Letter: Kenya school scam (2013)

Letter to the Editors from the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Kenya school scam

Dear Editors,

I worked as a school manager at Bridge International Academies from  2010 to mid this year. The company’s business is educating the less fortunate in society at an affordable cost. Most of the company’s schools are constructed using iron sheets. And they are located in the slums.

Workers (teachers, school managers) in these schools are poorly paid, work for long hours and are not represented in any trade union. The proprietor of these schools is a top American capitalist. Profit is his main theme, though from time to time high quality education is dangled to parents and in prospectuses to attract them to the schools.

Workers are paid per the pupils who pay that month. Those who pay later on don’t count for this and the money remains the profit of the company (worker’s sweat). Any worker who makes an attempt to complain or show displeasure is shown the door.

Morale has been low and prospects of employees scaling the corporate ladder are slim as there is no upward mobility in the firm. The company pays US nationals handsomely while Kenyans are left to feed on crumbs.

Out of the 210 schools, 75 percent are profitable but this profit doesn’t get to those who make this a reality (teachers and school managers).

If that’s the way capitalism operates, then damn the system. It’s ugly and repugnant. Companies ought to realise that without their workers the wheels of their operations would grind to a halt.

Patrick W. Ndege, 

Nairobi, Kenya.

Letter: Funny Money? (2013)

Letter to the Editors from the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Funny Money?

Dear Editors

Kaz’s interesting article ‘Propaganda Power… in your pocket’ in September’s Socialist Standard sparked a mischievous thought: How ironic it would be to find bank notes defaced with the briefest of messages: ‘Abolish money – see SPGB’.  I’m not suggesting a thing, mind.

Andy Cox (by email)

Reply:

Maybe that’s why they’re thinking of changing  to plastic notes? – Editors.

Voice From the Back: Even The Smiles Are Fakes (2013)

The Voice From the Back column from the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Even The Smiles Are Fakes

Not only do the capitalist class demand that workers produce surplus value for them they want them to smile while they do it. ‘Smiling all the time can be hard work, which is why airline crew and shop workers are turning to the latest plastic surgery fad, the ‘perma-smile’. South Korean surgeons are removing nerves and muscle at the corners of the mouth to mimic the ancient expression of welcome’ (Sunday Times, 1 September). Guest speakers from South Korea will inform the American Association of Plastic Surgeons how it is done this month. One female who works in a jewellery shop in California has already had the $3,500 operation. A phoney smile for a phoney society.

A Lifetime Of Exploitation

Britain’s pensions crisis was laid bare as official figures showed almost a million over-65s are working or looking for a job. They include 158,000 people over the age of 75. According to the most recent census, the number of residents of England and Wales aged 65 and over rose by nearly a million to 9.2 million between 2001 and 2011. One in 10 of those was employed or job-hunting. The number of those aged between 65 and 74 who were still economically active rose by 413,000 from 8.7 per cent to 16 per cent. ‘Michelle Mitchell, of Age UK, said: ‘People are living longer and are generally in better health, so many are likely to want to carry on working. However, rock-bottom annuity rates combined with low interest rates on savings mean others have no choice but to carry on working because they cannot afford to retire’’ (Daily Express, 7 September). Even after working for almost fifty years many workers still cannot afford to retire.

Politics And Health

Overwhelmed accident and emergency departments have suffered the worst summer in a decade, new figures show. They reveal almost a million patients are waiting more than four hours for treatment, nearly treble from four years ago. ‘Over the same period, key A&E departments missed Government targets for about 80 per cent of the time. …..Since last September, Jeremy Hunt’s first year as Health Secretary has seen 980,068 patients waiting longer than four hours to be seen in A&E units. Between 2009 and 2010 the figure was 353,617’ (Sun, 8 September). The figures also reveal 172,266 A&E patients were kept on trolleys last year for between four and 12 hours, 47 per cent higher than the previous year, and 219 patients waited more than 12 hours on a trolley, more than double the previous figure. We wonder how our caring MPs would relish 12 hours on a trolley awaiting treatment.

Not So Cool

When workers use new up-to-date technology they imagine they are being ultra cool and extremely modern, but they are inadvertently supporting work practices that would put Victorian sweatshops to shame. The new cheaper iPhone that Apple will unveil to a global audience is being produced under illegal and abusive conditions in Chinese factories owned by one of America’s largest manufacturing businesses, investigators have claimed. ‘Workers are asked to stand for 12-hour shifts with just two 30-minute breaks, six days a week, the non-profit organisation China Labor Watch has claimed. Staff are allegedly working without adequate protective equipment, at risk from chemicals, noise and lasers, for an average of 69 hours a week’ (Guardian, 5 September).

A Strange Kind Of Communism

Wang Jianlin is a property magnate who can count the world’s largest cinema chain amongst his business interests, in addition to dozens of shopping centres and five-star hotels. ‘ Now Wang Jianlin can add another accolade befitting his billionaire status — he has been named China’s richest man by Forbes. The 58-year-old Sichuan native, whose Dalian Wanda Group conglomerate this summer acquired a 92 per cent stake in the luxury British yacht manufacturer Sunseeker, whose boats have appeared in a number of James Bond films, is worth £8.9bn, the influential publication said’ (Independent, 10 September). How can the Chinese government claim to be a communist country when they have a member of the capitalist class ‘worth’ £8.9 billion?

Correction

In an item in Voice from the Back last month we quoted the Times as writing that Britain’s most expensive parking place had gone on sale for ‘£3,000,000’. This was a misprint for ‘£300,000’.

Mind the Gap (2013)

From the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

A recent ILO publications looks at wage trends globally.

It is important to note several things about the ongoing crisis of capitalism we are experiencing. Firstly, that a crisis is a normal part of the ordinary functioning of capitalism. It isn’t down to accident, or policy failures, but is almost a necessary part of the trial and error method of investment. The goldfish-like memory of politicians forgets that for every period of growth, there is a slow-down and a crisis to which we all have to react in panic. They proclaim a new age of prosperity with every year of economic growth and try to take the credit for it, and then blame someone else whenever crisis resumes.

Secondly, crises are not natural phenomena, but are a form of class struggle, as the owners of property try and protect themselves from losing their investments, and re-impose scarcity on the markets where they have over-invested (thus destroying their profitability). The inevitable result of any crisis is a rise of unemployment, and an attack on the wages and living standards of the working class as an attempt to restore profitability for the owners. Here Marx’s observations are pertinent. Average socially-necessary labour-time determines the exchange value of the produce of capital thus the profits of that capital depend on the difference between the exchange value of the workers’ skills and the amount of labour time they add to the product. There is a direct correlation between lowering wages and improved profitability of capital (in general).

Thirdly, aside from the specific crisis for the capitalists that we hear about at the top of the news headlines, there is the ongoing crisis of the workers, of the millions trapped in a life-time of poverty and servitude. Millions more will spend a life on low wages that will never substantially rise. They have to struggle daily for food and a place to live, with no security, let alone dignity.

