Sting in the Tail: Nazis (1992)

The Sting in the Tail column from the October 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nazis (1)
Searchlight magazine, called "the international anti-fascist monthly", covers the worldwide activities of nazis and racists and there's an awful lot to report.

Most countries in Europe and the Americas have their quota of crazies, from skinhead thugs and the Ku Klux Klan to followers of Nordic mysticism, with would-be fuhrers ten a penny. Searchlight revels in exposing their various criminal records which include murder, armed robbery, fraud, etc., and it is all very interesting.

However, no copy we have read down the years has given any sign that Searchlight has a clue as to why nazism and racism exist, let alone how to get rid of them.

The only way to eliminate these evils once and for all is to end the capitalist system which breeds the ignorance, insecurity and poverty on which they feed. Searchlight only highlights the effects, never the cause.


Nazis (2)
The Socialist Party has always insisted that the only way to deal with ideas that are opposed to those of socialism is in a rational and democratic manner. This is not the approach of the various left-wing groups.

In reporting the proposed concert organised by a neo-nazi group called Blood and Honour in London The Guardian (4 September) quotes a spokesman for the Anti-Fascist Action:

  "Blood and Honour has only one agenda — the terrorism of anyone opposed to them. We are prepared to meet like with like", said Mike Stone of AFA.

So here we have a group who propose to beat facism by adopting the tactics of the fascists. Apparently it is fascist behaviour to use violence against a political opponent — except when the violent act is being committed by someone in Anti-Fascist Action!


Heaven on Earth
In a society where people have so many troubles, the idea of a better life after death is inevitable.

A TV film, Heaven (BBC2, 1 September), asked some people what they thought Heaven will be like. Answers included ...

We'll have wonderful bodies and never get sick.
Like a billion years in Shangri-La.
Where you live forever in happiness with angels watching over you.

One man thought Heaven would be "Like New York or Los Angeles, a city", but perhaps he got heaven and hell mixed-up.

Socialists expect no life after death, heavenly or otherwise, but we strive for a worldwide society based on production for use and democratic control. That would be heaven enough for us.


What a Waste
One of the charges socialists lay against capitalism is that it causes vast numbers of people to spend their time sorting out private property rights.

The grounding of the QE2 off the American coast is an example. The big priority here is to establish responsibility and, therefore, who pays for the QE2's repairs and subsequent loss of business. To do this, teams from both the British and American marine accident departments, plus the insurers' army of loss adjusters, flew to Boston to begin their investigations (The Guardian 11 August).

And just think how many other people were involved in the work of insuring Cunard, the ship's owners, against this happening as well as the passengers against their cruise being cancelled.

All of this is necessary in a system where private property rights are sacred. In socialism a damaged ship would simply be repaired by society without capitalism's obsession with "who pays?".


SWP "Socialism "
The SWP's paper, Socialist Worker, carried an article titled "What Do We Mean By Socialism?" (5 September) which got itself into the inevitable muddle.

For example, we are told socialism "means the abolition of classes" and yet there will still be "workers". How come?

And there will still be money and exchange relations in the SWP's "socialism

  Of course not everything will be free the day after workers take power. But the list of free goods will constantly broaden.

Only health, education, housing and public transport are mentioned as being "instantly" free, so obviously other things people need will have to be paid for which means there would still be owners and non-owners just as there are today.

Incidentally, it was good to read that socialism "does not mean rule by a central committee . . ." but this is rich coming from a party which is itself ruled by one!


Food for Thought
We are forever being bombarded by TV images of starving millions: of little children dying in front of our eyes.

To the religious this may be God's will; to the capitalist economist the working out of the market system, but to the socialist it is the completely unnecessary destruction of human beings by the insanities of capitalism. People starve while surplus food is stored in mountains or destroyed to keep up prices.

How much surplus food is being stored in Britain alone was revealed by The Independent (3 September).

  The latest figures available from the Intervention Board, the body that administers the storage of EC surpluses in the UK, show that 144,179 tons of beef and 16,009 tons of butter are held at 95 cold-storage facilities all over the country.
  More than 695,000 tons of barley, 1,510 tons of premium wheat, 11,364 tons of feed wheat and 324 tons of rye are held at 24 grain stores. A further 2,145 tons of skimmed milk are in warehouse storage.
  It is estimated that the UK's stocks of grain alone would be enough to feed Somalia for a year.

New act in the courts (1992)

Cartoon by George Meddemmen

From the October 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

As they happily go about their business of committing crimes, criminals may not be aware that this month the new Criminal Justice Act came into operation. Normally, it would not be worth mentioning the arrival of yet another piece of law in this field, but this is the most far-reaching such Act for a very long time and what is called the criminal justice system is threatened with chaos as the courts, the prisons and the police try to digest the changes brought in by the Act.

The very words criminal justice have an interest of their own for they imply that someone who is suspected of a crime has a legal right to be told about the charges against them and to have the truth of them assessed without bias or prejudice by a court which, if it decides the defendant is guilty, will sentence them in the same objective way. If something goes wrong and an innocent person is found guilty, the appeal machinery exists to put the matter to rights. So if you haven’t done anything wrong you have nothing to fear; and if you have done something you will be dealt with fair and square.

So that's alright, then. Except that that proposition has only to be stated to expose its fallacy. Every day, the courts and the prisons are full of people whose response, if they were told about the essential goodness of the criminal justice system, would be a bitter, hollow laugh. With damning regularity—as in the case of the West Midlands Serious Crimes Squad—evidence emerges which shows that this cynicism is completely justified.

Changes
In any case criminal justice is not something which is consistent. At one time it can mean harsher penalties from the courts, at others more lenient. It once meant that some prison sentences had to be suspended—until another Act decided that that was not just. A few years later it meant the substitution of Youth Custody for Borstal training; more recently it has meant a deliberate policy of keeping younger offenders out of custody. With the new Act, criminal justice means that imprisonment should be reserved for only the most serious offence.

The changes brought about by the latest Act are too numerous to mention here. Some will be welcomed by the more neurotically punitive sentencer, like the combination order (which in practice is not expected to be available as a magistrates court sentence) which combines a period on probation with a community service order. Others may not be so welcome—fixing the size of fines by units, the number of which depends on the seriousness of the offence, multiplied by the “disposable income" of the defendant. The Act is intended to abolish the halllowed custom which encouraged courts to dish out punishment for the offence before them, adjusted to take account of a defendant's previous offences. So no more shall we hear puffed-up magistrates and judges address the quivering prison-bound wretch in the dock in such terms as “You have an appalling record, which leaves me with no choice but to . . .”. Another part of the Act which is unlikely to be welcomed by the courts is the requirement that people should be sentenced for the offences they have committed—which means not to set an example to others. This should mean the end of that traditional preamble to a sentence which began “There is altogether too much of this going on at present. This court wants the message to go out that it will no longer be tolerated. So we are going to sentence you to . . .”.

There will also be big changes in how the time to be spent in prison is calculated, how much of a sentence is served behind bars and how much under the less obvious, but nevertheless powerful, restraints of licence in the community (of which more later). It is open to question whether in the long term these changes will have any real effect. Whatever parliament says, the courts have usually been able to ensure that the people they send to prison do roughly the time the courts think they should. It has been simply a matter of adjusting the length of sentence to take account of the possibility of early release on parole, or licence or whatever. Finally, there are two requirements of the new Act which will be as ineffective as they are welcome to the ever-hopeful penal reformers. One is the sharper distinction to be drawn between offences against property and those against the person.This is in response to the many recent cases in which property was clearly valued higher than human safety, which is perfectly in tune with the basis of capitalist society and its morality.

