Fascism and Ignorance (1962)

Editorial from the September 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Once again, there is a demand that the Fascists in this country should be legally banned. This demand comes most strongly from what we can loosely call the Left Wing. A legal ban was their answer to the Fascists before the last war; they are, it seems, always wanting to ban something. It is no surprise that, as soon as the Fascists come in for some unnecessary publicity, the Left turn their attention momentarily from the bomb to the Blackshirts.

It is easy to see why the Left Wing, which mistakenly regards itself as consisting of democratic socialists, is so often eager to try to ban some other organisation's ideas. They have always firmly embraced the idea of leadership, by which they mean leadership of the working class to some vaguely defined destination by some dubiously knowledgeable Left Wing politicians.

An essential of the leadership theory is the political ignorance of the unlucky people who are to be led. Leadership, in fact could not exist without blind and ignorant followers. The followers, reason the leaders, cannot be trusted to resist the temptations of race hate and totalitarianism. It is a waste of time to try to educate them. Like children who are kept away from a case of chicken-pox, the working class must be quarantined from the infection of fascist ideas.

Like any other favourite Left Wing theory, this one starts off on the wrong foot and never recovers from it. The working class do not need any more leaders to decide what ideas they may and may not come into contact with. Capitalism is full of leaders, pulling this way and that and all achieving nothing towards the solution of our problems. It is high time for the working class to wake up from their slumbers.

It is high time for them to get some knowledge of capitalism. They need to know how capitalism works. Why it breeds ugly and destructive ideas like Fascism. Why it can never solve its own problems. Why its leaders are powerless to staunch its course.

This need is as great today as ever. Racist theories, with their vicious fallacies, are as active in the world as ever. In other fields there is the same depressing story. The endless saga of the test ban negotiations drags on, with both sides making offers which are transparently insincere. The disarmament conference has dissolved again in the usual muddle and exasperation. There is an excuse for anyone who thinks that capitalism is efficient only when it is being destructive.

There are other examples of the unpleasant prospect with which capitalism faces us. Whoever climbs into leadership, and whatever ideas they may try to proscribe, will make no difference. Capitalism will keep producing the evidence of its own contradictions and inhumanities.

There is only one way of cutting through the confusion. The future of society rests in the hands of the people who make it and organise it. The working class of the world can decide whether the waste and destruction of capitalism shall continue.

At the moment ignorance is in charge and capitalism rolls on. But when the working class have woken up, when they have realised that false ideas can only be answered with knowledge, when they have decided that they do not need leaders to run their lives and their ideas for them, capitalism will stop rolling. For the working class will also have realised that Socialism is the answer to the problems of property society.

Who wants an Income Policy? (1962)

From the September 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anyone who reads newspapers, listens to radio or looks in on TV, must be aware that there is supposed to be a thing called incomes policy and that it is most important. It is not, in the main, spoken of as something anyone actually knows or has, but as something we ought to have, and all good citizens are looking for. Some unofficial seekers claim to have found it. The Prime Minister, with more modesty or more caution, is setting up the National Incomes Commission to operate the as yet undefined policy, though the TUC has, in advance, rejected the Commission as “both irrelevant to the nation's needs and unworkable in practice."

Mr. Macmillan, addressing a Conservative rally at Luton Hoo towards the end of June, had told them about “ two great policies” he has for putting this country on the right road. The first is joining the Common Market. The second, as reported in the Sunday Telegraph on June 24th, “was to find further means, with the general consent of the people, to implement on a continuing basis an incomes policy based on fairness and common sense.” If we find such a policy, said Mr. Macmillan, and successfully applied it, we would “be able to keep our four great objectives, full employment, steady prices, a strong pound and steady growth.”

With the promise of fairness and common sense as its foundation, and so many nice things flowing from it, how could anyone not accept Mr. Macmillan's N.I.C.? But the truth is that when the TUC slashed the Commission on the ground that it is the Government’s device for restricting wages, they were echoing the thoughts most workers have when their own wage claims are being met with arguments about "putting the national interest first.” They think, with good reason, that it is to help profit.

Yet, despite its refusal to participate in NIC, the TUC (and the Labour Party) agrees that in principle there must be an incomes policy: only Socialists take another view.

People and unions and political parties have been arguing about an incomes policy and trying to frame one that would satisfy everybody, for a century and more. The ideas of the Unions have been rather restricted, going no deeper, for most members of each Union, than the belief that they at least ought to have higher wages even if the claims of the rest of the workers were a bit thin. The Unions found one slogan they could all agree upon: “A Fair Day’s Work for a Fair Day's Pay.” They and Mr. Macmillan both have a liking for that word fair. But, as the late Dr. Joad would have said, it all depends on what you mean by fair—such a comfortable word and so completely lacking in any meaning substantial enough to be got hold of. How can there be “fairness” between wages to workers who produce all wealth, and property incomes to non-workers?