Double dip in wages
Some of these themes are made clear by the Global Wage Report 20121/13 report from the International Labour Organization (ILO) (www.ilo.org/global/research/global-reports/global-wage-report/2012/lang–en/index.htm):

  ‘In developed economies, the crisis led to a ‘double dip’ in wages: real average wages fell in 2008 and again in 2011, and the current outlook suggests that in many of these countries wages are growing marginally, if at all, in 2012’  (p.5).

Of course, such trends are never even, and even within the ‘developed economies’ some people will have seen their wages rise at a rate faster than the trend. This is even truer on a worldwide scale:

  ‘Real average wage growth has remained far below pre-crisis levels globally, going into the red in developed economies, although it has remained significant in emerging economies. Monthly average wages adjusted for inflation – known as real average wages – grew globally by 1.2 percent in 2011, down from 2.1 percent in 2010 and 3 percent in 2007. Because of its size and strong economic performance, China weighs heavily in this global calculation. Omitting China, global real average wages grew at only 0.2 percent in 2011, down from 1.3 percent in 2010 and 2.3 percent in 2007’ (p. 13).

Longer term trends
Interestingly, one of the areas of wage growth, Latin America, has been where the massive protests of Brazil have recently been witnessed, with the workers demanding a share in the proceeds of growth. Indeed, Latin America is undergoing a period of social democratic governments building welfare states, and perhaps it is unlikely that this doesn’t correlate with the overall economic growth.

Of course, wages do grow, over time, but not necessarily in a continuous and linear fashion, as the report notes:

  ‘Taking a longer view, the report estimates that real monthly average wages almost doubled in Asia between 2000 and 2011, and increased by 18 percent in Africa, 15 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean, and 5 percent in developed economies. In Eastern Europe and Central Asia wages nearly tripled, but from a very low base following the economic collapse of the 1990s’ (p. 5).

That period, though, is the period of growth between crises, but it remains somewhat heartening that conditions for workers are improving in some of the most destitute parts of the world.

Declining share
According to figures collated by the House of Commons library, ‘average hourly wages have fallen 5.5 percent since mid-2010, adjusted for inflation’ (www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23655605) in the UK, which compares with a 0.7 percent across the European Union as a whole. In Germany, by way of contrast, wages rose by 2.7 percent.

The problem is that even a growing real wage might not match the increases in wealth produced by labour:

  ‘Between 1999 and 2011 average labour productivity in developed economies increased more than twice as much as average wages […] In the United States, real hourly labour productivity in the non-farm business sector increased by about 85 percent since 1980, while real hourly compensation increased by only around 35 percent. In Germany, labour productivity surged by almost a quarter over the past two decades while real monthly wages remained flat’ (p. 14).

This is the rawest form of class struggle, and the hardest part to grasp, since it is somewhat like the end of the old British TV quiz show Bullseye, with Jim Bowen saying ‘let’s take a look at what you could have won’. The wealth created by increased growth has increased faster than the real take-home pay of the workers, but the workers have never had the wealth they’ve lost, and although it affects their lives in so many ways, they don’t feel the loss as directly as they would, say, an increase in taxes. Likewise, some of that erosion will have been through inflation, so the difference between nominal wages and real wages becomes complex to calculate at a personal level.

Setting worker against worker
An illustration of the centrality of this process is the furore over pensions. It’s true that the ‘dependency ratio’ (the number of pensioners compared to those in work) is due to rise from about 350 per thousand to about 450 by 2050. So our political masters tell us that we must all accept smaller pensions (that is, lower deferred wages), yet the rate of increase in the dependency ratio is less than the trend rate in the growth of productivity, fewer workers will be needed to do the same amount of work. The question is, therefore, who benefits from that growth?

As the ILO notes:

  ‘In terms of functional income distribution, which concerns how national income has been distributed between labour and capital, there is a long run trend towards a falling share of wages and a rising share of profits in many countries. The personal distribution of wages has also become more unequal, with a growing gap between the top 10 percent and the bottom 10 percent of wage earners. These internal imbalances’ have tended to create or exacerbate external imbalances, even before the Great Recession, with countries trying to compensate the adverse effects of lower wage shares on consumption demands through easy credit or export surpluses.’ (p. 15).

Such variation harms the capacity to unite the working class, as the few on high wages struggle to defend their relative advantage, and the owners try to stir up tension between countries as part of their currency and export competition.

The report notes the underlying cause of the declining labour share:

 ‘The drop in the labour share is due to technological progress, trade globalization, the expansion of financial markets, and decreasing union density, which have eroded the bargaining power of labour. Financial globalization, in particular, may have played a bigger role than previously thought’ (p. 14).

Globalization and expansion of financial markets are another way of saying that more people have been drawn into the global labour market (in part thanks to and also causing the wage growth in developing countries). The ILO, obviously, only recommends reforms to capitalism, calling for a rebalancing of investment, ignoring the pure class war being waged by the capitalists themselves. The long term balance is on the side of the owning class, and even when their crisis ends, ours will continue, until we organise to abolish its cause: the wages system itself.

Pik Smeet

Letter: Ice Age Art (2013)

Letter to the Editors from the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ice Age Art

Dear Editors

Thank you very much for forwarding the copy of the review (Mixed Media, September). It is great to read a piece in which the Marxist arguments are remembered and there are certainly excellent discussions to be had on these themes. More information on the topics mentioned can be found in the book that accompanied the exhibition. In both I tried to get away from the notion that these societies were ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ as this is the language of the nineteenth century used to place modern western Europeans at the top of the evolutionary tree. The language of Marx and Engels that pursues evolution from savagery to barbarism and then civilization also need to be brought up to date with modern knowledge. It also sought to avoid the concept of Rousseau’s noble savage that is also inherent in the Marxist approach.

Ice Age art shows the developing skills in language and communication that enable modern humans to form larger, successful communities with many forms of organisation. Hunter gatherer communities have to be collaborative to survive and as I say in the book, these people probably did have gender specific activities but without concepts of male/female superiority or measures of value for activities. Men and women served one world through different tasks. The breakdown of this comes with agriculture and the measured values for activities. The concept of Mutterrecht as fully expressed by Jung’s disciple Erich Neumann also needs to be used with care.

The elaborate ornaments in the exhibition also express ideas about personal and social identities, wealth and status that may have been politically, socially or spiritually hierarchical but as always it is difficult to be conclusive about the implications from the archaeological record.

There is as ever much to debate.

