The Importance of Mr. Profumo (1963)

From the July 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

it was the Daily Express which pointed out, quickly, cruelly, that profumo is the Italian word meaning perfume. But the famous scandal sticks in a way undreamt of in the philosophies of big newspapers.

Now Profumo’s “sin,” for the Tories, was not just that he was running a mistress. That was bad enough, but there have been some famous precedents who have got away with the same thing. It was not even that the girl was being shared with a Russian intelligence agent and at least a couple of others, although that was enough to wilt the flowers on the starchiest of hats at a Conservative women’s fete. What really put Profumo beyond the pale was that he admitted to telling a lie. Not a lie to just anyone, but to the House of Commons, which is supposed to be an assembly of gentlemen and where it is the tradition not to question nor debate personal statements like Profumo’s original assertion of his innocence, this was what Robert McKenzie called a kick in the stomach for the Tories, who have always liked to think of themselves as the party of better people, of Christian gentlemen.

It was the lie which gave Lord Hailsham the excuse for his fireworks in his TV interview with McKenzie, when he blasted Profumo as a man who has “ lied and lied and lied ” and insisted that the whole affair was a moral issue. Hailsham is well known as a Tory moralist, a strict Christian who professes unshakeable principles. So is another central figure in the drama surrounding the government crisis—Enoch Powell. The hullabaloo over Profumo has served to make these men— and others like them—heroes of integrity. The inference we are invited to draw is that generally capitalism administered by the sort of men who would never tell a lie and that Profumo was just the inevitable bad apple.

Alright. Let us have a look at this business of lies. And if we do, the first thing to hit us is that political history is crammed with examples of men who, as a matter of course, have told enormous lies yet have never been accused of being liars. Some of them, in fact, have died as respected pillars of capitalist society. Stafford Cripps, for example, was the very caricature of an ascetic moralist. Strict vegetarian. Fervent Christian. Like Enoch Powell, he was supposed to be a man who stood for principle before everything. Did Cripps, then, never tell a lie? We need nudge our memories only a little to recall that in 1949 he protested for weeks that he had no intention of devaluing sterling, while all the time his plans for devaluation were cut and dried. There are plenty of other examples of Cripps’ flexible reverence for the truth.

The Tories are not, of course, untarred by this brush. Hailsham and Powell are only two of those who were unprotesting members of the Eden government which embarked on the Suez fiasco. They apparently held their consciences in check when their government broke its word to the United Nations and justified the invasion by what were quickly revealed as blatant lies. More recently the same, government has been what we can politely call less than frank over, the deportation of Doctor Soblen and of Chief Eriahoro. In fact, in a more subtle way, Christine Keeler is not the only matter on which Profumo has been dishonest, although on these issues his ex-colleagues in the government would never dream of calling him rude names. As Minister of War, Profumo bore the ultimate responsibility for the big publicity campaign to persuade people to join the Army. The advertisements used in this campaign showed such a one-sided view of Army life that even some newspapers felt moved to protest. Profumo’s ads. showed clean-living young men playing rugby, climbing mountains, patrolling romantic deserts. They did not hint that military discipline, in its dreary stupidities, is designed to degrade and brutalise men. They did not mention the unpleasant places a soldier may be sent to, nor the dirty jobs he may have to do there. They ignored the fact that soldiers often die especially horrible deaths, looking not at all like clean living Soldiers of the Queen as they do so. The advertisements told lies, but nobody in the government got upset with Profumo because of that.

Neither have they been upset by the lies about, say, the effects of testing nuclear weapons. The government assure us that the danger from these exercises is negligible and that another little test will not do us any harm. Yet they know perfectly well that every test adds to the atmosphere’s load of radioactivity and that this means that a lot of people, especially children, will die who would otherwise have lived. Overseas, as well, lies are told on this matter. President Kennedy has recently announced that his government will suspend all tests, unless some other country starts them up again. This may well be followed, as it was in 1958, by a similar announcement from Moscow. Both sides will pose as the guardians of peace and human safety. Yet both sides know that a suspension of tests does not mean that the development of nuclear weapons has been suspended. They know that they are all working on -their bombs and that when they think it is to their advantage to do so they will think up some reason to start testing them again. Are Kennedy and Khruschev, then, champions of truth?

It would, indeed, be surprising if men in their position were, for they administer a social system which is full of lies, and not only those told by politicians. Were the makers of thalidomide telling the truth when they asserted that the drug could safely be taken by pregnant women? What sort of principle were they upholding, when they protested that the delay in the American Food and Drug Administration approving thalidomide was costing them their chance of exploiting a Christmas market? Do the mass-production tailors believe their own advertisements, which show aristocratic young men being admired by glamorous girls for the cheap off-the-peg outfit they are wearing? Are the estate agents who advertise a cramped, poky apology for a house as “ neat and compact ” and a garden with knee-high weeds as “mature” keen churchgoers who regularly say their prayers?

We know what grounds these lies are excused on. We know that capitalism claims that strategic and commercial reasons justify telling lies. As R. A. Butler said about the Cripps lie, “. . . I know that if you talked about devaluing the currency well ahead of time, you would do indefinite damage to your own currency. . . .” But they cannot have it both ways. Capitalism professes to work on a basis of morality; workers are taught from the very beginning that the road to Heaven is paved with honesty and high principles. Yet capitalism admits that its own interests force it to deny these principles. And since when have the sort of morals propounded so often by capitalism's leaders been relative, adaptable, matters of expediency? A lie, after all, is a lie under any circumstances. No, they cannot have it both ways, although over Profumo that is how they have tried to have it.

