Bar room rebels (1986)

From the September 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

We hear that Red Action, mentioned in the article Bar Room Rebels in the August Socialist Standard, will reply to our criticisms of them. We hope to publish their response in the near future.

Blogger's Note:

To the best of my knowledge, Red Action never did reply in print to the article.

Races without winners (1982)

From the January 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 8 December last, a judge at Manchester Crown Court sentenced to gaol a sociology lecturer and eight students who had formed a left-wing hit squad armed with a “fearful array of weapons" and to crusade against their fascist rivals from the National Front. So. the right wing thugs won that battle 9-0 without having to cross their front doors. “Daddy, where are you going with that sledgehammer?” the child of the sociology lecturer might have enquired. “I’m going out to persuade those fascists of the need to establish a society of peace and harmony”, comes the reply.

As people become increasingly frustrated with the inability of the “respectable” political parties to solve major problems like unemployment and poverty, fascist ideas gain popularity. Today, both main political parties are riven with internal disputes. Neither can present to the electorate a united and confident parade of leaders in order to capture trust and votes, and both have records of miserable failures in government. As the recession aggravates social problems, so the appeal of fascist ideas grow stronger. “What we need is a clean break . . . stronger leaders . . . firmer discipline . . .  a firm movement to bring order where there is chaos . . .  to re-establish some of the old virtues like obedience and fear of God . . .  a clean Britain, a pure Britain ... a White Britain . . .  ”, runs the rhetoric of the dons of ignorance.

Organisations like the National Front and the British Movement have been churning out propaganda, aimed particularly at young people, to foster racial antagonism between between black and white. In recent years, minority ethnic groups have suffered an increasing number of racially inspired attacks. Temples, mosques, synagogues and burial grounds have been vandalised and daubed with fascist slogans and emblems; left-wing bookshops have been raided and bombed and people have been attacked in the streets and abused with racialist insults. This alarming trend is only the tip of an iceberg of popular and institutionalised racialism and romantic para-military left-wing expeditions to root it out will not only fail but could have the opposite effect.

The frequency and seriousness of racial attacks reached such a pitch last February that the first official Home Office study of racially inspired crime was commissioned by the Home Secretary. William “short, sharp shock” Whitelaw. The committee issued its report (Racial Attacks, Report of the Home Office Study 1981) last November.

The problem of racial tensions is usually approached from the assumption that we should be devising plans to enable ‘different races’ to exist co-operatively. Although on the face of it this is an anti-racialist attitude, it is in fact quite the reverse. There is, of course, only one race, the human race, and no one has a “pure racial make up”of one stock. Peoples of the world do enjoy many diverse cultures but there is no necessary link between ‘race’ and ‘culture’. A white Caucasian born and bred in an Indian village will acquire an Indian language and culture and, conversely, an Asian born and bred in England will acquire an English language and culture. The culture of a country is not a fixed, static entity, but rather something which constantly changes with the arrival of new ideas and people from different cultures. Today’s so called “British stock” in fact trace their ancestry to a great variety of groups who settled on this island including the Celts, Jutes, Angles, Saxons, Vikings, Romans and Normans. Each of these groups was, similarly, the result of a mixture of people of different geographical and cultural origins. So, many of the philanthropic reformers who today advocate measures like “positive discrimination” as ways of improving the relations between the “different races”, are in fact proceeding from the same fallacious racial assumptions as their fascist opponents.

The problem of police brutality, harassment and infringement of personal liberties is usually approached from the point of view of wanting to organise the police force to do their job kindly and unobtrusively. Like trying to design the gallows in the best interests of those sentenced to hang. It is the job of the police to act against the interests of most of us. Their main function is to protect property which means making sure that the great majority of us who actually create wealth don’t take back more of it than we can buy with our wages.

Since its organised beginnings in the eighteenth century, the police force has been their police force, not ours. Like banks or national armies, police forces are an integral part of modern capitalism. They can only be swept aside once their reason for existing – the protection of private and state property –has been removed. That is once a majority have established common ownership of social wealth. With the enormous oppression of the working class that the police force as such represents, it would be silly for us to campaign for trivial changes to police organisation. At the end of last year that party-of-a-thousand-demands,the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), launched a nationwide campaign to have the Chief Constable of Merseyside. Kenneth Oxford, sacked after the police behaviour leading up to and during the Toxteth riots. At a recent public meeting in Manchester, the SWP were asked in what possible way the removal of one Chief Constable (and, of course, his immediate replacement by another Boy in Blue) would help to establish socialism, or even benefit the working class. “Well, you've got to start somewhere” was the reply — not by some drunken joker, but by Tony Cliff, one of the leading theoreticians of the SWP.

