USSR — Land of Privilege (1976)

From the July 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

With the ever-increasing participation of the Soviet Union in western trade, more information about the way the Russians live is coming to hand. We suspect that much of the information was always available but for their own purposes the western capitalist press suppressed the information which would have destroyed the myth they wished to keep alive, namely that Socialism was established there. They back it both ways. Friendship with the Soviet Union will produce pro-Russian propaganda, and will gloss over the numerous shortcomings in the Soviet system. At other times when there are differences of policy with the western powers, anti-Russian propaganda will expose and exaggerate these shortcomings. Eventually truth, like Hamlet’s ghost, will out, and now that the Russian workers have been indoctrinated in the cause of capitalism, the Soviet authorities will relax their censorship up to a point, because they cannot keep the lid on the kettle. Censorship makes an expensive form of administration.

The SPGB have always maintained that there is no essential difference in the class system in the Soviet Union from that elsewhere. The ruling class enjoy the same privileged existence, and use the same means to stay on top. The common features of western capitalism, exploitation of wage labour and production for profit, are present — with the resulting social inequality. All the propaganda by friend and foe alike cannot contradict or obscure this real situation.

One of the most obvious signs of social inequality is the wage differentials between the higher and the lower paid workers. The Daily Telegraph (2nd June 1976) on the occasion of the visit of the Soviet missile destroyer Obraztsovy drew attention to the enormous discrepancy in pay between officers and ratings. A Russian naval rating is paid £4.70 a month, and a full captain’s pay is £202.00 a month, more than 40 times greater than that of the ratings. This differential is quite considerable when it is taken into account that the Russians have over 8 million men in the armed forces. The British equivalent is that a captain receives approximately 8 times that of a rating.

Graft & Corruption

The city column of the Sunday Telegraph (18th April 1976), gave numerous examples of the corruption practised by high-ranking government officers, top scientists and members of the Soviet Politburo. Otari Lazfishiyili, the head of the government synthetics laboratory, was renowned for throwing lavish parties costing thousands of roubles. He enjoyed the luxury of a mansion, and had two country homes with swimming pools. Apparently he was running a black-market nylon business on the side, with over 100 accomplices. He made a million pounds before they caught him.

Another government official, the chief of the agricultural equipment purchase department in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Trade, Uri Sosnovsky, planned to take a cut of a 30-million rouble contract with a Swiss firm — he was hanged. The then Minister of Culture, Yekaterina Furtseva, was alleged to have spent about £60,000 in having an exclusive country dacha built for her daughter; this was in addition to the two owned by the Minister herself. The scandal lost her her seat on the Supreme Soviet in 1974. In the same article, a reference was made to petty corruption. Izvestia, the State newspaper, last year published figures to the effect that one-third of the relatively small number of private motorists in the USSR drove their cars on petrol paid for by the State. About 150 million gallons were estimated to be stolen or siphoned off from State vehicles.

There are as many instances of graft and corruption in the USSR as there are elsewhere. There is also a colossal black market. The fact that the penalties are high only underlines the extent of the problem. If the name of the game is capitalism, then the aim of the game is privilege. Those nearest the till are in a better position to get their hand in it, as are high Communist Party officials, government officials, and other socially privileged groups. The difference with the black marketeer, the corrupt official, and the stealer of state property, is that they do it through the back door. But many more obtain their privileges through the front door.

In a capitalist society people will always behave in a capitalist way, and Russia is no exception. Chief among those who receive and confer privileges through the front door are the Communist Party hierarchy. According to a book recently published, The Russians by Hedrick Smith, for three years Moscow correspondent of the New York Times, life at the top in Moscow is based on privilege (Sunday Times 16th May 1976). The most conspicuous symbols are the numerous grey-curtained chauffeur-driven cars containing VIPS doing their shopping and ignoring all traffic laws. There are special shops which sell Russian delicacies like caviar, smoked salmon, and the best canned sturgeon, vintage wines, and other luxuries well beyond the reach of the average Russian worker, and only accessible by special pass to the politically anointed. Perquisites are handed out according to rank; top leaders get home delivery, or use stores right inside the Kremlin, and the Supreme Soviet executive group have their special shop in the government buildings, Versenevsky Embankment Road. Soviet marshals, admirals, top scientists, senior editors of Pravda and Izvestia and other important publications, Lenin prize winners, actors, writers, dancers, economic managers — all have their special shops where cut-rate food is available, and these shops are debarred to the general Russian public.

