Letter: Work and waste (1989)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Work and waste

Dear Editors,

You believe that in a future socialist society work will be shared. Yet no system will be so efficient as to train everyone to master every skill needed to keep a technological society running—it takes a half-lifetime to master only one profession!

Even if it were possible, the laws of the division of labour hold that someone is still going to have to do boring shop floor work and that will mean that they will have a low status. Such inequality can hardly be described as a socialist ideal.

In addition, even you now agree with the opposition to nuclear power. But just as you now believe that it's impossible to have nuclear power without poisonous nuclear waste, so it's impossible to have industry without poisonous industrial waste. De-industrialisation will be an answer to our main solution: the pursuit for human happiness.

J.D. Moreno, 

London SW19

Reply:

The skills necessary for running a highly complex industrial society are collective not individual or personal. It will be for socialist society to choose how far to automate production in order to remove drudgery and danger. If they cannot be eliminated then the danger and drudgery will have to be shared by a society that will understand that the work needs to be done if socialism is to continue functioning effectively. It is in this sense that we say work will be shared. No-one will be expected to do the same repetitive and dangerous work for a lifetime.

We do not envisage socialist society as one in which everyone will have all the skills to do everything ("It's your turn to be the brain surgeon this week, George!"). What we do look forward to is a situation where skills and talents currently trapped and distorted by capitalism are given the opportunity of full and free expression according to personal taste and inclination to do "useful work not useless toil", to use the words of William Morris.

Socialism before anything else will be a society of equals. Status and inequality will be meaningless concepts recalled only as hateful features of class society.

Waste is not inevitable—it is only a by-product of production which cannot be reused profitably and disposed of without incurring a loss.

De-industrialisation is not an option for the human race. Who would wish to do without the means now available to provide comfort and sufficiency for all? At a more prosaic level, would our correspondent wish to have dental treatment in the absence of a pain-killer administered by a hypodermic syringe?

Editors.

Caught In The Act: Back to Work (1989)

The Caught In The Act Column from the October 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Back to Work
Parliament re-assembles this month to the accompaniment of the annual bout of puzzlement among the voters. Brought up to believe in the importance of Parliament as the intellectual power-house which runs the country and keeps all of us happy, well-fed and secure, they wonder how MPs are able to desert the place for so long. How are the Honourable Members able to go swanning off on holiday, or to jack up their wages with lecture tours and journalism, or to bring their diaries up to date for future use in their memoirs, if their work is so vital? The country seems to have been running alright—no more than the usual crop of "accidents", the customary problems of people not having enough to live on. the accepted difficulties in access to medical care and social services. Things don't seem any better or worse, whether Parliament is sitting or not. Do we really need the place?

Any sort of observation of Parliament— listening to its proceedings on the radio, waiting around in the Lobby, watching it at work from the Public Gallery—does little to damage the case for its abolition. To begin with, quite a few MPs often seem to have drunk too much over lunch and to be, in more senses than one, flushed and excitable. Some are excruciatingly aware of their own talents and. in case anyone is missing out on them, make regular checks to ensure that they are being admiringly observed from the Gallery. The lucky onlooker will see the House at its liveliest— larking about, rocked with forced laughter, bubbling with bogus animosity towards the opposite side.

Close Contact
Face-to-face contact with an MP is not necessarily more re-assuring. One Labour Member, an old-time left-winger who now does not by any standards know where he stands on almost any issue, will lug you down to the Tea Room and there stubbornly evade the matter you have come to see him about while he drones on about his current obsession. Every so often some gnarled fellow Labour MP will come to the table to exult over some alleged triumph in some staggeringly trivial matter. There will be a bit of mutual back-slapping and morale boosting, for these people carry a burden of shame about the betrayal of what they once called their principles but also a crippling doubt about their own effectiveness. Very likely they will assure each other that they will be at some meeting that evening where they will continue to massage their morale by colouring the petty issue into one of enduring importance.

It is not only the older left-wingers who behave in a frustrating and irritating way. There is one younger Member, something of a specialist in radical law, who was not popular with his constituency party because of his womanising. A visit to the Tea Room with him reveals that there is some substance to this, as he ogles his way along the corridor, gropes the hapless girl at the cash desk who is only there to take his money and leers from his seat at every passing female. Whatever else this man respects, clearly it is not womanhood; only occasionally does he rein in his obsession to give some time to the issue which is supposed to be under discussion. Then he scampers off to the chamber to ask some daringly radical question which will have all the lefty reformists swooning with admiration.

Humbug
On the other side of the House, there is the Tory MP. one of Thatcher's most ardent and tireless sycophants, whose hypocrisy is gargantuan. This man is notorious in his constituency not just for being a humbug but also for his relentless quest for publicity. Provided that there is a news photographer handy, he descends on an old people's home to harrass some infirm pensioner into posing with him or he intrudes into local events where people have gathered with the innocent intention of enjoying themselves. A sort of male Mary Whitehouse, he rarely misses a chance to denounce what he calls permissiveness (his attitude towards gays and lesbians verges on the mediaevally persecutory) but he sees nothing wrong in entertaining in the Commons contestants for the Miss World title. This condoning of an event which is truly pornographic—which is not only designed to be sexually titillating but which deals in an unreal, distorted image of sex—is not inconsistent with this Honourable Member's professed moral stance for he is only looking for yet another photo-opportunity and presumably works on the principle that there is no such thing as bad publicity.

Of course there are also capable and conscientious MPs who do their best to help their constituents in their problems. It is fair to ask, however, why so many MPs rank so high in any league table of hypocrisy. stupidity or buffoonery. The answer is that they are unable to cope with their position of power—which brings us to the central point about the function of Parliament and whether, despite the antics of some of the people in it, it is a useful institution.

Power
Whether MPs are good or bad, efficient or bungling, sincere or hypocritical, is beside the point. They operate in, and by their votes they control, the place where the power in capitalist society is to be found. Any failure to understand that can lead workers into disaster. Parliament controls the state machine and that machine—the armed forces, the police, the penal system and so on—exists to defend the whole set-up of class society. This means that it defends the privileges of the people who own the means of life and asserts the fact that the rest are condemned to lives of poverty and exploitation. Workers who get depressed about Parliament, who decide that it is no better than a talking shop and that real power lies somewhere else have often tried to by-pass it. They have always failed, sometimes at great cost to themselves.

A recent example of how the state is used was the coal strike of 1984-5 which was motivated by the strange idea that the coal mines should be kept open so that miners could work in them and earn a wage rather than that the coal should be cut to be sold at a profit. The miners tried to make their point by striking and then, on the sensible argument that there is no point in a strike if a lot of workers are still at work, by preventing any miner who wanted to go to the pits from doing so. We all know what happened, how the police blocked roads to stop pickets moving about, how they broke up the pickets and fought pitched battles with miners who, in their own estimation, were only struggling for the chance to be exploited as employed, working coal producers. As things were—as the economy of capitalism was operating then—the strikers hadn't a hope. After their defeat one pit after another was closed; recently the last one in Kent stopped production. This is not because there is no use for the coal; it is because British Coal say there is no profit to be made from mining it. To assert this priority they are able to call on the state machine. The miners, if nobody else, should have learned from experience of the power of the state and of the way it is controlled, manipulated and applied through Parliament.

That is why, if we are to do anything significant about society's problems the working class must organise with the objective of controlling the state through Parliament. At present it is a place where the trivial, the exasperating and the sickening are everyday currency, where the bungling, the hypocrite and the deranged pick over the inconsequential details of running a social system which at best must exploit and degrade the majority of its people. But it could and it must be used to bring the basic social change which will end not just our material problems but also those of morale—the cynicism, the conceits and the inefficiencies which are typical of a decadent society.

So who goes home?

