Sting in the Tail: Madness in the Air (1994)

The Sting in the Tail column from the October 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Madness in the air

Capitalism’s private property set-up means that we have to pay for nearly everything we need. About the only thing that is still free is the air we breathe because, so far, our masters haven’t come up with a way of making us pay for it.

But what they can do in certain circumstances is ration the amount we get. The American Consumers’ Union (ACU) reports that airlines are reducing the quantity and quality of air provided for in-flight passengers in order to save money.

On old aircraft the air was completely changed every three minutes, but on modern planes passengers get a mix of fresh and recycled air which can trigger colds, flu, and even serious illnesses. The ACU claims this policy can save airlines £40,000 per plane a year.

Maybe they can’t make us pay for our air yet, but they can ensure that supplying us with the stuff costs them as little as it possibly can.


Bigger and bigger

The end of the Cold War and the resulting widespread cuts in military spending will force the ‘‘defence” industry to contract and consolidate.

Now, in an effort to survive, companies involved in the arms business must either swallow competitors or get out of the business altogether. This process is well underway in America. Industry giants Lockheed and Martin Marietta have just merged. Northrop has gobbled-up Grumman while General Electrical and General Dynamics have been selling-off their aerospace divisions. Only a few companies arc expected to emerge once the dust has settled.

In Europe this consolidation has hardly begun, but it must happen or European capitalism’s share in the world's arms market will decline in the face of stronger American competition.

And so capitalism’s relentless march towards bigger but fewer economic units continues, and even the arms industry’ has no defence against that.


Bought and sold

On BBC1's Business Breakfast news a Government Minister was going on about some people who are “the consumers of a lot of the products”.

This was Eric Forth, Education Minister and rabid free-marketeer, talking about the education industry, and those “consumers” are employers while the “products" are schoolchildren and students.

Forth’s labelling of these youngsters as “products” may have offended some viewers, but it's only his market-mad way of explaining that “a lot” of them will eventually be selling their commodity, labour power, to employers on the labour market in much the same way as other commodities are sold to other consumers in, say, supermarkets.


Capitalist roaders

Now that China is rushing headlong down the once-reviled capitalist road, there are many players in the game of grabbing wealth and power.

According to that same BBC1 news programme, one of the most powerful players is an organisation known by the initials PLA and it is busily expanding into ownership of night-clubs. Karaoke bars and brothels.

In case you haven't already guessed. PLA stands for Peoples Liberation Army, so whatever battling China’s army does these days would appear to be for market share.


Where will it end?

  "A senior medical expert has warned that a cash-strapped health service may decide it is cheaper to kill dying patients than to take care of them ” (The Herald, 24 August).

Doctor Donald Murchison thinks

  "there is little doubt that if market forces were to prevail, you wouldn't put your money into terminal care, you would dispose of them quietly and surreptitiously”.

Has the doc gone a little over the top? Actually, he is a bit behind the times. Eleven years ago Professor Stewart Cameron, a kidney specialist at Guy’s hospital, was publicly threatening to refuse to sign death certificates for patients who were allowed to die because of health cuts. An estimated 2,000 died yearly because they were refused dialysis once they reached a certain age.

So, what the good Doctor fears may happen to the dying has been happening for years to people who are only ill, and not even “quietly and surreptitiously” either.


A macabre tale

As if to emphasis capitalism's callousness, a BBC-TV programme (24 August) revealed that doctors in intensive care units are using computers in helping them to decide which patients should be treated or left to die.

  "David Bihari, director of intensive care at Guy's hospital, London, was featured on the programme using a computer system which flashed up a coffin if it assesses patients as being unlikely to survive beyond 90 days” (Guardian, 25 August).

A hospital spokeswoman denied that the computer was being used for the purpose of saving money, but Doctor Bihari struck an ominous note:

  "The issue for the 1990's is that health resources are limited and the pot is not infinitely deep. We have to identify patients where further treatment is futile. In these cases computer-aided diagnosis can be useful. ”

So the pressure to save money is there, and experience of capitalism’s priorities shows that when it comes to money versus human need then money wins it every time.

Pity the Continent (1994)

From the October 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

If ever a continent cried out for justice, for help and, more, for Socialism, it is Africa, a land of 30 million square miles, 54 nations, a thousand languages and 642 million people; a land geographically as rich in diversity as it is in fauna and flora; a land organically as rich in oil and coal as it is in gold and diamonds, and yet, paradoxically, the poorest continent on Earth.

For over a hundred years a spectre has haunted Africa — the demon of world capitalism that sees Africa only as a source of profit, cheap commodities, a gullible market for western exports and an easily exploitable population ruled by corrupt leaders.

The age of overt colonialism may have gone, when the European powers raped and carved up Africa, each with vested interests backed up by huge armies, but now there are new colonists who can do ten times as much damage with the flick of a pen — the World Bank and the IMF.

In ten years, loans given by the IMF and the World Bank have tripled Africa’s debt burden to $180 billion — a figure that represents more than Africa’s aggregate net income. Debt repayments currently stand at $11 billion a year — a staggering four rimes more than what Africa spends on health and welfare.

Since the mid-1980s, African governments have repaid the IMF $2 billion than they have received in loans — a system that is so severe that every adult and child in Tanzania and Zambia owe their nations' external debtors twice their yearly earnings.

African governments secure loans unwittingly to the detriment of their respective nations because they believe this is the only way to domestic stability. Most are forced into accepting loans on terms and conditions regarding policies they would not have hitherto adopted: the privatisation of state-owned industries, the introduction of new constitutions and drastic reductions in public expenditure which hit health and education programmes the hardest.

In the past ten years about 30 African nations have come to regret the acceptance of IMF and World Bank advice. Living standards have dropped by two per cent annually, while unemployment has quadrupled to 100 million, with real wages falling by 30 percent. Africa is now worse off than it was 25 years ago. The June issue of New African declared that "the average African has 10 percent less food to eat than twenty years ago”.

The Guardian (20 July) reported how "in myriad cases, bank projects, supposedly targeted at the poorest of Africa’s poor, not only increased inequality and hunger, but exacerbated ethnic conflicts . . . Across Africa, projects funded by the bank have become synonymous with financial mismanagement, environmental degradation, the displacement of vulnerable populations and corruption”.

Eighteen African nations are amongst the world's poorest 20, 30 amongst the world’s poorest 40. Africa with eight times the land area of the USA and twice its population has only one percent of world trade, while American capitalists are top of the world trade league. In 1991, the total GNP for Africa south of the Sahara, excluding South Africa, was $204.7 billion — only slightly higher than that of tiny Belgium with a population of 10 million. Within six years 300 million Africans will be living below the subsistence level.

Myth of overpopulation

Africa has a population of 642 million. Considering Africa is three times the size of China, it has one sixth the Chinese population per square mile. Yet some experts point to African overpopulation as one of its problems. This is pure fallacy. While 50 percent of Africans are undernourished, it is widely known that the continent is capable of sustaining a population several times its present size were Western farming methods applied there.

While millions were dying in the Ethiopian famine eight years ago. the Ethiopian government were exporting thousands of tonnes of lentils to the West. In 1991, Zimbabwe was forced, by the World Bank, to sell one million tonnes of surplus grain to meet debt repayments. A year later a drought hit southern African cutting Zimbabwe’s grain output by 60 percent, with disastrous effects.

If anything, the problem facing Africa is western capitalism. Shortages of food and overpopulation do not even enter the equation. Guy Arnold, writing in New African in September believes "an enormous deception has been practised upon Africa since I960. It is that all the interference by the World Bank, the IMF and the Paris Club has been for Africa’s advantage".

