Socialist Party of Gt. Britain’s statement to the Annan Committee (1977)

From the August 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Having submitted evidence to the Annan Committee on the Future of Broadcasting the Socialist Party of Great Britain were invited, along with other contributors, to comment on the subsequent Report of the Committee on the Future of Broadcasting published in March. We reproduce our statement below.

‘Rights’

1. The reason for the media's general persistence in refusing the Socialist Party of Great Britain the opportunity to state its views through the media is explained in para. 3.14 which states that minorities have no “rights” of access to the media. The report states that the media is “not a dialogue” but a “form of publishing”. In other words it is a one way process which gives the owners/controllers of the media a monopoly over the minds of those affected by ‘the process’. As a revolutionary party the SPGB is not so naive as to expect “rights” to be granted to us by a Royal Commission of reform, but see it as our responsibility to destroy the capitalist class monopoly over people’s minds through political organization for a classless, democratic world society. The report states that “our broadcasting system with a limited number of channels [cannot] perform such a service when the uniformity and cost of broadcasting makes it generally unsuitable as a means of communication between small numbers.” In other words, in capitalist society principles like democracy come second to those of “uniformity” and “cost”.

Cliches

2. In para. 3.18 the report states that the media “tends to reinforce the cliches, say, about sport or money of our times”. Indeed, that is one of the principal reasons why the media is so heavily subsidized by the state in whose interests such cliches are preserved. The SPGB has the duty, not the right, to challenge the “cliches of our times”.

Rôle of the State

3. In paras. 3.20-3.23 the report deals with the  rôle of the state in relation to the media it is suggested that broadcasters ought not to be allowed to decide what is “good for society” as this might lead to their taking control of the media for their own personal ends. Therefore, according to the report, the state should have ultimate control of the media. This implies that the state is in some ways a democratic representative of the people’s interests. This analysis is deceptive: the state is in existence to represent the interest of the ruling class. State control of the media therefore means class control of the media.

Broadcating Complaints Board

4. The report makes the specific proposal that a broadcasting complaints board be set up. The significant issue to us is the method which such a body would employ to determine the validity of a complaint. Would such a body be purely concerned with factual errors which are commonly accepted as being erroneous, or would it allow an organization putting a complaint to substantiate its case against inaccurate information? As one example of many we may cite the numerous organizations, governments and armies which the media refers to as being “Marxist”, thus discrediting genuine Marxists, even though many of these organizations do not even claim to be Marxist and many of those that do are not.

Access programmes 

5. Para. 18.9 deals with the criteria for selection of organizations for access programmes. One criterion not mentioned is that political parties are not allowed access to broadcasting unless they are advocating reforms. Thus, the National Front were recently given an access programme to put forward their views about immigration. The SPGB, because we are a revolutionary party standing for a single object and not for reforms, is therefore excluded.

Bias

6. In para. 17.15 there is a misrepresentation of the contribution of the SPGB to the Annan report. We did not say that there is a bias by the media against the Left wing and we strongly object to being coupled with the Communist Party of Great Britain in having made this alleged remark. Any bias by the media is not, in our opinion, based on a conscious effort to exclude or discredit Socialist ideas, but on a total unawareness of what Socialism means. In this the workers in the media are not alone and so the Socialist Party of Great Britain will continue to propagate our ideas in every way available to us.

Statement on the War in Ukraine (2022)

From the April 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Russian Federation has launched a full-scale attack upon Ukraine.

The World Socialist Movement is not concerned with the so-called rights and wrongs of this war, whether the niceties of international law were breached or if the sovereignty of Ukraine was disregarded. As workers, we are painfully aware that it will be fellow workers who will pay the blood price of the geo-political games played out by the Great Powers.

Ukraine isn’t the ‘democracy’ that Western politicians and media like to give the impression it is. In fact, the political and economic superstructure of Ukraine is not very much different from that of Russia. So the argument that it is ‘democratic’ while Russia isn’t and that ‘we’ must support it to defend ‘democratic values’ is false.

The trouble for our fellow workers living in Eastern Europe is that history has dealt them a bad hand — no choice but to be dominated either by the EU-US or by Russia. For the governments of either side, people in Ukraine are pawns to use to further their interests.

Not a drop of working people’s blood should be shed in supporting either side of this capitalist conflict of which bloc can claim territory as part of its sphere of influence. Whether it is the Ukrainian nation or the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, it is not worth the sacrifice of our fellow workers’ lives.