Others, who thought a little more deeply about the question of incomes, discovered that it is impossible to justify the incomes we see being paid and received, on grounds of logic, humanity, or the moral tenets of “just reward” that are supposed to govern the world of work and which in fact have no influence whatever. So, a number of people totally rejected inequality of income and decided that there should be universal equality. Among these people may be named the late G. B. Shaw and the Labour Prime Minister, Lord Attlee, who were writing  on these lines thirty years ago. What they meant, and what the leaders of the  Russian Communist Party meant when they promised equality in Russia in 1918,  was that there should be only one rate of income all-round, with no, or at most, only small variations. There would in fact be one standard of living for everybody. Socialists were not surprised that both in this country under Labour Government and in Russia under the Communist Party, equality never happened. It never had the slightest chance of happening, for the good and sufficient reason that you cannot retain capitalism yet hope to impose on it an abstract conception of equality which was quite alien to it.

In the very early days of British capitalism there were individuals, Jeremy Bentham was one, who thought that that society was moving towards equalitarianism under its own momentum. We have seen how wrong they were. Inequality of accumulated wealth and property-income grew apace while Bentham was expecting the reverse, and once a high degree of inequality was reached it has remained, not at all affected by reforms supposed to end or at least to mitigate it. And with the growth of bigger and bigger companies and combines inequality has strengthened its hold, so much so that demands for equality are hardly heard any more.

But Socialists are still aiming at Socialism; which does not mean equal incomes, but the introduction of the only possible distribution principle for a Socialist social system—” From each according to his ability; to each according to his need,” and this, of course, involves the end of wages and salaries as well as the end of rent, interest and profit. As Marx told trade unionists back in the 19th century, they should scrap their slogan, “A Fair Day’s Work for a Fair Day’s Pay,” and put in its place the abolition of the wages system.

Edgar Hardcastle

News in Review: Nuclear Shelters (1962)

The News in Review column from the September 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nuclear Shelters

This bit in the Observer it slays us all, it's so funny. Listen, it's about a retired army general and he's living in East Devon, so you know that something real humorous is coming up.

This general, he's got the bug about nuclear war. He’s even written a book about survival after they've dropped the H-bomb. Written it for the people of East Devon. Doesn't that make you laugh?

Listen, there’s more. He wants us to keep water in vinegar bottles. Non-returnable ones, of course—there's nothing dishonest about the general. Then he says we should fill up bits of furniture with earth. Yes, furniture. Fill them up and make a dug-out from them.

By now we're rolling on the floor.

Then we stop rolling because we've suddenly asked ourselves why. And this bit in the Observer it says the general's written this book because he knows that most people can't afford an expensive shelter against nuclear bombs.

So we stop laughing. And we wonder.

We wonder at a world which has built itself bombs which are powerful enough to wipe out whole cities—even whole countries. A world where most people can't even afford to get themselves a decent shelter against fall-out.

So maybe that general guy's nuts, filling his sideboard with earth. So maybe he’s only a little bit of a world that’s so crazy it's got its priorities and its motives right upside down.

So maybe the people of the world are crazy. They accept all this and they keep the whole show running, don’t they? And aren't they the ones to stop it all?

Hey there, Napoleon. Shake hands with the general.

Independent Jamaica

The short-lived West Indies Federation was regarded by some people as a great advance for the West Indian worker. They ignored the fact that capitalism would work on the Federation just as it works on the world outside.

Sure enough, it was a dispute over which territory should hold the economic and political reins which broke the Federation. When that happened it seemed fairly obvious that the richer and more powerful islands would go for their independence alone.

Now Jamaica is an independent state, born with all the barney of bands and festivals and speeches. Inevitably, God has been recruited to the side of capitalist independence. There was a thanksgiving service to mark the occasion in Westminster Abbey.

So Jamaica is free now to make her own way in capitalism's dangerous seas. All the familiar problems of property society will harass her government. They must struggle to safeguard her markets for bauxite, tobacco, rum, sugar and bananas. They must build up the island's armed forces, in case some other power threatens Jamaica's economic interests.

And they must sell all this to the Jamaican worker, who will vote them in and out of power under their new constitution. The island is notorious for its poverty, its slums and its diseases of malnutrition. That is why so many of its people come to seek what they hope will be a better life as a wage-slave in Britain —although this did not prevent them celebrating the independence of the island which gave them so miserable an existence.

Up to now the nationalists could easily blame the troubles of the Jamaican workers upon the shortcomings of British rule. It should soon become obvious that this was worth no more than any other vote-catching nonsense and that the problems cannot be cured by replacing British masters with Jamaican.

This will be a moment of truth for Jamaica.

If the new government is anything like the other capitalist administrations all over the world they will face it with lies, evasion and sometimes suppression.

Thalidomide Babies

It is not enough merely to say that the thalidomide babies are an awful tragedy. It is not enough, even, to help these tragic mites with artificial limbs and patient training.

We should be asking ourselves why so harmful a drug was so freely administered; why so many sedatives, stimulates, tranquilisers and the like are dished out in such quantities.

