SPGB Meetings (1967)

Party News from the December 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard 

The Referendum – Where We Stand (1997)

From the September 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Parliament for Scotland? An Assembly for Wales? Unable to agree among themselves and afraid to go ahead without popular support–last time they put this to a referendum their proposals were thrown out–our rulers have decided to ask us our opinion on the matter.

We should be flattered, but don’t be fooled. These proposals are part of a smokescreen to disguise the fact that the Labour Party cannot deliver, and no longer wants to deliver, social reforms aimed at shifting wealth and power from the privileged few to working people.

Labour has always accepted the profit system. They used to believe they could humanise it by social reform legislation. Not any longer. Bitter experience has taught them that where reforms and profits come into conflict, it is reforms that have to give way. The last Labour government under Callaghan ended up applying this and Blair had promised to do the same even before he became Prime Minister.

The Labour Party fully accepts now that priority has to be given to profits and no longer promises more spending on social reforms. But, to distinguish itself from the Tories, Labour still wants to retain a reforming image. But how? By finding reforms which don’t come into conflict with profits. Constitutional reforms fill the bill perfectly. They don’t interfere with profit-making. They don’t cost more money. And they give rise to an illusion of change.

It is in this light that the Labour government’s proposals for a Scottish Parliament and a Welsh Assembly should be seen, along with their proposals for turning the House of Lords into a huge non-elected quango and for elected mayors and other such gimmicks. But it’s all completely irrelevant as far as ordinary people are concerned.

Constitutional reform is of no benefit or relevance to us. It leaves our lives and the problems the profit system causes completely unchanged. Exploitation through the wages system continues. Unemployment continues. A crumbling health service, a chaotic transport system, a polluted environment, failing schools, rising crime and drug addiction and the general breakdown of society all continue. As far as solving these problems is concerned, constitutional reform is just a useless irrelevancy.

Deficient Democrats

Naturally, Labour wraps its irrelevant, constitutional reforms up in democratic rhetoric. Elected assemblies in Edinburgh and Cardiff, we are told, would be an extension of democracy, bringing power nearer to the people, so how can Socialists not be in favour of this?

Yes, Socialists are in favour of democracy, and socialism will be a fully democratic society, but full democracy is not possible under capitalism. Supporters of capitalism who talk about “democracy” always mean only political democracy since economic democracy–where people would democratically run the places where they work–is out of the question under capitalism, based as it is on these workplaces being owned and controlled by and for the benefit of a privileged minority.

You can have the most democratic constitution imaginable but this won’t make any difference to the fact that profits have to come before meeting needs under capitalism. The people’s will to have their needs met properly is frustrated all the time by the operation of the economic laws of the capitalist system which no political structure, however democratic, can control.

It is not imperfections in the political decision-making process that’s the problem but the profit system and its economic laws. And the answer is not democratic reform of capitalism’s political structure but the replacement of capitalism by socialism.

As a society based on common instead of class ownership of the means of production, socialism will fulfil the first condition for a genuine democracy. Because it will be a classless society without a privileged wealthy class everyone can have a genuinely equal say in the way things are run. Some will not be more equal than others, as they are under capitalism, because they own more wealth. Socialism will be a society where the laws of profit no longer operate since common ownership and democratic control will allow people to produce to meet their needs instead of for the profit of a few as today.

The argument about elected Scottish and Welsh assemblies bringing power nearer to the people might have something in it if, even within the limited context of mere political democracy, the proposed assemblies were going to have some real powers.

But they are not.

All their money is to come from the central government, and the only “power” they will have will be to rearrange slightly how the limited amount of funds they will be given is to be spent. In other words, they will have no more power than existing borough and county councils.

They will be part of the administrative arm of central government and their members will be no more than elected civil servants spending central government money. All that would happen would be the introduction of another layer of elected bureaucrats. Another trough for the professional politicians to get their snouts into perhaps, but ofno significance to ordinary people.

If our rulers want to reform the machinery of capitalist government in this way, that’s up to them. But spare us the pretence that it’s some great extension of democracy.

Nasty Nationalists

Also urging a “yes” vote are the Nationalists of the SNP and Plaid Cymru. They see the sham parliament with token powers that is on offer as a step towards their goal of an independent parliament with full powers to impose taxes and make laws.

This argument for voting “yes” cuts no ice with Socialists either. We are not nationalists–in fact we are implacably opposed to nationalism in whatever form it rears its ugly head–and we see the establishment of an independent Scotland or Wales as yet another irrelevant, constitutional reform. One of the last things the world needs at the moment is more states, with their own armed forces and divisive nationalist ideologies.

Nationalism is based on the illusion that all people who live in a particular geographical area have a common interest, against people in other areas. Hence the supposed need for a separate state and a separate government to defend this separate interest.

This flies in the face of the facts. All over the world, in all geographical areas, the population is divided into two basic classes, those who own the productive resources and those who don’t and have to work for those who do, and whose interests are antagonistic.

The non-owning class have a common interest, not with the owning class who live in the same area, but with people like themselves wherever they live. The interests of workers who live in Scotland and Wales are not opposed to the interests of those who live in England–or France or Germany or Russia or Japan or anywhere else in the world.

Nationalists like the SNP and Plaid Cymru who preach the opposite are spreading a divisive poison amongst people who Socialists say should unite to establish a frontierless world community, based on the world’s resources becoming the common heritage of all humanity, as the only framework within which the social problems which workers wherever they live face today. This is why Socialists and Nationalists are implacably opposed to each other.

We are working in opposite directions. Us to unite workers. Them to divide them. So, insofar as the proposed assemblies in Scotland and Wales are a sop to nationalism–as to a certain extent they are–that would be more a reason for voting “no” than for voting “yes”.

Useless Unionists

So, what about voting “no”? It’s tempting. After all, Socialists don’t want constitutional reform (we want socialism) and a “no” vote would be a repudiation of the divisive doctrines of the narrow-minded Scots and Welsh Nats. But in the end the point at issue–a mere constitutional reform which will leave profit-making, exploitation, unemployment and all the other social problems quite untouched–is so irrelevant that it is not worth taking sides.

In addition, those leading the campaign for a “no” vote–various business people and the Tory rump–are conservatives in both senses of the term. They want to leave things as they are. They don’t want to change anything. We don’t see any point in diverting our energies to changing the constitution but we certainly want things to change. We want people to change the economic and social basis of society and establish socialism in place of capitalism. So we’ve nothing in common with them.

They fear that the proposed change will be the first step on a slippery slope leading to the break-up of the United Kingdom. Maybe, though this is not the opinion of Labour and the Liberals who are also Unionists. The leading “no” campaigners, too, are nationalists. Not of course Scottish or Welsh Nationalists, but British Nationalists, since that is what the Unionists are, spreading the poison that it is all the people in the British Isles who have a common interest against people everywhere else. But Socialists are just as much opposed to British Nationalism as we are to Scottish or Welsh or any other nationalism.