Imagine a politician who told the truth! A Minister of Housing who admitted that he could not solve the housing problem! A Foreign Secretary who blew the gaff on every double-crossing international carve up as soon as he had made it! A Chancellor of the Exchequer who introduced his Budget with the admission that it was just a rehash of a lot of ideas which had flopped in the past! If that happened nobody would get involved in a scandal. There would be a dignified resignation, surrounded by sorrowful stories of tiredness, strain and mental breakdown.

Profumo told a rather foolish and, for him, a risky lie. But at least it was a lie about his personal life, a lie which involved only a very few people. In contrast, day after day capitalism goes on turning out lies which affect the welfare and in many cases the very lives of millions of people. What is more, those lies play their part in bolstering the social system which degrades and depresses the majority—the only socially useful people—the working class.

No minister gets worked up about that. There are no top level inquiries, no resignations, nothing on television. In cases like the Profumo scandal the working class are supposed to be content with a mixed diet of salacity and hypocritical moralising. The same newspapers which got indignant over Profumo's lie saw nothing wrong in paying thousands of pounds for Christine Keeler's story, nor in publishing photographs of her which we will describe—and not for want of a better word—as arresting.

It will be tragic if in among this smoke screen of hypocrisy and scandal the essential fact is lost sight of. Let us state it here, quickly and simply.

Lies are essential to capitalism and super moralists like Lord Hailsham know it. And capitalism itself is the biggest lie of all.

Ivan

Trump and lying as a tactic (2020)

From the November 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

The reign of President Trump in the United States has been characterised by open deceit. Many of his opponents berated the media for not calling his lies outright lies, but even when they have, it has not scratched the levels of support he possesses among his millions of followers. A recent example was following the revelations, in the Bob Woodward recorded interviews, that Trump had tried to downplay the seriousness of Covid 19, while knowing full well the danger it posed (as he later found to his cost). His team’s response was to announce that Trump had never played down the seriousness of Covid, despite him – on tape – saying he would and the plethora of public statements that can demonstrate that he did. That does not matter, they are sticking by the lie.

As Gary Kasparov, former Soviet chess grandmaster, has had occasion to point out, the purpose of such lies is not just to deceive, but to prove loyalty by seeing who is willing to swallow their pride and utter deliberate untruths that they know not just to be untruths but unconvincing ones at that. Kasparov had experienced this first hand in the Soviet Union and under Putin. It is an exercise in raw power. It promotes the cult-like following President Trump has whipped up.

Of course this is nothing new. As Marx and Engels wrote in The German Ideology:

‘The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it’.

Those ideas, necessarily, are going to serve that class (and they are by no means homogeneous and uncontested within the ruling class and between contending classes). To the extent that they present the interests of the ruling class as the interests of the whole of society, they are inherently deceitful (but not necessarily consciously so).

This accounts for so much of the noise around Trump: as a billionaire capitalist who surrounds himself with millionaires, centimillionaires and the billionaire Betsy DeVos, and who took the reins of power from the career politicians, he refuses to think and act like a career politician with the sensibility and decorum usually demanded of a candidate or office holder. The Democrats who find Trump uncouth are precisely the technocrats Noam Chomsky warned about in his essay The Responsibility of Intellectuals, who believe that ‘the age of ideology is ended, supplanted, at least in the West, by a general agreement that each issue must be settled in its own terms, within the framework of a Welfare State in which, presumably, experts in the conduct of public affairs will have a prominent role’. (chomsky.info/19670223/).

Those ‘experts’ dominated the Clinton, Blair and Obama governments. As the late David Graeber pointed out, they represented the ‘peculiar fusion of public and private, market forces and administrative oversight, the world of hallmarks, benchmarks, and stakeholders that characterizes what I’ve been calling centrism is a direct expression of the sensibilities of the professional-managerial classes’ (tinyurl.com/rmeyu88). Professional-managerial classes who value procedure over substance, the upshot of which is worth quoting at length:

‘All this also helps explain the otherwise mysterious popular appeal of the disorganized, impulsive, shambolic (but nonetheless cut-to-the-chase, get-things-done) personas cultivated by men like Trump and Johnson. Yes, they are children of privilege in every possible sense of the term. Yes, they are pathological liars. Yes, they don’t seem to care about anyone but themselves. But they also present themselves as the precise opposite of the infuriating administrator whose endless appeal to rules and demand for additional meetings, paperwork, and motivational seminars makes it impossible for you to do your job’.

The anger against the infuriatingly anodyne procedures designed to smother conflict in the workplace and society lies behind much of the willingness to submit to the enthusiastic lies of Trump. Added to this is the conviction that Trump’s Democrat rivals are themselves pathologically dishonest (albeit they prefer more plausible lies).

Some of this stretches back to Trump’s role in ‘birtherism’, the unshakable belief that Barack Obama wasn’t really American enough to be president (despite production of his birth certificate). But it also goes back further to things like 9/11 Truth, and the refusal to believe the ‘official story’.

QAnon

His most fervent acolytes have been found through incidents like the  Pizzagate furore (the belief that high ranking Democrat officials were meeting at a Washington DC pizza restaurant that was a front for human trafficking and paedophilic abuse). It was totally false, but one man decided to take action, and attack the restaurant. There has also been an arson attempt. The man claimed to believe he was freeing the children

This story has since merged with QAnon. Q is a putative member of the Whitehouse staff, leaking the ‘real’ agenda to the Trump administration. It is best summarised by the Wikipedia entry:

‘QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory alleging that a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles running a global child sex-trafficking ring is plotting against President Donald Trump, who is battling them, leading to a “day of reckoning” involving the mass arrest of journalists and politicians. No part of the theory is based on fact’,

Q posts gnomic comments on various right-wing communities boards, and his followers seek to decode them, believing that Trump is playing a long game against entrenched powerful interests, until the day they will all be arrested and tried. His lies are part of that game against the corrupt officials who infest Washington.