Diplomats, trusted journalists, poets and the like, who have worked abroad, are issued with certificate roubles, a special currency, and can buy imported goods at bargain prices at the hard-currency Beryozka shops in Moscow. Many Moscow people are infuriated at the existence of these special stores because they don’t even accept Soviet currency. One white-collar worker fumed that it was a “violation of socialist principles”.

The cream of the élite, Politburo members and National secretaries, use black Zil saloon cars, hand-tooled and worth £40,000 apiece. In addition to car and shopping privileges, the Kremlin leaders enjoy special travel facilities, including a special airport Vmukoy 11. They also have exclusive health clinics, clubs, and even certain universities are regarded as the province of the government, for the offspring of the military and diplomatic élite. Many of the Party leaders have large guest houses. Brezhnev takes his guests boar-hunting. Many have mansions with exclusive grounds, private beaches, and recreational areas provided by the state, and their privacy ensured by state guards.

Top Dogs

Hedrick Smith tells a funny story about Brezhnev who was showing his mother round his various possessions and trying to impress her. Apparently this is a Muscovite joke. “He invited her up to see his town apartment. She looked nonplussed, so they sped off in his Zil to his dacha near Usovo, one previously used by Stalin and Khruschev, but still she said nothing. So he called for his personal helicopter and flew her straight to his hunting lodge at Zavidovo. There he escorted her to the banquet room, grandly displaying the big fireplace, his guns, and unable to restrain himself any longer asked: ‘Tell me Mama, what do you think?’. ‘Well’, she hesitated. ‘It’s good, Leonid. But what if the Reds come back?’ ”

The Soviet élite do not advertise their privileges, but the workers in Russia are left in no doubt that there is a special class of person upon whom everybody else dances attendance. All railroad trains, Aeroflot airlines, theatres and hotels, always reserve accommodation or seats in the event that these “important” people may drop in. Even state officials are given priority in any allocation of tickets at sports fixtures. Apparently at the 1972 hockey inter national competition between Canada and Russia, a Canadian diplomat was waiting to obtain his allocation of tickets when a young man walked in, went to the head of the queue, and identified himself as a member of the Central Committee. He asked for, and received, 3,000 tickets per game, a quarter of all the available seats. The diplomat commented that by the time other influential people got their cut, there was nothing left for the genuine hockey fan except perhaps a few dozen tickets forming a token box office. This, according to Smith, happens every time a big foreign sports team or cultural show visits Moscow. (Sunday Times 16th May 1976).

Nobody who really understands the nature of class society will be surprised at the way it operates in Russia. What is the point of a society based on the exploitation of workers for the purpose of private gain, unless the exploiter reaps the benefit? To say that no capitalist class exists in Russia is playing with words. The system is riddled with inequality from top to bottom, apart from the corruption and graft which are inseparable from government by dictatorship where officials wield immense power.

To describe the system as Socialist, or anything remotely connected with Socialism is a deliberate and, as we have seen, a calculated distortion of words and meaning. We can well understand the intense hostility from Russian diplomats and politicians against those who criticise the Soviet Union. It certainly is a good system for them. We cannot understand the almost pathetic adulation from the underprivileged propertyless dupes of the Left in this country who look to the USSR as the “socialist oasis” in a capitalist paradise. This confuses the issue of Socialism, and to that extent holds back the genuine revolutionary movement.

Jim D'Arcy

Political Notes: It’s an honour (1983)

The Political Notes Column from the August 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

It’s an honour

There has never been any reason to believe that Harold Wilson had designs to abolish himself so there must be some other explanation for the fact that, although when he was prime minister he announced that no more hereditary peers would be created, now that he is out of parliament he is reported to have accepted — to have wanted — such an honour for himself.

Of course this may be yet another — if especially obscure — example of Labour Party gradualism, of the theory that capitalism will eventually find itself ended through a succession of near-imperceptible steps. It is something over fifty years since the Labour Party announced that one such step would be the abolition of the House of Lords and Wilson's stated preference for the creation of life, as opposed to hereditary, lords was greeted as a gradualist move in the process of abolition sometime.

This enthusiasm — Labour supporters starved of real progress, have had to learn to exist on such contemptible crumbs — must have been dented when the police began to take a deep interest in several of the eminences so recently ennobled by Wilson.

Capitalism can do very nicely — as it does in places like America, France and Russia — without the tradition of dressing people up in funny clothes, pinning bits of ribbon and metal on them and giving them funny titles. Which is not to say that the system does not have some picturesque rewards for those who have given it special service.

