up when the immense majority of workers wanted it. This socialist majority should win political power (through the ballot-box where possible) and use it to carry out the social revolution. It is true that a few times Marx did refer to the “dictatorship of the proletariat” but it is obvious from the contexts that this was merely another way of saying “rule of the workers” which Marx insisted could only be based on democracy. Lenin is the man responsible for twisting this phrase to mean dictatorship over the proletariat for that is what his “vanguard party” set up in Russia.

50 Years Ago: Distribution in Socialist Society (1970)

The 50 Years Ago column from the October 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Question and Answer

Dear Sir,

Will you kindly supply me with an answer to the following question?

In a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control and distributing wealth should the remuneration of each member of society be determined by the social labour time (accepting skilled labour as a multiple of unskilled labour) given in the service of the community, or should the total social product be equally divided among all the members of the community?
Hoping you will find room to reply to this (to me) most important question.

I remain

Yours, 

L. Thompson.

Reply.
Under Socialism, neither of the methods of ‘remuneration’ given by Mr. Thompson would prevail. The immense powers of production existing today would, if socially owned, provide plenty for all. When Socialism is established those powers will have reached a much higher degree of proficiency, and the best method of distribution will be to allow each as much as he or she desires of the social products. Each would contribute to the social production according to his capacity, and it would be a waste of time and energy to measure out what each should have. Today. for illustration, many municipalities supply water to their citizens on a ‘rate’ and find it more economical to let them take what they require for domestic purposes than to charge accordingly to quantity used.

Editorial Committee. 

[Socialist Standard, October 1920].

Are there too many houses? (1970)

From the October 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

They are now trying to tell us that there will be too many houses by 1973. Listen to this extraordinary exchange that took place in the House of Commons last March under the Labour government:

Mr. Rossi asked the Minister of Housing and Local Government what is his latest estimate of the number of surplus houses which will be available in 1973.
Mr. Greenwood: The overall numerical surplus of houses over households in 1973 is still expected to be of the order of 1 million, but I cannot stress too emphatically that this surplus will not be evenly spread throughout the country and that shortages and bad housing, as I have repeatedly said, will persist in some areas. (Hansard, 3 March 1970).

One million too many houses by 1973! Can they be serious when there are now a few million people living in houses even the government admits are unfit?

What the Ministry experts have done is to compare trends in “potential” demand for housing with trends in housebuilding capacity. Under capitalism this is a pretty pointless exercise since what decides how many houses are actually built is not “potential” demand (what people need) but “effective” demand (what they can afford). The only way of measuring whether there are too many houses on the market is to compare supply and demand; a “surplus” would arise if there were more houses for sale or rent than could be sold or let profitably. As the Lloyds Bank Review (April 1970) puts it:

 a ‘real’ surplus of houses can co-exist with hundreds of thousands of people either without homes or living in inadequate dwellings, if the price of the surplus accommodation is too expensive for it to clear itself.

In practice what would happen is that, anticipating such a situation, building firms would cut back on the number of houses they were going to build. The usual capitalist absurdity of curtailing production despite people's needs would again arise. Indeed stockbrokers are already predicting this and warning capitalists not to invest in house-building companies since profit prospects there are bad. For instance, early in 1968 Cazenove and Co. commented:

  The outlook for house building is particularly serious with the indication that there will be a genuine surplus of houses by 1973. The indicated annual requirement of new dwellings by then is put at only 270,000, as compared to the 400,000 expected to be built this year. These projections may be over-pessimistic, but it is evident that the house building industry is one without growth prospects.

One of the inevitable consequences of production for sale is that output goes up and down in accordance with changing market conditions. In some industries, like brickmaking, these cycles are fairly short. In house-building, because of the existence of old houses, the cycle is very much longer. The last major depression in house-building was in the 1930’s; the next one is due, the experts guess, in the 1970’s. No doubt those who think capitalism can be reformed to serve human interests will be bringing forward all sorts of futile proposals as to how “accommodation can be made available to poorer people at a price they can afford to pay” (Lloyds Bank Review). Will they never learn?