Jill Cook, 

Curator Ice Age Art: arrival of the modern mind, British Museum

Proper Gander: Left In The Dark (2013)

The Proper Gander column from the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Would a few days without electricity turn you into a hysterical, paranoid, petrol-siphoning looter? Perhaps, if Blackout (Channel 4) is as realistic as it hopes to be. This one-off docudrama imagines what would happen if the National Grid was shut down for a week by a terrorist ‘cyber attack’. Footage from real riots and protests is mixed with actors improvising what their characters film on mobile phones. This gives the programme a scary amount of verisimilitude, if you ignore how implausibly long-lasting the batteries in their phones must be. Through the blurry, wobbly camerawork we follow a couple of lairy lads on a looting spree and a woman with her comatose boyfriend in a hospital with its backup power dwindling. There are a few examples of individuals helping strangers, but the show focuses more on how relationships would be strained further. For instance, the character who starts out smug about having his own generator cracks under the pressure of keeping it from would-be thieves while struggling to provide for his family.

The shakily-filmed action is broken up with sombre captions giving some less-than-reassuring statistics. Emergency lighting in most public buildings usually lasts no more than three hours, apparently, while if you’re relying on a life support machine, then you’d have around five days before its back-up batteries are prioritised elsewhere. Like its grim forerunners about pandemics and nuclear war, Blackout points out that society’s current infrastructure would collapse within days of a serious catastrophe. However, the loss of electric power isn’t shown to lead to a loss of state power. Defending itself through the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, the state would bring in temporary courts, armed forces on the streets and ‘Emergency Relief Centres’, which in the drama turn out to be empty. A lack of decent contingency planning is to be expected in our society, focused on protecting the interests of the few and making the cheapest cutbacks for the rest of us. So, if the programme is right about this, would its predictions about chaos on the streets also be proved right? Such a bleak view ignores how groups of people have worked together to get through worse disasters in real life. The show would have been more interesting if it had explored how we could co-operate, but in that respect it leaves us in the dark.

Mike Foster

Confessions of a Fetishist (2013)

From the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Given the context of this essay only a minority of readers will have any misconceptions about the content. It was Karl Marx that first defined what we now know of as ‘Commodity Fetishism’. He meant by this the inherent power that a commodity has over its producer in contrast to any rational relationship between mankind and the products of its labour. This occurs because of the alienated nature of production within capitalism where profit is the goal rather than human need. If a profit is not created then production is considered ‘useless’ and thus the labour involved is likewise considered a waste. The commodity has become the master of labour and production itself. Entering the market of exchange for profit the product is divorced from the labour and the people that created it. It becomes ‘fetishised’ in that it appears independent of the producers and confronts them only as an object of consumerism. The need that this commodity serves can be entirely dependent on the need for social status i.e. jewellery, expensive clothing, electronic gizmos and, the one that this essay will focus on – cars.

The automobile has become a ‘paradigm’ of fetishised commodities. In terms of ‘status symbols’ it would be hard to find a better example; from Minis to Rolls Royces they all represent a statement about the owner. Or, more precisely, a statement that the owner wants to socially broadcast. My friends rarely fail to notice any perceived inconsistency between my lifestyle and my ‘principles’ as a socialist. My love of racing cars is one example. For many seasons I was to be found trackside enjoying my favourite sport – Drag Racing. My love of ‘hot rods’, ‘muscle cars’ and dragsters goes back to the summer of 1973 when, as a teenager, I got my first whiff of nitro methane. Since then I have been addicted to power, speed and, let’s be frank, the glamorous aesthetic of racing cars. What follows will not be a defence, but rather an attempted explanation of a sometimes uncomfortable love affair. It will also explain my hatred of Ferraris.

In contrast to the European tradition in motor racing the American experience was generated by working class, or as they say in the US ‘blue collar’ culture. After the end of World War 2 the returning GIs had to fill the vacuum of a return to civilian life with some form of excitement. Many chose, especially on the west coast, motor racing. Given the relatively cheap price of gasoline and production cars they began to modify the chassis and tune the engines to acquire more speed. Races were held on Bonneville salt flats to test these ‘hot rods’. Clubs were formed and illegal street races (drag races) began to take place all over America. Because of the danger to all involved a group called the National Hot Rod Association started to try and organise these races at unused Air Force bases where the runways were perfect for quarter mile side by side racing.

This hot rodding counter culture was soon noticed by the Detroit car manufactures and in an attempt to cash in on this new youth market they started making ‘muscle cars’. Dodge Barracudas, Ford Mustangs and Chevrolet Camaros were seen on the drag strips every weekend competing for the dollars in the pockets of these new performance consumers. Massive v8 engines were crammed into street legal coupes and saloons and you could drive one of these monsters straight out of the showroom onto the race track with 11 second 100+ mph quarter mile performances. The kids went crazy! Of course it couldn’t last and by the time I was beginning to enjoy the English version of hot-rodding (mid 70s) the hey-day was coming to an end courtesy of rising oil prices.

Drag racing was held in contempt by the ‘motor racing’ establishment in this country. Hill climbers, sports car racers, rally car drivers and, of course, the holy of holies, Formula One looked down from a great height on the lowly working class hotrodders. But this suited my personality perfectly and only served to reinforce my love of the culture. The fact that a mildly tuned Chevy v8 in a mildly modified Chevelle would out-accelerate any Ferrari or even an F1 car gave me immense satisfaction even before I understood it as part of the cultural ‘class war’ in this country.

So I ‘identified’ with the hotrod culture of late 60s to late 70s America. To me any one who could virtually build his own performance car from the chassis up was superior to a rich man who would simply buy his Maserati or Aston Martin from the dealer without any involvement in its production. This was how I rationalised my love of American muscle cars but, of course, there is more to it than that. I like to think that on some level it was a reaction by American youth against consumerism. They took Detroit’s alienated products and humanised them – made them ‘real’ as products of the labour of their class and then of themselves as non-alienated individuals. The car lost its power as a fetishised commodity and became what it really is – a product of social and individual labour.

Unfortunately, or some would say, inevitably corporate America soon subsumed the culture and turned it in to a meaningless symbol of ‘Americana’. TV shows like ‘American Hotrod’ and ‘Wrecks to Riches’ are examples of the corruption of hotrod culture where a rich ‘customer’ walks into the workshop and orders a hotrod like it’s a steak or a Ferrari. The subsequent struggle of the production staff to meet ‘deadlines’ is an archetype of alienated labour creating a fetishised commodity which is the very antithesis of hotrod culture.

Occasionally I still attend drag races but although the performances are truly staggering (4 second quarter miles with 330mph top-end speeds) all the fastest cars have corporate sponsors and I miss the ’Golden Age’ when a guy could turn up with a dragster built in his shed and still have a chance to win. Recently a reaction against the ’big show’, as corporate drag races are now called,  has spawned something called ‘Nostalgia Racing’ where engines and bodies/chassis are restricted to 1970s technology making it possible for a low budget racer to be competitive. I enjoy these races but, as the name implies, there’s something reactionary and non-progressive about it all. It seems to be part of the retro culture of post-modernism where sport takes its place alongside music and the other arts as part of the bankrupt capitalist culture of the 21st century. When humanity finally gets around to progressing once more (after the revolution) I wonder if they’ll let me fire up my Chevy occasionally at weekends?

