Grunwick (2026)

From the Socialism or Your Money Back blog

Having just read The Rotters Club by Jonathan Coe which is set in and around Birmingham in the 1970s I was most interested in a piece therein where there is a description of a picket travelling down to London to support striking Grunwick workers. The description of the police violence that occurred is, subjective view, one of the best things in the book. The violence described is harrowing so a look into the Grunswick dispute was called for.

Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories was a non-union company processing 35mm film and other formats. You would post your film and remuneration of to the company and receive twenty or thirty six six by four glossy photos back from then.The majority of their workforce were female and Asian. Following a dismissal other workers joined a picket. Workers were advised to join the Association of Professional, Executive, Clerical and Computer Staff. In September 1976 13y striking workers were sacked. The strike lasted from August 1976 to July 1978. Its objective, union recognition, failed to materialise.

The below is from a Brave.com search, police violence at Grunwick.

The Grunwick dispute (1976–1978) was marked by extreme police violence, primarily involving the Metropolitan Police’s Special Patrol Group (SPG), which was deployed for the first time in an industrial dispute. The SPG, modeled on paramilitary units from Northern Ireland, employed aggressive tactics including charges into crowds, flying wedges, and physical assaults, such as dragging picketers by their hair or grabbing women, resulting in numerous injuries including broken bones.

Key details of the violence include:

High Arrests and Injuries: Over 550 arrests were made, the highest figure for an industrial dispute since the 1926 General Strike. On November 7, 1977, 243 picketers were injured (12 with broken bones) and 113 arrested in a single day.

Media Narrative: Mainstream media heavily focused on images of injured police officers (such as one with a head wound), which framed the narrative around picketer violence while often downplaying the severity of police brutality against predominantly South Asian female strikers.

State Coordination: The Labour government and Home Secretary Merlyn Rees supported the heavy police presence to enforce court injunctions against secondary picketing, with Prime Minister James Callaghan encouraging a proactive police response to suppress the mass demonstrations.

Escalation: Violence peaked during mass pickets in June and July 1977, where thousands of trade unionists and supporters clashed with police attempting to escort non-striking workers and lorries into the factory. 

Extract from the Socialist Standard December 1977

‘A year ago few people had heard of the dispute at the Grunwick film-processing laboratories; today, the effort of the strikers to win union recognition has become a national cause célèbre. The events surrounding the dispute have been obscured by the press, which would have us believe that Grunwick is some kind of elaborate game in which one side tries to drive a bus through a gateway and the other side tries to stop them. The principle involved is lost amid reports of how many policemen were injured and how many demonstrators arrested. It is also difficult because socialists, while seeing the trade-union struggle as necessary, also recognise its futility in terms of the revolutionary political action we call upon workers to take.

Members of the SPGB have attended the Grunwick demonstrations in order to sell literature and distribute a leaflet putting the Party’s view on the dispute. The first paragraph of that leaflet states:

The dispute at Grunwick will come to an end…but the class struggle will go on. The Socialist Party of Great Britain believes in the urgent need for workers to join together, not simply for the defensive right of union recognition, but for the purpose of organising for social revolution—NOW. The need for class unity for Socialism is the pressing task of the age.

That, above all else, is the message of the SPGB. To abandon it would be to abandon our claim to be socialists.’

Read full piece below

https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2016/09/wage-labour-and-capital-case-of.html

Jottings. (1911)

The Jottings Column from the August 1911 issue of the Socialist Standard

“I understand that about twenty of the lasters recently discharged from the Wheatsheaf Works through the introduction of new labour-saving machinery, have this week each been handed a solatium of £10 by the Committee of the Wholesale Co operative Society.”—”Shoe and Leather Record.”

* * *

Lucky dogs ! I don’t know which they ought to be most thankful for—Co-operation, or the fact that they are lasters. Now I’ll tell you what I should do if I were a laster displaced by machinery, but with a solatium (blessed word) of £10 in my pocket.

I’d just let the machine do the work, and I’d last out on stout and oysters and rest till the old-age pension came along. Of course, one would have to be a pretty good laster to do it, but then what is the good of being a laster if you can’t last ?

* * *

Ireland is not the only subject of injustice. Mr. Douglas Hall, M.P., has discovered that the ‘armless (ask the Manchester carters), necessary copper is unjustly put upon on occasion, and he has taken up the cudgels on his behalf. He has entered into wordy warfare with Mr. Winston Churchill on the subject of the policemen’s Coronation medals, for he thinks it a burning shame that the police force in the Isle of Wight should not have medals to commemorate the fact that they have done some work—of a kind.

The hon. member felt so strongly on the matter, and the pure flame of chivalry blazed up so strongly within him, that he was moved to get up a petition, and “in less than an hour” (says he in a letter to Mr. Churchill, (which he also took the opportunity to get inserted in that excellent advertising medium, the “Isle of Wight County Times”) he obtained 100 signatures of Members of Parliament to the appeal.

* * *

Since it was discovered at Belfast that police cannot be relied upon to “bash” strikers while they have grievances of their own to brood over, quite a lot has been done to make “buttons” lie more comfortably. The policemen’s Sunday rest, is a case in point. It would be a pity to spoil all this for the sake of a few medals.

But I was forgetting—it may interest some of the workers who were lately bashed on the head by policemen at Tonypandy, Hull, Manchester and other places, to learn that among the M.P.’s who signed the petition are those prominent members of the Labour Party, Mr. George N. Barnes and Mr. Philip Snowden.

Couldn’t either of these gentlemen be induced to get up a petition for the recognition of the extremely valuable services of the police who were sent to South Wales in connection with the colliery dispute ? I am sure he could get the signature of every colliery-owner in Wales.

* * *

“The reason of the strength of Socialism was that it was so strenuous and uncompromising.”

Thus the “Daily Chronicle” (13. 7.11) reports Lord Selborne. It is very well said. Socialism must be uncompromising in order to be Socialism ; it must be strenuous in order to be strong. It seems the I.LP.-er and S.D.P.-er may learn something from a lord—I had thought they were incapable of learning anything from anybody.

If Lord Selborne will watch us and read the Socialist Standard in the future as he has evidently done in the past, he will discover that there are other sources of Socialist strength.

* * *

The hopelessness of the workers’ fight for anything else than Socialism (though, of course, the struggle must be kept up) is finely illustrated in the columns of the “Manchester Daily Despatch” (10.7.11), wherein it is pointed out that owing to the carters’ strike in that city there has been an unprecedented demand for motor lorries and waggons. The result has been that many firms have found these vehicles so economical, speedy and convenient that they are adopting them as rapidly as their demands can be met. It is claimed, and probably upon fair grounds, that when the carters’ strike is finished, many of the men will have no work to return to.

The tragedy of the workers’ position under capitalism is that their struggles, and still more their victories, handicap them against their pitiless competitor, machinery. Though it does not justify resigning the fight, it is, nevertheless, a never-to be forgotten fact that the lower wages are the slower machinery advances.

There is but one escape from this—Socialism. I am not going to adorn the tale with a moral.

* * *

Mr. Lloyd George, speaking at the Welsh Baptist Chapel, Castle Street, London, on June 25, is reported to have said :

“No reform was ever brought about by the people who suffered only, but always through the help of those who profited nothing.”

As it stands the statement is sheer nonsense, for it is just those who “suffer only” who gain nothing from reforms. However, ascribing this to temporary aberration (perhaps on the part of the printer), and reading the true meaning into the words (i.e., that reforms are never brought about solely by those who are to gain by them, but always with the help of those they will not profit), it seems to me that the statement is very near the truth.

I am not well up in the matter of reforms, but as far as my observations go they bear out the Chancellor of the Exchequer. I cannot call to mind any reform that has not solely benefited the ruling class, but to get which they have not sought and obtained the assistance of the gullible section of the working class.

* * *

Mr. Lloyd George also said upon the same auspicious occasion : “All the poverty of London was really at the door of religion.”