"Africa", Arnold says, “ is not at all interested in such donor prescriptions, but is obliged to accept them because it is heavily in debt and debt is a primary instrument of control."

This is an intrinsic fact of capitalist society: the wealthy control the poor.

Africa is a land of plenty and only Socialism could truly release its productive potential to the benefit of its people. For a hundred years the West has carved up Africa, diseased its flesh and drained its life-blood. Reforms and loans will only ever be the sticking plaster over the gunshot wound.

John Bissett

Battering down all Chinese Walls (1994)

From the October 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

The last remaining bastions of the doomed "Socialism in One Country" experiment, are finally facing up to the reality of the world capitalist market to which they are, and have always been, inextricably linked.

China’s government has now pretty much given up any pretence that it is operating a non-capitalist economy, with the current slogan "Socialism with a Chinese Face". This involves opening up the economy to international capital while retaining tight control over the apparatus of state repression.

The Chinese have been much bolder in opening up the fenced-off Economic Zones, where multinationals are free to exploit a cowed labour force without the unpleasantness of needing to account for their actions either to an elected government or to a strong union movement — increasingly the case in the other rapidly developing economies of east Asia.

Western multinationals recognise a good business partner when they see one, and the Chinese "Communists" are some of the best around. Nobody on the boards of US constructions companies like Parsons Brinckerhoff or Brown and Root wanted to see Western governments raising awkward questions of human rights on the recent anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and indeed the Clinton administration was quiet as a mouse on the subject.

The rewards are now being reaped. Between the 28 and 30 August, a US trade mission initialled over $5 billions-worth of new business in China in the key power, automotive and communications sectors.

No wonder that Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, who led the trade mission with the heads of some of America’s biggest corporations, proclaimed himself "exhilarated” by the warmth of his reception from Chinese officials.

And this is a mere taster for the $250 billions-worth of infrastructure projects coming up before the end of the century in China. "We intend to compete in this market and we intend to win", Brown warned his western rivals.

So important are these contracts to the ailing US economy — rivalling in size those in the halcyon days of the Shah's untrammelled spending with US heavy industry — that the "moral”and liberal Bill Clinton has bowed to the inevitable and "delinked" trade and human rights issues.

The key indicator of this was the renewal by his administration of China’s Most Favoured Nation trading status after US corporations argued that the administration's focus on human rights was jeopardising US business interests in China and benefiting competitors in Europe and Asia. US exports to China are growing at four times the rate of exports to the rest of the world, and now provide a living for around 150,000 Americans.

Commerce Secretary Brown says he will resume a “dialogue" on human rights issues this month. The Chinese contemptuously broke them off during a tense visit by Secretary of State Warren Christopher to China earlier this year.

As an interesting footnote, the contracts signed by Brown’s mission include an agreement between TRW in the US, Suman group of Guandong province and Beijing Cable TV Network to supply one million descrambler units for television programmes in Chinese households. We eagerly await the tortured explanations of Chinese state ideologues as to how this actually brings the day of universal access to the means of communications any nearer.

Andy Thomas

Highway-One Revisited (1994)

From the October 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Meanwhile in neighbouring Vietnam, the state bureaucracy is also well down the road to quietly burying the experiment of “Socialism in One Country". Seventy-five international construction companies arc now bidding for $317 millions-worth of contracts to rebuild Highway One. This road, which links Hanoi in the north with Ho Chi Minh City (ex-Saigon) is a key symbol of the war fought to rid Vietnam forever of American "Imperialism”.

Among the key bidders are US corporations anxious to repair the potholes and craters gouged by their own bombs and mines — and close on their heels the South Koreans, key supporters of the US’s Vietnam war effort. Even the Chinese are having a go, reckoning that this is one area where their technology can compete with the ex-imperialist enemy.

The renewed interest in Vietnam follows its full rehabilitation into the international capitalist system, capped with renewed access to International Monetary Fund and other multilateral agency loans. Naturally there are no humanitarian motives behind this. The flow of international capital into developing economies, set up by the Bretton Woods regime after the last world war, was designed to keep depression at bay in the West by allowing developing countries credit to buy excess production from Western corporations.

In the case of Highway One, international construction companies are now confident that with IMF and World Bank loans pump-priming the Vietnamese economy, traffic volumes will increase sufficiently to yield an acceptable profit from tolls.

And as in China, there are richer pickings to come. The World Bank estimates that Vietnam will need $7 to $10 billion by the year 2000 for infrastructure repair, with at least $2.2 billion allocated to transport.

Andy Thomas

Letter: In Search of Nebulous Reforms (1994)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

I should like to draw your attention to — and perhaps spark some debate amongst your readers — what I see as a nihilistic attitude developing amongst some Socialists towards reformism.

An attitude appears to be developing that reforms don’t do any good, are irrelevant to the emergence of real socialism, and are therefore not worth bothering about.

This is obviously nonsense. Of course it's true that any reforms under capitalism are nebulous and could disappear at any moment — indeed in the last fifteen years many of the earlier gains have been eroded or diminished — but it's also true that in many areas, reforms over the last 100 years have alleviated distress and provided better working conditions for many. It is far too glib to suggest that these reforms have been granted to the working class by the ruling class in order to consolidate their own position and for no other reason. If it wasn’t for the work of the activists and reformers in the last 100 years, we would be living in a country not unlike South America in the seventies perhaps.

It's perfectly reasonable for someone like myself to support campaigns such as that against the Criminal Justice Bill whilst at the same time recognising that winning a victory in this battlefield is not an end in itself and that socialism is the only ultimate answer to our problems. I’m perfectly capable of holding both positions simultaneously and indeed using the struggle against the Criminal Justice Bill as a vehicle for the propagation of socialist ideas.

Indeed, it’s perfectly reasonable to suggest that some reforms such as free health care, education, housing and perhaps ultimately basic foodstuffs (now there would be a genuine common agricultural policy!) and clothing could be enough to give the average man-in-the-street a taste of what full socialism could be like in its entirety, and we might find ourselves flooded with enough supporters to build the common majority we need to bring about full socialism.

In short, my view is that we should stamp on this defeatist tendency to wash our hands of the real world, and start working to change it to a better one. Socialism won't come about by writing pamphlets and passing them amongst ourselves, it will come about through years of working-class struggle in every field and on every front.

Andy Stephenson, 

Newhaven, Sussex

Reply:
Yes, socialism will only come about through years of working-class struggle in every field and on every front — but for socialism not for reforms of capitalism.

You are quite right too that it is obviously nonsense to suggest that reforms haven’t done any good. Of course some have. Health and safety at work legislation (now being watered down, by the way) would be an obvious case in point. But then we have never taken up the position that reforms do not, or cannot, improve things for workers under capitalism.

Our position is that it is not the purpose of a Socialist Party to advocate reforms. Its purpose is to advocate Socialism. That’s why we were set up and that’s why people join us.

Nor would we deny that as a matter of historical fact struggles by workers have got the ruling class to bring in reforms. But we would make three points here.

First, you underestimate the extent to which reforms which lead to a more healthy and better educated working class do benefit the capitalist class and that this has been an equally, if not more important, factor in their introduction.

Second, if workers had struggled for Socialism instead of for these reforms, they would still have got them — and probably more as the capitalist class made concessions to try to ward off their coming expropriation.

