Majority Understanding V. Direct Action (1972)

From the September 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

The various public opinion polls are not always a precise guide to what people think and feel, but one thing they establish beyond any question is the very large proportion of the workers who are actively discontented with their conditions of life. No pollster wastes time asking “Are you happy?”; always it is in the form “Which of your many hardships and frustrations upsets you most?” And we welcome the fact that at least the discontented are not generally passive; on the contrary they are impatient to have something done as quickly as possible.

They divide roughly into two groups, the ones who are content to try to change, from within, the leadership and policies of the large political parties and the others, including the so-called left-wing organizations of all kinds, who want to do it themselves and have a go at direct action.

Some of the discontented and disillusioned take a passing glance at the Socialist Party of Great Britain, only — as regards most of them — to write us off as too slow, too theoretical, too narrow, too “unrevolutionary”. Why, they ask, don’t we unite with “the other socialist bodies” to speed the revolution by political strikes, demos, riots, bomb-throwing or guerrilla action, whichever happens to be their favourite tactic? Why, they ask, does the Socialist Party of Great Britain refuse to recognize the achievement of Socialism in Russia, China, Cuba, etc. and stand aside theorizing, while the real battle is being fought by the “revolutionaries”?

The first point to get clear is what constitutes being revolutionary. The Socialist Party of Great Britain is a revolutionary organization because its object is to bring about a complete, revolutionary, change in the structure of society, to replace capitalism by Socialism. Action to bring about changes of the law within capitalism, or to get higher wages, is not revolutionary, and trying to achieve these changes by violence or lawbreaking does not thereby become revolutionary. It is not true that the Socialist Party of Great Britain is just one of a number of organizations having Socialism as their aim, and that what divides us from them is the question of method. Our aim of a socialist system is not their aim. This is not any the less true because some of them carry as a mere piece of decoration the aim of an ultimate socialist objective, which however in no way guides their policies and tactics and will never be achieved by the activities they carry on. Our aim is Socialism, not state capitalism or the reform of capitalism; and we do not want, either in the long or the short term, to see workers wasting time and energy on electing Labour governments to run capitalism or Communist governments to pursue the dead end of a Russian state capitalist system.

Our case is that the problems of the working class — poverty, exploitation, unemployment, wars, etc. — from which the working class suffers in all countries in the world without exception, cannot be solved either by peaceful reformism or by violent direct action, and that the revolutionary principles of the Socialist Party of Great Britain are the only way to achieve the socialist solution.

For us the end and the means are in harmony. The future socialist system of society embodying common ownership and democratic control, and operating in the interests of the whole community, will require the understanding and co-operation of the great mass of the population: Socialism cannot be imposed from above. Even if therefore it were theoretically possible for a minority favouring Socialism to come to power, it would be quite unable to introduce Socialism.

It follows therefore that the paramount need before Socialism becomes a practical possibility is that the great majority of the working class must be won over to an understanding of capitalism and Socialism. This is the task facing the socialist movement, a task totally ignored by the reformist and direct-action movements. Their defence has always been that propagating Socialism is useless because the working class cannot understand it. How would they know — for they have never tried? In greater or less degree they all share Lenin’s contemptuous attitude towards the workers’ ability to understand, as reported by John Reed:

If socialism can only be realised when the intellectual development of all the people permits it, then we shall not see socialism for at least five hundred years.

In place of working-class understanding they offer inspired guidance by the leader of the "intellectual minority”, which in practice degenerates into wrangling and feuding about who is the proper leader and how to counteract betrayal by the chosen ones. Their demand is for "good leaders”: ours is for the understanding in which leaders play no part.

When the Socialist Party of Great Britain was formed it was recognized that, as Engels wrote in the Preface to Marx’s Class Struggles in France, "So that the masses may understand what is to be done, long and persistent work is required”. It has been a longer task than Engels or the Socialist Party anticipated, but there is no other way, there are no short cuts. When that task has been completed the socialist working class needs to gain control of the machinery of government, including the armed forces, in order to take away from the capitalist class and their agents the power to dominate society, and thus to clear the way for Socialism.

Having said this, we meet the argument of the defeatists who say: Suppose the capitalists or some minority of them or some military group refused to relinquish their hold — would this not prove the weakness of the Socialist Party argument? In their support they point to examples of ruling-class groups who have in fact defied civil authorities and parliamentary majorities. Their supposed evidence is utterly irrelevant. We are relying on an internationally united working class, something which has never yet been in the world or any part of the world. When the world working class is overwhelmingly socialist, socialists will predominate or at least be in a position of strength throughout capitalist production, distribution and administration, not excluding the armed forces — in the factories and workshops, in transport and communications, in the trade unions, in the government and local-government services. In such a situation any attempt to thwart the will of society would at worst be a nuisance, a futile gesture, not a serious impediment.

It is not the Socialist who is being foolish in seeking to gain democratic control of the machinery of government and the armed forces, but the advocates of direct action. They first tell the workers to place in power political parties like the Labour Party which use their governmental position to perpetuate capitalism, and then tell the workers to take direct action against that government and the armed forces it controls. Even within the narrow framework of their reformist aims the "left wingers” who advocate violence and direct action are short-sighted. History is full of examples of reactionary governments capitalizing on violence and disorder (even on occasion using agents provocateurs to promote it) by proclaiming themselves the protectors of “law and order” and thereby winning the support of sections of the electorate which would otherwise not give much support.

One last word on the discontent about the hardships and evils of modern capitalism. Efforts to improve capitalism either by peaceful reform or by direct action are not new. The present discontents come after a hundred years of such activities. These activities were supposed to remove the evils — from war to unemployment, from poverty to bad housing, from overwork to high prices. Hundreds of struggles have been fought, hundreds of reform measures have been put in the statute books, hundreds of demonstrations for peace and disarmament conferences have been held — and not one of the evils has been removed. In effect we are being asked to waste another hundred years on more of the same.

Correcting Lenin we may say that unless the working class throw overboard their faith in reforms, with or without direct action, and their trust in leadership, and turn their minds to understanding Socialism, capitalism and its discontents will still be with us in five hundred years — unless before then war pushes us back into a new dark age.

Edgar Hardcastle

The Five Jailed Dockers (1972)

From the September 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

The dockers are worried about their jobs, or rather about the drop in standard of living they will suffer if they lose them. Since 1967 the number of dockers has fallen by a third, from 60,000 to 40,000, mainly as a result of the so-called container revolution. One aspect of this problem has been that much container work, even in dock areas, has been done by workers other than dockers, some non-union, some members of other unions, but all generally at lower wages.

