Socialists against racism (1992)

From the March 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Traditionally, racism has been seen as an ideology, a system of beliefs, which held that white people were superior to black people. It was an ideology of crude racial superiority and, as such, was used to justify the conquest, enslavement and pillaging by European nations of most of what is now called the Third World. This type of crude bigotry is still promoted by members of fascist groups throughout Europe and the USA.

The so-called new racism, on the other hand, is essentially a theory of “human nature" and “human instinct" the most important of which is supposed to be the desire for the company of the same kind. The idea that there exists such a human instinct is now widespread among right-wing politicians. For example, in The Meaning of Conservatism (Penguin 1980) Roger Scruton claims that:

Illiberal sentiments . . . are sentiments which seen to arise inevitably from social consciousness: they involve natural prejudice, and a desire for the company of ones own kind.

What bonds people together, what makes up “one's own kind" according to new racism, is “a shared way of life” which includes not just language and customs but also beliefs and feeling, in short a “culture”; and, the new racists continue, while there are many groupings, the most important way in which people who share a way of life come together is in a "nation" in which they identify themselves as who and what they are.

As with the old racism, science is called in in support of such an "instinct" to "prove" that it is “natural" for people to be hostile to "outsiders”. The idea of an innate and natural hostility towards those who are perceived to be different is something which runs through the new racism. But that biological differences determine other, cultural characteristics has been discredited by scientists for years. What are called "racial differences" is something which is socially defined. For example, groups which are classed as "outsiders" in one period or in one country may be defined as insiders in another.

Prejudice

According to the Daily Telegraph (23 September 1991), the former French President Giscard D’Estaing takes a tough line on immigration. He suggested a referendum to make citizenship a "right of blood” rather than a "right of ground"—in other words, he wants nationality to be determined by "race" and ancestry rather than by place of birth. In his article he wrote of an invasion by "unwanted aliens", an opinion he shares with, indeed derived from, his rightwing rival Jean Marie Le Pen and his National Front.

In the 1990s' economic recession many racist workers are blaming problems on immigrants who happen to mainly come from the so-called Third World. Their racism arises from fear that someone else is competing with them on the labour market and for housing, education and other social services.

The nationalistic and fascist ideas of the 1930s of Mussolini and Hitler such as xenophobia, nationalism and contempt for democracy are now at work again in Western society. Organisations like the National Front, the BNP. German and French neo-nazis and other European fascists have been churning out propaganda. aimed particularly at young people, to foster antagonism between black and white. In recent years minority ethnic groups have suffered an increasing number of racially-inspired attacks. Temples, mosques, synagogues and cemeteries have been vandalised and daubed with fascist slogans and emblems; people have been attacked in the streets and abused with racist insults. This alarming trend is only the tip of the iceberg of popular and institutionalised racism.

The problem of racial tensions is usually approached by the main political parties from the assumption that plans should be devised to enable "different races” to exist co-operatively. Although on the face of it this is an anti-racist attitude, it is in fact quite the reverse. There is of course only one race—the human race, and no-one comes from any pure "racial” stock. The peoples of the world enjoy many diverse cultures, but there is no necessary link between race and culture.

Todays so-called “British stock” in fact traces its ancestry to a great variety of groups who settled on this island including the Celts, Romans. Jutes. Angles, Saxons, Vikings 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.

Ignorance

The profit system doesn't operate on any moral code, and we can not say that as capitalism continues it will progress to smoother and more harmonious ways of working. Governments will tend to discourage or promote racism 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 reconstruction work to be done and. with about 30 million workers killed in Europe, there was an acute shortage of labour. The capitalists needed an enlarged workforce quickly, and they were not fussy about where the “hands” came from. In the Economic Review of 1947 the government 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. The undermanned industries have to be filled by the immigrant labour force mainly from the Colonies of West Indies, India and Africa.

Now Britain, along with other industrialised countries, is in economic crisis—and "swamping our culture", scaremongery and measures like the Nationality Act and the 1991 Asylum Bill have come back on to the agenda.

From the Jewish fundamentalists, who proclaim they are the “chosen people”, to the neo-nazis who believe that that honour is theirs, all racism feeds and flourishes upon ignorance. But the fact is that today the most significant division between 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 for the rich.