Ivan

Speaking from Experience (1989)

From the October 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

  "Past Labour governments have always worked within the limits set by market forces (as when the cabinet capitulated to the International Monetary Fund in 1976): have always supported nuclear weapons (as when Callaghan authorised the Chevaline without telling parliament): and have regularly confronted trade unionism (as with rigid wage policies)...
  We must add . . . a clear recognition that the Labour Party is not — and probably never was — a socialist party, and its individual members do not decide its policy, nor are its election pledges apparently meant to be taken seriously”.
—Tony Benn, former Labour cabinet Minister and present member of the Labour Party's National Executive Committee, writing in The Independent. 17 May 1989.

Robert Owen's place in history (1989)

Robert Owen (1771-1858)

From the October 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Manufacturer Robert Owen, a man of deep-rooted convictions, a reformer, an advocate of Utopian Socialism and of the materialist philosophy that people's characters are made for them by heredity and environment earned the respect of many of his contemporaries, including Friedrich Engels. Owen was a critic of religion, marriage and private property and a founder in 1834 of the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union of Great Britain and Ireland (numbering between half a million and a million members). In April 1834 he supported the mammoth procession to present a petition to the Home Office against the conviction of the Tolpuddle Martyrs. He also championed the National Equitable Labour Exchange (opened in September 1832) in its attempt to dispense with money and opposed the cruel and ruthless treatment of children under the factory system.

Shop assistant to capitalist
His birth and death (1771-1858) were in Newton, Montgomeryshire, where his father combined the occupations of postmaster, ironmonger and sadler. By the time Owen was seven, he had assimilated all that his school could teach him and in the two years thereafter acted as assistant teacher. At the age of nine, he became a shop assistant in his home town, and at ten entered the service of a Stamford linen draper in Lincolnshire. A few years later, he was employed in a Ludgate Hill shop in London, where he endured a crucifying workload. At 18, and with a small loan from his brother William, he set up in business with a man named Jones, making and selling cotton-spinning mules (then displacing the spinning jenny and the water frame). But Owen was soon required to sell back his share of the business to Jones — a transaction which left Owen, at the age of 19, in possession of three mules. He then rented a building, employed three men, and started a small-scale business on his own account. Soon after, he learned that one Drinkwater, a rich Manchester cotton manufacturer, had advertised for a manager. Owen successfully applied for the position and within a short time was offered, and accepted, a partnership in the business. He resigned in 1795 and became one of the managing directors of another large concern, the Chorlton Twist Company. In 1797 Owen had accumulated enough capital to enable him and some wealthy partners to purchase the New Lanark Cotton Mills from the philanthropist David Dale. He married Dale’s daughter and settled in New Lanark as manager and part owner; in 1800 he was vested with sole management.

New Lanark
Owen now had an opportunity for social experiment. Rejecting the Christian doctrine of original sin, he implemented his theory that people are creatures of pre-natal and post-natal circumstances. The environmental improvements he brought about at New Lanark saw the disappearance of vice, crime and drunkenness, and in their place a model village. He worked tirelessly to set up infant schools and to stop recruitment of children from the Edinburgh and Glasgow workhouses. He also reduced the New Lanark working day to ten-and-a-half hours — unlike his competitors who employed their workers fourteen hours a day. He ensured that medical attendance was denied to no-one in his community, and that a sick fund was created for the purpose. All these welfare and educational measures led to the founding in January 1816 of the Institution for the Formation of Character, a centre of communal life marked by a spirit of harmony and co-operation. Visitors were deeply impressed by the temper of the children and Friedrich Engels, in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, remarked:

  At the age of two the children came to school where they enjoyed themselves so much that they could scarcely be got home again . . .

Fall from grace
Gradually New Lanark's fame spread throughout Europe and it became a centre of pilgrimage, visited by bishops, economists, philanthropists, royalties, statesmen and diverse celebrities. Nicholas 1, Czar of Russia, was a pilgrim in 1816 and even Napoleon, in exile on the Island of Elba, knew of the New Lanark experiment. Owen at this time was at the height of his fame, but as soon as he proclaimed what were considered outrageous views, he fell from grace. As Engels explains:

  . . . As long as he was simply a philanthropist, he was rewarded with nothing but wealth, applause, honour, and glory. He was the most popular man in Europe. Not only men of his own class, but statesmen and princes listened to him approvingly. But when he came out with his communist theories that was quite another thing. Three great obstacles seemed to him especially to block the path to social reform: property, religion, the present form of marriage. He knew what confronted him if he attacked these — outlawry. Excommunication from official society, the loss of his whole social position. But nothing of this prevented him from attacking them without fear of the consequences, and what he had foreseen happened. Banished from official society, with a conspiracy of silence against him in the press, ruined by his unsuccessful Communist experiments in America, in which he sacrificed all his fortune, he turned directly to the working class and continued working in their midst for thirty years . . . 

Instances of Owen's courageous dedication and financial sacrifice are legion. In 1806, when the American embargo on cotton nearly brought business at New Lanark to a halt, he prevailed upon his capitalist partners — whose priorities were profit rather than welfare — to pay the workers their full wages throughout the four-month embargo. Following disagreements with his partners, Owen offered to buy the New Lanark undertaking, but on their refusal of his offer he resigned as managing director. However, in December 1813 New Lanark was auctioned to Owen at £114,100, then a vast capital sum.

Yet for all Owen's benevolence, he could not put his social theories into practice other than by means of capital, wages and their corollary money, which ultimately determined the success or otherwise of his New Lanark and other co-operative communities. Nevertheless he did conceive of purely communistic societies that went far beyond limited reform of capitalism. In these societies the workers would labour in a community of common interests and enjoy free access to the necessaries and comforts of life. No disputes would arise over divisions of property and the desire to accumulate goods would disappear. Such was his vision. But because of the inescapable logic of capitalism, he could not but depart from the simplicity of his aims.

Defeated by economic laws
In other words, Owen was defeated by the economic laws of capitalism. His collapsed experiments at New Harmony in Indiana, at Orbiston near Glasgow, and at Tytherly in Hampshire, are enough to show that these laws cannot be suspended or overridden. Invested capital must yield rent, interest and profit and welfare must play second fiddle. This reality applied to Owen's model villages, which were anyway inextricably tied to the outside market economy. Village land, buildings and machinery represented capital, and where Owen was not the sole proprietor the economic pressures were even greater, for his shareholding partners expected a return on capital. ‘‘Excessive" wage and welfare costs which eroded profits and threatened bankruptcy were not viewed by them with favour.

The incompatibility of Owen's Utopian benevolence and capitalism's laws was manifest at Orbiston, which in the late autumn of 1827 was close to collapse; the land, buildings and standing crops were sold by public auction because of pressure by the mortgagees to recoup the £16,000 security they had advanced on the property. No less disastrous was the agricultural experiment at Tytherly which may be said to have ceased in the summer of 1845 — Owen having spent enormous sums on projects which were never completed and the enlargement of farm buildings, none of which was worked at a profit. Small wonder, then, that these losses and those at New Harmony left Owen a comparatively poor man. Such was the sacrifice he had made in a life-time of sincere endeavours to eliminate poverty and misery from workers' lives.

Owen has an honourable and lasting place in working-class history. Since his death in 1858 socialists have had not only the benefit of the work of Marx and Engels, but also more than one hundred years' political experience.

Vic Berry

Cooking the Books (1989)

From the October 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pat a cake, pat a cake, Baker's man.
Bake me a cake as fast as you can.
Prick it, and pat it, and mark it with
. . . E for Education? or Exploitation?

"Children at infant schools in England and Wales will be expected to study marketing skills and profit-making under radical proposals for design and technology teaching to be implemented by the Government next year," says a report in the Guardian (21 June) by its Education Editor.