Harold Wilson was one of these. He came to power through a skilfully worded pledge that working class problems could easily be conjured away through something called the technological revolution; that the micro chip would alter the basic nature of capitalism. Predictably, he and his government were soon bogged down in crisis. Their fine promises were forgotten as they grappled to deplete workers’ living standards. When they lost power they were thoroughly exposed and discredited and since then no more is heard of the harvest to be reaped from the white hot technological revolution. By any standards, a notable achievement by Wilson. He fully deserves his honour; capitalism has looked on him and found him to be good.

Head count

The debate over the restoration of the death penalty was loaded with moral considerations and much talk about the ethics of the judicial taking of life and the right of society to respond to a murder by itself murdering the killer. Almost everyone who took part agreed that this was a very important issue because with human lives at stake a careful and informed discussion was necessary. When it was over and the votes had been counted everyone could go home congratulating themselves for playing their part in such a highly charged occasion with full regard to their grave responsibility.

But what sort of problem were they talking about? If the death penally is restored so that it applies as it did before the Homicide Act of 1957 — before the introduction of degrees of murder — there will be about one execution a week in Britain. If a Bill goes through in this form, something like 60 people will die who would otherwise survive to serve a life sentence.

Now there is no denying that the death penalty is a disfiguring barbarity. There is no denying that the vast majority of murders can be said to be some sort of response to the inhumanities which capitalism imposes on its people, and which it expects them to survive with patience and conformity. But in comparison to the tens of millions who die each year through the simple fact that capitalism can’t meet the needs of the human race, the numbers who might be despatched by the hangman in Britain are insignificant. If MPs. and others who were convinced that they were arguing about moral issues, about the sanctity of human life, were sincere why are they so consistently able to ignore this massively greater death toll?

The answer is simple. The apologists for capitalism can discuss an issue like the death penalty, with its strictly limited scope, without ever needing to consider the wider and deeper responsibility of this social system for the problem. The whole thing can be talked out in terms of ethics, religion, insignificant reforms; when it is over capitalism is left undisturbed.

This is a much more comfortable way of approaching an issue, than one which might call into question the basics of society, their effect on people and the fact that this social system must degrade the people who keep it in existence. As so often happens, the debate on the death penalty was really about granting capitalism yet another reprieve.

Up school

Margaret Thatcher has not made her name as a political tactician of historic subtlety so perhaps she was unaware that, by sacking Francis Pym, she was depriving some of her opponents of one of their most cherished illusions. Pym's departure from the government meant that, with the exception of the increasingly ridiculous Lord Hailsham, there is now not one Old Etonian in the Cabinet — to say the least, an unusual situation for a Tory government and one to cause consternation in London's clubland.

It has always been a favourite left-wing pastime to tot up the numbers of Tory ministers who spent their schooldays at Eton and Harrow and to produce the result as proof that a Conservative government is in the hands of a small, privileged, self-perpetuating clique. At times, there seemed to be something to be said for this theory. Harold Macmillan, for example, seemed to go out of his way to give some top jobs, not just to Old Etonians but to those who were related to him. The lesson we were invited by the left wing to draw from this was that a government full of such high born people could not possibly understand, and deal with, the problems of the “ordinary” people and that we should therefore vote for a party with a less exclusive background.

Unhappily for this theory, we had the experience of Labour governments, many of whose ministers had not only not been to public school but had sometimes had very little formal schooling at all. Some of them were fond of reminding us of this, by applying an eccentric pronunciation which removed aitches from where they should be and stuck them back on where they should not be.

Jimmy Thomas was one such eminence; another was Ernie Bevin. Their place in political history is assured; they were zealous workers for the interests of the British capitalist class at no matter what cost to the class of their origin, the class which can't send its children to Eton or Roedean and which suffers the effects of the social system which Thomas and Bevin helped to administer.

Thomas, after a spell drunkenly contemplating the deepening misery of British workers in the slump of the late twenties, saved his miserable skin by joining the National government with the Tories and the Liberals. His aristocratic friends were much amused by his comical terminology. Bevin, among his many other achievements, saw British workers committed to the slaughter of the Korean war and the start of the British nuclear weapon programme.

The familial and social beginnings of the people who run capitalism is of absolutely no account. It is working class acquiescence in the system which is important. Without that the leaders would be impotent and redundant and we would have a society free of conflict and privilege.

