'Was it something that we said scanned?'

MICHAEL: Hey, did you hear him making fun of you earlier?

ALAN: I did, Michael, but as Oscar Wilde said, ‘There’s only one thing worse than being talked about …’

MICHAEL: Cancer.

ALAN: No, not being talked about.

MICHAEL (Sickened): What, Oscar Wilde said not being talked about was worse than cancer?

ALAN: Yes, yes. I think he was at a party. Probably just being a gay show-off.

(from Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa.)

From the agenda for the SPGB's 2023 Autumn Delegate Meeting:

How's that for a kick in the knackers? No words. Actually, a few: To paraphrase Jean-Paul Sartre, 'Hell is other Party members . . .'

Greasy Pole: Looking forward to 2004 – in 1904 (2004)

The Greasy Pole column from the September 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Almost nine years have passed since Oscar Wilde was sent to prison at the Old Bailey for the offence of sodomy. He and his friends were not alone in their disappointment at the sentence because the judge, before waving the famous dramatist down to the Court cells, gave voice to his frustration that he was restricted to a sentence of only two years hard labour which was, he snarled, “totally inadequate” for “the worst case I have ever tried . . . a circle of extensive corruption of the most hideous kind among young men”.

    

The judge did not bother himself that to criminalise homosexuality as “hideous corruption” is a symptom of capitalism’s inhumanity. Nor did he muse on the corruption that was partly responsible for Wilde being in the dock before him. The dismay among Wilde’s supporters at his sentence was aggravated by the well-founded suspicion that he had been sacrificed – arrested, charged, tried, sentenced – to divert attention from somebody  else. It was obvious that the beneficiary must have been someone the authorities were anxious to protect from exposure. Among what was then known as the uranian community it was an open secret that Lord Rosebery was as active a homosexual as Wilde. In fact the Marquess of Queensbury, who had obsessively persecuted Wilde in retaliation for his relationship with his son, had made it quite clear that if Wilde was not prosecuted he, Queensbury, would ruin Rosebery by denouncing him as another sodomite.

Suicidal

The nub of the problem was that Rosebery was not just a peer of the realm and therefore an aristocrat who was supposed nobly to set an example to the rest of us, but the Prime Minister in the Liberal government. Before Wilde’s trial the blackmailing pressure from Queensbury was so fierce that Rosebery – said to be brilliant, erratic and unpredictable but obviously also a mite fragile – was fearful and depressed to the point of being suicidal. Soon after Wilde was safely behind the cell door at Pentonville and Queensbury’s fire had been quenched, Rosebery’s health miraculously improved and, benefiting from the corruption endemic in capitalist politics, he could continue contentedly being Prime Minister along with his other distractions. It was his bad luck that he did not enjoy coincidental good health and high office for long because a month after Wilde’s trial the Liberal government was out of power.

    

There would not have been the same concerns about the man who – a couple of years ago – succeeded to the job of Prime Minister, once held so tenuously by Rosebery. Arthur Balfour is another with a reputation for unusual brilliance but he has never shown the slightest interest in attaching himself to a female or a male. So on that score, if not on others which should be of more interest to the working class, he is safe.  Balfour is known as an aloof, self-satisfied man who is more comfortable in discussion of remote philosophical and religious abstractions – the less relevant the better – than in confronting the real world of poverty, disease, international conflicts. At Cambridge he spent what was called a “scandalous” amount of time watching or playing tennis and industriously built a reputation for idleness and for intolerance of anything he assessed as ignorance – but which may have been the very reality which he protected himself from.

Contemptuous

To behave like that it helps to be an aristocrat with the proper blue-blooded connections. Balfour went to Eton, his father and his grandfather were Conservative MPs and, even more to the point, he was the nephew of the late Lord Salisbury, who succeeded to the Prime Ministership when Rosebery’s Liberal government was defeated in 1895. Some years before that Salisbury, while taking an avuncular lunch with Balfour, broached the subject of politics as a career for him along with watching tennis and taking part in pointless arguments. At the time it just so happened that there was a vacancy at Hertford, a parliamentary constituency where the selection of the MP was controlled by Salisbury because he owned the place. Balfour regards politics as a kind of amusing game – clearly overlooking the unamusing, devastating effect which political decisions can have on the lives of the useful, non-aristocratic, working people in society. He was sure he could fit in attending the Commons with his other strenuous activities so yes, he would give it a try. In due course he was elected as the Honourable Member for Hertford. Thus Balfour was another who has reason to be grateful for the power of political corruption.

    

That when it comes to the ruling class blood is thicker than water was demonstrated in 1878 when Salisbury, who was then Foreign Secretary, made Balfour his private secretary. In 1885 Balfour was elected as MP for East Manchester; a week spent among his supporters there he described as “loathsome but necessary”, which perhaps meant that he had to spend some time in the slums of Ancoats or Salford. This contemptuous attitude, which he usually managed to hide beneath a mask of elaborate courtesy, surfaced again when he sneered at the rising suburban and provincial Tories “with their vineries and pineries” and in his comment that an industrialist who had what he considered “civilised” tastes was “a rare avis”.  All of this has been ammunition for those critics of Balfour who see him as a pretend politician who makes elegant speeches which do not contribute much to the question at issue – not that it mattered if they did. It fits in with the impression that he is an MP simply because it was the thing for a blue-blooded Old Etonian to do.

Poverty

But in spite of his affected langour and detachment Balfour has handled some weighty ministries, so that not too many of his Conservative colleagues were offended when, as his uncle Salisbury ceased to be Prime Minister in 1902, Balfour moved smoothly into the job. It will not be the last time a politician has cloaked their rampant ambition beneath a show of disinterest. Edward VII had just been crowned and the South African War, with its nasty shocks for the British military, was at an end. In some senses it was an abrasive conjunction of events as the crowning of a new king encouraged some of the customarily stupid jingoism at a time when the Boer farmers had uncovered evidence suggestive that the global power of the British ruling class is in decline. On the Continent Germany is overtaking Britain, for example accounting for about 22 percent of world production of steel compared to Britain’s 15 percent. In manufacture the respective shares are 17 percent and 19 percent. How long will it be, before British capitalism regards Germany as a competitor too threatening to be assuaged by mere diplomacy?  We are told that the Entente Cordiale, settled in April this year, is an instrument for peace as it re-assures France that there is a buffer against the ambitions of Germany. Another way of putting this is that the treaty lays out some of the issues over which the next war will be fought.

    

At home the work of Rowntree and Booth has illuminated the fact that the workers who cheered the coronation of the new king often did so from the depths of poverty. Booth’s study of the people in the East End of London found about 30 percent of them living below what he set as a ‘poverty line’. These are people whose means are barely sufficient for a decent independent life or, even worse, are actually insufficient for that life. Rowntree’s report on the people of York came to much the same conclusion; nearly ten percent of the people were found to be in ‘primary poverty’, with means insufficient to maintain merely physical efficiency, and another 18 percent are in the slightly more manageable ‘secondary poverty’. Unemployment, which is an aggravating factor in poverty, stands at ten percent of the working population.  These problems, with the suffering they cause to the class who produce everything but own nothing of any consequence, are the very stuff of capitalism and Balfour, for all his supposed effortless intellectualism, has been powerless to affect them.

    

How long will capitalism endure? If it is still here in a hundred years, what will the socialists of the year 2004 look back on? They will review a century in which millions will have died in wars or through hunger or avoidable diseases. A century in which the contrasts of riches and impoverishment remain as stark as ever. Whatever progress will be made in the technologies of communication and production will have gone to further enrich the ruling class while merely reshaping the poverty of the workers. And all of this will have been governed by political leaders notable in history for only their corruption, deceit and impotence.