Proposals drawn up by a working party as part of the new national curriculum include teaching children to become computer literate from the start of infant classes, and their becoming able to devise their own computer programmes by the age of eleven. The Guardian report continues: “Design and technological activities should cover a broad range of contexts— home, school, recreation, community, business and industry". Given this context.

  considerations such as client and consumer satisfaction, the importance of quality, added value, business structures, serviceability of products, market size, environmental impact, finance and deadlines can all arise naturally. At the same time, work-related activities can foster and demonstrate the value of personal qualities such as the ability to work constructively with others, a spirit of enterprise (taking initiatives and risks, seeing opportunities, identifying needs), self-discipline. persistence in the face of difficulties and a sense of responsibility.

Lady Parkes. who chaired the working party, said. "The aim of our proposals for design and technology is to prepare pupils to meet the needs of the 21st century.”

Since the prevailing ideas in society are those of the ruling class, it certainty makes both political and economic sense to "catch 'em young”. The Jesuit maxim, "give me a child until the age of seven and it is mine for life," seems very applicable here. However, the proposals, designed to ensure that by the age of seven children should be aware that goods and services were designed and made, distributed, bought and sold: that resources were not infinite; and that some technological solutions could damage the environment; and that the “brightest” children should understand the role of advertising and the need to make choices about resources like materials and time, are not designed to turn children into little capitalists, but into supporters of capitalism. To be capitalists they would have to be born into the minority class who own the means of production. The majority of them belong to the working class, the vast majority who have to sell their labour power in order to exist.

Although capitalism is a world-wide social system, by its very nature capitalists are in competition with each other. Whilst the working class may believe, as capitalism has taught them, that the minority ruling class owe their superior position to greater intelligence, business acumen, or some god-given right, in reality capitalism is run for capitalists by the skill and abilities of the majority, the working class. In order that capitalists in particular economic units, or countries, should not surrender their competitive edge to their rivals, it is important that they endeavour to ensure that their workers are trained in the necessary skills which will result in increased productivity of their labour.

Repressing Personality
Pupils would “thus begin to appreciate the challenges of a career in this field", translates as these future workers will not stop to question the alternative to spending their lives being economically exploited by a minority class. A recent survey by Incomes Data Services examined the recruitment methods of six large organizations, including Jaguar Cars and Vauxhall Motors. It detailed the changes in recruitment procedures that are now likely to confront those seeking manual jobs, including personality tests, which were previously associated with managerial recruitment.

  These tests are often designed not just to measure skills and aptitude for the the required tasks but also to assess whether a person is able to work in a team, show initiative, and in some cases adopt the organization's philosophy or 'culture'. At the same time work-related activities can foster personal qualities such as the ability to work constructively with others, self-discipline and a sense of social responsibility.

Translated, this means not rocking the boat, not being industrially militant, and not querying the stupidity of a system that produces for profit, not for need, whose economic exploitation of the majority overrides all other, human considerations.

The capitalist class is determined to hang on to its monopoly of political and economic power. The weapon of no work, no eat, means that those trying to sell their labour power are expected to embrace the "philosophy and culture” of their prospective masters. Being a member of the working class means having to spend your life repressing your personality in order to meet some employer's criteria of a pliable, compliant worker. This process begins in the infant school.

Are your children being educated, or merely trained to meet the demands of a class system whose sole aim is the accumulation of more and more capital. If you and your children want to fulfil your full potential as human beings it's never too late to learn. It's not too late to learn about Socialism, the only alternative to the repressive system of capitalism. Within a classless, moneyless, wageless, stateless, leaderless society people will develop their skills and abilities both for personal satisfaction and to benefit everyone. Education will become an on-going life experience, not just something to enable you to get a job and spend the rest of your life subservient to the capitalist class. Prick it, and pat it, and mark it with F . . . for Freedom.

Dave Coggan

Between the Lines: The Duty to be Free? (1989)

The Between the Lines column from the October 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

A few months ago I watched one of the most saddening documentaries to be shown on TV this year. It was not about starving children or concentration camps or inner-city deprivation. All of those are far more hugely tragic than the theme of this documentary, but this was the most depressing. It was about the coverage by New York TV stations of the sensational public trial of a prosperous lawyer called Joel Steinberg who had systematically degraded and beaten up his partner, Hedda Nussbaum.

When she first met him she was an attractive. talented designer of children's books; as the relationship developed she lost everything—her looks, which were battered out of her; her dignity, which she lost sight of; and her freedom to do or think anything without the permission of the man whom she imagined had superhuman power. The court case came about because Steinberg ended up by beating to death the couple's (illegally) adopted infant daughter. Lisa. He was charged with manslaughter. The question which became a talking-point for the New York TV viewers was. how responsible was Nussbaum for the death of the child? Her defence was that her lover had virtually brainwashed her and that she was physically frightened to disobey him. She claimed that she wanted to stop him beating the child, but knew that if she did she might be killed. She was afraid to leave because she had become totally dependent upon her lover, and he had convinced her that everyone outside of him was conspiring to destroy her. Under his orders, so she testified, she began to smoke cocaine (crack) which she used both to please her partner and to relieve her fear.

The Oprah Winfrey Show (C4, 1 September. 10.30pm) had a studio discussion about the questions posed by the Hedda Nussbaum trial. Battered wives explained how it is that repeated physical violence and personal humiliation knocks out of them the will to defend themselves. They submit to anything, even endangering the safety of their children. Nussbaum's closest friend was on the programme and she argued that there came a point at which Nussbaum could no longer be expected to do anything for herself. The author of a novel about the case also appeared, arguing that everyone, under whatever adverse circumstances, has a responsibility to defend themselves, and. especially, to defend those under their care who are too young to defend themselves. She contended that Nussbaum should have been charged as well as her lover.

For a socialist, the matters of legality are not at issue. It is not for the US state to determine the guilt or innocence of child abusers when they, through their perpetration of poverty and their cultivation of the war machine, are willing to make suffer and to kill millions of children. The question of the state, as usual, is an interference in human affairs. Neither need socialists spend time entering into the finer debates of individual ethics. The fact is that capitalism deprives vast numbers of workers of the chance to make the best decisions about their lives. Are we to force the parents of the 15 million children under the age of five who starved to death last year to repent for their immorality? What else could they do? It was the hopeless cultural rut in which so many people under capitalism find themselves (even economically affluent workers like Steinberg and Nussbaum) which was one of the most depressing things about the documentary and subsequent discussion.

What was more depressing was the wider question raised. Do humans have a duty to free themselves from oppression? In relation to the profit system, is the working class irresponsible for supporting the system? There are two Marxist answers on this: one is to say that capitalism imposes an ideology upon workers which can only be broken out of when the working class is historically ripe for escape from capitalism—until that moment it is foolish to blame the workers for all of the problems from which they suffer. The second answer is to say that humans are always able to muster within themselves a certain amount of intelligent response to their conditions and to fail to reach out for this is irresponsible.

In the month after the BBC's distasteful celebrations of the beginning of the war which killed millions of European workers, we could well think about this whole question. On the one hand, the Nazis were "seduced'' by Hitler and his pernicious ideology; they were victims. Similarly, workers of the Russian Empire were victims of Stalin. But if they were captured ideologically, could they be held responsible for the atrocities committed in their name? Could the worker who voted for Thatcher in 1979 be held responsible for the deaths of the men whose lives were wasted in the Falklands War? And not only those who voted for Thatcher, but those who refused to actively oppose what she stood for by becoming socialists? To say that deluded workers are irresponsible seems to be the same as saying that a baby who burns herself is irresponsible for not knowing better. On the other hand, if there is to be no question of irresponsibility in history. then not only has nobody any right to say that Hedda Nussbaum should have defended her child from her lover's beatings, but also we cannot suggest that workers who think that nuclear bombs make them secure are irresponsible in their support for what might well kill all of us.