The WSM condemns the attitude of all those prepared to see towns and cities littered with the corpses of men, women and children. For what? To fight for or against what would be in the main merely a change of rulers, with each side sacrificing our Ukrainian fellow workers and Russian Donbas fellow workers for such spurious claims as acting for ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’.

Whether or not the firing has ceased . . . (1973)

From the November 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Once again war rages in the Middle East. Once again men and women, deluded by the nationalist and religious slogans of their rulers, kill and wound each other. Once again wealth is destroyed and resources wasted. The sight of our fellow workers serving as tank fodder in this way sickens Socialists and our sympathies go to them and their families. We hope for an immediate end to this latest slaughter of our fellow workers in a cause which is not theirs, and re-affirm that only the establishment of world Socialism will abolish war for ever.

October 1973

Statement to a Conference of German Workers in Augsburg (September 1969) (1969)

From the October 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fellow workers,

1. We state below some of the principles on which, from our point of view, a genuine socialist party must be based and we hope by making a useful contribution to your discussions. We have divided our report into three parts:

I Socialism.
II The Way to Socialism.
III Reforms of Capitalism.

I. Socialism

2. A socialist party must first be clear that Socialism is a system of society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments of production and distribution and in the interest of the entire community. Socialism is a world community without frontiers, where wealth will be produced solely for use. Buying and selling, and with it prices, wages, money, profits and banks will disappear. Instead, everybody will have free access from the common store according to their needs. Socialism is a fully democratic society. The coercive state machine of class society will be replaced by the simple democratic administration of society’s affairs.

3. Government ownership of industry, or nationalisation, is state capitalism. In state-run industries workers are still exploited for profit through the wages system and still need to organise into unions and to strike to protect their interests. Nationalised industries are run on capitalist lines producing wealth for sale. They have nothing in at all to do with Socialism.

4. Socialism and Communism are not different systems of society ; both describe the same society based on the social or common ownership of the means of production. The false distinction which sees Socialism as a stage in social evolution between capitalism to Communism is a fabrication of Lenin‘s.

5. Russia is not and never has been a socialist society. Its social system has all the essential features of capitalism, viz., class monopoly of the means of production, class rule through the state, the wages system, capital accumulation and production for profit. Russian society is best described as state capitalism.

6. The 1917 revolution was not a working class or socialist revolution. It was merely the Russian equivalent of the English Revolution of 1688 and the French Revolution of 1789. Like them, it brought to power a class whose task was to clear away the obstacles to the further development of a market economy based on wages and profits, i.e. capitalism. Despite their socialist talk, the Bolsheviks had to develop capitalism in Russia. No matter how ruthless their dictatorship, they could not overcome the laws of social evolution which said that Russia, as a backward country with a predominantly peasant economy, was ripe only for capitalism and not for Socialism.

7. Nor has Socialism been established anywhere else, not in East Europe, China, Yugoslavia or Cuba for instance. The “socialism” of the privileged rulers of these states is ultimately derived from the Lenin-Stalin distortion. Their policy of national state capitalism has nothing in common with genuine Socialism.

8. The various so-called Communist Parties of the world are not socialist organisations, but have functioned primarily as overseas agents of the Russian capitalist class and its government.

II. The Path to Socialism

9.  Socialism can only be established by the majority political action of a working class that wants and understands it. To establish Socialism, the working class must first win control of political power and to do this they must organise as a political party.

10. That the majority must want and understand Socialism has been a principle which has distinguished us from all other parties who have claimed to be socialists. The Social Democrats did indeed assert that they wanted majority backing but did not insist that this be of a socialist nature while the Bolsheviks never believed that it was even possible for a majority to reach socialist understanding.

11. Once the nature of Socialism, as a free society based on voluntary work and free access to all the fruits of that work, is grasped, that it can only be set up by conscious majority action should be obvious. The voluntary cooperation and social responsibility that Socialism demands cannot be imposed by a minority of leaders; the people must cooperate to make it work because they want to.

12. This is why leadership is an anti-socialist principle. Once again, Lenin’s pernicious influence on working class political thought is evident. For he believed that by themselves workers could only reach a trade unionist or reformist political consciousness and that socialist understanding had to be brought to them by leaders, his “vanguard party”. As a result Lenin’s conception of the socialist revolution — a conscious minority leading a discontented majority by means of well-chosen slogans in an assault on the state, smashing it and building another with the conscious minority as the new rulers — was a caricature of the bourgeois revolution. In fact, Bolshevism is really a twentieth century theory for bourgeois revolutions in peasant countries.