Adam Buick

The emptiness of self-determination (1970)

From the October 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists do not support “Self-Determination for Ireland”. Insofar as this word has any meaning it runs counter to the socialist view that the nation is a capitalist political institution. The whole idea underlying nationalism — that all the people of a particular nation (however defined, and that’s another problem) have some common interest — challenges the socialist analysis which says that the workers have no country and that the “national interest” is a fraud and a trick designed to get them to co-operate on the political field with their rulers.

“Self-Determination” was the cry raised also by the Northern capitalists in their slogan “A Protestant Government for a Protestant People”. Why is the claim that all who live in Ireland form “one nation” with a common interest any more valid than the claim that all who adhere to the Protestant religion form “one people”? Both are equally wrong.

Irish nationalism was the ideology of one section of the Irish capitalist class, the small businessmen of the South, a section which after 1921 gained control over 26 of the 32 Irish counties, while their rivals, the big industrialists of the North East, kept the other six. Independence from Britain for the 26 counties merely meant a change of masters for the workers living there; the joining of the remaining six counties to form an All-Ireland Republic would be no different.

Unionism is obviously and openly an anti-working class political trend, but it is time that Irish Nationalism and Republicanism were recognised as such too. Unionism and Nationalism/Republicanism are the political theories of rival sections of the Irish capitalist class and as such should both be opposed by Socialists.

The task of Socialists in Ireland is to campaign, along with Socialists in other countries, for the establishment of a socialist society all over the world.

Black Power (1970)

From the October 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

The rise of the Black Power movement in the United States has spread around the world wherever Negroes live. It has has also invaded this country, gaining rapid momentum mainly among the young.

According to its followers, the poverty that affects the black masses is caused by the whites. We hear daily of white exploitation and the desire by the Black Power advocates to replace this by black exploitation. Now, will this make the exploitation any more worthy? Will the advent of Black Power (whatever that is) create jobs for the unemployed? Will they secure a better price for the fading sugar industry? Except for a change of boss, how different would the life of the man in the street be?

Under the searching light of reason Black Power turns out to be nothing more than another racist organisation, designed to gain power for a few by exploiting the ignorance of the majority. Those who are really interested in solving the desperate poverty we see around us should think carefully before they fall victims to cheap emotionalism.

The problems of black people are not caused by whites. There are whites in developed countries like America and England who are just as poverty-stricken as people are here. It is the social system that the people the world over live under that make poverty and other things a part of man's life. There is only one race, and that is the human race. Let us realise that we must all work together or the real enemy may never be destroyed.

—from The Socialist Review, published by a group of Socialists in Kingston, Jamaica.

The same everywhere (1970)

Book Review from the October 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Message From Moscow, by “An Observer". Cape 26s.

As life for workers of any country is one of wage slavery which influences them as a class more than all the local variations of that condition, the role of those who expose the evils of one country, with the implication that it is essentially different elsewhere, is that of the pot calling the kettle black. Capitalism provides no end of material for those so occupied. Those who would have us believe that ‘we' in Britain are doing alright, have Russia and the so-called communist countries to point to. Message from Moscow helps to serve that purpose. It tells us, as we have been told many times, that life is tough for those who don't see eye to eye with the government. ‘An Observer’ is claimed to be a non-communist Russian-speaking Westerner, who has penetrated the barriers preventing foreign visitors getting to know the people. He describes how tourists, business-men, and journalists, are kept isolated from the native population. His intimate contacts are mainly the so-called intellectuals and the type of manual worker in contact with them, such as waitresses, shop assistants and taxi drivers.

The starting point is the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The event was played down, an appendix is devoted to the front page of Pravda for 21 August 1968, to illustrate this. Most people showed little interest in the event. The author’s friends got the news from West European radio broadcasts, before the jamming became efficient enough to cut them out. They were outraged,

  Our bastards [the Soviet leadership] just couldn't let the Czechs go on like that, making something civilised out of Socialism.

Most comments ‘An Observer’ heard were more loyal.

  Those bastards, we freed them from the Germans, spilled our blood for their freedom — and now look : they’re going behind our backs to the West Germans again.