Third, there are other ways of improving things under capitalism than reform legislation: trade unions, tenants associations and like organisations in which workers organise themselves collectively to bring direct pressure to bear on those making decisions that affect their lives. We have always said workers should get involved in such organisations and our members, as workers, get involved in them themselves (and are just as capable as you of recognising that winning a victory in these struggles “is not an end in itself and that socialism is the only ultimate answer to our problems"). But as a party we don’t. We stick to our specific role of campaigning for Socialism.

Where we would take serious issue with you is when you claim that some reforms are relevant to the emergence of real socialism. We recognise that you are not putting the classic gradualist position that a series of reform measures can lead to Socialism step by step (free housing one year, free transport the next, free heating the year after, till in the end everything is free).

But you are suggesting that we should campaign for what might be called “socialist leaning" reforms. Quite apart from the fact that some of these reforms have been enacted (free education, free libraries, etc. exist while free transport has existed in some places) without having the effect on people's ideas you predict, if we were to campaign for them this would inevitably be to the detriment of our campaigning for Socialism.

And, as we pointed out earlier, if we do struggle for Socialism we'll probably get them anyway as a by-product of that struggle. That’s why it is saying that we should struggle for reforms that is defeatist, not the other way round. This is to concede that Socialism is not an urgent necessity, is not the immediate agenda. If you want Socialism, the quickest way to get it is to campaign for it directly. So, if you want Socialism, join the Socialists in that campaign.

Editors

#    #    #    #

If Paddy Small, of Glasgow, would let us know his address (not necessarily for publication) we will gladly consider his letter for publication. We regret we do not publish anonymous letters.

50 Years Ago: The Weakness of the Trotskyists (1994)

The 50 Years Ago column from the October 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Due to the Trotskyist belief in "revolutionary situations," no explanations of the nature of Socialism will be found in the columns of the Socialist Appeal. As the revolution will take place at any moment, there is no need for this painstaking work. The line of their propaganda is rather like the instructions of a general staff to its army — "Second Front — and the tasks of the working class." "Workers must fight for equal pay.” etc.

In spite of their claims to be revolutionary, their official policy contains the usual reformist nonsense, such as the "Nationalisation of the land, mines, banks, transport and all big industry.” "A rising scale of wages to meet increased cost of living,” "Confiscation of war profits." etc.

The Trotskyist attitude to the war is vague and ill-defined. Whilst denouncing the war as imperialist, they want the "unconditional defence of the Soviet Union against all imperialist powers, despatch of arms, food and essential materials to the Soviet Union."

The Trotskyist claim to be revolutionary is ill-founded. Once again we insist that the S.P.G.B. method is the only revolutionary one, and we will continue to do what the Trotskyists do not do — advocate Socialism as the only cure for social ills.

(From an article by G. Ewbank in the Socialist Standard, October 1944)

Nick, Nick — Sue, Sue (1994)

TV Review from the October 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

With crime so dominant in local, national and international news, it is hardly surprising that it features so prominently on television. This said, the array of crime-related programmes on British TV must soon be expected to reach saturation point. Both BBC and ITV currently cram their schedules with serials and features about the doings of the police in particular.

Possibly the most entertaining is BBC1’s Crimewatch UK which aims at helping the police do their work for them. It is presented, appropriately enough, by a couple called Nick and Sue. Realising that there is not too much antagonism in society at present towards those lucky enough to be able to defraud banks and multinationals out of their millions, Crimewatch instead focuses on violent crime carried out by desperate members of the working class against other workers hired to protect the property of the bosses. These invariably include Post Office workers, building society staff and others in a similar position. This plays on the good-natured side of most workers — they may not care much if the Halifax loses a few thousand of its profits, but they are likely to respond if somebody just like themselves is looking down the wrong end of a sawn-off shotgun for their £200 a week.

Sometimes Crimewatch spends time on other kinds of violent crime that are not ostensibly property related, particularly sexual crime. Here it does a job that even more people are likely to identify with, but to what effect? While armed robbers are thrown in Strangeways or Brixton to become even more embroiled in violent culture, sex offenders are locked together with others of their ilk so that they can turn their deviancy into a fine art in time for their release. The question that must really be asked is what sort of a society is it that treats its deranged and irrational members in such a way as to guarantee their problems become worse and not better? And, taking this into account, what real use does a programme like Crimewatch have? To say that it is a sticking plaster on capitalism’s burgeoning crime problem must be an insult to the usefulness of sticking plasters.

The flashing blue light

Most crime-related TV shows are of the serial variety, ranging from depictions of the organised chaos of US police work, like Cagney and Lacey, to home-grown creations like The Bill. For a time, The Bill was easily the best in this category, with some strong characterisations, but recently it has lost its cutting edge. The stories are the same — drugs, minor fraud, petty thieving and domestic squabbles, but without the sinister undertones provided by characters like Frank Burnside and Sergeant Roach whose approach was straight out of the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad's manual on The Care and Attention of Suspects and Witnesses. It would seem that The Bill, after many complaints from the police themselves, has gone for the official view of what constitutes “realism" in the Force. No more unnecessary violence, no more intimidation and no more back-handers.

It is a pity that this alleged "realism" isn’t reflected in the portrayal of the working class at large. Most workers in The Bill, like in one or two other programmes that could be mentioned, are depicted as the scum of the earth. One of the clear messages of The Bill is that if it wasn't for the intervention of public-spirited coppers like Reg Hollis then working-class life would sink into a state of barbarism. There may be a good deal of back-biting and office politics portrayed in the programme amongst the police themselves, but viewers are left in no doubt who the good guys are. The odd storyline still bucks the trend, but the overall message is still that left to their own devices the working class would stab one another to death and burn down their own houses until there was nothing and nobody left. A copper’s eye-view of the world can be a dangerous one indeed, and The Bill reinforces this more than most.

It is likely that much crime and police work is just too humdrum to be of interest to viewers. As such, there is bound to be some sort of trade-off between realism and entertainment value in any police series, but when realism goes out of the window, once again at the expense of the ordinary worker in the street, then it is time to take heed.

On a happier note, ITV recently revealed that one of its other top crime shows is to be axed. Michael Winner's True Crimes has now become so grotesque that even the ITV bosses can no longer stomach it. No more will we have to watch the oleaginous Winner breathing his odium across the airwaves, glorying in the brutality of bloody murders. He will now have more time to spend on his pompous Sunday Times column, which seems a small price to pay. The portrayal of crime on TV will undoubtedly be better off without him. but it can be little more than a welcome start.

Dave Perrin

Obituary: Tom Simpson (1994)

Obituary from the October 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tom's rather sudden death in July deprives the Party of a member of long standing. After joining Hackney Branch in November 1941, Tom heartily involved himself in socialist agitation. He was particularly active during the war years — one of the most testing times for Socialist Party members — and served three months of a twelve-month sentence in Wormwood Scrubs prison for his refusal to undertake military service. Subsequently he became secretary and then treasurer of Hackney Branch until its eventual break-up. In the post-war period Tom moved to Putney and became a member of the South West London Branch until the difficulties of late-night transport forced him to transfer to Central Branch.

His death ended fifty-two years of Party membership. He will be missed not only as a twin brother and close personal friend but as a Party member whose concepts were rooted in the fundamentals of the socialist case.

R. S.

Prelude to Terror (1994)

From the October 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Opinion as to when the atrocities started in Northern Ireland is very much governed by which “side” gives the opinion. The state was born in violence and was governed and politically structured both to resist violence and promote violence as an instrument of establishment policy.

Both the ruling Unionists and the opposition Nationalists seemed determined on keeping the population divided along politico-religious lines. The latter refused to co-operate with the state institutions and those who controlled those institutions totally reflected the repeated clarion of succeeding Prime Ministers that Northern Ireland had “a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people”.

