Another Labour Government or Socialism? (1991)

From the October 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Labour Party

Why does anybody join the Labour Party? Some join to make a career for themselves; to become leaders, rulers, future Labour Lords, men and women entrusted to run capitalism. At every Labour Conference it is easy to spot the opportunists: minds dominated by the opinion polls, concerned to be seen supporting whatever illusions or prejudices will win them seats in the places of power, red ties and smiles for the rank and file, but really they are aching to get away from all the noise, back to “the real job” of becoming successful politicians. The average Labour voter is being used by them.

Capitalism

Then there are those workers who join the Labour Party because they want modest reform of capitalism. They want to attend to this or that symptom of the capitalist disease, but will not get involved in the revolutionary work of abolishing the cause of the problems because “that would be immoderate –a vote loser”. These Labourites devote hours every week and years of their life trying to make the profit system just a little more humane. They have been at it since 1906 when the first Labour MP’s entered parliament: trying to empty the ocean of social distress by the bucketful. These people belong in the Labour Party because it is, at its best, a party of capitalist reform.

Socialism

There is another category of workers who join the Labour Party: those who want to change society – transform it. This category includes not only the infantile Leninists of the Militant Tendency (whose conception of revolution is as outdated as it is elitist), but very many other ordinary Labourites who think that the election of a Labour government is the way to bring about socialism. It is to these people in particular that the Socialist Party–an organisation entirely separate from the Labour Party –addresses itself. It is our claim that by voting for and joining the Labour Party you are not in any way furthering the cause of socialism; the election of another Labour government would indicate that the workers do not yet understand or want socialism.

This was it

From the outset there have always been Labourites who have said that they are out to achieve socialism. Their sincerity is not in question. At the 1925 Labour Party Conference, George Lansbury stated that “Socialism is inscribed on our banners … we intend that the land of Britain and all its resources shall be owned and used in the service of the British people”. In Labour’s 1945 election manifesto, Let Us Face The Future, workers were told that: “The Labour Party is a socialist party and proud of it. Its ultimate purpose is the establishment of the socialist commonwealth of Great Britain”. When that 1945 government was elected many workers thought that this was it–the dawn of socialism. What happened? Industries were nationalised – only to leave workers like the miners exploited under state capitalism. Troops were sent to Korea, the NATO gang was joined, the British atom bomb was secretly initiated, and support was given to the bombing of Hiroshima, all by a so-called socialist government. The dockers’ strike was smashed by the use of troops. Bevan promised there would be no homeless workers in Britain by the time the Labour government left office; in 1951 they lost the election and capitalism in all its ugliness was still wholly intact.

Disillusion

Then came the Wilson and the Callaghan years; radical transformation remained something to talk about at Conference, but running capitalism in accordance with its harsh economic laws was what those governments were all about. Many workers voted Labour in 1945, 1964 and 1974 and concluded in disillusion, “If that’s socialism, we won’t bother to vote for it”. That is why Labour’s share of the vote has fallen: workers do not believe the promises as much as they used to and they are right not to.

Leaders

“But we’ve got the wrong leadership”. This is the perpetual cry of Labourites who are mystified as to why the great change is not coming. It is not very long ago that Neil Kinnock was the golden boy of the Left. But now he has become a “realist”, as all leaders seeking to run capitalism must. The recently published Labour Party programme does not even mention the word “socialism”. Tony Benn, a member of the last Labour government, has described it as “violently anti-socialist”. Therefore it would seem that reality must be to leave a party which possesses such a programme. Of course, you will hear rousing speeches from Leftist leaders who will tell you that “Socialism is inscribed on our banners”; you will meet Labourites who will tell you that “anything” is better than the Tories; you will hear on the grapevine that there is a new socialist leader waiting in the wings and that, when they get power, socialism will be back on the agenda. The dogmatic belief that another Labour government is in the interest of the working class is one that will be thrown at you from every angle. But in your own mind you know very well that you will never see the establishment of socialism by sending Labour MP’s to Parliament.

The Alternative

Socialism will only be established when the vast majority of workers understand it, want it and democratically organise for it in a party which is not out to mend capitalism, but to end it. Socialism means the total abolition of capitalism. An end to private and state ownership and control of the means of wealth production and distribution, production would be solely for use, with all people having free access to the common store of goods and services, instead of production for sale on the market with a view to profit. To win workers to organise for socialism is a massive task and it is easy to be demoralised and deceive yourself that there is an easier way to initiate the new system. But there is no alternative to the hard work being carried out by the Socialist Party–and the sooner those who want us to succeed join us, the sooner it will be done.

Why you should (still) be a socialist (1991)

From the October 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

A myth is being celebrated. The rejoicing conveys all the emptiness of idiot-priests delighting in the exorcism of a demon spirit. The slayed ghost in question is “communism". The claim is that it, together with Marxism, socialism and anything else at all that dares to question the immutability of the capitalist system, is no longer on the historical agenda.

So it was that Jean-Denis Bredin. writing in Le Monde (4 September), a few days after the dissolution of the so-called Communist Party of the Soviet Union, could state triumphantly:

  Communism is dead—the word, the party, the empire, the theology, it’s all dead and everyone is happy . . . Mr Gorbachev was the timorous individual who started the progress . . . on the road which history had forced upon him. into the brilliant sunshine of the market economy. Are not the communists, if any are left, blind men and women who never understood that capitalism has taken over human destiny, that there would no longer be a Revolution but rather an eternal reform making the rich a little less rich, the poor a little less poor, not overnight but through the patient work of centuries. promising freedom and bread for all?

This crazed triumphalism has become an ideological hysteria, pushing the enemies of social change into ever new regions of intellectual arrogance in their assertions that—to use the catchphrase of She Who Was Deposed—There is No Alternative. What they are saying is that the decades of misery which followed the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in 1917 are proof that the consequence of deposing the dictatorship of Capital is ruin and grief. The tearing down of the statues of the Leninist leaders demonstrates, it is argued, that workers will never again be misled by those who dare to doubt the eternal life-span of “the brilliant sunshine of the market economy”.

The fundamental error—more than error: grand deception—upon which such reasoning is based is twofold. Firstly, the Leninist revolutions did not remove capitalism. Secondly, "the brilliant sunshine of the market” still does not shine upon the workers who form the majority of the world's population; on the contrary, we live under black clouds of debt, poverty, pollution, war, mass starvation, economic anxiety, all of which are direct consequences of the system of production for profit.

Lenin led to Stalin
Lenin and his Bolshevik Party were not socialists or communists (properly understood, the two words stand for the same thing: a society of common ownership), but élitists who sought to impose a new regime by minority insurrection. In the 19th century Engels had warned against the outdated notion that a so-called enlightened vanguard could emancipate the workers without the latter knowing about it. Marx had as his basic political motto that the working class alone could emancipate themselves, not leaders or vanguards.

By contrast, the Bolsheviks, in the style of capitalist revolutionaries such as Jacobins or Blanquists, took power in Russia where the workers were in a small minority and wanted only peace, land and bread, not socialism. It was impossible then, as it would be now, to establish socialism without a majority of socialists in society. It was inevitable that the Bolsheviks formed a dictatorship. The iron rule of Lenin, where opposition parties and newspapers were outlawed, the trade unions were turned into errand boys for the state, and secret police were at the service of the Party-run state, turned into Stalinism with all of its mass slaughter and torture and systematic suffering and pervasive lying. Stalinism was the product of Leninism.

In fairness to Lenin, his clique took power and knew that they had no hope of creating socialism in one country. Lenin was quite clear that the best that could be achieved was state capitalism in Russia. It was such a form of capitalism which was built up within the Russian Empire and which has failed so wretchedly. The Stalinists were to call this state capitalism “socialism” and "Communism”, and many leftists in the West convinced themselves that Russia was an island of socialist freedom in a capitalist ocean. They were as foolish as those in Russia who now look to Britain and the USA and see the mixture of state and private capitalism here as some sort of utopia. Distance creates absurd illusions.