Other comment shows more or less enlightenment, than those of workers elsewhere on the subject. For Socialists, this was a quarrel involving the security of the Russian-dominated Warsaw Pact. The interests at stake were capitalist, the question of Socialism did not arise and that working class interests were in opposition to those of their masters in any camp.

A chapter is devoted to the toughening attitude of the government to its critics, known as neo-stalinism. Things have changed somewhat;

  there have been no mass repressions and no trials unreported in the West. Mass terror and deportations, the infliction of direct physical pain and suffering, firing squads and torture techniques— in short, the horrifying aspects of Stalinism — play virtually no role in current measures of control: and in this sense, the comparison with genuine Stalinism is spurious . . . Punishment takes the form of personal and professional sanctions rather than imprisonment. The most common measures are dismissal from work, or demotion; expulsion from the party and Komsomol or severe censure, interference with academic and scientific careers; and retraction of privileges, including the privilege of living in Moscow.

It seems that the rulers of state capitalist Russia are beginning to learn that there are more ways of keeping control than by terror. The fact that workers are dependent on employers—state or private— for their living, makes them vulnerable to the kid glove type of coercion.

The most important fact about Russia which the author omits to mention is that the type of society existing there is state capitalism, a variation of the system of society that dominates the world.

Joe Carter

Does Mao provide the Answer? (1970)

Book Review from the October 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Freedom and Necessity: An Introduction to the Study of Society. Joan Robinson. (Allen and Unwin. 128 pages. 12/-.)

This rather expensive little book by Economics Professor Joan Robinson certainly comes up to her disarming claim that it is “intended to provoke inquiry rather than to give information”, but as its conclusion is to hold China as a model for the future of mankind that is not good enough. Professor Robinson sees Mao's China through rose-tinted spectacles but makes no attempt to back up her claims with solid information or to answer the many criticisms of whose existence she cannot be unaware.

She covers an enormous range of subjects, starting with social groups in the animal kingdom and sweeping through tribal society, feudalism and capitalism, the Russian Revolution and finally Maoist China. Her particular claim is that “Chinese socialism is something new in the world.”

She writes:

   The Czech reformers claimed to establish socialism with a human face. The Chinese have set out on the more ambitious course of establishing economic development with a human sense of values.

She then tells us that we shall have to wait twenty years to see “Whether or not humanity is capable of carrying out such a programme.” Professor Robinson is well aware that exactly the same claims about human values were made by the capitalists who overthrew feudalism, by the Russian Communist party in 1917, and by Labour governments with their so-called “welfare state”. Socialists did not have to wait twenty years to know that these were bound to be empty claims; socialists had the advantage of understanding the basic difference between capitalism and Socialism and of knowing that the state capitalism that Lenin proclaimed as the next step in Russia and that the Labour Party wants in Britain is not Socialism. Professor Robinson shows no such understanding: when she talks of Socialism it is state capitalism she means. For her Russia, as well as China, is “socialist”. She makes no attempt to consider the proposition that the human values she seeks are unattainable except in socialist society as conceived by Marx and the Socialist Party of Groat Britain.

She realises however that she has to show China as being, in some way, different from Russia. She makes many references to the “mistakes” of the Russian government and its tyranny and cruelties, but how is China basically different? For example, in Chapter Eleven (“Another Way") she describes how China has tried to solve its agricultural problems, but it reads exactly like a Communist Party description of Russia’s agricultural policies, including all the familiar features: state farms, collectives, and peasant holdings. In Russia these policies were imposed on the resisting peasants forcibly and brutally. Professor Robinson admits that the Chinese peasant outlook (as in Russia) “did not fit in with the ideals of socialism”, but she blandly tells us that the Chinese peasants “agree” with what the government does to them and accept it “with goodwill”. She gives no evidence for this. She might tell us if the Chinese government allows peasants (and workers) freely to make their own decisions and form their own political parties to further them, and if not why not.