Just because we are not prepared to back the efforts of Scottish and Welsh Nationalists to break away from the United Kingdom–and vigorously oppose their efforts to split the trade union movement–does not mean that we are Unionists. We don’t support the Union. We just put up with it while we get on with our work of convincing people to reject world capitalism in favour of world socialism.

Vote for Socialism

So we shan’t be voting “yes” or “no”. We shall, however, be voting. We’ll be going to the polling station and, since they are not giving us this option on the voting paper, we’ll be writing the word “SOCIALISM” or “SOSIALAETH” across it.

If you want socialism, we urge you to do the same, as a way of registering your support for world socialism and your rejection both of separatist Welsh and Scottish nationalism and of unionist British nationalism.

This article is also available in leaflet form. Readers in Scotland and Wales wanting copies to distribute should write to: 52 Clapham High St, London SW4 7UN.

Rear View: It started with a twit or rather a tweet (2020)

The Rear View Column from the February 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

It started with a twit or rather a tweet

During the season of goodwill, one Jamie Evans saw a jigsaw map of Great Britain and tweeted ‘is there any reason Wales has suddenly become part of England?’ The Daily Mirror (24 December), along with others, covered the story: ‘M&S blasted for £8 jigsaw of the UK that offends “absolutely everyone”‘. Jamie, a Plaid Cymru councillor in Neath, said it’s not the first time the store had forgotten about Wales. He hit out: ‘During the 2016 European football championships, which Wales were in, M&S put up posters urging people to support England. We’re used to it in Wales now, being subjected to that nonsense’. The nonsense is manifold. The original map dates from the 1800s. Whether Ireland (then a colony), Scotland, Wales, even Cornwall are independent matters not. Plaid Cymru deny that our problems are caused by the class monopoly of the means of production, in short, by capitalism. The solution lies not in nationalism, which is a delusion and a snare, but in world socialism.

Countries come and go, borders change, capitalism persists

Remember Refugia, the Utopian island between Italy and Tunisia, proposed as a solution to the ‘refugee and migrant crisis’ by two Oxford dons in 2016? The idea is going nowhere and that of No Borders fading: noborder.org has been dormant since mid-2013 and noborders.org.uk not updated since early November last year. Their slogans are worth recalling: No Border, No Nation, Stop Deportations! and No one is Illegal. Remember Biafra? The war for independence from Nigeria lasted over two and a half years and more than one million people lost their lives. Also worth recalling is that ‘Nigeria is an entirely artificial, colonial construct created by the British Empire (and bounded by the French Empire). Its boundaries bear no relation to internal national entities, and it is huge. The strange thing is that these totally artificial colonial constructs of states generate a genuine and fierce patriotism among their citizens…. ‘ (ICH. 14 March 2015). And: ‘Less than two decades after the painstaking removal of a massive border fence designed to keep people in, Bulgarian authorities are just as painstakingly building a new fence along the rugged Turkish border, this time to keep people out’ (New York Times, 5 April 2015).

Time For a New ‘Christmas Truce‘?

 ‘They lived in similar squalor, shared the same God, and celebrated the same holidays. It was December 24, 1914, Christmas Eve, and – though they spoke different languages and had ruthlessly killed one another for over four months – the British and German soldiers in the opposing trench lines had much in common’ (truthdig.com, 25 December). 

The author makes the same point about shared interests of those involved in conflicts in the 100 years since then. Indeed, the vast majority of those existing in countries as diverse as Afghanistan, Germany, Iraq, Libya, Russia and Syria have far more in common than they do with their respective generals, politicians and economic overlords, a fact recognised before, during and after the war to end all wars:

  ‘…The poor have no country, in all lands, they suffer from the same evils, and they, therefore, realise that the barriers put up by the powers that be the more thoroughly to enslave the people must fall’ (International Working Men’s Association, 1866). 

  ‘In a class society, “the nation” as a homogeneous socio-political entity does not exist. Rather, there exist within each nation, classes with antagonistic interests and “rights”’ (Rosa Luxemburg, The National Question, 1909). 

  ‘I have no country to fight for; my country is the Earth, and I am a citizen of the World’ (Eugene Debs, 1915). 

  ‘The old lie: It is sweet and right to die for one’s country’ (Wilfred Owen, 1918). 

  ‘.. [no] policy for settling minority problems and international rivalries within the framework of capitalism is capable of bringing peace and democracy to the peoples of the world. Another war would be followed by new treaties forced on the vanquished by the victors, and by preparations for further wars, new dictatorships and terrorism. The Socialist Party… reiterates the call it issued in 1914: “Having no quarrel with the working class of any country, we extend to our fellow workers of all lands the expression of our goodwill and socialist fraternity, and pledge ourselves to work for the overthrow of capitalism and the triumph of Socialism“’ (Socialist Party, September 1939). 

  Imagine there’s no countries; It isn’t hard to do; Nothing to kill or die for; And no religion, too (Imagine, John Lennon, 1971).

Plaid Cymru fallacy (1969)

From the May 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

The basic argument of Plaid Cymru is that our problems are caused by London government and the political link with England; that the London parties are bound to fail because they work within this system. The only solution, they say, is to set up a separate state in Wales.

It is true Labour, the Liberals, and the Tories are bound to fail but not because they they work within the so-called United Kingdom. They fail because they work within the economic system of the class ownership of the means of production and the profit motive. As long as they do this, it is the economic system that says what governments shall do, not the other way round, as the miserable failure of the Labour government shows with its record of continual backsliding on its promises in the face of economic pressures.

If you accept that it is the economic system, and not the political set-up, that causes our problems then the fallacy of Plaid policy is obvious. A separate state would not more solve them than a change of government in London. Any government in Cardiff would be in the same position as any in London: trying to see that goods produced in its state sell as cheaply as possible on the world market.

Abertillery (1965)

From the July 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Abertillery is said to be the constituency with the largest percentage of Socialist voters in the country. If only it were! Certainly the Labour Party has dominated the area for over 30 years but that’s a different matter altogether.

Labourism came to the mining valleys of Wales, in one of which is Abertillery, through the activities of the Independent Labour Party before the first world war. In South Wales, with over one hundred branches, the ILP was the leading light of the popular Social Reform movement which arose from the miseries and indignities the miners had to suffer. After a period of pre-war “Lib-Labism” all the mining constituencies fell to the Labour Party, which by 1922 had become the largest party in Wales.

The local councils too came under Labour control in this period. The Labour and ILP pioneers were at least sincere —although confused—men and women. Some had a very adequate knowledge of capitalist society and were well-versed in the theories of Marx. Today’s Labour people are of a different calibre.

For over thirty years the Labour Party has controlled the local councils of the area; only in the last ten years have they been opposed at election time. Many Labour candidates are still returned unopposed. The fact that the South Wales coalfield is a one-party area has had its inevitable effects on the Labour Party. Today in this area it has ceased to be even a sincere, if confused, popular movement for Social Reform and has become an organization for running the local government machine—right from the selection of councillors to administering the Water Boards.