Ivan

This Month's Quotation: Oscar Wilde (1938)

The Front Page quote from the September 1938 issue of the Socialist Standard

"A man who does not think for himself  does not think at all. "

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde on “Living for Others” (1988)

From issue 5 of the World Socialist Review

The following article is taken with permission from The Nation (2/20/88), where It appears as "Minority Report" (a feature column) . The writer— Christopher Hitchens— not only expresses an insight into the underlying realities of exploitation and social class but also reminds us of a few things about Oscar Wilde that the capitalist class would presumably prefer to play down as quaint or awkward.

 

That said, we do take exception to what seems to be the author's implied existence of a "middle class," since the liberal middle class of Wilde's time has itself become today's conservative "upper class", having changed only its ideological diapers in the process. Developed capitalism knows only two classes: those who own the means of production and those who work for them to produce and distribute wealth, either to the former's profit or to their minimum cost. A worker is anyone whose only source of income is the sale of their mental and physical abilities.

 

—The Editor

. . .  The salient point about (Oscar) Wilde was the economy and address of his wit. He did not froth with bons mots like some second-rate charmer. He was a tough and determined Irishman who more than once flattened bullies with his fist, and most of the time—if we exempt pardonable and tempting sallies about blue china and decorative screens—his drawling remarks were not snobbish or mannered. I suppose that people need to see him as a species of languid dandy, which is why The Soul of Man Under Socialism is almost never discussed when dear Oscar's name comes up.

Try to find that essay in any of the current anthologies of Wilde. First published in 1891, it was geldingly retitled The Soul of Man while Wilde was in prison. It expressed the sensibility that had impelled him to take the side of the Irish rebels and, in particular, to oppose the British government's attempted frame up of Charles Stewart Parnell, who, like Wilde, was destroyed on a charge of immorality when all else had failed. It gave Wilde the same distinction as that which he acquired by being the only writer in London to sign George Bernard Shaw's petition for the Haymarket martyrs. And it contains the following imperishable sentence:

The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody.

This is not the flippant remark that philistlnes might take it to be. It is in fact what is truly meant by "compassion," a word now made to sound sickening in the mouths of Democratic hypocrites.

What those hypocrites mean when they intone the hack word "compassion" is that we should not forget the needy and the desperate as we pursue our glorious path of self-advancement. This is the rough equivalent of the older injunction that we should remember the wretched in our prayers. Wilde was proposing something infinitely more daring and intelligent—that we regard poverty, ugliness and the exploitation of others as something repulsive to ourselves. If we see a slum, a ghetto, a beggar, or an old person eating pet food, we should not waste pity on the victim. We should want the abolition of such conditions for our own sakes. The burden of enduring them is too much.

This is why early socialists were quite proud to be accused of spitting in the face of charity. The principle that an injury to one is an injury to all is not just talk; it is the expression of a solidarity that recognizes mutual interest. As Wilde also wrote, in his review of Edward Carpenter's Chants of Labour, "For to make men Socialists is nothing, but to make Socialism human is a great thing." His appreciation of paradox here makes an excellent match with his rejection of sentimentality.

There is another sense in which it would be nice to think that Wilde intended his insight about "living for others." In the great working class novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists the laborer Robert Tressell describes the feelings of charity and gratitude that, overwhelm the credulous, patriotic men who worked alongside him. They were content to spend their entire lives living for others—their betters—each of them confident of his own sturdy independence. This type did not disappear with the waning of the Industrial Revolution. You can meet him today, the despair of "progressive" intellectuals, as he bellies up to the bar with his "can't fool me" talk and proceeds to speak, sometimes using the very same phrases, in the tones of the President's last lying paean to native virtues. Praise for these philanthropists, especially at times when they are needed to be expended in war, is the only official rhetoric you hear that mentions the word "class." Almost the only place that class distinctions are stressed these days is at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Class Factor Downplayed

They deserve to be stressed more often. Society labors on, supporting both an enormously wealthy upper class, whose corporate holdings are frequently tax free or even tax subsidized, and a growing underclass, which is sporadically and pathetically cited as a spur to conscience. Never is it asked, What are these classes for?

A sort of moral blackmail is exerted from both poles. The underclass, one gathers, should be dulled with charity and welfare provision lest it turn nasty. The upper class must likewise be conciliated by vast handouts, lest it lose the "incentive" to go on generating wealth. A rising tide, as we have recently learned, does not lift all boats, nor does a falling tide sink them all. If people were to recognize that they are all in the same boat, they would take better care of its furnishings, its comfort and its general decor. This is what Wilde meant by the importance of the aesthetic. 

Radicals have been taught to distrust any too great display of individualism, and where they forget this lesson there are always conservatives to remind them (a madly sweet but slightly lugubrious example of this style appears In the current New Criterion, reprobating my good self). Wilde himself was haunted by a Podhoretz-like chaplain in prison, who reported that the cell reeked of semen. (How could he tell?) We are in the debt of the brave man who taught us to ask, of their majesties, whether they deserve us, or our continued amiable subservience.

Christopher Hitchens

The soul of Oscar Wilde (2021)

From the June 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

I had often seen Oscar Wilde described as a socialist for his essay ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’, but I’d never read it. So when it was published in a recent selection of Wilde’s works (Oscar Wilde. In Praise of Disobedience, edited by Neil Bartlett, Verso, 2020), this seemed to me an opportunity to fill that gap. I was more familiar with the works Wilde is much more famous for – his plays (e.g. The Importance of Being Earnest), his poetry (e.g. The Ballad of Reading Gaol), and his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and of course with his spectacular fall from grace when he was imprisoned for sodomy in an age that criminalised homosexuality and brought the writer to poverty and exile before he died in 1900 at the age of 46.

In a beautifully written introduction to this collection, the editor describes ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ as ‘the writing of a man who knew all about being wounded, worried, maimed, and in danger’. And there’s no doubt that this is a tormented piece of writing. Its main theme is the quest for better social circumstances in which artists and all people can express their being freely and openly and without fear of outraging existing norms or incurring interdiction or punishment. But, given the essay’s title, I was rather surprised that a good deal of it is not specifically about socialism or indeed about any kind of politics at all. As much as anything else it’s about the role of art in human society and in particular the position of artists in Wilde’s time and the problems they faced. The connection of this to socialism is that, in what Wilde sees as a socialist society, artists would not have to abide by the strictures and constraints imposed on them in his own society. So we can agree with the editor of this volume that what we have here, at one level at least, is ‘an aesthetics of radicalism’.

But what is the ‘socialism’ of the title that Wilde sees as being necessary and through which man’s true ‘soul’ would be capable of free expression? In many ways it does seem strikingly close to the Socialist Party’s version of socialism – a world of common ownership, voluntary cooperation and free access – summed up as follows early in the essay: ‘Socialism, Communism, or whatever one chooses to call it, by converting private property into public wealth, and substituting cooperation for competition, will restore society to its proper condition of thoroughly healthy organism, and ensure the material well-being of each member of the community.’ There is much else along these lines – from ‘the proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible’, to ‘it is only in voluntary associations that man is fine’, to ‘the true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is’, and ‘when private property is abolished there will be no necessity for crime, no demand for it; it will cease to exist’. On issues like authority and human nature too, Wilde is strikingly ‘modern’ in his thought: ‘All authority is quite degrading (…) It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised’ (…) ‘The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes’.