Q followers post on Twitter under the hashtag #WWG1WGA (‘Where we go one, we go all’) as a sort of rallying cry. They also post a lot under #SaveTheChildren. The centrality of the paedophilia claims is curious. Certainly, it is common to impute absolute immorality to opponents. In this instance, partly, it is a method to gain support by finding people who will be upset by the horror of child abuse. It is also likely that this is an imaginary sublimation of the idea that their enemies are taking something precious away from them, and children are the most precious thing most people possess (as well as being metonymically linked with vitality and the future).

Dan Olson, in his YouTube video, In search of flat Earth, puts forward the analysis that the QAnon believers are actually engaged in a form of violence. Their whacky ideas are not about debate but about forcing people to choose sides (firstly by weeding out adherents who don’t buy the theory wholesale, then by closing down debate with anyone who tries to argue with them factually). QAnon is a refusal to see a structural problem, instead believing the system itself is being subverted by infiltration, which must be fought by any means necessary, including outright conscious lying. They want to shut up the critics of the system.

Trump turned himself into a danger to the world by clamping down on US state-sponsored climate science. Lies are a weapon against humanity. They cannot simply be debunked, the antidote is the building of conscious analysis of the way the world really is, and finding a constituency willing to listen to that truth that is bigger and better organised than the QAnon cultists.

Pik Smeet

Are Politicians Honest? (1960)

From the July 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

Does anybody expect politicians and other leaders to be honest? To keep their promises? To admit their mistakes and if necessary make way for somebody who can do better than they? The history of capitalism is crowded with examples of leaders who have never done anything of the kind. Of men who have persisted in policies and actions which were obviously harmful—and have lied to justify their mistakes.

Older people will remember the stubbornness of the European politicians in the 1914-18 war, who persisted in futile campaigns which were often costing thousands of lives every day, without achieving even the objects which the generals had set out for them. There as a story that, when the terrible battle at Passchendaele was at last over, a high ranking British officer went up to the battlefield and wept at what he saw there. But Douglas Haig, the man who had planned and defended the whole campaign, did not weep. He was given an earldom. None of the politicians suggested that the war was one great, bitter futility. None of them, when it was over, balanced the dead against what was settled at the so-called peace conferences. They simply rearranged the frontiers of Europe, threw the Germans out of Africa and waited for the next war to start. And when that happened, one of the excuses for it was a dispute over a part of the post-1918 settlement — the Polish Corridor. The treaties of 1945 have had the same effect—they have not pacified, but have irritated and provoked more sore spots in the world.

These are only some of the instances when, although direct and vital human interests were at stake, the leaders of capitalism have been less than honest .They are still at the same game. Last March, President Eisenhower spoke to some American-Chilean organisations in Santiago de Chile. He had this to say:

The suggestion that America supports dictators is ridiculous. Surely no nation loves liberty more. . . . We repudiate dictatorship in any form right or left. Our role . . . stands as a beacon to all who love freedom.

Fine words. They ignore the fact that, in the past few years, the U.S.A. has supported, financially and militarily, dictators like Franco, Syngman Rhee, and Batista. And, of course, they have helped one of the most ruthless of the lot—Stalin, who was sustained in his pitiless rule by the aid which America poured into his country during the war. At the time, the American and Russian ruling classes had common cause against Germany—and when capitalist interests are at stake, principles of freedom and human rights are left to take care of themselves.

Nearer home, we find other examples of political inconsistency. The Manchester Guardian of 15th June. 1959, reporting on the Whitehaven by-election, drew attention to two statements which had been made by the Conservative candidate. One, in February. 1950. when he was standing as a Liberal, called the Conservative Party ". . . a class party . . . which desires to keep power and privilege m the hands of a particular section of the community". The other, in October. 1951, when he had joined the Tories, described them as standing ". . . not for one section of the community, but for all.”

This latter can be a winning line. Most workers deny the existence of a class struggle and vote against a party which they think stands for the interests of any class. The majority of them harbour the delusion that everybody’s interests are the same—and woe betide the "rabble rouser" who talks about the class war. This goes down especially well with the hire-purchasers of television sets and the deferred buyers of cars. So, to win votes and influence people, a party must often claim that it is above class, and that its opponents dabble in the fields of narrow self-interest.

A lot of money can be spent to put over this sort of idea. The recently published The British General Election of 1959, by David Butler and Richard Rose, reveals that between July, 1957, and October, 1959, the Conservative Party lashed out £468,000 on press advertising and posters alone. All of this—and what was spent at the same time by the other parties and by the various industries threatened with nationalisation—to convince workers that capitalism could be better organised by one set of leaders rather than the other. Are the voters flattered? Apparently so; change as they might between Labour, Tory, Liberal or what have you, their support for capitalism is unwavering.

Here is the very centre of the whirlwind. They trust their leaders Field Marshal Lord Montgomery summed it up when he said, on the anniversary of D-Day:

. . . a way can be found by which the East and the West can live together in spite of different ideas and social systems, but the finding of that way is not for you and me—it is for our political leaders.

This surprisingly is not one of the Field Marshal's least sensible statements. The problems of capitalist society can be left to "our political leaders." But workers—the people who make and build, who manage and organise—and who die in capitalisms wars—have a different task. They must realise that the leaders themselves show the wretchedness and brutality of the system. That, even without the mistakes and dishonesty which we have seen, capitalism would still make one hell of a world. That the future is not in putting blind faith in leaders, but in widespread understanding and socially conscious action.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Sex, lies and leadership (1998)

The Greasy Pole column from the October 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

What was remarkable about the Monica Lewinsky affair was not that Clinton had what he called a “not appropriate” relationship with here, nor that he then lied about it but that there are people—so many people—who profess to be surprised, shocked, outraged by his behaviour.