The long history of the Leninist belief in the liberatory character of the Bolshevik regime has been one of the greatest obstacles to socialist understanding in this century. How often have we socialists talked of a free, co-operative, democratic social system to replace capitalism only to be told that if that is what we stand for we should go to Russia—where, incidentally, we would probably have been locked up for advocating such revolutionary ideas. The death of state capitalism and its naive supporters in the form of the Communist Parties can only be good news for socialists.

The Socialist Party has a proud record of exposing the pretensions of the pseudo-Communist dictatorships. While Stalin was being praised in Britain as “our democratic ally” we were exposing the purges, the show trials and the wage-slave status of the Russian working class. When Leninist newspapers such as the Morning Star, backed by money stolen from the Russian workers, told us about the happy lives of Russian workers and the peaceful intentions of the Warsaw Pact and the way in which nationalist and racist prejudice had been overcome within the Russian Empire, this party responded with utter scorn.

From food queue to dole queue
The celebrations in the West are all the more ridiculous when it is considered that orthodox capitalism is in the midst of a huge economic crisis which will be added to by the new demands upon the ailing Western economies to aid Russia and the new states which are coming out of its Empire. Bush has plenty of rhetoric to offer gullible listeners enchanted by his New World Order, a fairy-tale image of international capitalist unity, but is short on cash to pay for his little scheme. The fact is that the USA faces a record budget deficit; whole cities are on the brink of bankruptcy and working-class discontent is of a proportion which creates inner-city rioting and crime on a scale which makes Belfast look like a tame theme park. Is Bush to export to Russia and the Ukraine the economic wonder-drug which places the American workers in a position that one in five of them are living below the official poverty line?

As for the British government, its leader is so concerned about the coming of "freedom" to Russia that he celebrated it with a flight to visit his trading partners in the leadership of the brutal regime which butchered the workers in Tianenman Square. If Mr Lamont is to go to Moscow we suggest that the workers there prepare for a few more years of queuing, just as millions here queue for the dole in a country which tells talented and eager wealth-creators that it would be better for them to sit at home doing nothing because it is unprofitable to exploit them. The economic “experts" who are to lead Russia into the “free" market propose that there will be 30 million unemployed Russians within a year. Such is “the brilliant sunshine of the market economy”.

The Leninist left has no future. Those who went along with the nonsense of "Soviet socialism" are discredited and have one final historical task; to apologise to the workers for misleading them—and to socialists for getting in our way. The Right is in trouble because it no longer has the Russian bogey-man to frighten the workers with. Of course, there will be a sustained and vicious attempt to drown the vision of socialism in the muddy pit of the Leninists' grave. Anti-socialists have used this tactic since 1917 and have been more than adequately answered.

The future for genuine socialists—libertarians not statists; democrats not vanguardists; Marxists not Leninists; clear thinkers not sloganising sheep—is a good one. Our opponents in the Labour Party, who once posed as short-cut socialists, have now come out in the open as no-way socialists. Kinnock would be happier to be seen as a left-wing conservative than a real socialist. So, that red herring is out of the way. And the myth of “the socialist world" is now virtually buried. That leaves us with one final myth to shatter. The Big Lie: that capitalism can ever work in the interest of the majority.

The "magic of the market” and the miraculous power of “market forces" have enjoyed an improper reputation during the 1980s as having something to offer. That reputation will be short-lived, not simply because we socialists are going to expose its falsity at every turn, but because the market itself will fail to deliver the promised goods to the workers. Frustration will create an appetite for an alternative. Not a phoney alternative, as workers have so often fallen for. but the genuine socialist article: common ownership and democratic control of all the resources of the planet by all the people of the planet. Communism is dead? No, it has yet to be tried. And when the recognition that common ownership is the answer dawns upon more and more workers, as surely it will, the swines who bathe in "the brilliant sunshine of the market economy" will experience a severe case of sunstroke.

Steve Coleman

Reform or revolution? (1991)

From the October 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

It has been a busy year for the reformers. There have been local taxes to abolish, NHS reforms to reverse, seven-plus tests to get rid of, the homeless to be provided with emergency shelter, bank charges to be made less harsh on the small borrower. Every year is a busy year for the reformer. No sooner has one minor concession been won—or, more often, half-won or quarter-won—than a ton of new problems, or old ones returned, fall upon society. The reformer's job is never done. The paint on the rusty machine is no sooner dry than it is peeling off.

The reformer is always busy. Petitions, marches, visits to MP’s, conferences of good-willed people to organise. Busy—too busy to stop and think. Have we been down this road before? Is the fight for a larger crumb worthy of their energies? When all the short steps forward are added to all the shoves back is any headway being made at all? No, the reformer has no time to think about that. After all, politics is not about theorising, says the reformer. They are people of the practical world.

Take the fight against the poll tax. Now, that was practical. No time to think about what taxes are . . . So, the opposition to the tax was mobilised and led on marches and forward unto the great victory of ... a new local tax.

To the reformist, with an immutable sense of the here and now, the revolutionary socialist presents a quite unacceptable spectacle. Here is someone who wants to go beyond the here and now into a system which is not here in a time which is not now, but could come as soon as the workers so decide. This discomforts the reformist because at root, despite all radical protestations to the contrary, the busy reformer is a hopeless conservative who cannot see more than the most trifling of changes as being possible. Reformists claim that revolutionaries irritate them because we seek what is impossible: we are “impossibilists”, to use the term of abuse applied to us back in 1904. But in reality it is the reformer’s conviction that nothing very much can change—a conviction shared between the left and the right wings of capitalist politics—which defines revolution as an unthinkable impossibility.

Sometimes the reformist will grant the necessity of a grand socialist change. But this must always be some time in the distant future. Reformists who flirt with the socialist vision turn socialism into a utopia. The conquest of the bakery is for the future, but for now the struggle for the crumbs must be all-consuming.

The political battle between Reform and Revolution is not a matter of tactical strategy: you take the high road and we'll take the low road. The reformist is taking the roundabout, never intending to stray from the here and now. All reformist talk about socialism in the future, but in the meantime . . . is so much hot air. The meantime of reformism is an eternity. Workers have died within this never-ending meantime. Indeed, it is a mean time, because the reformers aim is ultimately narrow and mean and constrained by a poverty of desire.

The revolutionary sets out to end and not mend the capitalist system. For the socialist there can be no such thing as humanised capitalism: the only good policy for capitalism is its abolition by the force of democratic, class-conscious action. Once workers get busy working for socialism, in larger and larger numbers, the owners and controllers of the Earth will shower us with piddling reforms. The capitalists will concede anything except their right to monopolise the resources of the Earth. It is this freedom which socialists, committed to common ownership, democratic control and free access to resources for all, will take away from the existing rulers.

The revolutionary seeks to defeat the class enemy—and defeat can only mean total defeat, i.e. dispossession. The reformist seeks to leave the possession of class power in the enemy’s hands and then plead for a better deal. It is a futile and time-wasting policy, however sincere its many advocates undoubtedly are.

Next year will be a busy year for the reformers—and the one after and so on into the next decade and century. Unless the political folly of Reform is understood. Unless the partial victories of the crumb-collectors are abandoned and workers realise that we have a world to win. Not to ask for, but to take.

Steve Coleman

Turgid Tolstoy (1991)

Book Review from the October 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

What Then Must We Do? By Leo Tolstoy. Reissued 1991 with an introduction by Ronald Sampson. Green Books. £8.95.

Leo Tolstoy was a writer of genius: his novels are amongst the best ever written, but this is without doubt his worst book and it is difficult to believe that the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina could write this also.