One solution to the dilemma presented itself while watching Oprah Winfrey and her guests: some of the women on the programme had been battered and they did get out of the situation they were in. If they did. then resistance becomes a possibility and failure to resist needs to be explained. Similarly with the fight against capitalism and all that it is doing to the workers of the world. If some can escape from the ideology which we were taught since the cradle, then we have a right to expect others to respond historically in the same way.

If we can understand the duty to emancipate ourselves from capitalism, why should we excuse our fellow workers on the grounds that they have been conditioned to accept what we have managed to reject? Is the black South African who has been bought for the armed service of his racist masters to be blamed as an accomplice of racism? Are the teenaged Chinese soldiers who were almost brainwashed into slaughtering other Chinese soldiers irresponsible? Difficult questions—and extremely depressing.

Steve Coleman

Monopoly comes to Russia (1989)

From the October 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

The task of refuting the claim that Russia is socialist becomes easier and easier as the hallmarks of capitalism there become more and more clear for all to see.

"British Admen Leading Russians to Market” headlined an article in the Sunday Times (6 August). The chairman of Delaney Fletcher Delaney agency and president of the Institute of Practioners in Advertising is organising a two-day seminar to teach Russians the latest advertising and marketing techniques. The seminar will be run by the Institute and the Soviet Videofilm Corporation, which is responsible for television advertising in Russia, and subjects will include consumer as well as business-to-business advertising. Although domestic constraints and the non-convertible rouble still cause severe shortages. Western companies are setting up agencies ready to compete in a potential market of 283 million people. Young and Rubican, Ogilvy and Maher, as well as Mercedes-Benz. Allied-Lyons, British Airways and ICI, are already there.

If there was any doubt left about Russia not being capitalist, this should have been dispelled by an earlier report in the Observer Magazine (23 July) that Monopoly is shortly arriving in Russia. No, not the state monopoly which in fact is slowly being chipped away, but the world's most popular board game. You know, the one we've all played where, with "play” money, we've bought little green wooden houses or built red wooden hotels from the Old Kent Road to Mayfair, charging rent to other players unfortunate enough to land on our squares. To the 22 existing different language versions available in 33 countries, Russian is being added. As when the original American version was adapted for the English market in 1935, changes have been made. The street lay-out is that of Moscow. Mayfair has become Arbat, erstwhile habitation of Tsarist Imperial courtiers, just as Whitechapel Road here is Nagatynskaya Street in a run-down industrial suburb. The money is roubles and stocks and shares have become government bonds. Like their western counterparts. Russian workers will be able to play at property speculation and exploitation in their sitting-rooms while, in the real world outside where they have to sell their labour-power, they will continue to be exploited until capitalism—Russian or Western-style—is abolished.

Eva Goodman

". . . Cutting the wallet" (1989)

From the October 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Not just a singer (1989)

Book Review from the October 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Chaliapin. By Victor Borovsky. Hamish Hamilton.

This book is a study of the rise of Fyador Chaliapin from poor uneducated Russian peasant boy to the world's greatest opera singer and dramatic actor. Its interest from our viewpoint is in the light it throws on Russian life and conditions between 1873 and 1938.

On achieving fame on the Russian operatic stage Chaliapin established a close friendship with the writer Maxim Gorky, who was keen to help him write his autobiography. Both came from the same Volga district, both born to peasant status (a crippling handicap in old Russia) and experienced from an early age the appalling poverty and misery of the Russian casual labourer. Both had in fact been Volga boatmen (the barge hauliers epitomised in the famous song).

Gorky was up until 1917 a constant supporter and financier of Russian Social Democracy, especially Lenin's Bolshevik faction. It was in fact Gorky's money that financed the Party school on the Isle of Capri in Italy. But in 1917 Gorky was already disillusioned:

  The working class cannot fail to see that Lenin is only doing some experimenting with their living tissues, with their blood The working class must know that miracles don't exist, that they are going to face hunger, the complete disruption of industry, chaos in transport, a long term of bloody anarchy, followed by a no less bloody and dismal reaction. Aren't all those who disagree seized and dragged off to jail under the Lenin regime just as they were under the Romanovs.

Despite being sympathetically inclined to the revolutionaries before 1917 and certainly in favour of democratic freedoms. Chaliapin too became rapidly disillusioned with the Bolshevik regime and it was Gorky who advised him to leave Russia, which he did, never to return despite Stalin s blandishments.

At a time when thousands of Muscovites were living in “angles" (corners of rooms) Stalin offered Chaliapin a house in Moscow and a dacha in the country, almost anything in fact, to get him back to Russia. Chaliapin, to his credit, said. "He will give me money and a house but can he give me back my soul?". Which was one way of putting it.

After leaving Russia Chaliapin went on to consolidate a reputation as the greatest operatic bass singer of all time. He was not merely the possessor of a mighty voice but was also a great dramatic innovator, infusing old and encrusted stage traditions with new life. He toured the world electrifying audiences everywhere.

Early in his career after his first visits abroad he wrote:

  I have been all over Europe and have visited North and South America: everywhere I have seen Liberty, but nowhere greater freedom than exists in England. The meetings in Hyde Park surprised me especially. One hears Socialists and Anarchists speechifying almost side by side. The crowd listens with equal attention and respect to both of them. A Catholic defends his religion with fiery zeal, while not far away an atheist deprecates all faith no less ardently. I was very much astonished at some of the speeches that were translated for me by my Russian friends and my Russian habit of thought made me involuntarily wonder what the Police would say about it. At times I almost felt like asking the Park policeman how he could listen to such things unmoved. What an incredible phenomenon it seemed that a policeman should be the servant of free democracy.

This passage from his autobiography Pages from My Life, which, incidentally, was censored from the Soviet edition, shows Chaliapin to have been not merely a great musical artist and genius but an acute political observer.

It is regrettable that Dr. Borovsky (like so many Soviet-trained academics) is apparently ignorant of our existence and that we disowned the Bolshevik dictatorship in 1917—and that we still speak in Hyde Park.

Horatio

Media attempt to discredit Marx (1989)

From the October 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

No newspaper or television item is guaranteed to annoy a socialist more than those in which some capitalist country is described as "Marxist" or "socialist", both words that are frequently prefixed to the name of various state capitalist countries in Africa or South America which happen to be aligned with Russia.

Apart from the BBC, which has always refused to offer a reasoned reply to our request for an explanation of their deliberate policy decision to describe such countries as Mozambique and Ethiopia as Marxist, among the other main offenders are the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph. However, if recent reports from the correspondents of these two papers are to be believed, there will shortly need to be a fundamental editorial review on how their reporters are to describe these countries in the future.

In an article which appeared in the Guardian on 31 July, their correspondent in Mozambique reported that the single party there (Fremlimo) had just "abandoned Marxism”. Showing a painful lack of any knowledge about Marx's writings on politics and economics and under the heading 'Mozambique is No Longer Marxist', she claimed that Marx was being thrown overboard because private groups were now able to run their own schools but, more importantly to her mind, because there was to be a relaxation of state control over the means and methods of production. As this is what the media believe is meant by “Marxism", it is hardly surprising that there has been such an embarrassing silence from the BBC.

Marx was quite clear in his writings that not only has the establishment of socialism to result from the political action of the working class itself ("the proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority", as the Communist Manifesto puts it), but that this involves the abolition of commodity production and wage-exploitation (the workers, says Value, Price and Profit, "ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword 'Abolition of the Wages System'”) and their replacement by a democratically-organised society where the principle ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs' would apply (Critique of the Gotha programme).