How redolent of truth he was that fine summer afternoon. Some little correction, possibly, is needed, as with all general truths ; but in the sense that religion is one of the chief pillars of the present system of robbery, the pronouncement is substantially correct—though the parson must think it is like the politician’s darn’d cheek to go into the chapel and say so.

* * *

One more little selection from the same candid chin-wag. There was no stopping him when he got on the straight and narrow path of truth. You see he had escaped from the House of Commons, where only good, honest, downright lying is permissible, and he felt something of the wild exultation of the converted cannibal who has the good fortune to drop into a hut where they are boiling the missionary for supper. He spake unto the multitude thus :

“There is nothing between the people and tyranny but the spirit of the Christian Church.”

That’s just it—the vacuous, ethereal, ghostly, spirituous, spiritual spirit of the Christian Church—an intangible obfuscation of the foggy order that romps the land with a collection bag—a something just solid enough to hide the tyrant and his methods, but no sort of a foil against his mailed fist.

Yes, it is quite true that the spirit of the Christian Church is all that stands between the workers and tyranny, and that is one of the reasons the former cannot see who is hitting them

* * *

The “Evening News” of July 15 has the following on the action of the Labour Party in voting for the Financial resolution of the Insurance Bill after protesting against it.

“It was a Labour Party—

    The ‘Independent’ sort—

Its manner bluff and hearty,

    Its temper sometimes short.

It was its chiefest glory

    Its manly breast to thump

And say for Rad. or Tory

   It didn’t care a dump.

“It had its fixed convictions,

   Its views on what to do ;

And knowing no restrictions,

   It meant to see them through.

If, thinking these were novel

   (And O, his lights were dim)

The Premier didn’t grovel,

   Well, all the worse for him.

“Amendments most extensive

    It cheerfully designed ;

Its manner was offensive,

    But O, its heart was kind !

And when its speeches sprightly

    The Chancellor had chid,

It touched its hat politely

    And voted as he bid !—C. E. B.”

So doth genius put the whole thing in a nutshell.

A. E. Jacomb.

Between the Lines: Some riots you see . . . (1985)

The Between the Lines column from the December 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some riots you see . . .

Riots on TV are not what they used to be. In the early 1980s we used to get panicky reporters appearing live on the scene, not quite knowing whether the BBC had insured their limbs. These days no sooner does a riot start than a team of dull-witted politicians are in the studio, there to throw cliches at us like chucking nuts at monkeys The Tory says that it's all caused by criminal elements who are taking advantage of easily-led workers. Then comes the Labourite — usually Gerald Kaufman whose jackets are worn to remind us what value we're getting for our colour TV licence — who talks about how the Tories invented unemployment and while the rioters are wrong they can be sympathised with, but then again the police are doing a good job, but then again they really shouldn't shoot people if they can possibly avoid it. but then again reports have shown . . . Riots on telly are becoming more boring than The Horse of the Year Show. One good thing about the revolution: it will only happen once.

. . . and some you don’t

Remember the pictures of the Orgreave riot shown during the miners' strike? Remember how we were urged to have pity on those poor police who were doing their best to defend the peace against the violent tactics of those horrible strikers? And now, long after the strike is over, we see another view of the riot (People to People, C4. 9pm. 27 September). Clear pictures and accounts demonstrated very forcefully that what occurred at Orgreave was a police riot that the police were out of control and dished out violence to peaceful pickets in a manner which would be more typical of the Polish or South African state machine. Those with eyes to see. and minds unblocked by prejudices which tell them that the police can never be the aggressors, saw camera shots of police beating up workers who had gone to Orgreave to further their trade-union interests. Why were these pictures never shown while the strike was on? The fact is that while the camera never lies, the liars are very capable of manipulating the evidence of the camera when it so suits them.

Real lives

The banned and then censored BBC2 documentary on "political extremism" in Northern Ireland turned out to be nothing very original or surprising. Both nationalists in the programme (for let it not be forgotten that the Unionists are nationalists too) showed themselves to be buried in the politics of working-class disunity, sloganising and violence. McGuinness came across as somewhat saner than the Unionist clown whose response to the murder of some Catholics was to declare that "Christmas has come early this year". In fact, most workers are more advanced in their thinking than the sort of politically retarded mis-leaders portrayed in this film.

If only every town . . .

Have you seen that appalling advert which concludes. "If only every town could be like Milton Keynes '. Have you ever been to Milton Keynes? Has the joker who dreamed up the advert ever lived in Milton Keynes? Perhaps he should be given a chance to live in one of the uniform workers' houses in the land of his dreams. And while we're at it. why not give Jimmy Savile a free pensioners' travel pass and let him travel round the country on second-class British Rail trains instead of the Rolls which he is more accustomed to sitting in? And why not let old Barratt live in one of the poverty-homes he is so eager to advertise on TV instead of the expensive mansion near Hexham which he lives in now? Let the shoddy goods which the ad-men try to sell us be consumed by the idle parasites — they are not good enough for the wealth- producers. For workers nothing but the best is good enough — and to be sure. Milton Keynes is nothing like the best.

Showing it like it is

There is a popular view on the Left that everything shown on television is lies. Plenty of what we see on TV is lies and distortion, but much of it is both useful in providing an insight into aspects of life which most of us never experience and helpful in indicating the manifold contradictions of capitalism. Of late we have been offered several documentary series worthy of note. BBC2's series Probation (Tuesdays. 9.30pm. ended 29 October) was one of those "fly-on-the-wall" efforts in which we were allowed to look in on the ruined lives and confused existences of workers dependent on probation officers. Two points emerged from the series: firstly, that, despite the claims of the human nature brigade, there are plenty of workers in our society who are genuinely eager to help other workers to get out of their mess: secondly, it became clear that those society sees fit to punish or cure are inevitably the victims of a system in need of punishment or cure. A society which leaves thousands of workers ill-educated, unemployed, frustratedly aggressive, vulnerable to dangerous escapism and tempted by goodies beyond their reach creates more casualties than the over-burdened probation officers can hope to help satisfactorily. At best, the probation service can ameliorate the difficulties of those who attract problems like light attracts moths; at worst it serves as a rather authoritarian, patronising and sermonising outfit which seeks to normalise those capitalist normality can do without.

Infuriating though it has been. Queens': a Cambridge College (Wednesdays. 8.20pm. BBC2) provides a glimpse into an institution where students are taught that they are part of an intellectual élite. The evidence of the cameras (which could be discriminate) is that an awful lot of Cambridge geniuses are bores, morons or both. In the first programme in the series we were shown a public school twit in an interview, attempting to gain a place to "read" history. He is asked why he wants to read history and answers that it is because looking at the past will help us to understand the present Fair enough. Then he is asked to give an example of this. He mumbles vaguely that if you look at the origins of the Middle East you will understand the Arab-Israeli war. He lists as his hobby "fantasy war games" highly appropriate for a Cambridge history scholar. Asked why he wants to "come up" to Cambridge he answers that he wants to be trained for leadership. He gets in. As does the Sloane Ranger who is applying for medicine, whose parents live in the Sudan, has enjoyed "surfing on the Nile", working on a leper colony (which was absolutely amazing") and wants to work "with Third World people in North London".

In the second programme we see a crowd of these "intellectuals" joining the Christian Society and one of them (a science student) recounting how Christ appeared to him one night in his study after he had screwed up his packet of cigarettes. Nobody asked him what he had in them. In the third programme we were irritated by an offensive law student with pretensions to being an orator. He addressed the Cambridge Union (membership. £18 a year) on why public schools must exist. Apparently they produce academic excellence. Odd that: he came from one and seemed exceptionally unoriginal in his thinking.

After The War Is Over (Fridays. 9.25pm. BBC2) showed very clearly that after the suffering of the Second World War workers had big expectations. Returning from the war, the wage slaves came to something other than a land fit for heroes. The series has been very successful in showing both the utter impotence of the reformism of the patronising post-war Labour government and the shoddiness to which workers had access in those days of never having it so good. The Ministry of Information propaganda films are particularly striking in their transparent aim of bluffing the workers into continuing the war effort after the war had supposedly been won.