This book was written in 1886 when Tolstoy believed that his idiosyncratic religious views had given him the answers to society’s problems. A quarter of the book is devoted to Tolstoy’s guilt-ridden forays among the destitute to offer them charity. He rightly concludes that charity is not the answer to poverty but the point could have been made much more succinctly. Tolstoy concludes that money given by the rich to the poor is money that was gained by exploiting their labour in the first place.

Of wage labour he notes:

  Money is the new form of slavery, differing from the old only in its impersonality. in the freedom it gives from any human relation with the slave.

A large section of the book is devoted to the way that institutionalised violence maintains wage slavery. Marxists agree that the state is the instrument which the capitalist class uses to enforce exploitation but Tolstoy overlooks the fact that many workers accept working for wages because they believe it is natural and inevitable. The power of propaganda as a superior instrument of control to avert violence has been recognised more in the present century, but even in Tolstoy’s time the capitalist class used it for their own ends quite successfully.

Tolstoy’s solution to the inequalities of his time was to recommend that everyone should work on the land, living a simple life, without employing the labour of others. But this restriction of consumption would be regressive and not to the tastes of most people. Capitalism has made it possible, through technology, to release productive forces which would be used in a socialist society to eliminate all poverty and austerity.

The introduction by Ronald Sampson is more interesting than the rest of the book, such is the subordination of Tolstoy’s literary skills to the task of getting his message across. Tolstoy the novelist deserves our admiration but Tolstoy the polemicist and self-appointed prophet is downright dull.

Carl Pinel

Between the Lines: From Russia With Confusion (1991)

The Between the Lines column from the October 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

From Russia With Confusion

The mind-numbing simplicities of cold war propaganda dominated the British media's coverage of the Russian coup. News programmes offered a cartoon image of events. Gorbachev the Rather Good had been overthrown by The Big Bad Reds who could only be defeated by Boris the Great. As ever in the capitalist picture of history, the workers were depicted as mere spectators — extras in the scene: the BBC News called them "Yeltsin's people". Is that what all the bravery of the crowd was for — the standing in front of tanks and the demand that democratic rights be retained? All that to become Yeltsin's people?

For the media there was no question that the coup was successful. Great Man Gorbachev had been replaced by Judas Yenayev. And that was that. The media never once considered the possibility that people could alter their history — that the power struggle would be more than the in-fighting of a ruling elite. On the first night of the coup both BBC and ITN News broadcast effective obituaries for Gorbachev. When the crowd began to assemble, the media was shocked. But they did not explain this as the action of thousands of workers fighting against a dictatorship. The defence of the Russian parliament was explained entirely in terms of the will of leaders, notably Yeltsin. When the coup was overthrown the BBC and ITN continued to explain the whole affair in terms of a power battle at the top. But this was not so: the collapse of the Communist Party dictatorship after the coup's defeat was not decided by Yeltsin and his political allies (whose political careers had been carved out within that dictatorship), but by the will of the people, the working class majority. From BBC l's children's news programme Newsround to BBC2’s fairly sophisticated Newsnight the analysis of the collapse of state capitalism and the Russian Empire has been over-simplified to the point of utter distortion. Good has prevailed over Evil. Good equals the market which is portrayed as a redeemer. Yeltsin, a political opportunist, nationalist and populist demagogue, compared by those who know him well as a modem Mussolini, is given an uncritical press. Two days after the coup the ITV News at Ten included a ludicrous report about the failure of "Marxist economics" in Russia. This report claimed that Russia had been run according to policies stated by Marx in The Communist Manifesto written in 1848. This unsubstantiated rubbish was put out without a thought given to the long-standing Marxist analysis of Russia as a state capitalist country — which is exactly what Lenin himself called it at the outset. (Speaking of crazy historical claims, the school's supplement to The Guardian in the week after the coup claimed that Marx supported the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 — thirty-three years after he died!) On the day that Yeltsin's elite banned the Communist Party in Russia (an unpromising start to a liberal democratic government) the ever-mistaken CNN opened its midday news with the proclamation that the Russian people were at last free. Indeed, CNN's American hysteria was reflected on the British news broadcasts by reporters making wild comments about the euphoria of the Russian people. In fact with continued empty shelves in the shops, rent food and fare increases on the way and 30 million plus to become unemployed soon, the delight of feeling free was about as great as in the British cities where workers have spent the nights celebrating with street riots.

On 7 September BBC2 had Charles Wheeler introduce a programme showing excerpts from Leningrad's archives of propaganda films. The Orwellian character of what was shown was chilling. Never again, we suspect will such crude propaganda con the wage slaves. But what of the less crude methods of keeping the proles in their place? We expect that Yeltsin's new TV controllers are studying the methods of the BBC and the US networks for newer, more subtle tricks of deceit; less conspicuous forms of ideological doping.

In the modern battle of ideas the media is crucial. The media bosses are accountable to no-one, least of all the workers. They continue to lie, to twist, to omit, to push workers into believing half-truths, non-truths and cartoon views of the world in which we live. It was no coincidence that the first action of the coup organisers in Moscow was to close the TV stations which they could not rely on. If the parish priest was the ideological mouthpiece of feudal rule, the newscaster is the high priest of capitalist ideology.

This writer cheered at the overthrow of the Leninist dictators. Their downfall and the tremendous political fire within the bellies of the workers who took to the streets, who tragically do not know what they do want but only what they don't, was a great moment to live through. As the cheering of the media hirelings started, with all their phoney talk of the downfall of Communism and triumph of Freedom through Market Forces, this writer's cheering slopped abruptly. Solidarity with our fellow workers, yes; but with the cynical pimps whose champagne corks were popping at the thought of new profits to be made — Never!

Steve Coleman

Recent Socialist Activities (1991)

Party News from the October 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

A hundred people attended the Socialist Party meeting in Conway Hall, Central London. on 3 September on recent events in the Soviet Union at which the speakers exposed the twin lies that "the socialist countries” had been socialist and “the free world” free. The Socialist Party had been the one organisation in this country' which had consistently opposed the view that Russia had had anything to do with socialism; capitalism had never been abolished in Russia but had been developed there under the Bolshevik dictators Lenin and Stalin in the form of a state-run capitalism; this state capitalism was now giving way to a more market-directed type of capitalism, and now everyone could see that Russia was capitalist; our position had been completely vindicated.

Opposition came from a group of Leninists who distributed a leaflet headed "Stalinism was the Gravedigger of the October Revolution" which spoke of "the shining example of workers' revolution which 1917 still represents" when, allegedly, the working class took power "under the political leadership of its class party". This whitewash of Lenin and defence of the Bolshevik coup was not well received by the assembled workers.

The first meeting in the new series of Central London Sunday afternoon meetings got off to a good start on 8 September when over 30 people filled the meeting room in Dick Sheppard House, Euston, to hear the opening talk on "Why We Need to Change Society". Details of this month’s subjects can be found on the Meetings Page of this issue.

50 Years Ago: Mr. Keynes Goes to the Bank of England (1991)

The 50 Years Ago column from the October 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

The news that Mr. J. M. Keynes, the “rebel against financial orthodoxy”, has become a director of the Bank of England and may in due course become governor when Mr. Montagu Norman retires, inspires great hopes among his admirers in the Labour Party, but it will not cause even the slightest flutter among Socialists. His admirers may congratulate themselves because he opposed the return to the gold standard in 1925 and advocated "unorthodox" proposals such as a managed currency and State control of interest rates, but they should remember his own words: "My trouble has been that orthodoxy has always caught up with me”. In other words, his quarrel with the administrators of capitalist finance has always been at bottom that they did not know their job properly, and should take some tips from him. He has never been concerned with our job of getting rid of capitalism.

(From Socialist Standard, October 1941.)