But Wilde also has another axe to grind, one which at first sight may seem to run contrary to the vision he initially outlines. He tells us, repeatedly, that he prizes above all what he calls ‘individualism’. In a different context this could of course appear a way of describing the ‘every man for himself’ ethic which is at the heart of capitalist society. But Wilde sees ‘individualism’ not as the war of each person against the other, but rather a way of realising and releasing human energies in each individual to allow them to fulfil their personal potential in building a free cooperative society, a society in which ‘every man must be left quite free to choose his own work’. In Wilde’s view ‘private property has set up an Individualism that is false’, crushing true individualism, which for him is not egotism, since ‘the egotist is he who makes claims upon others, and the Individualist will not desire to do that’. But, he goes on, ‘when man has realised Individualism, he will also realise sympathy and exercise it freely and spontaneously’. And his exaltation of individualism ends on the most exalted of notes: ‘With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy, Individualism. No one will waste his life in accumulating things and the symbols for things’.

This is Wilde’s vision, but what of the means to achieve it? As the editor of this collection quite rightly points out, ‘the thing (…) that will surprise a modern reader most – given its title – is that it proposes no political or politicised action of any kind’. In other words, it contains no prescriptions on how the ‘adjustments’ to the society Wilde advocates would take place. So though he seems to be advocating socialism in the Socialist Party’s terms, he does not follow the Socialist Party’s proposal to achieve it, i.e. through political action via the spreading of socialist consciousness followed by democratic action through the ballot box. But though Wilde proposes no specific means of achieving socialism, he does make clear that he is not looking for the ‘socialism’ of state control (‘It is clear, then, that no Authoritarian Socialism will do.’). And so of course in adopting such a position, Wilde would not have found favour with many of the so-called ‘socialists’ of his day, for example the Fabians, who advocated state legislation to change social conditions. It must be said, however, that there is some residual attachment to the state in Wilde’s thinking, perhaps stemming from the same kind of failure of the imagination to be found in many of today’s ‘anti-capitalists’, a failure to imagine radically enough. In Wilde’s socialism, the state still does seem to have an existence, not apparently as a governing body, but, as he puts it, ’a voluntary association that will organise labour, and be the manufacturer and distributor of necessary commodities’. But, there again, this may be a question of terminology and what Wilde is describing is socialist organisation under another name.

So, what was my impression on reading this much-mentioned work for the first time? Was I enthused about Wilde’s vision of socialism or was I disappointed? Definitely more the first than the second and, especially given the time at which the work was written and the circumstances of that time, I would want to forgive certain flights of fancy by the author (for example something of an attachment to Christianity or at least to the figure of Christ), a tendency towards sweeping statements (part of what the editor describes as Wilde’s ‘firework display of opinion’) and the occasions on which he does not seem to entirely share the vision of a socialist world and how to achieve it of other socialists of his day (e.g. Marx or William Morris), a vision which continues to be entirely relevant today.

Howard Moss

Oscar Wilde on journalism. (1923)

From the July 1923 issue of the Socialist Standard

  “In England, Journalism, except in a few well-known instances, not having been carried to such excesses of brutality, is still a great factor, a really remarkable power. The tyranny that it proposes to exercise over people’s private lives seems to me quite extraordinary.

  “The fact is that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything except what is worth knowing.

   “Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesmen-like habits, supplies the demands. In centuries before ours, the public nailed the ears of journalists to the pump.

    “That was quite hideous.

    “In this century journalists have nailed their own ears to the keyhole.

   “That is much worse.”

Oscar Wilde

Meat, Money and Malnutrition (2005)

From the March 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Vegetarians International Voice for Animals (VIVA) make the claim that meat causes famine. Is this really the case, or does the real problem lie in the profit system? Rob Stafford investigates.

The Bristol-based charity Viva! in a recent pamphlet Join Viva! Join the Fight for Life claim that “millions of children in the developing world die from hunger alongside fields of high quality food, destined for the West’s farmed animals. The startling truth is that meat causes starvation.” Despite claiming that they monitor “the latest research from all over the world in the environment and development issues and argues for change with hard science” Viva provide absolutely no supporting evidence for their contention. Furthermore, a request for such material has yet to be answered.

Viva’s position is accepted as a common truth by other campaigning groups and individuals including Animal Aid, George Monbiot, Peter Singer, and repeated in some sections of the press, such as the Guardian and New Internationalist. While there is no doubt that growing crops as a source of food for the production of meat rather than feeding humans directly is less efficient in terms of land and energy, is there a direct relationship between meat and starvation? Consider a field of corn standing next to a group of starving children. The corn is destined for export as animal feed. Hence meat causes starvation. But if the corn was not grown for use as animal feed would the children be free to eat it? Indeed, would it even be grown in the first place? Simply because two effects (corn, starving children) are found side by side does not imply that one caused the other. Perhaps, however, the supporters of this position consider we have reached the limit of agriculture on this planet and therefore because some people eat meat fed on grain others, as a direct result of this practice, starve.

Over twenty years ago WHO stated that the technology existed to feed a global population twelve times its (then) size. The American Association for the Advancement of Science reported in 1997 that 78 percent of all malnourished children under the age of five in the developing world live in countries with a food surplus. Just over five years ago the United Nations reported that Africa could easily feed a population five times its current size if western technology were introduced. (And what of future technology?)

There is, in fact, a wealth of evidence to support the view that “famine exists largely because the hungry cannot afford to buy food, not because there is insufficient food produced” (New Scientist, 3 September 1994). Agricultural economist M. S. Swaminathan stated earlier this year that the “problem of undernutrition . . . is a lack of purchasing power” (Newsweek, 31 January). Even an establishment figure such as Sir Jonathan Porritt in his introduction to Compassion in World Farming’s report entitled The Global Benefits of Eating Less Meat (2004) is not blind to such facts. He quotes approvingly from Colin Tudge’s recent book, So Shall We Reap, and states that the author “develops an eloquent argument demonstrating that contemporary food and farming policy has very little to do with meeting human needs, guaranteeing food security, providing high and consistent levels of nutrition and food safety…Much more simply, it’s all about profit: squeezing the maximum financial yield out of every link in the food chain to benefit a tiny number of an already inconceivably rich minority of citizens” .

And those inconceivably rich do not just live in the West as Porritt states. For example, at the peak of the 1984 famine in Ethiopia such people enjoyed the benefits of exporting crops to the UK and taking delivery of Scottish malt whisky. This was just business as usual. Thus it should come as no surprise to learn that although the value of food exported by Ethiopia and other countries in the Horn of Africa during 1983 exceeded imports by $1 billion, hunger in this region increased (World Hunger: Twelve Myths. Frances Moore Lappe et al, Earthscan, 1998).

 

For some – but certainly not the 840 million malnourished (or the more than a billion existing in a state described by the UN as absolute poverty) – the ‘problem’ is an inconceivable embarrass de richesses. Try and imagine yourself as one of the 225 individuals owning wealth equivalent to that of 47 percent of the world’s population. Consider that the wealth of just three of these individuals exceeds the Gross National Product of the world’s 47 poorest nations. And that for four percent of the combined income of the three wealthiest people we could provide universal access to basic education, health care, adequate food as well as safe water and sanitation for all.