The old pioneers with their idealism have disappeared and a new generation has taken over. The new men—the councillors, the county councillors, the aldermen, the JP’s—who include the Labour MP, Alderman Clifford Williams JP, still speak the language of the pioneers. In the past by-election they have freely talked of Socialism and said they were Socialists. They have described their party as that of the people against the property-owners. They have declared that the forces of wealth are trying to smash the Labour Movement (if that’s not pure rhetoric what is?). Financiers have been called mad dogs. It’s the sort of language that would make the slick efficiency boys who are remodelling the Labour Party’s image throw up their hands in despair. But they needn’t worry; it goes down well. It’s doubtful if these people really know what the words they uttered originally meant. In any case it is an open question who are more despicable: the arrogant councillors mouthing the phrases of the Labour pioneers or those who don’t attempt to disguise the fact that they have capitulated to capitalism completely.

It is often said that the working class have a short memory. Certainly there are many grounds for such a conclusion but the working class of the mining valleys of Wales remember alright. They remember what the Labour candidate described as “the dark, desperate years” of 1920-1939 which were years of “misery, want and privation During this period the mining communities did suffer—from the attacks on their living standards by the coal-owners and from the unemployment and destitution of the years of the great depression.

At one end of the valley, where the Abertillery constituency is, lies the mining village of Nantyglo which in English means “coal valley”; today there are some eight pits in the constituency. Indeed Abertillery may well be the constituency with the highest percentage of miners on the register in South Wales, perhaps even higher than in the more famous Rhondda valley further west. The proportion is not what it used to be and an increasing number of workers are employed in nearby steelworks and factories. Nevertheless the mining tradition is dominant.

Unfortunately, Abertillery’s remembering of the past has taken the form of an unshakeable faith that the Labour Party is their Party and has their interests at heart. Nothing the Labour Party has done, or is doing, seems to shake this faith. Questioned over Vietnam, Alderman Williams said that as the Labour Party was “dedicated to peace” it must be right in what ever it was doing over the matter — and the audience cheered! On another occasion he declared that the Labour government had reduced the arms bill by £50m—and nobody questioned him.

The Conservative Party in an area such as this is in a hopeless position. The few thousand professional and tradespeople who make up its support are not organised to present a challenge to the Labour Party save at national elections—and then their election machine is manned mainly by outsiders. In between such elections the Conservative Party ceases to exist, though in recent years those who vote Conservative have been organising themselves into so-called “Independents' Associations” to contest local elections.

Nowadays the real political opposition to the Labour Party locally comes from Plaid Cymru, the nationalist party. Surprisingly, Plaid Cymru has been making headway in the mining valleys of Wales—they have councillors in Merthyr (which was Keir Hardie’s seat) and in the Rhondda, once the home of Noah Abblett and the syndicalists who wrote The Miners’ Next Step. This may be a sign that a political change is coming to these valleys after decades of one-party Labour domination.

The fourth political party operating in the area, the Communist Party, did not contest the by-election. The South Wales coalfield is one of the few areas where the so-called Communist Party has acquired a few seats on the local councils. However most of their councillors have been elected by Labour voters for multi-member wards. In the by-election campaign, an attempt was made to smear the Labour candidate by claiming that he was a Communist Party member or supporter in the 1930’s.

Whoever started this rumour was obviously unaware of political conditions in the mining valleys of South Wales; even if it had been true it would have helped rather than hindered the Labour candidate. For the Communist Party, by being militant trade unionists in the NUM, have earned the respect of many miners—the nickname “commo” has exactly the opposite connotation to the American one “commie". What support the Communist party has won has not been so much on its "principles" as on its trade unionism. Thus it is more a trade union pressure group than a gang of Russian nationalists like the CP in the industrial towns.

Adam Buick

Plaid Cymru is not the answer for Wales (1968)

From the October 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

If the results of July’s by-election in Caerphilly and the one last year in the Rhondda are anything to go by, nearly four out of every ten workers in the mining valleys now support Plaid Cymru, which wants a separate state in Wales. Since at the last general election Labour held most of these seats with majorities of up to and over 20.000 this represents a dramatic change of political opinion.

Plaid Cymru fought this election at Caerphilly (where in 1923 stood the first Communist Party candidate) more on Labour’s failure and their own reform programme than on their ultimate aim of a separate slate. With unemployment in Caerphilly at 8 per cent, which on a national scale would mean two million on the dole, they had plenty of discontent to work on. They argue that it is “London government" that causes our problems. The solution, apparently, is Cardiff government. This is nonsense. Our problems are not caused by London government but, as elsewhere, by the class monopoly of the means of production, in short, by capitalism. Their solution lies not in nationalism, which is a delusion and a snare, but in world Socialism.

Sometimes, Plaid members claim their party is the vehicle for “socialism in Wales". This too is absurd as it is not possible to set up Socialism in one country alone.

Labour’s reaction to this challenge was revealing. They stopped at nothing in their campaign against the "separatists" They dishonestly suggested that Plaid Cymru encouraged bomb outrages and wanted to reserve the best jobs (a matter dear to the heart of every Labour councillor) for those who spoke Welsh. They spoke of “incipient fascism". They claimed to be against nationalism as it put up barriers between people. One local official said he had nothing against workers in England, Scotland or Ireland (he did not mention anywhere else) and wanted a “socialist Britain.” Fred Evans, the candidate, too wanted, or so he said, "socialist, not separatist, solutions". The main case against a separate state of some of the Welsh Labour MP's who spoke was obviously a concern lest their careers in London come to an abrupt end. Michael Foot, who sits for Ebbw Vale, was afraid that a separate Wales and a separate Scotland would leave England with a built-in Tory majority, that is. would leave the Labour politicians in permanent opposition. Yet apparently the Tories have their uses. One Labour leaflet headed “Nationalism Doesn’t Pay” was partly a reprint of an anti-separatist item from the Daily Telegraph.

The Labour Party’s attitude here is just hypocrisy. They are not against violence, but have always supported wars and armed forces. If any party deserves the “fascist" tag surely it is Labour who have done so much to lay the foundations for a corporate state in Britain. Nor are they against nationalism: they are British nationalists. As for putting up barriers, was it not Labour who greatly strengthened the immigration colour bar? A “socialist Britain" is no less ridiculous than a “socialist Wales" and for the same reason.

Since a separate state is in fact no solution to our problems Labour was on stronger ground in dismissing this as irrelevant and in pointing to Eire where, despite an independent government in Dublin, there are the same problems as here such as high unemployment and emigration.

Although it is heartening to see a revival of political activity and argument in the valleys after years of Labour one-party rule, it is a pity that this is taking the form of rejecting one futile party for another, even if it is breaking away from the Tory-Labour Tweedledum-Tweedledee farce.