It does not have to be said, that Clinton is not the first politician to be exposed in this way and obviously he will not be the last. The sexual and political conditioning of capitalism work in combination to encourage relationships based on a recognition that, in the words of Henry Kissinger (who, it was said, knew what he was talking about) power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. This was put in another way by Antonia Sanchez, who experienced—whether she enjoyed it or not is another matter—a lot of attention over her affair with David Mellor, which did so much to undermine the Tories’ Back To Basics campaign. Ms Sanchez explained Mellor’s attraction for her by reference to his influence; he could, she said, “make things happen”. This influence—power would be a better word in the case of the President of America—is given to political leaders by the workers who vote for them, who surrender their own power to change human society to a few people mandated to keep the social system in being. There are so many elements in this for what is called the misuse of this power that the abnormal becomes the normal—the misuse becomes an appropriate use of the power. So we had all those Tory sleaze merchants and their hypocrisy about personal morality. So we had John Kennedy; so we have Bill Clinton.

Lies

Of course it would have been more than remarkable if Clinton had, from the first day of his exposure, told the truth and owned up to the affair. Because part of the job of a politician is to tell lies. (When they don’t in the House of Commons—or rather when they are caught out doing it—they describe it as “misleading the House”.) all their promises, which amount to an assurance that they can control, capitalism so that it stops being an anarchic, human-destructive social system and becomes an ordered, beneficial one instead, are lies. When the promises become discredited they try to cover it all up with more lies; they blame the depredations of greedy workers or foreign speculators or mad dictators in faraway countries ...

Imagine, if we can, the speech a political leader would need to make in order to tell the truth, in order to confess to their impotence and to the deceptions they have practised to hide it. Imagine, as well, how this suicide statement would be received by the workers who had voted for the leader. Millions of people vote for capitalism because they think their leaders are not impotent and don’t tell lies.That is why the same people who were so eager to denounce Clinton over his deceptions in the Lewinsky affair were falling over themselves in their eagerness to believe him when he said the American missiles recently sent into Sudan had destroyed a factory making material to be used in biological warfare and not pharmaceutical products.

Tough

This raises the question of what kind of leader the working class would like to have ruling over them—and what kind they think they get. “Strong” leadership is usually one of the most popular kinds—except that the “strong” leaders always have to be on your side and not on your adversary’s. For example foreign leaders like Hitler, Stalin and Saddam Hussein are famous for, among other things, a certain lack of tolerance of opposition. In fact anyone who opposed them was usually killed—and you can’t get much stronger then that. But for some reason such leaders are always known as madmen, or megalomaniacs or some such description when all they are doing is taking the theory of strong leadership to its logical end.

A Guardian/ICM Opinion poll published on 8 September assessed how strong—or rather “tough”—the voters rate Tony Blair. The prime minister will not go down in history as one of those leaders who has his opponents executed but he does give them quite a rough time, which gives him the reputation of being tough. So there would have been some dismay at Labour headquarters to see that Blair’s toughness rating has fallen from 57 percent in 1997 to 42 percent today. It is difficult to know what Blair was doing in August and September last year to justify a reputation for toughness, which he is not doing now. The only thing that comes to mind is his intervention over the funeral arrangements for Princess Diana— forcing her family to have a big public event, making sure that flags were flown at half-mast, that sort of thing. And of course coming up with the wheeze of calling a neurotic parasite the “people’s princess”.

Nonsense

If all the verbiage about leadership— about the lies, hypocrisy, toughness and weakness—sounds like nonsense that is because that is what it is. No leader, whatever their character and style, has been able to make any significant impression on the problems and the deficiencies of capitalism. That is why today tough, decisive Tony Blair confronts the same situation as weak and dithering John Major. Bill Clinton’s campaign to save his presidency was centred on the fact that as president he had the job of running American capitalism, beside which personal sexual difficulties are insignificant. Another way of putting that is that the working class should ignore such irrelevant issues and concentrate on the fact that they can themselves change society, without leaders of any kind.

Ivan

Getting off Scott Free (1996)

From the April 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

  To Socialists, the publication of the 1800 page Scott Report ranks as one of the great non-events of recent times. All the Report really revealed is that British government ministers, notably Alan Clark, were doing what they're in office for — looking after the economic interests of the British capitalist class.

Certain Tory government ministers, even the whole Tory government, have, it seems, been both caught out and let off the hook—though perhaps temporarily. Amid reports in, for example, the Independent (17 February) and the Observer (18 February), suggesting that Lord Justice Richard Scott has been somehow “nobbled” by government ministers, “persuaded” to be gentle with them, the facts remain in the public domain; whatever insipid conclusions Scott has come to, everybody else can judge for themselves. It is even almost as though Scott might have intended that they should do so. Having apparently bowed to pressure, induced perhaps by invocations of old school ties or past favours, or even favours to come, it is as though he has washed his hands of the matter but, unable to square his conscience with letting corrupt liars and dissimulators off scot-free, he has left it to a vague and amorphous “public opinion” to sit in judgment in his place.

That government ministers lied to parliament, lied to “the public”, tried to keep important information out of the law courts, was all down to their fear of “public opinion”, fear of being found out and forced to resign or, worse, being voted out of office. That this should be the case brings out an interesting conjunction of the personal and the political—which the ministers concerned, along with their colleagues and supporters, have tried to erase. They have tried to hide the personal dimension under the political, claiming that they felt secrecy was necessary' to safeguard jobs in the armaments industry, while in fact they were more concerned with safeguarding their own careers and their own power, which brings us nicely to the crux of the issue at hand.