When the Conservative M.P., Sir Fitzroy McLean, went to China in 1963 he said that he found there the same kind of inequalities and privilege that he found when he visited Russia. He wrote:

  In China, as elsewhere, how you live and what you buy depends on how much money you have. And who, it will be asked, has the money? The answer, as in the Soviet Union is: the privileged classes, officials, high-ranking officers, scientists, technicians, skilled workers and so on. But there must be added a small and peculiarly Chinese category: the Chinese capitalists. These, surprisingly enough, are the former owners of, for example, factories, whose enterprises have been taken over by the State and who receive annually from the State as compensation a percentage of the capital value of the enterprise. As they are also very often employed as managers of the factories, some of them are extremely well off.

(Sunday Times, 9 Oct. 1963)

Colette Modiano, the French woman courier in charge of a group of Western visitors to China in 1969, gave a similar account and instanced a manager in whose house they stayed receiving £13,000 a year as interest on the capital value of his business taken over in 1956. (Sunday Express, 28 Sept. 1969.) Does Professor Robinson ask us to believe that lop-paid Chinese peasants and workers approved of these privileged incomes, or indeed, were ever consulted about them?

Professor Robinson does not offer to explain the “human values” of Chinese armaments, including those weapons of mass destruction, the hydrogen bombs which the Chinese government claims it is now perfecting.

Among a number of references to Marx is one concerned with population. Professor Robinson says that Marx was right to criticise Malthus about population, but "unfortunately he drew from this the conclusion that growing numbers are not a menace to well-being.” She holds Marx, at least partly, responsible for the Russian government’s “dogma that family planning is contrary to socialism”. She gives no evidence that Marx held such a view and it is in direct conflict with his own assertion that what he held to be the laws of population under capitalism had no application elsewhere: “every special historic mode of production has its own special law's of population, historically valid within its limits alone. An abstract law of population exists for plants and animals only, and only in so far as man has not interfered with them.” Capital, Vol. I, Chap. XXV, Section 3.) Incidentally. Engels, during Marx’s lifetime, expressed the view that socialist society might find itself “obliged to regulate the production of human beings” (Quoted by Professor Lewis S. Feuer in Marx & Engels. Fontana Classics. (P. 32).

Professor Robinson’s book opens with a not-at-all original saying of Chairman Mao. She and other Mao admirers can now add to their collection of his sayings the most recent of all: he sent greetings to Queen Elizabeth II on her birthday!

Edgar Hardcastle

Religion and Society (1970)

From the October 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

The sole aim of the Companion Socialist Parties is the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by Socialism.

Membership is open to anyone who agrees with the party's object and principles. This involves understanding the basic features of capitalist society and includes a rejection of leadership (by man or god). Socialists are historical materialists and claim that religions are social products, subject to change as social conditions change. It is not a case of the world (or universe) being made by a creator with man made in his image, but of man making his gods in the image of natural phenomenon including man himself.

To try and justify the existence of a creator by asking who made the first particle of matter is only modifying the Adam and Eve story in which first particles have replaced first people. Scientists may be in disagreement in trying to explain how the universe is evolving but they are agreed that although the matter in it changes its form, its quantity does not change. There is no beginning or end to the universe only change. When there is no creation, there can be no creator.

As the universe has evolved so has that tiny part of it, the planet Earth. Mankind is a product of this evolution and is also subject to change. It has involved the progressive mastery by man over his environment and with it a progressive accumulation of knowledge of the world he lives in and of the universe of which it is a part. So that the relationship between man and nature and that between man and man have changed. Early man had no control over nature and consequently no means to enslave his fellow man. Nature was little understood and held in awe. Gradually the domestication of animals and cultivation of useful plants started the subjection of nature to man. It later became possible to support a class of people not directly involved in production, and with this the subjection of the producer by the non-producer. To the awe of nature was added the codes of conduct of and justification for a slave society. The social divisions of slave or class society have given rise to antagonism or class struggles which have given an impetus to man's conquest of nature. As the awe of nature has receded so the justification and code of conduct of class society have played larger parts in religion.

As one form of class society has given way to another so has religion changed. Christianity had its origin not in a man (Christ) but in social conditions of the Mediterranean area under Roman rule. A unified Empire increasingly worked by chattel slaves drawn in from its various parts, subjected to the harshness and degradation of this form of exploitation and the resultant decadence, made the local religions irrelevant and paved the way for a universal religion more sophisticated than those it superseded. With many modifications the religion of slaves in revolt gave way to that of feudalism and later capitalism.