It remains to be seen whether courts actually do treat people who have stolen large amounts of money more leniently than those who have injured someone. Another reaction to fashionable outrage is the Act placing a statutory duty on everyone in the criminal justice system, including the police, lawyers and the courts, to avoid discrimination on any grounds such as race or sex. Like “criminal justice’’, that sounds very re-assuring until we remember, for example, the repeated declarations by successive Commissioners of the Metropolitan Police, that racism will not be tolerated in the force—and contrast this with how the police actually behave towards black people on the streets or in the fastness of their stations.

Economy
The reason for the new Act, with its sweeping changes in policy and application, are not difficult to see. Even under a government which time and time again has declared war on crime, the figures for recorded offences climb up and up. Since Thatcher's coming to power in 1979 there has been an increase from 2,536,700 to 5,276,700 in 1991.The traditional response to this is to impose harsher penalties, in particular more prison sentences and longer ones. There are, however, some drawbacks to this policy.

First of all, prison is a very expensive way of temporarily removing someone from the opportunity to commit crime—or at any rate from the kind of crime which goes on in the world outside the prison walls as distinct from what happens inside the prison. The cost of keeping someone locked up varies from prison to prison but for all of them it costs a lot more than it would to send a youngster to public school. On top of that, the evidence is that prison is not effective in the way it is supposed to be—it does not deter people from crime when they come out. Indeed, through their embitterment, brutalizing, or institutionalizing, or getting a criminal education, it often tends to make them recidivist rather than conformist.

The government's response to this, after years of Green Papers and White Papers, of “consultation” and “debate”, has been to form the policy of dealing with offenders in the “community” rather than in custody. The motive for this is to save money but it is presented as a policy partly inspired on humane grounds because the very word “community” suggests something warm and caring and supportive. That is why we have Community Psychiatric Nurses whose function now is to treat people in their homes when they should be in mental hospitals if the hospitals hadn’t been cut back or closed in order to save money. We have community centres where mentally bedraggled residents of some ghastly estate where alienation was designed into every pre-cast concrete slab are encouraged to tolerate their intolerable lives. We have Community Service under which people have to do unpaid work to “make restitution to society” for their offences. But if such a thing as “the community” exists it does so as a defensive organism against some of the worst of capitalism’s excesses, or to anaesthetize the systems effects in the delusion that a society based on dividing human beings can have refuges of unity.

But dealing with more offenders in “the community” causes political problems because there are few votes to be gained— and a lot to be lost—by a government seen to be soft on criminals. The Tory government's wily response to this, in the latest Criminal Justice Act, is to legislate to keep people out of prison except for the most serious offences but then to treat them in a harsher, more controlling, way in “the community”.This has the added advantage of allowing ministers to make kinky speeches about the innate lawlessness of human beings which can only be controlled by the threat of strict punishment. It is no coincidence that the drafting of the Act and piloting of it through parliament was largely the work of the militant Roman Catholic John Patten, who is now venting his vaunted theories about morality on the education system and its children.

In spite of the theories and claims of the politicians, there is no evidence that the level of crime is affected by Acts of parliament or criminological theories or the vote-catching neuroses of politicians. Crime is just another aspect of the society we live under, dominated by a minority class which lives by the parasitic process of stealing from the majority through the exploitation of our wage labour. This theft is perfectly legal—like much of capitalism's violence against the person—because the parasites have seen to it that there is a huge legal and penal system to make it so, to bring to account anyone who indulges in theft or violence outside the law.

The exploited majority must exist on a lower social and economic level than those who exploit them. Workers in factories and offices are aware of how their social betters enjoy the results of that exploitation, in their sumptuous and glamorous life-styles and their contempt for how the majority are condemned to live. It is not envy which makes workers want to have some of that life-style, but an inevitable struggle to even things up a little. That is what crime is mostly concerned with, for the overwhelming majority it is offences against property and property rights.

In most cases the workers accept their depressed place under capitalism with an apathetic docility, dreaming of ending their misery with a big pools win. In some cases the criminals view it rather differently; theft is a faster, more lucrative way of getting a living and there is always the possibility of the equivalent of scooping the pools—the big tickle. Between these two delusions there is really nothing to choose—and while they persist the ruling class gets on with the more secure and predictable method of legal theft.

Ivan

The politics of Class War (1992)

From the October 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

What are we to make of the Class War Federation? According to the tabloids, who have not been slow to recognise this growing group within British politics over the past decade. Class War (CW) comprises a collection of wild-eyed revolutionary hooligans; the walking, swearing seeds of civilised destruction. But then, when have the booze-soaked brains of Sun and Daily Mail journalists ever come up with a valid definition of what a revolutionary is?

Many on the Left dismiss CW as a gang of loudmouthed lumpenproles whose entire existence is dedicated to gratuitous violence and offensively-stated propaganda. Some police and politicians imagine that behind every urban riot and act of vandalism there are CW organisers in the wings ticking off a list of targets. Others dismiss Class War as a prolier than thou version of Private Eye: satire for those who get their kicks out of wounded cops and dead aristocrats. Whatever worth there is in these analyses, there can be little doubt that plenty of people are talking about Class War, both the newspaper and the federation.

Our analysis will ignore the question of style. Revolutionaries are not identified by image or affectation, but by what they stand for and what they do. Our purpose is to examine and criticise the politics not the pose.

Areas of clarity
Class War understand more about what a socialist society will be like than any of the pseudo-socialists on the Left. We quote from their book Unfinished Business, the Politics of Class War (from which all the other quotes come):

  There will be no need to work for a capitalist to survive. The revolution will mean us clocking off wage slavery for good . . . [A]fter the revolution we can and will survive without (money]. Money will not be replaced by something with a different name that does the same thing such as bartering, coupons, tokens, etc. . . . Just by its existence, money is a measure of the failure of society to organise the production and distribution of goods for the benefit of all; IT HAS TO GO . . . We seek to do away with artificial boundaries and borders. The world will not be divided into countries or States . . .There will be no limitations on travel.

A wageless, moneyless, stateless world society is not a bad start as far as revolutionary vision goes. But ideals are cheap. How does CW do on some of the other basic revolutionary tests so regularly failed by the Left?

On several, they do pretty well. For example, the Left’s long-running sick love affair with the capitalist Labour Party has been one of the enduring comi-tragedies of the twentieth century. Not so CW:

  "At times we have no choice anyway but to fightback . . . This is where the role of the British Left is crucial to the ruling class. As long as they can divert us into stupid campaigns like getting Labour elected, the ruling class are safe”. 

Again, how often do we find leftists romanticising the role of the trade unions, seeing them as bodies of immense working-class struggle? Whilst socialists understand the need for unions as defensive combinations of our class (in which many of us are active) we are well aware that bodies committed to fighting for crumbs will do little to abolish the wages system. CW argues, correctly, that the unions are crucial to the role of "regulation stability and control . . .  In advanced capitalist countries like the UK. capitalism cannot function without the help of the unions".

CW opposes Leninism and those sects which stand for “taking control of the State with a vanguard party on behalf of the working class”. CW avoids falling into the trap of leftists who patronise feminists who are seeking women’s liberation without socialism:

  The objectives of equality for women can only be achieved as part of a wider social revolution . . . The idea of ‘wages for housework’ is an illusion. We believe the only real solution to low pay and no pay for women is the removal of capitalism.

