Letter: Why all this disagreement? (1995)

Letter to the Editors from the December 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

I read Allan Goldsmith’s report of the SWP public meeting in Chelmsford (October Socialist Standard).

In spite of years of becoming hardened to the senseless divisions among professing socialists, I am still capable of descending into a gloom of disappointment bordering on despair whenever yet another manifestation of what is the greatest strength of the capitalists is arraigned for all the world to see.

The capitalists, whose ethos is competition and conflict, display solidarity in defence of their system to the point of recruiting the working class to their cause to fight their battles for them. Professing socialists, whose ethos is co-operation and interdependence, make a virtue out of division by inflating tactical issues in displays of doctrinal infallibility.

In my article which I was privileged to have printed in the July Socialist Standard, I said:

'The achievement of socialism is the responsibility of all who take up the cause irrespective of which organisation, if any, they identify with. Socialism is no longer a luxury which can occupy our intellects in interminable arguments about strategies for achieving it to the exclusion of events unfolding around us. Socialism has become an urgent necessity. To hand over the world’s economy to the business elites to exploit for profit, by collusion or default, is a recipe for social and environmental disaster. If socialism is denied for lack of the will to unite, it will amount to a criminal act of betrayal of the working class.”

I said it to your readers and I would say the same to Tony Cliff and have often done so to SWP members.

Just suppose, for the sake of argument, that the working class came to "want and understand socialism". Can anyone really believe that the ensuing transformation could proceed with total unanimity where no differences would arise to be tested by discussion and debate, without controversy, without strongly held conflicting opinions to be resolved? Of course not. Would that be that, then? Would we say that we could not agree amongst ourselves and hand it all back? Of course not. We would have to display the will to overcome differences or disintegrate.

Human beings are not endowed with flawless strains of reason, logic and wisdom at birth. These qualities have to be learned by every generation by interaction. Doctrines of certainty produce only paralysis of thought and irrational acts by people anchored in their own obstinacy. The matter is not one of being "right” or "wrong” or of keeping faith with whatever flag you have nailed to the mast. No one is discredited by testing their beliefs or ideas and being ready to modify them by persuasion. My own belief in socialism has often been tested by a challenge to others to "talk me out of it”, and I have not yet been on the losing end of an argument with the capitalists nor ever expect to. But in engaging capitalists and professing socialists alike, there is much in the detail which advances my understanding and reinforces me in the view that with a will to achieving socialist unity, it can be done.

Subordinate issues should not overshadow the super-ordinate goal of realising socialist society. Whether Tony Cliff "tells the workers to vote Labour to beat the Tories" is irrelevant to them. They do it or not, anyway. What the "workers" find implausible is this advice being given by a party which uses as much newsprint condemning Labour's capitalism as it does attacking the Tories, yet makes no effort to present an alternative manifesto to the people by which they can register their support for socialism. As I have often been told in discussion with SWP members, it has more to do with the practical problem of installing large numbers of candidates and draining their funds and placing their capacity to publish and campaign at risk than any outright rejection of entering the electoral arena. I agree with Cliff that a socialist society is something that will not be realised until "many years in the future".

I also agree that "the Tories are the enemy” but so do the Liberal Democrats. So do we all. It is more important what defeats the Tories. Winning an election against the Conservative Party has never ushered in socialism. All the achievements of previous Labour governments this century have been either partially or wholly destroyed by Thatcher or Major. If Blair wins the next election, it will be on the basis of “giving the other lot a go" and not because the British people have changed their minds about capitalism. It will not even be a Scandinavian-style commitment to redistribution through the taxation system. The Tory Party, the "enemy", will be out of office but their ideas will prevail because their ideas will not have been defeated, only their personnel.

The defeat of capitalism can only come about by a commitment to socialism by the people. I am all for "teach, teach, teach” and Cliff shot himself in the foot by his disparaging remarks about the Socialist Party. But unless our message is presented widely and confidently by a united movement of socialists who are prepared to demonstrate the will and the maturity to rise above subordinate matters which can be discussed and debated, and focus their eyes on the super- ordinate goal of defeating capitalism, Tony Cliff will wait forever to have "socialism here and now”.