In the same way that the evolution of Christianity needed no Christ so the theory of Socialism has no originator. This theory has evolved from the struggle of the working class to emancipate themselves. The conditions of capitalism give rise to the struggle for the ending of all oppression. Capitalism dominates the world. Its science has removed all mystical explanations of the origins of the world and mankind. Social scientists such as Marx (a contributor not originator) have discovered the origin and development of social inequality. The working class who are responsible for running society are trained to think scientifically and so are equipped with an important tool for the struggle against the capitalist class. Religious ravers are still at work, their influence is reactionary and divisive. They can have no more success than politicians in giving workers satisfaction. Workers have only to realise that the world can be theirs once they unite for Socialism; and the influence of the Pope, Paisley and Billy Graham will evaporate.

Joe Carter

Political action for Socialism (1970)

From the October 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

To the Marxist, Socialism is the result of social development and is seen as evolving from capitalism in much the same way as previous forms of society have evolved, that is, growth and development up to the point where change, a complete change, is essential — a revolution. Capitalism, by its own development of large-scale organisation and high technical efficiency, its production of a working class owning no property in the means of production, has performed its historical task and must give way to its successor, a system of society based upon the common ownership of the means of production — Socialism.

No social system, however, has ever disappeared in a mechanical fashion, out of recognition of historical necessity as it were, and there is no evidence that suggests capitalism is an exception. The class position of the capitalists generally make it impossible for them to understand that their social usefulness has ended; they are deaf to all Socialist appeals because such appeals are in essence appeals for them to commit social suicide. The poverty and destitution of a large portion of the world’s population, wars, economic crises and financial panics contain no lesson for the capitalists who will use all the power they possess to keep the present system in being. Expecting only opposition from the capitalist class, the Socialist is compelled to turn to the working class, the class which produces all the wealth, performs all the necessary services in modern society yet suffers all the social indignities of to-day, the class which has nothing to lose by a change in the system, but everything to gain. The only class which can make a revolution.

The working class is always in conflict at numerous points with capitalism. In this conflict, however, the working class lacks the understanding of its basic cause. It is and must be the work of present-day Socialists to place such understanding at the disposal of their fellow workers. Workers do not need convincing of the necessity to establish Socialism by Utopian experiments or plans, as capitalism itself gives many practical reasons as to the need to change society. The details of the future society on which Utopians love to dwell, fade into insignificance in face of the importance of gaining political power.

Political power is centred in governments as is demonstrated in the ability to make and enforce laws by means of the judiciary, police and armed forces. This power is used when necessary to protect the interest of one national group of capitalists against a competing foreign group. This can and often does, lead to war. In this modern capitalist world the educational system is under the control of the central power and in many parts of the world the whole medium of propaganda and communication is included.

This form of power which exists in all those countries where the capitalist mode of production prevails can only be maintained by the active or passive consent of the majority of the population, that is the working class. This consent must be withdrawn and replaced by the deliberate and conscious act of taking over this power in order that the basis of society can be transformed from a capitalist one to a Socialist one.

The refusal to continue capitalism and the readiness to replace it with the new form of society presupposes that a class which has become revolutionary has at its disposal the requisite organisation to carry out its purpose. In those countries which have developed a political party system, a party which has for its object the establishment of Socialism, with a built-in refusal to compromise with capitalism, will if not already in existence, have to be formed. In those parts of the world which have developed a different political form, the struggle for political power must take place in line with such development.

In 1891, Engels wrote in his preface to Marx’s Civil War in France,

  The state is nothing else than a machine for the oppression of one class by another [and] at the best it is an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy and whose worst features it will have to lop off at once.

This opinion of the state arose out of the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871. Although the state machine has developed a complexity and power which no one living in 1891 could have foreseen, it is still true that the state is fundamentally as Engels defined it, a machine for the oppression of one class by another. It also has to function as the executive committee of the ruling class.

As it becomes imperative for society to progress and remove the last form of slavery, the state which is a barrier in its present form must be taken over, altered and shaped for the task of social revolution. Once this has been achieved it can fade away.