 

OK, so is it perhaps not meat on its own that causes starvation, but that it is one of a number of possible factors including problems relating to distribution, drought and natural disaster as well as war and poverty caused by unfair trade, third world debt, insufficient aid, etc? Well, the US recently was able within a few months to send 130,000 people (with supplies) half way across the world. Alas, their mission was one of death and destruction rather than to rescue, provide food, shelter and deliver other essentials to the suffering multitudes. War and poverty even after hundreds of years of social activism are still, patently, with us. But why? Oscar Wilde, writing over a hundred years ago about charity, provides some clues. “[T]heir remedies do not cure the disease; they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease. They try to solve the problem of poverty for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor. But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible” (The Soul of Man under Socialism).

It is to be hoped that historians living today will in the not distant future look at present day society and recognize that by failing to see starvation as one of many symptomatic problems that no amount of ‘band aids’ could cure, Viva and other well intentioned but misguided groups delayed the use of effective treatment. The activities of such groups will however probably be seen as benign in comparison with the likes of the Animal Liberation Front and PETA – who have more in common with companies such as Monsanto than either would like to admit – and other Malthusian-inspired misanthropes. All will be on record as failing to see the economic law which transcends government and companies however large or powerful: no profit, no production: can’t pay can’t have.

These future historians will indeed be deeply saddened that we took so long to see the link between this law and a myriad of contradictions (clues) in plain view today: people starving while food rots; brick mountains and empty homes existing alongside unemployed builders and the homeless; millions dying of curable diseases. On this last point, pharmaceutical chemist Dr Victoria Hale has made the telling observation that  “parasites and poverty are inextricably linked”. Referring to conditions such as leishmaniasis and Chagas disease, found almost exclusively in areas of the world where grinding poverty for the vast majority is the normal way of life (and death), she went on to say: “People with these diseases are not in sight as they cannot pay” (New Scientist, 25 September 2004).

Revealingly, Tudge is on record as proposing that if food production were designed to feed people rather than make a profit, then there would be no problem. Eureka! Imagine that: a world in which everything is produced for need, not profit! However, in asking “why we, humanity, allow the world to be run by people who have long since lost the plot?” (New Scientist, 13 March 2004) Tudge implies a change in leadership might suffice. But, two hundred years earlier, the Marquis De Sade saw through leadership and in doing so glimpsed the answer to securing “a saner sustainable future”: “You can only govern men by deceiving them; one must be hypocritical to deceive them; the enlightened man will never let himself be led, therefore it is necessary to deprive him of enlightenment to lead him as we want”.

Rob Stafford

This Month's Quotation: Oscar Wilde (1937)

The Front Page quote from the December 1937 issue of the Socialist Standard 

“To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.”

- Oscar Wilde

Sting in the Tail: Ignorance is Bliss (1991)

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

Ignorance is Bliss

A recent news item provided a long list of history exam howlers written by college students in the USA and Canada.

Examples included - 

• Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100 foot clipper.
• Martin Luther was nailed to the church door at Wittenberg.
• The Magna Carta provided that no free man could be hanged twice for the same offence.

Comical stuff, but what about the political howlers reported in the media any day of the week? For instance -

We were the first truly democratic party there has ever been in this country

(David Owen on the SDP)

Karl Marx invented Marxism in the British Museum

(historian A.J.P. Taylor)

We would see an end to all world wars if men wore fishnet stockings more often.

(Richard O'Brien, creator of The Rocky Horror Show)

Many workers vote Tory because the Labour Party isn’t left-wing enough.

(any Trotskyist paper)

Still Dreaming

British Telecom's plan to cut another 10,000 jobs despite having declared profits of over £3 billion outraged opposition MPs, trade union leaders and others.

These dreamers think the sackings are not justified when profits are so high, but BT is in business not to provide jobs but maximum profits so that it can keep its shareholders happy and re-invest in order to stay far ahead of its competitors.

BT knows it can only continue to do this by constantly cutting costs and reducing its workforce is an obvious way of doing this.

Karl Marx described how the war which capitalist enterprises wage among themselves must be fought-

this war has the peculiarity that its battles are won less by recruiting than by discharging the army of labour. The generals, the capitalists, compete with one another as to who can discharge most soldiers of industry.

That is the logic of capitalism no matter what the dreamers may think.

Charitable Thoughts

In the recent furore about registered charities adopting a political stance and the government's threats to tighten the laws governing charities, an interesting fact about the number of charities emerged.

  The number of charities is growing, totalling 171,434 at the end of the year — against 168,170 the previous year.

The Independent on Sunday (2 June)

The picture of 171,434 organisations beavering away trying to alleviate some of the problems arising from capitalism in 1991 shows how correct, a hundred years ago, Oscar Wilde was in attacking charities in his essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism, when he stated:

  They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor. But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.

A very clever person saw the futility of charity in 1891. It must be a very foolish one in 1991 who does not see that these 171,434 organisations are powerless to solve the problems of poverty.

Another Fake

Lesley Mahmood is the "Broad Left" candidate in the Walton by-election in Liverpool.

Ms Mahmood, who was recently expelled from the Labour Party, describes herself as a "socialist". The Guardian (11 June) has provided a selection of her recent statements and given us the opportunity to examine her socialist credentials.

No genuine socialist would say as she did "Of course I want a Labour government elected". After all, the Labour Party has supported the production for profit system throughout its inglorious history.

And although she wants to see ". . . socialist ideas being put into practice . . . her comrades in Militant need not panic because she doesn't mean anything really revolutionary like the abolition of the wages system, only ”. . . the council building new homes for people . . . that kind of thing."

Whatever the Labour Party expelled Lesley Mahmood for, it obviously had nothing to do with socialism.

Pin Stripe Penury

The Socialist Party have always clearly stated that there are only two classes in society. We have denied the existence of a "middle class".

This has made us unpopular with trendy left wingers and marketing people who claim that higher paid members of the working class, like managers, lawyers and doctors, are not members of the working class.

The recent increase in unemployment has made it very clear to many of these "middle class" people that there is no security for the working class — whether relatively lowly or highly paid.

Only 3 weeks ago the Department of Employment told the British Institute of Management that 80,000 people claiming unemployment benefit described themselves as managers.

Independent on Sunday (2 June)

Describe yourself how you may — you cannot escape the often unpalatable truth — if you have to work for a wage or a salary, then you are a member of the working class.

What's in a Name

The recent decision to change the name of Leningrad to St. Petersburg excited a great deal of media coverage.

Changing the name from that of a ruthless dictator to that of a megalomaniacal religious freak is just the sort of trivia that does excite the media.

At least it could be said in favour of the change that the working class residents of that city were consulted. That was certainly not the case in another change earlier that month.

  Republics still wanting to be part of the Soviet Union have agreed on a name, dropping "socialist" from the USSR to become the Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics, Tass reported last night. Leaders of nine of the original 15 Soviet republics, meeting at a government villa in Novo-Ogaievo, outside Moscow, decided on the name in discussions concerning a new Union Treaty.

Daily Telegraph (4 June)

After 84 years of deception the ruling class in the USSR are at least dropping the pretence of calling the country socialist.

The excitement felt by any class conscious worker in the USSR could be likened to that of an inmate of Strangeways on hearing the governor had decided on a new name for the prison.

Hand Outs & Charity

Socialists are always hammering on about people starving while farmers are being paid NOT to produce food. We make no apology for citing the most recent example of this obscenity reported in the Glasgow Herald on 19 June:

 On top of that, Mr Evans said that the Governor of the Bank of England, Mr Robin Leigh Pemberton, as well as being given a £22,000 pay rise, had received £80,000 compensation for NOT growing grain on his 2,000 acre farm.

Now that's what we call a hand out!

