Indictment of capitalism (2001)

From the November 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The following letter from a member was published in The Belfast Telegraph on 28 September

George Bush has made it clear that if we do not support his plans to use absolute state terrorism to defeat the more “laissez faire” variety of terrorism, we will be marked down as an enemy. This is, we are assured, in the interests of the Bush definition of freedom.

Meanwhile, America’s astronomical “defence” budget must be going through the roof. Enormous bribes to old enemies and new friends are the order of the day and what are obviously staggering amounts of dollars are being laid out in the massive movement of men and equipment to terrify the enemy and, presumably—unless the Pentagon is absurdly wanton with its military resources—take the lives of a great many human beings. As in all wars, most of the latter will be completely innocent people, or, to use that brutal term taken from the lexicon of the US military establishment, mere “collateral damage”.

While the killing hasn’t yet started, the starving people of Afghanistan whose lives have been blighted by the brutality of the Russian imperialists and cynical usage by the agents of the West, are already being terrified. The UN, obviously bound hand and foot by the purchasing power of the West, has embargoed food aid to these starving people, caught between the religious madmen of the Taliban and the threat of the allegedly sane leaders of what they insist are the Western democracies.

Conversely, while the miserably poor of Afghanistan are being starved and terrified, the US President and the mayor of New York are appealing to Americans—obviously excluding the millions of poor in that country—to go out and spend to help American capitalism.

Could there be a more profound indictment of the system of international capitalism?

Richard Montague

Inconvenient commemoration (1984)

From the December 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Not every liar, cheat and hypocrite is qualified to be a politician, for which a high standard of expertise is required. Even so equipped, however, politicians can frequently become victims of what has come to be known as the banana-skin syndrome. A pesky civil servant is sometimes the agent of this dreaded problem which can bring about political death, or even reveal the fact that a female generalissimo was lying through her teeth when she disclaimed responsibility for the slaughter of 350 of her fellow human beings.

Whether the suggestion by that well-known Christian. Enoch Powell, that the murder of 350 Argentinian sailors should have been an occasion for “justification and rejoicing" (as reported in the Belfast Telegraph, 3 October. 1984) is genuine hypocrisy, is open to doubt. It is true that according to the Christian ethic “thou shall not kill", but Christian practice has never been averse to a bout of murder, providing it is committed under the guise of war. At any rate, it is conceivable that the eminent Enoch is quite genuine in his well-publicised hatred of all but the best of white-anglo-saxon protestants.

Timing is critical in the use of hypocrisy. It is fine, for example, for the British Labour Party to show righteous indignation about the Tories presiding over rising unemployment; attacking the health service; breaking strikes and using the full rigour of the capitalist law to punish pickets and strikers and, indeed, all the other dirty things that Tories do. But the Labour Party can protest only when it is Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition — and its parliamentary representatives should leave the House before the Tories remind them that all Labour governments — all seven of them — have done all of these things in the past and will be obliged to do so again if they ever become the government again.

Yes, timing is always vital; but then, how fickle is the public memory? Who is likely to remind the pensioned media that butchering the people of Afghanistan was a practice taken up by British governments long before the Russian ruling class ever thought of it? Churchill, arguably one of the greatest exponents of political hypocrisy. just got his timing right in 1939 when he told the British working class to pledge their lives in the fight against Hitler — just two years after he had told readers of The Times that if Britain ever got into difficulties he hoped a man with the will and determination of Hitler would emerge. Mind you, this feat of monumental hypocrisy was almost eclipsed by the Russian Foreign Minister. Molotov, when he told his German counterpart that the Russian rulers had always held that a strong Germany was indispensable to world peace — about a year before their respective leaders sent their wage-slaves out to slaughter each other.

Then there was Kenyatta of Kenya, the leader of the Mau-Mau. If we believed the British press, this unsavoury bunch not only killed our brave boys who were upholding the flag in foreign parts, they actually ritualised the savaging of their corpses. Finally a deal was done with old Jomo that helped to keep trade and commerce intact and Kenyatta was canonised into the ranks of secular saints who help to keep the world safe for hypocrisy and capitalist exploitation.

Given half the space used by the press for bingo and trivia, we could lengthen indefinitely the list of current and past examples of hypocrisy. Where these examples proved successful, you can be sure that the timing was right. Bad timing and . . . there’s a banana skin!

It was such a banana skin that caused no less a person than the Deputy Prime Minister of the Republic of Ireland, the redoubtable hypocrite, Dick Spring, to fall on his political backside on 1 October last. In looking at the background to Spring’s misadventure. it is important to note that the Irish government is busily re-writing history in order to distance its more prominent personnel from the activities of the Provisional IRA and events in Northern Ireland. Again, the element of time comes into this mammoth exercise; according to the comfortable Garrett Fitzgerald and his cohorts, murder and mayhem was alright in 1916 and in 1919-21 but it is quite . . . well, barbaric, today.

Of course there were differences between 1916 and 1984. In 1916. when Pearse and Connolly led a bunch of politically ignorant workers onto the streets of Dublin to kill and be killed by their fellow members of the working class, Ireland was undergoing a period of British rule less rigorous and repressive than the country had ever experienced. In the present Northern Ireland troubles, on the other hand, those who mislead workers into an anti-working-class conflict against each other have very real military repression as well as social deprivation to play the role of recruiting sergeants. But this is not the difference that concerns southern Irish politicians; the difference is that they now have power and influence as the lickspittles of Irish capitalism; power, influence, Mercedes cars and all the trappings of rich living that their ex-imperial masters used to flaunt and all derived directly from the earlier bout of killing. Can it be wondered why they want to conceal the history of their bloody inheritance?

The old songs about yesterday’s heroes that once rocked the timbers where drunken patriotism found solace no longer have official favour — what respectable politician would want to share a ballad with the Provos? The sick commemoration services that previously allowed government ministers to unveil plaques to the immortal memory of some poor, unfortunate Paddy Murphy — whose dog might have barked at the Black-and-Tans — are, similarly, now frowned upon. But sometimes it can’t be helped; members of the commemoration committee might be the same people who marshall the voting fodder for the Party and. on the principle of votes before principles, what can a Minister, even a Deputy Prime Minister, do but attend?

Doubtless, for such good reason. Deputy Prime Minister Dick Spring was the chief hypocrite at a commemoration in honour of Sir Roger Casement, a would-be Republican gun-runner who was apprehended by the Royal Irish Constabulary in 1916. Actually, there are several layers of hypocrisy in the Casement affair. After his arrest, the British authorities — who had knighted him for his civil service in the Congo — found his diaries which, they claimed, revealed that he was a homosexual. The truth or otherwise of that claim should have been irrelevant but — mindful of the sick perversity of Catholic thinking on matters sexual — both sides tried to make propaganda out of the alleged revelations. the leaders of Catholic nationalism claiming that the “Black Diaries" were forgeries and, as such, demonstrated the depravity of the British.

The truth of the matter has never been cleared up nor have Irish politicians — the political heirs of yesterday’s gunmen — or the present IRA ever been brave enough to express their admiration for Casement irrespective of the nature of his sexual proclivities. The hypocrites can only revere the memory of a heterosexual Casement. But that is the lower layer of hypocrisy; the more immediately glaring aspect of the matter — the commemoration of a gunrunner by an Irish Minister — was the part that came unstuck — through bad timing for all concerned.

Poor Dick was not to know that the latter-day gunmen were attempting an almost carbon-copy re-run of the Casement adventure — at least, not when he agreed to give the oration. As it was a seven-ton trawler, loaded with weapons and surrounded by the entire Irish navy, was sailing into port within a short distance of the spot where Dick was commemorating an equally-failed venture. Whether it disturbed the Deputy Prime Minister to the point where he left the festivities without partaking in the sumptuous repast usually allotted to a hypocrite of such high standing. is not reported. Certainly, the affair did not appear to rock his boss, Garrett Fitzgerald, who with contemptible effrontery took credit for saving the lives of “fellow-irishmen” who might have died if the weapons had got into the hands of the Provos. Presumably, had Casement's mission been accomplished, the resultant deaths might have provided another opportunity for some other hypocrite to commemorate a "successful" engagement in the “Glorious Struggle" where the "other side" were “British" members of the working class.