It is the policy of the dockers’ unions, the Transport and General Workers Union and the rival National Amalgamated Stevedores and Dockers (expelled from the TUC in 1959 for “poaching” TGWU members), that the work should be done by dockers, at dockers’ wages. To this end, the dockers have taken various forms of industrial action, official and unofficial, legal and illegal, from blacking container firms to a national docks strike.

A number of the blacked container firms took the TGWU and some of the shop stewards (from both unions) to the National Industrial Relations Court complaining that the blacking was an “unfair industrial practice”. The Court agreed : the TGWU was fined at least £55,000 and, eventually, five dockers sent to prison for “contempt of Court”.

The reaction to the jailings shows that working-class, or at least trade-union, solidarity still exists. Besides other dockers, thousands of newspaper workers, miners, train drivers and others (including those at the blacked Midland Cold Storage depot) stopped work. Such was the pressure that even the TUC would have called a one-day general strike of all its ten million members if the five dockers hadn’t been released, an unprecedentedly during move from the Knights of Congress House. And of course they were released, obviously as a result of this working-class resistance. The government itself may not have directly influenced the Courts, but the workers on strike did. The House of Lords and NIRC were left with no alternative but to hurriedly concoct some legal excuse for letting the men out.

This was a successful defensive action by the working class and one which the Socialist Party of Great Britain welcomes just as we would have supported the one-day TUC general strike. Not of course that we share the romantic illusions of those who thought that such a strike might have been the beginning of “the revolution”, but because experience has shown that, on occasions such as this was, a general strike can be a useful weapon to defend the interests of the working class within capitalism. The Industrial Relations Act was designed to make working-class industrial action in defence of wages and working conditions less effective, so it is in the interest of the working class to try to make the Act itself ineffective.

This said, there is one reservation we must make, from a Socialist and working-class point of view, about the dockers’ activities. Their struggle had a sectional aspect in that they were pushing their interests as one section of the working class not just against employers but against another section of the working class. For their demand that container work should be done by dockers is a demand that it should not be done by those now doing it. This at least was how it was seen by the workers at Midland Cold Storage, all members of the TUC-affiliated Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers (USDAW). In a leaflet dated 10 July and issued to lorry drivers they declared:

“We are entitled to defend jobs that are ours. The dockers want our jobs and with your help are prepared to close down our firm. Why? The work we do is no different to that done in the many Cold Stores throughout the country.. We are not blacklegs — we are ordinary working men and we want our jobs. Dockers who picket our Depot have no greater claim to work available in a community. If they have, is your job really safe?”

It is because we as Socialists stand for the interests of the working class as a whole that we cannot take sides in such inter-union or inter-worker disputes and cannot endorse the dockers’ campaign.

Their action in picketing places such as Midland Cold Storage, though understandable (as is the reaction of the USDAW members employed there), illustrates one of the limitations of trade unionism. Trade unions, as the very word suggests, represent not the working class but just sections of it, their members, and in pursuit of the legitimate aim of protecting their members’ standard of living often emphasise, and exaggerate, the sectional divisions within the working class. This the Socialist Party does not support.

Needless to say, the concern expressed for the other workers by their employers and Mr. Heath was so much hypocrisy. The former were concerned rather with not having to pay dockers’ wage rates and Mr. Heath with saving his anti-working class Industrial Relations Act. Some of the older dockers may also have seen as hypocritical too the support expressed by the Labour Party for the five jailed men. They may have recalled the occasion in 1951 when a Labour Attorney General, acting on the instructions of a Labour cabinet which included Mr. Wilson, prosecuted some dockers for breaking an anti-strike order, also unsuccessfully as it turned out.

So, while the solidarity strikes to get the dockers released demonstrated the usefulness of trade unionism for the working class, the pickets and counter-pickets at the docks demonstrated the opposite: its tendency to divide the working class by sections rather than to unite them as a class. Working class unity, which is indispensable if capitalism is to be ended and replaced by Socialism, is a task for a political, not the industrial, organisation of the working class. To this end the Socialist Party of Great Britain exists and we appeal to all workers to join our struggle so that the system which forces them to engage in these degrading squabbles for jobs can be quickly abolished.

Background to Northern Ireland: "A Protestant Government" (1972)

From the September 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Ulster Unionists weren’t too happy about the 1920 Government of Ireland Act for, although it provided for Partition, it clearly intended that this should be only temporary. Fortunately for them the Republicans in the South didn’t think much of it either and stood by their January 1919 Declaration of Independence under which an all-Ireland Republican government had purportedly been set up. The 1921 Treaty which ended the resulting Anglo-Irish War made Partition likely to be much more permanent than originally intended and the Ulster Unionists settled down to govern their own six-county statelet.

The Belfast parliament was not just a glorified county council. It had some real political power since it had at its disposal armed force: the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), a para-military police force along the lines of the old Royal Irish Constabulary which had been set up in the 19th Century to help hold down the Irish peasantry. This was soon supplemented by a much larger force of part-time auxiliary policemen, also armed and all Protestants (the RUC at least had some Catholic members), called B Specials.

The Belfast parliament also had the power to legislate on law and order in the six counties and one of their first measures was to pass the Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act of 1922. This notorious Act, which was renewed annually for some years before being made permanent, allowed the government to detain people and intern them without trial, to ban meetings and newspapers and — the clause one South African Prime Minister said he’d scrap all his own repressive legislation for — arrest a person who does anything “calculated to be prejudicial to the preservation of peace or maintenance of order in Northern Ireland and not specifically provided for in the regulations”. The immediate political problem which faced the new Unionist government was that a third of its subjects — the Nationalist, Catholic minority — were opposed, sometimes violently, to its very existence and would have preferred to be governed by the newly-established Southern Irish ruling class in Dublin. They had to be subdued — by terror and intimidation. Already in 1920 there had been a vicious anti-Catholic pogrom in Belfast, when Catholic workers were driven out of the shipyards, their homes burned and their wives and children sent fleeing South. In other parts too of the about-to-be-established “Northern Ireland” Catholics were driven across what was soon to be the Border. After Partition the B Specials and the Special Powers Act were to be the permanent weapons of anti-Nationalist, anti-Catholic intimidation.

But not even this was a sufficient guarantee to the Belfast capitalists and their politicians in the Unionist party that some day by some means the Northern Nationalists might not succeed in re-uniting Ireland — behind the dreaded tariff walls. The normal rules of political democracy had to be set aside. Before Partition the British government had introduced proportional representation in Ireland, first for local and then for general elections. The Ulster Unionists never liked this for the very reason that it would give the Northern Nationalists representation in proportion to their numbers! They resolved to abolish it at the first opportunity, and did — in 1923 for local elections and in 1929 for general elections. This paved the way for the further gerrymandering of local council boundaries, particularly in areas with Nationalist majorities such as the town of Londonderry and the counties of Fermanagh and Tyrone. Derry was the most notorious example: here a two-thirds Nationalist majority among the electorate was turned into a two-thirds Unionist majority on the council. This was not only because Derry had an important role in Orange mythology, but also — and more importantly — because it was the centre of the Ulster shirt-making industry which, like Belfast heavy industry, was geared to Britain and its export markets. In fact at the time of the 1924 Boundary Commission the Derry shirt manufacturers specifically argued against being transferred to the Free State on the grounds that this would cut them off from markets behind possible Irish tariff walls.