In 1922, soon after the inception of the northern state, the Unionist government introduced the Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act. It was ludicrously draconian, a complete totalitarian’s do-it-yourself kit which allowed "the Authority” to declare
something not covered by the Act but deemed by Authority to be contrary to the Act to be unlawful, and provided for the power of the Authority to be delegatable to any of its servants. Effectively, then, a reserve constable in the exclusively Protestant “B” Special Constabulary could become an on-the-spot lawmaker and law-enforcer. The Act, which became part of the permanent law of the state in 1928, was frequently used to imprison opponents of the government without charge or trial but, mercifully, most of its other quite terrifying provisions were never used.

Inevitably, Nationalists made political capital out of the Act (a basically similar Act was introduced in the Irish Free State but was only activated during emergencies) especially when the architect of South Africa’s apartheid, responded to criticism by the British government, by saying he would give up the whole of his enabling legislation for a single clause of the Northern Ireland Special Powers Act. The London government was embarrassed. Engrossed in its own problems, however, it did not follow the advice of some of its members who urged a closer scrutiny of Britain’s Northern Ireland creation.

The Unionist justification for the Special Powers Act was the activities of the IRA; on the other hand, the Nationalists justified the IRA on the basis of the Special Powers Act. In 1921 when the state was established there was communal violence and the Unionist government made only minimal efforts to curb the sectarian bloodlust of its supporters. By 1923, the government had largely stamped out all violent opposition.

There were to be further troubles and IRA scares but the IRA was more fictional than threatening — for example, during most of the wartime Forties, when the IRA was supposed to be taking advantage of “England’s difficulty”, there was seldom more than a dozen active IRA volunteers in Belfast. This was, of course, before the intransigence of the landowners, industrialists and prosperous lawyers who made up the Unionist government had prepared history for the birth of the Provisionals.

The government did nothing to win the reluctant hearts and minds of its non-cooperating minority. It not only made permanent the sinister Special Powers Act, it structured the franchise and engineered electoral boundaries not simply to ensure that it remained in power but to see to it that the political influence of its constitutional opponents was zero. Unemployment and low pay were endemic but, there again, the government, from the Prime Minister down, overtly encouraged discrimination against the minority.

Despite the facts of the situation, the benefits of the “Protestant Parliament for a Protestant people” were, effectively, more illusionary' than real. As far as the working class was concerned, it is true that those labelled “Protestant” were more likely to find a job (which, of course, they desperately needed) than were Catholics. The latter also suffered discrimination in housing but, ironically, in the areas where Unionism was most violently vociferous and in areas where Catholics mulled their anger against Unionism, there was a marked identically of slums and mean living.

In 1945 the various schemes of social welfare outlined in the wartime all-party Beveridge Report were introduced in Westminster. The Unionist overlords opposed the extension of these provisions to Northern Ireland but, despite this, the ensuing legislation did cover the province.

Welfare capitalism had no direct impact on discrimination which was institutionalised in both in law and custom. It did, however, have dramatic indirect effects: social security payments may not have produced jobs and houses but, given the very real poverty of most Protestant workers, the general living standards of Catholics and Protestant members of the working class — employed and unemployed — were brought into closer proximity.

Allied to the 1944 Education Act, welfare payments and family allowances allowed greater numbers of young Catholics to remain at school rather than emigrating and this, in turn, began to throw up within the Nationalist community a young and articulate element that saw politics as the ending of discriminatory forms rather than the mythical gold at the end of an all-Ireland rainbow. This was clearly demonstrated in 1956 when a re-organised IRA launched a border campaign. After a few brief skirmishes, the “Campaign” lapsed into a war of press statements until, in 1962, the IRA acknowledged defeat and blamed it on the northern Nationalists whom, they said, had sold their heritage for the benefits of the welfare state. It was a watershed that official Unionism and the Orange bigots who bolstered their rule seemed oblivious of.

But, if the dream of a united Ireland was to be jettisoned, then the northern Nationalists insisted that they should be integrated into the system and that the structures that barred them from full participation should be dismantled. Unfortunately, while Unionism could give way on such demands as “One person, One vote”, the demand for jobs and homes were not within the power of northern capitalism to grant.

The minority, initially with significant Protestant working-class support, choose the methods that had been used successfully in the campaign of Martin Luther King in the United States. The demonstration and protest march. Unfortunately, the people leading the campaign wholly failed to recognise the real nature of the problem.

The pseudo-socialist, Gerry Fitt (now Lord Fitt) and aspiring respectable Nationalists like John Hume, argued that the social problems extant in Northern Ireland were caused by Unionism — as if poverty, slums and unemployment, together with the political rigging of these evils for electoral advantage, were not features of capitalism elsewhere, including the Republic of Ireland.

Certainly, Unionism maintained its power-base among working-class Protestants by an uneven distribution of these ills of capitalism along religious lines but, as we warned at the time, to base the demand for Civil Rights on the effects of the Unionist Party’s manipulation of the inadequacies of capitalism, rather than on capitalism itself, could be, and was, construed as a threat to every employed Protestant home occupier.

If capitalism’s poverty had been “fairly” distributed, it was likely that fewer Protestants and more Catholics would have had homes and jobs but, for an organisation allegedly campaigning for “civil rights” to offer the idea of a redistribution of poverty rather than an end to the economic system that created that poverty, clearly demonstrated not only the very limited thinking of the Civil Rights movement but the inherent sectarianism of the movement itself.

Tragically, the Civil Rights campaign, itself non-violent, offered a golden opportunity to fascist-type bigots like Paisley and Craig to provoke sectarian warfare. In the wings along with Paisley and others of his ilk were the dinosaurs of Irish republicanism, breathing the same wretched hatreds and nationalistic racism as their loyalist opponents.

The ensuing slaughter is history and we are tempted to think how different it might have been if the Civil Rights people had based their demands on class instead of creed, exposing the physical and intellectual poverty of the working class in Northern Ireland and not simply the “Catholic” segment of that class.

Richard Montague

What we said at the start . . . (1994)

From the October 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

To workers from Ireland 

Many of you will be concerned about what is happening in places like Belfast and Derry. You will probably support the civil rights struggle in Northern Ireland.

We too are concerned about the conditions our fellow workers in other parts of the world have to live and work under. We know that the role of the police and army is everywhere to protect private property and the existing political set-up.

When Ireland got independence in 1921 the North East part, for economic reasons, was kept under British rule though given a parliament and government of its own. The government there has since armed itself with various undemocratic powers to use against its opponents. It is against these powers, and against bad housing and unemployment, that the Civil Rights people are protesting.

Protest movements are nothing new and are not confined to Northern Ireland. They exist everywhere and show that everywhere workers are discontented with some aspect of their lot. It is by promising to do something about this that politicians obtain your votes — and it is their failures that lead people to protest on the streets.

The politicians fail not because they are dishonest or incompetent but because capitalism cannot be made to work for the good of all.

If you accept this, then you will see that direct action is in the end as futile as voting for parties that stand for capitalism. You will see too the uselessness of a United Ireland as a way of solving the problems of workers in the North. This would merely be a political re-shuffle — a change of masters, we would say — that would leave unchanged the class basis of society which is the real cause of these problems. As anyone who has lived in the Irish Republic can confirm, people there face the same problems of bad housing, unemployment and insecurity (indeed this may be why you are now living in Britain).

The lasting solution to these problems in Northern Ireland, the Irish Republic, Britain and the rest of the world is Socialism.

(From Socialist Standard, December 1970)

Don’t be fooled by words

"All I want to see, is my country free, happiness peace and prosperity." A theme, with variations, that has headed the top ten of the political hit parade with unceasing regularity during the last century.