The Home Office Report on Racial Attacks, recognising the upsurge of such incidents in recent years, and the way in which certain parties like the National Front are fostering a climate of antagonism between ‘blacks’ and ‘whites’, makes a number of recommendations. One is that in investigating and dealing with alleged racial attacks the police should be more “sensitive” to the issues involved. This is not very helpful. An organisation of uniformed men and women, armed with truncheons, handcuffs, private interrogation rooms and with the full force of the law behind them, even with the best will in the world (forget Blair Peach, Liddel Towers, David Moore) could not operate sensitively. With the huge job of methodical tyranny that they have to carry out, the police have to act on wide, clumsy and insensitive rules of thumb. For instance, in his book The Signs of Crime: A Field Manual for Police (1977) David Powis, then Deputy Assistant Commissioner to the Metropolitan Police, included in his list of indicators of suspicious people: “People of an untidy or dirty appearance –especially with dirty shoes” (even manual workers, if honest, he says, are clean and tidy!) Also included were “political radicals” particularly if they “spout extremist babble” and “groups of young people in cars”.

That Great Crusader for racial harmony, William Whitelaw after he had finished singing the praises of the overtly racialist Nationality Act and showing such concern to re-unite Anwar Ditta with her family, chipped in his little bit of piety to the Report by writing its introduction. He said he would be exploring ways of combating racialist propaganda. Perhaps he will be consulting the expert wisdom of members of the British judiciary like Justice McKinnon who, presiding at the trial last year of John Kingsley Read (Chairman of the British National Party) for inciting racial hatred, commented that he (McKinnon) saw nothing inflammatory in calling somebody a “wog” as he had often been called that himself at school. Justice McKinnon is a ‘white’ man who was educated in Australia. Exploring how best the law can deal with racial attacks, Whitelaw may also wish to tap the discretion of Lord Justice Lawton who was a parliamentary candidate for the British Union of Fascists in 1936 in Hammersmith.

The profit system does not operate on any moral code, and we cannot say that as capitalism continues it will progress to smoother and more harmonious ways of working. Governments will tend to discourage or promote racialism to suit the requirements of the profitability of industry. During the last World War much of industry and many services were destroyed. After the war there was much work to be done, and with about 30,000,000 workers killed in Europe, there was an acute shortage of labour. The capitalists needed an enlarged workforce quickly, and they weren’t fussy about where the ‘hands’ came from. In the Economic Review of 1947 the [govern]ment set out its policy.

Foreign labour can make a useful contribution to our needs . . . foreign labour is the only substantial additional source of manpower which is open to us–especially for the undermanned industries.

Apart from using refugees and displaced persons after the war as European Volunteer Workers (Britain took about 200,000 of these) the colonies were also used as a new source of immigrant labour, particularly the West Indies, India and Pakistan. Now that Britain along with other industralised countries is in the throes of another crisis and there is high unemployment, the government is less keen on immigration. Hence Thatcher’s “they’re swamping our culture” scaremongery, and measures like the Nationality Act.

From the Zionists, who proclaim they are the ‘Chosen People’, to the neo-Nazis who believe that honour is theirs, all racialism feeds and flourishes upon ignorance. Today, the most significant historical division of people is that by which a small minority (from all cultural origins) own and control the means of life, while the overwhelming majority of us (from all cultural origins) create wealth and run society primarily to produce profits to further enrich the rich.

Today, the great majority of workers are struggling under the weight of holding a privileged minority above their heads. When they look down and observe that we are blaming our poverty on each other, because some are “black” and some “white”, they must enjoy a contemptuous laugh and feel comfortably secure above us. The real tyranny today is not that of the police, the army, judges and politicians. They are a small minority. It is a Tyranny of Ideas which makes the minority mighty and the majority meek.

Gary Jay

The IRA bombing campaign (1993)

Editorial from the June 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Apart from a few genuinely looney lefties such as Red Action and those who produce Dead Leninism (or “Living Marxism” as they have the check to call it), the recent murders of working-class men, women and children committed by the IRA in their current bombing campaign in England have, rightly, been condemned by ordinary people, in Ireland as well as on the mainland.

Life under capitalism is difficult enough without having the additional worry of wondering whether you—or your children—are going to be killed by a bomb when you do your shopping or go for a drink. Making life worse under capitalism is all the IRA achieves by its bombing campaigns. But then terrorising the population is what terrorists set out to do.

As the physical force wing of Irish nationalism, the IRA does have a political objective: the establishment of an all-Ireland Republic. This, as the record of the regime set up in the South in 1922 shows, would be of no benefit whatsoever to workers in Ireland.