13. Lenin’s pamphlet The State and Revolution is a gross distortion of Marx’s views on the state in which he tries to demonstrate that Marx argued that workers should stage an armed rising against the “bourgeois” state and then construct a “socialist” state in its place. To us (as for Marx), the phrase a “socialist state” is a contradiction in terms. Where there is Socialism there is no state ; where there is a state there is no Socialism.

14. Traditionally, the discussion on peaceful versus violent methods to achieve power for Socialism has been conducted between people who were all committed to minority action in one form or another — the Bolsheviks, the Social Democrats and the anarchists. To us, as advocates of majority action, such a debate is largely academic, but we can readily admit that a minority has much more need to resort to violence to achieve power as than a majority .

15. The discussion takes a completely different dimension when based on the recognition that first there must be a majority of convinced Socialists. For, with majority socialist understanding, violence is unnecessary, unless the pro-capitalists resort to it . The socialist majority can use universal suffrage both to show that it is a majority and to send its delegates to parliament and local councils, thus gaining control of the state machine.

16. We maintain that the further development of the economic and political trends Marx himself saw as making for a peaceful revolution has made the barricade and the street battle outmoded as a revolutionary tactic. In modern political conditions — the overwhelming numerical superiority of the working class, universal suffrage, political democracy, an army and civil service recruited from the workers — the working class can, and should, use elections and parliament as the way to winning power for Socialism. A socialist party should contest elections whenever it can, but only on a socialist programme. Where there are no socialist candidates, the party should advocate the casting of blank or spoiled voting papers and never engage in anarchist-type anti-election propaganda.

17. The anarcho-syndicalist idea of a general strike of industrial unions as a means of overthrowing capitalist rule is obviously impractical since it leaves the means to crush any such strike, the state machine, in the hands of the capitalists.

18. Much the same can be said of the use of Soviets or workers’ councils as an alternative to parliament. After 1917 Lenin (somewhat hypocritically since he knew that the Bolsheviks had seized power not through the Soviets but through a well-planned military coup in which the Soviets were used only as a facade) proclaimed that in the Soviets the specific method of working class emancipation had at last been discovered. But the soviets were only, as was pointed out in a brilliant series of articles by the Russian Menshevik Martov, an expression of the lack of political development in Russia. Tsarist oppression was so far-reaching that once it was ended the workers and peasants had to create makeshift institutions to express and carry out their wishes; in more developed political conditions this would have been unnecessary since such institutions, in trade unions, political parties and local councils, would already have been in existence.

III. Reforms of Capitalism

19. The party which the working class will use as an instrument for winning political control must be organised on a democratic basis. Control of policy and administration must be entirely in the hands of its members; there must be no leaders and those chosen to carry out various functions must be answerable to the membership. There must be the fullest opportunity for free discussion of party policy. Such is the basis of the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

20. At some stage in the development of the socialist movement in each country socialists must organise as a party, with its own rules and democratic discipline, in place of the discussion groups and journals or educational societies they may at first find convenient.

21. Since a political party can only be what its members are, if a socialist party is to remain such it must recruit only socialists to its ranks. This is especially necessary in a democratic party where all members have an equal say in forming policy. Passing a test of basic socialist knowledge should be a condition for joining the party.

22. Again, in order to remain socialist, the party must only seek support on a socialist programme. Inevitably, in present circumstances, this will result in the party being comparatively small, but there is no other sound way to build a genuine socialist party. This is shown by the fate of Social Democratic parties all over Europe which, despite an original paper commitment to Socialism as an “ultimate aim”, admitted non-socialists to membership and sought votes on a programme of capitalist reforms rather than of Socialism. In order to retain their non-socialist support they themselves were forced to drop their talk of Socialism and to become ever more openly reformist. Today the Social Democratic parties are as firmly committed to capitalism, in theory as well as in practice, as those who have never pretended otherwise. We say this was the inevitable result of admitting non-socialists and of advocating reforms of capitalism.

23. This is why we have always advocated Socialism alone and never reforms of capitalism. We are not saying that all reforms are anti-working class, but that for a socialist party to advocate reforms would be its first step towards becoming a reformist party.