All three series helped to show workers more about what has been and is going on in society. They were not exercises in deception, but full-scale. uncensored pictures of capitalist reality. Proof that television can be used in the battle for working-class knowledge.

Charles and Di

Your reviewer did not watch the interview of the happy Royals on ITV (Sunday. 20 October), but is expecting at any time now a letter from the Palace calling on him to meet with Charlie for a serious discussion about how to abolish poverty and other related matters which our heir contemplates in his spare time. Let it be noted here that whatever passes between us will be in confidence. Suffice to say that I can offer him some definite advice about how to avoid becoming the ruler of a divided nation — and it doesn't involve doing yoga and keeping off red meat.

Steve Coleman

Cops protect robbers (1981)

From the September 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism will be a world society without a police force. In fact, it will be a society without a legal system. And because there will be no laws there will be no courts to argue about them in, no prisons in which to lock up offenders, and no people who will be called criminals because they have broken the law.

The idea of socialism as a lawless, crimeless society is likely to evoke the strangest of responses from those who stand for what is euphemistically referred to as ‘law and order’. Judges will tell us that prisons and punishment must always be, for we are all sinners. The person in the street will say that without the law there would be anarchy and under anarchy nothing would be safe. Criminologists will tell us that anti-social behaviour is a necessary feature of modern urban industrial living (which is only a trendy way of saying what the judge has already said). Indeed, even most criminals will insist that a certain degree of law and order is necessary and that the best place for those who have committed worse crimes than them is in a prison cell.

As for the politicians, Leftie Frank Field (Labour, Birkenhead, no convictions) writes that ‘Like most people, I cannot conceive of a society without a police force’. (Guardian, 5/8/81). Tory Home Secretary Whitelaw warned on television recently that ‘without the police, that which we treasure as a nation would be jeopardised’. (Could he have been referring to the Stock Exchange?) Even the very silly Workers’ Revolutionary Party, in their recent GLC election manifesto, called for the replacement of the Metropolitan police force by an armed workers’ militia.

The public’s view of the police is currently undergoing a profound change. The image of the Dixon of Dock Green—type copper with a patronising concern to protect ‘villains’ from themselves and a claim to serve ‘the community’ is fast dying. The role of the police as the brutal defenders of property and privilege is increasingly being recognised. The use of the police as strikebreakers, as contributors to the harassment of racial minorities, as corrupt bullies who will often turn a blind eye to law-breaking if the price is high enough, and, in the cases of Liddle Towers, Blair Peach and unrecorded others, as the unprosecuted murderers of members of the working class.

This writer’s first experience of police methods came during the Grunwick strike in 1977 when he saw uniformed officers kicking pickets when they lay on the ground and beating people up in the back of open police vans. Many trade unionists will testify as to how the police have been used in strikes in order to make life hard for the strikers. Accounts of police persecution of legally innocent workers are increasingly common, especially in areas where there are many black immigrants. Many people convicted of crimes—and many not convicted, but charged-have told how police have illegally beaten them, forced confessions from them and even intimidated their friends and relatives.

The words of police chiefs do not help to comfort those who live in fear of ‘the boys in blue’: Metropolitan Police Chief Commissioner, David McNee, recently stated that ‘if people stay off the streets at night they will have nothing to fear from the police’, while Merseyside’s Chief Constable. Kenneth Oxford, wrote in his report to the Liverpool police committee, six weeks before the Toxteth riot, that

My policy on relationships with the community has been endorsed and strengthened throughout the year, with all members of the force being mindful in this direction. I am confident that these relationships with all sections of the community are in a very healthy position and I do not foresee any serious difficulties developing in the future. (Quoted in the Guardian, 6/8/81. Our emphasis.)

Oxford, whose force has been seen as a major contributory factor in the outburst on Toxteth streets, is clearly not a man of prescience.

Much as some people would like to turn a blind eye to it, it is a fact that the police force often exceeds its legal powers, frequently serves to increase social tensions and ignore criminality when it is committed by the rich. But this is not the root of the problem; socialists are not simply opposed to the police-or to “bad” police—but to a system of social relationships which necessitates coercive forces.

The purpose of the police is to defend property. Yes, it is true that they help old ladies cross the road (whether they want to or not) and they run youth clubs for skinheads who want to be the next Henry Cooper. This, however, is not their main job and the idea of the police as uniformed social workers is a myth. Indeed, police officers can often be disciplined by their superiors for spending too much time helping people when there is real police work to be done elsewhere. One such case is quoted by E. Bittner:

An officer was walking a beat in a quiet residential area when he encountered a middle-aged matron who had been locked out of her home. She had a load of groceries and obviously could not climb into the window she designated as open . . . He set aside hat and truncheon, climbed in through the window, and came downstairs to let her in. As she was grateful and was going to write a letter informing his superior of his meritorious service, he had to carefully explain to her that what he did was against police regulations and quite possibly against the law (since he had no evidence that she actually lived in the house). Any mentions of his actions would probably become a black mark in his personnel file. (“A Theory of the Police” in Potential for Reform of Criminal Justice, ed. H. Jacob, Sage Publications.)

Before the establishment of an official police force in 1829, policing was the direct responsibility of property-owners. Private security gangs were employed to defend the wealth of the rich against the illegal requirements of the poor. Before the rise of industrial capitalism, the administration of the law was primarily in the hands of local land magnates. They would appoint their own magistrates, pay for their own guards and be looked upon as the final arbiters in local disputes. With the increasing role of the state as a means of social control in the mid-Nineteenth century, the unity between the right of ownership and the right of coercion became blurred, but not eradicated.

The role of the early police force, as now, was to ensure the maintenance of the order of property. In an age when slums and mansions, expensive restaurants and hungry children, night clubs and homeless vagrants exist in such close proximity to one another it is vital for the owning class to have a permanent force to protect them and their property from the intrusion of the impoverished. With capitalism, the concept of criminality became synonymous with the disruption of property relationships. In earlier centuries laws tended to be justified in moral terms, but modern jurisprudence has increasingly discarded anachronistic moral and religious formulae and has described its role in explicitly material terms. The police, as a body which is directly governed by laws passed in parliament, now have a clearly political role. What the state says, the police must do.

Dirty work

The state is not an institution which has always existed. In ancient societies, when the means of producing wealth were commonly held, there was no need for an institution to defend private property. The state was a direct consequence of the earliest appropriation of wealth in the form of tools, land and slaves—by private owners. The evolution of the state, as an institution to protect and expand private property, has developed as humankind has increased its domination over the natural environment. With the emergence of nation states with their own particular economic interests, in Western Europe in the late fifteenth century, it became necessary for states to recruit standing armies to fight the battles of the various national ruling classes. At this stage of the evolution of the state machine emerged a division of its functions between military responsibilities to the ruling class—the protection and expansion of markets—and domestic responsibilities- the retention of internal order on the part of the nation’s rulers. That is the role of the police: they are the uniformed guards of the property-owning class. For every worker’s car which they retrieve and for every mugger they catch (and the police are notoriously bad at solving crimes which affect the working class), there are a hundred cases in which the police are quite directly defending property against poverty.

Of course, the capitalists do not do their own dirty work. They are the last people to be found treading the beat or risking their lives in fights against criminals. Why should they bother when they can pay suckers from the working class to act as human guard-dogs on their behalf? Just like other members of the working class, members of the police force have problems. They are dependent upon wages and, like most workers, these are never enough to satisfy their complete needs. They are frequently pushed around by authoritarian superiors who expect them to obey senseless orders. Many of them would like to be liked, but because of the real nature of their job (which is disguised during their training) they are forced to come into frequent conflict with their fellow workers. Of course, many workers join the police force because they are authoritarian, sadistic or politically motivated, but for the vast majority it is just a job, just a wage and just employment. Often the police respond to their problems by demanding more weapons or tougher laws, but in the end these will not eradicate their problems. So long as there is a system which needs repression, intolerance and thuggery in order to defend its norms, and as long as there are wage slaves who are willing to get their hands dirty defending their exploiters’ position, the police’s problem will continue.