Professing socialists perpetuating a culture of competition amongst themselves contradict everything they claim to stand for by doing so. If professing socialists cannot achieve unity amongst themselves, why should anybody believe that a socialist society will be anything other than a chaotic shambles doomed to disintegration?

Peter Nielsen, 

Worcester

Reply:

Our differences with at least the leaders of the SWP are rather more than tactical. They see themselves as leaders, as the General Staff of the Revolution, and advocate a party organised on non-democratic lines, whereas we regard following leaders as disastrous and insist that the movement for socialism must, as a matter of principle, be thoroughly democratic both in its internal organisation and in the methods it employs. Socialism is a democratic society. Quite a different proposition from rule by a vanguard party.

Editors.

Socialist Unity — Is there any choice? (1995)

From the July 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

This article and the one on the following two pages should be
 read together since the first expresses some views which are 
countered in the second. Peter Nielsen is a former Labour
 parliamentary candidate.

"All it takes to do away with the ills of capitalism is a politically aware and motivated working class which wants and understands socialism." So said the Cover Feature, “What makes you angry?”, in the July 1992 edition of Socialist Standard. All? In a political environment where the word “socialism” is applied with such disregard for its real meaning, “understanding” it is no easy matter for people whose general political awareness is shaped by the capitalist agenda on which all mass media discussion takes place.

The experience of the working class of so-called “socialism” has not been a happy one. “Socialists” of many hues have come and gone this century world-wide, their promise unfulfilled through subversion and betrayal. In Britain, all the achievements of previous Labour governments have been partly or wholly destroyed since 1979. Cowed by Thatcher, seduced by an establishment which it has never repudiated anyway, and betrayed by its leaders. Labour now seeks an electoral mandate to govern the same old rotten system under Tony Blair declaring itself “a socialist party”. Coupled with the slavering triumphalism of the capitalists that “socialism is dead” following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, ordinary people are understandably lost in a maze of meanings. Worse still, the disowning of socialism by the Labour Party in recent years has only reinforced the capitalists in their propaganda that socialism is associated with hopeless idealism, incompetence and failure. The fact that the chronic economic and administrative incompetence of the nomenclatura of Soviet state capitalism caused it to collapse in chaos and defeat only adds to the scepticism of working class people. In their eyes, through their mass media, all systems end up with people at the top looking after themselves.

If socialism is to advance and not continue to be scandalised by vested interests who patronisingly describe it as a good idea which will never work in practice because of “human greed”, the task of socialists is not only to expose the ills of capitalism, but also to meet the challenge of cynicism and hopelessness so successfully nurtured by decades of Tory propaganda and Labour betrayal. Socialists need more than a definition of socialism. They need a language of socialism which expresses the rights and moral standards by which human beings must live to survive in peace, freedom and with justice. It must be capable of being articulated in a consistent way and of being recognised each time it is spoken.

The language of socialism must be the language of the ethical. It must not waver from principle. The concept of human rights must be total. It must not only concern itself with freedom from victimisation, false imprisonment, torture and execution. If anything, such acts are sanitised by being on the human rights agenda rather than in the sphere of criminality where they belong. Human rights must extend to the fields of economics, housing, health, education and the environment and they must be applied universally. The redistribution of wealth and the democratisation of industry must not be a mere policy option for socialists seeking votes in elections but must be taken for granted as an inevitable consequence of supporting socialism. Socialism should be synonymous with the highest standards of life. Human rights in the social and economic spheres demand the elimination of poverty, unemployment, homelessness and alienation. They also demand the highest levels of performance and professionalism in all work by each other for each other.