Paisley, one of the chief political architects of the present troubles in Northern Ireland, and the Unionist Party leader. Molyneaux, while complimenting the southern politicians on the capture of the arms, were quick to point to the hypocrisy of the Irish government. Molyneaux equated the Casement adventure with the more recent attempt to bring weapons into Ireland and he upbraided the southerners for not condemning all gun-running. A fair point, you might think, until you remember that he and his Party of Superbrits owe their existence in no small way to the fact that they conspired successfully with Germany, in 1912 — in the shadow of the First World War — to bring in guns to use against British troops if the British government intended to impose a solution of the Irish Problem that was not compatible with the political and economic requirements of the capitalist class in Northern Ireland.

Harrington might well have been referring particularly to Irish politicians when he penned the couplet:

Treason doth never prosper; what’s the

reason?

If it prosper, none dare call it treason!

We are not implying that capitalism is bad because its politicians are demonstrably cheats, liars and hypocrites. Capitalism should be abolished because it kills people by starvation, war and lack of medical attention; because it imposes poverty of varying intensity on the overwhelming majority of the world's people; because it divides. alienates and embitters the human family and denies us all the material means of a full and happy life — and finally because. even if the politicians who legalise its thieving processes were anxious to promote political honesty, they could not do so.

Richard Montague

Belfast Branch, WSP

Blogger's Note:

Embedded within this article in the original copy of the December 1984 Socialist Standard was an ad for the recently published pamphlet, Ireland — Past, Present and Future. This pamphlet was produced jointly by the SPGB and the World Socialist Party of Ireland. It can be accessed at the following link.

World Socialist Party - Belfast Branch (1984)

From the November 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nationalism's winners and losers (1993)

From the October 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

The IRA claims it is acting in the interests of 'The Risen People’. But as R Montague makes clear, it is our fellow members of the working class, fighting over the fictions of opposing nationalisms, who are not only the battle casualties but the social casualties of the ‘national question’.

'The cause of Labour is the cause of Ireland". So wrote the renegade James Connolly when he abandoned his concept of internationalism and aligned himself with the racist nationalist, Patrick Pearse, in a struggle to extend the power of Ireland's fledgling capitalists back in 1916.

The lie did not die with Connolly; it remained to pollute working-class politics in Ireland and to facilitate the divisive interests of Ulster Unionists and Irish Nationalists and to bolster the fiction among some workers that despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary Ireland is in some way "their country". Connolly's reformist vision of solving the "national question" in order to clear the ground for the class struggle played no small part in making the so-called national question — which should be of no concern to the working class — a battleground on which workers slaughter one another over tribal issues.

The Provisional IRA and its political cousin, Sinn Fein, frequently use the term "the risen people" to designate their members and supporters, most of whom reside in working-class housing estates or on small farms. Like much of the archaic political baggage of the republicans, the expression dates back to the early part of the present century when the Gaelic revival and Sinn Fein were a burgeoning force in Irish politics.

Not that Sinn Fein or the genteel pseuds of of the Gaelic League were particularly concerned about the ordinary people. In Dublin, where Sinn Fein was especially active, the Medical Officer of Health announced in 1912 that 82,000 people were living in one-roomed tenement slums. Poverty was endemic, grim, the sort of poverty that has an ambience of real hunger, foul smells, ignorance and beggarly hopes and expectations. In 1912, too, Jim Larkin began to unionize the low paid, the labourers and transport workers who, against a background of mass unemployment, had no protection from their particularly rapacious employers.

The employers responded with a lock-out and the Royal Irish Constabulary won a contemptible place in Irish history by brutally attacking these semi-starvelings who had the audacity to ask their employers for a little more. The priests moralized and reminded the workers that property was a divine right and that they must distrust the motives of trade unionists in Britain who opened their homes to the starving kids of the victims of property and who, according to the priests, might be careless of the religion of those they were helping!

Sinn Fein stood aloof; its founder. Arthur Griffith, making no secret of his bitter hostility to the cause of organized labour.

"The first duty of the (Irish) nation", according to Sinn Fein, was not the plight of the desperately poor and downtrodden families that represented the generality of working-class life. Sinn Fein and the Gaelic League were not on their side. On the contrary: in as much as Sinn Fein’s purpose and its policy was aimed at gaining political independence so that an Irish government could nurture a native capitalism behind tariff walls and import quotas, it can be said that it was firmly on the side of the masters whose riches and affluence were fashioned from the grim exploitation of the poor.

With fierce candour, Sinn Fein would declare the first duty of the new Irish nation to be the interests of "the home manufacturers and producers" — a euphemistic description of the Irish capitalists who were locked in class warfare with the workers. Yet it was these workers who were subsequently elevated in republican myth to the status of "the risen people" because the republicans had succeeded in convincing some of them to forgo their ow n class interests and risk their lives fighting for the political and economic interests of their enemies!

In the light of recent revelations appertaining to lifestyle, wealth and poverty in Northern Ireland, it might be of interest to take a look at the current crop of "risen people" and to assess whether they are winners or losers in the grim game of death, maiming and suffering so grandiloquently misrepresented by republican slogans.

We must make it immediately clear that when we look for those who are losers and those who are winners in the Northern Ireland troubles, we see neither category represented as catholics or protestants, or as republicans or loyalists. All such categories are among the winners and, of course, catholics, protestant, loyalists and republicans are the entire human material of the losers the people who suffer death, maiming, intimidation and imprisonment. Among the losers, too, are those who inflict these miseries on one another.

Who are the "risen people"? Where and how do they live and what sustains the claim that either in their actual conditions, or in their political aspirations, they could justifiably be seen to have "risen"? Put another way, as the media draws attention to the rich lifestyles of some people in Northern Ireland and disgraced ex-Minister, Michael Mates, suggests the British government’s £3 billion annual subvention is making life easy for some people, we might suspect that these are the real risen people. The question is, are these people whose lives have changed so noticeably for the better as to gain the attention of the national press the "risen people" of republican legend?

In offering the testimony of Michael Mates we are conscious of his dubious reputation but he is right in saying that the British government makes a nett contribution of some £3 billion annually to Northern Ireland and he is right in suggesting that some of this money goes to the Northern Ireland Housing Executive and he might even be right in inferring that that public authority has evolved a standard of housing which is superior to some local authority housing in Britain.

Where Mates lapses into nonsense is in inferring, as he does, that money invested in public housing is in some way associated with the reluctance of local politicians to hammer out an agreed solution to the province’s problems. The fact is that there is still an acute housing problem in Northern Ireland and that this is being currently aggravated by severe cuts in the housing budget.

It is true that the overwhelming majority of IRA activists and IRA supporters, the "risen people", in the cities, towns and villages of Northern Ireland live in public housing estates. By their nature, even where standards have improved, these are depressing places and when the IRA or Loyalist writ is triumphant life can be very frightening indeed.

Peculiarly, the "risen people” and their "enemies” who support the loyalist cause, live in very similar surroundings. Whether they support the posturings of the paramilitaries or remain frightened and silenced by graffiti, intimidation, hijackings, and the occasional taking-over of their homes by local or state gunmen, they live in fairly uniform poverty. Unemployment in some of these areas can be as high as 85 percent; where it is lower, it remains a fact that most of the people are wholly dependent on state benefits.

As far as political aspirations are concerned, for most people they extend to the simple and somewhat despairing hope that the killings will end and the gun bullies, legal and illegal, go away. For others, politics are the bitter reaction to the last atrocity. For others, and especially the young people, nurtured in the ambivalence of a capitalist "morality" that glorifies military thuggery, and licensed killings, it is easy to translate the machoism, romance and reaction to state violence into the cause of Ireland — or the cause of Ulster. These are the areas from which come those who are killed, those who are maimed and those who are sentenced to long periods of imprisonment — and, of course, those who are doing most of the killing. Workers in these areas are often articulate and aware that whatever way the troubles are ultimately resolved will not affect the economic life of their class. The regime under which they live — either republican or loyalist — doesn’t tolerate dissent, however. Freedom is the right to do what you’re told!