Blogger's Note:

On the subject of capital punishment, this issue of the Socialist Standard also had a longer article on the subject: British rope trick

Queen Mom’s birthday bash (2000)

From the August 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Where socialists stand on the media coverage of the Queen Mother’s birthday

For over a year we have heard of the preparations to commemorate the 100th birthday of the Queen Mother. Newspapers have given over thousands of column inches to this most important of national events, even stimulating debate as to whether the occasion be afforded the status of a bank holiday. On Wednesday, 19 July, there was a national tribute to the Queen Mother, with military parades and presentations and the dropping of a million rose petals over the crowds who turned out in their thousands and similar events have been planned for the coming weeks.

As socialists, what is our position on all of this? Firstly, we are certain we are not alone in believing that not one penny should be spent celebrating the 100 years of luxury this ageing parasite has enjoyed. Not that we believe it should be put to better use. No doubt it could, but we are not into the business of juggling the nations accounts.

For one thing, the Queen Mother was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, into the aristocracy and into a family which, at her birth owned three luxurious homes at a time when 99 percent of this country lived in various degrees of poverty. 100 years later, she still enjoys the good life, jumping hospital queues, waited on hand and foot by maids and servants and chauffeurs, whilst the average pensioner, after decades of struggling to survive, living in the shadow of debt, having been insulted by successive Labour and Tory governments, is given a weekly rise that could not, quite honestly, buy a packet of chips.

Undoubtedly, the cost of keeping this wizen-faced has-been alive and in the manner to which her ilk have grown accustomed—in the finest accommodation, the best food, the most expensive clothes and jewellery—for 100 years, is perhaps equivalent to the annual income of many a third world country.

The contribution made to society by the Queen Mother and her greedy and incestuous clan is quite simply zilch. Each one is capable of happily consuming in one day more resources and commodities than any 100 members of the working class, perhaps 1000 times as much as the inhabitants of a small African village. Yet we are meant to kowtow to this bunch of indifferent, self-seeking brain-dead leeches, to prostrate ourselves like imbeciles in front of them?

It is time we, the working class, celebrated something of far more importance—ourselves and the latent strength we have and can utilise to help bring about a world in which we can all enjoy the nice things that civilisation ought to bring. It seems we have been led for so long by idiots, convinced we should look up to our ‘betters’ and to celebrate their shenanigans, brainwashed into thinking the same by the media, that we have forgotten our own collective strength.

The Queen Mother’s 100th birthday deserves no more our sanction than the bombing of Iraq or the reintroduction of the slave trade. If the injustices that plague our world and perpetrated in the name of profit were to receive one-tenth as much coverage as this 100th birthday do, then our case would have been well publicised and our ranks undoubtedly swollen.

John Bissett

50 Years Ago: Kicked Upstairs (2011)

The 50 Years Ago column from the May 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. Anthony Wedgwood Benn has fought a furious fight against his transfer to the House of Lords. Despite his struggles, the government showed that they were determined to have him kicked upstairs.

Some lobby correspondents whispered that Mr. Macmillan personally gave the thumbs-down to Mr. Benn’s efforts to renounce his peerage. The P.M., said the rumour, is at odds with Lord Hailsham, and doesn’t want to set a precedent which might bring him back to the commons.

Mr. Benn’s predicament is not free of irony. The Labour Party, of course, once stood for the abolition of the House of Lords. And Mr. Benn’s constituency used to elect Sir Stafford Cripps, who was at one time an ardent opponent of royalty, titles and the rest.

By the time Labour achieved power in 1945, they had dropped their old pledge about the Lords. Now, in fact, they do their bit towards helping the Upper House alive by supplying their share of life peerages.

It is Mr. Benn’s bad luck to have been born the son of a peer. His membership of the Labour Party is a different matter. He may not be able to resign his title: but he can always leave the party which has supported the system of pomp and privilege.

(“News in Review”, Socialist Standard, May 1961)

Capitalism in Poland (1970)

From the November 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

There are about 500 zloty millionaires amongst Poland’s big market gardeners, according to the Financial Times (3 October). As a zloty is only worth a few pence the wealth of a Polish millionaire is "only" £17.000. but their existence shows that there still exists a privileged class in Poland. Says the Financial Times:

  Wealth here shows itself in tight bundles of 500 zloty notes, town houses, seaside villas, expensive Western cars, lavish parties, and other more blatant manifestations which from time to time draw bursts of criticism from the official Press. Friends of Pani Barbara estimate that she spends more in one month on massage and beauty treatment than a computer programmer earns in the same period.