Party News (1968)

Party News from the January 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

Kent Debate

Last November members of our Woolwich and Dartford branches put over the socialist case at the South East Model Parliament. Our comrade H. Ramsay proposed:

That this House, recognising the failure of the system of private and state ownership known as capitalism to solve the problems of society, declares that the solution of these problems lies in the establishment of a social system based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth, by and in the interest of the whole of society.

In what one local paper called “one of the most vigorous and electric debates in the Parliament’s first year of life” the main opposition to the motion came from the Tories who were unable in their arguments to rise much above the profit-is-an-incentive and look-at-East Germany level. Needless to say our members were easily able to deal with such objections. The debate was fully reported in the Kentish Times and the Kentish Independent.

Debate with Plaid Cymru

On December 10 the Party debated the London branch of Plaid Cymru at one of our Soho Square meetings.

Our comrade Buick argued that the basic fallacy of all nationalism, British as well as Welsh, was in seeking national solutions to world problems. The working class, he said, was a world-wide class. A change of state would not help solve working class problems any more than a change of government. For their cause lay not in the form or type of political set-up but in the economic system. Workers of all lands should unite to change this system from one based on the class ownership of the means of life to one based on common ownership and democratic control with production for use, not profit.

Dafydd Stephens, for the Plaid, said that the Welsh people had a long radical tradition and were still today overwhelmingly left wing. Association with England was holding back social change in Wales. Plaid Cymru, he said, could not wait for the people of England let alone the people of the world to change. They wanted an independent Wales now. With independence Wales would be able to push through many radical social measures as had other small countries like Norway.

Correction

In the article "Religion Retreat" in the December Socialist Standard occurs the passage “Catholics and Protestants, Atheists and Jews, are found in any and every political party, according to individual conviction.” This, of course does not apply to the Socialist Party of Gt. Britain where rejection of religion, in theory and practice, is a condition of membership.

Books for classes

We require books for the purpose of the Party’s Educational classes. Any member or sympathiser who wishes to dispose of books on Socialist theory, History or Politics is asked either to donate or offer them to us. All books received will be acknowledged.

Party Educational Organiser

Welsh Nationalism (1968)

From the May 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

Plaid Cymru—the Party of Wales—was set up in 1925 but only in the last decade or so has it become a real political force. Its basic aim is that Wales should be an independent state within the British Commonwealth. It also has a programme of vote-catching reforms ranging from "workers control” to pensions tied to the cost-of-living index. The general character of Plaid Cymru is well epitomised by the man who has been its President for over twenty years, Gwynfor Evans, recently elected MP for Carmarthen. Evans, Welsh-speaking, is a Congregationalist and a pacifist.

Wales is overwhelming anti-Tory. The great majority of Welsh people in elections vote for one or other of the radical parties—Labour, Liberal or Plaid Cymru. The reasons for this are to be found in Welsh history. Wales was joined with England in 1536. As a result of the deliberate policy of the Tudors the Welsh privileged class became English-speaking landlords with Welsh-speaking tenants. In the 18th and 19th centuries Wales, then more or less pagan, went through a religious revival. The significance of such revivals at the dawn of industrial capitalism is now well known. Protestant sects, especially Methodism served to break new workers into the ways of capitalism by encouraging hard, sustained work. Thus a further difference developed between the landlords and their tenants. Not only, did they speak different languages but they were now of different religions. The landlords were Anglicans, their tenants non-conformists. Most of the capitalists in the South—steelmasters and colliery-owners— were also non-conformists. In fact they, backed by their workers, played a prominent part in the campaign for the first Reform bill in 1832. The landowning families were of course Tories while the capitalists, tenant farmers and workers tended to support the radical wing of what was to become the Liberal Party.

In 1847 a Commission inquiring into education in Wales reported. Its report attacked Welsh as a barbaric language and implied that the sooner it disappeared the better. This incident known as the Treason of the Blue Books triggered off a wave of protest and greatly contributed to a growth in nationalist feeling amongst the Welsh-speaking middle class. Some talked of independence, most of Home Rule. In the election that followed the passing of the second Reform Act in 1867 the Liberals emerged as the dominant party in Wales. They particularly demanded disestablishment of the Church, as in Wales the majority non-conformists had to pay tithes to the minority Anglicans. The Liberal Party as a whole was too scared to call for disestablishment in England but eventually backed this for Wales. Parnell’s Irish Party, composed of Irish MP’s at Westminster, was admired by many Welsh radicals and there was talk of a Welsh Party too. Cymru Fydd (Young Wales) with which Lloyd George was associated, favoured Home Rule for Wales and the revival of the Welsh language and also supported tenant farmers against their landlords in riots, boycotts, rent and the tithe strikes. But by this time the capitalists who dominated the South Wales Liberal Federation were becoming conservative and it was they who finally came to dominate the Welsh Liberals.

In the 1906 election not a single Tory was returned for Wales. All were either Liberals or Lib-Labs from the mining areas. After trouble at the turn of the century when local councils refused to subsidise Church schools from the rates the Liberals agreed to disestablishment but this was delayed by the war and was not carried out till 1918. This ended the religious issue but the stigma of supporting a “foreign” church stuck to the Tories so that in Wales it was the Liberals who became the conservative opponents of the rising Labour Party (though between the wars the Welsh Liberal Party was not much more than the personal political machine of Lloyd George). Labour, by winning the industrial areas of the South, became the dominant party in Wales soon after the first world war. Since the last war they have won over the rest of Wales so that now the Liberals have only one seat there.

Carmarthen, which Labour won from the Liberals in 1957, fell to Plaid Cymru in 1966. In March last year in Rhonnda West, a traditionally Red mining area, Plaid Cymru came second with 10,000 votes, getting two out of every five votes cast. Are these just freak by-election results? Or is this the beginning of a process in which Plaid Cymru will replace Labour as the radical party in Wales just as Labour once replaced the Liberals? It is difficult to say at the moment. At the last General Election there was no real swing to the Nationalists. Since then, however, Labour administration. of capitalism has disillusioned many workers and the election of a nationalist MP is a breakthrough that may convince many more that Plaid Cymru could succeed. The Plaid has pursued the policy of building up its strength from the grass-roots, through local elections. Local politics in much of Wales is non-party so Plaid Cymru candidates stand and sit, like Gwynfor Evans on Carmarthen County Council, as independents. Although they have had no success in Cardiff and Swansea (where the Tories are well-organised) it is significant that in the mining valleys (where Tories and Liberals are unknown) it is Plaid Cymru that has emerged as the main opposition to Labour. Workers in these areas have begun to tire of years of unchallenged Labour rule which has turned the local Labour parties into mere machines for selecting councillors. Plaid Cymru already has its own councillors in the Rhondda and Merthyr.