Michael Ghebre

50 Years in the Party (2020)

From the December 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

I first heard about the Socialist Party of Great Britain in 1970 when I was a student in Hull. A couple of fellow students in the house I lived in were always going on about it. Until then I’d followed my parents in being a Labour supporter and saw the nationalisation of industry as the thing to support. But now I was being told that wouldn’t make any difference and I needed to look beyond it to an entirely different kind of society – and on a world scale. This was a society of common ownership and free access to all goods and services. No money, no buying and selling, no market – just production and distribution according to need. No leaders, no national frontiers, just one world – and this was to be achieved by majority democratic political action. This, I was told, if looked at closely, was what Marx had originally advocated and what socialism really meant.

I was incredulous at first and brought out all the arguments I’ve heard countless times since over the years. Human nature, need for gradual reforms, utopianism, over-population, shortage of resources, need for leaders, etc., etc. And I argued for a long time – until I no longer had any more arguments, since they’d all been answered. But I still somehow didn’t want to join a political organisation. I’d never been in one before and it didn’t seem to fit for me. Since no one actually pressed me to join, I just carried on talking and going to the meetings that the SPGB group organised and then helping to sell its journal, the Socialist Standard, in the town centre. But what then finally got me on side was the special edition of the Standard in August 1970. It was called ‘A World of Abundance’ and had articles with titles like ‘The World Can Feed Us All’, ‘Capitalism – Waste – Want’, ‘Not Too Many People’, ‘World Administration’ and a particular compelling one by Ron Cook with the self-explanatory title ‘Progress Perverted: the Technology of Abundance’. With all this it had to happen sooner or later and so, 50 years ago this month, I filled in the membership questionnaire and joined.

In the year that followed I attended meetings in Manchester, where I came from, in Sheffield and in London where, in 1971, the Party held its 66th annual conference. I found tremendous enthusiasm among members, tremendous knowledge of all things social, political and historical and tremendous optimism that the ideas were spreading and the movement growing.

Swansea

When the same year I moved into the world of employment, I found myself in a city, Swansea, with a long-standing branch of the Party, I found myself attending meetings regularly, selling Party literature on the steps of the town’s Central Library, helping to organise public meetings and going to other parties’ and organisations’ meetings to put our case there. A lot was going on at the time. It was the heyday of CND, Anti-Apartheid and Friends of the Earth as well as of those small left-wing political organisations that called themselves ‘socialist’ (IS, IMG, SLL, etc.) but, as far as we were concerned and despite their ‘revolutionary’ rhetoric, at the end of the day were (and still are) just going for reforms of the system and so were just part of the capitalist furniture. I was the branch’s ‘press officer’ and often wrote to the South Wales Evening Post putting these points as well as other aspects of our case. Many of the letters I sent were published. I found all this activity educational and exhilarating and soon found I was able to give talks and engage in public debate myself.

In the late 70s and 80s Swansea Branch built a core of active members across the age range and organised regular meetings that we advertised in the local press. There were topics as diverse as ‘Marxism and Science’, ‘Thatcher and Freedom’, ‘Women are Workers too’, ‘Animal Rights’ ‘Youth and Unemployment’, ‘How Politicians Con You’, ‘Feed the World’, ‘Energy for the Future’, ‘Soap Operas and Socialism’, and ‘John Lennon’. We got good attendances too, and as a key part of our activity sold the Socialist Standard in the city’s shopping precinct and set up an outdoor platform where I was one of our speakers. I would shout myself hoarse on a Saturday morning and got a surprisingly small amount of heckling. I was also writing regularly for the Socialist Standard. We had record Saturday morning sales with an edition of the journal with the words ‘Sex, Sin and Socialism’ emblazoned across the cover. It contained an article written by me on the recently published and much talked about book by anarchist Alex Comfort entitled The Joy of Sex.