Sting in the Tail: 30 Wasted Years (1991)

The Sting in the Tail column from the October 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

30 Wasted Years

The Labour Party is often described as "the mass party of the working class" yet the national membership of its youth wing, the Young Socialists, is now only 350.

When the YS was formed 30 years ago various Trotskyist groups moved in to control it. Recently it has been dominated by Militant but in earlier days It was Keep Left, another group of Trots who were dominant

This Trotskyist influence has been such an embarrassment to the Labour Party that it will probably be glad when the YS finally dies.

So it's goodbye to those bear-garden conferences where the YS passed all those resolutions denouncing the party leaders along with just about every bit of Labour Party policy.

And what did all the rebelliousness mean? Absolutely nothing. Indeed many YS are now staid Labour Party officials, councillors and even MPs, the same kind of people they once spent so much time attacking. It would be laughable if it wasn't so tragic.

Shop Steward's Dream

Tommy is a typical shop steward we know. When he speaks about "bread and butter" issues like overtime, sick pay and holidays he makes good sense, but on most other subjects he is a fount of prejudice and ignorance.

Prejudice? Jews are his pet hate although the Arabs ran them close during the Gulf war and you should hear him on about "Darkies"! By the way, Tommy always votes Labour.

Ignorance? The other day he was on about health -

  The rich aren't any healthier than us. You're either born with good health or you aren't. Money doesn't come into it.

Of course the left-wing with their absurdly idealised view of shop stewards would see Tommy as part of the "industrial vanguard in the struggle against capitalism".

But Tommy’s ideas are little different from those of most other workers or even shop stewards. His vision of a better world goes no further than society as it is but with more job security, a few pence extra on the hourly rate and Neil Kinnock in Downing Street

You Dirty Rat

Alastair Cooke, in his "Letter from America", (Radio 4) told an interesting story about the mayor of New York who, faced with a massive deficit, announced the probable slashing of public spending (surprise, surprise).

Among the possible casualties could be the sanitation department, which could result, according to experts, in an increase in the rat population of one million.

The mayor, who is either a shrewd vote-catcher or very naive, came up with what he undoubtedly thought was a unique proposal. He invited the "ordinary" people to come and tell him the solution to the city's problems. So for one week they queued up outside his office to lay it on him.

However, since there have been no reported cries of "Eureka" or the hip equivalent emanating from the inner sanctum, we can safely assume that none of the queuing hopefuls came up with the only solution; the abolition of the buying and selling system. All of which must have come as a relief to the capitalist class, not to mention the rats.

Caring Capitalism

Nowadays when capitalism is widely regarded as the altruistic saviour of mankind it comes as a pleasant surprise when someone sees it in its true colours.

Writing in The Independent (5 September) Suzanne Moore observes that while Gerald Ratner honestly described the cheap jewellery his shops sell as "crap", Anita Roddick of the Body Shop wraps her products in a haze of mysticism, 1960’s idealism and 1980's green awareness. By using her products you can, apparently, be healthier and do some ecological good at the same time.

Suzanne Moore sees Anita Roddick's guff as part of the growing trend to portray 1990's capitalism as a marriage of material values and spiritual good. Believe that, she says, and ". . . you'll believe that capitalism really can be "caring." and warns that behind this newer, softer, gentler-on-the-skin approach "business Is still basically about buying and selling."

She is mistaken, however, In thinking that — "any idea of a genuine alternative to capitalism is collapsing."

Socialists propose that capitalism be replaced by a classless, moneyless, worldwide society of production for use. Now, Suzanne Moore that really would be a genuine alternative, wouldn’t it?

Cold Comfort

The thermal underwear company Damart in conjunction with the organisation Help the Aged recently produced a little leaflet entitled Hypothermia - The Chilling Facts.

Chilling facts indeed; the leaflet points out that compared with the number of summer time deaths an extra 40,000 elderly persons will die in a mild winter and in a harsh winter this will rise to 80,000.

In a section entitled So, Who Is At Risk? it has this to say:

  We know that two groups of older people are particularly 'at risk'. They are the very elderly — from late seventies onwards — who are more likely, because of the ageing process, to have low body temperatures.
  And they are the pensioners who receive supplementary benefits — studies show that they are more likely to be living alone, less likely to have central heating, less likely to use electric blankets and more likely to be underweight — all these factors can lead to a lower body temperature.

Among the proposed solutions to the problem the leaflet lists warm clothing, adequate domestic heating systems and a better diet. All of which isn't much consolation for those who are on supplementary benefit. The fact is that it is poor people who are dying from hypothermia.

It is not more legislation or better hand-outs the elderly poor need. What they must have if this scandalous state of affairs is to be ended is World Socialism.

That is the only society in which everyone young and elderly can have unrestricted access to all the food, clothing and heating that society can provide.

A Racist Utopia?

There Is a sunny utopia called Oranla. Scores of workers have gone there on the promise of a better life and hundreds more are expected soon.

In case any reader is tempted to follow them we should explain that Orania is a small "white homeland" in South Africa. It is owned by some rich Afrikaners who have ejected all the black people and imported unemployed white South Africans to do the menial jobs previously done by the blacks.

These white workers now complain that, besides being underpaid, their bosses, regard them as "white kaffirs"-

  "We can’t even sit down and have a smoke break or a chat. It's just work, work and more work all day long"

The Sunday Times (1 September) 

The bosses answer to this is a familiar one — there is no room for laziness in creating the new white nation. The Sunday Times says of Orania -

  It has a lot of appeal for blue-collar workers who have the most to lose from the new South Africa but what they don't realise is that they are going to have to do for the well-off, upper-class Afrikaners what the blacks used to do. A system of servitude based on race is being replaced by one based on class.

Reaching where other propaganda can't (1991)

From the October 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Yesterday I was helping to wash my two-year old daughter in the bath. I picked up a toy boat and asked her what it was. “It's a big red boat", she replied.Then I held up a bottle. “And whats this?” I asked. She hesitated for a moment so I said “It’s shampoo, isn’t it?” “No!", she corrected me, and with her tone changing slightly to the undulating phrases of airport tannoy announcements, she told me that “'This is Wash and Go—not just shampoo, it’s shampoo and conditioner. Why bother to take two bottles into the shower. Just wash and go!”

I found this sudden fluent echo of a television advert quite funny, but then afterwards thought about the contempt that the manipulation and deceit of advertising deserves.

Building societies have repossessed more homes from "mortgage defaulters” than at any time on record. Families are ruthlessly evicted on to the streets. Lawyers and bailiffs are brought in to do the dirty work and then the Building Societies casually move on to pay Advertising Agencies to dream up a few slow-motion, black-and-white trendy adverts to portray them as the warm, beneficent friends of anyone who needs setting up with a loan for a home. A wolf in sheep’s clothing would, perhaps, be a more suitable image for such institutions.

As a source of ideas and prejudices about our society, advertising plays an important role. It has proliferated to such an extent that it now permeates every pore of social life. Today people are indoctrinated into the ways of the society into which they are born by a number of sources: their families, their schools, but predominantly the communications media. By the time most children leave school they will have spent more time watching television (10-15,000 hours) than in the classroom. During those hours they will have been exposed to approximately 20,000 commercials. They will have heard, perhaps more than 10,000 radio commercials and read thousands of adverts in newspapers and magazines.

Advertising has moved from the occasional bold and simple street poster to a continuously multiplying profusion of forms. Everywhere we go or look or listen we witness the selling game. From “Silk Cut Snooker” to “The Royal Shakespeare Company courtesy of Royal Assurance”.