From some points of view Northern Ireland itself was one big gerrymander. The Belfast capitalists were primarily concerned with keeping the link between industrialized East Ulster and Britain, but were prepared to take in other areas so long as they had a Unionist, Protestant majority. The full nine counties of Ulster had a slight Nationalist, Catholic majority which was obviously unacceptable. But once Donegal, Monaghan and Cavan had been conceded to the Free State the Unionists had a two-thirds majority in the remaining six counties, despite the fact that Fermanagh and Tyrone too had Nationalist majorities.

So, right from the start, Northern Ireland was corrupt from a democratic point of view. Not that the Unionist politicians who ruled continuously from 1921 ever bothered to pretend otherwise until a few years ago. Lord Craigavon, its first Prime Minister (who as James Craig had before the war been a leader of the planned Ulster Provisional Government with its armed UVF), openly declared in 1932, “Ours is a Protestant government”, and in July 1934 told the Belfast parliament, “We are a Protestant parliament and a Protestant State” (quoted in Divided Ulster by Liam De Paor).

Such sentiments were repeated by subsequent Northern Ireland Prime Ministers including Lord Brookeborough, the man who once boasted that he did not “have a Roman Catholic about my own place” and who remained Prime Minister until 1963.

One of the reforms introduced in Britain after the second world war was “one man, one vote” in local council elections. Previously only ratepayers and their wives had been able to vote while under certain circumstances a businessman could have more than one vote. The Ulster Unionist government in Northern Ireland chose not to implement this reform for the crude reason that it would have enfranchised more Nationalists than Unionists. It was estimated that this left at least a quarter of adult men and women without a vote in local elections.

Local councils also had other opportunities to discriminate against Nationalists and Catholics. Certain jobs and houses were reserved for Protestants and particularly for supporters of the Unionist party.

The Catholic minority gave its political support to the reactionary and clerical-dominated Nationalist party who were often known as “Green Tories” and, in Belfast and one or two other towns, to various Labour parties — “Irish Labour”, “Republican Labour” and even on occasions “Northern Ireland Labour”. The Nationalist party lost much of its support at the 1969 Northern Ireland general election to various Civil Rights and Labour candidates who later formed the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), at the moment the main political party supported by the Catholic minority.

The Unionists retained the support of the Protestant workers and small farmers by continuing to stir up sectarian hatreds and fears. It was a measure of the backwardness of politics there that “REMEMBER 1690”, "NOT AN INCH", "NO SURRENDER” and the like were, and still are, powerful political slogans. The Unionists successfully tricked the Protestant workers into believing that there was some special advantage for them in Northern Ireland being part of Britain rather than of Ireland. The Protestant worker came to believe that he was privileged as compared with his Catholic fellow worker and that any extension of civil rights to the Catholics would be a threat to his supposed privileges. This was a great illusion, but one which has retained mass Protestant working class support for the Unionist party, the Northern Ireland counterpart of the British Tories. The average Protestant worker has never even advanced to the limited-enough trade union and reformist consciousness represented by support for a Labour party. The Northern Ireland Labour Party, despite protestations of loyalty to the Crown and even of support for the Special Powers Act, has always remained a small minority party.

The Protestant worker never has been in any privileged position. He has always suffered from the working-class problems of poverty, slums and unemployment. And indeed it was only because of this that Unionist local councils were able to bribe a few of them with the occasional job or house in preference to a Catholic worker. One of the more pathetic Northern Ireland scenes has always been to see on the twelfth of July the Protestant slums of Belfast adorned with the unintentionally ironic banner, “THIS WE WILL MAINTAIN”.

The trade union movement in Northern Ireland is largely an extension of that of the rest of Britain and is the one mass organisation which unites both Protestants and Catholics, though there are two “transport and general workers’ unions” in the docks, one Protestant, the other Catholic. As in the South trade unions suffered more legal restrictions than in Britain, at least until the recent Industrial Relations Act. This Act does not apply to Northern Ireland (so making here, somewhat ironically, the part of the whole British Isles with the least restrictive trade union laws), but the 1927 Trades Disputes Act passed as a punitive measure after the British General Strike still applies and on one occasion the Special Powers Act was used against trade unionists. The main effect of this Act has been to make trade unionists who want to pay the political levy to finance the pro-capitalist Labour Party “contract in” (but Socialists don’t object to this since it is more democratic than the British system whereby those who don’t want to finance the Labour Party have to “contract out”).

This situation — where a corrupt Unionist clique ruled continuously by lies and threats and, despite having majority support, undemocratic practices — was accepted by successive Westminster governments, Labour as well as Conservative, until the whole system began to break down in 1968 and 1969.

As long as the Southern Ireland government pursued a protectionist policy the demand for a United Ireland, which most Catholics in the North supported, really was a threat to the material interests of the Belfast capitalists. Accordingly, those interests demanded that the Unionists continue to stir up sectarianism as a means of retaining mass support for Union with the British market. But when, from about 1960 onwards, the Southern Ireland government finally abandoned protection and sought, and eventually got, free trade with Britain (including Northern Ireland), the Irish Nationalism of the Catholic minority was not such a threat and the way was open for more friendly relations between Belfast and Dublin. This change was symbolized by the resignation in 1959 of De Valera as Prime Minister and his later election as figure-head President of the Irish Republic and the resignation in 1963 of Lord Brookeborough as Prime Minister of Northern Ireland.

De Valera’s successor, Lemass, began to speak of the North as “Northern Ireland” instead of the previously obligatory “Six Counties”, thus conceding it a certain amount of legitimacy. In the North the Nationalist MPs agreed to become “her majesty’s” official opposition and Brookeborough’s successor, O’Neill, authorised flags on official buildings to fly at half-mast on the death of Pope John in June 1963, a startling sight in a city like Belfast where the slum walls were daubed with the slogan “NO POPE HERE”. In January 1965 Lemass travelled secretly to meet O’Neill in Belfast; the following month O’Neill slipped off to Dublin. In December the Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement was signed. It appeared that the future held out the gradual disappearance of the sectarian bitterness which had been a feature of Northern Ireland political life since the 1880’s, a hope seemingly confirmed by the failure of the 1956-62 IRA campaign against the North because of lack of support from the Catholic minority.

