Voice From The Back: Spaced out (2001)

The Voice From The Back Column from the June 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Spaced out

The US multi-millionaire Dennis Tito returned to earth on 6 May after his trip on a Russian space flight. He paid about $20 million dollars for the privilege; well American capitalists have got to do something with the surplus value that they have extracted from the working class. The awful thing is that while he was away in space for a week the capital that he has invested in the exploitation of the working class made him even richer than he was when he left the planet earth. As he is estimated to have a fortune of $200 million at present that is bloody rich. If every capitalist in the world was given a one way ticket into space, it would make no difference to the wealth produced on this planet, it would of course cut the consumption of wealth quite considerably.

Is democracy ghastly?

The Trade Union movement, in one of its worst moves ever, assisted in the development of the Labour Party. The outcome of that decision is that former railway workers, coal miners and factory hands are calling themselves Lords, dining at the Savoy and discussing the merits of Bollinger ’57 champagne. And are the legions of present and former Labour MPs grateful for the soft living they procured with the help of the TUs? Not a bit of it.

“Teachers unions should end the “ghastly ritual” of their Easter Conferences because they turn off would-be recruits, the chairman of the Commons education committee said last night. Labour MP Barry Sheerman said he was dismayed by the behaviour of some delegates at the National Union of Teachers’ conference in Cardiff, who jeered and held up placards when education secretary, David Blunkett, addressed them.” Guardian 17 April.

Art for cash’s sake

The art world was excited by the re-emergence of a “lost” painting of Claude Monet entitled Haystacks, Last Rays of the Sun. It is a painting that has not been seen in public since 1895. It goes under the hammer at Southeby’s next month and is expected to fetch £5 million. So where has this masterpiece been for over a hundred years? In private hands, where its various owners have kept it safe from the prying eyes of the great unwashed. This is not an unusual fate for artistic works. The very rich, and quite often the very stupid, hoard them under lock and key, often not even looking at them for years on end. These are the people Wilde described as “knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing”. Inside a socialist society all works of art will be available for the public to enjoy, not for millionaires to store in vaults.

Strange bedfellows

The news from Scotland that the Socialist Workers Party will cease to exist and that its 272 members will transfer to the Scottish Socialist Party illustrates the complete lack of principles of both parties. The SSP stand for an independent Scotland, the SWP in the past have always ridiculed this as narrow nationalism. We predict that a battle for supremacy between these two Leninist factions will probably break out in the future. They have certain views in common though. They are opposed to the concept of a class-less, trade-less, money-less society and of course see themselves as the self-appointed leaders of a working class too stupid to get socialism for themselves for “five hundred years”. A plague on both their houses.

Slaughter of the innocents

Capitalism is an awful social system, the old, the infirm and the handicapped are particularly unfortunate recipients of its competitive uncaring nature, but a recent report by the United Nations Children’s Fund shows how terrible is the fate of many children inside capitalism:

“Two million children have been killed by conflict over the last 10 years; 12 million children have been made homeless; six million children have been injured or disabled. Of the world’s 40 million displaced, 20 million are children. Up to 10,000 children each year are killed by landmines” Observer, 6 May.

Situations vacant

From the majestic mountains and glens of Scotland we are delighted to inform our readers of the wonderful career opportunities that are available in Tony Blair’s modern, cool Britannia. “Grouse Beaters wanted. Male and female accommodation. Meals provided. Apply in writing to the Head-keeper, Corrybrough Estate, Tomatin, Inverness-shire IV13 7XY” Herald, 8 May. “Accommodation” AND “meals provided” – Wow! “Near Utopian conditions for the lower orders, your Lordship.” For how long are we going to let these arrogant swine get away with these insults?

Enlightened self-interest

When 39 drug firms dropped their case against South Africa importing cheaper anti-Aids drugs, it was hailed as a victory for humanity over profit. It wasn’t that simple though, because the firms had only bowed to public opinion when it seemed that the import of cheaper drugs into Africa seemed inevitable. The South African government have refused to provide retroviral drugs through the public health system despite this apparent victory. The London-based mining giant Anglo-American is now negotiating with an Indian pharmaceutical company to purchase cheap Aids drugs for its HIV-positive workers in South Africa. An altruistic gesture by big business? Not quite. “Businesses say the pandemic will have a devastating effect on the economy, and research has shown that providing workers with drugs is cheaper than paying for absenteeism, loss of productivity, hospital treatment, funerals, and replacing and retraining staff” Herald, 7 May.

Why you shouldn’t vote state capitalist (2001)

Pamphlet Review from the June 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why You Should Vote Socialist. By Paul Foot, Bookmarks.

Paul Foot is a good journalist, who specialises in exposing capitalism for not living up to its own standards. For this his fellow journalists chose him as “campaigning journalist of the decade”, even though he seems to have got it wrong about Hanratty. But let’s not be too churlish. Despite being a member of the SWP he’s a good writer and the first 50 pages of this 60-page pamphlet are an excellent demonstration of the truth of the old saying “Labour, Tory; Same Old Story” in relation to the Blair government.

Blair and his team have pursued the same policies as the Tory governments of the 80s and early 90s, not just on economic matters, which anyone with a knowledge of how capitalism works could have predicted (as we did, but not Foot – he voted Labour in 1997) but also on civil liberties, where governments have some leeway.

It’s in the last two chapters that Foot goes off the rails. He correctly states:

“Under capitalism, unemployment, inflation, the rise and fall of booms and slumps, are not brought about by governments, but by economic forces beyond government control.”

But also:

“Elected governments of whatever colour cannot and do not determine what happens to the international capitalist economy unless they embark on the most determined and ruthless economic intervention” (emphasis added).

It is just such a policy of state intervention to try to control capitalism that Foot advocates on behalf of the Trotskyist “Socialist” Alliance and the Scottish Sheridan Party (with which the SWP has just merged its Scottish section) who, together, are contesting a third of the seats in the present general election (in most other constituencies Foot says people should still vote Labour!). But, if tried, this would provoke an economic crisis and, if persisted in, would lead to an autarkic state capitalism with shortages and rationing as in Cuba and North Korea.