If Plaid Cymru were to become the major party in Wales this would cause a problem for the capitalist class of Britain. They would be faced with the choice of breaking-up the United Kingdom (economic madness as far as they are concerned) or of accepting the consequences of refusing the demand for an independent Wales. But that is their problem. Socialists are concerned about workers in Wales. How would a “free” Wales affect them? Would it be in their interests? As elsewhere it is those who have to sell their mental and physical energies for a wage or salary who make up the great majority of people in Wales. It is for their votes that the various parties compete. Plaid Cymru has to convince workers that their problems arise from the political link of Wales with England and that a break would help solve them. They particularly play up the fact that Wales is radical while England is Tory. That political association with England is the cause of working class problems in Wales is completely false. Working class problems in all lands—and they are basically the same everywhere—arise from the fact that the means of life belong to a privileged few. Their roots are in the social rather than the political set-up. A new state would no more solve them than a change of government or Prime Minister. A social revolution, necessarily world-wide (as capitalism itself is), is what is needed. This is why the Socialist Party of Great Britain opposes Plaid Cymru.

Nevertheless, in the context of reform politics Plaid Cymru is having some success, and why not? Look at the trivial explanations offered for working class problems by the rival parties. The Tories say it is because Labour is doctrinaire and incompetent. Labour says it's Tory callousness and misrule. The Liberals say the two big parties ignore the needs of ordinary people. So why cannot Plaid Cymru get on by blaming “English government” and the “English parties”? Whether workers in Wales vote for the Plaid because they really believe in independence for Wales or because they fed that this is the best way to air their grievances is debatable. Probably the latter, for while it is true that the decline of the Welsh language seems to have been halted there is still no sign of what nationalists would call a national consciousness. What may well happen is that as Plaid Cymru grows the other parties, and especially Labour, will make concessions: equal status for the Welsh language leading perhaps to Home Rule on the lines of Northern Ireland. This would be of no use to the working class and would give Plaid Cymru an alibi for failure. It would allow them to argue that the radical, reforming Regional government of Wales failed (as it must) not because capitalism can not be run in the interests of workers, as Socialists say, but because independence was not complete. In fact the worst fate that could befall Plaid Cymru would be to have to govern a “free” Wales. Then they would find that do matter how sincere or radical their intentions this made no difference. They would have to face the fact that capitalism (for this system would continue after independence) runs on profit and cannot be made to work in the interests of all. They would find that the problems they promised to solve did not arise, as they claimed, from the link, with England or from a conservative England holding back a radical Wales. At least that would be a useful lesson. But how much better would it be were workers to heed what Socialists say now and so avoid finding out the hard way. And independent Wales would not help solve their problems. What we must do for this is to take joint action with workers of other lands to make the means of life the property of a world community, with an end to frontiers and national states.

Adam Buick (Newbridge, Mon.)

Wales: A Nation? (1969)

From the July 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Lately the spirit of national identity has been reborn, both in Wales and elsewhere. Backed by the indignities of the past, fired by a renewed interest in the peculiarities of custom and language and consciousness of national resources, it has succeeded in forming an organised opinion which has forced the government of Westminster to take notice. The most important thing of all is that in their written and spoken propaganda nationalists, Welsh and others, maintain their faith in capitalism and are agreed to live within a state system of their own making.

At the moment, the focus is on Wales; attention is being paid by the world press and its general propaganda media on the investiture of the son of the reigning sovereign as Prince of Wales. The reaction in Wales, from that of outright opposition to apathy and support, is intriguing to the onlooker.

The early history of Wales shows it to be a land peopled by tribes for the most part engaged in inter-tribal disputes. Its ’community of interest' was of a plural nature, there being no centralisation of authority which could exist under the prevailing social and economic conditions. The only common features were a common tongue and a common way of life. Outside this their attachments went no further than their local territory (Cwmwd and Cantnef) and their local chiefs.

The Roman occupation, lasting about 400 years, did very little to change the broad pattern of social life though it did impose Roman laws, introduce new settlements and road systems, bring the country into close contact with European trade and culture, and introduce new words and phrases to the indigenous language, thereby enriching it. The occupation produced a class of elite Romano-British, whose future was bound up in Roman affairs; in other words their attitude was that of those who accepted the Roman ’State’. This has been the case ever since — it is in the interests of the minority that the state exists. 'Y Werin', the Folk, have no advantages worth talking about accruing from the State.

And so, we find that with the coming of the Normans, the country was divided into regions loosely ruled by native overlords (Y Tywysogion)—the Princes, who in their turn controlled lesser gentry (Boneddwir). The social set-up was true to the general pattern to be found in feudal society everywhere in Europe. This was the system taken over by the Normans who planted their own lords in place of the Welsh and ruled, first by military might and later by laws. In the meantime the agrarian economy remained unaltered, in the same way that when the Germanic people conquered the Old Roman Empire they did not introduce any new division of labour because conquered and conquerors were in the same stage of economic development.

By the 13th century the Normans and Saxons had become one people and in 1284 they so consolidated their footings in Wales that Edward I proclaimed a principality composed of five shires, so replacing forever the earlier regional groupings based on ‘blood ties’. These shires were given over to his eldest son. henceforth to be called the Prince of Wales. The principality, nevertheless remained politically distinct from England, having no representation in the parliament of the time.

Romantic visions

The Act of Union changed the situation: hitherto Wales represented a colony, now it became a part of England. Continual enactments, intrigue, and corruption tied the knot more securely with the passing of time. The Welsh gentry were in spirit with the English Court and the Welsh peasantry remained the providers of sustenance, content with the visions of an ancient freedom made more romantic by the poetry and songs of their bards. The great Arthur slept, to awake one day to lead them out of bondage.

The advent of the Industrial Revolution saw Wales as a people exploited by the coal and iron masters, both English and Welsh, a situation shared by their brethren throughout the length and breadth of Britain, spoon-fed by the same religious cant and moulded by a similar education system, first church charity then state schools. Mistakes were made of course, as for example the vicious attempts to destroy the native language by outlawing it from the schools. Resurgent Welsh capitalism would do the opposite, knowing that the sentiment of language is a potent weapon in maintaining the State Idea. Westminster, now faced with an awkward situation, has also gone a long way towards this end by providing Welsh in schools, parity of esteem, and recognition in all kinds of minor ways.

The growth of nationalist sentiment is being fostered by a variety of organisations at the present time but it is Plaid Cymru which is the spearhead. The events leading up to its formation are interesting, as they show how almost anybody can utilise nationalistic sentiments to further their ends—even people who call themselves socialists.