Despite so-called independence, mass emigration, unemployment, bad housing and a lower standard of living than on the mainland continued unchanged. In one respect things got worse. The power of the Catholic Church to interfere with people’s lives was strengthened though, thankfully, this has been changing in recent years.

Apart from this, the only difference was that government power passed out of the hands of the parasite Anglo-Irish landlord class into that of wheeler-dealer politicians of the likes of Reynolds, the present Irish Prime Minister, and Haughey, his predecessor. And the IRA is murdering children just to extend the rule of such politicians to the North of Ireland! Can political murder ever have been employed in pursuit of so utterly worthless an aim?

Most workers in the South know this anyway. They have no sympathy for the IRA or its political wing Sinn Fein and at election after election they have repeatedly repudiated its claim to be acting on their behalf. Without being socialists they know that changes to the political constitution make no essential difference to their lives and are certainly not worth killing anybody to bring about. Once again, ordinary people have demonstrated a higher degree of understanding than those who have appointed themselves to act on their behalf.

The only degree of support the IRA is able to claim is amongst a minority of those of Catholic background in the North of Ireland. Certainly, workers there have plenty to complain about— no job prospects, low incomes, bad housing, etc, etc—but they are terribly mistaken in imagining that a united Ireland would in any way improve their position.

They are suffering because they are property-less workers in a world where the means of life are owned by a privileged minority. Their problems are caused not by British rule but by capitalism; which Irish independence left intact. Just as ’’Irish Unity” would.

The solution to the problems facing workers in Ireland is the same as that to those facing workers the world over. We must organise together to replace capitalism everywhere with a system based on democratic control and the common ownership of the planet’s resources. The struggle for such a socialist society has to involve implacable opposition to nationalism, of whatever variety, whenever it rears its ugly ahead.

Bar Room Rebels (1986)

From the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

The bar-room rebels are very tough - when they talk. And they know how to talk. They have fought a hundred bloody battles in their conversations in the boozer on a Saturday night. With Guinness as their fuel for their tanks they have defeated countless oppressors - at least, they have spoken of doing so.

The bar-room rebels come to life on a Friday night when the pub doors open and the band is tuning up. After a pint or two they speak with passion about injustices which they know to exist. The troops in Ireland and the despicable prison camp at Long Kesh where men are sent without trial before a jury to be tortured and wasted. They are right to be angry - only the politically desensitised are not. The misery caused by racist tyranny in South Africa - the white dictatorship, the torture and murders committed in its name for the sake of "law and order", the willingness of governments to deal with such oppressors. Again, workers are right to be angry. The bosses who are robbing us - we work hard, they grow rich. The idle, parasitic millionaires. And the bar-room rebel downs another pint and concludes that "they're all a bunch of bastards". A common response to the class which exploits us; scientific socialists are not too pure of mind to share such indignant emotions - we would be peculiar revolutionaries if we did not.

The leisure hours of some of the bar-room rebels are one long expression of anger. Every symbol of capitalist oppression is muttered against in endless bitterness, usually preceded by the inappropriate adjective "fucking", and that for some of the bar-room rebels is the beginning and the end of the fight. At best, such behaviour can be described as harmless; it is also politically useless. But that is not the worst of bar-room politics.

Worse still are the theoretical terrorists who are to be found making aggressive verbal noises in the pub. They support the IRA. "Up the Provos", they shout, as if this is some kind of threat to the ruling class. Now let us be clear in understanding two points about the politics of the gun. Firstly, it has nothing to do with liberation. You do not liberate anyone by the tactics of the militarist oppressor. Cetainly, it is theoretically possible that violent struggle will remove British occupation of a part of Ireland, but it is just as sure that once the old oppressors are out the men with the guns will be the new oppressors - the new ruling class. That is the lesson of 1916. Workers who believe in the illusion of national liberation should look at the Irish Republic, where British capitalists have more capital invested in working class exploitation than in the North, and they will see that wars over nationalism lead only to new, but not very different, nations. Secondly, violence is not something to be theorised about. Armchair terrorists are not only mistaken for thinking that freedom will come from the barrel of a gun but they are hypocrites for doing nothing about their conviction.

Not so long ago the Islington branch of The Socialist Party had a debate against a bunch of bar-room rebels called Red Action. Their main speaker argued that winning the war against the British state in the north of Ireland is the key issue in the class struggle, exhibiting a degree of sincerity unusual on the Left. His comrades cheered him when he made his comment and spoke loudly about the important and brave struggle of the Republicans in Ireland. But killing workers is not a theoretical position, it is a practical one. Why don't those who are so eager to cheer when it comes to supporting military violence get in on the act? After all, if socialists genuinely believed that defeating the British army in Ireland was the decisive issue in the class struggle (a nationalistic belief which no socialist could share) we would have an obligation to join the armed struggle. But for the bar-room rebels it is much easier to sing a few nationalistic songs (it is a sight worth seeing: these so-called Red Internationalists sitting in a pub on a Saturday night singing A Nation Once Again) and paint a few slogans on the toilet walls than to go and do what they urge other to do.