The alternative to capitalism is not “determined and ruthless” state intervention but socialism, a world-wide society of common ownership, democratic control, and production for use not profit. But Foot doesn’t offer this, not even as a long-term aim. Instead, he accepts a curious definition (by Michael Barratt Brown) of socialism as a society where, among other things, “housing would be available at reasonable rents” and “pensions for the aged and invalid, and payments during sickness and unemployment would be provided on a universal scheme based on contributions related to income”. In other words, the Old Labourite dream of a reformed capitalism. Perhaps Foot never really did vote Labour without illusions.

Adam Buick

Voice From The Back: Another Labour failure (2001)

The Voice From The Back Column from the September 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Another Labour failure

In 1997 the new Labour Government claimed they were going to make fundamental changes in society and would wage war on poverty, or “social exclusion” as they preferred to call it. A recent official report shows that for all their bombastic confidence, the years from 1997 to 2000 have seen no real improvement for the working class. “Details published yesterday by the Department for Work and Pensions show that a quarter of the population was having to live on less than half the average income in 1999-2000, the same proportion as in 1996-97. . . The share of total income received by the poorest 20 percent of the population, for example, fell from 7.9 to 7.6 percent between 1994-95 and 1999-2000. Amongst the richest 20 percent it rose from 41 to 42 percent.” Times (14 July)

Hard times

Times, we are told, are hard in the City these days. The FTSE 100 seems to be in a constant nosedive and millions are being wiped off the stock exchange value of dot.com companies. Time for the high-rollers to tighten their belts? Hardly, for many of the capitalist class it’s still a case of let the good times roll. The owner of the restaurant Petros in London’s St. James was astonished at the lavish wine bill for a table of six. “His restaurant had sold three of the oldest bottles of the stunning claret from which it takes its name: a 1945 Chateau Petrus at £11,600, a bottle of the lesser 1946 at £9,400 and one of the 1947 – regarded by many as the greatest single bottle of the last century – £12,300. Plus a 1900 vintage of Chateau d’Yquem at £9,200. Oh, and a 1982 Montrachet at a paltry £1,400.” Observer (15 July)

Make my day, punk

A recent 10.9 percent annual rise in house prices in the South East of England has led to reformers of capitalism discussing all sorts of schemes to stop low paid public sector workers like schoolteachers quitting their job for better paid ones. Citing the case of the town of Reading, The Times (1 August) provided alarming figures. “The average price of a flat is £105,441 and the Institute for Public Policy estimates that a household needs to earn £25,000 a year to survive. Nurses earn an average £21,000 a year and teachers £24,000.” Tough times indeed for British schoolteachers but it could be worse; they could be American workers at the chalkface. “Pity the poor American teacher, besieged by classroom violence. School shootings are now so frequent that the largest teachers’ union is to offer $150,000 to families of members who are attacked and killed. Since 1992 there have been 29 such killings.” Times (4 August)

North Korean Newspeak

George Orwell’s 1984 invented a language called Newspeak that made clear thinking impossible. Thus the Ministry of War became the Ministry of Peace. He was satirising the current use of such euphemisms as the Ministry of “Defence”. Carrying on this tradition of capitalist cant the North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and the Russian president Vladimir Putin have issued a declaration on the subject of “peace”. “A declaration signed by Kim and Putin called their meeting a “historic landmark in efforts to strengthen peace and security in the Asia-Pacific region and the world”, and dismissed US fears of Pyongyang’s nuclear missile capability. “North Korea asserts that its missile programme is peaceful in nature and does not present a threat to any nature respecting North Korea’s sovereignty” the proclamation said.” Observer (5 August).

Vote catching SSP

At a press conference the Scottish Socialist Party revealed its latest recruit – a Roman Catholic priest! Father Steve Gilhooley was welcomed into the SSP by its leader Tommy Sheridan. “Mr Sheridan, however, spoke of his admiration for Father Gilhooley and said he had been extremely struck by his “incredible warmth and compassion”. “Steve deals day in day out with some of the ravages of our so-called free market in terms of broken families and broken communities and tries to fix them, so from that point of view he is very well equipped to be a member of the SSP,” he said. Herald, 2 August.

And we are asked to believe that this sort of nonsense has something to do with revolutionary socialism.

Letters: Making allowances (2004)

Letters to the Editors from the March 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Making allowances

Dear Editors,

The review of Beyond Capital in the December Socialist Standard deals with the question of wage determination as affected by the balance of class forces, there being no automatic passing on of workers’ higher living costs or taxes in higher wage levels. But government’s unceasing tinkering with the social wage in the form of benefits and subsidies shows that they are very much concerned with their role in maintaining and trying to regulate such a link.

The role of post-war Family Allowances in influencing wage levels is well known to Socialist Standard readers over the years. Rent control, introduced to prevent a wage explosion in the first world war, is another example.

More recently government has openly acknowledged Family Credits to be a top-up for low wages. Junior Employment Minister in the 1994 Conservative government, Philip Oppenheim, was reported as saying (Observer 28 August 1994):

“Employers cannot be expected to have regard to the family commitments of each of their employees. This must be the role of the tax and benefit system, which ensured that households have sufficient income upon which to live. That is why we introduced Family Credits and other benefits for lower-paid employees with a family to support. It would make no sense to outlaw every job which did not pay wages high enough to support a family.”

At the time now Deputy Prime Minister Prescott criticised the Conservative Party policy of this topping-up low wages, saying, “Family Credit is now part of wage negotiations”, encouraging low pay.

What is surprising is not Prescott’s tacit admission of his earlier ignorance of the purpose of much social welfare legislation, but the Conservative Party’s frankness in acknowledging the purpose of such “benefits” as being government policy in their attempts to regulate wage or, certainly income levels for the low-paid.