Both republican and loyalist paramilitaries accept and commonly practise capital punishment even for what they term anti-social behaviour; there is no appeal, no concern for the social conditions that give rise to the alleged misbehaviour. This is a dominant, frightening part of the life of the IRA's risen people and they are locked into it because it is the heritage of their class; because their poverty denies them the opportunity to seek another form of life that exists a short distance away — among the real winners.

The prominence of this other form of life has become so pronounced that it has become newsworthy. On August 8 the Independent on Sunday featured an article entitled "Ulster Few Enjoy A Golden Age”. The article was accompanied by a picture of yachts and luxury cruisers tied up at Bangor marina and the lead-in proclaimed. "The sweet life goes on in North Down despite everything".

The ”story" was about luxury boats, about Jaguars and Mercs and Porsches, and the arrogant, pompous and non-productive people who own these things.

Two days later, the Irish Times took up the theme in a lengthy article entitled "The Sweet Charm of the Northern Bourgeoisie". The writer, Nuala O Faolain, festoons her article with quotes that speak volumes about the "charm" of her subjects. Listen to their words. these people who live rich lives because they own the means of wealth production or who organize the exploitation of the producing class for those owners. When you read what these people have to say you will see that, while they live a mere dozen-or-so miles from the working-class housing estates of Belfast, economically and culturally they are light-years away.

Here are some of O Faolain’s direct quotes:

"You can hear explosions across the lough. I do wonder some times why we‘re so fortunate, when they're so unfortunate."

"Pound for pound, we have a higher standard of living than anywhere else in Europe."

There’s a lot more of the same thing. But there is no talk of catholics and protestants; not a word about republicanism or loyalism. These people might compete with each other but they have no fictions to kill for. No, they know what side their cake’s buttered on and they can eat in peace — together.

And there, surely, is a lesson for us — the working class.

Richard Montague

Blogger's Note:

Embedded within this article were two 'Facts Files' giving more background on some of the participants in the conflict. Rather than try and post them within the article, I have reproduced them below:

FACT FILE: The Royal Ulster Constabulary

The RUC came into being with the Stormont state and over the years proved a willing and frequently brutal instrument of the ruling Unionist Party. With the commencement of the Civil Rights agitation in 1968 the RUC unquestioningly accepted Unionist Party instructions to deal with protest in the traditional way — with the boot, the baton and, if necessary, the gun.

Before the provisional IRA came into existence (1970) the RUC had been responsible for at least six deaths. The first two fatalities were as a result of beatings and, later, the RUC directed heavy machine-gun fire against a block of flats killing four people including a nine-year-old boy and a British soldier home on leave.

The RUC do not carry out normal policing in nationalist areas; instead, heavily armed patrols in armoured Land Rovers travel through these areas accompanied by soldiers. No attempt is made by these patrols to carry out ordinary policing; on the contrary, the frequent journeyings up and down streets in residential areas is seen as an act of provocation which helps to consolidate the influence of the IRA. Given its history, it is as difficult to see the RUC achieving acceptance among nationalists as it is to see loyalists tolerating the IRA. The force is much more a part of the problem of Northern Ireland than it is a part of the solution.

FACT FILE: The IRA's "Mandate"

The last all-Ireland General Election was held in 1918. Sinn Fein won 73 seats (for Westminster parliament); other nationalists won a further 6 seats and the Unionist Party won 26 seats. The Unionists won majorities in four only of the six counties that was to become Northern Ireland.

In 1921 the British government partitioned Ireland, creating Northern Ireland (6 counties) and the Irish Free State (26 counties).

The present IRA and Sinn Fein validate their right to carry on an armed struggle by reference to the electoral victory of Sinn Fein in 1918. Given that numerous general elections have taken place in both parts of Ireland since that date and that, when they have contested these elections. Sinn Fein have failed to achieve a significant vote, the IRA/Sinn Fein "mandate" claim is patently absurd. Current indications are that in an all-Ireland election Sinn Fein could expect two percent of the vote.

The Provisionals do not mention that the Irish electorate in the 1918 election was staunchly catholic and conservative and that today that electorate oppose contraception, divorce, abortion and all the other trappings of a pluralist state. The IRA/Sinn Fein, on the other hand, have abandoned the old 1918 conservatism: today, despite their claim to be faithful to 1918. they not only mouth the sort of left-wing shibboleths that would cause the 1918 electors to rotate continuously in their graves but they have, also, espoused most pluralist reforms.

What price democracy? (1992)

Cartoon by George Meddemmen.

From the September 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

With the collapse of what we were encouraged to believe was communism in eastern Europe, another clutch of nations are undergoing the birth pangs of what passes for freedom in the so-called western democracies.

Unquestionably, it is better to live in a society where there is some degree of democracy than in one where opposition to the regime is not tolerated. The question is, however, how democratic are the democratic countries and how much benign repression is concealed by the illusion of freedom?

We have all heard the boast that America is a classless society and that any man or woman, whatever his or her origins, can become the nation’s chief executive. That no-one is debarred from the office of President on the grounds of being a cheat, a liar or a fool, is demonstrated by the history, past and present, of US Presidents. On the other hand, neither a woman nor a black person have had the distinction of being selected and, while it is possible that the colour and sex prohibition may be overcome in the future, the likelihood of someone who is not immensely rich succeeding to the Presidency of the United States is extremely unlikely.

In the struggle for electoral victory in the US Presidential elections money is a primary factor. It is not expensive, of course, to advise the voting public about the real issues that concern their future; but it does cost the most fantastic amounts of money to obscure the reality of both the present and the future. All the work of programme preparation, the prime media time, the wages and salaries of artisans and specialists in all sorts of hype and media trickery, conning with paper hats, raspberry blowers, millions of posters carrying asinine slogans, telling lies, using private detectives to look for dirt with which to expose an opponent. The disgusting circus that passes for democracy at Presidential level is very, very expensive stuff in which there is no place for ideas or concepts that cannot be backed by multi-millions of dollars.

Of course the election of a President is a two-horse race. We don’t even hear about the other candidates nor, indeed, do most Americans. There is no bar on socialists, or any other grouping, running for office—that’s the basis of the claim that America is a democracy—but without the massive wealth to buy the organisation, media time etc. that the Republicans and Democrats can deploy, that claim is patently fraudulent.

The system is not necessarily fashioned to repress the free expression of ideas but that is what it does. Western capitalism uses the power of money to benignly repress the general dissemination of ideas with even more efficacy than eastern state capitalism repressed ideas with terror. In the latter, the means used to suppress inexorably created their own reaction; in the former, since all are theoretically free to express their ideas and are gagged by lack of money, the public—conditioned to accept the economic logic of people even dying because they do not have the money to buy the food, shelter or medical care they need—can easily accept the financial suppression of ideas as being consistent with the democracy of the market.

Power of money

The same two-horse race as takes place between the Democrats and Republicans in the US takes place in Britain; here the runners are the Conservative Party and the Labour Party—with the so-called Liberal Democrats anxious to supplant one or other of the runners.

In Britain—especially following the revelation that one of the biggest press barons was a despicable crook who even stole from his retired workers—it would be freely admitted that, as in all the other so-called democratic countries, the press is owned and controlled by unscrupulous racketeers who have the power to influence millions of people every day. But it would be argued that at least the more influencial electronic media is largely free of undemocratic practices. Unlike the United States, where politicians and political interest groups can buy radio and TV lime, the electronic media here is allegedly protected against undemocratic abuse by rigorously enforced guidelines.

In fact these guidelines are even more repressive of genuine democratic practice than the American system. While it is true that in the United States those political parties serving the political needs of the capitalist class can buy the most potent means of controlling and conditioning masses of people and that this is the opposite of democratic, it is also true that interests outside the big parties can buy such exposure for their ideas as their necessarily meagre finances allow. In Britain, minority voices are denied access to the mass communication media except, of course, if they can muster amounts of money far greater than would be required for a modest campaign on American TV or radio!