We were hawking our literature on the same pedestrian stretch as Ian Bone, a self-avowed anarchist who was later to set up an organisation called Class War. Unlike most of the others there, he really did seem to want a different system of society even if he didn’t quite know what that system was to be and thought the best way to get it was by smashing things. The People newspaper later called him ‘the most dangerous man in Britain’, in which he took great pride. And, perhaps extraordinarily, when some 30 years later he wrote a book about his experiences in Swansea and elsewhere called Bash the Rich, I found myself debating with him at a packed meeting at the Party’s Head Office on Clapham High St with the subject ‘Which Way the Revolution?’. He was still the ‘one-off’ he’d ever been, but we did manage to agree on quite a few things regarding the revolution, even if we remained apart on others, for example violence and the number of classes in capitalist society.

Then there were the ‘speaking tours’ when I gave talks at various branches of the Party as far apart as Bristol, Bournemouth, Cornwall, Bolton, Canterbury and Guildford, some well attended, some pretty sparse. A ‘highlight’ for me was the debate with right-wing guru, Roger Scruton, organised by the Party’s Guildford branch. At the time Scruton, who remained a well-known public figure right up until his death earlier this year, wrote a weekly column in the Times and had raised debate with his book The Meaning of Conservatism. When we met in a pub before the meeting, I found him modest and affable. But he hadn’t bothered to find out what we were about and he asked me to tell him. He seemed to get the hang of it but then in the debate kept forgetting and referring to what had happened in Russia.

Another outstanding moment was a debate in Bolton Town Hall with local MP Tom Sackville, organised by the Bolton branch of the Party and chaired by a local cleric. It was a packed meeting and I managed to put our ‘version’ of socialism on the agenda immediately, after which the MP to his credit didn’t attempt to tar us with the Soviet brush.

I was also, together with a fellow member Pat Wilson, able to arrange a Q and A session for the Socialist Standard with a then leading figure of the burgeoning Green movement, Jonathan Porritt. It was a friendly occasion with Porritt strangely seeming to agree with most of what we said about the need for socialism.

The culmination of all this activity for me was the local election campaigns Swansea Branch ran in the late 1980s when, with the assistance of members from other branches, we knocked on every door in the local ward – twice. Even though we found a surprising amount of agreement on the doorstep, that didn’t really translate into votes, with 92 the maximum number we got in one of the three elections we ran in. An internal Party issue at the time was whether our candidate’s picture should appear on one of our election manifestos. The Party has always eschewed personalities as part of its antipathy to the idea of leaders and so a heated debate took place at the Executive Committee table about whether the candidate, myself, should show his ‘human face’. In the end the picture did appear, as it also did in the local press.

Trade union activity

The 1990s were a bit of an anti-climax in Party activity. The main thing was that the Socialist Standard kept being published and the case it propagated kept being put to readers. This was a period when I started to involve myself in trade union activity in my place of work. It was something I found extremely satisfying – and still do. That’s because you often saw quick results in terms of helping to resolve people’s problems at work, both individually and collectively, and felt you were making some kind of immediate difference, however small. For me it complemented the longer-term project of spreading socialist ideas in society at large and fitted well with the Party’s view of trade unionism as a necessary form of resistance to the tendency of capitalism to take for itself an increasingly large share of the surplus value produced by workers. It also made me fully conscious, if I was not already, of the need for trade unions to be fully independent of political parties and groups and not to succumb to the will of the union’s ‘politicos’ from the left-wing largely Trotskyist groups who were small in number but could still dominate union decision-making and use their position not for the benefit of members but to promote their own political ends. They would (and still do) constantly seek to bounce members into industrial action, even when such action is more likely to be damaging than successful.

Anti-capitalism

In the first decade of this century, as the Party celebrated its 100th anniversary, capitalism found itself facing the twin crises of terrorism and recession. The recession in particular gave rise to a phenomenon I found first surprising and encouraging but then disappointing, that is the quick spread in use of the term ‘capitalism’ with widespread discussion about it in books, magazines and the media. The Party had always freely used the term and, at a personal level, this made me feel a bit uneasy. I wondered whether people would know what we were talking about or would maybe just regard us as cranks or supporters of Russia. Now it was (and still is) everywhere. However, the trouble was, while often calling themselves ‘anti-capitalist’, critics of the system tended to propose more ‘benign’ models of capitalism via reforms seeking to achieve less poverty (e.g. universal basic income) and less waste of resources (e.g. the ‘green’ agenda) without taking into account the fact that reforms, even if alleviating things a little for some, can do nothing to change the basic profit-seeking nature of the system and the inevitable antagonism between what Marx called wage labour and capital.