It is a case of government being compelled to throw its weight in the balance of class forces mentioned in the review, in order to maintain competitiveness and profitability of the national economy. Seen as a necessary response to capitalism’s compulsions and priorities, political and economic, it might well be considered “automatic”.

Bill Robertson, 

Brighton

RMT and the SSP

Dear Editors,

Now that the RMT has been expelled from the Labour Party, the party they helped found 100 years ago, I wonder how long it will be before they are expelled again if the Scottish Socialist Party develop into a total British party whose reformist policies will no doubt evolve into what the Labour Party practice, as any other party who promises to manager Big Business.

Joe Boughey, 

Newton-le-willows, Merseyside

Alec Hart

Dear Editors,

Further to the obituary published in the February Socialist Standard, I have received the following story from one of Alec’s friends in Johannesburg:

“During the apartheid era he (Alec) was visited on many occasions by the ‘Special Branch’. Alec had an enormous picture of Karl Marx on the wall and when asked by one of these detectives ‘Who’s that man?’, he quite blandly said it was Johannes Brahms. Fortunately they believed him!”

I would have included this in the obituary if I’d had this story at the time

of writing!

Phyllis Hart, 

Westerham, Kent

Voice From The Back: Deep sea diving (2000)

The Voice From The Back Column from the May 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Deep sea diving 

 . . . has always been a hazardous job, but now industrial pollution of the sea bed is making it silently deadly. The Western Australian published a two-page feature last October about three experienced divers working for the Texan company Oceaneering under contract to Hyundai Heavy Industry 40 metres down in the South China Sea. As soon as they left the diving bell foul smells invaded their air supply. They were told to ignore it. They felt dizzy, the fillings fell out of their teeth. Then their teeth began to fall out. After repeated complaints, their diving bell, itself letting in the lethal volatile chemicals, was moved, still pressurised, to another site for two weeks while the toxic area was dredged, when they were taken back again, but it was little better. One man was close to death when they were finally brought up after a month. Even the laboratory technicians who tested samples of the mud became ill. HHI then hired Chinese divers who were poisoned one after another. The Australians are still fighting for adequate compensation. The Chinese will probably get nothing. The only thing that finally matters in capitalism is money.

Das Kapital Vol.III summarised 

Only a fool thinks price and value are the same. Silk Road, Chinese Fortune Cookie.

Forcing homeless people 

. . . off the streets may prove harder than the government thinks. Chris Holmes, director of Shelter, says present hostel places are 99.8 percent full the year round and Shelterline, the housing advice phone service gets 100 calls a day from single people desperate for somewhere to stay that night. There are over 600 a night sleeping on the streets of London, 2,400 people a year.

The Scottish Socialist Party

. . . is campaigning for a new bus shelter in Fort William, protesting about water rates in Inverness and complaining about the condition of a school in Easter Ross. This “socialism” has brought them “phenomenal growth” according to their Highland regional organiser, Steve Arnott. He doesn’t explain what bus shelters have got to do with socialism.

The American family farm 

. . . is almost extinct. In the 12 years of the Reagan-Bush administration 85,064 were taken over for $3.5 trillion. In the seven Clinton years, 166,310 corporate mergers, worth $9.8 trillion, have almost completed the job. Farms are no longer viable alone. They are only a small part of a vertical agricultural monolith in which the money is mostly made in processing and sales—not growing crops. Food retailers over the last ten years have returned 18 percent on investments, food manufacturers, 17.2 percent, agricultural banks 10.8 percent and farmers only 2.38 percent.

Half the population of Britain 

. . . have less than £750 in savings and investments, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. About one in ten have no savings at all.

Another Tony Blair promise 

. . . has fizzled out. The reform of company law to make “stakeholders” replace shareholders as the controllers of companies, taking into account the interests of customers, workers and environmental interests, has been thrown out by the officials responsible for reviewing the Victorian statutes. In a report which will surprise nobody who has any understanding of the capitalist system, they have reiterated the supremacy of shareholders. They do suggest, however, that directors should be aware of wider social responsibilities. So that’s all right then.

Clare Short is foolish 

. . . enough to believe that getting a ministerial job in a Labour government enables a concerned person to achieve improvements for the poor, the homeless, the starving. She told the World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle last year facts like:

• A fifth of the world’s population own 86 percent of its wealth.
• If the world’s richest 200 people gave up one percent of their wealth per year, it would pay for free primary education for every child on earth.
• As it is, 1.3 billion people have to live on 60p a day.
• The tiles in Bill Gates’s kitchen cost £450 each—twice the average annual income in Africa’s poor countries.

Clare Short hasn’t realised, what the delegates to the WTO meeting know only too well—that capitalism can work in no other way. The poor are poor because the rich are rich.

Party names and games (1999)

Party News from the April 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Last year Parliament passed an Act to allow political parties to register, both to protect their name and to present lists in elections where an element of proportional representation has been introduced—as in the elections to the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly this May, but also in those to the European Parliament in June and to the Greater London Authority in May next year.

The parliamentary parties brought in this Act mainly to protect their own position by stopping candidates calling themselves, notoriously, Literal Democrats but also Conversative Party and Independent Labour. However it has also settled our dispute with Militant over their attempted usurpation of one of our names (see Socialist Standard, February 1997).

While we have been registered under our full name of “The Socialist Party of Great Britain”, Militant were refused registration as “Socialist Party”. They are now going to Court to seek a judicial review. We don’t know officially on what grounds Militant were refused recognition but this can be gathered from a letter from their Executive Committee to the Registrar of Political Parties published in their paper The Socialist on 12 March. Part of this reads:

The reasons you give are that the similarity of our name to other parties will cause confusion to voters, and that we have adopted our name relatively recently compared to others.

Militant’s letter also includes a passage from the Registrar’s letter to them:

  “other and possibly lesser parties in terms of their organisation and membership have used the name ‘Socialist Party’ over a substantially greater number of years and therefore have a prior claim”.