The taking of political power and transforming it from a means of oppression to one of emancipation is the historical mission of the working class. This mission requiring as it does the conscious understanding by that class, places the responsibility on present day Socialists for creating and maintaining the organisation which can be used by the revolutionary class. Also to make available political knowledge to speed the development of revolutionary consciousness.

The false and dangerous notions about barricades and armed risings must be exposed and the difference between revolts and revolution understood and explained. For modern capitalism has been compelled to provide the weapon which can be used for its destruction. The ballot used by a sophisticated working class can make possible the use of political power to establish a world society where the problem of access to food and shelter will be solved by making these freely available to all.

Bob Ambridge

Jamaica: The task ahead (1970)

From the October 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

(We publish below an article from The Socialist Review, which our comrades in Jamaica publish, introducing Socialism to its readers.)

We welcome you to this our first edition, and look forward to a long and enlightening association. First, let us state clearly what is our object and how we intend to achieve this: the education of the working class to their real interest in society, and to expose the bankrupt social order under which we live.

We live in a capitalist society, and this is world wide. The main feature of this society is property ownership, buying and selling. On the one hand there are those who own all the important things in the world, land, factories, mines etc. On the other side the vast majority of those who own nothing except their abilities. By sheer necessity, those who own nothing are forced to sell their abilities to those who own. On this basis society as it is functions.

From what has been said it is clear that there are only two classes of people in capitalist society. Those who own, the capitalist class, and those who sell their skill, the working class. The popular view of a middle class is really a myth. The doctor is as much a worker as the bus driver, or the street cleaner. Observe that even doctors go on strike to support their demands for more pay and better conditions. Workers’ income groups are different, but they are still of the same class.

The conflict between capitalist (to pay as little as possible) and worker (to secure as high a price as possible) is an inherent feature of capitalist society. Nothing that can be said or done can reconcile the opposing interests of these two classes. Those of the owning class have clear ideas as to their interest. They, however, with their power and wealth and control of the mass media use these to maintain and even widen the division within the working class. They have done this with great success. Their existence depends on this division.

We must remember that society as it is today does not mean that it was always so. There was a time when men lived as slaves; they changed from this and became serfs. They again changed to the present system of wage earners. We Socialists believe, and events the world over support us, that the time is ripe for another change. Our present social system has outlived its social usefulness ; it is now a hindrance to mankind. Most people sense that something is fundamentally wrong with the world, but can’t name it. That unnamed thing really is, trying to operate a social system that is no longer in harmony with world conditions. Things are produced only if they can realise a profit, not to satisfy human need. Observe the vast areas of poverty alongside pockets of wealth. Capitalism has done much in the improvement of productive methods for man. It is quite hopeless at distributing this wealth it can create.

Socialists advocate a system of society where each will contribute to production and partake freely of his need. Sounds fantastic? We have heard that before, just think for a moment of the fantastic things we have come to accept as normal under capitalism. It is now quite normal for thousands of people to starve to death, as we have seen in one-time Biafra, while farmers in America are paid not to cultivate their land. Capitalism distorts the vision of a future society. We can only see a different system in terms of our present one.

Socialism can only function on a world wide basis. It cannot and does not exist in any country. Russia is just as capitalist a country as America. The constant reference to Russia as a Socialist country only serves to confuse the issue of what Socialism is. The attainment of Socialism is not only possible but necessary. The great mental problems that are evident in the developed countries: more people are going mad, there is widespread frustration and a deep sadness that seems to dominate people’s life. Even pleasure has been turned into a way of escape. All these are becoming more noticeable in our society.

The task ahead is difficult indeed; so much distortion and confusion to clear up. That is why we need your help, in whatever way you can. Read our literature, get to understand fully our point of view. Apart from the personal reward that this knowledge will give, you will be able to play an historic part in popularising Socialism throughout Jamaica. Hard and difficult yes, but so worth while.

High on Tressell (1970)

Book Review from the October 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Robert Tressell and The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, by Jack Mitchell: Lawrence & Wishart, 45s.