That much-loved concept of the pseudo-socialist, the state that will live on into the new socialist society, is rejected by CW: “We see no transitory workers* State . . . as the Left does, we have learnt the lessons of history". Finally, CW seems to understand clearly the role of mass culture as a means of feeding workers with capitalist ideology, and, unlike many leftists, they are firm in their rejection of religion: “Once you believe in divine beings or forces above humankind with superior power over our lives then you give up the right to control your own life yourself".

These areas of clarity are refreshing contrasts to the usual trash of left-wing thinking, and puts in question the popular claim that CW is just a bunch of noisy but vacuous graffiti kids. Unfortunately, in with the positive points are a load of major negatives—illusions, misconceptions, follies. We urge the supporters of the Class war Federation to think about these seriously.

How many classes?
This is no academic question, although for years it has been a key area of attention for the pseudo-intellectual sociologists. They are concerned to classify people in accordance with the market needs of a consumer-commerce society. That is why they break up the working class into an upper and lower section (often several sections) and are committed to the false view that there exists a middle class.

Our definition of class is clear: there are those who need to work and those who don’t. There are us workers who must try to sell our mental and physical energies in return for a wage, salary or giro cheque, and there are capitalist parasites who live off the proceeds of our work by receiving rent, interest and profit. The profit of the capitalists comes from the legalised robbery of the workers. We give them everything they have. They live in privilege and luxury out of our productive efforts. There can be no common interest between the class of exploiters and the class which is exploited: our class, the overwhelming majority. Willingly or otherwise, the antagonism between robber and robbed takes the form of a constant class conflict. The only way to end the class war is for our side to win. We must throw the very small minority who own the means of wealth production off of our backs. We are many, they are few.

We would expect an organisation called Class War to agree with all this. And at one point in their manifesto they do: “Struggle is inevitable because society is divided into two opposing camps, the working class and the ruling class, who are fundamentally at odds in this world” (our emphasis). But, aside from this accidental clarity, CW’s analysis of class is hopelessly confused and should be abandoned sooner rather than later. In chapter 3 on “Class" they claim that there are three classes under capitalism: ruling, middle and working. They claim that the ruling class in Britain comprises 5 percent of the population—which is probably much larger than the real size of the capitalist minority. They then claim that “the middle class" comprises 20 percent of the population and includes doctors (but not nurses, who are listed as workers), social workers, researchers, teachers and small employers.
The reasoning behind this false division is that the middle class are those with more power than the workers. In fact, this power which people in the middle class think they have is illusory. There are those who imagine that a “good” accent or a college degree or a job with a monthly salary puts them in a higher class. Look around the dole offices and see how wrong they are: these are just the deluded workers who are being hit, especially in the South East, now that the recession is cutting into welfare services, banking and insurance and other so-called safe jobs.

The myth of the middle class was invented by sociologists who saw themselves as being an intellectual vanguard for such a class, and CW has fallen into the trap of accepting their self-deceit. But there are practical questions which CW had better face up to. In the event of a working-class revolution, are we to assume that millions of teachers and social workers—or, put more clearly, people given a salary to teach infants to read or paid a wage to work in old people's homes or centres for the mentally handicapped—will be regarded as part of the non-working-class enemy? Are we to assume that a nurse with a posh accent or a bank clerk who plays golf at the weekend (both defined as working-class by CW) will be inherently more revolutionary than a junior doctor working sixty-plus hours a week for a pittance or a newsagent who employs a couple of part- time staff? We suggest that CW’s ridiculous class analysis is based upon a romanticised view of the workers as horny-handed sons of toil who wear cloth caps and drop their aitches and a large dose of sociological nonsense based upon middle-class guilt.

What is a revolution?
There are two areas of disagreement here. Firstly, CW throws out the democratic baby with the parliamentary bathwater. Secondly, having rejected a democratic road to the new world society they commit themselves to a policy of foolhardy violence.

As to democratic change, there is a long-standing confusion on this issue which requires serious debate amongst those who seriously seek a new system of society. For us the democratic principle is paramount. There can be no socialism without a majority who want and understand it. Only a socialist majority can enact the revolution. Democracy is not merely a strategic appendage to the thought of the Socialist Party, but it is inseparable from our aim: a truly democratic society. Unless those who seek to establish socialism do so as knowing participants in their emancipation, the outcome cannot be socialism, as it is bound to be the case that those who followed others into any new system would remain followers within it. Democratic change—which means a majority who are conscious and not willing to be passive— is a prerequisite for revolution.

In different parts of the world conscious socialist majorities will express their mandate for the new social system in different ways. In Britain workers have the vote.The vast majority use it now to elect leaders to run capitalism. They are not forced to do so; workers are deceived into wasting their votes on the continuation of their class slavery. Used by revolutionary workers the vote would be the most orderly and peaceful method of giving a mandate for socialism.

CW rejects this, but we see their objection as more based upon anarchist dogma than experience. They say that “as it exists, democracy is most definitely an illusion. It fools us into thinking we can change things through the vote". They argue that instead we should elect workers’ councils or soviets with instantly recallable delegates. The Socialist Party has no dogmatic objection to workers expressing their will through such bodies—why should we? But we warn CW that these bodies can become just as anti-democratic and leader-controlled as parliaments have been if those doing the voting for them are not politically conscious. The soviets in Russia in 1917 were used by the Bolshevik leaders as a means of getting a grip on the malleable workers in them; soviet power became party power.

Parliaments with instantly recallable and democratically elected and accountable delegates sent to outlaw capitalist property rights will make perfectly useful revolutionary bodies. And they can be won now, simply by having a majority of workers using the vote as a revolutionary weapon. CW is just wrong when it claims that "the condition for us to have a right to vote in this competition is that all the candidates are on the bosses’ side". We do live in an undemocratic society and the bosses do have millions to spend on their rotten candidates, and their laws do make it very hard for us to stand against them, but we can and we have. Imagine if we revolutionary socialists had enough candidates to stand in every constituency—if we could win one in ten of the votes cast—if workers started to realise that there is a real political opposition. Could the ruling class ban us at that stage in our growth? Let them try and see how much faster we would grow.

We realise that there are long-standing anarchistic sentiments which make the case for the majority vote seem unappealing. So the debate on this matter must go on, particularly amongst people who agree on the aim of a classless, wageless, moneyless global society. But in the meantime CW is committed to a case for revolution which rejects democracy. They say that “a revolution is not ‘democratic’ in the sense that there might be a majority of our class involved”. From there on in CW’s entire revolutionary strategy is useless.

Who needs violence?
What they seem to envisage is a growing minority of workers rioting, creating no-go areas, entering into violent conflicts with the police and army and eventually bringing about a civil war. They “see violence as necessary and inescapable”. Of course, in a minority revolution violence would be inescapable—and the ruling class, backed by the most sophisticated weaponry and well- trained and paid military force, would rout the insurrectionaries. There is nothing romantic about such a prospect. Look at how the Serbs are currently dealing with the Bosnians and then imagine what would happen if a civil war, fought between an army with NATO-type equipment and a well-tooled gang of glorified rioters, was ever to be fought in the name of working-class revolution.

At times CW glibly glorifies violence, such as in a rather sick passage in Unfinished Business where they recount an occasion in the Spanish Civil War when peasants shot the local nuns and priests and then dug up the bodies of previously dead clergy in order to shoot bullets through them too. “This brilliant piece of working class propaganda sets very well the tone for dealing with religion”, comments CW. But what about dealing with the teachers and the social workers and the greengrocers and the other so-called middle class enemies who must be defeated? Shooting people, even if they are of the most confused and ideologically unpleasant kind, has nothing to do with revolution and is, in fact, a recipe for the rule of bullies and psychopaths.