Reading between the lines it is clear that the Registrar came to the conclusion that, on the evidence, there was another party—us—who had a prior claim on this name because we had used it for longer (95 years compared with 2).

Militant themselves certainly assume this as, in their letter to the Registrar, they try to demolish us in his eyes:

  Over the past two years, we have built up recognition of our name in many areas of the country. There is much greater recognition of our name due to the work we have done, than there is of the SPGB.

In a footnote reference after SPGB they write:

 The Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB) is a small party founded over a century ago who are about one-tenth of the size of the Socialist Party (ourselves). They very rarely contest elections and are mainly a propaganda and discussion group.

This is wrong in nearly every respect. We were not founded over a century ago. We have many times more than a hundred members. And it is not true that we “very rarely” contest elections.

Although numbers can’t settle the issue, for the record, we have contested 12 of the 15 general elections that have taken place since 1945 as well as a number of by-elections and the 1989 and 1994 (and now the 1999) European elections. Geographically we have contested elections in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Salford, Oldham, Newcastle, Jarrow, Easington, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee, Livingston, Swansea and Belfast. In fact, in the 1994 Euro-elections alone, when we stood 4 candidates (including one against Militant who then called themselves “Militant Labour”), more electors—2 million or so—were faced with “Socialist Party” on the ballot papers representing us than the electorate of all the local wards and Westminister seats Militant has ever contested under the same usurped name added together.  

How Militant took the news

Dramatics in Scotland

In Scotland we found ourselves headline news for a week or so as the Registrar announced his intention not to register the latest name for Militant’s front organisation there of “Scottish Socialist Party”. His reason for this preliminary ruling was, apparently, that the name “Scottish Socialist Party” could be confused with ours, especially as we had contested two seats in Scotland at the 1997 General Election. SSP leader and Glasgow councillor Tommy Sheridan, who already sees himself as an MSP (Member of the Scottish Parliament), wasn’t at all happy.

First he said he was going to go to the Commission for Racial Equality because it was “racial discrimination” to refuse to allow a Scottish party to call itself Scottish because an English party had a similar name (Herald, 3 March). Then he claimed it was a breach of “two sections of the European Convention on Human Rights” (Herald, 4 March). Then he threatened “a campaign of mass civil disobedience to disrupt the Scottish General Election in May” (Herald, 8 March). Less amusingly, a section of the press began a smear campaign against us. Matthew Norman, for instance, wrote a piece in the Guardian (5 March) suggesting that while the SSP was a serious party with three councillors we were “a minute, slightly weird group which runs in very few seats, proposes the abolition of money and runs on a programme unchanged since 1910”.

Sheridan needn’t have bothered. First, although of course we don’t like people calling themselves “socialist” when in our opinion they’re not, that’s something to be settled by political debate not law. Our dispute was with Militant in England and their use of the same name as us even on the ballot papers (which Militant in Scotland never did, standing in the last election as the “Scottish Socialist Alliance”). Second, in the end the Registrar adopted a relatively liberal approach, allowing as many parties as possible to register including the SSP, only ruling out blatant cases of parties trying to usurp a name to which they had no historical right.

It is true that there would have been no possible confusion had Scottish Militant stuck to their name till last October of “Scottish Socialist Alliance”. But since we, being resolutely anti-nationalist, would never dream of calling ourselves “Scottish” (or “British” or “Welsh” or “Irish”) socialists, we can agree that any confusion between us and the SSP is going to be minimal.

Editorial: Nats whae hae (2007)

Editorial from the May 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nationalism is anathema to socialists. Wage and salary workers have no country. We have more in common with people like ourselves in other countries than with the privileged owning class of the country where we happen to live and work.

The world-wide working class has a common interest, to end its exploitation and solve its problems, to join together to establish a world without frontiers in which the resources of the planet will have become the heritage of all, so that there can be production to meet needs and not for profit. One world, one people, where cultural differences will still be celebrated, but where we’ll all be citizens of the world.

It is clear, then, why socialists don’t take sides in the debate, aired in this month’s elections to the Scottish Parliament, about whether it is better for workers there to be ruled from Edinburgh (as the SNP says) or from London with a little help from Edinburgh (as say the British Nationalists of the Labour, Liberal and Tory parties).

The SNP argues that the problems facing workers in scotland are due to “Westminster rule”. If only there was an independent Scotland, they say, separate from the rest of Britain, then there would be full employment, higher wages, job security, better state benefits, a healthy health service and all the other things politicians promise at election times.

This view is echoed by the so called Scottish “Socialist” Party and Tommy Sheridan’s Solidarity (with Sheridan) Party. But it is patently absurd. This would be a purely political, not to say mere constitutional change which would leave the basic economic structure of society unchanged.

There would still be a privileged class owning and controlling the means of production with the rest having to work for them for a living. Just as now. Maybe the pillar boxes would be painted tartan but that would be about all.

An independent Scottish government would still have to operate within the constraints of the world capitalist system. It would still have to ensure that goods produced in Scotland were competitive on world markets and that capitalists investing in Scotland were allowed to make the same level of profits as they could in other  countries.

In other words, it would still be subject to the same economic pressures as the existing London-based government to promote profits and restrict wages and benefits. And as the government of Ireland, which broke away from the United Kingdom in 1922 and where things have never been any different. Not even the national state capitalism proposed by the SSP and Sheridan would make any difference. As in Cuba, exports would still have to be competitive and popular consumption restricted to achieve this.

Since it is this class-divided, profit motivated society that is the cause of the problems workers face in Scotland, as in England and in the rest of the world, so these problems will continue, regardless of whether Scotland separates from or remains part of the United Kingdom.

The SNP is promising a referendum in 2010. What an irrelevant waste of time and energy that would be, but it’s their alibi. If they get to form the regional government of Scotland their excuse for not delivering (as capitalism won’t let them) will be that their hands were tied and that their promises will only be able to be honoured after separation.