Interest in the scope and background of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists has grown steadily since the publications, in 1951 and 1955 respectively, of F.C. Ball’s biography Tressell of Mugsborough and the full version of the book as Tressell—Robert Noonan -wrote it. Previously, little or nothing had been known about this most widely read of all books about working men since its appearance in 1914. Now, a further book on Tressell by Ball is promised: in 1967 The Times revealed that Tressell’s daughter Kathleen, thought to have been killed in an accident in 1919, was still alive: in August this year, The Guardian published details of surviving examples of Tressell’s decorative painting.

Mitchell’s book is an attempt at detailed critical analysis of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It has an astonishingly patronising foreword by Raymond Williams, and its endeavour is to place the Philanthropists among the great works of literature. Mitchell takes a classification suggested by Arnold Kettle, in an article called "Dickens and the Popular Tradition”, in which the classical nineteenth-century novelists are divided as belonging to "bourgeois critical realism” or “popular critical realism”. The difference is in “sensibility”, or the writer’s class awareness. The height of popular critical realism is "proletarian humanism”, and Mitchell sees this as reaching its peak in Dickens in the nineteenth century and Tressell in the twentieth.

In developing this theme, there are some interesting references to nineteenth-century working-class novels which are little known today. Mitchell says they failed because working-class sensibility was insufficiently developed before the last years of the century. Between 1889 and 1906, however: "The advent of imperialism revolutionised the situation.” The foundation of the Labour Party was a cultural as well as a political landmark: "It is not by chance that it precedes the break-through of the British working class in the narrower field of literary culture”— that is, the writing of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists—“by only five years”. The working class was about to wage fierce war. Mitchell writes: “By 1914 it was touch and go which would come first, world war or social revolution.’’ In this light, Tressell’s book is a vital self-criticism of the working class as it prepared for the struggle.

This is all dreadful nonsense. It throws into relief the weakness of Mitchell’s study of Tressell—that it is anything but critical. Starting thus from the belief that The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was the expression of “a realisation that in the long run they (the working class) were destined to take over the cultural heritage and with it the human leadership of the nation”, Mitchell praises it on every count and in the highest terms. The comparisons in which it is eulogised are themselves breathtakingly uncritical at times. For example "The two greatest anti-capitalist writers in Britain at that time, Shaw and Tressell”—though later Mitchell speaks of Tressell’s implicit exposure of the Fabian propaganda whose popular exponent, in fact, was Shaw. And what of Dickens, to whom Mitchell continually returns as the genius of popular humanism before Tressell? George Orwell has pointed out that Dickens never penned a decent picture of a working man or woman; the case is strong that Dickens radicalism was rooted in fear of the mob.

All the same, there is a good deal which is interesting in Mitchell’s examination of the structure of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. As he says, its central situation is the labour process. The characters are carefully arranged to show all the stages of a manual worker’s life, from the apprentice to the discarded old man. Attitudes to labour are crucial points in the book’s criticism of capitalism. The boss-figures are Anti-Man, in Mitchell’s phrase, precisely because they are destructive of men’s attachment to and satisfaction from labour. Influenced by William Morris, Tressell made art part of labour: and in this sense Owen’s decoration of the drawing-room in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a symbolic victory.

One of Mitchell’s more telling comparisons is between Tressell’s work and that of the “Naturalist” writers of the late nineteenth century. At first glance, the insistent accumulation of detail—the minute descriptions of rooms, buildings. clothes—reminds one of, say, Zola. But Zola’s picture was always of a slice of life whereas Tressell, as Mitchell points out, aims to show life itself under capitalism. While Zola lifts stones to reveal the horrors under them, Tressell’s mass of detail points to “the abnormality of the normal”: the horror of the stones themselves. Mitchell draws attention too to the exclusion by Tressell of any human personal element which might admit the possibility of bridge-building between the classes. Tressell’s insistence always is on the capitalist system as the culprit; grotesque as his boss-characters are, they remain the system’s creations.