Ministerial responsibility
The whole issue of ministerial responsibility and ministerial deceit is one of personal ethics dressed up as politics. Like most contemporary' mainstream “politics” it is really soap opera, drawing everybody’s attention to particular characters and focusing on issues of individual hypocrisy or corruption (it’s not entirely fortuitous that Scott’s investigations have twice during February been dramatised on television). There's little doubt that many of the characters involved in this little drama were (and are) hypocritical and corrupt, or at least incompetent, but that’s not the point, it’s only the point focused on by both the Opposition parties and by the media. Politicians are by definition incapable of mastering events whatever their personal attributes may be; they have always been so to some extent under capitalism, forced to react to the markets and the requirements of profit and capital. These days they are even less able to control the system they support than they have been in the past, due to modern information technologies and the speed at which information can travel, allowing capital and the markets to evade and pre-empt their every' attempt at control. Politicians are, as the philosopher Jacques Derrida has put it, “structurally incompetent”; to paraphrase Derrida, while they present themselves as political actors they are no more than TV actors. And they know it; they are, therefore, not only structurally incompetent, they are also structurally hypocritical. This is not to say that those involved are not responsible; they support capitalism after all, quite apart from the fact that they are, in any case, personally corrupt liars and arrogant hypocrites. The point is that this should only be of marginal interest, instead of being, as it is, the main focus of attention.

There is a very serious political dimension here which actually sheds some light on the complex but indissoluble links between war and armaments and the very existence of capitalism itself. The concentration by the media on ministerial ethics specifically marginalises the fact that this issue is about the sale of armaments, about, by extension, war and death. Even when this is considered, media concern, as well as the concern of the Opposition parties, is focused on the fact that the armaments were being sold to Iraq. The demonisation of a particular national leader by the Western ruling class could, ironically, lead to the downfall of some of the very people who have encouraged this demonisation. This concern with Iraq, though, is still without any really serious point. Saddam Hussein is undoubtedly a tyrant; but so was Somoza of Nicaragua and Pinochet of Chile, to name only two, who were supported by the Western so-called “liberal democracies”. All this selective support and demonisation is itself simply a smokescreen for the way in which war and capitalism feed off each other, the fact that the gulf war was fought for economic reasons, the fact that all the major industrialised states produce and sell arms; that the arms trade is the height of modern capitalism.

Scarce material resources

War is largely a result of scarcity; however the causes of war are dressed up ideologically, war is a more-or-less direct result of the struggles of particular peoples for a greater share of scarce material resources, though down through history this has had less and less actual effect on the lives of ordinary people as the minority ruling classes have taken more of those resources for themselves. In pre-capitalist societies, though, there was at least a true scarcity which led inevitably to conflict. Under the capitalist mode of production on the other hand, scarcity is artificially created by the system itself even as it develops the productive potential for its eradication. Capitalism requires competition for its existence and competition requires scarcity ; and it should be noted that war itself is simply a form of competition on a particularly large and deadly scale. Scarcity and competition are vital to capitalism, and scarcity and competition are also the necessary pre-conditions for inevitable war.

War itself, in its turn, creates further massive conditions of scarcity through the damage it inflicts and the consequent need to rebuild. The arms themselves are also obviously a paradigm of material scarcity; they can only be used once and require immediate replacement. The armaments market is highly competitive and there is an enormous amount of money to be made; whichever way you look at it, there is always a lot of money to be made from war, which is why, beneath all the moral platitudes, capitalism loves it. It has nothing to do with which party is in office; Labour supported the Americans in Vietnam and the recent Australian Labor government supplied and supported the raping, torturing aggressors in East Timor. Particular governments, in the final analysis, are neither here nor there. Capitalism itself produces greed, corruption and war through the artificial production of scarcity and the exploitation for its own ends of the absurd quasi-mystical ideologies of nationalism. The only way to end war and the manufacture of arms is to end capitalism, world-wide; to abolish the profit system and abolish states and borders. The only really worthwhile use of parliaments is to bring a democratic end, once-and-for-all, to the system that makes them otherwise no more then TV studios for tedious and absurdly repetitive “dramas”.

Jonathan Clay

Greasy Pole: The truth can keep you in shackles (1996)

The Greasy Pole column from the April 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Now that we have got the Arms to Iraq business out of the way, Sir Richard Scott can get down to what may turn out to be his real life’s work. This will be a new dictionary of English usage in which words can change their meaning by the addition of a nervous qualifying phrase or can have their meaning obscured by burying them beneath layers of double—perhaps treble or even quadruple—negatives.

For example, if someone thinks an Attorney General is personally at fault in dealing with evidence which might help to acquit people who are in danger of going to prison they don’t have to say so directly; the proper way is to say “I do not accept that he was not personally at fault.” For example, if a minister is caught out in a piece of double-dealing he or she can be described as making a claim of a “duplicitous nature", which softens the criticism quite a bit, and then can be got off the hook almost entirely by saying that of course they had "no duplicitous intention". For example, if a government has avoided what it claims to be its clear obligation always to conform to the constitutional principle of ministers’ accountability, there is no need to denounce this in clear terms; any criticism you make can be qualified with the words "in my opinion". And as by this time more people will be completely fed-up with such wimpish evasions it is a fair bet that your opinion will not be given much more than a contemptuous laugh.