Wez

Mixed Media: L. S. Lowry (2013)

The Mixed Media Column from the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Lowry exhibition currently at Tate Britain in London includes all the popular ‘matchstalk men and matchstalk cats and dogs’ paintings paid tribute to in the 1978 song by Brian and Michael. Lowry portrayed working class life in Pendlebury, Salford and Manchester from the economic depression of the 1930s to welfare state Britain of the 1950s or as John Berger wrote in New Society in 1966: ‘this is what has happened to the ‘workshop of the world’, the production crisis, the obsolete industrial plants’.

The ‘matchstalk’ paintings such as Coming Home from the Mill, People Going to Work, Returning from Work, Coming from the Mill and Outside the Mill are repetitive and convey the world of factory whistles, wage slavery and payday for the Manchester working class only a few generations after Engels wrote his investigative book.

Lowry’s more interesting work includes the 1926 A Northern Hospital which is fundamentally a workhouse (‘a Bastille of the proletariat’) which contrasts with the NHS in Ancoats Hospital Outpatients Hall from 1952. For all his ‘solid Lancashire conservatism’ Lowry quietly welcomed the post-1945 new world of the NHS and welfare state.

Lowry’s industrial landscapes and The Pond commissioned for the 1951 Festival of Britain are impressive panoramic views of industrial Manchester. The Pond with its smoking chimneys, terraced houses and the Stockport Viaduct was used as a Christmas card by prime minister Harold Wilson in 1964.

Lowry’s 1937 The Lake is all fetid spillage in an industrial scene and demonstrates clearly his opposition to sentiment in art and his statement that he ‘was affected and inspired by the beauty of the industrial scene’.

Going to the Match, 1953.

Going to the Match from 1953, one of his football paintings which the Professional Footballers Association bought for £1.9 million in 1999 depicts Burnden Park, home of Bolton Wanderers Football Club, which was the scene of a disaster in 1946 when 33 football fans were crushed to death. Football was central to masculine working class culture at this time and Burnden Park was later used prominently in the 1955 Arthur Askey film The Love Match.

The Funeral from 1928 and the cemetery in Necropolis of 1947 are a reminder of the centrality of death in life but also the financial cost. Today there is a rise in ‘public health funerals’ which is another name for ‘paupers funerals’ and the working class have to resort to pay-day lenders and credit cards to pay for funerals.

Although conservative in many respects, Lowry was an enemy of privilege and turned down all ‘gongs’ and a knighthood.

Steve Clayton

Happy Bands of Pilgrims? (2013)

The Halo Halo! column from the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Members of the Latin Mass Society are probably not best known for being the life and soul of the party. Their aims, as their name suggests, are for more use of Latin in the Catholic Church and, er, more Gregorian chanting. And, if their recent report on the popularity of the Church is anything to go by, they are not wildly optimistic about that either.

The number of baptisms in the Church today is less than half of those in 1964, they say. Catholic marriages, less than a quarter of those in 1968, and ordinations of new priests are now only a tenth of the 1965 figure.

Well, there you go. Sitting in a box with a priest who wants you to confess all your guilty little secrets, while the figure of a dead man impaled on a wooden cross glares mournfully down at you perhaps doesn’t appeal to everyone.

The Bishop of Shrewsbury is no more optimistic. Addressing 1,000 young Catholics at a recent five-day prayer festival in Norfolk (the Catholic equivalent of sitting in the mud at Glastonbury) he gloomily advised them that 4,000 churches may close by 2020, and Christians in Britain could soon become a minority.

On top of all this, in August, the Christian Post website announced that a study of pastors found that the clergy are at a far greater risk of depression and anxiety than those in other occupations.

What they need, obviously, is a bit of razzmatazz – a few hearty verses of ‘Jesus wants me for a sunbeam’ maybe.

Meanwhile the happy-clappy, faith-healing, demon expelling, singing, dancing, tambourine bashing Pentecostals seem to be spreading like the plague. According to a report by the National Secular Society, there has been a 50 percent increase in the numbers attending Pentecostal churches in London since 2005.And it’s not only taking off in the UK.

In Nigeria some of the wealthier pastors rival the super-rich US televangelists. A recent ‘Christianity Today’ article entitled ‘Private Jets for Jesus’, gives details of four Nigerian Preachers each with their own private jets. One of them, ‘Bishop’ David Oyedepo, reportedly, owns three Gulfstreams and a Learjet worth almost 100 million US dollars.

So what is it that gets the punters flocking in and handing over their money? One ex-Pentecostal describes their attractions on his website. David Icke (yes, the man who alerted us to shape-shifting lizards) says he attended a Pentecostal Church from the age of 17 to 19.

‘The services were very emotionally manipulative’ he says. ‘They would lift us up and down with 10 minutes of loud, rousing music and everybody jumping up and down, punching the air and shouting, then 10 minutes of sad, reflective music with everyone crying, lying down on their faces weeping, lifting their hands and swaying slowly. And through all this, people rolling around, laughing hysterically, groaning, ‘speaking in tongues’ and shaking’. … ‘They were hugely concerned with making you believe you were gonna get rich and get better careers, very materialistic’.

These are apparently the mysterious ways in which the Lord now moves. No more Latin, and definitely no Gregorian chanting. Unfortunately, says Icke, ‘The experience has left me very confused’.

The Times though (22 August), was concerned by a different aspect. ‘Too much religion can harm a society’s economy by undermining the drive for financial success’ it reported. ‘Religiosity may curb ever-needed economic growth but may also thwart individuals and cultures from making risky financial decisions’. But, it added, ‘Poor people can be happy with their lack of material wealth if they have religion’.

You have been warned.

NW

Islamist brothers (2013)

Pamphlet Review from the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Siding with the Oppressor: The Pro-Islamist Left. By John Miller. One Law for All, 2013. £4.

This is a well-documented pamphlet describing the hobnobbing of the Labourite politicians George Galloway and Ken Livingstone and of the SWP (via its front organisation ‘Unite Against Fascism’, Stop the War Coalition and, till 2007, Respect) with Islamic fundamentalists connected to the Muslim Brotherhood. It is a shameful story.

Galloway and Livingstone were in search of votes while the SWP was pursuing the tactic of a ‘people’s front’ against Western intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq, and (via Israel) Palestine, and now Syria. This last must be causing problems today as previous praise for the Assad and Iranian regimes will no longer be welcomed by the Sunni Muslim fundamentalists they courted, now that Hezbollah are fighting the Sunni jihadists.

Galloway, Livingstone and the SWP bear a heavy responsibility for having encouraged immigrant ‘communalist politics’ in Britain, so also encouraging the opposing ‘White communalists’ of the BNP and EDL. In doing so, they have dragged the name of socialism through the mud and, as the pamphlet points out, betrayed not only secularist principles (One Law for All campaigns against the application of Sharia and Jewish religious law in Britain) but also those Muslims and ex-Muslims resisting the reactionary views of the likes of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian Ayatollahs. From a socialist point of view, it’s a negation of class politics and a confirmation of their anti-working class stance and activity.