In order to get an insignificant amount of broadcasting time on BBC or ITV in a general election, a political organisation must put up at least £25,000 as deposits for 50 candidates. On top of this a reasonably credible campaign in support these candidates would cost another £125,000. Any crackpot thesis, providing it is legal—and the rubbish that the major parties pul out on TV shows legality is no guide to sense!—can get the maximum amount of time if its sponsors can raise about £300,000 in the form of deposits for candidates in every coastituency. This amount of money buys it the right of access to the public through the medium of television and radio just as surely as it would in the US if it was paid over directly to the TV companies.

It has to be added, lest anyone is surprised that British democracy is so cheap that, after the deposits have been paid, about another £1,500,000 would be required to field a modest campaign—indeed, one press report claimed that the Tories invested in excess of £20,000,000 in buying the opportunity in the 1992 General Election to govern Britain.

So much for living in a democratic society. The cash nexus that controls capitalist democracy means that new ideas and concepts that do have, or may have, merit in solving the terrible and intractable problems of capitalism are frozen out of the pseudo-democratic system by the power of money. That, of course, is why problems like poverty, insecurity, homelessness, crime and wars, are intractable—because mass public examination of new solutions or different approaches to our problems are not permitted by those who gain wealth, power and privilege out of the very system that creates these problems.

Struggle for democracy

The "justification" for this anti-democratic system of closed loop capitalist "democracy" that ensures that the public is comfortably insulated from knowledge of any sane alternative to the present system of social lunacy, is the argument that the financial bar precludes all sorts of nut-cases from getting involved in elections. Of course, the amount of money spent in procuring a percentage of the vote at elections also acts as the means of measuring what access, if any, those outside the mainstream parties have between elections.

It is certainly no accident that, despite the fact that political fare is a sought after and, normally, ongoing part of television and radio programming, it is a rarity for anyone outside the mainstream panics to be seen or heard on British TV. Nor does the absence mean that there is a dearth of minority political opinion or spokespersons prepared to pul such opinion. No, it means that the utterly anti-democratic "percentage of the vote" thesis is working a treat for British capitalism.

But the argument itself, that nut-cases are kept off the air—apart from the fact that it is an essentially anti-democratic argument that makes money the arbiter of political sanity—falls down in practice. Apart from the Monster Raving Looney Party and the mass of candidates who fought the General Election on a policy of conquering problems by thinking they are not there, there are the orthodox inanities of Major, Kinnock and Ashdown.

Real democracy, of course, is impossible to achieve within a system of social inequality; the essence of real, informed and fully participative democracy can only prevail in a truly socialist society. Still, to establish the majority socialist consciousness that must necessarily underpin Socialism, it is important to struggle for our voice to be heard; for the limping democracy of capitalism to become more than a mere numbers game for pollsters and politicians. That is not to say that the struggle for a wider degree of democracy must precede the struggle for Socialism but, rather, that the struggle for democracy is an integral part of the struggle for Socialism.

Richard Montague

The Power and The Priests (1995)

From the February 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Hardly a day goes by now without the Catholic Church in Ireland having to face some scandal or other. However, it is not only the wayward behaviour of some of its priests that has resulted in Irish people abandoning the church in droves and ignoring its reactionary teachings

One of the many fictions that prevails among Protestants in Ireland is that the Catholic Church always stood in the forefront of the struggle for independence from Britain. The reverse of this is true but acknowledging that would not fit in with the traditional Unionist slogan that “Home Rule is Rome Rule” — even though the slogan itself contains more than a germ of truth.

The historian Beresford Ellis rightly points out that the Roman Church played a key role in preparing Ireland for the Anglo-Norman invasion and it was Pope Adrian IV who, in 1154, promulgated a Bull authorising Henry II of England to invade Ireland. After the Reformation the Catholic Church in Ireland saw its role as that of facilitating the counter-Reformation and it was identified with conspiracies, mostly emanating from Spain, aimed at bringing about the defeat of the English Reformation. These activities were not aimed at the independence of Ireland; on the contrary, Ireland was now seen as an essential springboard for restoring Rome’s authority throughout the entire Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

The Roman Church was hostile to every succeeding effort by Irish nationalists to cast off “the English yoke”, especially during those periods when the national struggle was married to the struggle of the poor for the amelioration of their poverty. It opposed the Fenian movement and its opposition became hysterical when the Fenians established relations with the International Working Men’s Association. Indeed, Archbishop Moriarity opinioned that hell was not hot enough or eternity long enough to punish the Fenians.

Earlier, in the period 1845-8, when the potato crop was blighted and thousands of people were dying of hunger and its diseases, while the export of sheep, cattle and pigs, as well as most of the cereal crop continued unabated, the bishops reminded the starving of the “moral” duty to pay their rents. In 1848, a leading Catholic layman, Dr John O'Connell, the son of Daniel O’Connell, the famous Catholic Emancipator, said “I thank God I live among people who would rather die of hunger than defraud their landlords of rent.” The bishops were eloquently silent.

Boycott weapon

The events of 1879-82 are significant in that they paved the way for resolution of the land question in Ireland and the establishment of the material conditions that were to create modern Ireland. It is a classical example of how a subject class can oppose with peaceful means its oppressors and, if sufficient unity is achieved, win victory. The Land League forged the boycott weapon, not only giving a new word to the English language but also setting in train a social revolution that was to finally banish the worst features of landlordism from Ireland.

With notable exceptions, the Church was unhelpful. An earlier version of the Land League, the Tenant Right League had achieved a considerable degree of unity between Protestant small farmers in the north and their more impoverished Catholic counterparts in the south. It was potentially an exciting development but, when Lord John Russell, the British Prime Minister, responded to the Pope's attempts to establish new bishoprics in Britain with an anti-papist Ecclesiastical Titles Act, the Catholic clergy and some Catholic leaders of the Tenant Right League sacrificed the unity that underpinned the struggle of the Irish poor in order to promote the politics of Rome.

A few years later the bishops brought bitter division into the Home Rule movement with the outrageous vilification of Charles Stewart Parnell after it was revealed that the Protestant leader of the Irish National Party was involved in a relationship with a married woman. As effectively as it had split the Tenant Right League, it now shattered the unity of the National Party and inadvertently set the stage for the entrance of Sinn Fein.

In 1912-13, the desperately impoverished transport and general workers of Dublin were locked out by their employers for joining a trade union. Revealingly, Sinn Fein was promoting the political interests of the vicious coterie of Catholic capitalists who were savaging the poor and the Church did nothing to hide its bitter opposition to the workers. As a gesture of solidarity, English trade unionists (whom Sinn Fein opposed) offered to take some of the workers' children and ensure that they were provided for while the lock-out lasted. The Church went wild and priestly louts led attacks on the departing parade of hapless children. The excuse was that these unfortunates whose little bodies were suffering from the bitter rapacity of Irish capitalism might have their souls endangered by the Protestant and “pagan” English.

In 1916, the residue of the Irish Volunteers — the great majority of whom had gone to fight the Germans — combined with the Irish Citizen Army to form the IRA which staged the so-called “Easter Rising”. The ICA had been formed by James Connolly to protect locked-out workers from the thuggery of the paramilitary Royal Irish Constabulary three years earlier. Now, incorporated into the IRA, it was hijacked by Connolly into taking part in an insurrection to forward the Sinn Fein policy of legislative independence to promote the interests of Irish capitalists.

After the defeat of the insurrection the Catholic newspaper, the Irish Catholic, editorialised on the immorality of the Rising and opinioned that it was an act of treachery and that there was no reason to lament that its perpetrators (the leaders of the Rising had been executed) had met the fate that since the dawn of history had been reserved for traitors.

The subsequent establishment of the Irish Free State politically canonised the executed leaders and nowhere were they more lauded than by the hypocritical Catholic hierarchy.