Film Review: The Selfish Giant (2014)

Film Review from the June 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Selfish Giant directed by Clio Barnard is a poetic social-realist film, unsentimental, politically angry in the tradition of Ken Loach’s Kes. Barnard’s aim was ‘to make a film in the realist tradition of fables about children’ like De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cent Coups, and Samira Makhmalbaf’s The Apple. She has created a damning portrait of capitalist society where a ADD-afflicted teen called Arbor (Conner Chapman) and his best friend Swifty (Shaun Thomas) engage in ‘scrapping’: collecting scrap metal or the detritus of capitalism with a horse and cart in the post-industrial landscape of Bradford with its cooling towers and electricity pylons.

It is inspired by the Oscar Wilde story The Selfish Giant whose message is that private property is evil; a permanent winter descends caused by his determination to stop children playing in the grounds of his castle. Barnard uses the metaphor for the deleterious effect on communities when society as a whole fails children. Wilde himself wrote in The Soul of Man Under Socialism: ‘With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live.’

Barnard said ‘The selfish giant of my film is a selfish ideology. I liked Glenda Jackson’s speech in the House of Commons after the death of Thatcher when she said that under Thatcher selfishness and greed had become virtues. The film is about what got lost.’ The Selfish Giant is about capitalism and consumerism fuelling greed, selfishness as an ideology, children marginalised and the general lack of concern about society in capitalism.

Steve Clayton

Rear View: Clueless Charities (2017)

The Rear View Column from the January 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Clueless Charities

Shelter, a charity campaigning to end homelessness, celebrated its 50th anniversary last year. Towards the end of 2016 they reminded us that during the season of goodwill 120,000 children in Britain would be homeless. Related news coverage has been grim and predictable. ‘A homeless man froze to death on the streets of Birmingham just a day before UK charity Shelter warned more than 250,000 people in England will be homeless this Christmas as high rents, benefit cuts, and a worsening housing crisis create the perfect storm. The body of the unknown man was found in the West Midlands city at 11.30pm GMT on Wednesday, the coldest night of the year. It is understood the body, found in John Bright Street, is that of a 30-year-old man with no fixed address. Figures compiled by Shelter reveal that 255,000 people across the country are forced to live in hostels and other types of temporary accommodation, or to sleep rough on the streets. London has the highest rate of homelessness. As many as one in 25 residents of the central London borough of Westminster are without a home” (rt.com, 1 December). But what has 50 years on the reformist treadmill achieved? We are informed that presently one in three UK households are on the ‘brink’ of homelessness. This ‘problem’ existed long before Shelter and many other charities came into being and will persist for another 50+ years unless we bring an end to capitalism. Oscar Wilde expressed this well: ‘their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease. They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor. But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible’ (The Soul of Man under Socialism, 1891).

Free Speech

‘Cardiff University in Wales has said it will no longer ban events by controversial speakers, declaring censorship is not the answer. The decision was made by the Cardiff University Students’ Union at their annual conference last week, where they passed a motion called Challenge, Don’t Censor‘ (patriotnewsagency.com, 3 December). This is good news. Socialists value free and open debate with all opponents, and naturally oppose censorship and safe spaces. George Yancy, a professor of philosophy at Emory University, stated recently ‘I refuse to entertain my students with mummified ideas and abstract forms of philosophical self-stimulation. What leaves their hands is always philosophically alive, vibrant and filled with urgency. I want them to engage in the process of freeing ideas, freeing their philosophical imaginations. I want them to lose sleep over the pain and suffering of so many lives that many of us deem disposable. I want them to become conceptually unhinged, to leave my classes discontented and maladjusted’ (nytimes.com, 30 November). Such a rare and provocative approach to education has been reported to the Professor Watchlist, a modern-day form of McCarthyism promoted by the conservative youth group Turning Point USA. The Economic League in the UK had similar objectives for the duration of its existence, 1919-1993.

Pious Platitudes

Who said ‘. . . what we are speaking about is the common good of humanity, of the right of each person to share in the resources of this world and to have the same opportunities to realize his or her potential…’ (time.com, 3 December)? Marx? Morris? Wilde? No, one Jorge Mario Bergoglio – in his current role as Pope. The 1 percent have no need to tremble in their designer boots as the Dalai Lama went through such a phase, even calling himself a Marxist, without socialism being any nearer. Besides, did not Sarah Palin insist recently that one or other gods had intervened in the US election in order to give us Donald Trump? The prayers of the capitalists are answered: it’s business as usual.

It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World

‘. . . pyrimethamine, the drug the Sydney Grammar School kids were able to make for $2 per dose, and which Turing sells for up to $750, can be bought in India for as little as $0.10’ (qz.com, 2 December). That’s capitalism folks!

This Month's Quotation: Oscar Wilde (1938)

The Front Page quote from the April 1938 issue of the Socialist Standard

"A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it. 

                                                                                Oscar Wilde

What’s Wrong With Dreaming? (2018)

Illustration for the 1516 first edition of Utopia.

From the February 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why oppose dreaming? Who opposes dreaming? Those who are supporters of the status quo.

The enemy of the dreamer of better times is the ideologist of the present, out to defend the existing miseries with the claim that the prevailing relationships of oppression are immutable.

‘You wouldn’t abandon ship in a storm just because you couldn’t control the winds.’  – Thomas More (1478 -1535), Utopia, published in 1516 in Latin.

‘One man with an idea in his head is in danger to be considered a mad man; two men with the same idea in common may be foolish, but can hardly be mad; ten men sharing an idea begin to act; a hundred draw attention as fanatics, a thousand and society begins to tremble, a hundred thousand and there is war abroad, and the cause has victories tangible and real; and why a hundred thousand? Why not a hundred million and peace upon earth? You and I who agree together, it is we who have to answer the question.’ – William Morris (1834-1896), ‘Art Under Plutocracy’ 1883, LINK. ).

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) once remarked, ‘We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars.’ Also that: ‘The map of the world which does not include Utopia is not worth glaring at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.’ (Plays, Prose Writings and Poems, p. 270).

‘Be realistic – Demand the Impossible’ was the slogan of the active dreamers who gave the ‘realists’ a good shock in the Paris of May 1968. A couple of years later John Lennon (1940 -1980) composed one of the finest modern contributions to utopian literature: the words of Imagine urged the millions who sent the song to Number One in the record charts to share the vision of a world without possessions, commerce, countries or religion. ‘You may say I’m a dreamer’, sang Lennon, ‘but I’m not the only one: I hope some day you’ll join us , and the world will live as one.’

William Morris (who had little time for music) would have had a lot of time for those words. In another lecture he said:

   ‘It is not we who can build up the new social order; the past ages have done the most of that work for us; but we can clear our eyes to the signs of the times, and we shall then see that the attainment of a good condition of life is being made possible for us, and that it is now our business to stretch our hands to take it’ (How We Live and How We Might Live).

In Marx’s words, ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please: they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.’ (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte).

Binay Sarkar

World Socialist Party of India

The Soul of Man under Socialism (1956)

From the October-December 1956 issue of Forum

Most people think of Oscar Wilde as the writer of The Picture of Dorian Grey, The Importance of Being Earnest or that great poem. The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Few think of him as a propagandist of socialism, or even a revolutionary thinker. Very few have taken seriously an essay written in 1891—The Soul of Man Under Socialism, and yet this short work has much to commend it.

Wilde was not a “professional revolutionary"; he had little understanding of economics, and had probably never read a word of Marx. He was a “Utopian.” Still, even to-day, The Soul of Man is worth reading—even by scientific socialists.

Socialism and Reformism.