But this was not to be. The Unionist government could now without danger have abandoned its corrupt and undemocratic practices and O’Neill — the first Northern Ireland Prime Minister not to claim to be governing a Protestant State for a Protestant People — did urge this. But it was no easy task for the Unionist political machine to suddenly turn off the hatreds it had assiduously cultivated for the previous eighty years. In fact nearly every prominent figure in Northern Ireland life — judges and Church leaders as well as politicians — is on record as saying, not so very long ago, what the Rev. Ian Paisley now says.

When a Civil Rights movement arose to demand the end of the various corrupt and undemocratic practices — the gerrymandering, the restricted franchise, discrimination over housing and jobs, the B Specials and the Special Powers Act — the Unionist government, with present Ulster Vanguard leader William Craig as Home Affairs Minister, reacted as it had done towards all previous opposition movements supported by Catholics: it saw it as a threat to the existence of the Unionist statelet, as a Republican plot to be ruthlessly crushed. It was a fatal mistake which within four years led to the overthrow, by a British Tory government, of fifty years of Unionist rule in Northern Ireland. In any event, almost the whole Civil Rights programme — with the exception of the repeal of the Special Powers Act, but even this would probably have been replaced by something less comprehensive but just as effective had not war broken out between the Provisional IRA and the British Army in February 1971 — had already been conceded. In fact the franchise in Northern Ireland is now wider than in the Republic: it gives votes at 18 while the South still sticks to 21.

So Northern Ireland too is now back where it was before the first world war: ruled directly from Britain. The fifty-year stretch of Ulster Unionist rule over the six counties of North-East Ireland stands out as an episode in the development of capitalism in Ireland, as a means of preventing the Belfast capitalists from having been cut off from the rest of industrial Britain behind the tariff walls of an agricultural Ireland. The fear of the effect this would have had on profits has been the material basis of Belfast’s steadfast Unionism and "Loyalty”. The Unionists, as the saying puts it, were basically more loyal to the half-crown than the Crown.

Adam Buick

For an exposure of the Southern Irish Capitalist Republic see last month’s issue.

Make-Believe Revolutionaries: Two Case-Histories of Direct Action (1972)

From the September 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

A commonplace response to the Socialist case, by people who find it unanswerable, is that it is “all right in theory”. The implication is that there is something separate from and superior to theories, called Practice. This is, to start with, a misunderstanding of the nature of theory. Theory does not precede or stand apart from practice: on the contrary, it is the conclusion from practice — from what has happened and what is observed.

The sort of Practice implied, therefore, is action which does not give a hang for the known facts. The practitioners never state it like that, of course; they are Getting Things Done, and Striking a Blow for this or that. In recent years its special manifestation has been Direct Action, the doctrine of people taking things into their own hands and launching themselves against the system. Looking at some well-known instances, it is possible to see Practice in practice. Does direct action work?

Squatting

The squatter movement began in 1968, as a venture by the East London Libertarian Group. “Venture” is an accurate enough term: it was preceded by agitations over housing conditions at Coventry Cross, conditions in an unmarried mothers’ home in Walthamstow, and claimants’ grievances at the local Social Security office. For several weeks the squatter campaign consisted of Sunday afternoon visits to examples of inequality in housing. Invited groups of libertarians met without knowing where they would be taken — mystery tours, as a delighted anarchist described them without qualms over the leadership principle.

The general history of the squatter battles at Ilford and derivative episodes elsewhere, when the occupation of empty property began, is well enough known. Demonstration about homelessness became an infection in the Left; the north-west anarchist federation’s bulletin described it as “the highest form of revolutionary activity possible in Britain today”. But in fact the campaign’s first casualty was the proclaimed revolutionary content, the deadest mortality the anarchist slogan “Do it yourself”. For the avowed purpose was to promote direct action among the working class, and it never happened. The families which squatted in empty houses were taken to, installed and defended in them by the libertarian groups. No one did it himself.

Scalps & Souls

The Ilford episode ended in a treaty with the Council, which undertook — on certain conditions — to make condemned houses available for homeless families. The terms re-invoked the original presumption of the mystery tours: they were made not by the house-seekers or by collective decision of the agitators, but by the East London Libertarians’ leader Ron Bailey. Among the conditions was one that the houses where the siege had raged were to be given up, including a house in which a group of libertarians had made their own commune. On their eviction Freedom had a bitter, passionate article headed “The Soul of a Movement”. It was, they felt, as if the Redskin chief had started trading his own braves’ scalps to the white man.

Freedom Press was enthusiastic for squatting, and for the London hippies who occupied buildings in the Drury Lane-Piccadilly area: the “commune of the streets”. In 1969, after successive evictions, some of the hippies went to Freedom, cited the paper’s persistent encouragement of them and pointed out that the Freedom/Express Printers building in Angel Alley, Whitechapel, had empty rooms galore. The building had been acquired and renovated in the previous two years. The Freedom group felt a moral compulsion — they had supported, vindicated, egged-on; so they let the army of hippy squatters in. In the next two weeks, the building was turned to a shambles. Hell’s Angels stood guard, demanding subscriptions from anarchists who went there. The culminating incident was lead-stripping — from the roof above, from the printing works below. Describing it all in an article, the Freedom group asked unhappily: “What were we to do?” The movement’s soul was certainly a soul in torment.

Uncritical Support

At its height, squatting had a great deal of public sympathy. It had the Left and libertarian groups working together; and it illustrated succinctly all their misdirections and failings. “Direct action” failed, in circumstances most favourable to it. Indeed, the term “squatting” was a misnomer, implying people spontaneously taking possession. As has been said, that never happened: “installation” would have been more accurate. Nor is this mere carping. What has to be seen is that the do-it-yourself revolution was a myth, and the reality was a series of simple charitable acts. And today the energy and good intentions of the squatter movement appear to have made useful auxiliaries for local councils in their housing administration and welfare services.

As for the hippy squatters, it may sound ungracious but is true to say they were not homeless people at all. In general, they had homes but chose to be away from them; perhaps with reasons, but that is a different question. Their being on the streets was due chiefly to the demise of the Drury Lane Arts Laboratory, where anyone and everyone kipped. But the Freedom Press dilemma — “What were we to do?” — originated in uncritical support for any semblance of direct action. Otherwise, it would be hard to account for the presence on Freedom’s doorstep of Hell’s Angels, who are the nearest thing to pre-war Fascist youth in Britain today.