Rat-race
The unavoidable message of advertising is to inculcate people with a frame of mind which is prone to regard the rat-race as a fundamentally unchangeable feature of society. Adverts do not directly advocate capitalism. Imagine one which did. The viewer might be addressed by a well-fed man or woman from the capitalist class, holding a glass of the finest Champagne. “Well now. you are a wage-slave. You have nothing to sell but your mental and physical energies. You have to keep working all your life just to get by. I am a member of a class who live in luxury as a result of your efforts. You fight my wars for me and sometimes pray to the skies for better things. Probably the best system in the world, for us. Support capitalism. You know it makes sense."

Party political broadcasts are adverts for capitalism whose claims about how the parties will improve our lives are about as meaningful as stating that a soap powder washes whiter than white. Advertising really imparts its social message by omission. It sets an agenda of “important" concerns, occasionally with wit and style, which project the basic way in which we live in a way which is forever out of focus. You should be thinking about what to rub into your legs, what to rub into your face, 20 good reasons to read The Sun. what toilet paper is best, which building society you should rent your home from, which music to plug into your cars, and whether the man and woman from the coffee advert saga will ever stir more than each other's coffee?

Within the context of the society we inhabit—a class-divided society working in the interests of a parasitical minority—there is a necessary role for advertising in its current form. As with all other problems generated by the profit system, it cannot be resolved by legislative reform. Socialists do not hold a brief for the Advertising Standards Authority. We do not want adverts to be "legal, decent, truthful and honest”, as these ideas are measured by the barbaric standards of the profit system. Soliciting men to join a violent gang and to use weapons to kill strangers is a criminal offence unless you are advertising for recruits to the army.

Selling game

Advertising and marketing are the glossy, glamorous facades on a society of starving children, the carnage of war, 35 million refugees and the menace of insecurity for everyone. Advertising aggravates the problems of workers by tempting people with merchandise which poverty precludes from our legal grasp. The society of the hard sell and the soft sell is also the society of the prison cell.

The only way to genuinely escape from the culture of commodities is to transform society from one based upon property to one based upon common ownership of the means for producing and distributing goods and services. Only when the means of communication have been put into the control of the community will they be operated in a way which can inform people about goods and services without the deceptions and trickery that flow from vested  interests.

The children's educational programme Sesame Street uses a skilful mixture of imaginative techniques to teach young children basic numeracy, literacy and points of nature and culture. The originator of the programme once said that she realised how powerful were repetition and short musical jingles as teaching aids when her child demonstrated the ability to sing lots of television adverts. It is a reflection of the disingenuous aims of the advertising agencies (and their paymasters/mistresses) that they attempt to shape our lifestyles and outlook by techniques that exist where nursery rhymes meet mantras.

George Orwell once described advertising as "the rattling of a stick in a bucket”. As the volume of those beats grows and the cacophony worsens, thundering and screaming to obliterate the noises of social misery, it becomes imperative to organise a society with a break from commercials.

Gary Jay

Why capitalism must go (1991)

Editorial from the October 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

We live in a world dominated by capitalism. A tiny minority—the international capitalist class—between them own and control all the major productive resources of society, the land, mines, factories, machinery, transport, media, communications, and the goods and services which these resources are capable of turning out. The task of actually producing this social wealth, however, is carried on by those on the other side of the class divide: the world working class, the vast majority who, because we are excluded from any significant ownership of the productive forces, must work for the capitalists for a wage or a salary in order to live.

The wages system is a form of rationing which limits our access to the wealth we collectively as a class have produced. In the long run our wages are eaten up in the struggle to make ends meet, which means we have to continually find or stay in employment—or stretch our meagre dole cheques—to try and support ourselves and our families.

The basic contradiction of capitalism is that whilst wealth production today is a globally inter-related activity carried out by millions of workers, who alone run society from top to bottom, the social relationships of class ownership restrict and subordinate our common social needs to the impersonal dictates of the market. With modern productive methods, such as computers and information technology, the world now has the potential to provide more than adequately for the material needs of the whole global population and to ensure a satisfying and creative life for us all. Yet if we look at the TV, listen to the radio or read a newspaper, what do we continually see?

Vast social inequality and discontent; grinding poverty alongside conspicuous plenty; thousands of our fellow humans dying daily of starvation with millions more undernourished or in refugee camps; slums and dereliction in the inner cities; the chronic wastage and misuse of resources; the never-ending human cost of the ravages of war; the devastation of communities; the turning of workers into highly efficient killing machines; the ignorance and bigotry of racial hatred and nationalism.

Throughout the history of the capitalist system attempts have been made to address these problems, but today the problems are if anything greater than ever. For example, that of people dying from hunger in one part of the world, while in another part food is stockpiled or farmers are paid not to grow it because it can't be sold profitably. Socialists say that this and the many other social problems are the inevitable consequences of production for profit instead of human need, and that only a world socialist system of society can provide the framework for solving these problems by removing their basic cause once and for all.

We put forward the revolutionary proposition that everything in and on the Earth should become the common property of the whole worlds population, without distinction of race, sex or ability; that society should be run by and in everyone’s interest; and that the production of useful wealth should be directly determined by our common social needs and freely available to all without any market mechanism. It means a society where classes no longer exist because we would all have equal access to and control over the means for satisfying our needs. It means the end of national frontiers and governments, the end of wars and social conflict, and the start of a truly global society of harmony and co-operation with all our rich human diversity.

Access, free and not free (1991)

From the October 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

In moments of exhilaration, we socialists have been known to indulge in some highly optimistic assessments of our importance in the order of things. In our more commonplace moods of despair, we are prone to underestimate the impact we have on public opinion and social affairs. It is not surprising, therefore, that we have given only limited attention to the extent to which some of the brighter sparks amongst the advertising fraternity have found it opportune to take over some of our dreams and to filch our terminology for concepts they can harness to their merchandising schemes.

Of course, we are all too familiar with advertising which trades upon the everyday fears of working people to sell us insurance or a multitude of products we are led to believe will obviate the shortcomings of their market rivals. A recent feature article in the weekend supplement of the Guardian dwelt upon how a go-getting PR woman clawed her way to success by utilizing the phraseology of the ecological movement to sanitise her sales efforts on behalf of clients. This prompted me to ponder the even more cynical plundering of socialist ideas which had been going on over the past few decades with similar purposes in view.

For all the efforts of our opponents to find us guilty of association (by their reckoning) with Russia’s “communist” tyranny—although they and not us were Stalins war-time allies—it remains generally true that when someone gives an objective hearing to our aims and democratic, non-violent methods it is more likely than not they will be received very favourably, albeit with the reservation that we are excessively "idealistic" and expect far too much of so-called “human-nature”. It is quite rare for us to be criticised for advocating some kind of totalitarian nightmare. In my opinion, the professional publicists have quite shamelessly purloined the most attractive single feature of the sane society we propose, namely "free access" to what we require from the socialist community’s pool of resources.

Since the high-street banks have been concerned to sign up most of us for their credit-card method of money-lending (my own comes with the blessing of my trade-union) their advertisements referring to a "cashless society" have borne an ironic resemblance to socialist aspirations. Surely it is possible that the adoption of the name "Access" for the name of the best-known UK credit-card was a direct consequence of some bright spark in the advertising industry listening to one of our open-air meetings and carrying off the phrase as class-war booty? And. for that matter, where did John Major latch on to the notion of a “classless society” if not around Clapham High Street in his days as a Tory councillor in the London Borough of Lambeth?

E. S. Grant

Economic Crisis in Russia (1991)

From the October 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

The current economic crisis in the Soviet Union well illustrates the effect of years of totalitarian state control on a capitalist economy. Having attempted to bring a semblance of order to the anarchic capitalist system, the Soviet Union is now experiencing a devastating period of industrial stagnation and growing unemployment, previously considered unthinkable by its admirers. Gross National Product fell by 4 percent in 1990 and is widely forecast to fall by 10-20 percent this year (Financial Times, 20 August).