In July 1918, the South Wales Labour Federation convened a special 'Home Rule' conference in Cardiff where the leaders explained the purport of the Federation “to become the true Nationalist Party of Wales." The Liberals too, at their Conference before the 1918 election, not to be left out of the picture, favoured a parliament for Wales. In 1925 a group founded at Aberystwyth, composed largely of 'intellectuals', claimed nationalism as their goal and published a journal 'Y Wauw' — the Dawn. This group was quickly supressed by the Government. For a short while there existed a Welsh Republican Party — Gwerinialthwyr Cymru — which included in its manifesto the statement that in republican Wales, "ownership would be by and for use only”. It advocated complete severance from the English crown. This party withered away to be replaced by the present Nationalist Party, formed in August 1925. The present Nationalists are prepared to recognise the Crown and would be content with dominion status. In its journal Draig Goch we find the peculiar statement that capital should be created and then shared out among the people. It is interesting to note that about this time a movement known as Byddin Ymreolwyr Cymru (The Home Rule Army of Wales) had views of their own. The present Free Wales Army may be an attempt to revive some of them in terms of ‘direct action'.

At the present time there are numerous organisations on the fringe of the political nationalists proper, most of them of a cultural nature from the Urdd (a kind of cultural youth movement), to bodies like the Llewellyn Society, the Patriotic Front Welsh Language Society.

Everywhere one finds the nation states built on the broad shoulders of its working class and everywhere workers are subject to poverty, insecurity, and war. Plaid Cymru wish to add another party to the list. "If there is to he a future Welsh Nation there must be a State” (Gwynfor Evans).

Socialists in Wales know that the Welsh language and cultural tradition cannot be created or maintained by the establishment of a separate political state. In a free society the economic and political pressures that now tend to crush minority cultures will no longer operate.

So much for the ‘grand illusionist trick' to be enacted at Caernarvon: the recognition by the English Crown that Wales shall be a nation but part of the English state. This situation has its supporters and opponents among the Welsh people but it means nothing except that the position of the working class will be that they remain working class.

W. Brain.

Why all this fuss about Welsh? (1980)

From the November 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

So Gwynfor Evans did not need to fast after all. Wales will have its all-Welsh TV channel. The Tories, after saying they would break their election promise, are now going to keep it. Nicholas Edwards, Secretary' of State for Wales, after first insisting that his party would not be deflected by threats of violence, justified its second U-turn by saying that it “could not withstand the threat of violence”. “We misjudged our ability to convert opinion”, he added.

In fact, the issue of the fourth channel figured no more than tiny in the preoccupations of the majority of people in the highly populated parts of Wales. A certain number of them would, if asked, have probably declared themselves in favour of a Welsh-only service on Channel 4. But this would only have been because they wished to get rid of the Welsh programmes at present on the other channels. Hunger strike or no hunger strike there was never any question of people getting seriously worked up about TV in Welsh, and still less of their giving support to a campaign of violence in favour of it. A visit to Westminster by the Archbishop of Wales and other assorted dignitaries was enough to convince the Tory leadership that the population of Wales was up in arms and ready to fight to have Welsh on telly. But the powers-that-be got it wrong again, just as they did over devolution.

Ironically it is the Tories’ second change of mind, more than their first, which may do them the most harm among the electorate in Wales. For they will not be thanked by the non-Welsh speaking majority when it fully sinks in, as it has not yet done, that the fourth channel will be seen everywhere in Britain but that only in Wales will it be transmitted in Welsh. And even Welsh speaking viewers will probably be disappointed with a service which is almost certain to be of low quality owing to lack of funds from advertising.

But why all this fuss about Welsh? What is actually happening to the language? Well, from being the majority language in the last century and that of half the population (929,000) in 1901, Welsh is now known, according to the 1971 census figures, by only 20.9 per cent (less than 600,000) of the population of Wales.* And even this figure is probably an overestimate based on false information given by nationalist sympathisers on their census forms. What makes the future for Welsh look even dimmer is the census figure of 13.6 per cent for children aged 3 to 10 knowing the language. This decline is due to the development of British capitalism which in the 19th and early 20th century brought to Wales large numbers of industrial workers from England and Ireland (their descendants now probably form the majority of people living in Wales), which in the inter-war years caused many native Welsh speakers to emigrate to England in search of work, and which all along has exerted tremendous direct pressure on the Welsh language by its preponderant use of English in business, administration, education, technology and communications generally. It has forced Welsh speakers to get to know and use English for reasons of social and economic survival, and the incentive to know, use and transmit Welsh has been reduced accordingly. Now, less than 1 per cent of people in Wales are Welsh- only speakers and between 1961 and, 1971 alone Welsh lost speakers at the rate of about 200 per week.

To arrest this decline in the language and encourage its wider use is one of the stated aims of Plaid Cymru, the Welsh Nationalist Party, and was the reason given for its leader’s proposed fast. In recent years its efforts on behalf of the language seem to have had a certain degree of success with government agreement to bilingualism on road signs, notices and official forms and an expansion in Welsh-medium schools. But it is doubtful whether any of this or indeed any of its activities at all have actually led to more people knowing Welsh or using it regularly. On the contrary the evidence points to a continued decline in the use of Welsh accompanied by a decrease in sympathy for the language among non-Welsh speakers due to the nationalists’ policy of trying to impose Welsh on those who neither understand it nor want to learn it.

This is a process which will almost certainly be accelerated by the coming all-Welsh TV channel. English-only viewers will resent having to miss programmes available to people elsewhere and this will make them less likely to sympathise with efforts to keep Welsh alive. In addition the lower quality of programme on the Welsh channel will make Welsh speakers more likely to tune in to English programmes instead and so miss what is at present the only contact some of them have with the native language. So by their action Plaid Cymru may well have done the language more harm than good.

Plaid Cymru were successful however in finding the issue they so badly needed to rally support. In last year’s general election only 8.1 per cent of all people in Wales voted for them. Their stock had gone down dramatically after the March 1979 devolution referendum. Here they had hoped for a massive vote in favour of a Welsh assembly, which they saw as a half-way house to independence. The 4 to 1 majority against what in reality would have been no more than a modest administrative reform left them shattered. Their argument that nationalism is the only solution to the problems of a backward Wales where wages are lower and unemployment higher than the national average was emphatically rejected by the people of Wales. After that groups of militants tried direct action tactics (bomb attacks on holiday homes) to attract attention to their cause, but it was the TV issue that gave the nationalists a chance to get back into the limelight “respectably”. It is worth noting however that Gwynfor Evans’s threatened fast, although in itself a peaceful form of protest, carried with it a deliberate menace of violence. “The responsibility for any acts of violence that may occur as a result of my hunger strike lies on the doorstep of our government”, said Evans in a newspaper interview (South Wales Evening Post, 1 September 1980) and this underlined the dictatorial nature of nationalist attempts to impose their will on the non-nationalist majority.

But even if the nationalists managed to win the support of the people of Wales and to bring into being an independent state would the evils they now see as being inflicted on Wales by rule from London be eradicated? For the answer one need only look across the Irish Sea where almost 60 years of independence has left Eire with the same combination of unemployment, inflation, industrial conflict and bad housing as Wales and has left the Irish language virtually dead. A faction within the Welsh Language Society, the direct action wing of the nationalist movement, has apparently learned this lesson and sees the Welsh language and culture as more likely to survive by struggle within the present arrangements than by the winning of formal political independence from the rest of Britain. They recognise that an independent Wales would continue, for all practical purposes, to be totally dependent on its bigger more powerful neighbour and that the pressure on the language would continue and probably intensify due to its supporters sitting back on their victory.