Bombs & Bullets

The most recent demonstration of direct action has been the “Angry Brigade” bombings. There is, no doubt, a division between those who would actually have done this kind of thing and those who would not; but there is no doubt either that it had the sympathy of practically all direct-actionists. A pamphlet published shortly before the Old Bailey trial, by the “Stoke Newington Eight Defence Group”, tries hard to suggest that bombs and firearms are now the method of radical activists at large:

The state is also alleging that bombings and shootings claimed by the First of May Group, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the Wild Bunch and Lotta Continua are also part of this conspiracy. In fact just about every single guerrilla action undertaken by groups from very different political areas within the movement over the past four years has been put down to them. The prosecution is attempting to create falsely the image that the political offensive carried out by the movement in the past four years is the work of a very small isolated gang of madmen.

Grand Delusion

What is a “political offensive” in these terms supposed to achieve? The authors of the pamphlet, which is called A Political Statement, assert that the Angry Brigade’s terrorism was an integral part of a working-class uprising:

Being part of their revolution they are sensitive to the needs and desires of that revolution. On January 12th we had a one day strike, we went on huge marches all over the country, we planned strategies for the future and we bombed Robert Carr.

The implication intended is of a massive number of workers united in all those activities. But one has only to ask who are the “we” of the dramatically italicized sentence, and its meaningless ranting is immediately exposed. On January 12, 1971, some trade unionists demonstrated against the Industrial Relations Bill; Left-wing groups distributed leaflets and had euphoric syndicalist dreams; and, in complete dissociation from all of that, a secret handful planted bombs which caused outrage but little harm.

The absurd delusion of a grand “political offensive” is further emphasized in a photograph of Carr’s front door, under the heading “The Minister’s Palace Destroyed”: which is quite untrue. Indeed, if the object of the “bombing and shooting” has been to kill representatives of the State, its incompetence is almost comical. The pamphlet claims at least 107 bombing episodes: not one person was hurt by them, it seems. If, on the other hand, the aim was not to kill but to alarm, that is even more ludicrous. It is reminiscent of the old yarn about the man who, finding his wife in bed with the milkman, went outside and kicked the milkman’s horse. What sort of “offensive” is that?

Serious Questions

Nevertheless, behind the puerile fantasy lie serious political considerations. At a simple everyday level, those most likely to be killed and injured by bombing are not establishment-figures but working men and women; Northern Ireland, to which the pamphlet refers repeatedly, demonstrates this only too well. For all the cant about “we” and “the movement”, bomb-planting is the negation of class-consciousness and democratic practice. Anarchists and direct-actionists may approve of the faits-accomplis, but that does not alter the fact that at the time they had no knowledge or control of what was being done in their name. Early in 1971 when publicity for the Angry Brigade explosions was at its height, the libertarian gossip and speculation were that the bombs were the work of agents-provocateurs with the object of raising public opinion against the Left. So much for “we”!

The knowledge that opinion — and repressive measures — are thus raised is another reason why terrorist tactics should not be supported. The State and the newspapers do not distinguish between “pretend” revolutionaries and real ones: direct action has done great harm to the growth of the Socialist movement. The “political statement” pamphlet complains of these consequences of the actions it is acclaiming:

This is a long hard struggle . . . It will be even more difficult in face of attacks from the political police which have grown enormously in organisation and number in the past year. The fact that there have been so many raids, the fact that they now habitually seize all political documents that they come across in their raids. The fact that innocent brothers and sisters arc locked up, some of them for many years.

Up to recent times anarchists were wont to respond to the traditional accusation of bomb-throwing by saying they had given it up because they had learned that governments did it better. That was at least a realistic view. The “urban guerrilla” and the saboteur may be problems to the state, but there is no question of their being able to match or weaken its armed power. Engels was able to point this out in military detail to would-be insurrectionists in 1895, in his preface to Marx’s Class Struggles in France. Speaking of the German bourgeoisie’s readiness to let rebels engage in physical battle with them, he said: “We are not so stupid.”

The State

The most important question of all, however, is: who are the enemy? Against whom is the “offensive”? The Angry Brigade’s targets were representatives of the State. The “political statement” of their supporters has not a single reference to capitalism, but insists on the state as adversary:

It began when it became clear that the state can and will smash the movement if it feels it can win. The bombings started.

And when he [Heath] talks of civil war, he is talking of a military/political offensive against all who oppose the corporate state.

The Stoke Newington Eight are . . . militants who have been active in the resistance to the corporate state and in the revolutionary movement.

Six years ago anarchists were wearing badges and carrying banners which said: “The state is your enemy”. And it is wrong, wrong, wrong. The deprivations, conflicts and miseries of the world we live in are caused not just by governments but by capitalism. The State’s rôle is to enforce them with the coercive machinery against which direct-actionists stub their toes and knock their heads. What the working class has to do is organize to abolish capitalism — by gaining control of the state machine with conscious intent to that end.

Consciousness

Socialists have no sympathy with those who believe bombs contribute to a social revolution. Of course rage and the desire for reprisal are emotions we have all experienced — who has not felt something like the poet’s “Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough/It isn’t fit for humans now”, or wished to kick-in the huge grinning teeth of some inflated politician? But the futility and self-destructiveness are clear. Indignation becomes constructive only when it is translated to consciousness. The direct-actionist asserts that consciousness can be a result of the act, that to cajole or push people into being hammered by capitalism’s force is to spread comprehension of what it is all about. There is not a shred of evidence that this has ever happened. On the other hand, the evidence provided by case-histories of direct action and terrorism is that they are at least fatuous and at worst horrifyingly pernicious, and always anti-working-class.

The means to change society exist and wait to be used, as Engels went on to say:

The irony of world history turns everything upside down. We, the 'revolutionaries’, the 'rebels’—we are thriving far better on legal methods than on illegal methods and revolt . . . we, under this legality, get firm muscles and rosy cheeks and look like eternal life.

Robert Barltrop

Letter: Rents: To Pay or Not To Pay? (1972)

Letter to the Editors from the September 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Like all other papers of what is known as the "left” you just now devote a good deal of attention to rents. In your February issue for instance there are two articles on the subject. In each of these you mention the 1915 rent controls. But you do not give the reason why the control was imposed in 1915. It was because in Glasgow and other towns in Scotland tenants not only refused to pay the increase but refused to pay any rent at all. As indeed some are doing in Northern Ireland to-day. The government in Westminster was terrified and in great haste passed the Rent Control Act making it illegal to demand increased rents. This of course was a great blow to landlords and they have by one means or another, with the assistance of all governments, been getting round it ever since as described in your first article “Why Rents Must Go Up”.

Unfortunately you have not learnt the lesson, if tenants of council or landlord living accommodation refuse to pay any rent at all or if those who are forced to borrow money to get a place to live in refuse to pay out rent charges no power can force them to do so if they stand united.

Having read your paper for many years I know your normal reply would be "What of it”, even if British workers do not pay capitalism will still exist and people in France, the USSR, China etc. etc. will still be paying rents. True enough but if the British worker can defeat the landlord and money lender in the matter of rents etc., it will not be long before others follow their example. After all you are not against the miners, you say, — “They should have the support of all other workers etc. etc.”

