Sting in the Tail: Going Legit (1991)

The Sting in the Tail column from the September 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Going Legit

The Camorra of Naples now rivals the Sicilian Mafia In wealth and power.

Now their huge profits from drugs, smuggling and extortion are being invested in banking, industry, agriculture, etc., to the point where -

. . . their legal income is now greater than their illegal one.

The Guardian 25 July

This move away from illegal to legal activities is nothing new. Many of Britain’s "noblest" families began just like the Camorra and made their fortunes from land-theft, banditry and piracy. For example, Lord Home, Tory Prime Minister in 1963-4, proudly boasted that his ancestors had been border cattle thieves.

These earlier bandits have long since legitimised their operations and now legally plunder the working class through the wages system. The Camorra is only following in their footsteps.

Showing by Example

The Socialist Workers Party condemns those Labour councils which make economies by sacking workers.

It was Liverpool council's turn in Socialist Worker 27 July -

City Treasurer Phil Kelly unveiled plans which will mean real anguish for thousands of people.

To close a £10 million deficit, the council wants to push through another 155 compulsory redundancies In addition to the 160 already announced and the 460 resulting from the bins service privatisation.

The SWP insists that under no circumstances should the workers be sacked, but back in 1975 the SWP (then called The International Socialists) had to make economies. Its national committee reported that -

. . . extra efficiency will not save enough money so we considered the running of all the departments to see if they could possibly function on less workers. We decided that two should go from the printshop, one from Socialist Worker, and 2.5 from admin.

Dally Telegraph 13 March 1975

So the SWP's solution was exactly the same as the councils they condemn. A clear case of the Trotskyist pot calling the Labour kettle black.

Labour's "Socialists"

John Molyneux's column in Socialist Worker is titled "Teach Yourself Marxism" although anytime Scorpion has read it there has never been anything about Marxism in it.

That is until the issue dated 27 July when we read that Marx stood for "smashing the capitalist state". In fact he did stand for the abolition of the state but not for attacking it head on. No evidence for this "smashing" was given but it's a bit rich when someone who can write such nonsense urges anyone else to "Teach Yourself Marxism".

But Molyneux's column was mainly about the agonising time "socialists" are having in "Kinnock's Labour Party".

Who are these "socialists"and what do they get up to in an anti-socialist party? Molyneux tells us they are, among other things, "usually the most energetic canvassers and recruiters".

So here are "socialists" who devote much of their political activity to peddling Labour Party policies to workers; policies which are aimed solely at propping-up British capitalism. Some "socialists" these!

Crime and Punishment

As newspapers reveal some of the skullduggery that goes on The City, where million pound frauds are commonplace It is interesting to compare the fate in the courts of those committing these frauds with that of the working class who have been at the fiddle.

A recent example was reported in Glasgow in the local Evening Times (7 August) -

A man who stole his sister's DSS giro and cashed it has been jailed for six months . . .  He also admitted cashing it at Tormusk Post Office, Castlemilk and defrauding the DSS of £37.05.

Six months in nick for stealing £37.05! At that rate of punishment how long would those city-slickers spend in jail for their muti-million pound scams? There is a lot of truth in the old saying — never steal anything small!

Housing — the Facts

Amidst all the nonsense of the reformist political parties and their practical plans to deal with the "housing problem" it is interesting to note some of the hard facts about the so-called "housing problem". A recent issue of The Guardian provided some useful information about the present position -

• 169,000 households are classed as homeless in Britain this year.
• Between 30,000 and 40,000 people around the country are believed to sleep rough from time to time. About 5,000 sleep out in London each night.
• There are 700,000 empty homes in the country, many awaiting repair; 100,000 are owned by councils, 600,000 by private landlords.

This ghastly situation is made all the more horrendous when you realise that there is no "housing problem" only a poverty problem. One that will last as long as we have wealth produced to realise a profit instead of the socialist society where everything, including housing, will be produced to satisfy human need.

Housing — More Facts

In case anyone imagines that a cause of the "housing problem" is a physical shortage of the ability to build houses we would point out a report in The Times (5 August) -

A quarter of a million construction workers are likely to lose their jobs during the recession, according to forecasts from the Building Employers Confederation...