Adam Buick

Greasy Pole: Obsessed With Disorder (2013)

The Greasy Pole column from the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his keen sense of anticipation for my interesting speech . . . I know that for the hon. Gentleman’s party it is always somebody else’s fault . . . the hon. Gentleman is confused . . . the hon. Gentleman knows that I respect him . . . my hon. Friend is absolutely right . . . (Jim Murphy, Labour MP for East Renfrewshire, House of Commons 16 February 2011).

Debate

As the 2015 election draws nearer, we shall find ourselves under ever fiercer pressure to express our relieved gratitude for the courage and sanity of all the decisions taken by our Members of Parliament. As an early example of this, in summer last June there was a debate in the Commons about mental ill-health and the fact that sufferers of it are restricted in the opportunities open to them in employment and other fields. A surprisingly large clutch of MPs told of their experience of the illness in its various forms. Among them were Labour’s former Defence Minister, the renowned bruiser Kevan Jones and the Conservative ex-general practitioner Sarah Wollaston. In particular, one who seems likely to make it his recurring theme was Charles Walker, MP for the Green Belt (although Sainsbury and Marks and Spencer occupied) Borough of Broxbourne in Hertfordshire. Walker’s condition is not of a kind to make him uncontrollably violent or perilously demented; it is Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) which holds him in a grip of needing to carry out everyday actions-washing his hands, turning lights off – in sets of four. Symptoms can be effectively numberless – and debilitating: Walker relates ‘I say “My grandmother’s hat is green” four times, and then just to be sure I say it another four times, and then in my head I think, better say it 16 times, just in case’. Other sufferers may be compelled to open a door repeatedly to see if there is anyone outside, or to sit with their legs crossed in a particular, even if uncomfortable, way.

OCD

Walker was first aware of having the disease when he was 13 years old. It was worse at university, again when he worked at ‘marketing’ and then when he became an MP – after failing in the 2001 election against the immovable Steve Pound in Ealing North. He is inclined to ‘catastrophise’ – always prepare for the worst. (Although we might ask whether this may be connected with the requirements of ‘marketing’ and all that it implies in the need for unremitting drive to promote the processing of some commodities in the face of competition). And there was the House of Commons, inhabited with those inflated personalities who defend their self-constructed reputation for decisive and effective action against all questioners and faint-hearts, even although they fail to control this essentially anarchic social system. Informed by an interviewer that he is ‘incredibly honest for a politician’, Walker responds: ‘Well I can barely lie’ – which if it were true would in fact isolate him to a degree undreamed of by any victim of OCD.

Symptoms

Some of the speakers in the mental health debate described their symptoms in frighteningly colourful terms but Walker was not among them, preferring to flavour his account with a lighter touch, telling of his family likening him to an extra in Riverdance as he bounces in and out of the room. And he used some relaxed language: ‘Look, it’s not a problem, it really is not: let’s get over it guys and move on’. And then winding up: ‘Hon. Gentlemen, Hon. Ladies and friends, rock and roll, as they say’. But he is capable of a different type of colourful contribution. On 9 November 2005, when he was a new Member, the Blair government were defeated by 322 to 291 votes on their proposal to extend to 90 days the period of detention of terrorist suspects without trial. Walker got himself into the news by shouting ‘Police state’ at Blair, who left the chamber shaking his head in anger and later bitterly denounced his opponents. Walker is not always disrespectful to his leaders. On Margaret Thatcher he ‘… admired her from afar… a great woman, a great Prime Minister and she had love of this country emblazoned on her heart’. But he is not so bedazzled by the present leadership for on the matter of their opposition to the proposed rise in MPs pay he raged that Cameron and Clegg are ‘crass’ and ‘trying to make capital off their MPs’. Even further – and perhaps dangerously, he thinks that ‘there are many, many better people in parliament as humble backbenchers than those at the head of our parties ‘. He does not fit in completely with the Daily Mail stereotype of the predictable right-wing MP from a South England shire for while he thinks that immigration has been too free and rates himself as a Eurosceptic he supports same-sex marriage.

Failure

Mental illness does not take root and proliferate in isolation. There are many examples of it being a defence against the stress of survival in poverty – which validates those psychiatrists who might regard it as comparatively healthy, preferable to surrendering to those pressures. In another field there is a thicket of evidence about the psychiatric damage to soldiers who have survived one type of combat – Iraq, Afghanistan – only to find themselves laid low when they are invalided out and have to face the devastating disciplines of employment and shortage of money. On this basis it might be argued that politicians can endure the frustrations of struggling to reshape the savagery of capitalism only by diagnosing themselves as mental invalids. The history of politics is littered with examples of policies which governments have persisted with when, judged even by their own appalling standards, they were driving themselves into exposed failure. For example Iraq and Afghanistan were preceded by bloody episodes such as the Suez invasion in 1956, Kenya, Palestine… It is the same story in domestic politics, when ministers and their ‘experts’ apply their power over us by insisting on measures which were clearly doomed to failure – the Poll Tax, the Child Support Agency, Norman Lamont’s ERM. Charles Walker may speak about his OCD, apparently unconscious of the fact that trying to govern – to control – capitalism must demand a disorder which is obsessional and compulsive because this is intrinsic to a government’s priority to disguise the awful reality of their sick impotence.

Ivan

SWP Fallout (2013)

From the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many student members of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) have left in the past few months. Two new groups have been formed from the wreckage, the ISN (International Socialist Network) and the UK RevSoc (the Revolutionary Socialists) both composed largely of student ex-members of the SWP.

ISN published a prototype issue of a publication called Cactus. Two UK RevSoc regional branches have made publications: Leeds RevSoc called Dissent and Queen Mary’s RevSoc’s two issues of The Spark.

Spark Issue 1 April 2013 has the look of a cut and paste pre-computer magazine. It has 23 pages of articles on Sussex University, Occupy Sussex, University Education, Women’s Militia, the EDL, Thatcher, the Youth, the British Spring, Illegal Music Downloading and Food. Cactus Issue 0 (so-called because it is a prototype) is much more professionally presented and has 140 smaller pages of articles on Egypt, Brazil, Bangladesh, Women’s Oppression, Where Now For The Left and Culture. Richard Seymour (the key figure in ISN) suggests ‘[the ISN] is not, it seems to me, the ‘true bearer’ of the legacy of Marx …’ And ‘We do not even place an undue premium on self-preservation. Indeed, if all goes well, we won’t exist for too long.’

Another article makes a plea ‘The Left Unity project, in our opinion, has the potential to play the role of a broad, class-struggle party’. We disagree.

DJW

Left Unity, Broad Church (2013)

From the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

If you have ideas that aren’t supported, but you want your ideas to win support what do you do? Should you dismiss the ability of people to think and change and set out to deceive people not supportive of your ideas, since this is what most political parties do? Should you play down your ideas in an organisation, in order to win supporters, putting numbers of supporters as more important than your ideas?