Let us see the SPGB taking up the fight for the workers on the rents issue and advocating "No rents or interest charges for lousy accommodation”.

Tom Braddock

East Preston.

Reply: 

The episode to which our correspondent refers was a consequence of housing shortage after the outbreak of the 1914-1918 war. House-building virtually ceased when the war began, and in the munitions-producing areas the shortage gave a special opportunity for profiteering in rents. In Glasgow, tenants in slum districts refused to pay increased rents and were supported by the militant Clyde workers. The outcry was a principal factor in causing the government to pass the Increase of Rent and Mortgage Interest (War Restrictions) Act, 1915.

It was, as Tom Braddock says, "a great blow to landlords”; this was one of the themes of our article Why Must the Rent Go Up? However, he is assuming that a blow against landlords is a blow against capitalism. In fact, a reduction in so large an item in working-class living costs is extremely welcome to the other sections of the capitalist class. Rent control has remained in force for fifty-seven years because it has helped keep wages down; a free market in rented housing would inevitably mean universal demands for higher wages. The present government and its predecessors have been as frightened of this as Braddock says they were of agitation in 1915, and have made concessions to landlords only because the alternative — already happening — was having large numbers of controlled houses deteriorating into slums.

As for the suggestion that the working class should now refuse altogether to pay rent or mortgage interest, Braddock does not tell us what would be achieved by this. He does not imagine, surely, that every household would then find itself better off by that amount every week? If he does, his reading of the Socialist Standard for many years cannot have been attentive.

Editorial Committee.

This Capitalist World (1972)

From the September 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

How to feed the hungry

Something like 90,000 tons of US chemical-warfare agents have now been employed in the Vietnam war. Seven thousand tons have been CS gas, the remainder herbicides. With the latter, crop cultivations sufficient to feed two million people for a year have been destroyed, and 20,000 square kilometres of forest laid waste.

(New Scientist, 22 June 1972).

Abolishing plenty amidst poverty

Up to two million laying hens may have to be slaughtered in an attempt to solve the present surplus of eggs on the British market.

The National Farmers’ Union has put a plan to the Eggs Authority suggesting that a special slaughter subsidy should be paid to poultry farmers who want to cut down on their hens because they are making a loss. There are 60 million egg-laying hens in the national scheme. 

(The Sunday Telegraph, 30 July, 1972).

Planners' Roulette (1972)

From the September 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the many pipe-dreams of capitalist politicians and economists is to be able to plan the smooth and even growth of national economies without the disruptive cyclical phenomena which have been part and parcel of the system in the past.

Despite Keynes and his economic theories and various pseudo-socialist governments throughout the world, who claimed that they could produce a planned economy from which stop-go (as downturns and upswings in economic activity have come to be known in Britain) would be obviated, the capitalist system is still working in the same way it has always worked. Marx described the various stages of the industrial cycle of capitalism, ranging from a state of stagnation to one of intense activity, over a hundred years ago, and it is a description still valid today.

Even the new pseudo-science of econometrics and the development of data and statistics collection and forecasting techniques have failed to eliminate the anarchy from capitalism. The information merely enables the economists to get some idea when the next downturn in the business cycle will occur, but not to prevent it, as post-war events have clearly shown.

An example of the impossibility of planning capitalism was recently illustrated by a report that a five-year plan drawn up by the budget and economic planning ministry of Italy had in effect become a four-year plan and might even become a three-year plan, because of the slow growth of the economy. Obviously there is no point in planning resource application in other sectors of the economy if the output of those sectors upon which they are dependent for growth is incapable of meeting their requirements. It seems that the planners are without a clue to achieve this and may even be regarded as playing a game of chance in drawing up plans on the basis of information which is usually useless before it has left the planner’s desk. A suitable name for an economic planner’s game of chance would be “planners’ roulette”. The fault, however, lies not with the planners, but with the economic system which they are trying to plan and with the economic forces which drive it along.

Goods and services under the capitalist system are produced not to satisfy human needs, but for sale in order to realise profit, for a market. For a variety of reasons, the size of the market is constantly fluctuating and it should be obvious that under such conditions planning is impossible.

The recent rise in unemployment levels and the problem of over-capacity in many industries, viz. textiles, shipping and steel, would support the conclusion that economists do not know where to start. Do economists plan over-capacity and unemployment? One of the aims of planning was to eliminate just this problem and yet clearly they have been unsuccessful. They have been forced to change their plans to conform to the changes in the market; the market has not been controlled to conform to their plans. The housing problem, too, is an area in which governments have intervened on a large scale, but here they have been just as unsuccessful in solving the slum problem and homelessness; the situation is as bad as ever.

Economists claim to be scientific in their outlook and yet if scientists in the natural sciences had such a failure rate in their researches in understanding the world, then the outlook would be pretty bleak for the human race. Most of the economists’ claims ultimately rest upon the false premise that an exchange economy is the only, and indeed the best, way of organizing the production and distribution of wealth. Socialists repudiate this notion emphatically. But more than this Socialists advocate an alternative society based upon production for use. Capitalism has generated a vast, world-wide productive network of industries and a technology capable of producing wealth on an unlimited scale, if it were unrestricted by fetters of the market economy. Only when there has been a world-wide social revolution and the means of production have passed into the control of the whole of society will real planning be possible, a system of planning into which no other factor but human need enters.

Spectator.

The Establishment of Socialism (1972)

From the September 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism is a society in which all social affairs, including the production and distribution of wealth will be democratically controlled by the people as a whole. There will be no ruling class nor any permanent administrative élite but rather the active participation of all the people, at all levels and in all fields, in the planning and running of their various common affairs.

This is why Socialism can only be established democratically, both in the sense of being what the vast majority want and in the sense of being established by their own democratically-organised action. Any attempt by a minority to establish Socialism is bound to fail because, without a population who want to participate in social decision-making themselves and not leave it to an élite, the minority would be forced to become the exclusive decision-makers and eventually a new ruling class. The very fact that only a minority wanted Socialism would be a sign that Socialism was not yet possible. Indeed, the fact that a minority should think it could establish Socialism before a majority wanted it would show that they didn’t understand the full implication of Socialism themselves and so were not really Socialists.

A look at the various theories of minority, or minority-led, action to establish ‘socialism’ — essentially Lenin’s Bolshevism and its various offshoots, Stalinism, Trotskyism, Maoism, Castroism, etc. — confirms that in practice these were the ideologies of would-be national ruling classes aiming to industrialize economically backward parts of the world through a policy of state capitalism, mistakenly called ‘socialism’. Their tactics — vanguard party, violent insurrection, ruthless measures against the old rulers and all opponents — are thus quite irrelevant for a genuine Socialist movement, though superficially attractive to those who want radical social change yet despair of ever winning over a currently indifferent or conservative-minded working class. In the unlikely event of them being successful in some highly industrialised country the outcome would be some form of state capitalism, certainly not Socialism.