While the last decade too has been full of proposals for coping with the problems of capitalism within its existing framework, disappointingly it has not seen an obvious rise in consciousness among wage and salary earners of the need for an entirely different kind of society. This is an idea that the Party and the World Socialist Movement have continued to keep alive by publishing literature, holding meetings and seeking to spread the idea in all other ways possible. For example, via our website and, in these pandemic days, the Party’s virtual ‘Discord’ platform.

Looking back over my 50 years in the Party, though a lot has happened, a lot has also remained the same. Capitalism has gone on its merry way with its wars, poverty, unemployment, glaring inequality, environmental degradation, and now a global pandemic. Many campaigns to try and improve it have come – CND, Shelter, Greenpeace, Right to Work, Anti-Nazi League, Child Poverty Action, Occupy, Extinction Rebellion, just to mention a few – and many have gone. But to be fair there have been some changes for the better – racism and sexism for example are definitely on the back foot in many parts of the world, and a whole slew of recent books on human nature have shifted opinion away from the long-held notion that human beings are selfish and competitive creatures rather than naturally cooperative ones.

In addition there is widespread consciousness of the environmental destruction which Rachel Carson pointed to in 1962 but which I only found out about the year I joined. At the same time the ‘experts’ who two years after this published The Limits of Growth, predicting ecological breakdown by the end of the century and calling for population control, were proved wrong. The profit system has of course gone on despoiling the planet but at the same time managing to adapt sufficiently not to cause an environmental apocalypse. It has also given better living standards to many wage and salary workers, while however heaping misery of varying degrees on many others. And it has made a very small number of individuals massively and increasingly wealthy, with the richest 1 percent of the world’s population owning 29 times more than the poorest 20 percent. All of which will continue as long as the capitalist mode of production continues and as long as those with good intentions (and there are many) say they support our aims but somehow think capitalism can gradually be reformed into something better or even into socialism.

I’m not planning to stop any time soon. I’ll carry on helping to keep alive the idea of a society I first heard about more than fifty years ago, since nothing I’ve heard in all that time from either supporters or critics of the present system has discouraged me from seeing the World Socialist Movement’s concept of socialism as the most desirable and most feasible next stage in human social development.

Howard Moss

Sting in the Tail: Force and Revolution (1990)

The Sting in the Tail Column from the April 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Force and Revolution

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto that the defeat of capitalism " . . . can be achieved only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions".

Generations of left-wingers have claimed this is proof that Marx and Engels advocated armed insurrection, smashing state power, etc.

Of course they did no such thing. Instead they urged workers "to win the battle of democracy" in order to control state power and thus secure the socialist revolution.

Left-wingers have ignored the fact that "force" doesn't only mean violence but has economic and political meanings too.

For example, workers are "forced" by economic need to work for wages: More to the point, almost all of Eastern Europe's dictatorships were ousted by political force and without any violence being used. This "force" was the determination of the people to get rid of a system they detested and is in line with the "forcible overthrow" envisaged by Marx and Engels.

Economics of Health

How splendid is the claim of Kenneth Clarke, Health Secretary, that under his White Paper no patients will be refused the medicine they need.

This is, of course, a downright lie. There is a drug called erythropoetin that can transform the life of those suffering kidney failure. A thousand patients are being denied the drug because it is so expensive. It costs between £3,000 and £5,000 per patient per year.

Of the 1,500 who would benefit from it, only 500 are receiving it. The doctors have to refuse the treatment to the other 1,000 sufferers, because it is too expensive for the NHS.

Commenting on this, Dr. Stephen Waldeck, consultant renal physician at Hope Hospital, Salford said:

It is extremely frustrating for doctors and nurses, having seen how much better that little ampoule can make the patients to have to refuse it.

It is also frustrating, doctor, to see workers suffering unnecessarily while bare-faced liars like Clarke get away with their empty political boasts.