Those who are interested in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists will, and ought to, read this book. Despite the parallels it draws with Fielding, Bunyan. Swift, Gorky, Hardy and others—besides Dickens—it does not succeed in its intention of giving the Philanthropists an exalted place in literature. Nor is there any reason really for seeking to do so. Tressell’s work is a gem in its field. If it were a literary masterpiece, perhaps we should not lay claim, as we all do, to innumerable copies given away and lent to people at work. Mitchell lays on his claims thickly, apparently high on enthusiasm for Tressell. One sees, however, the political malpositions from which the claims arise - and wonders whether such a structure of illusion would have been tolerable to Tressell himself.

Robert Barltrop

Keeping us down (1970)

Book Review from the October 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Irrational in Politics by Solidarity. 2s.

This short pamphlet largely consists of verbatim extracts from, and summaries of, the works of Engels, Freud, Reich, Michael Cattier and others, and it would be better to read their works yourself to draw your own conclusions. For those without the time or inclination to do this, however, the pamphlet is quite useful.

It sets out to give a partial explanation of why, given the availability of revolutionary propaganda and the logic of establishing Socialism, workers in general still reject, often violently, this alternative to the insoluble mess of capitalism. The smallness of revolutionary propaganda set against the capitalist monopoly of the mass media is accepted as a major factor in the conditioning of workers , but further reasons are sought to explain the contradiction between the self-evident economic logic of abolishing capitalism and the acceptance of this system by the mass of the people.

The crude outlook of many "left-wingers", who see a working class naturally revolutionary being thwarted by incompetent and bureaucratic leaders and the physical repression of the state machine, is from the start rejected:

It is obvious that if large sections of the population were constantly questioning the principles of hierarchy, the authoritarian organisation of production, the wages system, or other fundamental aspects of the social structure, no ruling class could maintain itself in power for long. For rulers to continue ruling it is necessary for those at the bottom of the social ladder not only to accept their condition but eventually to lose even the sense of being exploited. Once this psychological process has been achieved the division of society becomes legitimised in people's minds. The exploited cease to perceive it as something imposed on them from without . . . Only at times of occasional insurrectionary outbursts do the rulers have to resort to force, as a kind of reinforcement of a conditioning stimulus.

According to Solidarity it was left to Wilhelm Reich to explain " . . . the lag between class consciousness and economic reality, and the tremendous social inertia represented by habits of deference and submission among the oppressed". The explanation lay in the sexual repression of people and in the whole authoritarian upbringing of children associated in particular with the patriarchal family. Reich expressed it this way:

As the economic basis (of the family) became less significant, its place was taken by the political function which the family now began to assume. Its cardinal function, that for which it is mostly supported by conservative science and law, is that of serving as a factory for authoritarian ideologies and conservative structures.

From this examination of family relationships Reich concludes pessimistically that revolutionary propaganda seeking to explain the social injustice and irrationality of the economic system falls on deaf ears, because if people realised they were wasting their lives in the service of an absurd system they would either go mad or commit suicide:

To avoid achieving such anxiety-laden insight they justify their existence by rationalising it. They repress anything that might disturb them and acquire a character structure adapted to the conditions under which they live.

The writer of the pamphlet is aware of the inadequate nature of this conclusion since it implies totally malleable individuals in whom total sexual repression has produced total conditioning. It does not allow for the possibility (dictated by man's sexual needs themselves)  that a fight against sexual repression may well loosen this "character-structure". We might say furthermore that the choice depicted by Reich between madness and submission to capitalism's authority would only be real to the extent that the individuals who have begun to break loose remained isolated. The socialist organisation would enable a group-identity to be formed as a force against this. There are now also healthy signs that young people in struggling to achieve free-sex life are denting the repressive ideology of capitalism. The pamphlet outlines two main reactions to this movement. One is open, outward opposition, the other is an attempt at absorption and control through commercialising sexuality. Solidarity correctly describe the process whereby this is done but appear to attribute to it the status of a conscious capitalist policy which it definitely is not. Making profits from "consumer sex"  is not done for ideological reasons.

The last part of the pamphlet is an attack on the inner conservatism of Bolshevik ideology in relation to sex and family relationships. Unfortunately Solidarity are still handicapped in their examination of this subject by their acceptance of the myth that the 1917 Russian revolution was socialist. The material provided can nevertheless be used to the greater advantage by others.

Michael Bradley