It is clear that, on Marx’s definition, Mozambique is not socialist. It is in fact a developing capitalist country which is trying to find its feet in an ever more competitive world market. That its ruling class felt that it would accumulate capital quicker if it adopted state capitalism and its attendant Leninist (not Marxist) ideology and is now prepared to accept harsh measures imposed upon it by the IMF, including the liberalising of its economy, does not mean that it is no longer Marxist. It never had anything to do with Marx to begin with. Workers there, as elsewhere, still need to engage in the general democratic struggle for society as a whole to own and control the means to life.

In the same week that the Guardian informed its readers that Mozambique was “no longer” Marxist, the Daily Telegraph (3 August) ran a report on its foreign news page with the headline ’Ethiopia Loosens Marxist Chains To Woo Investors'. Like Mozambique's ruling class the dictators in Ethiopia require foreign investors from outside the Russian sphere of influence. If that means changing one set of ideological clothes for another, and if it means introducing a modicum of private capitalism and a loosening-up of the state-controlled economy, then this is something they have accepted they will have to do. But, as with Mozambique, it has nothing to do with abandoning Marx or socialism.

One central feature of socialism, clearly stated by Marx, is that it would be a classless society in which the means to life would be the common ownership of all society ("In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have", says the Communist Manifesto again, “an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all").

So, if Ethiopia was socialist by Marx's definition, it would have abolished classes, but the Daily Telegraph writer actually draws her readers’ attention to the class divisions that exist there. In one place she writes that “Ethiopian teenage girls in puffball silk skirts and the latest European finery attend parties at the Hilton Hotel" and in another that “more than a million people live in squalid homes with mud walls and tin roofs”. If there was common ownership and direct access to production then nobody in Ethiopia or anywhere else in the world would need to be living in squalor and poverty.

Reporters who describe backward state-capitalist countries like Ethiopia and Mozambique as “Marxist" are either ignorant or are telling lies to try to discredit Marx.

Richard Lloyd

50 Years Ago: The Partition of Ireland (1989)

The 50 Years Ago column from the October 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

The question of the demand by the Government of Eire for the incorporation of Northern Ireland in a united, independent Ireland is one which really requires full and detailed treatment in order to make plain the correctness of the Socialist attitude of refusing to support either side . . .

The Socialist view is that the problems and conflicts arising from capitalism do now prevent, and will continue to prevent, the large and small racial and language groups of peoples in the world from living together harmoniously. Neither the creation of small would-be independent nations nor the forcible incorporation of unwilling groups in larger States, will work satisfactorily as long as international commercial rivalries keep stoking the fires of national hatreds.

One argument used in the past by advocates of Irish nationalism has been that until the national question is settled the workers will never be able to recognise their worldwide community of interest in the abolition of capitalism. As against this the Socialist points out that nationality problems never will be settled under capitalism. The efforts to do so under the Versailles Treaty illustrate this.

Moreover, national movements tend invariably towards methods of force to attain their ends, as witness the traditions of the Irish factions. This in itself is a factor which militates against the spread of Socialist knowledge.

[From the Socialist Standard, October 1939.]

Solidarity’s Wrong Turn (1989)

From the October 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

So, nine years after it was formed as the first independent trade union in Eastern Europe since the war, Solidarity has now supplied a Prime Minister for Poland. Remarkable as this development is, it is nevertheless a fateful mistake from a working class point of view for an organisation formed as a trade union to get involved in government.

This is because the exercise of government power and trade union action are ultimately incompatible. Governments, whatever they might originally intend, have to give priority to maintaining or restoring the profitability and the international competitiveness of industries, whether private or state-owned, situated in the country they are governing. Trade unions, on the other hand, exist to defend workers against the downward pressures that are constantly exerted on their wages and working conditions, whether these come from employers or governments. Those Solidarity members who have entered the government in Poland have put themselves on a collision course with the membership of Solidarity as a trade union. However sincere they may be, they have betrayed the original aim for which Solidarity was established by ordinary workers in 1980, as will become clear when they find themselves, as they will, obliged to oppose wage demands and strikes.

It is true that Solidarity eventually developed other aims, like trade unions everywhere (after all, most trade unions in Britain made the mistake of associating with the Labour Party). Opponents of the regime realised the potential of a movement supported by millions for bringing about changes, and Solidarity’s original working class leaders came to be surrounded by “advisers” and “experts” and “Catholic intellectuals”. These people had other aims than the mere defence of wages and working conditions. They wanted an end to Polish dependence on Russian imperialism, freedom for the Catholic Church to do what it wanted and, on the economic field, a more market-oriented economy and more freedom for private enterprise.

The Class Structure or Polish Society

Solidarity, though far from being a socialist organisation even nominally, realised very quickly that Poland was a class-divided society in which the working class was oppressed and exploited and not a society in which, as the regime’s propaganda machine claimed, the working class ruled through its vanguard, the Polish Communist Party. The exploiting and oppressing class was identified as being the nomenklatura – those filling the top posts in the Party, the government, industry and the armed forces, reserved for Party nominees and carrying with them various material privileges – and the Communist Party was identified as the party of this class and not the working class as – it mockingly pretended.

The class situation in Poland has not been better analysed from within the country than by Jacek Kuron (now a Solidarity MP, whose name was even one of the three proposed by Walesa to General Jaruzelski for the post of Prime Minister) and Karol Modzelewski in the Open Letter to the Party they wrote in 1968 (earning themselves a three-year jail sentence):

  In our system, the Party elite is, at one and the same time, also the power elite; all decisions relating to state power are made by it and, in any case, at the top of the Party and state hierarchies there exists, as a rule, a fusion of responsible posts. By exercising state power, the Party elite has at its disposal all the nationalized means of production; it decides on the extent of accumulation and consumption, on the direction of investment, on the share of various social groups in consumption and in the national income; in other words, it decides on the distribution and utilization of the entire social product . . . The worker is thus exploited, because he is deprived of the ownership of the means of production; in order to live, he must sell his labour. From the moment he performs that act, which to him is indispensable, i.e., when he sells his ability to do a given job in a given time, his labour and its product no longer belong to him but to those who have bought his labour, the owners of the means of production, the exploiters. To whom does the worker in our country sell his labour? To those who have at their disposal the means of production, in other words, to the central political bureaucracy.

The class Kuron and Modzelewski call here the “central political bureaucracy” is the same as what everyone in Poland now calls the nomenklatura. It was a class that was imposed on Poland by the Russian army after the last world war as a mirror-image of the Russian ruling class. Through its party, the Communist Party, it has ruthlessly governed Poland for the past forty years, jailing opponents and brutally suppressing strikes by discontented workers.

The Rise of Solidarity

Then came August 1980 when, in a manifestation of mass working class discontent with their exploitation, millions of workers throughout Poland went on strike. Unable to suppress this by armed force, the government had to agree to negotiate with the representatives of Solidarity, the union the striking workers had formed. But the Polish ruling class had still not given up its desire to rule by dictatorship. Egged on by the Russian ruling class who feared that things might get out of hand and Poland escape from its sphere of influence, the government declared martial law in December 1981 and banned Solidarity. Its leaders, including Walesa and the present Prime Minister Mazowiecki, were rounded up and jailed or sent into internal exile.

Solidarity, however, continued to exist and, still supported by millions of workers, went underground. Meanwhile Poland’s economic situation continued to worsen. In the 1970s the Polish government had borrowed heavily from Western banks in order to finance investments and imports of consumer goods, hoping to be able to pay off these debts from the increased exports it expected to follow from its investments in new equipment. Then came the world slump; the exports failed to materialise and Poland found itself reduced to the status of a Latin American debtor country. Living standards continued to fall, and rations became smaller and smaller and spread to more and more goods.