Holy orders

It would take volumes to detail the way the Catholic Church wormed and bullied its way into the affairs of the newly-established Irish Free State. One example will suffice.

In February 1948, the Fianna Fail government of Eamon De Valera lost its Dail majority for the first time since it achieved power in 1932. The new government was a coalition, and a young medical doctor, a left-wing republican, Dr Noël Browne, became an enthusiastic Minister of Health.

Poverty and acute privation grew during the war despite Southern Ireland’s neutrality. In the nine years since 1939, taxable profits had risen by some 200 percent but real wages had actually fallen below their pre-war level. The war years had been preceded by the heightened poverty resulting from the British embargo on Irish imports in the early 1930s which had followed the refusal of the De Valera government to pay the annuities which Britain had imposed when the Irish Free State was established. Life was hard for the urban workers and desperate for small farmers and this proved a fecund breeding ground for tuberculosis, a poverty disease which was then sweeping Europe.

I had met Browne and can testify to the enthusiasm of his efforts to counter the medical consequences of poverty in southern Ireland. After much trimming by his cabinet colleagues, the Minister introduced a Bill in the Dail that provided for free healthcare for expectant mothers and children up to the age of five.

The Irish Catholic bishops went wild. These puny efforts to give some medical help to mothers and babies was “rank socialism” and could not be tolerated by “Holy Mother", the Church. The well- cosseted bishops, living like feudal princes, did not simply pass on their opinion that the state help for the poor was “socialism” (which the church universally had always vigorously opposed), they wrote to the Taoiseach, John A. Costello, an earlier fascist sympathiser, instructing him that the government would introduce the Mother and Child Bill "under pain of sin”. The Bill was abandoned but an amended scheme was introduced, despite clerical protest, by the succeeding Fianna Fail government.

Since then, a new reality, brought about by the needs of a burgeoning capitalism, has inhibited the more audacious arrogance of the Catholic hierarchy. For years, as the Republic first become a trading partner with Britain in the Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement of the mid-Sixties, and later as a minor player in big-league EC capitalism, the Church remained a formidable agent of reaction. But television, with its insensate curiosity and its international programme fare, has had a part to play in breaking down the old walls of secrecy and false piety behind which many eminent churchmen traditionally sheltered. Again, the narrow world of gombeen capitalism has been overtaken by the brash presence of the multinationals and their religiously indifferent personnel. Reality was, and is, changing fast in Ireland, sometimes pushed by European law, and the Church is being exposed as a mere part of the “hallowed sepulchre" of its teachings.

Crumbling monolith

In Northern Ireland, especially in places like Belfast, the Catholic clergy have been happy to accept the bribes of the British government to act as a counterinsurgency agent. In an effort to combat the massive unemployment that, especially in more impoverished urban areas, plays into the hands of the paramilitaries, the Northern Ireland Office introduced Action for Community Employment (ACE) which provides temporary employment in non-profit-making enterprises. Shrewdly, the government used the Catholic clergy as a conduit for distribution of the ACE largesse in the Catholic community, thus, indirectly giving priests the power to assist those whom they favoured. Doubtless, Tory largess has won the Church a few friends. Undoubtedly, too, it has made them many enemies in the more embattled regions of the north.

We do not regard priests or bishops as being especially obedient to their own precepts of “morality”. Accordingly, unlike the media in general, we see no undue significance in their being increasingly exposed as liars, cheats and child molesters. Probably, in the past, many young men who aspired to the priesthood were able to suppress normal sexuality, often at the cost of personality deviance or alcoholism. Today there are few recruits to the priesthood; young Catholics have become disaffected as reality overwhelms theology. Regrettably for their victims, it appears that increasing numbers of the sad fraternity who seek opportunities for the expression of their sick proclivities are taking advantage of the scarcity and swelling the numbers of deviant priests.

Just as the advent of electricity reduced the sightings of leprechauns, so the heightened understanding of natural phenomena and its concomitant disregard of unevidenced beliefs — both by-products of modern capitalism — has destroyed the mystery and secrecy of the holy men who presume to “sin” outside the parameters of their own precepts.

The gullible will turn to the weeping statues. More will show their contempt for a crumbling monolith that, for the love of its god, heaped misery on humanity. 

Richard Montague

Crime and Politicians (1995)

From the February 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

What to do about crime is a question the capitalist parties 
are forever debating without ever coming near a solution.
They refuse to accept that capitalism causes crime

The Tories, the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats are all preoccupied with the problem of crime because crime is one of the principal concerns of the public. Even the smaller political organisations have been forced, by public demand, to address the question.

That demand is based on the proximity of crime — theft, burglary, mugging, armed robbery, car stealing, violence and murder, to name only the illegal variety — to the citizen. Crime is not now only something most members of the public read about; it is a frightening reality for most people, either as a personal experience or through association with a friend or neighbour. Nor is the illusion of security traditionally reinforced any more by the presence of the ubiquitous policeman a comfort. Despite massive increases in their numbers and vast sums spent on prevention and detection technology, the police response to run-of-the-mill crime is such that thousands of offences go unreported.

Like unemployment and the problems of the NHS, crime has become a potential election winner — or loser. As such, it occupies the attention of government and opposition while, in the background, specialists, like the police, criminologists, sociologists and other experts wrestle with the problem. Like poverty, homelessness, unemployment, health care and other acute problems of our present social order, no politicians, experts or academics would dare to suggest that they could ever solve the problem of crime; indeed, they all claim that crime results from our “human nature” and, therefore, all they can do is create mechanisms for containing the fruits of our human frailty.

Gutter media

The problems for the politicians and the experts is that they face a public opinion largely fed by a gutter, headline-seeking press which, like the criminals, benefits from crime — without taking any of the chances the criminals have to take. Recently Channel 4 had a programme on crime and its prevention in its series, Power and the People. Of the 300 people used in an experimental programme aimed at testing the citizen’s response to intelligent persuasion — as opposed to the brutal rhetoric of the gutter media — most of the suggestions for dealing with the problem of crime, offered by the majority of these voters, made the crimes they were discussing seem innocent and benign.

The floggers were there, the throw-away-the-key brigade, string-’em-up was well represented, cut-off-their-fingers seemed a cross-cultural response. Listening to the “solutions” offered by these opponents of crime, it occurred to this writer that, if the 300 had been a convocation of criminals, the innocent would be in grave peril.

Happily, and most instructively, after they had heard from the experts, police officers, criminologists, jailers and others, about the application of some of their “solutions” there was a swing of 12 to 15 percent towards more civilised views. The point is, though, that these people were a random sample of the electorate; the people with votes; the people who want something done.

It places the humane politician in a dilemma. If he, or she, has done their homework on the question, they know that all the knee-jerk “solutions” have been tried and found wanting. The death penalty didn’t stop sheep-stealing or reduce murders. An obvious, and an economically-effective, means of ending the intractable problem of “joyriding” would be to give the offenders the means, through employment or otherwise, of having a car, but that sort of solution would not win votes. Indeed, recently we saw the reaction of the gutter scribes of some of the tabloids and the so-called “quality” press to attempts by penologists to create some self-esteem in youthful criminals by exposing them to something that their station in life doesn’t allow them to contemplate — a holiday in East Africa.

But elections, for the politicians, are about winning. That means that political parties cannot be seen to be soft or innovative about crime — and many of the opinion-formers think that looking for its cause is being “soft”. In the Channel 4 programme referred to earlier, Labour leader Tony Blair was subjected to questioning about his attitudes to crime by people whose questions showed that they suspected him of being “soft” on the subject. He squirmed but his solutions, though more intelligently expressed, were essentially the same as those of Sir Ivan Lawrence, a typical Tory twit who had been questioned earlier. Blair may not have believed the nonsense he mouthed but capitalist politics are not about changing people’s ideas but with identifying with those ideas in order to get votes.