No conflict

There should be no conflict between the good of the individual and the good of the community. The two are inseparable. Individuals benefit from communities organised to provide the best in public services, and communities benefit from free and fulfilled individuals realising their full potential be they highly gifted or severely handicapped. The full realisation of the potential in all human beings is the ultimate guarantee of the best society that can be conceived. Th waste of one human being through neglect and exploitation denies others the fruits of their endeavour.

Such general tenets are not, as cynics would have it, the utopian beliefs of idealists and dreamers. They command wide support according to the ICM State of the Nation polls published annually in the Guardian newspaper. For years, they have shown big majorities who regard unemployment more serious than inflation, who think that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor, who oppose privatisations, who regard environmental protection as more important than producing “cheap” goods, and who prefer better public services to lower taxes. Substantial minorities still oppose Britain's nuclear weapons and support more trade union involvement in industry and the economy. There is an even split between those who believe that more socialist planning would be the best way to solve Britain's economic problems and those who did not.

These views are some way from being those of “a politically aware and motivated working class which wants and understands socialism”, but that is not the point. Given that such opinions are expressed in the context of the capitalist agenda by people who have rarely or ever been exposed to a true socialist alternative and whose most recent encounter with commentaries on socialism was intended to consign socialism as variously “unworkable”, “failed”, “discredited” and “dead”, they must be regarded as remarkable. They should tell us that all the political parties represented in Parliament, including the Labour Party, should speak for less than half of the people and that there is a huge political void waiting to be occupied by advocates of socialism.

Political void

The crunch is, how is it to be occupied? Who will occupy it? The Lahour Party has abandoned it if it ever occupied it at all. Socialist thinkers and activists are scattered across a profusion of parties and organisations which collectively represent a common rejection of capitalism and its wars, its environmental vandalism, its poverty, starvation, homelessness, unemployment and racism, and its ambition for the usurious enslavement of all humanity. How many more decades will it take socialists to work through their differences towards a socialist consensus? Is there no synthesis of socialism, democracy, peace, freedom and justice to which we can all subscribe?

If objectives can be broadly agreed, then two steps towards unity will have been made possible: A united critique of capitalism and a united vision of what should replace it. There only remains agreement about the process of achieving it. That will be difficult and will require the putting to pasture of some sacred cows on the left. It will be an iconoclastic endeavour, not against socialist sentiment but against long and dearly held convictions about the “only” way to defeat capitalism in a left culture in which there are many “only” ways including insurrection, revolution, entryism, the ballot box and just waiting around until the system grows rotten, collapses and dies.

The achievement of socialism is the responsibility of all who take up the cause irrespective of which organisation, if any, they identify with. Socialism is no longer a luxury which can occupy our intellects in interminable arguments about strategies for achieving it to the exclusion of events unfolding around us. Socialism has become an urgent necessity. To hand over the world's economy to the business élites to exploit for profit, by collusion or by default, is a recipe for social and environmental disaster. If socialism is denied for lack of the will to unite, it will amount to a criminal act of passive surrender to the capitalists and to betrayal of the working class. It is not just about filling a vacuum left by the Labour Party’s rightward shifts. It is also about a vacuum in the understanding of people who have never thought about politics, who are dissatisfied but don’t know what with, some of who may even vote for the Tories without being sure why. That requires that socialists organise to demand the attention given to the capitalist parties in the media, on the stump and on the street. Socialists must speak the language of socialism which the people understand. Above all, they must reach the people, confronting the capitalist agenda issue-by-issue, blow-for-blow.

United Left

Demanding attention requires presence. Presence comes from the status conferred by the strength of a united socialist front which cannot be dismissed as “marginal” or “extreme”. The capitalists may control the media through the ownership of its assets but they do not own the right of communication and dialogue between peoples any more than they own the rain in spite of their efforts to privatise it. Their monopoly of the use of the media and of the agenda should not be surrendered by default. As long as these powerful levers remain in their hands, the capitalists retain the ability to contain everything a divided Left can throw at them A united Left could not be denied, especially if it scored enough points under the capitalists' own rules of access to the media, namely by the election of MPs and councillors.