The chorus master on this occasion is Joe Cahill who has been described as "the militant leader of the Belfast wing of the provisional IRA" after his release from detention in Dublin. At this point we will stop the satire; the part played over the decades by political "leaders" with their message of national independence has proved too tragic and disastrous to joke about.

The working class of Ireland, that is to say of Eire and Northern Ireland, as indeed workers wherever they may reside, should think seriously about such phrases as "Freedom". "My country", "Prosperity" and "Peace". Let's see what they really mean.

FREEDOM: In capitalist society means the right of the vast majority to be property's wage workers producing wealth to be sold on a market with a view to profit.

MY COUNTRY: The countries of the world are owned by a privileged minority. The working class has problems and interests that are produced by capitalism and not by the existence of national barriers.

PROSPERITY: All workers are poor, some are destitute. A prosperous working class is a contradiction in terms. Capitalism is as incapable of producing a working class that is prosperous as it is of producing a government that is popular. 

PEACE: Even if the shooting stopped the class war would remain, that is the struggle which goes on all the time over the ownership of the wealth of society, whether it be in a so called “United” Ireland, the “United" States, the "United" Kingdom, the "United” Arab Republic, Russia, Africa, in fact wherever capitalism is the predominating form of society.

(From Socialist Standard, November 1971)

The Masquerade and the Reality (1994)

From the October 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Having spent a quarter of a century trying to force the British government to sever its political and military connection with Northern Ireland and of trying to coerce the Unionist population into accepting a United Ireland against their will through the threat of violence, the IRA has finally called it a day and called a permanent ceasefire. In some quarters at least, notably amongst desperate Dublin politicians, this is the interpretation put on the statement from the IRA that they had ordered “a complete cessation of military operations”. The hard reality of countless IRA atrocities, however, has taught most people living in Northern Ireland to be somewhat more cynical of the IRA’s words and motives than the Dublin government appears to be. The overwhelming response to the Provo’s “Peace Process” is to question why the people who brought us La Mon House, Abercorn, Teebane, Shankill Road, to name but some of the worst outrages, and who had no compunction in placing entire working class ghettoes under the iron heel of Nationalist conformity, have suddenly let go of the armalite for a two handed grip on the ballot box.

The Unionists, of course, are particularly sceptical and distrustful. Not withstanding the predictable antics of Paisley, whom more and more Protestants are dismissing as a political clown, there is genuine concern amongst the majority that something has been done behind their backs. Reasons for the distrust are not far to seek. It has been common knowledge now amongst the majority of Unionists that the British government considers Northern Ireland as an economic black hole into which £3 billion of its revenues disappears annually. They know that the British would dump them if they could, and they fear that pressure from what they call the “pan-Nationalist front” — a supposed alliance between the SDLP, Sinn Fein, the Catholic Church, Dublin government and powerful American allies — has nudged the British Government in the direction of a United Ireland.

It is this fear that fuels the activities of the Protestant paramilitaries, whose immediate response to the IRA ceasefire was to murder a Catholic worker, carry out further, unsuccessful, gun attacks on others and to try to blow up Sinn Fein’s Press Office on the Falls Road. Despite the self-delusion of the Protestant paramilitaries that they have significant support amongst the Protestant working class for their activities, most Protestant workers, however misguidedly, are looking to the Unionist establishment to protect what they perceive as their “constitutional position”and their “British way of life”. Aggrieved as they might feel over the actions of a mercenary British government which, as Lord Palmerston once pointed out, has no long-term friends or enemies, only interests, few would sanction the indiscriminate murder of innocent Catholic workers as a legitimate response.

The arguments of the Loyalists in relation to their “British way of life” are the arguments of patriots and nationalists everywhere; they are illogical, mythical and misguided. Socialists are not conned by capitalist propaganda; we see this “way of life” for what it is: a mean, restricted existence made marginally more bearable by a “cultural” diet of American sit-coms, Australian soap operas and all the crap you can eat at McDonalds or Kentucky Fried Garbage; an artificial culture which, for the present historical period at least, a triumphant capitalism has enforced everywhere from Moscow in Russia to Moscow Street on the Shankill Road.

It may be common for the Leninist Left to go into raptures at the very mention of the IRA and to sing hallelujahs to the so-called “armed struggle” (a struggle, which, incidentally, they have shown commendable, indeed, remarkable, restraint in furthering by any sacrifice on their part), but socialists refuse to support one group of misguided nationalist workers as opposed to some other group. Socialists no more support the myths of “republicanism” than we do “loyalism”. Lining up on the side of nationalists means two things; it means drawing battle lines between sections of the working class whose sole interest in capitalism should be to unite to abolish it, and it means promoting the capitalist myth of the “national interest” — in short, collaboration with the bosses. Attempts to solve so-called “national questions”, to rearrange capitalist borders, in other words, is a futile concern to occupy nationalists, not socialists.

It is because of the Left’s policy of mouthing the lunacies of Irish Nationalism in practically the same breath as they spout platitudes about their spurious socialism that most Protestant workers in Northern Ireland are openly hostile to even discussing socialism. This attitude is hardly surprising; for decades every shade of “Socialist” or “Marxist” opinion has reviled the Protestant working class, much as Marx and Engels, in The Communist Manifesto, reviled “The ‘dangerous class’, the social scum. . . ,” stigmatising such people as “the bribed tool of reactionary intrigue”. To view the Protestant workers in Northern Ireland as “the bribed tools” of British imperialism, bought off with a small fraction of the "super-profits" accruing to British capitalism through their “occupation” of Ireland, is comforting for people whose historical materialism is so deep that their entire vision of the world resolves itself into supporting “good” nationalists against “bad” nationalists, “good” governments against “bad" governments, and, ultimately, much as the religious superstitionists do, “good” people against “bad" people. The problem with this Leninist claptrap is that it is somewhat at odds with the reality which sees the saints, as well as the sinners, on the receiving end of £3 billion.

State-capitalism supporting “socialists” have done their best to alienate Protestant workers from real socialist ideas, but they haven’t entirely succeeded. Many workers from Protestant ghettoes are starting to recognise that, in a sense, the phoney “socialists” and the Unionist parties have been unwittingly fighting each others’ battles by preventing Protestant workers from coming to a realisation of their class position in capitalism. In the Shankill Road area of Belfast at least there are signs that this realisation is starling to dawn. For example, Eddie Kinner, an ex-UVF lifer who spent thirteen and a half years in jail and who, in conversations with the present writer, openly describes himself, and many of his acquaintances, as socialists, recently had published in The Irish Times an article in which he pointed out that:

  The working class Protestants feel that they have been held responsible for the misrule of the Stormont government under which they were exploited and oppressed just as much as the Catholics. They feel that the Unionists have represented the middle class Protestants and religious fundamentalists but misrepresented the views and position of the working class Protestants. (The Irish Times, September 3 1994)

Working-class Protestants are now starting to articulate their position in a more positive way. Although the activities of the fascists in the IRA have hardened their feelings towards those on the “other side”, many of them, probably the majority, would now admit that the original grievances of the Civil Rights marchers were justified. They accept there was discrimination over jobs and houses and that there were anomalies in the voting system which tended to be directed against Catholics. In no way, however, should Protestant workers feel that some act of contrition on their part is called for. They should recognise that the real discrimination in Northern Ireland, like everywhere else in capitalism, was not practised by those who fought over the crumbs, it was practised by those who took the cake and left the crumbs to be fought over. If Protestant workers were materially any better off, it was because their majority strength compelled the ruling class to fob them off with slightly bigger crumbs.