Love's Young Dream

It is not often that any worker will find anything of interest in Harper's and Queen magazine. It is a snobby magazine aimed at the parasites who own this country, but have been woefully short changed in the brains department.

But there was an interesting little item in a recent issue about the 20 richest women in Europe. It comes as no surprise to learn that Queen Elizabeth tops the list, with a personal fortune of £5,300 million. She was way ahead of her nearest rival Queen Beatrix of Netherlands, who had a mere £3,800 million.

But this wealth accumulation is not the exclusive domain of royals. It was heartening to see that a former member of the working class had managed to reach number 10 in the Rich Bitch Charts.

She is Janni Spies-Kjaer who has a personal fortune of £330 million. Not bad for a former lift-operator!

How did she manage this transformation? It seems that at 16 years of age she caught the eye of her 60 year old employer. Married him and a year later he died, leaving her his Scandinavian travel empire. Later she consoled herself by marrying a multi-millionaire.

Now £330 million is a tidy sum. Why, it could buy 66,000 treatments of erythropoetin!

The Nutty Professor

The new Tory "Libertarians" claim that they influence the government by "thinking the unthinkable: and setting out to deliberately shock.

Roger Scruton, professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College, has set out to shock us.

We must recuperate yet another Victorian value: that of child labour. Many a 14 year old, set to work as a builder's apprentice, an electrician's mate or a stable hand, will learn far more than he could ever learn at school, while acquiring independence, responsibility and self-respect. If the pay were sufficiently low - and children are willing to work for quite paltry sums -  there would be no lack of employers ready to offer it.

The Guardian 13 February.

So you see, child labour would really benefit the children: just look at all the things they would gain! Of course the "paltry sums" they might earn are purely incidental as are the extra profits employers would get.

Scruton's views that many children would "learn far more" if they left school at 14 is his unconscious verdict on the standard of working class education, and has he never wondered how the children of our masters manage to acquire "independence, responsibility and self-respect" without the advantage of child labour?

Anyone who thinks Scruton's obnoxious views are mere fantasy should remember that some previous libertarian fantasies are now law. Child labour is only one example of the kind of society they want and work for.

Oh No, Not That!

Can you imagine Kenny Dalglish complaining that fans are talking football or Bros being unhappy because youngster discuss pop music?

Of course not, but here's a politician who doesn't want people talking about politics. Tory MP John Stokes told a meeting of Tory MPs

People never talk about politics in the pubs. But now they are starting to. I regard this as a sinister sign.

Glasgow Herald 9 February.

It's easy to see why Stokes doesn't welcome this trend. Tory policies such as the Poll tax, high interest rates, etc., are highly unpopular and Stokes thinks that if politics is being discussed then so will those unpopular policies.

But maybe something much worse has dawned on Stokes: like the dread thought that workers who talk about politics might even start thinking for themselves.

Every would-be leader from "right wing" Tory to "vanguard" Leninist would find that very sinister indeed.

Letter to Tebbit

The Scorpion's Nest

1st April

Dear Norm,

We read how upset you were at at the BBC for describing those Russian hardliners who opposed Gorbie as "conservatives". You added:

Indeed, to my astonishment I find from the BBC that Stalin and Brezhnev were "conservatives" while poor ill-informed me, well, I had thought they were communists.

The Independent 22 February.

We know how you feel, Norm: haven't we in the Socialist Party fumed when the Labour Party is miscalled "socialist" or some dictatorship is dubbed "Marxist"? We even read, in your favourite rag, The Sun, about Nicaragua's awful "Marxist coffee".

But Norm, you've got a nerve to complain about others misusing words. You do it all the time! You're doing it when you say Stalin and Brezhnev were communists: what communist principle did they ever adhere to?

And at the last general election you were even describing the Liberal-SDP Alliance as "socialist", so you really shouldn't whinge when you get a taste of your own medicine. 

Guru on the spot (1984)

From the May 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Roger Scruton arrived early to debate with the SPGB in Guildford. The debate wasn't due to start till 8pm, so one of the members suggested I take him to the pub across the road for a drink.