Wilde was no reformer. Of the “very advanced” school of reformers he said: "They try to solve the problem of poverty,  for instance, by keeping the poor alive"; or, he added, by amusing the poor. But, he continued, this is not the solution to the problem of poverty—it is an aggravation. "Accordingly, with admirable, though redirected, intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.”

Wilde also felt that the worst slave-owners were those who were most kind to their slaves, who were the most altruistic and charitable, as they prevented the horrors of me system being realized by those who suffered from them. “Charity,” he wrote, creates a multitude of sins.” The only real and lasting answer to poverty was to reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty would be impossible; to establish Socialism (or Communism) where “each member of the society will share in the general prosperity and happiness of the society . . . ”

Individualism and Authority.

By converting private property into common property and substituting co-operation for competition, society will become a healthy organism; it will give life its proper basis, its proper environment. Socialism, thought Oscar Wilde, will lead to Individualism, or what we would probably term “individuality”—the free expression and development of each individual in his society. Socialism would be, must be, a completely free society, a way of life free from authority and coercion. He saw authority and compulsion as the negation of a society of free individuals, as the enemy of “Individualism.” He writes: —

  “What is needed is Individualism. If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first. At present, in consequence of the existence of private property, a great many people are enabled to develop a certain very limited amount of Individualism. They are either under no necessity to work for a living, or are enabled to choose the sphere of activity that is really congenial for them, and gives them pleasure. These are the poets, the philosophers, the men of science, the men of culture—in a word, the real men, the men who have realized themselves, and in whom all Humanity gains a partial realization.”

But the great majority, says Oscar Wilde, have no property; they are compelled to do uncongenial work, “and to which they are forced by the peremptory unreasonable, degrading tyranny of want. They are the poor . . . ” Later in the essay Wilde returns to this lack of Individualism in our present- day society and the dangers of authoritarianism in future society. For, he says: —

  “ It is clear . . .  that no Authoritarian Socialism will do. For while under the present system a very large number of people can lead lives of a certain amount of freedom and expression and happiness, under an industrial-barrack system, or a system of economic tyranny, nobody would be able to have any freedom at all . . .  Every man must be left quite free to choose his own work. No form of compulsion must be exercised over him. If there is, his work will not be good for him, will not be good in itself, and will not be good for others.”

Wilde thought that private property had crushed “Individualism ” and the creative spirit in general. But, with the abolition of private property, there would be a healthy and beautiful Individualism; for no one would waste his life accumulating things and symbols of things. Most people exist, but in a socialist world they would really live.

Here Wilde runs parallel with Engels when the latter says that with the seizing of the means of production by society, man for the first time emerges from mere animal conditions into really human ones—from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom. “Man, at last the master of his own form of social organization, becomes at the same time lord over Nature and his own master—free” (Socialism, Utopian and Scientific).

Engels and Wilde.

Engels was a “ scientific socialist.” He was in the main scientific, analytical, in his approach to social problems. Wilde was not. He saw poverty, degradation, a lack of freedom or “ Individualism,” and he did not like it. It revolted him. He looked upon Socialism not only as the solution to the problems thrown up by private property but as something desirable in itself, as something beautiful, ennobling. Engels saw it as the logical outcome of social processes.

But for all that, The Soul of Man Under Socialism does give us something. It warns us of the dangers of authority; and it gives us a vision of a future society where all can develop their individual capacities quite freely. Wilde was probably the last of the “Utopians”—and the most human. Let us also be a little “utopian” at times. “ Progress is the realization of Utopias.”

Peter E. Newell

Capitalist Labour and Socialist Work (1984)

From the February 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism means far more than the mere satisfaction of material needs; creative, emotional and intellectual life will also be given full expression. It is for this aspect of the socialist case that the subject of work has particular relevance. William Morris said in one of his lectures, "if pleasure in labour be generally possible, what a strange folly it must be for men to consent to labour without pleasure, and what a hideous injustice it must be for society to compel most men to labour without pleasure.” (Art under Plutocracy, reprinted by us as Art, Labour and Socialism) The fact is, most workers do consent to labour without pleasure, in so far as they continue to give their support to capitalism which is the cause of all the problems surrounding work — the boredom, the pressures, the insecurity.

In all forms of society the requirements of life must be produced; work therefore is a nature-imposed necessity. The kind of work, the techniques and conditions under which it is done, depend on the stage of development society has reached. For example, capitalism requires arms production, with armed forces, a legal system with a police force, commerce, banking, buying and selling, but none of these activities would have any place in socialism. It is necessary that we study work in relation to society for only then will we understand how socialism will change our whole conception of work and what it will mean.

Capitalism has certain unalterable basic conditions of work that will remain until the system is abolished. Those conditions are — that work takes the form of employment requiring workers to sell their mental and physical energies — their ability to work — to an employer. In doing so, they surrender themselves to the direction and control of others. They work from economic necessity, not for pleasure, nor to express themselves. Workers do not own the tools and instruments with which they produce; they are owned by the capitalist class, and may only be used, with the consent of the capitalists, when they think it is profitable to do so. Workers have no say in the matter. Consequently, in the face of modern technology workers feel threatened by mechanisation and automation. and by the over-organisation of their lives and the dull conformism that it demands. The very thing workers produce is not for their use and satisfaction; it is for selling with a view to realising profit. It is a commodity which faces workers in the market as a force obeying only economic laws, with no concern for their wellbeing.

These basic conditions of work under capitalism ensure that workers have little or no control over their working activity, yet control is of the very essence of work satisfaction. Most writers on the subject, whatever their other disagreements, stress the need for autonomy in work. Under capitalism, therefore, workers produce only as a means to an end — to earn their living, to reproduce themselves as workers. They do not produce for the intrinsic nature of the work, to develop freely their mental and physical energies. Workers are alienated not only from the means of production and the product, but also from the very act of working.

The economic base of socialism will be the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production by the whole of society, not a privileged section of it. The wage-labour and capital relation will no longer exist, therefore work would not take the form of employment. In dealing with socialism we can no longer speak of workers, only of freely associated people who own the social means of production in common, who produce for use and satisfaction. Production would no longer control the producers: at last they would be in control.

Capitalism has developed co-operation of labour, but only in the individual place of work, not in society at large. Socialism will be the highest state in co-operation and organisation of social labour. The lone individual can accomplish little; only in co-operation with others will individuals fully realise themselves.

Work will be an end in itself, done with the decision and inclination of the individual, not from external pressure. No longer will the same task have to be performed for a life-time through economic necessity. There will be great variety in occupation, which is important for work satisfaction, and greater efficiency.

Modern technology demands for its most efficient use interchange of activity, yet capitalism confines workers to small details of production, leaving them ignorant of other aspects, unable to adapt to the constantly changing needs of technology, as acquired skills are made redundant. When people spend their lives engaged only in fragments of production, they can only develop as a fragment, not as whole people. Thus capitalism cannot make full use of the technology it has created.

Socialism will be very different. The means of production will be used to the best advantage of all members of society. The productive process will present a whole variety of occupations, allowing people to move from one activity to another. Everyone will have opportunity to develop a range of skills and knowledge; thereby people will gain an insight into the productive process as a whole, instead of only tiny fragments of it. Society and individuals will work in direct relation to human needs; this is what having control over production means. Work will take on a completely different meaning; it will contribute to enriching the experience of life. No longer will it be a drudgery.

The objection may be raised that this all sounds fine, but even in socialism much unpleasant and boring work will still need to be done. Who would do the dirty and dangerous work? Well, most of it would be done with the aid of machinery, as Oscar Wilde said in The Soul of Man Under Socialism:

 All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things and involves unpleasant conditions. must be done by machinery.