The bar-room rebel fight wars with his mouth. The present writer has been told countless times that he is not qualified to speak about Ireland because he was not born there. Such crass reasoning would lead to the conclusion that the Loyalist majority of the North must be most qualified to speak about Ireland because they were born there. Socialists recognise that workers have no country. The bar-room rebels will agree with that view and then talk at length about the nation which is soon to be born out of the heroic military struggle which they are unwilling to join.

Those who offer support to terrorism in resolutions have an obligation to do so on the streets. Socialists refuse to make brave sounding noises which we cannot back up with action. Like the Christian pacifist who declares that "Thou shall not kill . . . unless under orders from Her Majesty's government", the bar-room rebels proclaim that the armed road is the only road - but they'll not be collecting their ammunition this weekend.

Within Trotskyist circles, where insurrection is always just coming up on the agenda (after the expulsion of this or that member) bar-room rebellion is a favourite pastime. They are to be found often, sitting over half pints of lager discussing whether the Socialist Workers Party or the Workers Revolutionary Party will run soviets after the BBC has been taken over in a midnight coup and the Royal Family has been sent to Epping Forest to receive the Nicholas II treatment. Big talk; if words were bullets the millionaires would be trembling. And the bar-room rebel is quite sure of the futility of trying to persuade fellow workers of the need for a new system. The essence of Leninist politics is that workers are too thick to know what socialism is all about. We must be led. So the bar-room rebels persist in their puerile fantasies about Petrograd in 1917, expelling each other as they fight over who will be Lenin and who will be Trotsky. Meanwhile the would-be Stalin never buys a round and takes the minutes.

The odd thing about these bar-room insurrectionists is that (to their credit) if they saw a gun they would faint. Guns and bombs and the sophisticated instruments of murder are sickening, obscene objects, not symbols of human freedom. Armies are necessarily brutal and authoritarian.

The case for political violence is the case against the possibility of working class consciousness. Once workers understand our oppression we can disposssess he ruling class of both the means of violent coercion and the means of wealth production and distribution. The bar-room rebels base their talk about violence on the defeatist belief that the ruling minority will always be bigger than us. Indeed, the capitalist elite might respond to majority socialist revolution with violence. But if they do they will be powerless in the face of the democratic majority. There is no glory in getting killed; as workers, our aim must be to avoid at all costs the possibility of suffering for our class, while ensuring victory for our class.

A recent topic of noise-making for the bar-room rebels is the struggle in South Africa. Socialists are just as sickened and angered by the racist dictatorship of apartheid as are our fellow workers who have come to hate it. It is easy to be sickened and angered, but then what? There is an implicit racist attitude, expressed by some leftists in Britain, both white and black, that violence is the only possible way out of oppression for the African blacks. It is a racist perception because it assumes that persuasion, organisation, democratic action, trade union struggle - these are not to be expected of the black South African. It is based on the racist caricature of the spear-carrying, unthinking "native" who can only win by the rules of the jungle. The bar-room rebels are quite happy to see a bloodbath in South Africa - "it is the only way". But it will not be their blood in the bath. There have been no reports of British leftists going to fight alongside the ANC.

Socialists would not be historically scientific if they did not understand why workers join the IRA, why they join the ANC. The present writer was once told by a comrade in Belfast how after the British troops started beating up and killing Republicans the IRA won more recruits than they had guns. State violence breeds counter-violence. The Socialist Party is not the Liberal Party; we do not sit around tutting at workers for becoming violent. But neither are we opportunist liars who will tell workers that violence will create anything but new rulers. Only the struggle to end capitalism will bring genuine human liberation. And the struggle is easier to win than those in which countless workers have had their lives wasted as they have swallowed nationalist myths and joined the dead heroes.

It is not for socialists to begrudge our fellow workers a few drinks and a bit of shouting on a Saturday night. The bar-room rebel is but a political reflection of the poverty of working class life. Out of the emotional anger of the heated pub debate socialists have been made - and many more will begin to think about politics in the place where workers try to escape and brewers get rich. But to the bar-room rebel we have a warning: you can't romanticise the struggle forever. The need to get rid of this rotten capitalist system is urgent. Sloganising and fighting wars with bar mats and looking for new nations is no solution. And the bar-room rebel knows that it is no solution. Perhaps that is why one or two of them are reading this article.

Steve Coleman