Anyway, if Sir Richard Scott will send The Greasy Pole a free, autographed copy of his dictionary when it is complete we will respond by sending him a copy of the dictionary occasionally referred to by this column—a dictionary which defines duplicity as "deceit, double-dealing", and which he can use the next time he is called on to tackle the question of whether politicians ever mislead the rest of us and if they do whether this is deliberate or by accident. Whether, in words which may well make Sir Richard shudder, they ever tell lies.

The relevance of this issue is rooted in the fact that politicians base their appeal for votes on a clear, copper-bottomed guarantee that they are people of honour, people who hold to principles, which they will never betray. On the basis of those principles they make promises to us about how they will re-arrange society in any number of superficial ways so that many of its problems won’t worry us any more. Vote for them. You know you can trust them. Don’t you?

And so it has come about that among its many quaint, tourist-attracting rituals like Black Rod knocking three times on the door, like MPs addressing each other as honourable and gallant and learned or whatever and never saying anything controversial in their maiden speech, there is also the tradition that they never lie in the House of Commons. This causes certain difficulties because not a few MPs and ministers have been caught out making statements in the House which were not true. Indeed over the past few years there has been a succession of cases in which Members have at first defended themselves against allegations but have then had more-or-less to own up and resign

Shackled women
But whatever happens none has ever admitted to telling a lie and, perhaps more to the point, no other MP has ever accused them of doing so. Because that is another of those quaint customs. What it gets down to is this: it is permissible to tell a lie but if you are caught out you must not call it a lie; it is permissible to say that a Member is lying but you must not actually use the word. Other words must be used. Like mislead.

Because that was the word used by Ann Widdecombe, the Home Secretary’s deputy who is in charge of prisons, in the infamous case of the Shackled Women. Under the rule of Howard and Widdecombe, the prisons of Britain have had to develop internal regimes which have left the more anxious reformers wondering how long it will be before the crank and the treadmill will return. The duo in charge at the Home Office have notoriously thick skins, but even they were rattled when it was revealed that women prisoners who were about to give birth were being transferred to the nearby Whittington Hospital in chains which were not removed until the final stage of the confinement.

In the subsequent uproar Widdecombe—who was left by Howard to take the criticism—defended the policy with her customary obduracy and seemed to think she had clinched the argument by saying that the medical staff at the Whittington had not complained about the barbaric practice. But for Widdecombe this was a claim too far because the hospital had complained—indeed it would have been astounding if any doctor or nurse would happily treat patients in shackles— and had done so some time before. And of course the hospital were not slow to put the record straight, to expose Widdecombe in giving false information to parliament.

Telling the truth
Now this could have been a serious matter. Had Widdecombe told a lie about so sensitive an issue? Well we have already mentioned how durable are her dermal defences. So when she explained the matter to the House, when she apologised, it was not for lying, but for “misleading" them. So that’s alright then. Except, perhaps, for the women in Holloway and their children.

Except, perhaps, for the millions of people who live in the wider confinement of working-class life, who are so impressed with the promises and the declarations of honour that they elect politicians to sit in places where they make laws and mislead each other but never, never tell lies. Of course there is a desperate need in all this ritual of deception. What would happen, if politicians suddenly began to tell the truth? If they suddenly exposed their own impotence to make a world free of war. poverty, famine, fear. . . ? If they suddenly admitted that all those promises were really bribes to persuade us to vote for them? If the politicians’ sophistry fell into disuse and words always meant—well, what we know they mean?

Ivan

Sting in the Tail: The spying game (1994)

The Sting in the Tail column from the April 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

The spying game

The outraged howls coining from America because Aldrich Ames, a top CIA official, had been recruited by the KGB to spy for the USSR, were sheer hypocrisy.

After all, Ames had in the past been busy recruiting Soviet officials and KGB agents to spy against their own country, but what had the howls rising to crescendo was that after the collapse of the USSR Ames had then carried on spying for Boris Yeltsin’s Russia which is supposed to be an ally of America.

So what? William Webster, the CIA’s director, said in 1989 that following the demise of the USSR the CIA would now step-up spying on "our political and military allies" in order to gain technological and economic advantage for American capitalism.

As one newspaper editorial put it:

  "Does anyone seriously imagine that the CIA’s long-serving agents in the Kremlin have all traded in their false moustaches and invisible ink?’

No escape for Cuba

Economic reforms in Cuba mean that joint ventures with foreign capital and a growing tourist trade are exposing the island to market forces:

  "Dollars, illegal for thirty years before being legalised last July now circulate freely. A chain of state-owned hard-currency stores is flourishing, with people usually queueing up." (Guardian, 9 February)

The Castro regime has also legalised 140 categories of self-employment and, in a bid to boost agriculture, most of the state-owned farms are now semi-autonomous co-ops which can "lay-off surplus labour".

These changes are the result of Cuba losing its main trading partners, the so-called "communist countries", which had provided food, hard currency and oil in exchange for sugar. Now Cuba must buy what it needs at world market prices, hence the desire for dollars.

So Cuba follows the USSR and its European satellites along with China and Vietnam in learning that no country, whatever its political system, can distance itself from the global market economy that is capitalism.

Tell it like it is

Parliament was in a turmoil. TV reporters were buttonholing any MP they could find to put in front of a camera. We were told "MPs were infuriated".

What was all the fuss about?

William Waldegrave the minister responsible for "more open government" had been telling the truth to the Treasury and Civil Service Committee. He had stated:

  "in exceptional cases, it is necessary to say something that is untrue in the House of Commons.. . The House of Commons understands that and accepts that".

It seems that such candour has alarmed MPs. One Tory is reported as saying "it is a terrible blunder". Giles Radice, the Labour MP chairing the select committee said, "I was amazed. I don’t think it is right that ministers should deceive or mislead the House".