Or more recently Lisl Klein in The Meaning of Work:

Technically there is probably very little which could not be done in the way of reorganising work so as to abolish those aspects of work which it might be demonstrated are harmful to the people doing them.

If there still should be awful work to do, we can only echo some more words of William Morris “. . . if there be any work which cannot be but a torment to the worker what then? Well then, let us see if the heavens will fall on us if we leave it undone” (Useful Work versus Useless Toil).

Handicraft is stressed throughout Morris's writing as a means of achieving happiness and satisfaction in work. He writes in an article, the Revival of Handicraft:

We do most certainly need happiness in our daily work, content in our daily rest, and all this cannot be if we hand over the whole responsibility for the details of our daily life to machines and their drivers. We are right to long for intelligent handicraft to come back to the world which it once made tolerable. 

But Morris was not against machinery, only against how it is used under capitalism. In speaking of unpleasant labour he writes: "If machinery had been used for minimising such labour, the utmost ingenuity would scarcely have been wasted on it" (Art under Plutocracy). Indeed, socialism is possible because the forces of production are developed to the point of potential abundance, which implies a high degree of technology. But socialism will have handicraft production as well. Some things that are now made by machines may be made by hand and vice versa.

Work involving the production of food, clothing and shelter is necessary whatever form society takes. Other kinds of work, such as composing music, painting, scientific research, may be done for its own sake. It is sometimes argued that if the necessary work could be limited to as short a time a possible, there would be more time to pursue the more satisfying. However in terms of fulfilment the distinction could not exist. For example designing and building a house is very necessary; we must have houses, but it can also be a very creative form of work in itself. Also, producing something we know to be useful is itself a contributing factor to work satisfaction. Again, painting serves no vitally useful purpose in that it does not feed, clothe or shelter us. But as long as people desire works of art, are they not also useful?

William Morris gave the following definition of art: "The thing I understand by real art is the expression by man of his pleasure in labour” (Hopes and Fears for Art). One thing is certain: if we are to gain real pleasure in our labour we must be in control of our productive activity, but since this is an impossibility within the framework of capitalism, the only possible way to achieve this is through socialism.

P. B. Young

What Price Charity (1968)

From the January 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

That the face of society is becoming increasingly more scarred by the demands being made from charity organisations is now only too painfully clear. That the social problems which these organisations were formed to alleviate are becoming more acute also is only too clear.

That there is no new thinking on the question of ends and means only shows the extent to which emotionalism rather than rationalism governs the actions of both those who beseech our support and those who are morally blackmailed into giving their support to charity organisations.

We are bombarded from all directions to support this appeal, or that cause; accusing fingers thrust their way into our faces reminding us that one day age too will menacingly envelope us. That illness, or loneliness, or worse incapacity might strike us down. We are informed that there are homeless children, and homeless aged. Not so very long ago we were seduced into filling tin boxes with metal coins to help the homeless children in China. In yet a later decade the labels on the collecting boxes were changed to the homeless children of Korea. Yet again the labels change to show that the Vietnam children should be the recipients of our help. No Cooks Tour of the world need remind us of those in need in the many parts of the globe. This function is well served by the rattle of little tin boxes. Christian Aid reminds us that millions are hungry. The National Food Survey Committee tells us that 500,000 children live in poverty in England, living on inferior diets. There are fund raising campaigns for diseases of the heart, polio, cerebral palsy, cancer and many others. Money raising is big business, quite often competing one against the other. The Aberfan fund did much to deplete the tin boxes of other charities.

The Jewish Board of Guardians was founded 107 years ago. The ambitions which animated the J.B.G. were similar to those of other reformist bodies, namely that inherent in their activity for voluntary work in such fields as housing, health and general welfare for immigrant Jews was the concept “that the amelioration of physical conditions and the relief of poverty was the key to the solution of all social problems.”

V. D. Lipman. in his book Social History of the Jews in England 1850- 1950 tells us that the various Jewish charities, including the J.B.G., were originally supported by large donations from wealthy and generous individuals such as the Rothschilds; he however does not question the origin of the accumulation of Rothschild’s wealth, neither does he question the fact of riches alongside poverty or physical degradation alongside privilege and comfort. These are accepted as part of some vast eternal plan, but somehow or other to he alleviated.

Mr. Lipman suggests that today's welfare state has replaced many of the functions previously performed by charities. Even if this were true, which it is not, he completely fails to understand that the “welfare" state is in itself a reflection of capitalism's inability to provide for those in want. The Observer agony column of 29 October last carried advertisements from 17 charities advertising the sale of Christmas cards on behalf of bodies concerned with cancer research, the deaf and the blind, spastics. diabetics, rheumatism and arthritis. The plight of sufferers from these diseases is pitiful, particularly when it is reported that economies have to be instituted in the Royal Marsden Hospital for Leukaemia (a killer disease). Because of shortages of funds wards will have to close down (Times 22.4.67).

In the same year that the [Jewish] Board of Guardians was founded in 1859, Karl Marx too had some observations to make about social problems. He wrote “that the working class may improve their material conditions in Capitalist society, but they do so at a cost of their social conditions". In the light of the many demands now being made by charity organisations throughout the world, for so many causes, it would seem that Marx was right. One does not have to look very long upon the social scene to see that the efficacy of charity organisations is being frustrated by the very conditions that have given rise to the problems they have set out to alleviate. That this so is substantiated by the charity organisations themselves.

The Jewish Chronicle of October 27 carries an article by a Mr. Mark Fineman, who gives a quotation from the Jewish Welfare Board’s annual report for 1922: “We recognise that bad times, the crushing burden of taxation, the insistence of appeals for our suffering co-religionists abroad, and for hospitals and for other general charities at home, all make it more difficult to support the Board in the generous way of our forerunners”. Mr. Fineman then concludes with the statement “These words are as true today”. This after 100 years!

Oxfam reminds us that 1967 marked their 25th anniversary. Their current appeal does show more realism by asking us to help put them out of business, but it then goes on to say “how many of the hungry will live to see their (Oxfam’s) 26th anniversary?”

That it is utopian to expect charity organisations to make any inroads into the problems they collect funds for is evident by the title of one particular organisation — World Hunger Week — in other words the title is a reflection of the proportion of the problem. They are no longer local in character or isolated “unfortunate incidents in the life of a nation”. On the contrary, they are increasing in dimension and mote acute in their effects. For example, the Jewish Chronicle quotes Browning “Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be” then goes on to say that “for many Jewish citizens old age threatens, fear, illness and isolation at the end.” And then proceeds to tell us that the support Israel fund did much to deplete the funds for the aged and for the infirm! And in another edition God had performed a miracle of divine intervention in order that an Israeli victory was assured, but in his divine inscrutable wisdom failed to intervene on behalf of aged Jews. That must be left to charity!

Neither the supporters nor the organisers are concerned, so it would seem, to establish the cause of poverty in the modern world. They fail to see that the one complements the other. They fail to recognise that sufferers from poverty and social inadequacy, or maladjusted human beings are in the main wage earners, and it is the fact that they are wage earners first, living in a highly competitive industrial society which renders them immediately vulnerable to all the slings and arrows of a rapacious system.

One other aspect of charity worth dwelling upon which organisers themselves might consider is the degradation of being the recipient of charity. Oscar Wilde observed in his essay The Soul of Man under Socialism that “it is safer to beg than to take, but it is nobler to take than to beg.”