CW proposes the setting up of no-go areas administered by vigilante-type workers’ militias. You cannot run an army democratically. On the contrary military organisations are notoriously authoritarian. Living on a council estate where thuggish police hassle young workers and blacks is bad news, but the way out is not to create new cops who will, as CW might put it, “sort out their own”. Workers in Ireland who have been on the receiving end of so-called paramilitary justice will be the first to warn against new self-policing squads.

CW warns of “the dangers of these forces becoming detached from our class and becoming a new power in themselves”. The only safeguard against this is to close the doors of the revolutionary movement to those who think with their fists and are happiest when they are playing authoritarian militarist roles. We don’t need them, In a majority revolution the capitalist minority will be likely to cave in peacefully, but even if they do not they could easily be dealt with by the socialist majority.

The basic prerequisite for a socialist revolution is widespread working-class self-education. The Left, who have contempt for workers’ intelligence, have always been against this. They are just officers looking for infantry. The Class War Federation seems to be still at a stage where it is willing to debate and to learn. To that end we challenge them, as workers to workers, to enter the process of public scrutiny and discussion of their ideas and ours.

Steve Coleman

Final Demands (1992)

Cartoon from the October 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

They Said It . . . (1992)

From the October 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

• I believe large wealth in private hands is only morally sustainable if it used to benefit people—The Duke of Westminster.
• We might execute a 12-year old. It depends on the case—US District Attorney John Holmes.
• The government deserves every sympathy in its present situation—Daily Telegraph leader on the sterling crisis. 
• We do not attribute emotions to Her Majesty—Buckingham Palace aide, on the Queen and the Fergie photos.
• The Quayle family believes in the power of prayer—Dan Quayle, to a Christian Coalition rally.
• A presidential campaign is not a democracy—Lyn Nofziger, Reagans political director, on the Bush campaign.
• I'm not an expert on the economy— Norman Lamont.

Shelley – Poet and Socialist (1992)

From the October 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

I became acquainted with Shelley in 1944. At the time I was eighteen years of age and a Republican remand prisoner in Belfast jail. I liked poetry and, searching for something readable in the prison library—a cupboard which they opened twice weekly to the accompaniment of bawling screws, who could see no justification for delay in lifting one of the books—I found a treasure: The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Eventually I got my own copy of Shelley and, over many, many years, I have prized it as the first real socialist literature I ever read. It is, I think, fitting that, on the 200th anniversary of his birth, an appreciation of his life’s work should appear in a socialist journal.

Poets, with their abstract notions of freedom and justice, can momentarily help a prisoner transcend the ignominy and degradation that the prison system imposes. But Shelley’s ideas of freedom and justice were no way abstract; his was no mere solace for the soul. Yes, there were the odes To The West Wind, To A Skylark, To A Cloud; beautiful word music in the classical tradition of English metrical composition.

But, more importantly, there was the wisdom that stripped to its essential ugliness a system of society that dissipates, wastes and destroys wealth in order to make its rich richer while mentally and physically impoverishing the producers of that wealth. There was the vision of a new world, a world of dignity and equality where cash would not be the measure of human need. And there was the indignation, the anguish, even the pain—sometimes written in a spontaneity of anger that defied the discipline of well-marshalled prosody. Here was a text-book of revolutionary thought that showed the futility of the cause for which I was imprisoned and extended my vision beyond the empty rhetoric of nationalism.

During his lifetime Shelley had come to Ireland to protest at the misery of the peasantry. Some Irish nationalists have equated this with sympathy for Irish nationalism but Shelley, whose constituency was the toiling masses everywhere, did not subscribe to the myth that the English working class were the beneficiaries of English imperialism. Thus, after hearing of the Peterloo Massacre at Manchester in 1819, Shelley wrote the Masque of Anarchy in which he describes the contemporary condition of the working class in England:

Asses, swine have litter spread
And with fitting food are fed;
All things have a home but one—
Thou, Oh Englishman, hast none!

This is Slavery —savage men,
Or wild beasts within a den
Would endure not as ye do—
But such ills they never knew.

This poem, consisting of some ninety-one short stanzas of varying lengths was written at Leghorn in Italy. According to his wife, Mary, when Shelley heard how the military murderers had waded into a peaceful reform protest “it . . . aroused in him violent emotions of indignation and compassion”. According to some purists, that anger adversely affected the quality of the poem.

Whatever its poetic qualities, Shelley’s Masque of Anarchy must rank, from a working-class standpoint, as the most didactic of English poetical works. His verse castigates every rotten facet of capitalism: its law, its judiciary, its priests, its parasite class and the foulness of its oppression. His words bear the reader along the path of anger and frustration seeking, it would seem, retribution, revenge.

But Shelley, in an age when violence was the tool of revolution, was too deeply perceptive of the need for democratic action if the revolution which he craved was to realise his vision. True, he makes us angry, makes us loathe this evil that murders people for profit but, on the crest of our anger, he stops us:

Then it is to feel revenge
Fiercely thirsting to exchange
Blood for blood—and wrong for wrong—
Do not thus when ye are strong.

What then? What should we do when “we are strong”? Shelley, the democratic socialist says we should use the unassailable power of our numbers. Poetically, he says we should think . . . decide:

Stand ye calm and resolute,
Like a forest, close and mute,
With folded arms and looks which are
Weapons of unvanquished war.
(…)
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number—
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few.

In 1888 Marx’s daughter, Eleanor, and her partner, Edward Aveling published an appreciation of Shelley under the title Shelley’s Socialism. The justification for their assumption is abundant throughout Shelley’s poems and prose writings.

In one of his notes to Queen Mab, Shelley quotes Godwin with approval: “there is no real wealth but the labour of man”. Prometheus Unbound, The Masque of Anarchy, Queen Mab, The Ode to Liberty, these, with his prose writings, his prologues, his sonnets and his songs chronicle the misery of the peasant and the wage slave but always, there is the optimism of the true revolutionary; the clarity of vision, as here in Prometheus Unbound, of a future where:

The Loathsome mask has fallen the man remains
Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man
Equal, unclassed, tribeless and nationless,
Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king,
Over himself, just, gentle, wise.

In this passage from Queen Mab he criticises the way money contaminates all human relationships:

All things are sold: the very light of Heaven
Is venal; Earth’s unsparing gifts of love,
The smallest and most despicable things
That lurk in the abysses of the deep,
All objects of our life, even life itself,
And the poor pittance which the laws allow
Of liberty, the fellowship of man,
Those duties which his heart of human love
Should urge him to perform instinctively,
Are bought and sold as in a public mart
Of undisguising selfishness, that sets
On each its price, the stamp-mark of her reign.

He saw money, “paper coin—that forgery of the title deeds”, as capitalism’s instrument of theft; he saw slavery as a natural result of property society; he saw the poverty and alienation of the masses and, especially, did he decry the intellectual poverty and deception which capitalism inflicted on its wage slaves.

Richard Montague

Lamont's long wait (1992)

From the October 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

  “We have already weathered the worst of the storm and signs of stability are already appearing".

So said Lamont on 6 December . . . 1930. No, not Norman, but Robert P. Lamont, President Hoover’s Secretary of Commerce. As Marx once remarked, when history repeats itself the first time is a tragedy, the second a farce.