Any adequate theory as to how to establish Socialism must have as its basic premise that this must be the work of a democratically-organised, socialist-minded working class majority. That the socialist revolution, in other words, must be a majority revolution. Let us follow through the implications of this.

The State machine, being both the public power of coercion and the centre of social administration, must be taken over before capitalism can be abolished and Socialism established, first to prevent it being used to resist this change and, secondly, in order to centrally co-ordinate it. This would not be denied by many of those who advocate minority action. But from here on a basic difference emerges. They repudiate the policy of trying to convince, by peaceful persuasion, a majority to join them in their struggle; in short, they reject democratic methods. Instead they favour minority action, first to disrupt society and undermine the majority-supported government and, then, to take advantage of the resulting social and political instability to seize government power themselves in an armed uprising.

Those who realise that the Socialist revolution can only be a majority revolution have no need to consider such a method of winning State power (which would almost certainly fail anyway with the loss of many innocent working class lives). Once capitalist conditions, including the persuasive efforts of a one-time Socialist minority, have created a Socialist majority the question is: What is the easiest method of winning control of the State?

In the most advanced capitalist parts of the world, such as Britain, where economic circumstances and working class pressure have forced the ruling class to grant a certain degree of political democracy, the answer is obvious. Use the existing political institutions which provide for members of parliament, local councillors and other public offices to be elected by universal suffrage, limited and incomplete as these institutions are from the point of view of democratic theory.

This would involve the Socialist majority organising themselves as a political party, but one completely different both from existing parliamentary parties and from Leninist vanguard parties. The workers’ socialist party must be democratic through and through: its policy and all its activities must be under the complete control of its members and it must have no leader or leaders. Being the actual movement of the working class to establish Socialism it must reflect, as far as is possible under capitalism, the organisational forms of Socialism, namely, democratic control and popular participation. And far from being a vanguard party seeking to lead the working class with attractive slogans, is would merely be the instrument they can use to win political power once a majority of them have become Socialists.

Naturally, such a party would have to appoint candidates to contest the elections for public offices. But those appointed would simply be mandated delegates from the working-class Socialist majority. The position would be the exact reverse of that in existing, parliamentary parties. Instead of the party outside Parliament being essentially only vote-catchers for the parliamentary leadership, Socialist MPs and councillors would merely be the messenger boys of the Socialist working class outside Parliament, democratically-organised in their Socialist political party. And, of course, the aim of sending Socialist delegates to Parliament would not be to form a ‘socialist government’ (a contradiction in terms) but to abolish capitalism as smoothly and peaceably as possible.

Once in control of State power the Socialist majority can abolish the capitalist class’s monopoly over the means of production by making them the common property of the whole community under the democratic control of all the people. And the State machine — as a public power of coercion — would be abolished by its coercive institutions (the armed forces, police, law courts, jails) being dismantled. The remaining administrative institutions (health, education, the State-run industries) would be fully democratised and extended to cover all industries. This done, the centre of social administration has ceased to be a ‘State’, properly so-called, and become simply an unarmed clearing-house for democratically settling social affairs.

Socialism will have been established.

Adam Buick

Sixty Years Ago (1972)

From the September 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Answer to a Correspondent from the “Socialist Standard", September 1912. 

It is quite true that “the power of repression was with the master classes before the workers had votes”. But material development, with the alterations in the material conditions, made the ruling class adopt a Constitution — a charter which provides for the consent of citizens to the policy of those in power. Hence it is, alas! only too true that “the murder machinery” is "put into their (the masters’) hands by the votes of the workers”, as the latter hold more than two-thirds of the voting power. You say that “power” is not a thing to be captured by votes, yet our masters spend a great deal of time and money in securing that power through getting a majority of votes. . . . How can "industrial organisation generate power”? History is very explicit on the fact that power has rested with those who commanded the political machinery, but where does history record that power has been generated through "industrial organisation”? It is a pity that our “anti-political” critics do not tell us what the power is that can be generated in this way. If they mean power to destroy, power to paralyse general industry (and themselves), then it can be granted — but that disposes of their case. For if they are unable to carry on production uninterrupted, they are manifestly powerless to take and hold the means of life. You say they will render the State impotent, but we still await information as to how that can be done. Can you render the “murder machinery” impotent? Or if not, can you control it by other means? Until you do control the “murder machinery” you cannot “control industry”.

Adolph Kohn

China: Next in Lin? (1972)

From the September 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Recent comings and goings among British politicians are as nothing compared to the convulsions that have been taking place over the past year in the ruling class of China. An official statement made by the Chinese Embassy in Algiers (see the Times, July 29) has confirmed that Lin Piao, formerly the officially-designated successor to Mao Tse-tung, was killed in a plane crash last September while fleeing to Russia after an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Mao.

A “Communist’' from his young days, Lin Piao seemed to possess all the qualifications needed for the assumption of supreme power. He had taken part in the Long March of 1934-5, when the remnants of the Red Army marched eight thousand miles to a new base in the north-west. After the surrender of the Japanese, he was instrumental in defeating the Nationalists in Manchuria, thus paving the way for the Communist conquest of the entire country. Despite ill-health, Lin was in 1959 appointed Minister of National Defence; as spokesman for the army, he played a prominent role in the Cultural Revolution, when the Communist Party machinery was virtually destroyed. Indeed, with the disgrace of Liu Shao-ch’i, Lin became second in rank only to Mao Tse-tung: the high point of his power appears to have been marked by the draft of a new Constitution (which became available in Taiwan late in 1970), which declared Mao to be head of state and Lin Piao to be his successor.

This Constitution, however, was never adopted. From the later months of 1971, Lin’s name disappeared from public mention, and the Little Red Book of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, to which he had contributed the foreword, slipped into the background. If the recent Chinese reports are reliable, Lin, perhaps disappointed and impatient on account of Chairman Mao's longevity, plotted, with his son as accomplice, to assassinate Mao. When the plot was discovered, Lin attempted to escape to Russia: whether the fatal air crash was an accident or not, remains uncertain.

There is no doubt that Lin’s death is part of a continuing struggle between the political and military bosses of China. As far back as 1938, Mao had written:

  Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party. (“Problems of War and Strategy”).