It was the bosses. Catholic, as well as Protestant, who decided who entered into wage-slavery and who languished on state hand-outs where these existed — or starved, where they didn't. The bosses could pick and choose. From the very outset, the capitalist class of the North East of Ireland had decided that their economic interests were best served by a retention of the union with Britain for the sole reason that this also retained their access to British markets.

Naturally, as most working class Catholics had been duped into believing that their interests were with the Southern capitalists, and said so, they were seen as hostile to the new set-up which served the interests of the northern capitalists. Discrimination was the result. What were Protestant workers to do? Refuse to take the jobs and watch their families suffer even more than they already were on the grounds that a Catholic worker might have been “unfairly” passed over? Are socialists to accept that if there had been a Catholic majority in the state, a Catholic parliament for a Catholic people and an overwhelmingly Catholic ruling class, that the attitude of these to a recalcitrant minority of Protestant workers would have been any different? To argue this way is to show an abysmal ignorance of how capitalism works.

Everywhere capitalism exists it creates conflict. Capitalism pits state against state over positions of military and economic influence, capitalist against capitalist over markets, raw materials and cheap labour power, capitalist against worker over wages and conditions and worker against worker over a continuous scramble for scarce jobs. Conflict is capitalism’s permanent condition; the problem is that there is no shortage of people whose ignorance and bigotry enables the conflict to masquerade as one based on nationalism, religion or race. Protestant workers in Northern Ireland have been among the worst victims of this masquerade. A community worker in the Glencairn area of Belfast recently complained to the media that his area, a sprawling, ugly estate, pock-marked everywhere by vandalised blocks of flats, had no community centre, no shopping area, no post office, no chemist, no health centre and that gangs of bored youths roamed the area using empty flats as drinking and drug-taking dens. For some, the mask is beginning to slip.

Nigel McCullough

The Tiny Trots Enclosure (1994)

Book Review from the October 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pit Sense Versus the State - 
a history of militant miners
 in the Doncaster area by David John Douglass.
 (Phoenix Press. £4.50.)

Next time you find yourself on the receiving end of some empty-headed carping about “vanguards" and "leadership” from the Tiny Trots enclosure, you could do worse than to point them in the direction of Pit Sense Versus the State; also essential reading for anyone into first hand accounts from the sharp end of the class struggle.

Focusing primarily on the Miners' Strike of 1984-85 the book begins with a summary of industrial action taken by the miners from 1926 to the late 1960s. and an account of the political and economic background to the State’s assault on the coal industry in the mid- 1980s.

The author, himself a miner (now unemployed and blacklisted), was formerly delegate of the NUM’s Hatfield Main Branch. During the 1984- 85 Strike he served on picket lines and strike committees, in support groups and food kitchens and is thus able to give us an insider’s view of the day-to-day conduct of the strike, capturing the spirit and mood of those engaged in it — something which academic “histories” never do. Nevertheless this is more than a series of personal reminiscences and anecdotes. Douglass draws heavily from the picket log and the minutes of the various strike committee meetings, allowing the strike to speak for itself, again something that opinionated academics and political "scientists" never do.

The strength of the book lies in showing the ability of working people to organise themselves in defence of their own material interests and kills off the myth that strikes are the result of machinations by evil demagogues or infiltration by subversive lefty rabble-rousers. On the contrary, Douglass shows us that the initiative for the strike came from the grassroots and that the failures and setbacks were often the result of interference from above or from outside.

Take the bloody encounter at Orgreave, for example. The miners themselves had organised picketing strategy along "guerrilla" lines, regularly changing targets and maintaining the element of surprise thereby avoiding clashes, making fools out of the police and gaining support along the way. The decision to concentrate on Orgreave changed all this. Intended by the NUM leadership as a rallying point for militant trade unionists and showpiece victory along the lines of Saltley Gate in 1972, the picketing of Orgreave merely resulted in the police being "highly delighted to have the troublesome miners all in one place at one time. They knew where we would be, they set out their troops like Sitting Bull prepared for Custer, then they brayed us all to hell". But needless to say: "the SWP, Workers Power, et al, made Orgreave the test of a true socialist If you didn't think Orgreave was right you were an agent, a spy, a traitor . . . The paper sellers never fought there themselves, of course, they only talked about it".

This is a further strength of the book, the insight it gives into the capers pulled by "the left". These included everything from drawing up hare-brained picketing "strategies" leading to confusion and mass arrests, to what appears to be bald-faced fraud: "The Socialist Workers Party had set up a fighting fund but none of this money was coming back to the NUM. . . .  It was suggested that a public statement concerning the Socialist Workers Party and what it was trying to do should be distributed. A circular should go out to all Branches telling them that money is not coming into the NUM. (Strike Co-ordinating Committee, 22 May 1984)."

As well as their opportunism, "the left" are characterised by their inability to grasp the nature of industrial action and the role of a trade union. To them every strike is potentially "revolutionary”, what stops them from being so is the lack of "leadership" from the unions. Douglass makes clear in the final chapter, "The Left and the Miners", that the left have it wrong. The unions are defensive organisations to resist exploitation by capital. True, they may on occasion be conservative and bureaucratic, they are also constrained by anti-union laws, but they are necessary nonetheless, if only for routine negotiations, welfare benefits, compensation claims, etc. In the last analysis, however, the union is the workers united in the workplace, not the bureaucracy, and it is these workers who know best how to manage their own affairs. Thus we see strike committees, flying picket squads etc., set up in extension of the formal union structure and from which for legal reasons the formal structure must necessarily distance itself. The left don't understand this, but, as Douglass says, why should they?

So what does Douglass say should be the role of revolutionaries in the defensive actions of the class struggle? Simply that: " . . . we should intervene in the struggles the workers themselves engaged in, we should assist them in the way they wish to be assisted. We should put our determination, skill, constructive and destructive abilities at their disposal, and ask, how can we assist you? How are we better placed to do some of the things you want doing but can’t do yourselves? We must fundamentally recognise that the working class was engaged in struggle before any of us organisationally or individually came along. They are engaged in struggle now, with us or without us, they are not waiting for us . . . We will be of relevance as long as we intervene, without preconditions, without delusions of vanguardism, into the actual struggles of the working class, not standing outside the class mocking the crude attempts at combat organisation the workers have built, but alongside them, as part of them."

This said, the limitation of the book is its failure to point to a way out of all these defensive struggles and to a new way of organising society so that classes, and hence the struggle between them over the social product, would no longer exist. This will be achieved not by workers organised in trade unions to fight for crumbs and better conditions of exploitation, but by the same workers organised in a revolutionary party whose aim is the democratic capture and then the dissolution of political power so as to allow the means of production to be taken peacefully into common ownership. Such a party exists — you are reading its journal. 

Ian Simpson

Obituary: Solomon Goldstein (1994)

Obituary from the October 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have to report the death of Solomon Goldstein. Goldstein (as he was known in the Party) joined at the age of 16 in 1931 after listening to Party outdoor speakers near Brick Lane, in East London, where he lived all his life. Soon he himself was speaking both outdoors and as an indoor lecturer where his specialist subject was Marxian economics, contributing in no small way to the Party’s reputation in this field.

Coming from a Yiddish-speaking family he was easily able to learn German and became as fluent in it as he was in English. Indeed, he used to claim that you couldn’t understand Marxian economics properly unless you had read Capital the originaL

When he was ailed up to take part in the second world slaughter he applied for registration as a Conscientious Objector but was turned down and decided to go on the run. His health suffered and after the war he was never the same, having to spend long periods in hospitaL Although he had ceased to be a member some years ago he still bought the Socialist Standard and corresponded with the Internationales Fries Wort the German-language socialist journal published by our comrades in Austria.