The Soviet Union, it was said, could plan away the capitalist trade cycle on the basis of the nationalisation of the economy and the “collectivisation” of agriculture, and ensure steady growth and economic prosperity. But the actual course of events has not proceeded in the way the supporters of the Soviet regime had hoped. There are two basic reasons why this should have been the case.

Firstly—and as the proponents of Western-style private enterprise have always been quick to point out—planning the intricate operations of capitalism down to every investment decision, every price, every wage and so on is impossible. Planning virtually every aspect of economic activity to avoid a disproportionate, unbalanced growth simply cannot be done, and this has been shown through practical experience in the Soviet Union, China and elsewhere. Indeed, it must now be obvious to almost anyone, except, that is, to the small band of faithful defenders of centralised state planning, to be found now mostly in the Trotskyist movement, who still insist that planning the profit system through state control is a worthwhile aim. Belgian Trotskyist Ernest Mandel, for one, has recently praised Soviet achievements on planning and balanced growth as the success of a “post-capitalist” society:

From 1928 onwards . . . growth really was regular and uninterrupted (and) that unlike the capitalist economy the USSR has experienced no recession, no crisis of overproduction leading to an absolute fall in production, for more than 60 years.

(International Socialism 49)

Trotskyists like Mandel are looking at the Soviet Union through rose-tinted spectacles, ignoring, for instance, that the difference between growth rates in maximum growth years and minimum growth years in Russia and other state-capitalist countries has been quite pronounced. When the Western capitalist world was experiencing an economic downturn in the period 1966- 74, the difference was 130 percent in the USSR and as much as 228 percent in Poland. Even though offical statistics are not as reliable as they perhaps might be in many instances, it should also be noted that "absolute falls in production” were not a phenomenon restricted to the Western capitalist world.

Law of value

It is undoubtedly the case that state-capitalist economics are unable to escape the capitalist trade cycle, though this is not to suggest that the operation of these economics is identical in all respects to private-enterprise-based capitalism. The primary difference is that state-capitalist economies are not subject to the direct operation of Marx’s law of value, and herein lies the second reason for the current Russian economic crisis.

Very often, prices have not been related to the labour value of commodities and inefficient enterprises have not been purged from the system as they have in the West. The process by which a slump serves as a means to future development for the capitalist economy has not readily applied, at least until now. What has tended to happen in state-capitalist countries is that inefficient enterprises and productive methods have been supported, and wastage often tolerated, with new technology only being introduced at a generally more pedestrian pace than in the West.

In such a situation, the purging benefits of a fully-blown capitalist slump are lost. The state intervenes to offset the development of mass unemployment by methods such as planned overstaffing, largely at the expense of the more efficient sectors. Instead of capital flowing to the most profitable areas of investment, it is redirected on a mass scale towards units of production that would otherwise be purged from the system. Thus there is an attempt to “cheat” the operation of the law of value.

Though some of the worst effects of the capitalist trade cycle can be avoided in this way, this is only achieved at the expense of the long-term health of the economy. Slumps are not aberrations for capitalism, but are entirely necessary for the overall development of the system, helping to offset the long- term tendency for the average rate of profit to fall caused by the displacement of the sole source of surplus value, variable capital (investment in human labour power), by constant capital (investment in machinery, raw materials etc). Slumps offset this tendency by devaluing the elements of constant capital, through, for instance, the destruction of stocks and even machinery.

Because of the attempts in state-capitalist countries to cheat this process of normal capitalist development, stagnation set in. which eventually undermined the stability of the one-party political structure and the position of the privileged ruling class. A more unrestricted capitalism than has hitherto been allowed to operate in the Soviet Union will provide its own solution to the problem of industrial stagnation— mass unemployment as inefficient productive units are allowed to go to the wall, and attacks on working-class living standards to restore profitability for investors. It will come as no surprise that the only “solution” capitalism knows will be of detriment to the interest of the working class.

Dave Perrin

Mistaken Marx (1991)

Book Review from the October 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marxism and Nationalism. By Ephraim Nimni. Pluto Press, 1991

The Socialist Party is a Marxist organisation. We accept the main points of Karl Marx's theories of history, economics and politics. But not uncritically. We differ from Marx on a number of issues, and we have made our own contributions to socialist theory. Without doubt our most serious disagreement with Marx is over nationalism.

Although Marx and Engels had declared that workers have no country and urged the workers of the world to unite, this was not their only statement on the matter. They also made a distinction between "historical nations" (such as Poland and Ireland) and "non-historical nations" (such as the Czechs, Scots and Welsh). Historical nations met with their approval because, as independent states, they could be progressive in terms of capitalist development. Non-historical nations, on the other hand, were doomed to be assimilated into the more progressive states (with "democracy as compensation", as Engels put it). Non-historical nations were not viable as independent states in a capitalist world, argued Marx and Engels, and any movement for state independence in such nations could only be reactionary. The nation is largely cultural and linguistic whereas the state and its machinery of government is a geo-political entity.

Nimni also claims that Marx and Engels got it wrong on nationalism—but from a different point of view to us. He says that socialists can legitimately be nationalists, though not necessarily statists, given the widespread concern on the issue. His book is mainly a defence of Otto Bauer on nationalism. For Bauer, a member of the Austrian Social Democratic Party in the early years of this century:

Integration of the whole people in their national cultural community, full achievement of self-determination of nations, growing spiritual differentation of nations—this is the meaning of socialism.

Which calls into question Bauer's and Nimni's understanding of capitalism and socialism. Certainly socialism will allow the fullest linguistic and cultural diversity, but to make this the basis of a political programme is something altogether different. Marxism explains how workers are exploited and unfree, not as individuals or particular nationalities, but as members of a class. From this perspective, identifying with a class provides as a rational basis for working class political action. The objective would be a stateless world community of free access. Given that nationalism does nothing to further this understanding, however, it is an obstruction to world socialism.

Lew Higgins

SLP history (1991)

Book Review from the October 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Labor Party 1876-1991. A Short History by Frank Girard and Ben Perry (Livra Books, 422 W. Upsal St, Philadelphia, PA 19119, USA.

In our August issue we referred to the SLP of America as "our political cousins". This was a reference to the common historical origin of us and the SLP in the "impossibilist" (i.e, anti-reform-programme) wing of pre-WWI Social Democracy. It was not meant to suggest that we had some political affiliation with them. In fact, of course, we are opposed to them as we are to all other political parties.

The SLP, for those who don't know, is a party founded in America in 1878 and whose outstanding figure was Daniel De Leon who edited their paper from 1891 till his death in 1914. Until 1976 it used to contest the US presidential elections every four years, polling around 40,000 votes. Its main plank is "socialist industrial unionism" which advocates that, to establish socialism, workers should organise into industrial unions to take and hold the means of production and then to administer future society.

The SLP has a detailed blueprint for future society involving the substitution of what they call "industrial government" for the political state (people are to vote at their places of work rather than where they live as at present) and the substitution of labour-time vouchers for money, and which is seen as being able to exist in just one country. We have seen this as pre-empting the democratic decision of those who will set up and live in socialist society. Clearly there will be democratic control in the workplaces in socialism, but there is no reason why the whole decision-making and administrative processes should be based on industrial constituencies and we have never favoured labour-time vouchers even to deal with any temporary problems of supply that might exist in the very early days of socialism. We also say that socialism must be worldwide, because capitalism already is.

Although they never regarded the Bolshevik coup of 1917 as a socialist revolution nor Russia as socialist, right up until the Russian invasion of Finland in 1939 the SLP did consider Russia to be some sort of "proletarian" regime and even today are reluctant to refer to it during this period as "state capitalism". They took the view that Russia was not ripe for socialism and had first to be industrialised and saw the Bolsheviks as doing this in some "non-capitalist" way (a position similar to that of some Trotskyist groups).