Of course big ideas overlap, it would be sectarian to suggest otherwise, but what if those ideas are political and require political organisation for a political purpose? How important is sticking to your ideas, or what might be called principles, then? What if the idea is socialism, which represents a fundamental break with previous society? How important then, is clearly defining supporters from non-supporters?

The project called Left Unity then is going for the broad approach. There is a willingness to accept subscriptions from members not in agreement on political purpose with other members. Agreeing on action first, then (if at all) worrying about ideological agreement (as unfashionable as that is), is not the way to persuade people. Very quickly they will find out that some ideas negate other ideas, such as higher wages negates abolition of the wages system. Some supporters of the organisation will become ideological opponents (or at least non-supporters) when revolutionary change arises.

The greatest American orator for socialism once said ‘It is better to vote for what you want and not get it, than to vote for what you don’t want and get it.’

50 Years Ago: Demonstration in Washington (2013)

The 50 Years Ago column from the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

The demonstration by two hundred thousand people in Washington recently to protest at discrimination against the American Negro was an example of self-disciplined protest —restrained, yet massively determined. August 28th marked the flaring of accumulated frustrations that had smouldered for over two centuries. From this time forward the character of the Negroes’ struggle is altered, they have a national organisation and specifically formulated demands that they can pursue in the spotlight of world-wide publicity.

‘Nobody knows the trouble I seen’ is a familiar lament of a Negro blues song. It expresses the special misery of 19 million people who have inherited a legacy of hatred and violent suffering. Although it is possible to recognise it as a fact, nobody who has not experienced it can feel on his shoulders the harrowing burden of American Negro history. And even now, for the Negro, life offers unstinted humiliation, for added to his exploitation as a wage worker, in every corner of American social life he faces the pointed finger that accuses him of racial inferiority. (. . .)

It is vital that sooner or later Negroes should transcend any strong identification they have with what they may regard as an exclusively ‘Negro’ interest. At the moment, at least in America, this is made extremely difficult for them. In a hundred and one ways, American life drives the Negro into insularity and narrow fugitive attitudes, and to some extent, especially where democratic rights are concerned, their views can be understood.

At the same time, it must be remembered that there are no solutions to the problems of this world that hold out hope to any particular section of men without holding out hope at the same time to all men. Individuals have had the courage and the generosity to rise above the embittering agony of their recent history. James Baldwin writes ‘I am not a nigger—I am a man.’ We equally wish to simplify things and join in the refutation of ‘Niggers,’ ‘Yids,’ ‘Wogs,’ ‘Proddydogs,’ ‘Jocks’ and ‘White Trash’. We too want to celebrate —Man.*

(from article by P. L., Socialist Standard, October 1963)

*Note: today we would say ‘Human’. 

Red Round-Up (2013)

Picture via Libcom.

Pamphlet Review from the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Spanish Anti-Fascist ‘Prisoners of War’ in Lancashire, 1944-1946. By Richard Cleminson, Northern Earth, 2012 (£2.50)

This short pamphlet, although primarily of local interest, is of considerable value in highlighting wider issues. After having escaped Franco’s victorious armies in 1939, most Spanish Republican fighters were interned in ‘democratic’ France, often in appalling conditions. After May 1940, those lucky enough not to be shot on site were ‘volunteered’ as slave labourers by the Nazis.

1944 was far from the liberation many had expected: Condemned as collaborators, many of the ‘Spanish Reds’ were again rounded up and imprisoned, this time by the Allies. By various convoluted routes, some 226 of these ‘POWs’ ended up in Hall o’ the Hill Camp near Chorley. The disrespect shown to the credentials of these honourable individuals is a clear indication that the Second World War was by no means a clear anti-fascist struggle.

Particularly interesting are the pictures, which were mostly taken by Marie-Louise Berneri, the famous anarchist, and the all-too-brief personal stories of the individuals involved. The message is somewhat undermined by the copious references, a result of the text being taken verbatim from an academic journal. The publishers would be well-advised to adapt any future texts, bearing in mind that literature intended for the general reader does not have to be as rigorously sourced as scholarly works.

Keith Scholey

Lounge Lezard (2013)

Book Review from the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bitter Experience Has Taught Me. By Nicholas Lezard, Faber and Faber, 2013. £9.99.

Lezard is a Guardian book reviewer and critic, with a column in the New Statesman called ‘Down And Out in London’. This book has been adapted from that column and is a self-deprecating and amusing account of his life after being kicked out of the family home by Mrs Lezard for a wide variety of inadequacies and misdemeanours. In near financial ruin, he shares a dilapidated house near Baker Street called ‘The Hovel’ with his friend Razors and the focus of this book is his struggle to maintain his head above water while also maintaining his daily wine habit (Lezard is an erstwhile companion of Jeffrey Bernard).

Originally from a relatively privileged background, Lezard is a left-wing, professional cynic who also thinks nothing of inviting police attention by playing midnight cricket – after a few glasses and with real cricket balls – on the chi-chi streets of Marylebone. The contradictions are often what make the humour here, and Lezard is an engaging writer.

He claims to have often annoyed his right–wing father (who at an earlier time of life had been rather bizarrely awarded the Order of Lenin, Fifth Class) with his forthright, radical politics. Interestingly, on one occasion this involved young Nick ‘urging everyone to vote for the Socialist Party of Great Britain’ during a mock election at school, with himself as the candidate. Inexplicably, he seems to have done worse than we normally do, and we can only hope that this psychological trauma didn’t influence his subsequent life path too much.

Dave Perrin

Le Capital (2013)

Film Review from the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Le Capital (dir. Costa-Gavras)

Le Capital is a European financial thriller made in France by Greek director Costa-Gavras that had its première at the Toronto Film Festival in 2012, was nominated for the 2012 Special Jury Prize at the San Sebastian International Film Festival but to date has not been released in Britain. Costa-Gavras is notable for his Academy Award winning film Z (1969), Missing (1982) which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and Music Box (1989) winner of the Golden Bear at Berlin.

Costa-Gavras based his film on the 2004 novel Le Capital by French banker Stephane Osmont but was also inspired by the book Totalitarian Capitalism by Jean Peyrelvade. The film stars Moroccan actor Gad Elmaleh and also Gabriel Byrne, the Irish actor memorable in the 1995 noir film The Usual Suspects.

Le Capital is a fast-paced film set in the closed world of investment banking full of cunning boardroom politics, billion-dollar banking takeovers, supermodels, corporate suits in jets globe-trotting from Paris to London, New York, Tokyo and Miami. The main protagonist played with a reptilian self-awareness by Elmaleh occasionally breaks the fourth wall and gives 'Brechtian' asides to the audience. Elmaleh has the best lines such as 'money makes people respect you, money is the master, money never sleeps'.