He ordered Irish Whisky and we started to talk. I was interested to see the human side of a man I only knew from difficult-to-read books on politics and philosophy, a highly reactionary weekly column in the Times and highbrow discussion programmes on radio and television. I'd read in the press that he was arrogant, conceited and intolerant. I found him modest and likeable and the more we chatted the less accurate the press descriptions seemed to be. I asked what had made him accept our challenge to debate and he said that he thought that opinionated people like himself should be called on to defend their opinions in public.

He hadn't made any detailed preparation for the debate and asked me if I'd tell him about the Socialist Party and what my arguments were going to be. I did, and he admitted that it wasn't what he'd expected. He said he'd make a few notes to speak from and did this while I went to the bar for more drinks. As we walked back to the hall he said he thought he'd got the message about the Socialist Party, but wouldn't a fully democratic socialist society be an impractical proposition because of the time and effort involved in people voting democratically on absolutely everything? I told him that everyone wouldn't have to vote on everything but only on those things that directly concerned them.

The swirling rain made me think we wouldn't have much of an audience. And when we entered the hall, there were about fifty—fewer people than could have been expected for a meeting with a "celebrity".

Scruton was introduced by the chairman as a leading conservative philosopher and editor of the Salisbury Review. He was answering no to the question: "Is Socialism Compatible With Freedom?" He opened with a joke—a funny one. He said he understood that the Socialist Party no more supported the countries that called themselves "socialist" than those which are openly capitalist, and this reminded him of an old, East European joke: "Under capitalism man exploits man; under socialism it's quite the other way round".

On the subject of freedom he started off on a tack that he said would probably seem unusual. He talked about love. He said that love between two people placed limitations on their freedom but that nobody would say that this was a bad thing because they were limitations that had been freely chosen and desired. In the same way, he went on, capitalist society limited people's freedom in some areas but this was with their consent. They consented to it because they realised that these limitations—those involved in wage labour—were necessary in order to be able to enjoy the other freedoms and choices that capitalism gave them. Capitalism he claimed, with its markets, wage labour and money system, gave the maximum freedom available, and gave far more of it than previous societies such as feudalism.

He spoke fluently along these lines from the sparse notes he'd made in the pub, showed an accurate knowledge of Marxist ideas, and ended by stating that if socialists thought a different kind of society could be more free that the present one, then the onus was on them to describe and define it. But the "facts of human nature", he insisted, were on his side and all attempts so far to put socialism into effect had, far from increasing people's freedom, ended up restricting it.

This last point, I felt, was one below the belt as Scruton had earlier recognised and accepted the Socialist Party's description of countries like Russia, China and Cuba as not socialist but state capitalist. I began, therefore, by pointing out that Scruton couldn't reasonably damn the idea of socialism because of what had happened under state capitalism and because the state capitalist rulers happened to call their regimes socialist. I pointed to the openly repressive features of such regimes—one-party rule, political prisoners, press censorship, state-run trade unions—and agreed that by comparison countries like Britain, the USA, Germany and Japan appeared to enjoy considerable freedom. But, despite appearances, they did restrict personal freedom in an absolutely fundamental way—in operating the system of employment.

This meant that most people were bound for most of their lives to a set place of residence, set living conditions and a set job—whether they liked it or not. The job they did was not necessarily one they found pleasant or satisfying but one they needed to do to have money to live. The employment system was shared by countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain. So in both East and West people were denied freedom by needing to work for wages or salaries and therefore by not having control over what they did with their own lives.

Despite his lack of preparation Scruton had timed his contribution to exactly the agreed twenty minutes. Looking at my watch I realised that I'd have to rush if I didn't want to run over. The chairman had already started putting slips of paper in front of me. I breathlessly tried to take up Scruton's challenge to describe and define a freer society than capitalism. It was clear, I said, that enough resources now existed potentially to satisfy people's needs the world over if production of goods and services could take place directly for need and not for sale and profit. This was the basis of the "freer society: Scruton wanted defined. It would be a worldwide moneyless system of free access—"the supermarket without the bottleneck at the cash desk". And the shelves of the supermarket would be kept full by the voluntary co-operative work of people for whom work would not be compulsory toil for money but conscious, freely chosen activity to satisfy their own needs and those of society as a whole. In a society of common ownership and democratic control no one would be able to compel others to do work in conditions they found unacceptable. In this society people would value work, as they often value leisure today, for the creative or pleasurable activity it represents, not for the money it earns them. I sat down just as the chairman was about to make me.