Under these circumstances working class discontent grew, culminating last year in the biggest strike wave since 1980. The Party and government, now completely discredited, realised that they were going to have to negotiate again with Solidarity. So weak was their position that they had to concede not just the re-legalisation of Solidarity but a revision of the Constitution.

The agreement, reached in March, provided for elections to be held this June but elections of a special kind in that the Communist Party (and its satellite parties) was guaranteed a majority in the lower house, with 60 per cent of the seats being reserved for them. Elections to the new Senate, on the other hand, were to be completely free. In the next elections, to be held in four years time, there were to be no reserved seats in the lower house either.

The results of the election confirmed that Solidarity enjoyed overwhelming support and that the Communist Party had no support outside the ranks of the nomenklatura. All the seats in the Senate save one (which went to an independent oppositionist) and the 35 per cent of freely-elected seats in the lower house were won by Solidarity (the other 5 per cent had been reserved for some Catholic representatives). The Communist Party even failed to win on the first round all the seats reserved for it since a number of their candidates, including the outgoing Prime Minister Rakowski, failed to achieve the 50 per cent of votes cast required to be elected.

In Office but Not Power

This result was embarrassing, both to the government and to Solidarity since it undermined the compromise deal whereby the Communist Party would be allowed to rule until further elections in four years time. The way out favoured by the Polish ruling class was a coalition between their party and Solidarity, with Solidarity as the junior partner whose role would be to defuse working class discontent while highly unpopular measures, involving price rises and redundancies, were pushed through. But Solidarity was not prepared to be used to bailout the regime in this way.

This refusal placed the Polish ruling class in a dilemma since the only option now left was to allow Solidarity a larger share of power, but could they be trusted? After all, hadn’t Solidarity identified them as the class enemy and hadn’t they spoken of dismantling the whole system of patronage and privilege from which they benefited? In the end they decided to let Solidarity form a government while retaining key ministries for their own direct political representatives – the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of the Interior which together control the coercive forces of the Polish state. In addition, the President, General Jaruzelski, retains considerable powers. But even though the Solidarity government will be in office rather than in power, it will still have to assume responsibility for running Polish capitalism, inevitably against the interests of the working class in Poland. This of course is the plus side for the Polish ruling class. They will still be able to use Solidarity to defuse working class discontent while the unpopular measures, necessary to restructure Polish capitalism and render it internationally competitive again, are implemented.

Already, even before the Solidarity government came into office, Solidarity politicians were urging workers not to rock the boat by going on strike. The Financial Times (19 August) reported that in a debate in the Senate the previous day

  Senator Leszek Pietrowski, the Solidarity Senator from Katowice, appealed to striking miners in his constituency to return to work in the name of their feelings for Solidarity. ‘We can’t strike when Solidarity is beginning to rule the country’, he said

More, much more, such talk will be heard over the coming months. Indeed, it is probable that Walesa refused office precisely so as to be able to use his influence with the trade union side of Solidarity to get workers to accept the austerity measures that the Solidarity government will be imposing on them.

Transition to Private Capitalism?

A Solidarity government, despite its trade union origins, will do – can do – nothing to further the interests of workers in Poland. However, committed as it is to an economic programme that amounts to the transformation of Poland from the bureaucratic state capitalist country it has been since 1948 into the sort of mixed private and state economy that exists in the West, the Solidarity government could well take steps that really would undermine the position of the nomenklatura, benefiting instead the growing private capitalist class – the zloty millionaires, as they are known – that exists in Poland.

Earlier this year the Financial Times (13 January) published a revealing article by Jan Winiecki, who lectures at the Catholic University of Lublin, which amounted to a blueprint for a transition from bureaucratic state capitalism to free enterprise private capitalism. Discussing the “critical mass of changes that must be made at the beginning to get things moving towards the market system”. Winiecki argued that:

  an elimination of the nomenklatura Communist apparatchiks’ privilege to appoint managers at all levels of economic management is the crucial, though politically most difficult, component of the critical mass. Elimination of the nomenklatura is not an end in itself. It is simply a prerequisite to establishing some sensible property rights in place of the chimera of ‘social’ ownership.

In other words, the monopoly control over industry currently exercised by the nomenklatura – supposedly in the name of society but in reality in their own interests as a class – should give way to monopoly control exercised by private capitalists enjoying legal ownership rights over industry.

Realising that the nomenklatura are not likely to accept without a struggle what amounts to their dispossession, Winiecki proposed that:

  If the nomenklatura cannot be beaten it can still be bought out. Party apparatchiks and high level bureaucrats (or most of them) should be offered high compensation for leaving their positions, which would then be abolished.

Actually, if they see that the bureaucratic state capitalism of which they are the beneficiaries really is going to be abolished, this could be an attractive deal for them. They could use their “high compensation” to convert themselves into private capitalist investors and continue to live the life of parasites on the workers to which they have become accustomed.

Only history will tell whether Poland will take this road or whether some other compromise will be worked out between the two sections of the capitalist exploiting class there – the nomenklatura and the zloty millionaires – but one thing is clear. Such a change in the composition of the exploiting class has nothing to offer the workers who sacrificed so much to establish Solidarity as a trade union.

Adam Buick

The Tory Reserve Team (1989)

From the October 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Would you buy a load of worn-out policies from Kinnock, Hattersley and their gang of reformist politicians? Socialists would sooner buy a secondhand motor from Arthur Daley. The Labour Party has never stood for socialism. But now it has come out in its true colours. Its pathetic Policy Review documents leave nobody in any doubt: Labour is out to run the Profit System.

There is nothing new about Labour trying to do the dirty work of managing capitalism. We have had eight Labour governments. They had as much to do with bringing about socialism as the Sun has with bringing you the news. Labour governments have brought in incomes policies to keep our wages down; they have smashed strikes, using police and troops: they have passed racist immigration laws; they have built new bombs—they were the ones who brought into being the British atom bomb; they have supported wars; they have made cuts in essential services, like the NHS; and all of the last seven Labour governments have left power with unemployment higher than when they came in. Above all. Labour has seen to it that profits can be made by the capitalists who own and control Britain. Under the last Labour government the richest 1 per cent increased their share of wealth ownership from 24 to 25 per cent. Labour has a long record of keeping capitalism in "safe'' hands. Just like Mitterrand's phoney 'socialists" in France and the Australian Labour government which is Torier than Thatcher. Kinnock's crew are a bunch of errand boys for the bosses.

Making Capitalism Work
What is new about the Policy Review is that Labour has confessed to the crime. In times past they stuffed their manifestos with pious rhetoric about “democratic socialism" Now they are telling it like it is: Give us your votes and we ll run capitalism better than the Thatcher mob. As Kinnock told the 1988 Labour Conference. ‘. . . the fact is that the kind of economy that we are faced with is going to be a market economy. It will be the one that we have to deal with when we are elected. We have got to make it work better than the Tories make it work . . . " Making capitalism work well means making sure that profits are high; that means milking the workers for as much as they can get out of us.

The millionaire-parasites need have no fear of a Labour government. The Policy Review makes clear that it will serve them well. Profits will be protected: international investors will be free to make money out of a stable economy: the bombs required by the NATO generals will all be kept in readiness for war: the workers will be disciplined, with most of the Tory anti-union laws kept in force. In short, Labour will act as efficient substitutes for the Tories while they take a rest after their long years of holding the harness.

Workers and capitalists do not have the same interests. They are legalised robbers—we are the robbed. It does not take a genius to see that the Tories are on the side of the capitalists. The Labour Party talks as if it is on the side of the workers. But read the new Policy Review and you will discover that:

We shall make it clear throughout the economy that our emphasis is on investment rather than consumption, and that money spent too generously on consumption today could prejudice jobs and services tomorrow.

Now. ask yourself the question: Who invests in the economy? The capitalists do. And who needs to consume? We. the workers. And Labour's "emphasis" will be on assisting which class?