Following the Wall Street Crash in October 1929 industrial production in America fell continuously until by the second half of 1932 it had dropped by nearly a half. During this period the politicians and economic “experts” regularly predicted that the bottom had been reached and that recovery was just round the corner:

1 January 1930:  “I have every confidence that there will be a revival of activity in the spring and that during the coming year the country will make steady progress."—Andrew Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury, in his New Year message.

15 February 1930:   “The bottom of the business decline appears to have been reached.”—Cleveland Trust Company.

15 September 1930:  “Business appears to be turning the corner, and industrial activity seems to be increasing."—Cleveland Trust Company.

5 November 1930:  “The prospect is that by March unmistakable signs of business recovery will be available."—Standard Statistics.

21 March 1931:  “The business decline, if not already ended will end in the present half year, and be succeeded by general business improvement."—Harvard Economic Society.

27 May 1931:   “We believe that the worst of the industrial depression has been witnessed."—Standard Statistics.

18 October 1931:   “The depression has been deepened by events from abroad which are beyond the control either of our citizens or our government."—President Hoover.

26 October 1931:  "Important forecast: During the winter and early spring, business will round out the U-bottom trough."—Babsons.

1 February 1932:  “In our opinion, evidence now at hand strongly suggests that business sounded bottom in the last quarter of 1931.”— Babsons.

As in Britain over the past two years, these predictions were worthless. And for the same reason. Capitalism is an uncontrollable economic system which will bend neither to the wishes of politicians nor to the opinions of experts. But Marx was wrong. Not about slumps being inevitable from time to time under capitalism but about what happens when the same event occurs twice in history. The predictions of Robert P. Lamont in 1930 were as farcical as those of Norman N. S. H. Lamont today.

(The source of the quotes above is Faith, Fear and Fortunes by Daniel Starch, published in New York in 1934.)

What is capitalism? (1992)

From the October 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Just as some "experts” once justified the relations of feudal society as “God-given” and eternal, so today others seek to justify capitalism as an eternal state of affairs, holding good for all time. Why a small section of humankind should exclusively own, control and dispose of the means of life holding the rest of us to ransom, is a question we are encouraged not to ask. History, however, shows us that existing social relations are far from reflecting "eternal truths"; that society is dynamic, and that the society of today is just as much a result of socio-historical evolution as were previous social systems. A social and economic system comes into being through its ability to fulfil a useful social function. When it ceases to be of social use, it decays, and a new social system rises out of that decay.

In our present social system (which exists in all countries) the means of production and distribution (land, factories, offices, transport, media, communication, etc) are monopolized by a minority, the capitalist class. All wealth is produced by us, the majority working class, who sell our mental and physical energies to the capitalists in return for a price called a wage or salary. The object of wealth production is to create goods and services which can be sold on the market at a profit, not to satisfy human needs. Not only do the capitalists live off the profits they obtain from exploiting the working class, they go on accumulating wealth extracted from each generation of workers.

The influence of the capitalist class over the minds of the working class is also powerful. From the early stages of our life, they try to shape our way of thinking through the institutional brain-washing machine. In the society we live in vast impersonal forces are making for the centralization of power and a regimented society. The role of the workers in this regimented society today is unacceptable. They experience themselves as a commodity, as an investment, their aim is to become a success, that is to sell themselves as profitably as possible on the market. Our value as people lies in our saleability
not in our human qualities of love, reason or in our artistic capacities.

How did the capitalist system of society evolve? This system came out of the decay of feudalism. In spite of the horrors of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, capitalism was a great progressive force, which reorganized and linked up the world, developed the means of production to their present day level where they can provide plenty for all. Capitalism has now fulfilled its usefulness. Now the time is ripe for the working class to move on, into a different system of society— socialism—prior to that they must understand it, want it and accept it.

Michael Ghebre

50 Years Ago: The Worker and his Work (1992)

The 50 Years Ago column from the October 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many years ago the S.P.G.B. rescued from undeserved oblivion William Morris’s Art, Labour and Socialism, in which the truth was proclaimed by a man who understood the subject in all its aspects. Morris had his limitations, but he was right in his insistence that capitalism, along with its economic exploitation of the working class, had committed the crime of compelling many workers to perform degrading tasks under conditions robbed of all pleasure and intelligence. He rejected the shallow view that all we can do, and want to do. is to take over capitalist industry as a going concern, and put it under new management. He saw that with the abolition of capitalism Socialists will get rid of the profit seeking that has corrupted the production of wealth. "That system.” he wrote, "is after all nothing but a continuous implacable war; the war once ended and commerce, as we now understand the word, comes to an end, and the mountains of wares which are either useless in themselves or only useful to slaves and slave-owners, are no longer made, and once again art will be used to determine what things are useful and what useless to be made; since nothing should be made which does not give pleasure to the maker and the user.” He was not, as some of his admirers have supposed, aiming at putting the clock back and dispensing with machinery. He knew this could not be done, but he also saw that machinery which could have been used to minimise that necessary labour, not pleasant in itself, had not been so used under capitalism. He echoed J. S. Mill's doubt whether all the machinery of modern times has lightened the daily work of one labourer. Instead, capitalism has imposed on its machine slaves "plenty of unnecessary labour which is merely painful".

[From the editorial, Socialist Standard. October 1942.]

Jobless—who's to blame? (1992)

From the October 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sir—I work three shifts and on most days am able to go to various pubs for a drink. I am amazed at what I can see and hear. Many of the customers are unemployed and have been for years. They don't want work. One person told me he is getting family support. He only pays a very little poll tax, and pays a very small amount of rent. By the way, this person mentioned to me that he smokes 30 cigarettes a day and his wife also smokes. Another customer in the pub said he was disgusted that these people (men and women) get away with these perks. He pointed out the names of the darts and domino players on the team sheets. He knew them and said most of them were on income support. But they can afford to go out playing pub games at nights as well as in the daytime. (Letters, Wolverhampton Express & Star, 4 July).

Since the writer of this letter obviously enjoys the odd pint or two, we cannot say with certainty whether he disagrees with the adage that work is the curse of the drinking classes. However, from the tone of his missive it’s more likely that he would agree with the comments of Machiavelli that "one can make this generalization about men: they are ungrateful, fickle, liars and deceivers". This view is one no doubt shared by the capitalist ruling class.

We must not judge too harshly this member of the working class for adhering to the opinion that all jobless wage slaves are "parasites". After all, as Marx rightly said, the prevailing ideas in society are those of its ruling class. The myth that it is in fact members of the industrial reserve army who deserve no support from their fellow workers is a useful tool in the diversionary armoury of the capitalist class—which is the real parasite class in society.

Less benefit

In between recovering from the stresses and strains that shift work imposes, what would be his reaction to recent newspaper reports that Ministers are considering cuts in unemployment benefit?

Whitehall sources say the options include restricting unemployment benefit, now paid for one year, to a shorter period, such as nine or six months. This would force the jobless to rely on means-tested income support at an earlier stage. Ministers are also considering new cash penalites to encourage the jobless to find work. (Sunday Times, 5 July).

That should remove the “perks" of the unemployed — and, by "encouraging" the jobless to get on their bikes and find a job, help to reduce the cost to the capitalist class of the only commodity the working class possesses — its labour power. Although what that section of the capitalist class, the brewers, will say when all sections of the working class stop frequenting pubs is another matter.