Using official statistics, the BEC calculates that 150,000 construction jobs have been lost since the middle of last year. The federation predicts a further 100,000 will be lost by the middle of next year.

So there you have it — 160,000 homeless households, hundreds of thousands of houses needing repairs; and at the same time a quarter of a million construction workers thrown out of a job. But that is typical of capitalism — the economics of the madhouse.

The Pope Knows It!

The notion that state interference in the day to day running of capitalism has something to do with socialism is more and more being discredited. The events in Russia and Eastern Europe are glaring examples of this but now this fallacy has been so well exposed that even the Pope knows it now.

Pope John Paul II's latest encyclical Centesimus Annus commenting on the idea that government Intervention in the market system is socialism states:

In the struggle against such a system, what is being proposed as an alternative is not the socialist system, which in fact turns out to be state capitalism . . .

What about Russia? (1991)

From the September 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is the Soviet Union socialist?

Of course not. Nobody believes that any more, do they?

But didn't they try socialism and it failed?

No. The Soviet Union has never at any time been socialist. Socialism has always meant a society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production where goods and services are produced directly to satisfy people’s needs, not for sale on a market with a view to profit. Since 1917 the Soviet Union has always had state ownership not common ownership and this under a one-party dictatorship with goods and services still being produced for sale and profit. Lenin, whose government introduced this system, called it “state capitalism”. It was an accurate description. What has failed in the Soviet Union is this state capitalism not socialism.

But they called themselves socialists, didn't they?

Yes, but that is not enough to make someone a socialist. All sorts of people have called themselves socialist, including Hitler, Idi Amin and Colonel Gaddaffi. without anybody taking their claims seriously. The claims of the Soviet dictators should have been dismissed in the same way, and probably would have been if parties like the Communist Party which once had some influence amongst workers in Britain had not talked about "the socialist sixth of the world” and painted the Soviet government as governing in the interests of the workers.

So you say that this wasn't true?

Yes, that's right. It was a lie. and we exposed it right from the start earning ourselves the undying hatred of the Communist Party. The Soviet Union has never been socialist and the workers have never held power there. Socialism means a classless society but ever since their coup of 1917 power has been exercised by the Party bosses. Over time these evolved into a new ruling class, collectively owning the means of production and enjoying a privileged lifestyle—the notorious nomenklatura.

OK, you say the Soviet Union was state capitalist but whatever it was it failed, didn't it?

Sure, but don’t forget that all forms of capitalism in all countries have always failed to solve the problems facing wage and salary workers, and always will because capitalism is based on exploitation, whether the exploiters are rich private capitalists or privileged state bureaucrats. It is true that by the 1950s the centrally-planned state-capitalist economy completed under Stalin after Lenin’s death did begin to show signs of stagnation. Sections of the Soviet ruling class did realise this and under Khrushchev some reforms allowing market forces more freedom to operate were tried, but when the political implications of this for the rule of the Party bosses became clear Khrushchev was removed. Brezhnev took over and so began "twenty years of stagnation". Then came Gorbachev.

Wasn't Gorbachev forced to abandon Marxian economics and embrace the market?

No. You can’t abandon something you never accepted in the first place. Marx, who always insisted that socialism had to be democratic, would turn in his grave at what has been done in his name in the Soviet Union. It is quite true that he was against the market since it represented everything that he as a socialist saw as wrong with capitalism: impersonal forces controlling people’s lives instead of their own conscious democratic decisions; relations between people reduced to the cash nexus; profits being put before needs. Nor did Gorbachev have to restore the market in the Soviet Union since it has never ceased to exist there. Workers have always had to work for wages and purchase their needs. Enterprises have always tried to make a profit and have supplied each other on a buying and selling basis. It was these market relationships that the state tried to plan, with the aim of maximising profits not necessarily at enterprise level but on the economy as a whole.

So what was perestroika about then?