At this year's Labour Conference the delegates will adopt the Policy Review. It will be presented as Labour's secret key to power. Some of the delegates will be asking themselves what it is that Labour is asking for power to do. Many will compromise and convince themselves that anyone running the profit system will be better than the present lot. But is that really so? At least with the Tories we can see the enemies clearly. But under a Labour government of capitalism workers will be asked to put up with all kinds of suffering so that Neil and "our government" can do the job properly. "Back us or sack us" is what Callaghan (now Lord Callaghan—payment for services rendered) told the unions. The workers in the unions went out in 1979 and sacked him. Why elect Kinnock and have to sack him five years after the election? He has told you in advance what he is out to do. Why not deny him your backing before he gets to the top of the greasy pole?

Cartoon by George Meddemmen.

Reformist Time-wasting
Countless numbers of Labour members and voters are feeling desperate. Even if they have not read the Policy Review they know that it is blatantly a manifesto for the profit system. They do not want to support this tasteless stew of half-cooked Harold Wilson peppered with some stale David Owen. Vast numbers of Labour supporters—decent, caring, concerned people—can smell the stinking scent of compromise in the air. The wider Kinnock smiles the more they know that their radical hopes are being betrayed. What can they do?

Should they elect a new leader? Kinnock is not the cause of Labour’s anti-socialist outlook any more than it was the captain’s fault that the Titanic sank when it hit the iceberg. The Titanic was not constructed to overcome the hazards it met— and Labour is certainly not constructed to overcome the profit system. Maybe John Smith could do a better job—maybe Gould could, but what matters is the product, not the front-man for the ad. And the fact is that the product is useless. Labour left-wingers say that Kinnock has betrayed them. Just as every previous Labour leader has done. So they need to find a new leader, like Tony Benn. Apart from the fact that Benn was overwhelmingly defeated when he stood against Kinnock last year, what is the point of adopting a lot of second-hand policies for nationalisation (which is State Capitalism) when these have been tried before and failed? State capitalism has been a disaster in Eastern Europe and China and the nationalised industries in Britain have not benefited the workers in them one little bit, as the miners have discovered. So. why change Labour's support for private capitalism for the state-capitalist line?

Some workers will leave the Labour Party. They are right. It is crazy to support an organisation if its policies betray all that you stand for. The new-look Labour Party of open support for the market and the nuclear bomb will be more than many can put up with. As they tear up their membership cards socialists will be cheering.

But where will the workers who abandon Kinnock's team go to? Some will look towards the Greens. They are making radical sounds. But the Greens have no class analysis and think that robbers and robbed should co-exist in harmony: we should all pull together and look after the ozone layer—never mind the profit motive which makes it economically rational to destroy the world. Green capitalism will still be capitalism. What about the Communist Party? Not many will join that: these days even the CP itself does not know what it stands for. The SWP? But why join a party which spends half its time exposing the Labour Party for being just like the Tories and the other half telling us all to Vote Labour? The sad fact is that many ex-Labour members and supporters will drift into apathy. They will vote for no- one. They will give up on making the world decent for its inhabitants to live in. Just think how many active men and women who wanted to change society the Labour Party has demoralised in its eight decades of reformist time-wasting! 

Join the real Socialist Party

However depressed many workers feel about Labour's abandonment of its few remaining principles, socialists say that now is not the time to give up. We should not allow a few pink-rosed careerists to tell us that the time for advocating socialism is over. The truth is that Labour never did put forward a case for socialism—all that has changed is that they have admitted what they stand for. Their admission proves just how right the Socialist Party has been from day one to treat these Labour fakers with complete and utter hostility. It shows how right we were stand our ground and say to our fellow workers: There is more to win than a few welfare reforms; we have a world to win.

We, the Socialist Party, have never betrayed our principled stand for the working-class interest and nothing less. And now. while the Labour Party stands exposed like a bad trickster with the pencil marks showing on the back of its playing cards, it is time to show that you are serious about socialism by joining the ranks of a party which is not out to run the profit system, but to end it. It will be the most momentous and militant political move of your life. The more who make it, the sooner will we be able to tell the Tory reserve team that they will not be required to play because the rules of the game have been abolished and the ground closed down.

Steve Coleman

Letter to the Editors: Is socialism practical (1989)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is socialism practical?

Dear Editors,

Your principles are excellent but their implementation in the foreseeable future is, I’m afraid, impracticable. May I make two points in this regard?

First, you say that goods will be distributed according to needs. How would that need be assessed? Or would assessment not be necessary because goods would be available in any quantity, at any time, to anybody? If that were the case, then an increased production of goods would be imperative, which raises the question of "to what level?" From which follows the setting of a standard of living throughout the world. The task of satisfying such a high demand would be unimaginable and would surely be impossible at the level of the Western industrial states, or anything like it. What would the people in those countries do when they found that their standard of living was reduced?

My second point concerns the increased production necessary under my first point. We already complain, with every justification, that growth (i.e. increased production) involves ever-increasing pollution. There seems to be no readily available solution of that problem which, surely, your actions would make worse. How would you solve it?

W. F. Whitehead, 

Burnley

Reply:

In socialism, a society of production for use with free access to the means of life, an individual's needs will be determined by individuals themselves. They are, after all, best placed to do so!

The revolutionary change to socialism will require a majority of workers consciously and democratically deciding that this is in their interest as a class. They will appreciate that plans and preparations need to be made before the change-over from capitalism to socialism to ensure a smooth transition to production for use and free access. Capitalism is run from top to bottom by the working class (the employing class having long ago become economically redundant). As workers we have the knowledge and skills, and have developed the means of production to the level needed for the implementation of socialism. All that is lacking is political consciousness and the determination to win control of the machinery of the state to convert the means of life from private and state ownership to common ownership by the whole of society.

The gathering of information and projections of likely demand for goods and services should present few difficulties. For example, the development of the "bar code” system in retailing could easily be adapted to measure trends and facilitate distribution and to assess likely future needs. The larger the number covered by such estimates the smaller the effects of any sudden or unforeseen fluctuations.

Certainly, it would be one of the first tasks of a socialist society to increase the amount of goods produced to ensure enough for all. You doubt whether this can be achieved. We think your doubts are unjustified. A report by the World Commission on Environment and Development was published in 1987 entitled Our Common Future (the Brundtland report). In it were quoted the UN Industrial Development Organisation estimates that, for the consumption of manufactured goods in developing countries (the "Third World") to be raised to current industrial country levels, world industrial output would have to be increased by 2.6 times. But even under capitalism, with its production restricted to what can be sold at a profit, the output of goods increased by seven times between 1950 and 1987. Freed from the constraints of the profit motive and with the ending of the waste of the world's resources represented by armaments, banking, buying and selling and other such activities, socialism will have little difficulty in producing sufficient wealth to enable the whole of the world's people to live in comfort and decency.

Nor is your fear well-founded that the increased production necessary to do this will result in increasing pollution. Manufacturing industry is already implementing pollution control measures where it pays it to do so. A 1984 OECD survey concluded that expenditure on environmental measures over a period of twenty years had positive effects on the capitalist economy. According to the Brundtland report, "the benefits, including health, property and ecosystem damage avoided . . . have generally exceeded costs”. Clearly we have the knowledge and techniques to avoid environmental pollution—only capitalism's drive for profit prevents their immediate implementation. However, if in socialism it can be demonstrated that a productive process cannot be operated without unacceptable damage to the environment (for example, nuclear fission energy production) then it will have to be abandoned and alternatives developed in its place.