Should the proposals outlined in the Sunday Times story be implemented, they will no doubt meet with the approval of Daily Telegraph readers. Whether the writer of the following letter belongs to the capitalist class I don't know. She seems at odds with the Prime Minister, John Major, however, who tells us we now have a "classless" society

Sir—Most people seem to regard class as a bad thing, causing snobbery and injustice. I regard it as a good thing, causing square pegs to be put into square holes and people to diversify without strain. But whether you consider it a good thing or a bad thing it is an inevitable thing. Attempts to alter this fact—as with communism, or money, class or political correctness— merely seem to make things worse. Of course you need equality under the law and equality of opportunity but people are generally happier when they know where they arc and where they belong. The pilot may seem more glamorous; but you need mechanics and aircraft designers and air hostesses and passengers just as much. Arguments as to who is the grandest are very silly. (Daily Telegraph. 4 July).

I have no doubt that this writer's views would be much enlightened by suitable exposure to Socialist Party literature. Would the shift worker from the Black Country agree with her? Despite his condemnation of his fellow workers he is almost certainly aware that there is a "them" and “us” in society and although it is implied that an airline pilot is one of “them”, the shift worker, the pilot, the mechanics, the designers, the air hostesses and probably the majority of the passengers all share one thing in common—they belong to the working class.

The working class is that majority in society which is forced to sell its physical and mental skills for a wage or salary in order to live. The other class in society is the minority capitalist class which owns or controls the factories, the land, the financial institutions, the communications industry, etc. Membership of the working class is not just confined to that section which is in paid work—it also includes pensioners, children, the unemployed and women who do unpaid work in the home. The majority working class is economically exploited by the minority capitalist class not just in Britain, but worldwide, for capitalism is now the dominant global system of society.

More restrictions

If the recession continues to "gather pace”, as mounting evidence shows that it will, should we expect even more denigration of the unemployed working class from those of its members grimly hanging on to paid wage slavery? During August the canard of "dole scroungers" was resurrected by the Sunday Express. Shortly afterwards the news that £34m of capitalists’ “hard earned" money had been saved when Department of Employment hit squads had forced 50,000 claimants to withdraw their claims due to activities incompatible with being eligible for state handouts.

Fuel was added to the fire of the government’s desire to impose further restrictions on the unemployed and others by the New Age travellers. Once again, the newspapers were full of irate letters from outraged citizens who were finding it rather more difficult than the travellers to obtain benefits. Bureaucracy demands that even those workers desperately pedalling around on their bikes looking for someone to buy their labour power, but badly in need of a break to help them over the coming months of living on £43.10 a week, notify the state in triplicate of their intentions. The unemployed are allowed two weeks holiday a year, but not to be taken abroad, and must sign an undertaking that they are prepared to rush back from their holiday destination immediately in order to fulfil their obligations to their capitalist masters.

What is the alternative for the working class? Cigarettes, alcohol, darts and dominoes are no solution to the plethora of problems, personal, ecological and worldwide, caused by capitalism. It is said that in times of capitalist crisis, workers turn to the Right for a solution to apparently insurmountable problems. Perhaps those workers who look back to April now feel conned. But their frustration would remain even if they had elected a Labour government to run the capitalists' affairs for them in the United Kingdom.

As individuals it is perhaps easier to blame your economic plight upon the unemployed, those whose skin colour is different, and upon those whose life-style appears to offend your values. As individuals it seems that we have no power to change things, even though it is obvious that change is needed. But we have the power—as a class. We have the power to bring about real freedom. The Daily Telegraph letter writer is right. Arguments as to who is the grandest are very silly.

Dave Coggan

Organise—without leaders (1992)

Cartoon by Peter Rigg.

From the October 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

The TUC met in Blackpool in early September amid a continuing decline in trade union membership. Membership reached a peak in 1979 when overall—TUC and non-TUC unions—it stood at 13,446,000, a density of 58 percent of the working population. Membership of unions affiliated to the TUC amounted to 11,731,399 if the electricians, who were expelled in 1988, are excluded. According to the Department of Employment Gazette (April 1992) overall membership of trade unions stood at 9,947,000 in 1990. This meant that the proportion of workers organized in unions had declined to 43.9 percent. TUC membership at the end of 1991 had declined to 7,757,000, a fall of almost 4 million compared with the 1979 figure (Labour Research, August 1992).

The point can be made that union membership tends to decline when unemployment is on the rise, as it has been in the last two years. However this will not do as an explanation for the decline in membership over the last 13 years. Unemployment has of course had a negative effect on membership in the last couple of years. However, even when unemployment was falling between 1986 and 1989 membership continued to decline. Quite clearly there are other problems such as a longer-term change in employment patterns. The areas of the economy which are witnessing a growth of employment arc those which lack a tradition of strong union organization whereas those sectors which have had that tradition are in many cases areas of declining employment. Therefore, the theory which states that union membership will grow when unemployment starts to fall again must be regarded as dubious.

Nothing from Labour

To pin hopes of a recovery on the trade union leadership is likely to lead to despair. Ever since the election of the Conservative Party in 1979, union leaders have based most of their hopes on the future election of a Labour government. When this failed in 1983 they bowed their heads in disbelief and sat back for another four years. In 1987 the Labour Party once again failed to gain a mandate to attempt to run the wages system more effectively than the Conservatives. With yet another failure this year, it might have been thought that lessons might have been learnt. Nothing of the sort. Most recently, union leaders concerned themselves with the completely irrelevant business of who would lead the Labour Party, quite possibly into a further, record-breaking, fifth defeat in a row.

What needs to be done is to rebuild trade-union organization from the base. The basis of strong trade unionism is effective local and workplace organization with active rank and file participation and direct election and control over local representatives. It seems clear that in many industries and workplaces this organization needs rebuilding whilst in others it needs establishing for the first time. From this base more effective links would need to be built between workers in different workplaces, companies and industries. Such effective organization cannot be built from the top downwards but needs to be established by workers themselves. Effective trade-union organization has to be based on workers self-organization: a self-organization based on the understanding that the interests of employers as buyers of labour power and workers as the sellers of that commodity are antagonistic.

Quite clearly a leadership with strong links with a party which aims at running capitalism and which all too often puts forward the view that the interests of employees and employers are identical cannot be relied upon to build industrial organisations based on working-class interests. This policy of class collaboration reached its disgusting height at this year's TUC when the Director-General of the Confederation of British Industry was invited to address the delegates. The CBI Director-General certainly had a better notion of the interests of his class than most union leaders, calling as he did for lower wage increases.

Walk—out

As usual with capitalism the class who produce all the wealth and receive in return only enough to keep us in working order have to bear the brunt of the downturn in the capitalist economy. We have to suffer for the shortcomings of their system. Whilst socialists might have several disagreements with the miners’ leader Arthur Scargill he [has], at least, had the guts and common sense to lead his members out of the hall when the representative of the class enemy began his speech. This policy of so-called “Social Partnership” must be rigorously opposed by all trade unionists with any understanding of the class nature of present-day world-wide society.

The policy of some unions of seeking to build their organizations by selling themselves to employers on the basis of how friendly they are to the aims of those employers can receive nothing but hostility. The sole purpose of a union is to organize workers to defend and promote their interests, not to increase their numerical strength by selling themselves to employers on the basis of no-strike deals, selling hard-won workers’ rights down the river or any other acts of class collaboration.

Workers need a political party to build a democratic movement designed to oppose and end a system based on the exploitation of the majority by the minority. Likewise, we need a strong industrial movement to defend ourselves so long as the system of capitalism remains. The socialist message to workers who may despair at the state of working class organisation at the present time echoes that of the IWW activist Joe Hill "Don’t mourn, organize”.