So the nationalists may be cock-a-hoop over the Tory surrender and convinced they have won a famous victory for the language. But, as they will realise later, that victory is illusory, short-term and in reality part of a longer-term process of defeat. In the history of capitalism their action will be seen as a hard fought exercise in futility. For—let there be no mistake about it—as long as capitalism continues to live, the Welsh language will continue to die. 

Howard Moss

* Statistics are taken from: Report on the Welsh Language, H.MSO, 1963; Census 1971: Report on the Welsh Language in Wales, HMSO. 1973; and D. Halsom and M. Burch, A Political and Electoral Handbook for Wales, Gower Publishing Co, Farnborough, 1980.

Letter from Wales (1960)

From the December 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

"The fault lies in the system and it is natural that individuals should re-act as they do when such an occasion arises." I pricked my ears up. The speaker was one of a small group of men waiting in the local doctor's surgery.

It is always good to be in on any discussion about Capitalism and so it was not long before I found an opportunity to contribute. The topic that drew the above remark was actually concerned with Roy Paul, the Welsh international footballer admitting to having accepted a £500 bribe. From there on we continued to probe deeper into the “carryings on," the actions and statements of important people and organizations in the news.

For example, the Ebbw Vale Election. Though there are four contestants, two only—Labour and Plaid Cymru appear to interest the electorate. Plaid Cymru, the Welsh Nationalist Party, is being aided by its pirate radio station “The Voice of Wales." They are also introducing “ colour" in the form of music at their meetings—items on the harp. They continue—as in previous elections —to “harp on the theme" “ Ruddid i Gymru" (Freedom for Wales).

Another topic was the C.N.D. March. Cardiff was recently chosen as the venue for an attack. Much excitement prevailed, not the least being the closed doors of the Temple of Peace in the face of the marchers (which were later opened to allow them entry). A prominent Communist leader was roundly accused of attempting to make political capital out of the proceedings. This should be a warning to all that the true C.ND’er may be all for peace as long as you accept the view that the struggle against was has nothing to do with political ideology!

W. Brain

Welsh Nationalism (1964)

From the April 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1925 was formed Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party. One of its aims was to achieve Dominion status for Wales.

Today Plaid Cymru has become a national party and a real challenge to the Liberal and Labour parties. Plaid Cymru claims that English domination is the cause of the social ills, such as bad housing, old age poverty, unemployment and rural depopulation from which the people of Wales suffer. What is the attitude of the Socialist Party of Great Britain to Welsh nationalism? Do we support the aim of Welsh independence? The Socialist and the nationalist see society from different points of view. For the Socialist present-day society is divided into two classes: a capitalist class who own the means of production, and a working class who, having no property, are forced to work for the capitalists. The interests of these two classes are opposed and between them there is a class struggle. This transcends national boundaries.

For the Socialist the propertyless working class have no country. The nationalist, on the other hand, sees the inhabitants of one particular area as a unit having a common interest. He ignores the class division of society and the class struggle. For him the nation is all-important. He encourages the worker to believe he has a country. Thus Socialism and nationalism are opposed. They are irreconcilable. Nationalism is in fact one of the means which capitalism uses to blind the workers to class society. It is a delusion which Socialists seek to dispel. For this reason the Socialist Party is opposed to Welsh nationalism and does not support the demand for Welsh independence.

The cause of unemployment and other social ills is in capitalism and its production for profit. When there is no profit to make from production, then production stops and unemployment spreads. Unemployment is inevitable under capitalism.

Plaid Cymru sees the cause of Welsh unemployment in a mythical English domination. Here again the nationalist is mistaken. He sees poverty not as a class problem but as a national problem: a problem to be solved not by class emancipation but by national emancipation. Socialists are committed to exposing this way of looking at social problems. We deny that English domination is the cause of poverty in Wales and consequently hold that national independence is not the solution.

Plaid Cymru promises that if it forms the government it will introduce various social reforms designed to improve the lot of the people of Wales. We say that such reforms will fail. For it is the social system, and not the political regime, which will determine how people will live in an independent Wales. It is obvious that Plaid Cymru, despite its talk of “co-operative Welsh Socialism,” intends that capitalism in one form or another should continue after Wales has achieved independence. This means that poverty also will continue. National independence will merely mean that the capitalists of Wales will pay their taxes to a government in Cardiff instead of to a government in London—a change of no interest to the workers of Wales.

What then is the solution? Since these social problems arise from capitalism nothing short of the complete overthrow of this system will be sufficient. The Socialist Party therefore urges the workers of Wales to unite with workers elsewhere to set up a world Socialist system where the peoples of the world will co-operate to produce for their needs on the basis of the common ownership and democratic control of the means of life. This will be a society without frontiers, without nations and without war. This is the real alternative to capitalism and nationalism.

Adam Buick

The Lunacy of Left-Wing Nationalism (1988)

From the February 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

We all expect Tories to be flag-waving fools. The political Right rejoices in the lunacy of nationalistic fervour, with sick demonstrations of patriotic enthusiasm used as a means of whipping up workers' support for the pernicious belief that we who do not own the nation's wealth have an identity of interest with those who do. Not for nothing did Thatcher build a reputation of iron out of the corpses who littered the South Atlantic in the Falklands war. Nationalism is at the top of the list of political illusions used to blind capitalism's victims: the workers of the world.

Of nations, Marx and Engels wrote that:

  The Communists are . . . reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality. The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. (The Communist Manifesto, 1848)

Workers own no country, so why should we care which section of the class of thieves owns which national portion of the world? Workers have a world to win, not nations to fight for.

Not everyone who has called themselves Marxists or socialists has followed such simple logic. Too often in history workers have been urged to concern themselves with the interests of nations — to fight to defend one against the other, or to establish new ones.

In Ireland the cause of nationalism was advanced not only by rabid anti-socialists like Arthur Griffith (the founder of Sinn Fein whose contempt for trade unions was notorious) and Padraig Pearce (who rejoiced at the heroism of Irish workers who were slaughtered in the trenches of the First World War), but by men calling themselves socialists, such as James Connolly. He contended that religious faith and nationalist politics were compatible with the objective of establishing socialism. The creation of the Irish Republic has demonstrated all too clearly that a nation run by priests and armed by police and soldiers little different from the British variety is no step forward for the working class. All that Connolly's mistaken association of the concepts of nationalism and socialism has done has been to add to the confusion in working-class minds about what socialists really stand for. In practical terms, it has served to alienate the non-Roman Catholic, non-nationalistic Irish workers (many of them active in the trade unions) from anything they imagine to be socialist politics.