Finally, you ask how would we solve this problem. We do not exist as a political party to try to solve within capitalism the problems that it generates. We exist as a party to be used by the working class to win control of political power for the sole purpose of abolishing capitalism and establishing socialism. We cannot by minority, or "vanguard", action do it for you. If you agree with our principles then we invite you to join with us in the urgently necessary task of spreading socialist ideas. Your efforts can then help bring socialism into the "foreseeable future”.

Editors.

Labour MPs in confusion (1989)

From the October 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Labour Party has always attracted a wide range of politically bewildered do-gooders and reformists. These believe that in spite of their many differences, they can all band together and run capitalism more acceptably than the Tories. In the past some, like David Owen, have decided that their ambitions would be better served by getting out and abandoning the principles they once claimed to hold. Others like Tony Benn have remained despite their out-of-step ideas, to become eccentric and embarrassing curiosities in the eyes of their more ambitious colleagues.

In his leadership acceptance speech of October 1983, Neil Kinnock attempted to forge a new unity by referring to "socialism" in the vague and misleading way that the Labour Party has often had recourse to when convenient:

Our function, our mission as socialists, is to see we gain the power to achieve that, and there is no other way but by Socialism—deliberate organisation of all the resources of humankind and talents. That is the definition of Socialism.

Such loose catch-all phrases may win standing ovations at Labour Party Conferences, but would also receive lip-service from all kinds of other capitalist politicians too.

In contrast to this, the Socialist Party has always held to a clear and precise definition of our aim, and being a democratic movement without leaders, any Socialist Party member could be relied on to explain this clear definition of socialism: a worldwide system of society in which goods and services are produced solely to satisfy human needs, not profit; which will only be possible when all the productive resources are democratically controlled, rather than at present where they are owned and controlled by private individuals or by the state on the "people's behalf". It cannot therefore be a system of buying and selling or bartering. Money will then be obsolete, as will be the need for human beings to starve while food is destroyed or allowed to rot because they cannot pay for it. This definition, of common ownership, production for use, and free access to all wealth, is expanded on throughout the journals and pamphlets of the Socialist Party.

Mixed Economy
In an effort to find out what was lift of Kinnock's so-called socialist unity after five years of his leadership, one of our members wrote to a number of Labour MPs late last year and asked for their definitions of socialism. The results were quite spectacular, confirming our suspicion of utter confusion, disagreement and bewilderment.

Both Kinnock and his right-hand man Hattersley simply sent copies of Democratic Socialist Aims and Values which at the time was the latest creation of the Labour Party's waffle factory in Walworth Road. The nearest that the pamphlet came to defining socialism was as a system of state capitalism, heavily decorated with a generous dose of liberal rhetoric. "The state', we were assured, "is an instrument for sustaining and enhancing the liberties of the whole community". "Free trade unions" would be vital to democracy; but Kinnock has been rather shy about any pledge to repeal the anti-trade union legislation of the past ten years. They trot out the old clichés about "redistribution of wealth" (and this is one promise which the 1974-79 Labour government did keep—the richest ten per cent became richer!) but there is no talk of changing the basis on which wealth is produced, only a recommitment to the "mixed economy", as "there are many areas of the economy where market allocation and competition between companies . . . is essential" and "democratic socialists believe in market allocation". Next they'll be telling us that defenders of capitalism "believe in common ownership".

Tony Benn was one of several respondents who referred us to literature on the subject, in this instance a list of the many books and pamphlets he has written since 1957. He also sent the Aims and Objectives of the Campaign Group, which advocates "a steady expansion of common ownership . . . covering the commanding heights of the economy". It is clear, however, that this refers to state capitalism again, as the leaflet elsewhere speaks not of ending the state, government and law which are all parts of the profit system and of class division, but of subjecting these institutions to "fundamental reform" only. Likewise, when interviewed in the Socialist Standard in 1980, Benn upheld the Clause Four blueprint for nationalisation.

Gwyneth Dunwoody also referred us to the old chestnut of Clause Four of the Labour Party Constitution, while Dale Campbell-Savours plumped for "a collectivist approach" with a bit of "democratic accountability" on the side. His comment that "I could have spent several hours pondering in the most subtle detail exactly what I do mean by Socialism, and it might be good for me personally to do so" could well be taken to heart by many of the other respondents. Peter Shore, on the other hand, went for "a society of equals . . . to end the exploitation of man by man". He seems to have forgotten that saying that under Labour governments the exploitation of "man by man" is replaced by its opposite.

Stuart Bell sent several typed sheets, the gist of which can be summed up by his assertion that "the Labour Party believes in a mixed economy where profits are accepted but where profits are accepted but where a better use of them would be re-investment". He also showed an unfortunate lack of prescience by stating (in November 1988) that "Mikhail Gorbachov and the leader of the Chinese people . . . are seeking to democratise their socialism, to make it accountable and therefore flexible and responsive to the needs of people rather than bureaucracies". So, according to his defence of state capitalism referred to as "socialism", is the wholesale slaughter of Chinese workers part of this new "flexible" response?

Self-Publicity
Michael Foot declined to provide a definition, instead recommending various books by Aneurin Bevan, John Strachey, himself and others. Several others also found themselves more inclined towards arrogant self-publicity than to define for us what they stand for. Ken Livingstone assured us  that we would find his definition of socialism in an interview he had had with Tariq Ali. Eric Heffer complained to that to define socialism "would take a lot of time and effort" and recommended instead that we get his latest book. Likewise, Bryan Gould recommend his own book and, as a teasing taster gave us this morsel, that socialism is "a political system designed to break down the concentrations in society and to defuse power as widely as possible". There was certainly a breakdown of concentration as far as these definitions were concerned.

Bearing in mind that many of these people have been elected to power on the basis of standing for something called "socialism", their general reluctance to give a clear and practical definition of what they stand for shows a quite outstanding contempt for the people who elect them to such positions of power. Perhaps the best example of this arrogance came from Robin Cook, whose assistant wrote that "Robin Cook has asked me to thank you for writing to him, unfortunately he does not feel that he is in a position to respond to your request." You could probably get a more helpful response from the queen.

Jeremy Corbyn wrote of an absence of exploitation, respect for the natural environment, and production for need and not profit. In this last phrase, he came dangerously close to a genuine definition of socialism. But the capitalist class need not fear; production for need cannot be introduced on the basis of minority control of the means of production, whether through private enterprise or through the state control which Corbyn stands for. Tam Dalyell limply offered "a system based on the advantage of the community rather than the individual". Finally, Denis Healey (don't forget the MBE) suggested "collective control of society" with the rider that "I hope my views will be clear to you in the enclosed pamphlet". In what might be regarded as a symbolic gesture, however, there was no pamphlet enclosed.

Politically Bankrupt
Then, for some light relief, some Tory MPs were also asked the same question. Teresa Gorman and John Carlisle both felt too bound by parliamentary protocol to be able to answer correspondence from a constituent of another MP. Dame Jill Knight quoted tediously from the Universal English Dictionary about collective ownership of capital. Henry Bellingham wrote passionately about "restrictions of an individuals freedom". Leon Brittan would not offer a definition as he would prefer to leave that to those who claim to be socialists. (He seems unaware that he would have as much claim to call himself a socialist as some of the other respondents!) Finally, our member was warmly reassured by Graham Bright that "as a Conservative MP my aim is to preserve the liberties of my country and ensure its peace and prosperity".

The conclusion to this enquiry, then, must be that the Labour Party remains quite bankrupt politically. Even when invited to define socialism, the rhetoric of confusion continues to churn out. Even in their most visionary moments, these people continue to fluctuate narrowly between the limited horizons of private and state forms of capitalism. They are unable to define socialism clearly or in practical terms because they are caught up entirely in the idea of trying to run capitalism. For a clear explanation of the socialist alternative then, workers must turn to the uncompromising, principled aim of the Socialist Party and our companion parties in the World Socialist Movement.

NW/CS