Ray Carr

Saklatvala's "Holy Ghost" (1992)

Book Review from the October 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Fifth Commandant. By Sehri Saklatvala. Miranda Press. Salford. 1991. £4.95.

The author was sixteen years old when her father, Shapurji Saklatvala, died in 1936 but more than 50 years later her devotion to his memory is clearly evident in this biography of his life and work.

Saklatvala was a Parsee, born into an affluent Bombay family in 1874. But after emigrating to England in 1905 he gradually gave up his family business connections to devote himself to politics. From 1922-23 and 1924-29 he was a member of parliament for Battersea North. First for Labour and then as a Communist.

Saklatvala's political affiliations often overlapped: he was a member of the Liberal Party until 1910 although he joined the ILP in 1909. In 1917 he was a member of the British Socialist Party as well as the ILP; at the 1921 ILP Conference he represented the ILP’s Clapham Branch although he joined the Communist Party in the spring of that year. In 1922 he was elected as a Labour MP although it was known that he was a member of the Communist Party. He continued to be an active member of the Labour Party until 1928 despite being elected as a Communist MP in 1924.

During his time as an MP, and afterwards, Saklatvala tirelessly worked to inform the public of the exploitation of Indian workers, and also helped to form a Communist Party in India.

There is no doubt that Saklatvala had the courage of his convictions and was a thorn in the side of the establishment. In May 1926 he served two months in prison for sedition. Such was the haste and determination to silence him that detectives tried to arrest him before the Emergency Powers Act was passed.

Saklatvala’s life epitomises the futility of reformism. He was a sincere man with a genuine wish to see poverty eradicated. Despite having a serious heart condition he kept up a punishing schedule of work which undoubtedly hastened his premature death. But he tackled effects rather than causes: during the 1923 budget debate Saklatvala asked for low incomes to be free from tax. But the take- home pay of workers is subjected to downward pressure irrespective of the amount of taxes levied. A revolutionary would have advocated the abolition of the wages system; anything less is simply a continuation of the exploitation of the working class by the capitalist class.

Chapter 20 gives the full text of Saklatvala’s speech defining socialism in the House of Commons on 21 March 1928. He correctly repudiated nationalisation as a path to socialism and understood the necessity for socialism to be a worldwide movement. But instead of a socialist society he envisaged standardisation of working conditions and wages in all countries to avoid the extreme exploitation of workers in underdeveloped countries, and the nationalisation of all industries under workers’ control. He also stated his belief that Russia was a socialist country.

Despite his criticism of capitalism, Saklatvala did not understand that while the wages system existed capitalism—either monopoly capitalism or state capitalism—would continue nor that a socialist society, with goods produced for use instead of for sale, would have no need of money or any means of exchange.

Saklatvala once stated that he had made up his mind never to admit even the tiniest criticism of Russia because that, for him, “was like a sin against the Holy Ghost". Today the economic doctrines of state capitalist Russia are discredited, and the late, unlamented British Communist Party has revealed a few unpleasant secrets about its unsavoury past. What a sad epitaph for such a dedicated propagandist! And what a blind alley to devote one’s life to!

This is an affectionate portrait of one of the erstwhile Communist Party’s few MPs and it provides an interesting glimpse of the politics of the 1920s. particularly in regard to British foreign policy in India, with details of the Meerut trial and the Simon Commission.

Carl Pinel

Between the Lines: Uncle Sam's half-forgotten purge (1992)

The Between the Lines Column from the October 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Uncle Sam's half-forgotten purge

In Russia it is now common for many people to feel guilty about their complicity with Stalinism. After all, oppressors are only as strong as they are allowed to be by those who stand by passively. In Germany the sense of self-blame for passive collaboration with the Nazi monstrosity has haunted a generation and appears to be playing its part in a grotesque recidivism in a new one. Guilt gets nobody anywhere; it is a pain felt rather than a lesson learned. But worse perhaps than guilt is that complacent incomprehension of past atrocities which accompanies historical ignorance.

In the main, Americans fall into this latter category. The wretched story of McCarthyism is rarely spoken about and even more rarely recognized as being deeply symptomatic of the pseudo-freedom of US capitalist order. The Un-Americans (BBC2, 8.10 pm. Wednesdays 2nd, 9th and 16th September) was a superb reminder of that period of American political madness. Of particular merit was the series' refusal to dwell solely upon the purge of famous actors, writers and so-called intellectuals. The McCarthy witch-hunt hit vast numbers of unknown workers. Their political views lost them their jobs. Four hundred and fifty workers were imprisoned for political crimes - often for as long as twenty years.

One such ease was Steve Nelson, who in 1950 was chairman of the Western Pennsylvania Communist Party. He was arrested on the order of one Judge Musmanno - a man who had been a supporter of Mussolini before the war, praising the Fascists for "their purification of Italian soil" by “driving Bolshevism from the country". Nelson was charged on the basis of his possession of books, including the works of Marx. At the time of his trial a film was released, based on Nelson, called I Was A Communist For The FBI, in which the Nelsonesque caricature was shown to be a murderer. Nelson argued in court that the film would prejudice the jury. He, after all, was accused of being a CPer and possessing books, not of killing anyone. The film was written by one Harry Sherman, local vice-president of the McCarthyite organization, Americans Battling Communism. Musmanno, the trial judge, was also a member.

At the trial Musmanno declared of Nelson's books that "I regard those books as more I dangerous than any firearms". Nelson was sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment, a $10,000 fine and $13,291 court costs to pay the expenses of the prosecution - for which read "persecution". Like others shown on the programme, Nelson now realizes the folly of his old Leninist beliefs and sees how easy it was for the authorities to pursue their purge with impunity. But hostile as we are to the politics of Stalinism, who could watch Nelson's account of how he had a farewell picnic with his wife and kids before he went off to serve his sentence without feeling the utmost sympathy for him and the deepest loathing for the men who persecuted him in the name of freedom?

Lenin at the BBC?

The TV bosses are shouting at one another and in the exchange truths are coming out. It all began at the Edinburgh TV Festival when Michael Grade accused the BBC of becoming an institution which is scared by and sycophantic towards the Government. He accused the BBC bosses of being "Leninist" in their complicity with state demands, of "political appeasement to the Government; abandoning its heritage by axing resources; creating a culture of secrecy through editorial dictatorship; and stifling talent". Quite right. We have long pointed out that the government, in the name of freedom, imposes more and more control over state broadcasting, and, in the name of market forces, is dragging TV down to a lower and lower level. Is there a lower level than Eldorado? Watching it brings back fond memories of Crossroads as a relative example of dramatic sophistication. Marx called it the increasing misery of the working class - and watching Eldorado you get a funny feeling that he might just have been right.

Meanwhile ITV has announced that it is going to cut current affairs out of its peak-time hours altogether. Marcus Plantin, head of London Weekend Television, told the Edinburgh TV Festival that "We're not going to abandon current affairs, but we have to move it to a less competetive slot". By this he meant that advertisers want to put their money behind programmes that pull in the viewers and if game shows attract more soap powder buyers than news analysis, then World In Action will just have to go into the insomniac slot Paul Jackson, head of programmes for Carlton TV. the shoddy little outfit which will replace Thames next year, told the Festival that even though ITV output of news programmes currently constitutes only four percent, that is too much: "Four percent represents tens of millions of pounds and could make the difference between profit and loss". What all this is most clearly leading to is the Americanization of British TV: more tatty soaps like Eldorado, more horrible little game shows, more mindless chat, less news or serious analysis which costs money to research and film. Judge Musmanno and has fascistic friends would be proud: "freedom" (of the market) is flourishing and Lenin is purged from Moscow and well at home at the BBC.