Our opposition to the SNP should not be interpreted as support for the Union or the Labour, Liberal or Tory parties that support it. We are just as opposed to them. A plague on both their houses is what we say. To adapt a slogan, “Neither London nor Edinburgh, but World Socialism”.

Sheridan no socialist (2011)

From the January 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

 “Sheridan told he faces years in prison for lies about sex and socialism”, so ran one newspaper headline the day after a jury found the former MSP guilty of perjury (Times, 24 December).

We don’t know, or care, if he told lies about his sex life to get at a scandal rag that was trying to entrap him. It’s only the political aspect of the case that interests us, and it’s true that, as a reformist politician, he had certainly told lies about socialism. But this is the first time we have heard of this being a crime punishable by imprisonment. If it was, the prisons would be full of journalists, politicians and academics. Of course the Times – like the News of the World, owned by media tycoon Rupert Murdoch – was merely trying to discredit socialism.

Sheridan was a Trotskyist, originally of the Militant Tendency variety, and although he could not doubt explain why the USSR had been a “degenerate workers state” or why some common or garden reform was a “transitional demand” and so a stepping stone to “socialism”, he was not that kind of Trotskyist.

Trotskyists, being Leninists, hold that workers are incapable of evolving beyond a “trade union consciousness” (defined by Lenin as “the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc.”). So, according to them, putting the straight socialist case for common ownership, democratic control and production for use not profit to workers is to cast pearls before swine.

Instead, according to Trotskyists, what must be put before workers are demands that the government introduce this or that reform within capitalism. Getting workers to support such “transitional demands” is the only way they calculate they can get the mass support which, when the government fails to respond, can be used to catapult their vanguard party to power. But this requires people on the ground who are capable of winning a personal following. Normally, the Trotskyist gurus who direct their organisation from the shadows, are not up to this. They require front men. As it happens, Militant has been rather successful in this, with Derek Hatton in Liverpool, Joe Higgins at the moment in Dublin, and Tommy Sheridan in Glasgow.

Sheridan first came to prominence in the anti-Poll Tax campaign of the 1980s when he, along with the rest of the Militant Tendency, was still boring from within the Labour Party. Sheridan earned a reputation for being an indefatigable fighter, defending non-payers before the courts and himself getting a six-month sentence for contempt of court.

The trouble, from the point of view of the Trotskyist gurus in the background, is that such front men have, because of their following, a degree of independence and can prove difficult to control. Which is what happened in Sheridan’s case. When Kinnock clamped down on Militant – Sheridan himself was expelled from the Labour Party in 1989 – the group’s leaders didn’t want to change their tactics. They wanted to continue boring from within the Labour Party, in accordance with the argument they had used for years, that when the workers began to move against capitalism this would begin as a swing to the left by the Labour Party, so that’s where the vanguard cadres should be. Sheridan and most others disagreed. They wanted to form an independent party, opposed to Labour. They won out and a new party called “Militant Labour” was formed (the minority are still somewhere in the Labour Party, so deeply buried as to be invisible). In Scotland this became, in 1998, the “Socialist Socialist Party” with Sheridan as leader. It departed from traditional Trotskyism by embracing the idea of Scottish independence which of course is quite irrelevant from a working class and socialist perspective.

In 1999 Sheridan was elected a member of the Scottish Parliament. He was re-elected in 2003 with 5 other SSP members. This was the heyday of “Scottish socialism” (more properly, Tartan leftwing reformism). Under other circumstances they might have held the balance of power and given parliamentary support in exchange for some reforms to an SNP government. But it was not to be. In 2004 the News of the World published allegations about Sheridan’s sex life. He (apparently) told the SSP executive that there was some truth in them but that he was going to deny them. A majority disagreed and he eventually resigned as leader and, after winning a libel case against the Murdoch scandal-rag, left the SSP to form a new party, “Solidarity Scotland’s Socialist Movement”. In the 2007 elections to the Scottish Parliament both parties were wiped out,

Neither of them stood for socialism, only for reforms of capitalism and an independent Scotland (i.e. an independent capitalist republic like southern Ireland). Solidarity’s founding statement, for instance, declared that it was “a socialist movement that fights for the redistribution of wealth from big business and the millionaires to working class people and their families.” It does do this, but this has nothing to do with socialism, which is not about the redistribution of wealth within capitalism but about the common ownership of the means of wealth production.

Following the end of his career as an MSP Sheridan has only been involved in minor-league reformist politics, standing for Bob Crow’s petty nationalist “No2 Europe” list in the 2009 European elections and for the Militant/SWP TUSC in last year’s general election (the Militant and SWP Trotskyists, despite reservations about his views on Scottish independence, had followed him out of the SSP into Solidarity). On both occasions he stood on a reformist platform, a series of demands that the government must do this or not to do that which would have left capitalism, and its problems, intact.

Adam Buick

Which way forward? (2003)

Editorial from the August 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Thanks in large measure to proportional representation, the Scottish Parliament now has 6 (out of 129) MSPs from a left-of-Labour party, Tommy Sheridan’s “Scottish Socialist Party”. The SSP is a direct descendant of Militant and so has a Trotskyist past, and in fact includes the members in Scotland of Militant, the SWP and other such groups.

Many in England who don’t like the profit system look to the SSP as a model, hoping that the “Socialist Alliance” will be able to repeat its success south of the border. However, without proportional representation, they are not making much headway, trailing far behind the BNP as a party of populist protest (the BNP would be a major beneficiary of PR in England, just as the National Front was in France).

So, in England, a rival idea is being canvassed: that of refounding the – or a – Labour Party, as a group of trade-union sponsored MPs pressing for reforms of capitalism in the interest of trade unionists and workers generally.

Yet others, believe it or not, entertain the illusion that, after Blair goes, it will be possible to recapture the Labour Party and turn it back into a party committed to redistributing power and wealth to working people that they believe it once was.