This short history of the SLP by two of its ex-members brings out another difference which is not apparent from a comparison of their policies and analyses and ours: the SLP's undemocratic internal structure. Girard and Perry describe how the National Secretary and the NEC have the power to expel any member and how this has been widely used over the years. This contrasts with the position in the SPGB where a vote of the entire membership is required before anyone can be expelled.

In covering the period after De Leon's death in 1914 this booklet is a useful complement to Stephen Coleman's 1990 biography of Daniel De Leon in the Manchester University Press's "Lives of the Left" series.

Adam Buick

Caught in the Act: The Collapse of Trotsky’s Monument (1991)

Book Review from the October 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bad news for Tariq Ali. Having with Redemption written an outrageously funny novel about the pretensions, delusions and follies of the Trotskyist Left in which he was once a prominent participant, he has been denounced as a renegade, a traitor, a bourgeois philistine, a despicable leper . . . only the Leninists know how to denounce like that. Having deployed his wit against the world Trotskyist movement, the crumbling Trotskyist monuments have responded with their dependable witlessness. The totally humour-free Socialist Workers' Review dismissed Ali's effort as "unfunny".

We suspect that Ali can cope with such devastating assaults. Impossible to cope with for him will be what is here: an article in the Socialist Standard praising him as a novelist and recommending this satire to all socialists who for years have laughed their heads off at the antics of the would-be vanguards on the Left. Old Leninists desert all kinds of silly prejudices as they discard their old dogmas, but few of them lose their dislike for those four commonly-spat initials, the SPGB. Bad luck. Tariq – everyone else thinks your novel stinks, but this writer loved every page of it.

Redemption is an almost relentlessly funny novel. What Malcolm Bradbury did to the trendy campus clowns in The History Man, Ali has done to the bar-room Bolsheviks of the Trotskyist left. The story concerns the aftermath of the east European uprisings of 1989 and the preparations for and holding of a congress of the Trotskyist Fourth International to formulate a new political position. The old Bolshevik formula is in worldwide disrepute: the proletariat have kicked out the dictatorship and the only believers left are the would-be dictators. These "leaders" are shown as pathetic, deluded, dishonest, unscrupulous and, not infrequently, insane men.

There are several easily identified caricatures of Trotskyist leaders. They are painfully accurate. Ali is ungenerous and spiteful towards these superstars of the sects, but they in real life are ungenerous and spiteful people whose opportunist tactics and contempt for working-class understanding makes them fair targets for Ali's poison pen. There is Frank Hood (the late Gerry Healy) who has young women from his party, the Hoodlums (WRP), sent to him for sex sessions. Another leading Hoodlum is Laura Shaw (Vanessa Redgrave) who drives to Trotskyist meetings in her chauffeur-driven Rolls and has Hood's body embalmed after he dies at the shock of a young female "comrade" discovering his artificial penis. There is Jed Burroughs (Ted Grant), the Shadow-Shadow Prime Minister and leader of the Burrowers (Militant Tendency) and Jimmy Rock (Tony Cliff), author of The Rockers Guide To Soviet Realities and leader of the Rockers (SWP).

The chapters on these latter two sects, which are both as detestable as each other, are the funniest pages in the book. Also captured with an accuracy which only a novel could capture so acutely (a pamphlet would be libellous, after all) are John Justice and his Satanist Tendency (the ultra-barmy Spartacist League in real life – real life?). Jemima Wilcox, editor of the "New Life Review" (New Left Review), Diablo (a parody of the ex-Trotskyist veteran Pablo) and Jim Noble, the archetypal fascist/Leninist leader of a party based on the American SWP called in the novel the Proletarian International Socialist Party of American Workers -PISPAW for short; get it? This was the section of the Fourth International that Ali used to be involved in.

LEFTWING SEXISM

Ali seems to think – and he should know because he has been closer to the Trotskyist leaders than most of us – that these people are motivated either by sexual disorders, whereby left-wing fantasising becomes a form of replacement for a humane sensuality, and/or egomania. These sound like cheap smears, and might have been intended so, but the analysis is not without insight We live in a society of perverse notions of success. Leninism, as a strategy for successful power-taking, is deeply authoritarian and is bound to attract those for whom the rhetoric of power (dictatorships, central committees, democratic centralism, smashing states, orders from above) is appealing. For such political personalities the power obsession becomes functional rather than instrumental. It should come as no surprise to materialists that the men who run power-hungry sects are created out of the ingredients which make up other authoritarian bosses who expect to have their egos massaged by their followers – and not only their egos.

Emma Carpenter, a disillusioned American Trotskyist in the novel, tells Jim Noble that the Trot sects are mirror images of Stalinism; Hood/Healy is referred to as an "inverted Stalinist". The capitalist system has screwed up a lot of people in its time, so what is odd about the fact that some of them try to screw up their unwitting political followers in a futile attempt to unscrew themselves? Maybe some of the characterisations are a touch crude in their depictions of the psycho-pathology of the fantasy lives of lefty leaders, but there is nothing far-fetched about the novel's description of they way in which so-called radicals have often treated women like dirt. (Let's fight for equality, but tonight, Me Dictator, You Proletarian). Left-wing sexism, an infantile disorder?

Redemption has some interesting things to say about the way that the Left treats women – one half of the species. The character of Maya, the young Brazilian beauty who is made pregnant by the seventy-year old Ezra Einstein, reminds us that while geriatric dogmatists play at revolutions in congress halls it is often women who are connected to those feeling of humanity without which there will never be any genuine socialism.

POLITICAL NUTCASES

Ah yes, socialism. This is where Ali has advanced no further than his days in the Trotskyist mad-house. Ali still believes that socialism came about in Russia in 1917. He applauds Leninism, but is embarrassed by the Leninists. On page one he writes of how popular wisdom had "consigned insurrections to the museum of Europe", but throughout his book he never touches on the root of the Trotskyist fallacy: the belief that by a vanguard-led insurrection working-class liberation, and therefore, socialism, can come about. In this he is at one with the political nutcases in his novel. He quotes Emma Carpenter's grandfather's Menshevik criticism of the Bolshevik adventure, but takes neither that critique nor any of his own a step further. He parodies Rock/Cliffs thesis that state capitalism came to Russia in the 1920s after years of Russia having been socialist, and rightly ridicules such unhistorical drivel, but what does he say about the serious state-capitalist analysis stated persistently since 1918 by the Socialist Party? Trotskyists have never liked to admit that they are simply Leninists who did not like Stalin's continuation of what Lenin began. This writer recalls challenging Ali to a debate several years ago on this very question. He replied that there was nothing that the wise Marxists of our party could possibly learn from him. No, that was not the point of the educational exercise.

The novel concludes with the congress of the Fourth International adopting a strategy from its master theoretician, Ezra Einstein (Ernest Mandel), to infiltrate the religions of the world. More could be gained from this than from boring within the left-reform parties, he believed: "Within ten years I predict we could have at least three or four cardinals, two ayatollahs, dozens of rabbis, and some of the smaller Churches like the Methodists in parts of Britain could be totally under our control. Our aim is to occupy the Vatican and elect a Pope from our movement". The PISPAW delegation responds with a resolution to form a new Trotskyist religion based upon the "dictatorship of the Angelariat". Very funny – nearly as hilarious as so-called Marxists telling workers to vote Labour at election time.

Steve Coleman

Jack Common and Working Class Writing (1991)

From the October 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

It could easily have escaped your notice that Jack Common is back in print. Jack who? Here is a write whose life was dogged by bad luck, never receiving the recognition he deserved. Passed over by the literary and academic world, his writings have been highly acclaimed by a small group of admirers, the most famous being George Orwell. Reviewing Common's Freedom of the Streets in 1938, Orwell wrote that "this is the authentic voice of the ordinary man, the man who might infuse a new decency into he control of affairs if only he could get there, but who in practice never seems to get much further than the trenches, the sweatshop and the jail."