This is of course the most awful hypocrisy. All professional politicians lie. It is their stock-in-trade. In order to get to Parliament they must tell the lie that capitalism can be made to work in the interest of the working class.

Farcical goings-on

Can certain nosh and booze actually be the body and blood of a long-dead Israelite? Did his virgin mother really float up to heaven along with him when she wasn’t even dead? Does an old Polish geezer living in Rome never make a mistake?

These and similar burning questions of the day were mulled over by a motley bunch of religious nit-pickers, paid and unpaid, when the Environment Secretary John Gummer changed his brand of superstition by dumping the C of E because he opposed women priests, and joined the Roman Catholic church.

The Anglican bishop of Sheffield called this a "kick in the teeth" and, with true Christian forgiveness, lambasted Gummer for his "ignorant silliness".

Meanwhile an Anglican group which shares Gummer’s views on women priests rubbished their own church for 'thinking it knows better than God", and so on.

Isn’t it pathetic when otherwise sane adults can debate in all seriousness these absurdities and fabrications as if they had any relevance to humanity today?

Age no barrier

  "At a reception for Britain's oldest workers in London, the Employment Minister, Ann Widdecombe MP, welcomed men and women in their eighties and nineties who labour at daily jobs."(Guardian, 15 February)

This stunt was part of the government’s campaign to cut social security costs as men and women of pensionable age who keep working would not be drawing state pensions and benefits.

However, the idea that people should be able to work for as long as they wish is one we heartily endorse, but this can really only happen in socialist society because in capitalism employers don’t want older workers. Indeed, Widdecombe said she wanted "to shame those employers who won’t take on workers in their forties and fifties".

And people who wish to stop working, for whatever reason, should also be able to do so, but that too is something that will have to wait until socialism.

One law for them

If parliament had voted to reduce the age of consent for homosexuals to sixteen it would not have applied to Northern Ireland. One argument given for this is that the age of consent for heterosexuals there is seventeen and it would never do if the age for gays was lower than for non-gays.

This wouldn’t have been the first time gays in Northern Ireland had been denied changes made in the law for the rest of Britain. When the last Labour government was trying to hang onto office at any price, it even sunk to bribing Ulster Unionist MPs with the promise that homosexual acts in the province would remain illegal:

  "Homosexual law reform for Northern Ireland appears to have been delayed once again, as a sop to the seven official Unionist MPs who could he the Government's only allies in the Commons next week." (Guardian, 3 March 1979)

When freedom comes

An item on ITN on the 17th February concerned plans for the takeover of the West Bank by the Palestinians when (or if?) that area is evacuated by the Israelis. Apparently a senior cop from the Nottinghamshire force has been given a nice little earner training Palestinian recruits for a new police force.

The item closed with a close-up of the recruits lifting long clubs from a pile while the voice-over told us that these men would have an important role in helping to establish the new Palestinian democracy.

Seems the Palestinian freedom fighters, like those in many other countries, are going to learn what they have been fighting for. No doubt they will be filled with patriotic pride at the thought of being attacked by a club-wielding Palestinian cop rather than an Israeli thug.

Editorial: Do Budget Leakages Matter? (1936)

Editorial from the July 1936 issue of the Socialist Standard

Those who measure events by the amount of space devoted to them in the daily newspapers will have supposed that the tribunal on the giving away of Budget secrets was of supreme importance. Day by day, spread over whole pages, were reports of how our industrious propertied class gamble on horses, and speculate on stocks, shares and commodity prices, to the tune of thousands of pounds, without anybody objecting. It is not for these luxurious parasites, but for the workers that the ruling class institute organisations with highly paid staffs preaching thrift, economy and sobriety. The Budget enquiry tribunal was not concerned with speculation itself, but with the complaint that Budget secrets, contrary to the law, were communicated to speculators so that they could profit by having information about income tax and tea duties before it was published.

We say that the whole affair did not matter one jot to nine-tenths of the population. They had no interest at stake, and would not be affected, directly or indirectly in any way at all. Not that it was of no importance to anyone, but that the only people affected were the ruling class, not the ruled. Any kind of organisation has to keep within bounds the extent to which an individual may be allowed to exploit his position for his own ends.

The S.P. G.B. provides no career for any individual, but some organisations, the capitalist political parties, for example, normally allow their political leaders to use the party machine as a means of carving out a career full of honours and wealth. Yet even they could not tolerate such an attitude beyond more or less clearly understood limits. Much more then must this be true of the Government, the executive committee of the ruling class. The Cabinet, representing the outlook of the capitalist majority in Parliament is the servant of a minority of the population, the minority which owns and controls die resources of the country to the exclusion of the mass of the population. This state of affairs will continue until the workers cease sending defenders of capitalism to Parliament.

The Government then represents the collective interests of the capitalist class. The principal part of its task is to keep the propertyless working class from challenging the position of the exploiting class. The workers must, in other words, be fobbed off with promises, bemused with fine-sounding, but empty, phrases, bought off with petty concessions, and—if everything else fails— beaten down by force in the name of the law. What, then, is the first qualification of the politician who wants to be useful to the ruling class? Obviously it is that he shall have the confidence of the workers or at least of a large number of them. He must be popular. Only so can he misdirect the sheep on behalf of the wolves, who are his paymasters. Like the quack doctor, he must have patter. He must speak the language of the factory and market-place. He must be able to dress up his capitalist nostrums in phraseology which makes them look like the real thing for the workers. That is why the ruling class all over the world has seen the necessity for employing ex-Labour leaders and others reputed (though falsely) to have been Socialists.