Steve Coleman

Yawn in the USA (1992)

Editorial from the October 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

If it was not tragic it would be funny. With a mixture of anguish and amusement, socialists look on as the multi-million dollar campaigns to elect the most important political leader in the world drip down the middle of our TV screens.

The US Presidential contest is a sick, slick manipulation of what is declared to be a democratic election. To begin with, only millionaires or those backed by millionaires can afford to run televised, mass-appeal campaigns. Most US states have laws designed to prevent small parties from even being on the ballot paper: tens of thousands of nominations must be collected before you can even appeal to voters as an electoral contender. The TV networks and the press are subsumed by the petty irrelevancies of which candidate has the most extra-martial liaisons, whose wife looks cutest and which party can provide the catchiest ten-second sound bite.

The election is a farce. Rarely was this more clearly seen that at the Republican Convention when Bush and Quayle accepted their nominations; their speeches were of the emptiest rhetoric, but crowds of media men were placed in the audience to cheer at their every empty promise, laugh uproariously at their every semi-witty jest and, most sinister of all, burst into pre-arranged "spontaneous" bouts of slogan-chanting, Goodbye Gorbachev, but Stalinism is still alive and well in the Houston Astrodome.

The differences between the two big parties are negligible—more minute than ever. Like the British Labour Party, the US Democrats have adopted the view that the only way they might beat the Republicans is by kidding the voters that they are the Republicans. Bush or Clinton—who in their right mind cares? Certainly tens of millions of American workers don't, for it is anticipated that half the electorate will not vote next month.

As in Britain, liberal reformists are tempted by what they see as the lesser evil. The Nation, that journalistic symbol of wishy-washy niceness, hopes that Bush will lose, but its editorial of 14 September shows just how pathetic the case for the Democrats is: "in almost every category of capitalist economic growth—income, profit, gross domestic product, employment—Democratic administrations do better than Republican ones". As if that were a reason why workers, whose exploitation is the source of capitalist economic growth, should vote for their most efficient fleecers.

The truth is that US capitalism is in trouble, and social problems which they thought they could avoid are exploding all over the place. Vast numbers of homeless, a drug epidemic, 12 million hungry, over 20 million illiterates, riots in LA and more brewing in other deprived city areas, a multi-trillion dollar budget deficit and the collapse of welfare, huge numbers of bankruptcies. What American workers need to hear is the case for an alternative to the profit system: the case for production for use and not profit. There will be no Land of the Free until we have a world where all have free access to the abundant wealth that we can produce.

But instead of the voice of sanity, the Republicans have been infiltrated by crazy Christians, no more in possession of their reason than the Muslim fundamentalists. Their leader, and a definite Republican hopeful for 1996, is Pat Robertson who told the Convention in Houston that feminism "encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians". With God on their side these loony leaders are asking the millions to put their faith in them.

Analysing Marx (1992)

Book Review from the October 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Karl Marx, Our Contemporary. Social for a Post-Leninist World. by Keith Graham. (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992. £35)

Marx is our contemporary, argues Keith Graham in this book, in that he analysed not just 19th century capitalism but capitalism in general, and capitalism, unfortunately, is still very much with us.

Graham's approach is that of what has come to be called "analytical Marxism" which consists on analysing what Marx wrote to get at the logic of his line of argument and then to see where this leads, as well as identifying, and even correcting, any inconsistencies.

Graham applied this technique both to what he calls Marx's "general theory" (basically, the materialist conception of history, how societies are structured and change) and to his "special theory" (of how capitalism works and how it can be abolished). Light is thrown on various problems of interpretation of Marx. For example, what did Marx mean when he wrote about property relations becoming a fetter on the development of the means of production? Is it the class struggle or the development of the productive forces that is the motor of change from one form of society to another?

Graham also discusses Marx's concept of class and its political implications. Marx adhered to the principle that "the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself". So do we (it is incorporated into our declaration of principles). So do many others. But the sort of action this commits you to depends on how you define "working class". Which is where the disagreements and misunderstandings begin.

One view defines the working class as, essentially, only manual workers who actually physically manipulate raw materials. This is the popular view and also that of non-Marxists who define class in terms of occupation and way of life. It has definite political implications, as Graham points out:

If it [the working class] is identified with those engaged in manual labour, it constitutes a small and probably shrinking proportion of the population. And, as Przeworski puts it, 'A party representing a class which has fewer members than the other classes combined cannot win electoral battles'. This identification would therefore militate against acceptance of democratic political structures.

As a minority within society, the working class would not be able to use democratic political means to emancipate itself and so would have to reject majority action and favour some other means, such as industrial action.

Another view holds that Marx defined class in terms of class consciousness and political organisation. Graham quotes David McLellan who says that for Marx "a class only existed when it was conscious of itself as such, and this always implied common hostility to another social group", and Ralph Miliband who argues that "for Marx, the working class is not truly a class until it acquires the capacity to organize itself politically . . . without consciousness, the working class is a mere mass".

This view too can lead to an anti-democratic conception of the emancipation of the working class by excluding the un-class conscious and the politically unorganised—and allowing the politically organised minority to act as "the working class".

Graham argues, convincingly, that Marx rejected this view. Marx defined class in terms of a social group's material circumstances (relationship to other social groups with regard to control over and access to means for producing wealth) not of their consciousness. He gave an objective not a subjective definition of class. The working class were the working class, by virtue of their position in society, even if they were unaware of being a class.

So how did Marx define working class? Graham has no difficulty in showing that Marx did not restrict the working class to skilled and unskilled manual workers. First, Marx introduced the concept of the "collective worker" as all those workers who, within the social division of labour, contributed in way or another to the productive effort; this would include those engaged in activities which at a lower stage of technological development would have been done by the same person as actually worked the raw material—planning, researching and co-ordinating the work—and so embraced engineers, researchers, draughtspeople, their back-up clerical staff and other such "white collar" workers.

But, even apart from this, Marx defined the working class as the class of those whose economic circumstances (exclusion from ownership of means of production) compelled them to sell their ability to work for a wage or salary, including those dependent on them and those unable to find an employer. This included clerical workers, civil servants, teachers and even managers (who Marx referred to as "a special kind of wage labourer"). In a country like Britain we are talking about the overwhelming majority of the population, well over 90 percent of people in fact.

If this overwhelming majority is the working class that is to emancipate itself, then the political strategy for achieving a classless society can live with, and make use of existing democratic political institutions, limited and distorted as they are and must be under capitalism. As Graham puts it:

If you believe that the proletariat is in the process of becoming the majority class in society, and if you believe that this class is the only practical agency which can be expected to carry out and consolidate the desired transformation to the future society, then you have strong grounds for favouring democratic values. Universal suffrage and majority rule will be congenial institutions in that regard.

This was why Marx always supported action by workers to secure the franchise, as the Chartists in Britain, and urged those who had got it, as in France, to transform universal suffrage "from the instrument of fraud it has been up till now into an instrument of emancipation" ("Introduction to the Programme of the French Workers Party", 1880).

The principle that the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself committed Marx to a thoroughly democratic practice. His was a concept of a democratic social revolution, both in the sense of the workers organizing themselves democratically without leaders and in the sense of democratic methods being employed.

Graham brings this point out well in his book, which can be highly recommended to those who  want to understand what Marx was trying to say on this and other subjects.

Adam Buick