Capitalism - Driving Us To Destruction (1994)

From the October 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

• January 1993, Bradford: van driver killed by runaway lorry. Lorry' owners subsequently fined £4,500 for failing to maintain the vehicle’s brakes.
• September 1993, near Leeds: two killed and five injured by a lorry which crashed through the central reservation of the M62. Lorry owners fined £6,500 for failing to maintain the vehicle’s brakes.
• September 1993, East Yorkshire: a schoolgirl and the driver of a school bus killed when a lorry collided with said bus. Lorry owners face prosecution for failing to maintain vehicle’s brakes.
• September 1993, Sowerby Bridge, West Yorkshire: six people killed by 30-tonne truck. The owners — fined £5,000 for failing to maintain the vehicle’s brakes — have applied for their operator’s license to be renewed. Despite an inquest verdict of unlawful killing, the Crown Prosecution Service have decided that there is insufficient evidence for a corporate manslaughter charge.

Spotted the similarities yet?
For one thing, they are all genuine cases, recently picked up again by the local press because they have either just come to court or are being used by some reformer campaigning for better road safety.

For another, the owners in each case look like getting away with murder. And it looks a lot like said owners have a bit of a thing about not maintaining the brakes on their vehicles.

But take a look at this next lot . . .
• July 1994: Avon & Somerset police conducted spot-checks on coaches travelling on the M5. Of 236 vehicles inspected, 118 had defects. Three — with exhaust and oil-leak problems — were banned from going any further. Thirty-one prosecutions are being considered.
• June 1994: West Yorkshire police spot-checked 98 HGVs on the M62. Sixty percent were defective, with 34 having to be ordered to effect immediate repairs.
• June 1994: police spot-checked 104 vehicles of all types near Halifax. Forty-six had defects.

. . . so it is not just brakes on lorries in Yorkshire in 1993!

According to the Department of Transport (DoT) there were 902 deaths on the roads during the first three months of 1994, as well as over 10,000 serious injuries.

Readers may be tempted to think that lorry, bus and car owners are, by nature, deliberately murderously negligent — that they like nothing better than seeing drivers and innocent bystanders alike killed or maimed. But the truth is that vehicle owners and drivers are not psychopaths — it is profit that is the real culprit here.

Car drivers all too often simply cannot afford to properly maintain their vehicles, or cannot take the time off work to get their cars checked. And cost is a major factor for lorry and coach owners too. At the same time, a lorry or coach which has to be checked and repaired is off the road for a day or more, which means it is not earning money for its owners. Which means that the vehicle is not making a profit for the shareholders of the haulage or passenger transport company.

Road safety campaigners argue that individuals should be held responsible for their vehicles, and prosecuted. But as with all types of reform, this is to try to treat the symptoms, not the root cause. The competition for profit leads to companies cutting comers on safety as surely as night follows day.

The same people also call for stiffer regulations, and more resources for those organisations responsible for enforcing them. But here too the profit motive overrides safety. The Vehicle Inspectorate, an agency with the Department of Transport which is responsible for ensuring the roadworthiness of goods and passenger vehicles, has just announced that it will cut 26 percent of its staff over the next three years. As the examples cited above show, this is certainly not because there is not enough work for it to do. In a Parliamentary answer, the DoT revealed that, of 218,648 HGVs and PSVs inspected throughout the country during 1992/3, 22 percent were found to be defective. It is because the Government ordered the agency (along with other parts of the DoT, including the Marine Safety & Driving Standards agencies) to cut 20 percent off their costs. Why? To help deliver tax cuts. Taxes cut into profit margins, after all.

At the same time, the Government aims to “reduce the burden on business” by ending the practice whereby haulage and passenger transport companies have to renew their operator licences every year (cf. The Deregulation & Contracting-Out Bill, currently wending its way through parliament). And for the same sorts of reasons the Government is dragging its feet over implementing recommendations, made in the wake of the recent M40 minibus crash and similar disasters, that coaches should be fitted with seat belts.

Everybody wants to see an end to the slaughter on our roads. But while pursuit of profit is the primary consideration, drivers will continue to fall asleep at the wheel, coaches will keep travelling at 80 mph in the outside lane, wheels will go on shearing off lorries. Capitalism will continue to kill people.

Paul Burroughs

End of the long war (1994)

Editorial from the October 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

As we write, the shooting war in Northern Ireland would appear to be almost over. The relief in places like Belfast is almost palpable as people are freed from the fear of themselves or their loved ones becoming the victim of the assassin's bullet or the bomber's "mistake".

Three thousand two hundred people have died in the so-called "Long War", some 60,000 have been injured — some left limbless, some horribly disfigured, some vegetablised. The amount represented by damage to property would have provided a super home for every family in the province and vastly improved the social infrastructure — though, of course, outside of a war situation, governments would not regard spending on these essentials as being economically justified.

Who won? If winning can be defined in terms of making money, then lawyers, loss adjusters and that group of rapid-response builders who became known as the “hardboard millionaires" have had a good war. As far as the working class is concerned there were no gains whatsoever — whatever religious labels its individual members may wear.

Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein and consistent apologist for the IRA’s campaign of killing is euphoric in his ascension to the upper echelons of political chicanery. Writing in the Belfast Telegraph on 8 September, he assures us that he, and. presumably, his coalition Irish nationalists, plan a fair and democratic society for Ireland: "No privileges, no perks, no special relationships . . . (no) economic favouritism for any individual or organization".

If we thought that Adams knew what he was talking about, we would have to say he was simply telling lies. Is he seriously suggesting that he and his fellow Irish Nationalists want to create a society where there will not be a minority owning class exploiting the working class — including those workers who were foolish enough to support Sinn Fein? No privileges, perks or profits for the capitalists, the minority class who are the real owners of Ireland and who can be of any nationality or religion? Come to that, no minority class owning Ireland? Even the Unionists, who are past masters in conning working-class Protestants, wouldn’t dare to serve up that sort of rubbish.

We hope that peace, or what passes for peace in capitalist society, will reign in Ireland and that the hatreds and division which the republican and loyalist nationalists have rekindled amongst the working class will soon dissipate, and workers, wiser from their grim experiences, will lend themselves to the political struggle to end capitalism and its propensity to violence.

Still there are the dead, the maimed . . .  and, surely, the heritage of crippled minds of men and women who carried out such awful atrocities for what they believed was a just cause and who are going to learn that their cause was just a squalid conflict about the distribution of capitalism's miseries. A small addition to the nearly one hundred million people who have died in capitalism's wars this century.

If nationalism was a recognised disease, its terrible toll of human life would excite the demand for a cure.

A Question of Class (1994)

From the October 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Exploitation is now a thing of the past. If you don’t like your job you can always leave it.

Exploitation exists because of the very fact that there are jobs. Employers buy our capacity to work, for a wage or a salary, and then extract more work out of us than it costs them to pay as. This unpaid surplus work is the source of their profit. So there’s a conflict of interests at work: they want to get as much out of us for as little expenditure as possible, and we need the money in order to live. It’s the only way this competitive organisation of society can work, since their success depends on our exploitation. It’s nothing to do with morality or low wages. It’s all do to with the employers owning the workplace and us earning our livelihood by being wage slaves. And it really is a form of slavery, because although you may leave your particular job you cannot usually leave that class of people who are compelled to get a job or do one of the various roles involved in wage-slavery.