24. This is one of the important points on which we disagree with Rosa Luxemburg. In her Reform or Revolution she presents a good case against reformism but still argues that socialists should advocate reforms on the ground that socialist understanding will grow out of the struggle for reforms. We submit that experience has proved her wrong. It does not matter why or how reforms are advocated the result is the same: confusion of working class thought rather than growth of socialist understanding.

25. Rosa Luxemburg was wrong on a number of other points, for instance, her economics of the collapse of capitalism. Capitalism will never collapse of its own accord, as she suggested, it will stagger on from crisis to crisis till the working class consciously organise to bring it to an end. She was wrong too on “spontaneity” when she suggested that “mass action” often failed because of the conservative and restraining role of the parties the workers supported rather than on the non-socialist ideas of the workers themselves. Nevertheless, we recognise that on a number of other points like reformism, Bolshevism, the first world war slaughter and nationalism she reached much the same conclusions as us.

26. A socialist party must oppose nationalism in all its forms and refuse to compromise with it in any way. Talk of “Socialism in Germany” or “Czechoslovakia for the Czechs and Slovaks” is dangerous nonsense. Socialists should always make clear that the workers have no country and that Socialism can only exist on a world scale.

27. A socialist party must also expose religion and its role as a prop for class society. Religion tries to prevent the spread of a scientific view of the world, man and his history and must be opposed by a clear statement of the case for scientific materialism. However, a socialist party should not get bogged down in mere anti-clericalism by advocating such reforms as the separation of Church and State or secular education.

28. There are many other aspects of our case we should like to have presented (such as on war, fascism, anarchism, trade unionism, whether a transition period is still needed) but this statement is already long enough. We invite you to send us any comments and criticisms on what we have written above and to ask for our views on any subject we have not been able to cover.

 Yours for Socialism,

The Executive Committee,

The Socialist Party of Great Britain

August 1969.

The Falklands Crisis (1982)

From the May 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

In face of the imminent threat of war over the potential wealth of the Falkland Islands the Socialist Party of Great Britain affirms:

1. That despite the wave of jingoistic hysteria in the press and its endorsement by Labour and Tory politicians alike, no working class interests in Britain, Argentina or the Falklands themselves can be served by war.
2. That neither the military junta in Buenos Aires nor the elected representatives of British capitalism, least of all the business interests of Coalite-Charringtons, can justify the shedding of a single drop of working class blood.
3. That the new-found outrage at the undemocratic and oppressive nature of the Argentine regime rings false coming from a government which was arming that regime until the eve of hostilities.
4. That the crucial role of Argentine capitalism in profitably making-up the notorious shortfall of agricultural production within the Russian Empire goes far to explain the support given to the junta by the local “Communist Party” and the muted criticism of it by the same circles who so vociferously denounce the similar dictatorship in Chile and its parallel suppression of trade unionism and free speech.

We therefore reiterate that having no quarrel with the working class of any country, we extend to our fellow-workers of all lands the expression of goodwill and socialist fraternity and pledge ourselves to work for the overthrow of capitalism in all its guises and the establishment of socialism throughout the world, the only way to end war.

The Executive Committee

13 April 1982

The War Crisis in the Middle East (1990)

From the September 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fellow Workers.

There are few subtleties about the present Middle East conflict which threatens the world with yet another global war. The conflict is about oil; about who will own and control those areas of the Middle East which produce about a third of the world's oil and which contain vast untapped reserves of this key raw material, ft is about this oil, about the territory in which it is located, the pipelines and ports through which it flows, its price and. ultimately, how it affects the profits going into the pockets of rival sections of the International capitalist class, that conflict has arisen.

If the conflict sharpens, if it gets to the point where you have to be convinced that you should go out and kill Iraqis because the oligarchy of thieves who ruled in Kuwait or the bloody tyrants who rule in Saudi Arabia are being plundered by Iraq's latter-day Hitler, then the engines of state propaganda, leaders, politicians, and media will doctor reality. Oil might well become "our way of life", and Arab sheiks who cut off heads at the merest whiff of democratic challenge might become pillars of "Western freedom"!

DAILY WAR

You know that there is at least one war going on every single day. Ceaselessly, throughout the world, the scientists and the factories are hard at work turning out armaments the cost of which are beyond our imagination and men and women are being made frighteningly proficient in the business of killing.

Assessments of the total number killed, since the second world war, in which some 50 million people died, vary enormously but are most commonly put at around 25 million.