The point is not to sign up to the traditions of British politics and the institutions of the establishment which sustains them. It is to give united public expression to the socialist cause in a form which is familiar to people and which can reach people in an age of mass telecommunications which demands presence and status to justify participation. Virtue is not enough. A show of strength is needed, strength in numbers which demands attention and can show that socialism is not a scattered body of non-conformist belief but a philosophy which is the true reflection of the natural state of human society. To a rising generation which has known no other political environment than that which exists today, and to who this century’s two World Wars and the Cold War exist only in history’ books, the arguments for socialism must address the world as it is today. Not the “modern” world of Tony Blair which accepts a limited democratic influence over the forces of international capitalism, but the modern world whose awesome problems of inequality and environmental plunder and destruction can only be solved by co-operation through assent, inseparably by socialism and democracy.

The capitalists are rampant in the wake of the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the ascendancy of the so-called New World Order. If they are to be challenged, it must be done before it is too late. Socialists bear that responsibility. United we stand, divided we fall. After all, if professing socialists can’t get their act together, how will the people ever be persuaded “to want and understand socialism”?

Peter Nielsen

Blogger's Note:

Here's an obituary for Peter Nielsen which dates from 2018, and which gives more background on his political and personal life.

Is there a better alternative? (1995)

From the July 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Since its formation the Socialist Party has argued that it is
 essential for the working class to unite in order to gel rid of
 capitalism. But this unity must be on the basis of a clear
 understanding of what socialism is, of what capitalism is,
 and of how to replace one with the other.

Without winning the battle of ideas socialists will achieve nothing. Workers, who constitute the vast majority of society, will either have their own class-consciousness or they will fall victim to the ideological attack of the minority class who are the legalised exploiters of the profit system There is no middle ground: workers must either understand and want a co-operative society which is fundamentally different from the class-divided system we have or capitalism will carry on in its callous, destructive way.

So we agree with a good deal of what Peter Nielsen says. Yes, the capitalist agenda does dominate mass media communication and makes it far from easy for workers to think for ourselves. Added to that, there are schools and churches and all kinds of institutions dedicated, intentionally or otherwise, to the confusion of the working class Yes, the triumphalism or capitalism's apologists in the light of the alleged “failure of socialism” has misled millions of workers. The fact that the Labour Party has only ever stood for capitalism and that the so-called socialist countries were no more than attempts by élite-run states to manage capitalism (state capitalism) makes it easy for workers to assume that real socialism could never work. The recognition that socialists have a big battle on our hands, made more difficult not only by media disinformation but also by the historical actions of pseudo-socialists, is one that does not need to be pointed out to the Socialist Party. After all, we stand alone in the political arena as the only party professing socialism which was never for a minute taken in by the socialist claims of state capitalists and left-wing reformers of capitalism. We know just how big an ideological mess this history has created.

Indecencies of capitalism

So, what is to be the way forward out of the mess? We are told that we need more than a definition of socialism, but an ethical language within which to express it. In truth, it would be impossible to define and argue for socialism without pointing to the indecencies of capitalism. It is the fundamental opposition to the interests and feelings of the majority which arises from production for profit (capitalism) which makes production for use (socialism) so compelling and urgent. We are not seeking to win workers to support for a dry political definition, but to a new way of running the world, a different way of living which is co-operative, caring and free from the shackles of the market. Indeed, this means rejecting the individual/community dichotomy and recognising in practical terms the need for a society where the interest of one is the interest of all.

We agree also that there are many workers who are far from actively liking or supporting the profit system. Capitalism thrives upon the passive support of the scared and the uninformed. But there are those who will not vote for any of the capitalist parties and would agree with Peter Nielsen that this huge radical political void needs to be occupied by an alternative movement.