What all three options share is a reformist approach: that what is important is to get people elected to parliament and local councils to pass measures aimed at improving the lot of wage and salary workers within the profit system.

There’s nothing wrong with contesting elections, but if Socialists are going to do this it should be done on a sound basis: getting elected on a straight socialist programme of common ownership, democratic control and production for use not profit, with a view to using parliament or the council chamber as a platform from which to spread socialist ideas (while still a minority) and to usher in socialism (when a majority, acting on instructions from a mass democratically-organised and socialist-minded movement outside).

But what is being proposed is quite different: getting elected with non-socialist votes on a programme of attractive-sounding reforms to capitalism. It was on this basis (tinged with a divisive Scottish nationalism: they appear to believe in “socialism in one province”) that the SSP’s MSPs were elected, promising a local income tax, free school meals, a £7.32-an-hour minimum wage, a 35-hour working week, which are reforms of capitalism not socialism. (In fact, neither the SSP, nor the Socialist Alliance, nor the Old Labourites have any clear idea of what socialism means; they hardly ever mention the word and, when they do, it turns out they mean state capitalism – nationalisation, or the wages system under state management.)

It is not as if the workers’ movement hasn’t been here before. This was what the Labour Party in Britain set out to do. On the Continent it was the policy of parties which, on the face of it, were far more radical than Labour in that they claimed to be Marxist and based on the class struggle. In practice, however, they were just as reformist as the Labour Party, and failed just as miserably.

The danger is that the same mistake is going to be made again. While some trade union leaders and activists want to re-found a Labour Party, others such as the SWP see the “Socialist Alliance” as a revival of the left and centre of pre-WWI continental “Marxist” Social Democracy – as an embryonic leftwing party calling itself Marxist but pursuing reforms to capitalism.

This might just be a tactic – another ploy by a vanguard to attract a following. But it’s a bad tactic that can only encourage illusions about what can be achieved under capitalism. It glosses over the fact that capitalism is not a system that can be humanised or reformed or transformed into something better. It is a profit system subject to economic laws which can only work in one way: as a system of profit-making and accumulation of capital in the interest of a tiny minority of profit-takers.

The failure in the course of the 20th century of every single Labour or Social Democratic government, in all of the countries of Europe, to make any progress towards socialism has demonstrated the soundness of the position taken up by the “impossibilists” at the turn of that century: that it is impossible to reform capitalism so as to make it work in the interest of working people. And that, therefore, it is futile and time-wasting and a diversion to try.

What those who want a better society should be doing – should have done – is to campaign to change people’s minds, to get them to realise that they are living in an exploitative, class-divided society and that the only way out is to end capitalism and replace it by a new and different system based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production, with production to satisfy people’s needs, and distribution on the basis of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”.

Once a majority have come to this realisation, they will know what to do: organise themselves into a socialist party to democratically win political control and use it to bring about a socialist society. That’s what socialist politics should be about.

Worldwide is the only way (1999)

Editorial from the April 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tommy Sheridan surely put his finger on it when he said, in a letter to the Glasgow Herald (10 February), that the "the problem is that wealth is owned and controlled by a tiny minority of society in an undemocratic and unaccountable fashion".

This obscene concentration of wealth in a few hands lies at the heart of all major social problems which confront us today. Far from being irrelevant, as some argue, the property question is the most important social question of the modern age. It cries out for a solution.

What, then, is Sheridan's solution? By his own account, it is "the collective ownership and democratic control of the means of production throughout Scotland".

This won't work. Scotland is only a small part of an economic system which embraces the whole world. It could never enjoy any real autonomy or self-sufficiency in the face of the world market. From day one it will be buffeted by hostile economic forces entirely beyond its control.

In no time at all, Scotland will be faced with two choices—either total ruin, or the complete restoration of capitalist economics. Councillor Sheridan's "independent socialist Scotland" would be neither independent nor socialist.

We completely share Tommy Sheridan's disgust at what capitalism does to people. We can readily understand his impatience for an end to poverty in all its hideous guises. But we think he has allowed his impatience to get the better of him, to lead him down short-cuts that go nowhere.

There is no sense in dodging the issue. Since the property problem is in its essence worldwide, the solution to that problem must also be worldwide. That is why the Socialist Party insists that the socialist transformation of society must be carried out on a worldwide basis. Quite simply, nothing less will do.

"Socialism in one country" is an illusion. That is the lesson of history. If the Soviets could not manage it, we fail to see how the Scots could.

Why Socialists aren’t part of the Left (2006)

From the January 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

When someone comes across the Socialist Party for the first time, a common reaction is to consider us as just another left-wing political organisation. From one point of view this is not surprising, as the left use similar terminology to us, talking of Socialism, class struggle, exploitation, etc, and invoking Karl Marx. But digging a little deeper will show that our political position is very different from that of the left. By ‘the left’ we mean the Socialist Workers Party, the Workers Revolutionary Party, the Socialist Labour Party, all the groups with a name that’s a variation on Communist Party, Militant (dishonestly using the name ‘Socialist Party’), and the Scottish Socialist Party, among others. All quotations in this article are taken from the websites of the organisations referred to.

The first difference is that of our aims, the kind of society we wish to see established. Socialists are quite clear and uncompromising on this — our aim is a society without wages, money, countries or governments, based on common ownership of the means of production (land, factories, offices, etc.). Production would be for use, not profit, and there would be free access to what had been produced. The result is quite simple: no poverty, no homelessness, no starvation, no war. Such a society would be fully democratic, with no ruling class or vested interests.