Of course the world of capitalism, which means all the nations on this planet - including those who organise capitalism under the aegis of the State and lyingly call it "socialism" - have endemic problems which might well bring about conflict. For example, according to the United Nations relief agencies, some 15 million children die every year of starvation or poverty-related diseases. These deaths occur, largely, in what is called the Third World. In the First World of highly developed capitalist states medical terminology disguises the number of lives terminated annually by diseases of poverty.

Since the last world war, then, up to half a billion people have been killed by poverty and war. Even in a world where we have become inured to the obscene statistics of capitalism's horrors, such figures must apall; even more so, they must surely make any intelligent and civilised human being ask who was fighting the wars and why were they being fought?

WHO

It can be said quite categorically that none of the wars was about poverty; no nation on earth mobilised its scientists, its finances, or its armed forces, because 40,000 children under the age of five are dying every day and could be saved by a small fraction of the wealth required to maintain the world's war machines. None of the wars that have occurred this century have been concerned with any of the problems that permanently confront the majority of people in every country - the working class.

And yet, despite the incontrovertible fact that wars have nothing whatsoever to do with working class interests, it is the working class that, almost exclusively, is called upon to do the killing, the suffering and the dying. It sounds incredible that we workers can be conned again and again into killing and risking our lives when it is patently obvious that we will not be the beneficiaries of victory and that we have not got anything an enemy would want to fight for.

HYPOCRISY

Events have moved rapidly in the Middle East. Until the present crisis broke, our leaders and the media were generally hiding the truth about the barbarities of the Hussein regime in Iraq, which, according to Amnesty International, has the worlds worst record for using torture and murder against political opponents. Iran was cocking a snoot at the West: Ayatollah Khomeini and his fellow clerics were the favourite media baddies, therefore Hussein, who was butchering Iranians, could not be depicted as a ruthless despot.

Hussein has armed forces in excess of a million. His airforce has 670 combat aircraft and helicopters provided by his erstwhile allies in the West. His ground forces have 5,500 tanks, including Russian T72s. German technology has provided Hussein's forces with the means of producing nerve gases and mustard gas they used against Iran and against Kurdish villagers. For several years Iraq was purchasing almost the entire production run of French Exocet missiles.

It is possible that Iraq will not want to face the military and economic consequences of its Kuwait adventure: possible that they might negotiate a compromise solution that will temporarily ease the tension. If that happens, only the multinational oil companies will have profited from the exercise.

It is equally possible, that they might either force, or have forced on them, a military confrontation. In that event, the current alignment of military forces in the Gulf could undergo a rapid change: those Arab governments currently numbered against Iraq could change sides, or be overthrown if, when moslems started to be killed, Hussein succeeded in promoting a jihad, or holy war, against ’"he infidels".

In that event, the combined Arab armies in the Gulf would amount to some 2.7 million men armed with over 10,000 tanks, about 2,200 combat aircraft and about 500 helicopters, as well as destroyers, frigates and fast motor patrol boats. Given the American threat that their naval forces currently in the Gulf has greater firepower than the combined forces of the combatants in World War Two and the warning that Iraq may be very close to developing its own nuclear weapons, the situation must represent a frightening threat to the whole world.

WAR AIMS -SAME AS COMMERCIAL AIMS

The Iraqi rulers want more oil and they also want guaranteed bunkering and port outlets to the oil markets of the world. That is why they invaded Kuwait. If they gain control of enough oil and have the facilities to move and market that oil, then, they believe, they can exercise more control over prices and. thus, make greater profits. So Iraqi war aims are commercial as are those of the Western powers, who want to protect the profits of their capitalists by securing for them a stable supply of low-price oil.

As with all wars, and threats of war, the conflict is about the squalid interests of the owning class in our society. The World Socialist Movement again reminds our fellow workers that we members of the working class own no productive resources except our ability to work. Britain and Ireland, like all other nations, belong to the world capitalist class and, when one nation threatens war on another, it is about the ownership and control of wealth; it is about resources, markets or areas of strategic importance - in a word, about things that concern us only in that our masters order us to kill and die for them.

We say to our fellow workers in all other lands, we have no quarrel with you. On the contrary, we appeal to workers in all lands to refuse to slaughter one another for, and at the behest of, our capitalist masters. We appeal to you to unite with us in the struggle to overthrow the system of capitalism which not only causes war but all the other social problems which our class endures throughout the world.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain 

The World Socialist Party (Ireland)

22 August 1990