Reformists are occasionally heard to demand the reform of the police. Indeed, the new Labour GLC leader, Ken Livingstone, has recently pledged himself in favour of a people’s police force, accountable to a ‘socialist GLC’! We have all experienced what is meant by a people’s police force. In state capitalist Poland, the armed bullies who smashed the skulls of striking workers in Bydgoszcz were called a ‘people’s’ militia. Did that stop them from viciously defending the right of capital against the needs of wage labour? To conceive of a legal system which will operate in terms of friendship and consensus within a system where ownership and control are firmly in the hands of a minority who own the productive and distributive machinery is naive in the extreme.

In a socialist society the means of wealth production and distribution will be commonly owned and democratically controlled by the whole community without distinction of race or sex. In such a society, where no factory, farm, mine, newspaper, aeroplane or house will have an owner, be it an individual or the state, there will be no need for property laws. There will be no function for police or courts or prisons. The vast libraries containing thick statutes on who is entitled to possess what (and, by implication, who isn’t) will be placed in museums. The truncheons and uniforms and judge’s wigs will be regarded as items of perverse historical curiosity. For once the wealth of the world belongs to all humanity and there for our free access, what will there be to steal and what reason would there be to steal it?

Of course, the Human Nature Brigade will not be slow to answer our question. They will correct us for indulging in such utopian dreams. They will remind us that it is not the viciously competitive, warlike system of capitalism which leads people to commit acts of violence, but Human Nature. They will inform us that it is not the system which turns sex into a commodity and makes films glorifying the conquest of women which leads men to rape women, but Human Nature. They, who are the selected élite who have special knowledge of mankind’s inherent characteristics, will be able to tell us that it is not the overcrowded, boring, stressful conditions of most workers’ lives which leads some to act anti-socially, but Human Nature. And our Nature being what it is, we shall always need police to push us around and prison warders to lock us up and judges to judge us. Socialists argue that the social environment makes men and women what they are and that a competitive, jungle society will create anti-social beasts. Change the way in which the society is organised and human behaviour will change also.

But just as capitalism creates wage slaves who want to be pushed around and want to be slaves and fear freedom, at the same time, paradoxically, it creates its own gravediggers. By subjecting the working class more and more to the reality of its exploited and oppressed condition, capitalism creates dissent. If such dissent currently takes the form of engaging in futile street battles with the police and looting the third-rate commodities from the windows of the cheapest shops, experience will eventually transform such dissent into conscious political action. After all, however many policeman’s hats are knocked from their head, the police and the class which they exist to protect will still be there. However many reforms are passed to soften policemen’s truncheons, the arm of the law will always be stronger than the power of a politically atomised working class.

Steve Coleman

Proper Gander: Crossing the line (2024)

The Proper Gander TV column from the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Recent strikes by teachers, drivers, lawyers, medics and others have been a reminder that this kind of organised action is one of the few ways workers have to defend our position in capitalism. This latest wave of strike action, however effective in the short-term, hasn’t managed to resonate across wider society as much as the mid-80s miners’ strike did for the previous generation. To mark the 40th anniversary of this flashpoint, Channel 4 broadcast the documentary series Miners’ Strike 1984: The Battle For Britain. Without a spoken commentary and with sparse on-screen text to set the scene, the story is told by archive footage and new interviews with miners, police and solicitors, still affected by what happened, particularly at Orgreave.

In March 1984, the National Coal Board announced the closure of 20 collieries with an expected loss of 20,000 jobs. This triggered miners to strike in Yorkshire and Scotland, supported by the National Union of Mineworkers, then led by Arthur Scargill. The NUM called for action in all areas but didn’t hold a nationwide ballot, so regional branches instead voted on whether their members would withhold their labour. The strikes lasted almost a year, in which time communities changed forever, the violent nature of the state was exposed again and the NUM ended up weakened. These three aspects of the strike were covered in each episode of the documentary.

As described in the first part, communities such as Shirebrook in Derbyshire had built up over the decades around their local mines. As well as being the main employer in many towns and villages, a colliery would also run sports clubs and social events for employees’ families. So, when miners went on strike, they did so not just with the aim of defending their jobs, but also their communities. Unfortunately, these were damaged not just by the fight between the miners and the capitalist class’s representatives, but also that between miners who went on strike and those who continued to work. To shouts of ‘scab’, strike-breakers were driven to work on buses with grilles over the windows, guarded by police. The programme is quite sympathetic to the strike-breakers, emphasising the view that they continued to work because they were following the majority decision from ballots of local workers which were overturned by the NUM without a national vote. This, along with Scargill’s often-inflexible leadership style, raises questions about how democracy was managed in the union. Would it have been stronger if it had been more democratic?

The second episode focuses on how the state weaponised the police and courts against the strikers. The battle at Orgreave in South Yorkshire on 18 June 1984 was between strikers and lines of police equipped with truncheons, shields, crash helmets and horses. Footage recorded by the NUM and even the police shows the brutality of those in uniform. An interview with one of the officers saying they ‘never aimed for the head’ cuts to video of a dazed picketer with a bleeding head injury. Biased news reports at the time portrayed the miners as aggressors. Solicitor Gareth Peirce says it was ‘not accidental’ that police drove people away from the field where the confrontation began to the village, as doing this moved events to where others could be affected. This meant that those arrested could be charged under legislation applicable to ‘riots’, one of the criteria for which is that other people are frightened. Being found guilty of rioting could result in life imprisonment, whereas convictions for ‘unlawful assembly’ carried less harsh punishments.

Another method used by the police is described by one of the officers at Orgreave interviewed for the documentary. He says he found it ‘really bizarre’ when a senior detective dictated what he and his colleagues would write in their statements about what happened. Defence barrister Marguerite Russell says that there was ‘mass corruption’ in how the witness statements were recorded. However, all 55 miners at Orgreave charged with offences were found not guilty. One of those, Arthur Critchlow, tells us that how the charges were framed had a longer effect than the beatings. No police have faced disciplinary action for their conduct. Then-Chief Constable Tony Leonard tells us that the police were there to ‘protect’ people’s right to work as well as people’s right to picket. His words echoed those of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who also said she would ‘never negotiate with people who use violence to achieve their objective’ even when the police had used violence to achieve her objective. The battle of Orgreave and its aftermath demonstrate how the capitalist class uses parts of the state to protect its interests and keep workers subdued, although the documentary doesn’t explain it that way.

The third episode turns to other approaches used to oppose the strikers. We’re told that a pivotal character was David Hart, one of Thatcher’s advisers who was a ‘self-promoting Scarlet Pimpernel kind of figure’, according to then-Private Secretary Andrew Turnbull. Hart’s strategy involved the National Working Miners Committee, which had been formed with the aim of ending the strike by taking legal action against the NUM. Hart brought funds to the NWMC, including contributions from capitalists such as John Paul Getty, enabling it to afford renowned lawyers. They won in court when the strike was ruled illegal as it hadn’t been decided by a nationwide ballot. After Scargill refused to halt the strike, the High Court ordered that the NUM’s assets be sequestrated, and he was further knocked when links between the union and dodgy Libyan leader Gaddafi were reported. The strike was called off in March 1985. Thatcher, who Turnbull says didn’t want to risk her reputation being harmed by the unions, had won.

The series doesn’t present a comprehensive account of the strike, as there are only brief mentions of the National Coal Board, and none at all of the Trades Union Congress or the impact of cheaper coal imports from Poland. What the programme reveals about the tactics of the state are useful, but by dwelling on the motives and actions of figures like David Hart, Arthur Scargill and Thatcher, it doesn’t reach far enough to examine the strike’s wider economic context. There’s only a rushed outline at the end about how coal had become less profitable than the emerging financial services symbolised by the up-and-coming yuppies. Another episode to explore the strike’s place in the history of capitalism would have been welcome, but wouldn’t have been commissioned.