The question time was interesting. Scruton, although he didn't say so, must have been surprised by the friendly atmosphere and the cordiality of the audience. Any visions he'd had of meeting wild lefties must have been completely dispelled as contributors from the floor addressed him without hostility and with a clear desire to exchange ideas. It was he who became heated when it was put to him that rather than compare the amount of freedom in capitalism to the amount in feudalism, he should be comparing capitalist freedom to the kind of freedom there could be in a future society—socialism—where modern technology could be maintained and used but in a quite different setting. Scruton, argued the questioner, had presented no solid theory of "human nature" to show that such a society was not possible. Scruton went a bit wild, said the debate had been forced on him and referred to my own description of what socialism would be like as "a lot of air". My reply to this was that he lacked imagination in not wanting to contemplate anything beyond the narrow confines of present reality.

He soon cooled down as more questions came from both socialists and non-socialists in the audience. One was about whether you could organise society without leaders. I said you could. Scruton said that "little points control" would always develop and that seeking power over others was fundamental to human nature. Another question was about how in a society of free access people would be able to distinguish between "need and greed". Scruton thought they would not. I argued that people were quite capable of responsibly determining their own needs of they didn't live in conditions of rationing and scarcity as they did in capitalism where they were rationed by their wage packet.

At the end we had five minutes each to sum up. Again I tried to say too much and had to rush. My thrust was that at one time in history people (Greeks and Romans) had used intellectually sophisticated arguments to assert that chattel slavery was inevitable and eternal. Aristotle had said that it was a fundamental feature of civilised life. Scruton, I went on, was using the same kind of arguments to defend a different kind of slavery, but slavery nonetheless—wage slavery. Historically wage slavery was no more inevitable or eternal than chattel slavery had been and when the majority of people wanted to get rid of it and bring in a non-slave society in which no man or woman was subordinate to any other, they would do so. Then we would have socialism.

Scruton would up by stating that he was the only one who'd taken account of history, for the whole of history gave evidence that people sought power over others. For socialism to be set up fundamental human desires would have to be abolished. He said that the discussion had, however, been a "most instructive" one. He denied there was any proof that the pursuit of profit on the part of the few was a limitation on the freedom of the many and concluded by stating that he had not, that evening, heard a formula for what everyone, himself included, would like to achieve but what was unachievable—freedom from necessity.

He told me he'd enjoyed the occasion and asked if I could try to get the library of the institution I'd told him I was a teacher in to subscribe to his Salisbury Review. "A serious journal:, he called it. I promised I'd have a go.

As we left the hall he was approached by an excited gentleman who'd been taking photographs during the meeting and who, as I read later in a cutting sent me from a Guildford paper, was a local Greek-Cypriot businessman complaining about a pro-Turkish article on Cyprus which Scruton had written in the Times.

Over in the pub Scruton eased himself away from Mr Demosthenous only to be taxed by a very hairy teenaged socialist on the subject of pre-capitalist societies—tribal ones—which had operated with far greater freedom than capitalism on a basis of common ownership and democratic participation. Didn't this show that human beings weren't naturally power-seeking or grasping? Scruton must have been a bit nonplussed by an articulate argument from what he thought was an unlikely source because he didn't put up much resistance.

As I left I asked him if he thought private property itself was fundamental to human nature. He said he did and that he'd argued the point "very rudely" in one of his books. I felt like saying that the point got argued very frequently and very rudely too by visitors at my local branch meetings but that, despite his learning and sophistication, his arguments for it had been no more convincing than theirs. All the evidence, I said to myself as he vanished out the door, was in the other direction. But then he had taken a Socialist Standard away with him and if he read it maybe he'd find some of that evidence there. Come to think of it, maybe I should have asked him to subscribe to the Standard? After all my library's now agreed to take the Salisbury Review.

Howard Moss