Of course it is easy to understand public reaction to crime — especially those most despicable of crimes carried out against the poor, the weak, against children or on the elderly. Actually, such crimes, though they get the big headlines, are relatively rare and represent a very small percentage of all crimes. The overwhelming volume of crime, some 94 percent, is against property and the offences at the top of the crime league, in monetary terms, are rarely associated with members of the working class. The really big money is in fraud, embezzlement, insider trading, insurance racketeering, tax evasion and the like.

Mammoth swindle

In these matters detection and convictions are low because there are grey areas between capitalism’s legal thieving and the illegal variety. An example of this appeared in the Observer on 15 May of last year and concerned a mammoth swindle carried out by insurance companies cashing in on Tory pressure on workers to join, or transfer to, private pension schemes. The Director of the Serious Fraud Office, responding to enquires about the insurance super-crooks said: “We have neither the resources nor the powers to investigate the whole area of personal pension transfers”. The same cannot be said about the resources and powers enjoyed by the army of snoopers the state employs to detect social security fraud.

Crime is a filthy business. According to Ken Smith, in his book Free is Cheaper, it employs about one million people, guarding, protecting, policing, transporting, arresting, convicting and incarcerating. The police, especially, are judged by the number of convictions they achieve and over the last few years there have been a succession of cases that have shown that police officers of all ranks are as ready to use thuggery, lies and deceit to achieve their purpose as are the criminals. In the upper echelons of crime, opportunity often plays a part in determining who is the criminal and who the victim but, at the low end of the crime scale are the really sad eases, the mugged, the terrified, the deprived and the injured. It is difficult for these victims to appreciate that the petty criminal is the product of the same system that made them his, or her, victim.

Free Access

Socialists do not need an answer to the problems of crime. We are organised to gain majority support for the abolition of capitalism, and the achievement of a society in which all human beings would have free and equal access to the goods and services they need. It requires little mental effort to appreciate that, in a society where everybody could avail of their needs the overwhelming burden of crime would disappear.

Space precludes a deeper examination of that other small volume of crime that does not appear to be directly connected with property but which usually results from the values and conditioning of people in a property society.

Capitalism without crime is just not possible. Most of the more repressive and brutal means advanced for its containment are not only angry, despairing and degrading ways of striking back at the criminal, they are utterly futile. While we have competition, profit, aggression, conflict and, of course, poverty, despair and alienation, we will have crime and while we have capitalism we will have all of these things.

Richard Montague

Whose thoughts are you thinking? (2006)

From the December 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Richard Dawkins, the biologist, has become something of a celebrity through his outspoken advocacy of atheism as in his new book “The God Delusion”. But his approach to religion is still an idealist one.

The Dawkins approach to the question of religion is, like religion itself, an idealist one: religion is false, rationally unsustainable; morally enfeebling and a basis for hatred and division. Presumably Dawkins sees the death or meaningful diminution of religion by means of secularist persuasion just as religion hopes to resist secularisation by what it sees as ethical persuasion.

Dawkins looks into the biological evolution of homo sapiens for the origin and growth of the multiplicity of religious faiths. He is speculative rather than dogmatic on the issue but much more convincing when showing how the stringency of faith-based social morality has been softened over time by an intellectual response to the social development of society. He recognises this but, unlike Marx and Engels on the question of religion, simply reports it as a phenomenon under the label of moral Zeitgeist.

Unlike Dawkins, the pioneers of scientific socialism sought to show religion as a reflex of the social organisation of society. Marx, in the Introduction to his Critique of Hegel’s of Philosophy of Right, wrote:

“This state, this society, produces religion, a reversed world consciousness, because they are a reversed world. Religion is the general theory of that world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritualistic point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction. The struggle against religion is therefore immediately the fight against the other world of which religion is the spiritual aroma. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.” (original italics)

It wasn’t simply a question of religion being false, or brutal or divisive; it was a weapon of the ruling class, a bulwark in the way of the emancipation of the working class, a hurdle to be overcome in the progress to socialism nor could it be overcome while the conditions that nourished it continued to exist. Thus, the socialist sees religion as an integral part of the class struggle while the secularist sees it simply as a harmful, false premise on which to base a system of moral rectitude. As far as capitalism’s subject class is concerned, whether those who govern it or those who exploit it reject or accept faith is irrelevant; the morality of capitalism is not governed either by humanistic or religious considerations but by the constraints and compulsions of the marketplace.

Inculcating religion

Dawkins deals well, even poignantly, with the religious indoctrination of children pointing, for example, to the absurd practice of labelling young children with the faith identity of their parents or guardians. Even very young children, as young as three or four are referred to as, for example, ‘Catholic’, ‘Protestant’ or ‘Muslim’ children because society accepts the legitimacy of parents or guardians or clerics or teachers hijacking the innocence of children for the inculcation of beliefs more likely to be resisted if they were offered initially to an older person. Dawkins rightly calls it child abuse with ramifications sometimes even more devastating than the sexual abuse of children.

Obviously socialists agree that the indoctrination of children is a contemptible invasion of the rights of a child but, grave as it is, it is less socially heinous than the ruthless inculcation of the appalling precepts and values of capitalism – accompanied usually by the notion of a ubiquitous Divine Policeman – to which both children and adults of all ages are remorselessly exposed.

Science and the system

Indoctrination makes a nonsense of the claim that we live in a democracy. Democracy is about choice and choice is based on information and knowledge. But nowhere in the world of capitalism are the people offered the slightest hint that there could be a way of running our society that might free us from the appalling problems that are built-in, inevitable aspects of global capitalism. Instead we have intense conditioning and thought control to the extent were we look on the utterly absurd, like war and world hunger, as natural and as inevitable as the seasons.

Capitalism and its institutions rape our consciousness and rob us of the ability to think independently. Every situation must be reasoned within the paradigm of a world in which we are beholden to a class of owners not only for our daily bread but for every aspect of our life-functions from the cradle to the grave and unless our needs are consistent with the profit needs of the owning class they will not be met.

Richard Dawkins sings the praises of science and in a general sense socialists join in the chorus. But science, possibly more than most other disciplines, is a prisoner of capitalism. The scientists have to beg at the table of the system for funding to pursue their projects; their sponsors are usually largely mammoth capitalist enterprises bent on discerning means of further enriching their directors and shareholders or capitalist governments dedicated to the overall concerns of national capitalism.

Just like the rest of us, the scientist is a prisoner of the crazy logic of the system and just  like the rest of us if his or her dedicated function does not hold promise of profit for those who directly or indirectly employ them, irrespective of the potential social benefits of their work, it will be denied funding.

The first phase in the struggle to end the political and economic exploitation of our class is to learn to question the thoughts we inherit from well-intentioned parents and teachers; to challenge the strictures of the priests, parsons, rabbis and mullahs and to question why in a world of potential abundance, where a parasite class of non-productive money shufflers and profit-takers are rich beyond measure, and the working class that produces all real wealth endure mere want or dire poverty.

Richard Montague

Capitalism's code of killing (1993)

From the December 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism has always maintained the mythology of the ’just war’, and the church has always been the leading standard bearer for state-sanctioned murder.

It’s not all that long ago since boys’ adventure stories were about swashbuckling heroes meeting in battle on more-or-less equal terms. Raphael Sabbatini's Captain Blood or Maurice Walsh’s David Gordon were fairly typical of the type: brave men opposing one another with courage and resolution and a determination not to take unfair advantage in battle.

Such romantic nonsense is out of place against the background of modern weaponry that denies the killer the agony of watching his victim die. War was never romantic nor "fair"; individual hand-to-hand combat with pikes, lances or swords must have been hell and the science of gaining an unfair advantage over an opponent, then as now. was known as strategy.

Because war and preparation for war is a permanent feature of capitalism that accounts for massive investments of personnel and finance and because it is an utterly foul business, governments are obliged to "respectabilize” it. Thus, something of the old romanticism prevails in what is offered as history. In every' walk of life, parents, schools, churches, participation in war is elevated in the public consciousness and emotive key words, like bravery, heroism, sacrifice, dedicated, proud and patriotic are part of the lexicon of glorification used to transmute the most utterly debased acts of human savagery into something necessary and noble.