I am unemployed/a student/a public-sector worker/pensioner. I produce no profits for an employer, therefore I am not exploited.

The lifeblood of this economic system is the making of profits through the exploitation of the whole working class. This is a social process which necessarily involves the vast majority of people in a complex division of labour, Throughout our lives as workers we may take on a number of roles in this division of labour. All of these roles are part of this economic system: all of them are as equally exploited as those who produce profits directly for an employer. Together this class of people runs society from top to bottom. They do not run it in their own interest, however. They run it for the profit of the employing class, a minority of people but with most of the power and wealth and the freedom this gives them. 

I am not working class: I earn a good salary, own a big house and expensive car. I have been to university, take a foreign holiday every year and work in an office.

For workers, there can never be anything fair about the wages system, since this is the mechanism for our exploitation. It presupposes that workers do not own or control the workplace. Wages and salaries are the price of the value-creating ability workers sell to employers. Workers can then produce goods and services worth more than they receive in pay, whether the pay is high or low. This socially-produced surplus value is the source of the employers’ profit. Employers operate in a competitive world economy and will, regardless of the size of their profits, pay their workers only what they must. And, without the resistance of workers, wages and salaries would be lower than they are. So we have a class struggle at work.

Class is a redundant issue. Now workers control the workplace, not the employers.

In this society people are divided into those who possess the workplace in the form of capital, the employers or capitalist class, and those who produce but do not possess, the employees or working class. It is the working class who keep the workplaces going, but lack the effective control which would enable them to produce solely for need. Of course there are other social groups such as the self-employed, but these are incidental to capitalism. As a system of society which predominates throughout the world, capitalism is based on the extraction of surplus value through wage-labour. Even if there has been some separation of ownership and control of capitalist enterprises, the capitalists still benefit in terms of power and privileged income. It does not affect the inherent class antagonism of wage-labour and capital.

There will always be classes: there will always be rich and poor. It’s only human.

Capitalism has not always existed, nor has there always been classes. It is class society which operates against human nature. Capitalist exploitation creates rich and poor people, together with their opposing interests. However, there is no reason why our rational desire for mutual aid should not allow us to establish a classless society. To end class exploitation requires revolutionary and democratic control of all the places of work. This will do away with the wages system and wage- slavery, and open the way for work based solely on human need and abilities.

Lew Higgins

In the shadow of Mickey Mouse & Clinton (1994)

From the October 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

We are living in a Brave New World and the invisible dictator is Walt Disney. After the death camps came the theme parks: in the first human bodies were cast into furnaces, like so many offensive animals to be slaughtered; now they cast human sensibilities into the mind-numbing, culture-eroding cartoon community of Mickey Mouse and make the victims pay to get in. No longer is total power sought, at least by the sophisticated, by means of the cudgel and the bullet. Now the slaves are condemned to prisons of fabricated fun. (Has it ever occurred to those who declaim against prisons being turned into holiday camps that this says more than a little about holiday camps?) From the phoney friendliness of Radio One (where we all have Fun) to the cheap and sloppy outpourings of Hollywood's hypnosis industry', fun is for sale; illusion has become one of the fastest-growing commodities of world capitalism. You want happiness? How much can you afford?

Brave New World

In this Brave New World, which is indeed the same old world with its same old system and single old agenda of profits before life, there is a celebration of the ephemeral and the unhistorical. The beauty of Disney, the first theoretician of cultural excretion, is that nothing he produces (produced by others, of course) exists within real history. From Bambi to Aladdin to Peter Pan and assorted talking animals, every thing is ripped from the context of materiality, like a drunk's view of the night before An epidemic in the use of banned drugs, pathways to escape, plagues the inner cities where a passage from reality can be fixed for a price. But the legal illusion-sellers, the merchants of here-today-gone-before-you-know-it Fun, are the market leaders with their drip- drip-drip of manufactured escapism designed to make you forget what you are and why you are. Disney does this well. Not for nothing did they call his corporation an Empire. Not for being jolly good fellows did the Disney Corporation (now in the midst of internecine executive warfare over its future leadership) make $3.6 billion in 1993, as against a mere $244 million in 1984.

Speaking of which . . .  Orwell’s novel was basically wrong. In parts chillingly predictive of the sinister world of security cameras, "intelligence services" and news manipulation which modem capitalism has become. Nineteen Eighty Four was essentially a scare story for people who could only recognise an oppressor if he looked like Hitler or Stalin. This has been the great self-defence of liberal capitalism: well, at least we’re not Hitlers or Stalins. Examine and scrutinise as much as you will the smarmy, offensive, unctuous grin of a Clinton and there can be no doubt that the funny little moustache just isn’t there and neither is the Stalinist stare or the goose-stepping crazies with medals and ministerial powers.

"Big Clinton Is Watching You"? No, it just does not ring true. Clinton is a product of the Brave New World, more at home in a Disney theme park with the Three Blairs, Captain Kohl and Major the Mouse (that couldn’t roar) than in any Ministry of Truth worthy of Orwell’s ink. In the Clinton World Empire nobody is sent to Room 101; we send ourselves into a dazed captivity of MTV where music has become a hostage to star-selling, or CNN where news happens so fast that it is invented before history has had time to take place. In Orwell’s nightmare at least you would know where you were. Or if not, at least the simplicity of brainwashing (never a convincing explanation of the ideological process, incidentally) could be blamed for not knowing where you are. But Maoism is as obsolete now as the Ford Popular and dental care on the NHS; Orwell was the prophet of a disaster which had already largely happened when he forewarned us of it.

Happy slaves

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which predated Orwell’s by a decade-and-a-half, is the story of what has happened to capitalist culture. It is a critical guide-book to DisneyWorld. It is a tale of death by a billion laughs. It and Crome Yellow may well be the only successful  novels which Huxley wrote, and to be sure The Doors of Perception (which gave its name to a rock band and an air of intellectual legitimacy to a drug culture) was the product of a mind rotten with empty Californian culture [sic] and devoid of the slightest reference to the capitalist system. Had Huxley directed his eminently scientific brain towards the nature of the profit system which can only ever employ science unscientifically he might have left us more. As it was he died on the day that JFK was shot (by several hundred people if the books and films are to be believed) and did not even make the News. "What were you doing when you heard that JFK was shot?" (Perhaps one of the more inane cliches of our century.) "Reading Brave New World and wondering if things can get any worse." They did get worse and here we are. The novel is still worth reading.

Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death (a book replete with insight, but feeble on vision) supports what has been stated here:

“What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In the Huxley an prophecy. Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk: culture-death is a clear possibility".

Leaving aside questions of spirits and nations (both themselves artificial products), the analysis is not to be dismissed lightly. Persuading the victim to find the strength to break free is one thing, but persuading happy slaves that they are not really happy is quite another.

Metaphysical fantasy

In Brave New World Revisited, Huxley, writing in 1958, displayed prescient sagacity in spotting the cultural signs which contemporary jumbled-up minds have thrown into the lucky-dip theory called Postmodernism (of which more some other time): In Brave New World non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature (the feelies, orgy-porgy, centrifugal bumble-puppy) are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation . . .  A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time on the spot, not here and now in the calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those who would manipulate and control it.

"Instruments of policy" In an age where sound bites and cultivated images subdue larger populations than armies could dream of regimenting, we should think more and more about just what these "instruments of policy" are all about. Look again at that robotic, idiot's grin on the face of the American President and ask yourself how safe you feel with Mickey Mouse’s foam-filled fabricated finger on the fun-packed, all-action, bang-bang-bang nuclear button.

Steve Coleman