Zionist nationalism had its share of leftist confusionists in its early days — people who imagined that the establishment of an independent Jewish state would provide not only a refuge from the threat of racist persecution but a territory in which a new socialist order would emerge. In his book, From Class To Nation, David Ben Gurion wrote optimistically that

   Socialist Zionism means a full Zionism. . .This is a sort of Zionism which will not be content with redeeming only a part of the people, but aims at the complete redemption of all the people of Israel; this is a sort of Zionism which envisages the Land of Israel as a homeland not only for a few privileged and wealthy but wants it to be a homeland for every Jew who returns there — a homeland that equally provides for all her children, revives them, makes them into citizens and redeems all of them without discrimination.

Ben Gurion was later to become Prime Minister of the Israeli state. Things did not turn out as those who saw Zionism as a step forward to socialism had thought it would. It is very easy to say, before a nation has been established, that it will not only be a homeland for the "privileged and wealthy". But under capitalism, in which Israel exists, countries belong to the minority class who own their resources and for all the talk of equality Israel is a country of brutal contradictions between affluence for a few and poverty for many. The almost racist assumption in the above quotation explains much that has happened since. If Israel is to be a homeland for the Jews, then what is to happen to those not invited into the new land of supposed equality? The answer is to be found all too evidently in the recent brutalities committed by the Israeli state on the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Israel is not unique in its anti-social military savagery: all capitalist nations act that way — they usually call it "national defence". But those who advocated the creation of such a state in the name of socialism have much to answer for. There is no shortage of disillusioned left-wing Zionists in Israel today who will have to make up their minds whether to support nationalism or its ceaseless enemy — socialism.

In the Guardian on 21 December 1987, Dafydd Elis Thomas, the Plaid Cymru MP for Merionydd Nant Conway, urged English leftists to develop a new kind of English nationalism to supersede what he regards as the aggressive nationalism of the Thatcher government. He contends that this would lead to a new, different kind of patriotism to which English "socialists" (he means supporters of state capitalism) could appeal in the working class. The hard fact is that nationalism cannot be de-odorised or made to look pretty. The Labour Party in the early 1980s made great play of how their non-nuclear defence policy was connected to a more morally pure, humane conception of British nationalism. By 1987, when Kinnock and his team were desperate to sell their policies for running the system to the capitalist-minded voters, Kinnock was making great play of the fact that only under a Labour government, with increased defence spending and even more ferocious conventional weapons than the Tories are willing to invest in, will Britain be Great. The pornographic Labour election material with the Union Jack on the front summed up the folly of believing that you can mix policies for patriotism with any of the ideas of world unity which only socialists put. Indeed, Kinnock even offered in his speech at the Labour Party conference to die for "his" country. According to some political commentators, the 1987 election result was not a bad suicide attempt.

Of course, when it comes to providing the really lunatic policies, one might step back from the likes of Kinnock and the Welsh Nats and read the absurdities which abound in the circles of the "theoretically sophisticated" Leninists. The Leninist contention is that in all wars "small nations" must be supported against larger, oppressive ones. We recall how in 1982 the crazy Revolutionary Communist Party urged workers to support fascist-run Argentina in its military battle against Britain. Not to be undone by the RCP, the ultra-confused Socialist Workers' Party set its leading theoretician, Alex Callinicos (a name to watch in the circles of especially misguided Leninists) to work out a policy on the Iran-Iraq war. The Socialist Party policy is simple: like in all wars within capitalism we warn workers against taking the side of one capitalist gang against another. But the Ayatollah Khomeni will be delighted to learn that luck has come his way: the SWP has decided that

  We have no choice but to support the Khomeni regime against the US and its allies. (Socialist Worker, 28 November, 1987)

The article goes on to state that, although the SWP is in favour of Iranian workers opposing the Khomeni regime while fighting for it, "there will be instances when it is wrong to strike". (For example, when strikes will affect the war effort). So Iranian workers, oppressed by one of the most monstrous dictatorships in the modern world, living under the misery of religious totalitarianism, conscripted almost at childhood to die in a pointless war, are now told by the official interpreters of the creed of Lenin that "socialists" must support Iran in its war. Keep laughing, dear reader, or you might just start to weep.

Steve Coleman

My road to socialism (2006)

From the May 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

I first encountered the Socialist Party in a South Wales valley town. It was late 1972, and I was at a loose end politically. Years before, I had flirted with the Communist Party, to the outrage of my parents, despite my maternal grandparents having been CP supporters from the time of the Russian Revolution.

I used to read Soviet Weekly, and a lavishly illustrated magazine sent to me direct from Moscow, Soviet Union, full of happy smiling Russian workers on their way to exceeding the norms of the latest Five Year Plan. Nothing about Stalin having murdered thirty million or so of his own people. Nothing about the string of slave labour camps dotted around the Arctic Circle, Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, where political dissidents ended up.

What cured me of Bolshevism was the outbreak of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. My family possessed one of the few televisions in our street in those days. Here was film, direct from Budapest, of Russian tanks slaughtering Hungarian workers, whose only offence was to try to shake off Soviet tyranny. I wrote a blistering letter to Soviet Weekly but, of course, I never got a reply. One of the maxims of capitalist society is obviously ‘when faced with the truth, ignore it.’

For the next sixteen years, except for one brief episode, I was more or less in the political wilderness. My father was a lifelong member of the NUM and its local predecessor, the South Wales Miners’ Federation, the “Fed” whose subs had to be paid in secret, lest you ended up on the colliery owner’s blacklist, then being unable to get a job in any colliery in the valley. Dad was an admirer of Aneurin Bevan, the Labour Health Minister, a former miner himself, and MP for a local constituency, Ebbw Vale. Bevan’s stock went even higher in our house when he described the Conservatives as “lower than vermin”.

The watershed came in 1964. For the first time since 1951 a Labour government was elected. But it didn’t turn out to be the promised land that some had thought. Far from it. Labour proved itself incapable of solving the intractable issues of capitalism, unemployment, poverty, homelessness, warfare and a host of other working class problems too.

Somewhere between 1964 and 1972, still looking for an alternative to capitalism, I joined Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party. Out of the frying pan into the fire! Some forty years later there are only one or two aspects of their policies I can recollect. They regarded themselves as a socialist party, by which they meant state capitalism, and they had the curious belief that the little countries of Europe were all doing better than the larger ones, as if capitalism was particularly considerate in this respect. Of course, it was twaddle. What Plaid didn’t say was that in an independent Wales, the situation of the worker would be no different from in a larger political unit, i.e. they would have only their ability to work to sell, and so would be shut out from the wealth of society, which would be appropriated by a Welsh capitalist class. For the worker, nationalism is a total waste of time.

And so to 1972. On a November day I picked up a copy of the Socialist Standard in the local library. It came like a political thunderbolt. Here were ideas I had never encountered before. Free access to the wealth of society. Production for use. The workers have no country. Abolition of money. No more governments, no more states, no more frontiers, no armies, no war.

For the first time in my life, I felt politically free.

Greenie