It would be a mistake to think that Poland's wealthy individuals are all private-enterprise market gardeners. Others will have amassed personal wealth out of the bloated salaries they are paid while occupying the top posts in the government, army or industry.

Nor is the existence of millionaires in an allegedly socialist country new. During the last war supporters of Russia were shocked to learn that some people were contributing millions of roubles to Stalin’s war loan. In Britain the Russia Today Society had to rush out a special pamphlet, Soviet Millionaires by Reg Bishop, to try to explain this away. Apparently the first Russian millionaire, Berdyebekov, was. like Mrs. Barbara in Poland today, a farmer.

Bishop never did succeed in explaining what wealthy individuals were doing under "socialism”, but that was because he avoided the obvious answer: there are capitalists in Poland and Russia because these have never ceased to be capitalist countries.

The belated death of a class warrior (2002)

Editorial from the May 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

So, she's finally gone. The BBC dusted off its pre-prepared reels of fawning documentaries and gave Peter Sissons the task of breaking the bad news to the public. Sissons, however, forgot the script and put on a maroon tie, much to the chagrin of the Daily Mail, who seemed to want him charged with treason.

Then one million pathetic crawlers emerged from under their rocks to line the streets of the capital – or at least that's the way it first appeared. In reality, many turned up just to see the spectacle. And for the million who turned up on the day another 57 million voted with their feet and didn't.

Why should they have paid their respects to Britain's most famous parasite anyway? Few in society epitomised the privilege and condescension which are the traditional hallmarks of the owning class better than Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. That patronising grimace and vague wave of the gloved hand (like “opening a jar slowly” she once said, but in reality more like a thinly disguised two-fingered salute) were the body language of one who considered herself “born to rule”.

Of course, this was an arrogance that was as baseless as it was base. For what was the Queen Mother actually good at? What did she do? Did she ever make things? Or look after people? Or teach them? By all accounts she couldn't even open her own curtains or squeeze the toothpaste from its packet without having assistance from one of her fifty servants. Sure, she drank gin a lot by all accounts but any of us can do that and it can hardly be considered a talent. She liked the gee-gees too – and a flutter – but then so does your average derelict.

Some people in the queues outside Westminster Abbey said she “stood by the nation during the war”, but what exactly did they mean by that? Were the blitzed and beleaguered working class in wartime London supposed to thank their little ration books that she hadn't decamped to join most of the rest of her family in Germany? And why should we all be eternally grateful to her for this since?

During the blitz the working class in the East End of London took a different view of her entirely. When she lorded it over them on one of her walkabouts, they returned her salute to them with interest, pelting her with rotten vegetables. Then, after Buckingham Palace was hit by a couple of stray bombs she made her famous statement that “I can now look the East Enders in the eye” despite the fact that for nearly all the blitz the King and Queen were holed up in Windsor Castle. It was one of first of the many PR stunts for which the entire royal family are now famous.

And some public relations triumph it was – at least for a while. It is in many respects quite amazing that the Queen Mother was able to cultivate the image she did as “the nation's favourite grandmother”, representing an oasis of virtue in an otherwise barren scene. The epithets most commonly deployed to describe her by those who had never met her: “caring”, “considerate”, “dignified” and “loyal”, were phrases devoid of real meaning. How could it be otherwise when she spoke in public rarely if ever, didn't give an interview from 1928 until her death and never wrote an article or otherwise do anything to instil such emotions or elicit such responses?

Her political views were just about as reactionary as they come – far to the right of where popular opinion currently resides, enough to make even Mr Blair blush. She was an old-fashioned ruling class warrior – anti-trade union, suspicious of (and patronising towards) the working class and distrustful of arrivistes like Blair and New Labour. She reportedly said on one occasion that she preferred “Old” Labour but even this was only for their novelty value and so long as they stayed in opposition, where they belonged.

In the end, she died when the popularity of the thing she held dearest – the Royal Family as exemplars of ruling class standards and etiquette – had already started to badly fade. That so few people were really bothered or troubled by her death is testament to this as was the decision by the BBC to significantly scale down its coverage compared to what had been envisaged some years ago.

Socialists – like increasing numbers of the working class as a whole it would seem – will remember her for the things that truly defined her existence: her uselessness on the one hand and her daily embodiment of ruling class privilege on the other. Born in different circumstances into a different environment she may have grown to be somebody genuinely useful to society. But, unfortunately, and to paraphrase the lady herself, she was born to be a parasite. And for that we can only say goodbye . . . and good riddance.