Mike Foster

Bloggr's Note:

The SPGB's 1985 pamphlet, The Strike Weapon: Lessons of the Miners’ Strike, is available at the following link.

Letter From Europe: SOS Longwy (1979)

The Letter From Europe Column from the August 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some miles before Longwy there comes into view the reddish cloud which permanently hangs over it and over nearby Rodange in Luxemburg. As you get nearer you can see on the top of the slag heap which dominates the centre of the town a sign flashing “SOS EMPLOI". Longwy, in other words, is a steel town, and a steel town threatened with massive redundancies.

The world steel industry has been in crisis since 1974—productive capacity exceeds what can be sold profitably—and this has had serious repercussions in the old steel-making areas of Europe, such as Lorraine. The Lorraine steel industry began to develop a hundred or so years ago when a method of using the iron ore found in abundance in the area was discovered. Now that there are more modern methods of production and cheaper sources of iron ore, Lorraine is inevitably suffering the measures to reduce capacity which, within the framework of capitalism, is the only way of “solving” the current crisis. That such drastic measures were going to be necessary was evident as far back as 1976 when, instead of expanding again after a year or so of recession as on previous occasions, steel sales and production continued to stagnate.

The French government waited until the general elections of March 1978 were over (and won) before considering what to do. By then the privately-owned French steel firms were virtually bankrupt. Towards the end of last year the government announced that it was going to take over the running of these firms, appointing its own nominees to preside over the “restructuring” of the industry—the suppression of “excess” capacity—and jobs.

Over Lorraine, the government had a difficult decision to make: where to build a new modern steel works, in Longwy or in Neuves-Maisons, 100 or so kilometres further south near Nancy? In the end they chose Neuves-Maisons. As soon as the announcement was made there was consternation and anger in Longwy since the whole population realised that, on top of the already announced loss of jobs, this meant mass unemployment and a slow decline for their town. Thousands of school-children were assembled in the town centre to release balloons bearing the message “Longwy vivra” (Longwy will live). International passenger trains were stopped; wagons carrying Swedish iron ore were emptied on to the tracks; the frontiers with Belgium and Luxemburg were blocked; and lorries carrying steel products from Holland and, in particular, Germany were stopped and unloaded onto the motorway.

CRS move in

At the end of January two top managers of the steel firm Usinor were held hostage in their offices in Longwy. This led to the first violent clash with the CRS (the para-military riot police with a justified reputation for brutality) when they intervened to free the managers. The local police station was attacked with stones and other missiles. But the attack of 30 January was mild compared with what was to happen on the night of 23/24 February. Members of the CFDT trade union had been occupying a television relay station on a nearby hill and interrupting programmes to screen written messages opposing the planned redundancies. In a surprise attack in the middle of the night the CRS recaptured the station. News of this was announced to the population by the sounding of factory sirens and in no time a crowd of several hundreds had gathered in the centre of town in an angry mood. A bulldozer was commandeered and used against the gates of the police station. The crowd only dispersed after the intervention of the local Communist Party MP, Antoine Porcu, who had arranged a tacit truce: retreat by the crowd and their bulldozer in return for the withdrawal of the CRS (but not the local police) to outside the town limits. Later on in the morning the leaders of the Communist Party (PCF) dominated trade union, the CGT, organised the sacking of the local office of the steel employers’ federation; furniture was thrown out of the windows and files burned.

By now Longwy had acquired a national, and even an international, reputation of being in a fighting mood. The authorities decided that discretion was the better part of valour and kept the CRS out of Longwy, well aware that their very presence there would provoke fresh violence.

But the violence was not yet over. The two trade unions, the CFDT and the CGT had both established radio stations the latter in Longwy’s town hall with the evident blessing and support of the PCF mayor. Since the state in France has a monopoly of broadcasting these stations were technically illegal “pirate” stations and on 17 May jamming began of the CGT station. Radio Coeur d’Acier (Radio Heart of Steel). The result was the worst violence to date. The population was again called out by factory sirens and in the course of five hours fighting during the night 25 people, from the CRS as well as the crowd, were injured and 5 arrests made. Unusually, these 5 were not held in custody and, when they came up for trial, the charges against them were dismissed. The jamming of Radio Coeur d’Acier also stopped.

Clearly, the population of Longwy has shown a remarkable degree of solidarity and determination and this has enabled them to restrict the authority of the central State which has seen itself obliged to keep its riot police away and to allow the trade union radios to continue broadcasting illegally. But, and this is why the central State can afford to sit back and wait, the working class in Longwy are fighting a battle they cannot win. For in trying to keep open an unprofitable and outdated steel works they are not simply fighting against a government decision but against the economic laws of capitalism. If central governments not only in France but in Britain, Germany, Belgium and other countries too have had to bow to the logic of capitalism and cut back their steel industries, then the action of a small town, however determined, is not going to be able to override the iron law of “no profit, no production”.

Defensive Struggles

The sad fact is that the loss of the steel jobs in Longwy is inevitable and the most that the workers affected can hope for is a short postponement of their sackings and bigger redundancy payments. Indeed, this is what their solidarity and determination may bring them in the end and. if it does, it will not have been entirely in vain. But, when analysed unemotionally, it’s precious little. Like its neighbouring town of Athus in Belgium (which also had its clashes with the police when its steelworks was closed—but who remembers this now, except a few old men wondering what’s going to happen when their three-year redundancy benefits come to an end?). Longwy is doomed to decline even if its working class population had chosen to go down fighting.

There are those who don’t share this analysis but who see the clashes in Longwy as “the first flames of a renaissant proletarian flare-up” (Revolution Internationale, April 1979) and who talk of “the flare-up of proletarian violence that has restarted from Longwy” (Jeune Taupe, March-April 1979). According to these starry-eyed idealisers of violence, the events are the beginning of a revival of the working class’ “lost” revolutionary consciousness. Let’s scotch this myth before it goes any further. First, willingness to fight the police is no gauge of revolutionary consciousness (otherwise Manchester United supporters would have to be regarded as hardened revolutionaries). What allows someone to be described as a revolutionary is the aim he seeks—a complete transformation of society. In Longwy, despite the violence, the struggle is purely defensive: to save jobs (and on an issue where, unlike defensive struggles over wages and working conditions, failure is inevitable). Even the fights with the police have been defensive in the sense of being responses to actions started by the police. As for the political consciousness of those involved, unfortunately it is at the same level as in similar industrial towns in other parts of France: mostly support for the so-called Communist Party. Longwy has a PCF member of parliament and a PCF mayor.

The French CP, although still hypocritically paying lip-service to Marx’s ideas, has gone completely nationalist and analyses the steel crisis in France as an attempt by the German steel barons to eliminate a competitor. The German steel barons are supposed to control the Common Market Commission in Brussels and to have instructed Viscount Davignon, the Belgian Commissioner responsible for industrial affairs, to draw up a plan involving the dismantling of the French steel industry. This analysis would be laughable did it not provide the basis for a deliberate campaign by the PCF to stir up anti- German feelings. The PCF mayor of Longlaville, a small commune between Longwy and the Luxemburg border, has put up the following slogan on his town hall: “1870-1914-1939. La Lorraine ne sera pas vendue aux trusts allemands” (1870-1914-1939. Lorraine will not be sold to the German trusts). The present writer has seen this with his own eyes and is therefore prepared to believe reports of similar sentiments being expressed by other PCF members, the worst of which is the following from a certain J Gillet, a local CGT trade union official:

What's going to come about is the domination of Europe and France by the German capitalists. What the Germans were unable to obtain in 1914 and 1939, they are conquering today. Our action can be likened to that of the Resistance. It is a struggle for national independence (quoted in L'Anarcho-Syndicaliste. April-May 1979).