As with the man so with the institution. The politician and the Cabinet must be trusted and respected. No breath of suspicion of personal self-seeking must be allowed to blow on them. In order to serve most effectively as cover for the brutal methods of factory exploitation and the tortuous ways of finance, the political institutions must stand forth as beacons of purity and unselfishness.

That is all there is to it. The affair was of concern to the ruling class, and to them alone.

Two Readers Write about the Russian Trials (1937)

Letters to the Editors from the May 1937 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the article “What is Wrong with Russia?” published in the March The Socialist Standard, the point was made that Communists, having themselves advocated lying and double-dealing as a form of activity, have no reason for being indignant because they are suspected of having used these methods against prisoners in the series of trials. A Glasgow reader asks us for our authority for the statement that such methods were advocated. It will be found in Lenin's Should Communists Participate in Reactionary Trade Unions? written in 1920. The following extract is taken from the edition published by the American Communists (“Workers' Party of America”): —

COMMUNISTS MUST BE TACTFUL.

   There is no doubt but that the opportunist leaders of the unions will resort to all the dirty tricks of bourgeois diplomacy, invoking the help of the capitalist governments, priests, police, judges, etc., in order to prevent the Communists from penetrating into the trade unions, to force them out of the unions, to make their work within the unions as dangerous as possible, aiding the police to persecute and run them down. But we must be able to withstand all that, to be ready for any and every sacrifice, and even if necessary, to practice trickery, to employ cunning, and to resort to illegal methods, to sometimes even overlook or conceal the truth—all for the sake of penetrating into the trade unions, to stay there and by every and all means carry on the work of Communism.

The publication of this in America led to the Communists being strongly criticised, and they found it very inconvenient to have to defend their declared intention of using trickery, cunning, and overlooking and concealing the. truth, and it was perhaps for this reason that the words were toned down somewhat in the English version to be found in “Left-Wing Communism,” published by the Communist Party of Great Britain. Here the last few lines read : —

   It is necessary to be able to withstand all this, to go the whole length of any sacrifice if need be, to resort to strategy and adroitness, illegal proceedings, reticence and subterfuge, to anything in order to penetrate into the trade unions, remain in them, and carry on Communist work inside them, at any cost.

The case against this sort of thing is a strong one. Ultimately the workers have got to be won over for Socialism by being convinced that the Socialist argument is unanswerable. Trying to win them prematurely by means of trickery and subterfuge is worse than useless. The ruling class and the reformist leaders are bound to win at the game, and the workers will be not more but less ready to listen to what Socialists have to say when they discover that Communists have been willing to trick them.

The second letter, from Mr. T. Roberts, Wealdstone, is largely based on misunderstanding of our position. Mr. Roberts jumps to the conclusion that we have some moral objection to the workers concealing information from the capitalist class. The S.P.G.B. has never held so absurd a view. What we are concerned with is misleading the workers.

Mr. Roberts goes on to argue at some length that the Communists are entitled to lie. He writes: —

    No, they are not willing to submit to the authority of capitalism, whether that authority is expressed directly by the capitalist class themselves or indirectly through traitorous lenders. So what? They double-deal and lie!!? What sanctimonious humbug finds expression in the Sunday School dithering of the writer of the article in question.
   The next step, of course, is clean collars and manicured hands, with the new workers' slogan, “ Play the game, you cads!”

The first thing we notice is that Mr. Roberts does not deny that Communists practise lying and trickery. Indeed, he holds that it is their duty to do so. So we ask again the original question which has roused Mr. Roberts to fury. Why should the Communists be so indignant at the suggestion that they, who preach and practice lying, have perhaps used it to get rid of their Trotskyist and other opponents in Russia?

Come, Mr. Roberts, let us know why the indignation ?

The series of Russian trials are quite a good illustration of the dangers of this policy. If lying is to be effective it is essential that it shall not be found out. But when used on a large scale, sooner or later some of it is bound to be found out. In the case of the Russians, to take only one instance, there is the “confession" of the prisoner who said he was plotting with Abramovitch in Russia, while actually the latter was in Brussels, seen by large numbers of delegates at a conference there. (Mr. Roberts, we notice, does not refer to this.) The result is that among wide circles of workers there is now a suspicion that the trials are not what they seem, and time and energy are now being devoted to that controversy which might have been devoted to more important things.

In passing, it may be remarked that Mr. Roberts jibe about clean collars, and so on, is singularly ill-conceived. One of the recent trends sponsored by Stalin in Russia has been just that— the slogan for clean collars for men and cosmetics and fashionable clothes for women. Though why 'Mr. Roberts should object to workers having these things is a mystery to us. Does Mr. Roberts insist on wearing a dirty collar and is he, in his view, a better revolutionary for doing so?

Mr. Roberts goes on to justify double-dealing as used by the Communists against MacDonald, Snowden and Thomas. Which only shows how little Mr. Roberts knows of the Communists or their methods. The worst lies and double-dealing used by the Communists were not against these men but for them. At election after election, Communists, knowing they were lying, roused the workers to vote for these men, representing them as fit and proper persons for workers* votes. It did not deceive the capitalists, but it did deceive the workers.

May we now ask Mr. Roberts to tell us what useful purpose this lying has served, useful, that is, to the working class and the Socialist movement ?

Mr. Roberts raises many other points, mainly concerned with the reason why the S.P.G.B. doesn’t produce evidence of discontent in Russia, evidence of faked confessions, etc.

What Mr. Roberts forgets is that the Communists, who, as he admits, believe in lying and trickery, also control the Russian Press, the Russian postal, telegraph and telephone services, and almost every source of information.

And doesn't Mr. Roberts perceive that the repeated mass trials themselves are evidence that some discontent exists in Russia?

Editorial Committee.