According to Victor Zorza, however (Sunday Times, July 30), the real point at issue is whether or not the Chinese economy shall emphasize agriculture or heavy industry. The Chinese press has been criticising the Lin Piao clique for wishing to spend too much on modern-style armaments, and Zorza believes that such newspaper statements constitute “a new attack on China’s military industrial complex. . . . Were such policies to be applied, the authoritative Peking party journal Red Flag says, the upshot would be that agriculture lagged behind, while industry ‘especially military industry, could develop abnormally’.” So for the time being at least, it seems, Chinese capitalism will aim to devote more resources to feeding its wage slaves than to expanding its industrial production.

And the lesson of all this for socialists — and indeed for all workers? Only that quarrels within the ruling class, wherever they occur, are of no concern to ordinary men and women. While the Maos and Lins of this world do their best to run things for their own benefit, the workers may be able (perhaps even in a dictatorship like China) to gain short-term advantages by playing off one faction of the ruling class against another. But they should never forget that their real interests lie not in supporting one or other set of rulers, but in establishing a world-wide democratic system of society, where there will be no ruling class and no oppression of man by man.

Paul Bennett

Is Socialism Left? (1972)

Pamphlet Review from the September 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is Socialism Left? by George Watson. (Unservile State Papers. 15p.)

This is a pamphlet published by the Unservile State Group, a small body of Liberals aiming to foster the growth of Liberal political and economic ideas.

Rather than refer explicitly to aspects of Liberal policy and principles, however, George Watson, lecturer in English at Cambridge and author of books on literary criticism and thesis writing, sets out to show how certain standpoints popularly referred to as Socialist (and therefore, in most people’s minds "left”) have very close parallels in traditionally accepted features of Fascist (and therefore "right”) ideology. The impressive array of evidence he draws upon to support his case includes the setting up of Bolshevik extermination camps in Russia in 1918, the policies of minority violence advocated by left-wingers such as G. B. Shaw and H. G. Wells, the undemocratic authoritarianism of the Webbs, the founders of Fabianism, the anti-working class policies practised in Britain by successive Labour governments, the conditions of savage political repression the people of Eastern Europe live under.

Nothing here unfamiliar to the Socialist critique of Labourism and State control masquerading as Socialism. But what a pity that in attempting to clarify terms, Watson adds to the already existing confusion about Socialism by defining it as ". . . a spectrum . . . that stretches from a totalitarian extreme in Stalin and Mao, through diluted forms of the same doctrine in Gomulka and Tito, as far (say) as the Swedish and British Social Democrats.” From this comment and others we can deduce that Socialism for this pamphleteer means State control, which he contrasts unfavourably with the private variety. Yet, at the same time, he shows signs of realising that both are forms of capitalism, for he states: "In the socialist countries beyond the Curtain, the state is the only capitalist, or the only major one” and "The power of a Western or private capitalist is necessarily less than that of a socialist one” (a socialist capitalist therefore — how’s that for semantic confusion?).

What a pity too that Watson, despite his hearteningly unexpected awareness of the existence of State capitalism in Russia, goes on to make the elementary blunder of equating Russian Bolshevism with Marxian Socialism. His uncritical assumption that Lenin’s setting up of a one-party regime of political terror constituted Marxism in action compounds the ignorance or misunderstanding of Marx’s writings inherent in such statements as "Marxian Socialism is little short of bloodthirsty” and "Marx himself certainly believed that socialism could only be created through violence on a world-scale”. Serious students of Marx know that he was never an advocate of mass violence and indeed, in his later writings, was quite clear that where electoral machinery existed a class-conscious majority could use the vote to take over the State preparatory to the changeover from commodity production (capitalism) to a system of common ownership and free access (Socialism). Engels, in his 1895 preface to Marx’s Class Struggles in France sums up the Marxist position:

  And so it happened that the bourgeoisie and the government came to be much more afraid of the legal than of the illegal action of the workers’ party, of the results of elections than of those of rebellion.
  For here, too, the conditions of the struggle had essentially changed. Rebellion in the old style, street fighting with barricades, which decided the issue everywhere up to 1848, was to a considerable extent obsolete . . . The time of surprise attacks, of revolutions, carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of unconscious masses, is past.

Marx’s writings, therefore, contain no warrant for the politically backward, minority violence of Bolshevism. Any association between Marxism and the events of 1917 and their aftermath turns solely on the dishonest use Lenin made of Marx’s terminology. In particular the terms socialist and communist, which for Marx were interchangeable, came, under Lenins’ distortion, to mean two separate stages of development, while Marx’s dictatorship of the proletariat, a political condition not a form of government, has nothing in common with the dictatorship over the proletariat established by Lenin.

Watson’s conclusion that the repressive social, political and moral features of Russian society represent conservatism far in excess of anything found in the West is incontrovertible and a view shared by all objective observers. Next to this, however, the question he poses of whether such a set-up can be legitimately referred to as "left” is of little importance. For whatever label a government in the modern world attaches to itself, right, left or centre, its function remains the same — to administer as efficiently as possible a system of production for profit which, come what may, cannot be run in the interests of the working majority. This applies just as rigorously to State capitalism in Russia (and in East Germany, China, Cuba, etc. for that matter) as it does to Watson’s implied favourite, private capitalism in the Western world.

Howard Moss

Dishonest Tactics (1972)

From the September 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

SELF-STYLED REVOLUTIONARY TELLS ALL 

On 18th May a speaker from the Socialist Party of Great Britain went to the University of Kent, at Canterbury, for a debate on “Should the Working Class Support the Labour Party?” The affirmative was to be taken by Reg Race, a local Labour Party agent.

Since Race’s speech was made before an audience, there is no reason why its contents should not be made known here. (Notes of the speech were made by our speaker, and Race agreed in front of the audience that they were a fair summary of what he had said.)

Race said he had no time for the Labour Party and its reformism. He described the Labour leadership as “shit”, and thought the idea of changing society through Parliament was nonsense. He was for “the revolutionary movement”, but the fact that Labour had mass working-class support gave the opportunity for “revolutionaries” to use it. Their objective should be to try to take over the Labour Party, then get it while in power to engineer an economic crisis of which they could take advantage.

As far as could be judged, “the revolutionary movement” meant such factions as the International Marxist Group and International Socialists. We are not concerned here with the ideas put forward by Race, which deserve notice only as antiquities, but with the double dishonesty of the position shown.

On one hand. Race presumably spends his time persuading people to vote for Labour, in which he acknowledges he does not believe, and for candidates and leaders whom, when elected, he describes with a four-letter word. On the other, his “revolutionary movement" which cannot (as he admits) gain support by its own merits hopes to pass itself off to the electorate as Labour and then, at a chosen moment, whip off the mask and inaugurate policies for which it has no mandate.

The working class would, we are sure, be enthusiastic over the plan of Race and his friends to try and make it revolutionary by arranging a slump. We say that this sort of deceit can benefit nobody except those who are seeking political power for themselves.