Do the left stand for this kind of society? The simple answer is No. Militant, for instance, say they wish to ‘take into public ownership the top 150 companies, banks and building societies that dominate the economy, under democratic working-class control and management.’ Forget the rhetoric about democratic control — this is a recipe for state-run capitalism. Socialism, as a moneyless society, will have no need for banks or building societies. In general, in fact, the left stand for a version of capitalism where the state is the main employer. This makes no difference to members of the working class, who still have to work for wages, but will now be exploited by the state and those who run it rather than by private capitalists. The left are admirers of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, which ushered in over 70 years of state capitalism and a police state. They differ on when and why they think things ‘went wrong’ in Russia, but they all support the regime established in 1917.

It’s true that there are minor variations on the theme of state-run capitalism. The SSP, for instance, advocates ‘the break-up of the British state and the creation of a free Scottish socialist republic.’ But a single Socialist country in a hostile capitalist world is just impossible, and this quote just reveals that the SSP aim is state capitalism — Scottish state capitalism. Many of the left are in fact nationalistic in one way or another.

It is also true that some left-wing organisations pay lip service to the idea of a moneyless society. The CPGB, for example, refers to ‘communism — a system which knows neither wars, exploitation, money, classes, states nor nations.’ But, like the rest of the left, this is for them a paper aim that bears no relation to their everyday activity or the ideas set out in their publications. They make no effort to explain how Socialist/Communist society would work, and no effort to convince workers of the advantages of such a way of organising things. Instead they combine a set of immediate demands with the aim of a so-called proletarian dictatorship, which in reality means state-run capitalism.

This takes us on to a further point. In spite of all their revolutionary posturing and calls for a fundamental change in society, the left actually devote their time to chasing reforms of capitalism. If you look at the programmes or manifestos of left-wing parties, you will find them full of reforms of a wide variety of types. A random list of examples: ‘Right to retirement from age 60 for all workers’ (CPGB); ‘a Scottish Service Tax — a fair alternative to the council tax that will make the rich pay their share’ (SSP); ‘An immediate 50% increase in the pension as a step towards a living pension for all pensioners’ (Militant); ‘Renationalise the railways’ (WRP).

The left generally draw a distinction between ‘immediate demands’ such as those just listed and longer-term goals. We’ve already seen that the longer-term goals in any case involve a continuation of capitalism, but they are usually given second place to the short-term demands. The justification normally provided is that fighting on the immediate demands will win workers over to the longer-term ideas of the organisation. ‘The struggle for reforms can tip over into revolution. Battles for reforms are vital preparation for social revolution’ (SWP). But no evidence is offered for such a position, and the task of revolutionaries is not to jump on the bandwagon of reforms but to expose their inadequacies, to show that reforms cannot solve working-class problems. Indeed, some left-wing groups deliberately and dishonestly go for short-term aims that they know cannot be met under capitalism, as a way of fuelling working-class discontent. In other words, they deliberately lie to workers as a way of getting them into their party!

Lastly, Socialists differ from the left in our attitude to leadership and democracy. Socialism will be democratic, with all having an equal say in how things are run; it follows that the movement for Socialism must be democratic too. The Socialist Party has no leaders and is run by its membership. We have an executive committee, elected each year by ballot of the members; their role is not to make policy but to administer the Party in accordance with decisions made by members. The left, however, adopt a Leninist view and support leadership: they see themselves as leaders of the working class, and are organised internally with a division between an inner circle of leaders and ‘ordinary’ members. For instance, they see the need for ‘authoritative and influential leaders who have been steeled over a long period of time’ (CPGB). Most left-wing groups do not operate as cults (see the November Socialist Standard), but they still have a distinction between rank-and-file members and the leadership. They are often rather coy about their role as would-be leaders, but as Leninists they all support the idea of a vanguard. A leadership-based organisation is not going to be any use in establishing an egalitarian society without leaders. But, as we’ve said, that’s not what the left aim for anyway.

The left, then, stand for state-run capitalism rather than Socialism; they advocate reforms rather than revolution; they are in favour of leadership rather than democracy. The Socialist Party, in contrast, does not aim at reforming capitalism but at replacing it by a new democratic way of organising the world, Socialism, brought about by a revolution, and we do not see ourselves as leaders. It should be clear that the Socialist Party is quite unlike the left wing, and that we are definitely and for good reason not part of the left.

Paul Bennett

School dinners and the class struggle (2003)

From the August 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party does not oppose reformism because it is against improvements in workers' lives lest they dampen their revolutionary ardour; nor, because it thinks that decadent capitalism simply cannot deliver on any reforms; but because our continued existence as propertyless wage slaves undermines whatever attempts we make to control and better our lives through reforms. Any fortune – whether in the form of money payments or subsidised services – that falls into our laps becomes an opportunity for those that live off our labour to lower their costs, and increase their profits. So long as there is a class divided society, it becomes impossible for us to enact measures to benefit the whole community.

A clear illustration of this consequence of class-divided society is the current proposal from the ultra-reformists in the (so-called) Scottish Socialist Party to introduce universal free school dinners. A more noble aspiration could scarcely be imagined – an attempt to eradicate poor diets and consequent poor health of children, in a cheap (they say £175 million) and efficient way, without the stench of means testing or qualification. By providing food, for all, through schools, they say, they could avoid the costs associated with administering most types of welfare, and it is fraud-proof and there is no way of transferring the benefit received to third parties.

It has the added advantage of being an age-old demand, one that "Old" Labour types have long held in high regard. With all this going for it, Socialists should have no complaints, surely? Socialists, however, point to the continuing condition of our class as wage-slaves, and affirm that whatever the gains from free school dinners, the wages system will take away in another form with another hand.

The reason why lies in the very form of wage slavery. We are, collectively, compelled to sell our capacity to work – our labour power – in order to get access to those things which we need in order to live as members of our community – our food, clothes, housing, transportation and the like. The value of this labour power is the cost of maintaining and reproducing our capacity to work – and this entails the cost of keeping and rearing the next generation of workers, our children.

This value is not found by some chemical process of deciding what we need to have to keep ourselves and our families, but is instead found through the struggle between ourselves and our employers, as they try to drive our wages as low as possible, and we try to prevent this or push up the price they pay us. It is not driven by the living costs of any one individual, but by the general costs of living in society.