Pregnant women, like many sick people, often have trouble with their sleep. Sometimes this is a straightforward inability to drop off and in such cases there is a case for using a sedative. But in many cases it is only a difficulty in sleeping at the same time as the rest of us, whose sleeping and waking times are geared to the requirements of working class existence.

This difficulty need not be serious enough to need a sedative. The expectant mother can simply sleep during the day, or whenever else she feels the need.

But what if she, too, is tied to the regularity of working class life? What if she has to go out to work to help keep up the payments on a mortgage or on a hire-purchase buy? What if she has other children and, like all working class wives, cannot afford a nurse to look after them?

This is where the sedatives come in.

It is easier to give the patient a dose of something than to get to the root of her trouble. The handier to use, the easier to administer, the briefer its side-effects, the more popular the sedative becomes and the more freely it is given.

And that is where thalidomide came in.

Is there a lesson in this for us?

Whatever the truth of the controversy over drugs and medicines, of one thing we can be sure. The question should be settled in terms of human interests. But as long as capitalism lasts this will never happen.

A Tale of Two Simpletons: Good man gone wrong (1962)

From the September 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nothing so sharply divides the Socialist from the non-Socialist as the recognition that the world needs a different social structure—not just different men or different political parties to administer capitalism, but deliberate understanding action by the working class to replace the existing social system by a Socialist one. The extent to which this is appreciated is a measure of political maturity. Those who are politically quite immature believe the opposite. They believe that if they have “good” men to lead them these men can purify capitalism, solve its insoluble problems, rid it of unemployment, poverty and war. etc. Experience proves this to be unfounded. Politicians with no mandate to establish Socialism do not, when they become the government, have the power to impose their good intentions on capitalism. Instead, they are in its clutches; of necessity the Labour Government which had preached disarmament, peace and high wages in practice rearmed, supported war and tried to impose a wage-freeze. They end by being hardly distinguishable from the avowed. supporters of capitalism.

A curious by-product of this situation is the emergence of critics of the Labour Party, many of them claiming to be pacifists. who take a dim view of British capitalism and its supporters but fancy that foreign representatives of capitalism are somehow different; the Reverend Donald Soper, for example. He sees the world of politics, at least outside of this country, in terms of good men and bad men. and is blind to the fact that capitalism takes no notice of such distinctions. But time digs its pitfalls for the Sopers of this world: the “good" men turn out to be “bad” after all.

Soper in his weekly article in Tribune dealt on July. 27th with “Mosley, Nasser and the Jews." His argument was that anti-Jewish propaganda in this country is of little significance compared with the menace of Colonel Nasser, Egypt's dictator:

   What is much more threatening and unmanageable is the anti-Semitism contained in Nasser's speeches last week-end in Cairo—particularly as this outburst in words coincides with the launching of Egyptian rockets for the first time. I find the following quotations almost appalling. He pledged himself to liberate Palestine from Israel. This is frightening enough in all conscience, but at least he has been saying this all along. He went on to hint that Egypt's rocket arsenal was being built up for this express purpose.

Soper fears that Nasser is bent on a war of conquest with his new rockets, and Soper wants him to be stopped. It would be too much to expect Soper to see that only the abolition of capitalism will stop Egypt, Israel, America, Nasser, Britain and the rest of the capitalist powers from waging war; instead, he puts his trust in the farcical notion of “a system of international law which could restrain men like Nasser."

But to come back to the question of Soper's childish politics, why on earth should Soper want Nasser to be stopped, for we have it on the authority of Soper that Nasser is a “good” man, one who ought to be encouraged.

Speaking at Caxton Hall on August 14th, 1956, Soper had this to say:

   The third and last thing I want to say, because it is my purpose tonight rather to testify from the Christian standpoint, and to say something on behalf, I am sure, of thousands of Christian people who are inarticulate, whatever the other dignitaries of the church may or may not say—I want to say in the name of Christianity that this Nasser ought to be encouraged and not be repressed, because I believe the root of the matter in him is good and, because it is good, it is our business to evoke it by corresponding good and not to repress it by threats of violence.

This ought to cure Soper, but it probably won't, and readers who may take comfort in the belief that there cannot be more than one person with Soper's naive approach to the world have to learn that the same week produced another. While Soper is a pacifist who wanted to encourage the Egyptian warlord but has changed his mind and wants him restrained, another sometime supporter of the Labour Party, Ethel Mannin, who describes herself as an "unrepentant pacifist," thinks Nasser should still be encouraged. In a letter to the Daily Telegraph (July 26th), she said she was worried about some things, “notably the indoctrination of the children in a school I visited and which seemed to me Hitlerism,” but "for your information, Sir, my attitude to Nasser's Egypt is one of the utmost goodwill, tempered with anxiety. . . .  But whatever criticisms may be made of President Nasser’s interpretation of Socialism, and his methods of implementing his ideas and ideals, of his sincerity there can be no doubt."

Ethel Mannin describes herself in her letter as “an old campaigner": she. like Soper, appears to be as simple as when she started.

Edgar Hardcastle