CP Chauvinism

This is not to say that the working class of Longwy are rabid German-haters. Far from it. They are ordinary workers worried about their future who, besides, being for the most part immigrants or children of immigrants from Poland and Italy, have no reason to see themselves as French chauvinists. This is why it is quite disgusting that the PCF should be exploiting the very real fears of the ordinary workers of Longwy in this way. Without exaggeration, their campaign can be said to be on a par with that of the pre-war German Nazis who blamed, again falsely, the problems of unemployed German workers on the Jews. To give credit where it is due, the smaller CFDT trade union has tried to counter this chauvinistic anti-German campaign of the PCF.

Those who see the combative attitude of the workers of Longwy as the beginning of a revival of a revolutionary, socialist consciousness among the working class are deluding themselves. We only wish that it was, but sober reality forces us to recognise that it isn’t. Yet it is an indication of the solidarity and determination the working class are capable of, a display which enables us to confidently conclude that when the workers really do want and understand socialism nothing is going to stop them getting it.

Adam Buick (Luxemburg).

World View: Sierra Leone (2000)

From the June 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

(We publish below an email we received on 9 May from a political party in Sierra Leone (the SPSL—Socialist Party of Sierra Leone—with which we have some contact) and which provides some first-hand information on what has been happening there.)

I am afraid we have lost a comrade, Abu Koroma. He died early this morning as a result of multiple wounds sustained during a peace demonstration we had yesterday with all other political parties and civic organizations. Two other members, comrades Nim Dixon and Opah Thomas are still recovering. Dixons case is a bit serious and all is being done to save their lives. British forces are here and I saw them around the beach taking position today. They are only providing security for the diplomatic and wealthy areas, we the poors are left to the mercy of the rebels. There is still lots of shooting going on in the city and no one seems able to stop it. We have locked the office and we have removed all our little belongings for safe-keeping around the beach, to be exact at Cape Sierra hotel.

Hope to keep in touch if there is power and if I can get to a computer.

Army shoots schoolkids in Gambia

(A correspondent in West Africa writes about an incident in Gambia in April during which at least 16 school students were shot down by the security forces and which went virtually unreported in the press.)

Perhaps, for a country considered to be the Lilliputian of sub-Sahara Africa, Gambia was the most unlikely place for such mayhem to have occurred. Commentators had concluded that, with the military coup in Ivory coast, the last haven of Africa had lost its decorum. In the words of Achebe, the Nigerian writer, things had fallen apart and the centre could no longer hold.

Gambia, the lowest spot in West Africa, almost below sea level, had until now seen itself as the haven of peace in Africa. For decades it has used as its national slogan “Gambia No Problem”, meaning the land and its people were at peace with one another.

In Gambia today questions are piling up as to why the darling of peace let go its steam almost without notice. On the morning of 10 April students called attention to the years or decades of wrongs handed out to them by the capitalist system. Two pivotal events highlighted their case: the rape of a female student by a paramilitary officer during the inter-school athletics meet at the National Stadium and the broad-day killing of a schoolboy by six fire service officers.

In the opinion of the students, there was something seriously faulty with a system that allows a security officer to openly rape a student and proudly walk away dusting his uniform. But then, they said, a system is morally moronic that allows a teacher to go beyond the confines of his school in reporting a male student to the fire service and not to the school principal.

Six fire service officers then took it upon themselves to punish the boy by first physically assaulting him, then they made him carry bags of cement for long periods. As a result of the brutal punishment the boy was pronounced dead upon arrival at the hospital. The students demanded justice, and then came the pathologist’s long-awaited report, “the boy died from natural causes”. For the aggrieved students that was not only a miscarriage of justice, it was equally a denial of justice. The writing was on the wall; everyone saw it except the capitalist masters who thought a show of strength would be sufficient to calm the protesting students.

The authorities got their calculations woefully wrong. By 8 am the students had stamped their willingness to protest and their loss of confidence in a system that reduced them to anything but human. The Head of State was in Cuba attending the Group of 77’s summit hosted by Fidel Castro. The protest started peacefully with students chanting their displeasure, carrying placards and banners.

The security operatives went into full gear by firing tear gas and rubber bullets. Instead of dispersing the students, this hardened their resolve to defend and die for what they believed in. The security forces were rudely awakened from their nest of slumber. More troops were brought to beef up their strength, they used live ammunition to shoot students, they beat them and molested female students. But amidst the armament employed against them the students stood their ground.

They went on the rampage, burned down four police stations; they caused physical harm to public and private properties including transportation, telephone outlets, stores and shops. What actually baffled the custodians of the capitalist system was how unarmed students were able to withstand the firepower of the security forces and still wreak such destruction–unique in the country’s history–to property.

The message was clear, from Beijing, Berlin, to Seattle, to Banjul, the days of the totalitarian era are over. Man cannot rule man against his will. The breeze of change was blowing across the face of Gambia and it was high time its capitalist leaders took note.

Unfortunately, and as expected, afterwards came the time for the capitalist leaders to apportion blame. The opposition came in for a blasting, they had “instigated and motivated” the students to demonstrate in an effort to bring the government down. But did the students have to demonstrate, did 16 of their colleagues–according to a government estimate–have to die with dozens wounded in all shape and form? Was it politically motivated or were the students only trying to vent their frustration with a rotten system?

To better understand the dynamics of everyone collaborating in the death of those students, it needs to be appreciated that, irrespective of where it occurs, the lords of capitalism are never at ease with themselves when the working masses venture or attempt to take their destiny into their own hands. Every and all effort will be exhausted to muzzle and nip it in the bud.

The problem was a Gambian one, but has a universal appeal. Masters are uneasy when servants are awake.

Daniel Wah

Running Commentary: Retired unhurt (1983)

The Running Commentary column from the March 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Retired unhurt

Before he became a well-known television tyre salesman, Robert Mark worked as the chief of London’s police but he may not have enjoyed the job because he once described the Met as an organisation where corruption was routine. Under his rule there was a re-organisation in which some policemen found themselves moved to less sensitive work and others were persuaded to slip quietly out of the Force.

Then came the bible salesman. David McNee called himself Hammer because he claimed to have battered the criminals of Glasgow into submission. His success was not apparent to anyone who actually observed or experienced the agonies of that impoverished, violent city. McNee asserted that he hated crime through a stern religious conviction, which might have misled many people into believing that under his dour management corruption in the Met would wither and die along with improper police practices. The evidence shows that nothing of the sort happened. Most efforts at exposure continued to be frustrated in the traditional way, or succumbed through lack of official support.

So McNee left the Met in no better shape than when he arrived with his burning religious zeal. Even worse, there were important, unanswered questions about illegal police activities on the London streets; for example, the killing of Blair Peach, the riots in Brixton.

But somebody, somewhere — in fact quite a lot of them — thinks that the Hammer did a good job. Plainly he fits in well with ruling class requirements for filling important, sensitive jobs. First, he has retired on an index-linked pension of £22,000 a year. Then there is no lack of companies eager to employ him. Lord Matthews has taken him on as a non-executive director of Fleet Holdings; he has a similar post with the Clydesdale Bank paying him £5,000 a year and he gets £10,000 a year as a member of the board of British Airways.

This model of Christian rectitude, who was wont to discourse on the lack of moral restraint in society, has sold his memoirs to the busty Sunday Mirror whose gratitude extends to their paying him £120,000.

And in case anyone should doubt that all of this money-grubbing conforms to the unctuous moralising and denunciations of Christianity, McNee has taken yet another job. He is President of the National Bible Society of Scotland, to help teach the workers of that country to accept their depressed lot with meekness and gratitude.

Year of peace?

Having failed to cut London's fares because a judge said it was illegal to do so, Ken Livingstone’s GLC are turning their attention to rather wider issues.

In London, 1983 will be Peace Year — something which all Londoners will hope the other side remembers if World War III breaks out between now and December 31. Presumably to inform potential breakers of the peace, the GLC have invited several mayors from foreign cities. There will be peace conferences, peace concerts, peace community events.

Two defenceless and innocent shire horses will be named Peace and Friendship and will be in the Easter Parade in Regents Park. A statue (of a woman, of course; Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher have proved how much more peace loving women are than men) has been erected in the garden near Red Ken’s County Hall.