These general costs of living form a pressure on wages, which can force them upwards, as can the level of class consciousness and understanding of the workers; whereas counter-acting forces, such as the availability of a particular type of labour, general unemployment and the use of state power, combine to create downwards pressures on wages. All of which is to say that our wages are set by class struggle. This is a continuous struggle in which every gain has to be defended, and in which there is no relenting.

If the price of one of our necessities of life falls, this will be reflected by a decrease in the upwards pressure on wages. Without a corresponding relenting in the downward forces on wages, our real wages would begin to dwindle towards a new level (either through direct wage cuts, or by allowing inflation – that is a decrease in the value of money – to eat away at our spending power). Free school dinners would be an example of this process in action.

Those workers with children would be relieved of the cost of providing those meals to their children. This would result in a decline in the monetary cost of maintaining themselves and their family, and thus a decrease in the upwards pressure on wages. The typical wage would then tend to fall towards something nearer to living costs of those of a childless worker. This would thus benefit the employing class, both through cutting the overall direct cost of wages, but also through ending the situation in which childless workers were paid unnecessarily from the point of view of the employers.

The employer could be prevented from gaining from this process by an increase in taxation – whether nominally on the workers' wages or directly on employers' profits; this would serve to cream off the difference between the old and the new prices of labour power. In this way, the free school dinners scheme could be made to pay for itself. This would, though, merely represent a redistribution of poverty for the working class, the intervention by the state into the labour market to ensure a more efficient allocation of the workers' ration, so that children get a protected share.

Indeed, there could be a strong capitalist motive for having free school dinners. Efficiency savings through only paying the wages that are actually needed by their workers could increase their profits (especially as the majority of workers do not have children of school age). As could ensuring a healthier future generation of workers, able to work harder and cost less in terms of medical care. All of which, of course, would be subject to the ongoing profitability of the capitalist system and its current need for labour. The costs of the dinners would have to be watched closely, managers constantly pressured to keep the costs of food provided to a bare minimum.

The SSP proponents of this scheme observe that their draft bill will include provisions on nutritional content. This does not mean that the ongoing pressure will disappear. King Canute passed the well drafted Tides' Direction (Reversal) Act over a thousand years ago, to little noticeable effect. The statute books are littered with Health and Safety legislation that goes ignored and unenforced because the political will and resources are not there to counteract the profit needs of the capitalists to encroach on their provisions.

That is, assuming such a Bill would pass unamended. The SSP only have six members of the Scottish parliament, and their current strategy is to apply moral pressure to Labour and Liberal MSPs to vote for their bill; in the course of which, small amendments here and there from the more openly capitalist parties, on whose support it will depend, could well rob it even of its nominal stringency. Such amendments would be simple capitulations to the reality that the ultimate determinant of policy is the ongoing profitability of capital.

If the free school meals were deemed to be too expensive relative to the benefits and profits accruing to the capitalist class, then heavy political pressure would be added to the situation to reform the scheme. Were a Scottish Parliament to make a fight of it, then capitalists would use their capacity to disinvest in Scotland, as they would anywhere else, to go in search of better profits. That is, the limit of any reforms we could win for ourselves on the basis of the capitalist system will always be circumscribed by the need to keep the capitalist system functioning.

Of course, the SSP could fight to form an executive outright and use control of the political machinery to resist the encroachment of capital trying to claw back any costs of running the school dinners scheme. The net result of that, though, is that after going to all that time and effort, they would simply have succeeded in resuming the class struggle as before, only in the domain of the state, rather than in the workplace. Further, they would have gone to all that effort to fight for the crumbs, when by the very same means they could have put an end to the capitalist system itself.

Our objection to reformism is, then, that by ignoring the essence of class, it throws blood, sweat and tears into battles that will be undermined by the workings of the wages system. All that effort, skill, energy, all those tools could be turned against class society, to create a society of common interest where we can make changes for our common mutual benefit. So long as class exists, any gains will be partial and fleeting, subject to the ongoing struggle.

Socialists understand well the urge to do something now, to make a change. That makes us all the more determined, however, to get the message across, to gather our fellows to clear away the barrier of the wages system, so that we can begin to build a truly human society, in which children aren't given a share in a wage-slave's ration – whether at home or at school – but instead receive all the food they need without having to pay. In the face of such potential, why waste time fighting for half measures?

Pik Smeet

SSP Tames Capitalism!

From the Socialist Courier blog

Reformist political parties in opposition always claim how much better everything would be if only they were in power and the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) is no exception.

One of their policy documents tells us they would provide free public transport and that this, on it's own, would bring fabulous benefits in just about every area of life.

Everything would be better: the NHS, the environment, the economy, business efficiency, productivity, road safety, more tourists, etc. On top of all this there would be savings of many millions, even billions, of pounds, giving us all more spending power as well as big savings for businesses.

And how is all this to be achieved? By two old leftist illusions; taxing the rich and nationalisation (disguised as public or social ownership). Apparently, nationalisation would be more efficient and cheaper, despite the evidence of past experience, and taxing the rich must mean that we'll still have them. The source of their riches is the surplus value wrung from the working class but the SSP seem not to have noticed this.

We are grateful that the word "socialism" isn't mentioned once in this document because its contents have nothing whatever to do with socialism. The SSP's aim is really just the same as all the other reformist parties - they try to solve capitalism's problems by merely re-organising it. If all their proposed reforms were adopted - nationalisation, the multitude of changes in the tax system, defence budget cuts, etc., we'd still be living in a money-driven, buying and selling economy, still working for wages and salaries, still insecure, being hired and fired, in short, in capitalism.

Free transport for all can really only be achieved in a worldwide, moneyless, production for use society in which ALL goods and services would be freely available to everyone. That's what genuine socialists campaign for and what the SSP NEVER does.

Vic Vanni