Even the "enemy" is not completely damned lest condemnation provoke interest and enquiry. His leaders can be mad or bad and his courage, dignity and honour can rarely be accepted as on a level with "our boys". Nevertheless, there is a decorum that embellishes the obscenity of war. almost a mystique to lighten the haunting futility of death and this can be extended to the enemy.

Thus, it is expected that "we" and our "enemy" will reciprocate in showing a respect to corpses that must be denied to the living. The Luftwaffe pilot shot down while slaughtering women and children in London, the RAF man show down over Dresden while carrying out Churchill’s plan to kill as many German civilians as possible, the hyped-up John Wayne dropping a 2.000kg bomb on a Baghdad street, the heroes who made history at Hiroshima; if, in death, any of these falls into the hands of "the enemy", then they will be accorded the ritual firing of rifles and blowing of bugles over their graves. The exercise gives dignity to those who work at killing and promotes the notion that they died bravely in pursuit of a noble calling.

Appalling reality

But, in the reality of war. battles are won by the gaining of unfair advantage. Obviously, a completely fair fight could have no winner and it is, thus, imperative to the opposing sides to deceive their opponent and. where possible, to introduce weapons of greater destructive capacity and to amass greater concentrations of men and materials.

Spying, with its underscore of lies, deceit, blackmail and, not infrequently, murder, is a legitimate adjunct of war; striking at the enemy’s homeland and slaughtering innocent civilians demoralizes the enemy, impedes his movement and his production of munitions and is, therefore, condoned on the grounds of saving lives. The watchword in war must be "Victory!", untrammelled and uncompromised by considerations of everyday moral rectitude. The Roman Catholic church articulates the provisions for waging a "just war" and one of these stipulates a favourable chance of winning. In common with other bodies, the churches deplore war but lend their services to succour the participants and, often, to plead with their god for the vanquishing of "the enemy".

It is remarkable that decent people who deplore violence and who might be in the forefront of those demanding stiffer sentences and the return of the death penalty for people engaged in violence are often the most vociferous supporters of armed forces and patriotic aggression. How can any rational human being defend the idea of training great masses of people to kill and arming them with guns, bombs, nuclear weapons and the rest of the obscene array destructive equipment that governments provide for the killing business?

The answer we get from apologists for state violence is that it is made necessary by the nature of our society and the fact that our potential enemies have armed forces. The latter simply acknowledges that the effect lies in the cause — because there are armed forces, we must get armed conflict. Pressed, then, to consider an alternative form of society that will not contain the seeds of conflict, these apologists are usually revealed as the most trenchant defenders of the present system.

But there are other aspects of the killing business that create a real dilemma for the upholders of the political and economic status quo with its competition and built-in propensity for conflict and war. Among these is the problem of political terrorism.

In Northern Ireland, for example, people like Archbishop Eames of the Church of Ireland frequently grab headlines with condemnations of terrorists. There are many other churchmen, politicians and others who echo Eames’s sentiments and we name him only because he is the most forceful and frequent person to condemn violence. Like the others. Eames does not condemn all violence or dissociate his church from bodies established and maintained to excel in the use of the most calculatingly efficient means of inflicting death and injury.

Forthrightly and correctly — he condemns the terrorist who leaves a bomb in a hold-all in a public place; he condemns the gunman and his organization and he argues that such behaviour is anti-Christian and that, despite the claims of loyalist killers, they are not acting for the Protestant community.

But Archbishop Eames has yet to go on record condemning governments for having armed forces, he does not condemn gunmen acting for the state and he is silent when a massive bomb is dropped on a city by a sophisticated flying machine using the most advanced technology to conceal its presence and its purpose, and, of course. Eames does not tell members of the state armed forces that their behaviour is anti-Christian.

Psychological scars

In fact the Archbishop, like his competitor colleagues in the other churches and, indeed, most of those in the forefront of the various well-intentioned peace groups, is not opposed to violence and killing. He may be moved to sadness by the lunacy of human beings killing human beings but he only condemns and disowns such behaviour when it is illegal.

Effectively, this reduces the Christian — and, it must be said, the general — concept of so-called moral reasoning to the politics of the head count and this, in turn, must raise very serious questions about the nature of capitalist democracy and the manipulation of "public opinion" by a minority-controlled public power of persuasion.

The question is particularly crucial for those of us who live in Northern Ireland, where the violence which spawned the ruthless Provisional IRA was initialed by a repressive elected government some twenty-five years ago. Now. with violence an everyday occurrence and selective condemnations ritualized by, among others, the very people whose behaviour and political ambition made it inevitable, the hypocritical utterances of people with a ready recourse to a microphone or TV camera can itself fuel violence.

Random killing

Recently, with an upsurge in the random killing of catholics by groups of loyalists operating under various fine sounding titles, a new strain of hypocrisy has emerged — from Sinn Fein, who articulate the political thinking of the IRA. According to this source, killing people because of their job or their overt political altitudes is a legitimate pursuit. On the other hand, if protestant terrorists, in order to exert political pressure, identify their targets on the basis of perceived religion, that is breaking the rules and must, therefore, be evil.

But is it? If you can departmentalize your thinking of the question you might conclude that killing someone is deplorable but sometimes necessary and proper providing the killing is within the confines of a particular code. But who determines the nature of the code and on what basis is it justified? Who is it says that it is permissible to kill perhaps millions of people in another country with a nuclear bomb because that country, or the authority within it that controls armed force, is threatening "our" markets, trade routes or sources of raw materials but it is wrong to kill people who represent an authority that abuses you or unfairly frustrates your political aspirations?

In the ease of the Provisional IRA, apart from the spurious claim to the democratic succession of Sinn Fein’s 1918 all-Ireland electoral victory, the historical morality of violence is often advanced, it is true, of course, that most states owe their existence and their power to the violence, often illegal violence, by which they were established. The "morality" of that argument is that violence is the justification of violence.

Special condemnation

As for preserving a social condemnation for the random killings carried out by loyalist gunmen, it might be asked by what logic it is permissible to shoot a bricklayer because the only way he can make a living is by selling his skills to "the enemy" but wrong to kill at random in order to frustrate a perceived harmful political design.

This is a part of the maze of contradictions you get into when you accept violence at any level. Nor can the question be resolved legalistically for, in every case, the lawful executive is itself not only an agent, real or potential. of the most ruthless violence but. in its role as what Marx referred to as "the executive committee of the ruling class". "Lawful government" is the constant agent of the many other forms of, frequently obscene, violence perpetrated on the working class.

Condemn all violence

Socialists condemn all wars and all political violence. That might seem a simplistic way of avoiding comparisons and condemnations of one form of violence as opposed to another. But it is not a simplistic formula; it is the inescapable logic of the fact that while members of the working class are pitched against one another in wars and so-called national liberation struggles, working class interests are never at stake.

All wars and violent political struggles arise directly or indirectly out of the competition and conflicts of capitalism though such conflicts are usually filtered through an ideological disguise in order to conceal their nature and as a means of enlisting working-class support.

The only struggle that concerns socialists and should concern the working class is the class struggle — the struggle between those who produce all wealth and own virtually none and those who produce nothing and own virtually everything. That struggle, we hold, can be resolved democratically when we have divested ourselves of the fictions that allow us to be enlisted as killers.

Richard Montague

The tyranny of the wages system (1985-6)

From the Winter 1985-6 issue of the World Socialist

In any form of society wealth is created by the application of human labour-power to nature-given materials. In capitalist society, whether 'private' or state varieties, this fact is concealed by the need to procure capital to furnish machinery and equipment and to pay wages — thus the capitalist apologia that capital and labour are complementary. The relationship is one created by capitalism and, whereas the skills and energies of workers can, if allowed access to natural resources, produce all the goods and services required by human beings, a train-load of money, left over an area where seismographic tests have indicated, say, the presence of oil, will not succeed even in breaking the soil.