What does all this mean, apart from a bit more publicity for Livingstone and his party? The “peace” movement, like all the other movements, exists under the delusion that demonstrations, festivals, dedications, have some effect on the problem they are concerned about.

In fact, in themselves such movements are ineffective — except that, by contributing to the maintenance of the very conditions which cause the problems, they can be said actually to worsen the situation. While peace movements and anti-nuclear demonstrators proliferate, the bald fact is that the weapons have got more dreadful and more widespread.

What really counts is the idea behind a demonstration. Marching, or sitting down, against the effects of the social system we live under does nothing to end that system. So it leaves the root of the problems untouched, to flourish and propagate.

The example of Livingstone’s Labour Party is typically illustrative. In power, they have always clearly stood for the production, and when it suited their purposes the use, of nuclear weapons. That fact is not wiped away by their organising this spurious event now.

A demonstration properly against war, or weapons, could take only one form; it would be a demonstration against the very social system which gives rise to them and it would extend a long, long way beyond the boundaries of any city.

No joke

For some reason obscured by time and the complexities of upper-class japes, Private Eye relentlessly calls him Lord Whelks. Upper-class japes are, of course, always relentless. In other circles he is known as the noble Lord Matthews who at his peak was boss of the mighty Trafalgar House empire which encompassed ships, hotels, property, newspapers.

Now Matthews has stepped down on the peak and will be devoting more time to one of the combines which made a part of Trafalgar — Fleet Holdings, which includes the Express newspapers. He also threatens to make more speeches in the House of Lords, where they may well be hoping he will not inflict on them the world famous Express style: "There may for all I know be no truth in the rumour that Princess Diana is really a buxom go-go dancer. But I think we ought to be told".

For Matthews is really torn between patriotism and profit and an occasional difficulty in reconciling them has given him much anguish. He it was who wanted to register Trafalgar’s ships under flags of convenience and crew them with foreign seamen. Only an embarrassing splurge of publicity. inciting protest from those who stubbornly live in the days of Victorian naval power, excluded the QEII from this arrangement. Matthews made no secret about his motivation — British seamen, because of their trade union organisation, were higher paid than those he could recruit abroad.

This was the argument he used again, when one of the Trafalgar companies put out for tender the rebuilding of the Atlantic Conveyor, the container ship lost to an Exocet at the Falklands. Matthews was clear that the contract should go to the yard promising the cheapest deal. Patriotism is for the likes of those who perished with the Atlantic Conveyor, always useful to persuade workers to act against their interests, not for hard-nosed businessmen with allegiance to the profit figures.

But Matthews is no figure of fun; he must be taken very, very seriously. Not one of the modern, enlightened, smoother breed of capitalists, he represents the authentic morality of private property society in which achievement is maximum exploitation and the only worthwhile human being is one who can be profitably put to use.

Editorial: The Socialist View of the Situation in China. (1925)

Editorial from the August 1924 issue of the Socialist Standard

The present disturbances in those of China occupied by foreign settlements may be said to have had their immediate origin in a strike which took place in February last. Chinese workers employed in Japanese textile factories in Shanghai protested against the ill-treatment of a girl who was seriously injured by a Japanese foreman. Her offence was that she was found asleep after a twelve-hour night shift. The strikers demanded that fines and personal violence of this kind be abolished, and a 10 per cent, increase of their wages. The strike appears to have been unsuccessful, but even so the employers failed to keep the terms of settlement.

In May this and many long-standing grievances led to a general strike movement in Shanghai, and feeling was quickly inflamed by the death of a striker at the hands of a Japanese factory official. On May 30th a number of Chinese students paraded in protest after having been forbidden to do so by the police. Some students were arrested and the remainder demanded their release. Shanghai police in the charge of a British inspector were then ordered by him to “shoot to kill” only 10 seconds after he had announced his intention to the few bystanders who were near enough to hear his words. The result was that 6 were killed and 40 wounded. Within 6 days the victims in the ensuing riots numbered 70 dead and 300 wounded —all Chinese.

The movement rapidly spread to Hong Kong, Canton and other industrial and commercial centres, being added to and made more complex by the race hatred of British, French, Japanese and other foreigners who have at different times occupied Chinese territory and maintained their occupation by force, in spite of the opposition of Chinese governments. It has been easy enough to induce the strikers to believe that their enemy is the “foreigner,” because the majority of the factories happen to be foreign owned. There is actually, of course, no question of the Chinese exploiter being any less brutal in his treatment of his employees than are his alien rivals. The abominable conditions which prevail in the foreign mills—as bad as those common in this country in the early days of the factory system—are equalled, if not surpassed, by those in Chinese establishments in and outside the foreign settlements.

The foreign settlers, backed by their respective governments, are thus threatened by two quite different but at present associated movements—by their Chinese employes, who want better conditions, and by the propertied and educated Chinese, who burn with hatred of the foreign invaders and demand independence. They resent their position of political and social inferiority and (most intolerable of all the burdens a would-be ruling class can be made to bear) they have had to suffer the indignity of seeing the proceeds of the exploitation of Chinese workers pocketed by European and Japanese capitalists. The first principle of patriotism in China, as elsewhere, is that robbery, like charity, should begin—and end—at home.

For their part the foreigners are by no means more than superficially united. Great Britain arrived early and obtained the best ports and most extensive spheres of interest, and now in consequence has to face the hardly disguised hostility of the late arrivals who seek to gain commercial and financial advantage by other means than those adopted by Great Britain. Thus Russia and U.S.A. both go out of their way to pose as friends of China. Russia has already relinquished all special privileges in China, and America chooses this moment to announce that it foregoes the last instalments of the Boxer indemnity. American missionaries supported the policy of their Government by giving evidence on behalf of the arrested Chinese students, while British and others were defending and glorifyingf the brutality of the British controlled police.

As for the disturbances, we are familiar enough with the customary violent and hypocritical attitude of the European ruling classes towards their workers not to be surprised at the use of similar methods in Shanghai. All the blame was as a matter of course laid on the Chinese students and “agitators,” but little by little evidence has accumulated which badly damages the pretensions of the guardians of “law and order.”

In the demonstration the only casualties were Chinese; two out of three doctors stated at the trial that the wounds were nearly all in the back, which would be inexplicable if the crowd had been attacking the police; the third doctor said, “I am not sure whether the bullets were shot from the back or the front.” (Daily Herald, July 21st.) The judges found “that there was no violence or indication of violence, that most of the arrests took place before the shooting. …” The students were all acquitted. The Commission appointed by the diplomatic body blamed the police and recommended the dismissal of those responsible (Daily Herald, 22nd July). This finding has been overlooked or suppressed by most of the Press.

The recent movement is, however, only a symptom of a change which coming over China—the change from a static peasant system to an aggressive and progressive capitalism.

“China is passing through the first phases of the industrial revolution. … In the seven years from 1915 the number of spindles rose from one to two millions.”—” Manchester Guardian,” 19th June, 1925.

A propertyless industrial working class is massing and slowly learning to organise against vile factory conditions and low wages. Whether they will or no they are being brought into dependence on world capitalism, and they will in time take their part in the struggle for the overthrow of that system.

Unfortunately this critical phase finds them overwhelmed with interested parties offering them bad advice, anxious to divert them into various blind alleys.

The Chinese capitalists, the Communists and the Labour Party are all “friends” of the Chinese worker. If the Chinese workers are led to support the Chinese capitalist independence movement, experience will soon teach them that nationality means nothing whatever to the workers ; their lot will be no degree better if and when their exploiters are all Chinese.

The Communists’ willingness to deceive other people is only equalled by the ability to deceive themselves. They disregard the fact that at present only a small fraction of China is industrialised, they slur over the Capitalist aims of the independence movement and urge the workers to support anti-working class political groups to fight issues of no moment except to Chinese capitalists.