What Gorbachev inherited from Brezhnev was a stagnating state-capitalist economy where the attempt to control the market by central state commands had failed, resulting in a fall in the rate of profit in the Soviet Union—a serious matter in a profit-seeking economy such as the Soviet Union has always had. since profits are the source of funds not only for the privileges of the nomenklatura but also for re-investment in the more up-to-date productive equipment and techniques needed to remain competitive by international standards. To restore the rate of profit in the Soviet Union and make the Soviet economy more competitive, Gorbachev proposed abandoning the central command economy and allowing enterprises much more freedom to respond to market forces and profits.

So why did they overthrow Gorbachev?

Gorbachev represented that section of the Soviet ruling class who realised that things could not go on as before if the Soviet Union was to remain a powerful state in the capitalist world. They were prepared to move in the direction of western-style capitalism, even if this meant abandoning the dictatorship of the Communist Party and finding some other way of maintaining the power and privileges of their class. Those who overthrew him represent another section of the Soviet ruling class who are not prepared to surrender their political and economic privileges under the nomenklatura system.

So do you support Gorbachev?

No.

What about Yeltsin?

Not him either.

So who do you support?

We are always on the side of the workers in any situation. Gorbachev and Yeltsin are capitalist politicians who represent one section of the Soviet ruling class. They merely have a different programme for increasing working class exploitation in the Soviet Union and restoring the rate of profit there from that of the military junta who seized power. Workers should not follow leaders in Russia any more than they should in any country. Instead they should look to their own democratic self-organisation both to defend their interests within capitalism and, once they have become socialists, to get rid of capitalism and replace it by real socialism. This means a society of common ownership and democratic control of the means of production by all the people with goods and services being turned out to satisfy people's needs not for the market and profits.

Caught In The Act: On the agenda (1991)

The Caught In The Act Column from the September 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

On the agenda

As the nights start drawing in, we are reminded that soon it will be time for us to be amused, bewildered or outraged — or perhaps all three — by those annual excursions into fantasy called the party conferences. This year the minds of the party faithful (if that is the right word for the intriguers, back-stabbers and manipulators who infest the chosen seaside towns on these occasions) will be that much more concentrated by the prospect of a general election. It is strongly rumoured that John Major will allow the voters to choose between the Labour and Tory methods of running British capitalism in early November and will use his party's conference as the launch pad for their campaign.

There would be nothing unusual in this. Harold Wilson and Margaret Thatcher are only two recent examples of remorseless exploiters of the publicity given to their party conferences, with an eye to the next election no matter how far away that might have been. So in 1969 Wilson attacked the Tories: "We are promising change: theirs is a prescription for decay". So Thatcher, year after year, fertilised the uglier tumours of nationalism among the sillier of her fans. It was all aimed at a wider audience, beyond the conference hall, watching it happen on their TV sets or reading about it in their newspapers and, it was assumed, deciding thereby how they would vote.

This is all good fun except that conferences are supposed to be events where members of an organisation confer. That means they review past activities, debate current issues and decide about the future. Of course the Tories have never been impressed by that. They never have pretended that theirs was a democratic conference. An all-controlling chair, an overbearing line-up of party heavyweights on the platform and a carefully sifted parade of speakers ensured that controversy reared its unwelcome head only in complaints about party policy being loo indulgent — in calls to bring back hanging, or to bash more foreigners or to turn the screw more tightly on the poorer members of the working class. Stage management was the name of the game, with its climax in Thatcher's exit to the boneheaded chanting of Land of Hope and Glory.

Much as they might sneer at these substitutes for thinking, the Labour Party of the 1990s seems keen to imitate them. Time was when their conferences were freer ranging, but this caused a certain amount of embarrassment when the delegates, under the impression that they were laying down policy for a Labour government, voted for unilateral nuclear disarmament or some other idea which no government in its right mind would entertain. Faced with this, the Labour Party tactic has been to ignore any conference decisions they did not like as glowing examples of a great democratic movement at work.

Either way. and for either party, it amounts to the same thing — a waste of time. When there is work to be done to change society fundamentally, nobody should be deceived by the spewing of words, the reams of promises and the gushing of public relations hype which is what the conferences really are.