So, what are these people to do? How is the radical void to be filled? Clearly, not by the Labour Party. It never was socialist or radical, but now it is so far from seriously claiming to be so that nobody in their right mind would join it with a view to ending capitalism. Nor does the answer lie in the Leninist Left which has spent this century wasting workers’ time calling for a re-enactment of the insurrectionary tactics which gave rise the state-capitalist tyrannies and telling workers to vote Labour at every election: a history' of double-confusion. Clearly, the alternative is not going to come from their direction

So, what is the case for unity? We agree with Peter Nielsen that those who unite for socialism must understand what capitalism is and share a common socialist objective. Indeed, that is the basis for membership of the Socialist Party. All workers who oppose capitalism and seek the establishment of socialism, not just as definitions but as practically understood and experienced systems of society, must unite. In this sense, we are all for unity.

Unity for socialism

But can we unite with those whose professed radical or socialist energies amount to campaigns to reform capitalism? No—never! This is not because we doubt the sincerity of such would-be reformers or enjoy standing aloof from active struggles. But we must at all times and without compromise stick to the Big Issue of opposing capitalism as a whole, not just bits of it, and advocating socialism as a basic social alternative, not just a new policy for running capitalism. Organised socialists must be politically hostile to reformism, whilst doing our utmost to win reformists from the path of mending capitalism to that of ending it.

We are all for “a show of strength”, but numbers without understanding and clear-cut principles do not constitute strength but easily broken weakness. So, to be plain-speaking about it, we reject the proposal that we should unite with reformists and call instead for them to abandon their struggles for the crumbs from their masters’ tables and unite to take possession of the whole cake and the bakery in which it is made: common ownership and democratic control of the means of wealth production and distribution.

We do not reject Peter Nielsen's call for “socialist unity” out of sectarian indifference to the need to build a mass socialist movement. Far from it: there is nothing that we would more like to see. But the unity of socialists with non-socialists, semi-socialists or single-issue radicals would be to build a castle made of straw.

In the spirit of Peter Nielsen’s enthusiastic and hopeful call for socialist unity, let us offer a different proposition. Consider what would happen if the active support for the Socialist Party, which is small at present, were to be doubled or trebled or multiplied by ten? What impact might 10,000 politically-conscious and actively-organised socialists make if enough people were to get to the roots of society’s problems and join our cause? And if we allow ourselves to think of 10,000, how long before they became 100,000? What if such numbers of people were to distribute socialist literature in opposition to the lie-sheets of the capitalist media? What if every phone-in programme had hundreds of socialists jamming the switchboards intent on arguing the need to get rid of production for profit and establish production for need? Now, that would be unity. It would be a force to be reckoned with. Of course, within a growing socialists movement there would be different people motivated by different problems, but all would be united by a recognition that the root cause of these problems is this rotten capitalist system.

These are exciting and invigorating thoughts, but left in the realm of though they will achieve nothing. So, why not start now? Why not think about uniting with those of us who are committed to the single aim of world socialism? Why not persuade friends, workmates and family to join us, or at least read what we have to say? Why not lake ten copies of the Socialist Standard instead of one or two—or write in for a few hundred free leaflets to distribute in your area? Why not organise a socialist meeting locally? Invite along the local radicals, convince them of the need for real socialist unity and let’s have new branches and groups everywhere. Why not unite for the greatest historical aim in human history: the possession of the world and all of its resources by its inhabitants? And why not do it now?

Steve Coleman

New Realism (1992)

From the December 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

They drove us from the land on which
we fed
into town and city
They starved us lest their bidding we did
to labour without pity 

They drove us from the streets on which
we met
into pub and hovel
They beat us lest our voices we quelled
to listen and to grovel 

They drove us from halls in which we
gathered
into suburb and flat
They sent us papers and screens
commending us
to apathy and tat 

They drove the sight out of the world
from our eyes
with censorship and soap
But our eyes still wandered towards the
land
and lingered yet in hope 

They drove our heads into wired iron
hats
of myth and fantasy
We found ourselves back on the land
in virtual reality.
                                                      Peter Nielsen