What they cannot or do not wish to see is plainly visible to others. The Chinese representative in London of the “Sin Po” (Batavia) writes as follows in “Foreign Affairs” (July, 1925):

“China, a land of conservatism and tradition, of peasant proprietorship, is the worst imaginable ground for the sowing of Marxian ideas. China being so vast, it is not surprising that in certain parts of the country the extreme Left wing of the Kuomintang is Communist ; but the body of the organisation is bourgeois and capitalistic with the mediaeval capitalism (“distributism”) of Mr. G. K. Chesterton. Let not Europeans be deceived by their newspapers: the present trouble in China, in so far as it is political, is a manifestation of nationalism in which merchants and bourgeois join with workers and students to resist foreign exploitation.”

The British Labour Party and Trades Union Congress have passed resolutions of sympathy protesting their solidarity with the Chinese workers. How little their socialist understanding and how little the value of their sympathy is shown by the fact that on 25th May the General Council sent a deputation to the President of the Board of Trade

“To protest against the continued employment of Chinese and cheap Asiatic labour on British steamers. The deputation asked the Government to introduce a Bill to make illegal such employment west of the Suez Canal.”—” Daily Herald,” 26th May.

The industrial workers of China are few at present. They should organise and work to defend their class interests on the economic field against capitalists irrespective of nationality, and prepare for the future when conditions will have been prepared making working class emancipation possible through Socialism.

News in Review: Syngman Rhee (1960)

The News in Review column from the June 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

Syngman Rhee

In 1950 the U.S.A. intervened in Korea, when that country was torn by internal strife and faced with the threat that Communist China was attempting to take over the country. Fortunately for the U.S.A., Russia had just walked out of the Security Council, and the United States was able to get the United Nations' support against “Communist aggression" and go to the aid of Korea in order to save that country for “democracy.” Most nations of the Western bloc will not forget in a hurry places like Pusan and Seoul, where bitter fighting took place. Many died on both sides for that hackneyed phrase “ Freedom.” 

It has been asserted more than once that the so-called Chinese Communism is a repressive dictatorship where people have no rights and democratic government is not known—in fact it is a police state. The war, as we know, ended in a stalemate in 1953 with North Korea in the orbit of China and the Southern part under the “democracy” of Syngman Rhee. Following the recent shooting of demonstrators in Seoul. Mr. Christian Herter, the U.S. Secretary of State summoned Mr. Yen Chan Yeng, South Korea's Ambassador to the U.S.A. for discussion. Within an hour, the Secretary's Press Officer was “expressing the U.S.A.’s profound and growing concern over (1) the high-handed suppression of political opposition by Korea's 85 year old President Syngman Rhee; (2) brutal Korean police action against student protest marchers and (3) other repressive measures unsuited to a free democracy.” It seems that Syngman Rhee has all the aspirations and undemocratic desires of a minor Stalin. Unfortunately, the workers who died in defence of “Freedom” in Korea cannot protest, but we can. This is another of the many tragic examples of workers being hoodwinked with empty phrases. Wars are fought to perpetuate this vicious capitalist system, not to institute “democratic freedoms.”

Caryl Chessman

The recent legal, ritual putting to death of Caryl Chessman in San Quentin gas chamber, after twelve years' occupation of a death cell, brings into morbid focus the irrational and negative character of the death penalty. Those who defend the death penalty act on the base assumption that human nature is essentially anti-social and that only “the fear of the rope” deters us from asserting our “instincts” to wantonly murder and rape. On the contrary, it was our own society, which institutes at every level of social life struggle and competition, that nurtured the violence in Caryl Chessman's make-up during his earlier years. Twelve years ago, Chessman was a hardened criminal, a product of slum poverty, brutalised by a childhood history of reformatory schools. His own criminality was in itself a negative response to the injustices of his own environment. Yet by Chessman's own efforts through education, the man they executed was a thousand cultural miles removed from the man they originally condemned. But blind retribution had to proceed. For an individual to offend against morals by committing rape, as Chessman was convicted of having done, poses a social problem. But when organised society in all its brutal ignorance exacts primitive vengeance from the life of an individual after twelve years' incarceration, that constitutes a nightmare. The significance of the case of Caryl Chessman will be missed if we fail to condemn the society which first produced him and then so brutally destroyed him.

That Wedding

Princess Margaret's wedding has been a source of joy to the headline writers of the popular press for some months now. Sickening discussions have taken place on the number of bridesmaids, the style of the wedding dress, and so on. More recently, sections of the press have been coming down to earth with some articles on the cost of the whole pantomime. The Government, without batting an eyelid, has spent £25,000 on the wedding, with a further £40,000 on the honeymoon cruise. It is surprising that these papers, and some Labour M.P.'s. should suddenly criticise the expenditure on the cruise, because, as pointed out in the House of Commons, the royal yacht costs £4,000 a week in wages alone, whether or not it is in use. However, those in Parliament who do criticise, are in the minority; the majority think that as advertising agents for British capitalism, the royal family do a good job of work, and they should be paid accordingly, with now and then a bonus like this gigantic wedding.

Economic Rebore

Our economic system is a gigantic machine that needs constant care and attention. A mechanic who understands his car can keep it in good order indefinitely, but the political mechanics, whose job it is to keep capitalism in good running order, have very limited control over the caprices of our mode of production. However, one body of opinion insists that a healthy balance between production and consumption can be maintained, if, from time to time, the brakes are applied to working class spending. Production is geared to meet the demands of the market at their peak, and any fall in demand can cause chaos in the economy. The latest credit squeeze was designed to restrict the too rampant expansion of industry by putting a curb on capital investment. This old machine, even if it gets a de-carb and a rebore, is liable to break down at any time. We all have to travel in it, and it is time we thought seriously about getting ourselves a new one.

Policeman's Lot

The increasing rate of crime and the shortage of manpower in the police force has caused the Government to set up a Royal Commission to investigate the matter. A joint memorandum has been submitted to the Commission by the Police Federations of England and Wales and Scotland. The memorandum said “That the decline in the relative status and pay of the police constable was calamitous—that police pay should be maintained at between 40 and 45 per cent. above the average weekly earnings of manual workers." It was claimed in the memorandum that "the constable at the maximum of his scale is no longer 55 to 60 per cent. ahead of the average worker’s earnings. He has fallen so far that he is getting less pay than the average.” This situation led one Chief Constable into allowing his men to take up civilian work after finishing their duty, a state of affairs that is deplored in the memorandum, it being considered that “a constable should be paid sufficient to be able to hold himself aloof from spare time work which might lead to embarrassment or to a conflict of loyalties.”

This fall in pay is an example of the natural oscillation of price around value, caused by fluctuation of supply and demand on the market. The fact is that the post-war boom having created a terrific demand for productive labour power, the police force has been to some extent neglected in the mad scramble for profit. We use the term ”natural oscillation of price” because this applies to all commodities which are helpless to resist the effect of these oscillations. The unique commodity in this respect is labour power, whose owners can resist market fluctuations to some extent by intelligent use of their trade unions and the strike weapon. The police don’t have access to this weapon and are thus as helpless as a pot of- jam in determining its price.

Red Herrings

The second United Nations law of the sea conference — on the Icelandic fishing dispute — has ended in failure. Mr. John Hare, leader of the British delegation, blamed the "selfish interest" of the other contending capitalist countries. No capitalist class will ever admit that its own interests are selfish: the selfish ones are always the others. Our rulers will expect the working class to support them on this as on many other issues. But the disputes over three, six or twelve mile limit does not consume the working class. The only limits which concerns the workers is the budget between them two classes in society — the rulers on one side and the ruled on the other.

Plane Over Russia

The incident of the American plane which was shot down over Russia when on a spying mission raised a furore. There was much criticism of the American action, especially in left-wing circles. It is hard to see why this was. The present division of the world into mutually contending powers — which is inevitable so long as there is capitalism — means that each country must spy on all the others in order not to be taken at a disadvantage if war breaks out. It all goes back to the basic contradiction in all non-Socialist "progressive” thinking: the system of capitalism is supported. and yet its results are attacked.