The film is dominated by memories of the global financial capitalist meltdown of 2008 caused by overproduction in the housing sub-prime market, deregulation of commercial bank securities such as the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, and the use of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and other derivatives described as 'financial weapons of mass destruction' by Warren Buffett. The crisis was such that Ben Bernanke, head of the US Federal Reserve, feared the end of capitalism and said of the $700 billion emergency bailout of banks: 'if we don't do this, we may not have an economy on Monday'. According to Roger C Altman in The Great Crash 2008 losses totalled $8.3 trillion.

Costa-Gavras makes reference to the 'cowboy capitalism' of a 'brutal hedge fund' who are 'preachers of instant profit'. Elmaleh delivers lines such as 'I am a modern Robin Hood who takes from the poor to give to the rich'. There is also a possible allusion to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the IMF who in May 2011was subject to allegations of sexual assault. The working class represented by one character accuses the bankers: 'You are bleeding the world thrice, the markets want blood, you fuck people with lay-offs, you fuck them with loans and debt, money rots everything'. A female English banker with a 'conscience' delivers an indictment near the end of the film: 'Banks in the claws of predatory stockholders, the dictatorship of the markets, speculation, the rating agencies that run the economy for politicos that threaten society, democratic states that can no longer govern or get rid of banks who stifle them'.

Costa-Gavras concludes in Le Capital that the bankers 'have fun and will go on having fun until everything is blown up in pieces'.

Steve Clayton

Cooking the Books: In or Out - Who Cares? (2013)

The Cooking the Books column from the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists sometimes talk of ‘the capitalist class’ doing this or wanting that as if they were a monolithic whole with a single interest. In fact different sections of the capitalist class have different interests. Their attitude to the EU is a case in point.

Cameron has rather foolishly promised an in/out referendum on the issue; rather foolishly because (as the vote in parliament on bombing Syria shows) he cannot be sure that the result will be the one he wants, which will be to stay in with reforms, also the position of the Confederation of British Industry, which represents the biggest capitalist corporations operating in and from Britain.

One of the export-oriented big boys put the case for staying in to the Evening Standard (9 August):

‘Britain should stay in the European Union to safeguard exports to the Continent, the boss of Hitachi’s train operations in the UK urged today.… Mr Dormer… said exporters wanted Britain to have warm and stable relations with Europe. ‘Europe is potentially our biggest market and we would not want anything to happen that would create barriers or damage the relationship,’ he said.’

The previous day, the Times had reported ‘Business leaders press for single market withdrawal’:

‘Business for Britain will call for the nation to downgrade its relationship with the EU and become part of a customs union instead… The plans would allow Britain to avoid tariffs when trading with Europe, while not having to sign up to various rules which harmonise business conditions across the 28 member countries. If a future government managed to negotiate such a change, it would put Britain in a similar trading position to Turkey.’

Business for Britain, the Times explained, ‘claims to have the backing of 500 influential figures, including FTSE 100 directors and the owners of smaller businesses. They include Sir Stuart Rose, chairman of Ocado, Richard Burrows, chairman of British American Tobacco, and Ian Cheshire, chief executive of Kingfisher, parent company of B&Q.’ Other backers are Lord Wolfson, CEO of Next, John Caudwell, founder of Phones4U, Sir Rocco Forte, executive chairman of Rocco Forte Hotels, Tim Martin, chairman of pub group JD Wetherspoon, and Charlie Mullins, managing director of Pimlico Plumbers.

It is easy to see what these have in common: they are all bosses of firms producing for the home market. The exception is BAT but they want to push their risky product in developing countries where restrictions on its sale are less than in Europe.

The same relationship to the EU as Turkey? The CBI has already rejected the even less distant relationships of Norway and Switzerland. Its director-general, John Cridland, had an article in the Times (4 July) headed ‘In or out, Britain has to play by Europe’s rules. Norway and Switzerland pay the costs of membership with no say over EU laws. That’s a bad deal for UK businesses.’

This dispute within the British capitalist class has no class interest for workers. Whether British capitalism is in or out of the EU will make no difference to their position as a class forced to work for a wage or a salary and won’t affect the problems they face either way.

So, if the referendum ever comes, you won’t find us joining with the xenophobic right and the xenophobic left to line up behind Ocado, B&Q, Next, Phones4U, Wetherspoons, Pimlico Plumbers and other firms producing for the home market in saying No2EU. We’ll be advising workers who understand their class position to write ‘World Socialism’ across their ballot paper.

Left Unity - for Socialism or for Reformism? (2013)

From the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

In March, following the relative success of his nostalgic film about the post-war Labour government The Spirit of 45, Ken Loach launched an appeal for the formation of a new left-of-Labour (not to say Old Labour) party. The ball was picked up by others and a new Left Party is to be founded at a meeting in London on 30 November.

Loach’s appeal brought in some 9000 replies, though well under  a thousand of them seem to have followed this up by getting involved in local ‘Left Unity’ groups. An appeal published in the Guardian (12 August) sets out the general aim of those calling for the new party:

‘We urgently need a new party of the left. Labour will not provide the opposition to coalition politics that the situation demands. We need to provide a genuine alternative to the austerity policies which the three main parties support. A party that is socialist, environmentalist, feminist and opposed to all forms of discrimination.’

A meeting in May of those who had responded to Loach’s appeal decided that the new party should be an individual membership organisation. This was in deliberate contrast to a previous attempt to form a new left-of-Labour party in the early years of this century – the ‘Socialist Alliance’, which was in effect an electoral alliance between the SWP and Militant and which eventually fell apart because of rivalry between these two Trotskyist groups.

The individual membership decision was, and was meant to be, a rebuff to such groups, though their members are still free to join as individuals. Some Trotskyist groups – ‘Socialist Resistance’ and ‘Workers Power’ – have accepted this. This is likely to cause the new party problems in the future as it is a well-known tactic of such groups to ‘enter’ a bigger party, form a ‘faction’ (whether open or clandestine) within it, and breakaway away at some point with, they calculate, more members than they went in with.

But why another Left party? Aren’t there already a number of left-of-Labour parties which contest elections? Scargill’s SLP, Galloway’s Respect Party, the SWP, Militant (now calling themselves SPEW), TUSC and even the Communist Party of Britain (who run the Morning Star). The aim seems to be to form a party of a different type, one that is neither dominated by a single individual nor organised on Leninist lines; an open, more or less democratic party like, in the British context, the old ILP. Supporters of the new party cite existing European parties such as the Party of the Left in France, Die Linke in Germany and Syriza in Greece as examples they want to follow.

The general orientation of the new party has yet to be decided. That’s going to be settled at its founding conference at the end of the November. In the meantime three ‘platforms’ for discussion at the conference are circulating amongst those who signed up to Loach’s appeal.