Capital, in the form of money, is simply congealed labour, an exchange equivalent of commodities already produced by wage labour. In its constant form (raw materials, buildings, machinery, etc.) it is, similarly, a representation of accumulated labour. It is labour-power that produces all wealth and it is in our role as wealth-producers obliged to sell ourselves on the labour market for a wage or salary that the working class is exploited. We are not, as a class, exploited as consumers or as taxpayers but as producers.

Capitalism's exploitive mechanism is the wages system. We live in a society where the means of life such as food, clothing and shelter have to be purchased with money. For the great majority of people, that money is derived from a wage packet or a salary cheque which they receive from their employer for the sale of their labour-power, their mental or physical ability to contribute to the production of wealth. It is this necessity to sell its labour-power that divides the working class from the minority of capitalists who — whether they choose to work or not — are able to live by profit or by rent or interest. Thus capitalism divides the human family into two distinct and conflicting classes: the capitalist class, which buys labour-power, and the working class, which sells labour-power. Inevitably, as in all transactions between buyer and seller, there is a conflict of interest between these two classes with one trying to sell its labour-power for as much as possible and the other trying to buy it as cheaply as possible.

The source of all wealth, as we have observed, is human labour-power applied to nature-given materials. But the wealth produced, which, under capitalism takes the form of a great aggregation of commodities, does not belong to the class that produces it but, instead, to the class whose claim to ownership of the natural resources and the means of production (themselves the product of past expenditure of labour-power) are enshrined in law and enforced, if necessary, by the coercive power of the state.

The unassailable fact that all wealth is produced by the working class demonstrates that the source of capital accumulation and of the profit, rent and interest that underwrites the affluence, power and privilege of the capitalist class is the surplus of wealth produced over and above what the working class is paid for its labours. This is in accordance with the economic laws of a market economy for though the workers do receive the value of the commodity they sell, their labour-power, nevertheless their exploitation is through the wages system.

What we get for the sale of our labour-power to our employers is a wage or salary that equates to the price currently being paid for our particular type of labour-power. Our ability to work, in capitalist society, is a commodity the price of which is determined by the same factors as govern the price of other commodities. When a particular commodity is in short supply its price tends to rise and, when it is plentiful, its price tends to fall. To say this, however, begs the question: above what does it rise and fall? The answer is its value and that value is determined by its labour cost of production or, in other words, by the amount of socially-necessary labour time required under average conditions of production to produce it from start to finish. It is value that determines the point above and below which prices fluctuate in line with supply and demand.

Since our labour-power is sold on the labour market as a commodity, its value is determined in the same way as any other commodity. In other words, the value of labour-power is determined by the amount of socially-necessary labour required to maintain us as useful, functioning units of production and enable us to provide for the next generation of wage slaves. The value of particular types of labour-power varies, then, in accordance with the amount of training or education that is required to equip workers with certain skills and these greater values are reflected in the inequality of wages.

But labour-power has a unique property: it can create value of greater quantity than the value required in its own production. It is this capacity to create surplus value that lies at the heart of the workers' exploitation and the capitalists' profit. In any given period labour-power can produce wealth greater than the equivalent of the socially-necessary labour required in its own production. Let us say that workers in a particular industry produce a value amounting to double that of the value of their own labour-power. In half of each day they would produce a value equal to the value represented by their wages for a full day. For the second half of each day they would produce a surplus over and above the value they received in the form of wages or salary. This surplus value belongs to their employer and represents his profit, after payment of rent or Interest if the employer has such obligations.

The ratio of labour-power paid for by an employer to that spent by the worker in creating surplus value determines the rate of exploitation of the worker or, as Marx called it, the rate of surplus value. "The rate of surplus value, all other circumstances remaining the same, will depend in the proportion between that part of the working day necessary to reproduce the value of the labouring power and the surplus time performed for the capitalists" (Value, Price and Profit).

This, then, is the seat of capitalist exploitation of the working class. Other conditions, such as the state of the market, the degree of working class organisation in trade unions and, even, the form of capitalist organisation, may affect or influence the rate of exploitation of the worker at particular times but such influences can themselves be cancelled out by market forces. It is the tyranny of the wages system that itself imposes on the working class their slave status. Where the wages-system exists, irrespective of what party holds political power or whether ownership of the wealth-producing machinery is vested in the state or is in private hands, capitalism exists. That is why Marx refused to support the nonsensical slogan of "a fair day's pay for a fair day's work" and urged workers to inscribe instead on their banner "ABOLITION OF THE WAGES SYSTEM".

That is why the World Socialist Movement defines Socialism as a wageless, moneyless and classless society of common ownership and production for use.

Richard Montague

(Ireland)

Beyond sectarianism (2007)

From the February 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

David Ervine, Member of the Northern Ireland Assembly for a loyalist area of east Belfast, who died in January, saw that working class Protestants and Catholics had both been conned. Ervine recounted how in July 1972 as a young man on what came to be known as Bloody Friday he watched as the IRA carried out 22 bomb attacks in Belfast killing innocent people and ripping the commercial heart out of the city. For him it was the final straw; he decided to join the protestant UVF then engaged in a sectarian war against innocent Catholics who it regarded as the soft underbelly of the IRA. Ironically, Ervine was reacting to the other side of the same politico-religious stimuli that had created the material basis for the emergence and recruitment of the Provisional IRA in 1970. His ‘war’ ended when he was caught ferrying a bomb and was sentenced to 6 years’ imprisonment.

David Ervine was a Belfast man from the east of the city, an area which in the sectarian demography of Belfast is mainly ‘Protestant’. Though the area was heavily industrialised and the workforce was overwhelmingly Protestant and Unionist, the acres of mean back-to-back houses demonstrated the poverty of those who were fed the fiction that they were the special concern of the Unionist government.

Some on the political Left tried to emphasise this point but the active political Left painfully avoided a class analysis of the local political situation – a failure which ultimately, in 1948, caused a split in the Northern Ireland Labour Party on sectarian lines. After that split, four Labour candidates in three overwhelmingly Protestant constituencies in east Belfast won seats in the Stormont parliament. Labour was by no means socialist but it represented the political philosophy of many on the Catholic side who thought it was, thus exposing the nonsense that working class Protestants would always support Unionism because they were ‘a labour aristocracy’.

Capitalism had sundered any little sense of unity within the working class. Catholics and Irish nationalists, including Sinn Fein, reflecting the ignorance and bigotry of the Orange Order, and the Left utterly failed to offer any real alternative to what was, and remains, a conflict of opposing capitalist nationalisms.

This was the world David Ervine was brought up in. In his early youth he might well have imbibed the dregs of bigotry and hatred and looked with deep suspicion on workers who were Catholics equally bigoted, equally embittered. He would have learnt from the demagoguery of Ian Paisley, then forging a rich fiefdom in bigotry, that the removal of the property qualification in the local government franchise, the establishment of a fair system of social housing distribution and the abolition of gerrymandered electoral constituencies would have been a defeat for his religion and his national culture.

Maybe he was caught up in the vibrant youth culture of the period; maybe he didn’t give a damn but the combustibles of conflict were gathering and like many other working class young men and women on both ‘sides’ of the artificially-devised sectarian barrier he would become a victim of that conflict, condemned and criminalised by holy men and politicians and those who combined these functions and greatly enhanced their mean earning power.

To his credit, despite his experiences, Ervine rose superior to the politics of bigotry and hatred. In his wry way he was to show the extent of his learning when a few years ago he said publicly that he looked forward to the day when he and Gerry Adams could have a pint together. Those who know the territory will appreciate just how far David Ervine had come and the courage it took to voice such a sentiment.

On the evening of his death a camera crew visited a working class club Ervine frequented in east Belfast. The drinkers, Protestants to a man, praised Ervine, the loquacious peace monger, the man who told them that working class Protestants and Catholics had been conned. Specifically, he was praised as ‘a socialist’. That he was not, but he was motivated by the same political honesty and concern for his class that motivates socialists; he had learnt to detest the political and economic realities of capitalism. The  next step would have been an appreciation of the fact that the problems of his class, including the generation of division, were inevitable aspects of that system.

Richard Montague