So who was Jack Common? He was born in 1903 and grew up in the back streets of Heaton, a working class suburb of Newcastle. His father worked on the railways and his mother in the home. Common received a basic education and picked up some office skills at a local college. His working life was punctuated by a variety of jobs such as clerk, mechanic, labourer, museum caretaker and film scriptwriter. He was to use these experiences in his writings. A prolonged period of unemployment led Common to move to London in 1928 in search of work.

Some of his early essays impressed Middleton-Murry and he was given a job as a circulation pusher on the left-wing literary magazine the Adelphi. Common progressed quickly, contributing more articles and obtaining editorial responsibilities. It was here that he met and became a close friend of Orwell. While Common continued to write for a range of newspapers and journals he had to take labouring jobs to support his family financially. During the 1950s, writing against a backdrop of poverty and house evictions, he produced two important biographical novels. His death in 1968 went largely unnoticed and his writings slipped out of print.

Common's literary output over a period of 40 years was rather small and can be divided into two phases. Firstly, in the 1930s there were the social and political essays he wrote for Adelphi, Tribune, New Statesman, Manchester Guardian, etc. In these he explored various aspects of working class culture, an area which was just beginning to attract attention. Writing in the Adelphi in December 1934, he provides a map of the side of town which interests him:

" . . . the queer half-lit geography familiar to the proletarian, an affair of boozers, boxing halls, fried fish-saloons, corner-ends where meetings are held, missions, secular society rooms, spiritualist haunts, odd debating societies and Labour Halls." (Christmas Carol)

Amongst these articles are sketches of street life, factory work and the life on the dole. There are also discussions about politics, religion, unions and schools. This is how he describes the experience of signing on the dole:

"What a day! An invalid's wife with daily attendance at a hospital for financial incurables, maddening in every restriction, because normal good health with its healthy wants is beating in the blood. A day to be endured, to be got through, like all those who come till the luck changes." ('Why Work?', Manchester Guardian, 27/10/1930)

Common was ahead of this time in exposing the role played by the mass media, advertising and consumerism in maintaining capitalism. Ken Worpole described him as "perhaps one of the most original political and cultural commentators of the 1930s" (New Society, 14/8/1980).

The selection of writings, Jack Common's Revolt Against An 'Age of Plenty' (1980) compiled by Benyon and Hutchinson is out of print but the good news is that another small book of essays, Freedom of the Streets (1980), is available from People's Publications. One of the concerns found here and elsewhere is that the working class have not got many books which express their own views and experiences. They are what Grey has aptly called the "silent majority" in his study (1973). In his essay The Silent Majority: A Study of the Working Class in Post-War British Fiction'How Proletarian Are You?', Common Writes:

"Glance into any library and you'll come across acres of accurate and lively descriptions of life amongst the bourgeoisie. The proletarian, though, has few books to his name, and those fumbling ones. He's no hero, that's why. He's a something-something, poor fellow, busy trying to spell it out and make it come different this time."

One practical way Common tried to give the working class a voice is found in Seven Shifts (1938), a collection of short accounts of working-class life he edited, introduced and inspired. In the Preface he writes:

"My friends include members of the literary bourgeoisie and lads from the un-printed proletariat. Both parties talk well, and you'd probably enjoy a crack with them as much as I do. But here's the pity. The bourgeois ones get published right and left, especially left; the others are mute as far as print goes, though exceedingly vocal in public houses."

He continues:

"Well, here is the result: seven narratives in which workingmen describe their jobs, their conditions, and some of their reactions to the life they lead. They are not highly literary compositions, yet the lads can write, as you'll see."

The second part of Common's writing career involved two autobiographical novels: Kiddar's Luck and The Ampersand. These books were published in the 1950s before the upsurge of interest in working class writing. He was a forerunner of such writers as Braine, Barstow and Sillitoe. Kiddar's Luck (available from Bloodaxe Books, 1990) has rightly been described as a small masterpiece. Common draws upon personal memories of his childhood and youth to produce a highly authentic yet entertaining picture of working class life at the turn of the century. The writer Sid Chaplin described Common as "perhaps the finest chronicler of the English working class to follow Robert Tressell" ('A Wry Smile from Tyneside', Sunday Times, 12 May 1968).

The narrative traces the relative freedom enjoyed by Willie Kiddar on the streets with his friends and the increasing constraints and limitations imposed by the prospects of a life of mundane labour and wage-slavery. Common's sting-in-the-tail technique of writing allows him to deal with this is a self-mockingly humorous way. Take the marvellous use of irony in the opening passages where Kiddar (in the form of his genes) reflects on is bad luck on being born into the working class and missing all of the opportunities going on the night of his conception:

"I at once came under the minus sign which society had already placed upon my parents. They were of no account, not even overdrawn or marked 'R.D.', people who have worked for a living and got just that, who had a home so long as they paid the weekly rent and who could provide for offspring by the simple method of doing without themselves".

He continues:

"Naturally, there were some bad fairies gathered round the bed at such a conception. One, somewhat like a tramp, chalked upon the bedstead the sign which means 'no handouts here'. Another, four-belted as a ghostly navvy, swung his pick in promise of future hard work; a blear-eyed one, faintly lit up, lifted the bottle and one looking like a magistrate made a bitter mouth over the syllables of unspoken 'Borstal'".

Common used his childhood in Kiddar's Luck as a means of reworking many of the ideas and concerns found in his earlier writings like the Freedom of the Streets. For example, the self-taught uncle who introduces Kiddar to radical books and ideas is one of the most "unhonoured intellectuals" debating on the street corners in the essay 'Great Men of the Gutter'. A passing reference is made to the SPGB in this context. Common was opposed to capitalism and the way it limited and thwarted working class potential. One of the institutions involved in preparing children for the world of work is the school. In the Freedom of the Streets, he explains that school:

" . . . is in origin quite alien to working class life. It does not grow from that life: it is not 'our' school, in the sense in which in other schools can be spoken of by the folk of other classes".

This critique is taken up in chapter five of Kiddar's Luck:

"I had acquired the one faculty with which every school infallibly endows its pupils - that of being bored. It is very important, of course, that every child should in the course of time becomes fitted up with this negative capability. If they didn't have it, they'd never put up with the jobs they are going to get, most of them, on leaving school. Boredom, or the ability to endure it, is the hub on which the whole universe of work turns".

Sociological studies, such as P Willis's Learning to Labour (1977), show this is still the case. Kiddar's Luck ends in 1917 when Kiddar is fourteen and about to apply or work. The sequel, The Ampersand (which is out of print) continues the adventures of Kiddar, although her is renamed Clart. These autobiographical novels are not simply about Common or Kiddar/Clart; the experience and fate are intended to be representative of others in similar circumstances. Kiddar, as the name suggests, is a typical product of the environment. Returning to the opening passage:

"I had picked the bottom rung of the ladder with a vengeance . . . A sad mistake. Though millions make it, I think it still deserves a mourning wreath."These books show working class writing at its best. They are full of witty observations and interesting insights from one born under a minus sign".

Common did not belong to any political party and was highly critical of those left-wing organisations that claimed to speak for and lead the working class. He ends Freedom of the Streets with:

"No conclusions, then. You can work them out yourself, and its odd's on you'll get at least as good an answer as I should. The things I've been talking about hit you as hard as they do me, mate, and that's a fact. I'll leave it to you, then - all the best."

Common's own highly individualistic "socialism" is often confused and confusing. However, whilst you will find plenty of things to argue with in these books they do help to show the potential ordinary people have themselves to change society. Get hold of these books while you can, because knowing Kiddar's luck, they will be out of print before you can say Jack . . .

Brian Rubin