One – the Left Unity Platform – is that of those who took the initiative to call for setting up the new party. They want a broad party that will attract any and every one to the left of Labour. In other words, an opportunist, catch-all party. They have the support of one of the Trotskyist groups, ‘Socialist Resistance’, which claims to be the genuine ‘Fourth International’ and is the successor of the old IMG of the 1970s of which Tariq Ali was a prominent member.

More interesting is the second one, called the ‘Socialist Platform’. It seems to be the initiative of one of the constituents of TUSC – the ‘Independent Socialist Network’, which caters for individuals who support TUSC but are not members of SPEW or of the RMT union. In fact the ISN seems to be on the brink of defecting from TUSC to the new Left Party.

The third – the so-called ‘Class Struggle Platform’ – can be dismissed fairly quickly. It has been put forward by another Trotskyist group, ‘Workers Power’, and just reproduces their programme. These people are nothing if not brazen. The new party has not yet been formed and they have already founded a ‘faction’ within it.

The ‘Socialist Platform’ is reproduced opposite. As can be seen, it is written in the same sort of language that we use; in fact we can agree with a large part of it, especially that ‘capitalism does not and cannot be made to work in the interests of the majority’ and clauses 6, 7 and 9. There are of course differences. For instance, clause 2 could imply that a ‘state’ will continue to exist in socialism. Clause 3 does not say explicitly that socialism has to involve the complete ending of production for the market. Clause 5 ends with a peculiar formulation on Europe (even though this is an advance on the No2EU embraced by most of the Left). Clause 8 is the real stumbling block from our point of view as it opens the way for the party to campaign for reforms.

Others, too, have noticed its similarity with what we say. A supporter of the Left Unity Platform has offered the following criticism of it:

‘There is no acknowledgement that fighting for reforms in the short term is entirely compatible with aiming for socialism in the longer term. Absent is any idea that a fight for reforms can raise people’s self-activity and point towards escalating demands; instead we are offered something approaching impossibilism. Current struggles are played down in favour of visions of a utopian future.’

If you follow the link from the word “impossibilism” it takes you to a Wikipedia page which explains that the main current exponent of this in Britain is us (see: leftunity.org/which-way-for-left-unity-the-case-for-the-left-party-platform). The author, Tom Walker, is a member of a breakaway group from the SWP. So this is a case of a Trotskyist criticising the ‘Socialist Platform’ for being too like the SPGB, a damning argument amongst Trotskyists.

One group of Leninists who have signed it are not satisfied with it, but because they see it as non-Leninist. This group, calling itself the ‘Communist Party of Great Britain’ (even though they have nothing to do with the old, now defunct CPGB) and publishing the Weekly Worker, have proposed a series of amendments intended to turn it into a Leninist statement.

For instance, where the original version says:

‘The Left Unity party is a socialist party. Its aim is to bring about the end of capitalism and its replacement by socialism’

they want to change this to:

‘It seeks to bring about the end of capitalism and its replacement by the rule of the working class. Our ultimate aim is a society based on the principle of ‘from each according to their abilities; to each according to their needs’, a moneyless, classless, stateless society, within which each individual can develop their fullest individuality.’

On the face of it this seems more explicitly socialist and of course we too want a ‘moneyless, classless, stateless society’, but what this is actually doing is introducing the Leninist distinction (which we reject and which was never in Marx’s writings) between ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’. We call a moneyless, classless, stateless society ‘socialism’ (or, occasionally ‘communism’, as the two words mean the same) and this may well be the view also of some of those who have signed the original platform. For us, this is the immediate aim, but for those behind the amendment it is only a far-off ‘ultimate aim’, just as it was for the government of the old USSR. Their immediate aim is a so-called ‘workers state’ in which money, classes and the state will continue to exist.

There is no chance of the ‘Socialist Platform’ being accepted at the founding conference of the new party. The Left Unity Platform will be adopted and a new wishy-washy, leftwing reformist party will come into existence.

The trouble, for them, is that such a left-of-Labour party already exists in the Green Party. The only difference is that the Green Party does not claim to be ‘socialist’, only ‘environmentalist, feminist and opposed to all forms of discrimination’. Apart from that, the policies that the two parties will be advocating will be the same, for instance, defence of the welfare state, bringing the utilities back into ‘public’ ownership, failed Keynesian policies as a supposed alternative to austerity, against overseas military action… So, to succeed, the new party will have to replace the Green Party. Which hardly seems likely.

Then there are the other smaller left-of-Labour parties competing on the same ground. They are not going to go away. Nor will the Trotskyist groups that have decided to ‘enter’ it. So the new Left Party is likely to be a non-starter and will probably end up as just another such small party, so adding to the confusion as to what socialism is and how to get it.

The only positive thing that could come out of this is for some of those who signed the ‘Socialist Platform’ to realise that a socialist party, on sound socialist principles, already exists and is already campaigning for socialism and nothing but.

Adam Buick

Statement of Aims and Principles for the [Left Unity] Party (‘Socialist Platform’)

1. The [Left Unity] Party is a socialist party. Its aim is to bring about the end of capitalism and its replacement by socialism.

2. Under capitalism, production is carried out solely to make a profit for the few, regardless of the needs of society or damage to the environment.  Capitalism does not and cannot be made to work in the interests of the majority. Its state and institutions will have to be replaced by ones that act in the interests of the majority.

3. Socialism means complete political, social and economic democracy. It requires a fundamental breach with capitalism. It means a society in which the wealth and the means of production are no longer in private hands but are owned in common. Everyone will have the right to participate in deciding how the wealth of society is used and how production is planned to meet the needs of all and to protect the natural world on which we depend. We reject the idea that the undemocratic regimes that existed in the former Soviet Union and other countries were socialist.

4. The [Left Unity] Party opposes all oppression and discrimination, whether on the basis of gender, nationality, ethnicity, disability, religion or sexual orientation and aims to create a society in which such oppression and discrimination no longer exist. 

5. Socialism has to be international. The interests of the working class are the same everywhere. The [Left Unity] Party opposes all imperialist wars and military interventions. It rejects the idea that there is a national solution to the problems of capitalism. It stands for the maximum solidarity and cooperation between the working class in Britain and elsewhere. It will work with others across Europe to replace the European Union with a voluntary European federation of socialist societies.

6. The [Left Unity] Party aims to win support from the working class and all those who want to bring about the socialist transformation of society, which can only be accomplished by the working class itself acting democratically as the majority in society.

7. The [Left Unity] Party aims to win political power to end capitalism, not to manage it. It will not participate in governmental coalitions with capitalist parties at national or local level.

8.  So long as the working class is not able to win political power for itself the [Left Unity] Party will participate in working-class campaigns to defend all past gains and to improve living standards and democratic rights. But it recognises that any reforms will only be partial and temporary so long as capitalism continues.

9.  The [Left Unity] Party will use both parliamentary and extra-parliamentary means to build support for its ultimate goal – the socialist transformation of society.

10. All elected representatives will be accountable to the party membership and will receive no payment above the average wage of a skilled worker (the exact level to be determined by the party conference) plus legitimate expenses.