Socialism being the conversion of private property into common property replacing competition with co-operation will restore society from one of wanton waste into one of plenty, where human beings will take from society according to their need, freed from the necessity of having to live for others but where man can finally live for himself but in cooperation with others.

Harry Hamme

Know your place (1984)

From the January 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

    "I can't cope with it. Sometimes I have to go hungry in order to feed the child. For two or three days at a time, I go without food. I just drink a cup of tea” (a single parent, Breadline Britain. LWT, 1983).   

  "Roland Waller (Tiny) Chairman and Managing Director of Lonrho, according to the company's latest set of accounts, picked up £266,034 in salary (1982). plus £3,990,513 in dividends. His income of £4,250,000 is the equivalent of £82,000 per week" (Labour Research, 1983).

What is wealth? It is the result of human effort being applied to the material environment. In order for human society to continue it needs to produce wealth. As our technology to operate on the environment has been changed in character, so the system of social relations in which we combine to produce wealth has changed. Very early forms of human beings arranged their production and distribution of wealth on a communistic basis. They suffered under no governments. They had no notion of individual property by which one person could exclude others from access to the wealth which many of them had taken part in helping to produce.

When, for reasons of scarcity of raw materials, competition between communities arose, the phenomenon of property took root. Since the emergence of property society the ways in which we have related to each other in the process of producing wealth have been changing. One epoch in human history was characterised by most of the wealth producers being physically owned and possessed by the ruling class. These were the ancient slave societies: what the doublespeak history books describe as the “ancient democracies of Greece and Rome".

Another era in our history worked on the basis of a pyramidal hierarchy with the monarch at the pinnacle and beneath him aristocrats, knights, serfs and peasants. The modern set of social relationships in which we work to produce wealth are those of the profit system — capitalism. We have reached a stage where we have developed a very efficient means of producing and distributing wealth, but the system (the set of social relations) that we use to produce and distribute wealth is one which conflicts with the needs of the majority of people. Today the factories, farms, offices, transport and communications networks are owned by a small minority of people and state bureaucracies. In return for wages and salaries the majority work for the minority. Each worker is paid less than the value of what he or she produces and the capital-owning minority live off the surplus value thus donated by the workers.

So the rich get increasingly rich by not working, while the workers remain in a constant state of poverty as wages and salaries are used up before the end of each week or month. Production in this system is aimed at the goal of profit. From the point of view of the capitalist there is no reason to allow commodities to be produced if there is no prospect of being able to sell them for a profit. This explains why millions of human beings die each year from starvation although society has the capacity to produce more than enough for everyone.

The nineteenth century social investigators Booth and Rowntree exposed and commented on the wretched poverty of Victorian society. Many subsequent improvements in society were, and still are, measured against this sort of backdrop. But the argument that “at least we are better off than we used to be" is not very helpful. You could say that compared with the workers of a century ago. the workers of today are not poor. But poverty is not measured by reference to the past. It needs to be measured by reference to the present. Bearing in mind the sort of prosperity that most people could enjoy today because of what we could produce, the majority are poor. There are, of course, degrees of poverty ranging from the millions who are destitute and starving to the millions who exhaust themselves each week in order to varnish the mediocrity of their lives with artificial fun.

Since the implementation of Beveridge's plan for social security by the Attlee government of 1945-50 some people have opposed the urgent need for socialism — that is classless society — on the grounds that you could, after all, make capitalism run well for the working class. Because capitalism works on the principle of continuous impoverishment of the working class it can never work in our interest, any more than a prison can be designed to work in the interest of the prisoners. The welfare state provides a careful system of indoctrination to produce literate, numerate. punctual, obedient and docile wage- slaves: state education; and a cheap medical service to keep workers just healthy enough. In a House of Commons debate on the Beveridge Report. Quintin Hogg MP (now Lord Hailsham) remarked that.

Some of my honorable Friends seem to overlook one or two ultimate facts about social reform. The first is that if you do not give the people social reform they arc going to give you social revolution . . .

(Parliamentary Debates. 17 February. 1943, Col. 1818)

In fact, Beveridge himself saw his plan as a means of making the existing social services “more economical". He observed that.

It is to the interest of employers as such that the employees should have security, should be properly maintained during the inevitable intervals of unemployment or of sickness, should have the content which helps to make them efficient producers.

(Beveridge Report. Social Insurance and Allied Services, p. 109)

In the same vein Samuel Courtauld, millionaire chairman of the great rayon company. said that he was.

   . . . strongly in favour of the principles and almost all of the proposals of the Beveridge Report . . .  I have not the faintest doubt that if we can survive the first severe business contraction which arises after the war, social security of this nature will be about the most profitable long-term investment the country could make. It will not undermine the morale of the nation’s workers: it will ultimately lead to higher efficiency among them and a lowering of production costs.

(Manchester Guardian, 19 February 1943).

The relative poverty of the majority is endemic to capitalism. The majority under this system will have to live second-rate lives. And being in this condition of poverty cannot be easily escaped from. Generally, you do not get rich by working hard. You just get tired.

Poverty is a social problem today not because there are insufficient resources. We can project laboratories into space. We can construct thriving cities where once there was desert. The current state of agricultural and industrial technique enable us to adequately feed and clothe all of the world’s 4.2 billion inhabitants. The political parties which stand to operate this present social system do not have a solution to the problem of poverty. According to the “virtuous" Victorian values advocated by vocal members of the Conservative Party it is individual frailty or idleness which is the cause of poverty although not perhaps in the case of the House of Lords and the top exclusive gentlemen's clubs.

Throughout its history, including prior to the seven occasions when it has formed the government, the Labour Party has made promises about reducing poverty. Perhaps more so than the other parties, it is seen as the party to do away with poverty. But because it has only ever stood to run capitalism the Labour Party has always, as a government, acted against the interest of the working class. During their last period of office, according to the Department of Health and Social Security, the number of poor families increased by 37 per cent between 1974 and 1977. Over the same period the number of individuals living in poverty increased by 43 per cent. The social service cuts introduced by the last Labour government meant the loss of 25,000 hospital beds. In its first two years, the share of the nation's wealth held by the top five per cent of people increased from 43.1 per cent to 46.2 per cent, while that of the bottom 50 per cent of the population fell from 7.1 per cent to 5.6 per cent.

Although the SDP/Liberal policy is difficult to discover, it appears that the Alliance is moderately in favour of moderately reducing poverty to an acceptable level. Before it eliminates poverty from society, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) seeks to sack Thatcher, reform the Labour Party and create more jobs. As jobs, or employment, or exploitation, were the cause of poverty in the first place, voting Labour to abolish poverty is about as logical as jumping into the bath in order to get dry.

The only solution to poverty is for the majority of people to act democratically and to put the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth into the hands of the whole community. With production carried out on the basis of "from each according to ability, to each according to need” there will be no poverty, just one prosperous world community. There will be no antagonism of economic interest between those who produce but do not possess and those who possess but do not produce. With one worldwide community democratically using the earth's resources to provide for our needs, we will finally have stepped from the contradictions of property society. The most painful and stark contradiction we suffer now is that the profit system itself has created a single, world-integrated society of production. Labour and resources come together from all over the planet to constitute many goods. Commerce has accelerated the development of highly efficient communications networks (including telephones, television communication, computer link-ups and holographs) and transport systems. But standing in the way, preventing this technology from being used to satisfy our needs, is the tyrannous idea that we need to have a social system with property owners, money, profits, wages, policemen, prisons, passports and nations. In his essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Oscar Wilde observed:

There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else. That is the misery of being poor.

Gary Jay