USSR Unemployment - Official

In those good old, bad days when Stalin glowered over the cowering people of Russia, apologists for the murderous regime there always had a last line of defence when they were forced up against reality. Unable to refute the hard evidence that "peace loving" Russia was in fact a world-ranking military power, that "freedom loving" Russia in fact ruthlessly controlled every possible aspect of its people lives, that "socialist" Russia imprisoned, tortured and murdered tens of millions of people in order to sustain Stalin in power, there was always one final pathetic justification for all the horrors. There was. squirmed the apologists, no unemployment in Russia; surely that proved the system there was basically different to, and better than, what existed in the West.

So there must have been many a die-hard from the old Communist Party, grown old and weary under the stress of defending the indefensible, in despair at the news that even that puny argument is no longer available. In July a new employment law came into effect in Russia which legalises — in other words admits the existence of — unemployment and lays down a system of unemployment benefit, or dole to you and me.

As Russian industry moves into a long and painful period of reform it is being encouraged to "release" its "surplus" workers, just like British firms when they try to stay profitable by sacking people. Some estimates have it that as many as 20 million Russian workers may be out of work — or thrown on to the industrial scrapheap, to use a favourite Communist phrase — to rely on state benefit for their subsistence.

But being on the dole in "socialist" Russia, where poverty was supposed to have been wiped out over 50 years ago, will not be easy. Seven conditions will have to be satisfied, like signing as available for work and being means tested. To dole claimants in this country it will be gloomily familiar; they will be able to depress their Russian counterparts with an endless fund of stories about waiting for hours to plead for their pittance, about how to grovel to the best effect and finally how to get by on starvation money with no new clothes or outings or entertainment.

Like any country threatened with large scale unemployment, Russia expects a steep increase in the harshness and more destructive poverty among its workers. The Communist die-hards will probably blame it all onto Gorbachev and his betrayal of the true, Stalinist faith. In fact all Gorbachev is doing is to rearrange a social system which was basically never different from avowedly capitalist states like Britain and America. After nearly a century of appalling suffering, with the prospect now of yet more, the people of Russia have nothing to thank their "Communist" rulers for — nor those in other countries whose obsession made them blind and deaf to the suffering.

Citizen's Arrest 

There has recently been an addition to the list of words — like "freedom", "peace" and "truth" — without which the life of a speech-making politician would be exceedingly difficult. It is "citizen". The fact that the Tories have recently begun to talk about their concern for the "citizen" and the government to produce something called a Citizen's Charter should rally us to the defence of the word, to prevent it being mauled like so many others.

The word "citizen" has a lot of implied meanings for it suggests people of equal standing, who participate in society on terms of equality and who willingly share in social obligations. It is the kind of word we might use to describe the people of the future society in which work and pleasure are inseparable and human beings regard each other as natural friends. It will be tragic if by "citizen" we mean some unquestioning sycophant of property society, if the word becomes twisted and debased in the battle between the Labour and Conservative parties over who should be the next government of British capitalism.

In any case what "rights" do we "citizens" have under this social system? Capitalism is founded on the monopoly of the means of life by a minority of parasites and its laws and morals — including the "rights" of people — are fashioned by that fact. Governments win power through the votes of "citizens" who have been seduced by promises to protect their interests but when a party are in power those promises are at best compromised, at worst ignored. This happens behind a smokescreen of lies, evasions and euphemisms, some of these the product of devilishly creative minds, which no "citizen" is permitted to penetrate.

In fact any government which really acknowledged the "rights" of its "citizens" is unlikely to survive very long. Capitalism depends on the restriction of freedom and of "rights" and part of its trick is to persuade the very people who are denied these things that it is in their interests for things to be like that. To overturn this set-up we might begin by thinking about how words are distorted in order to sustain it.

Ivan

Schooled for capitalism (1991)

From the September 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Different people expect different things from schools. Margaret Thatcher is on record as saying that education should prepare children for the world of work, while the radical educationist A. S. Neill (head of Summerhill) thought that education should be a preparation for life. These views may seem poles apart, but both coincide in seeing education as a preparation for something else. Neill’s position is especially odd. as it implies that education is not part of life. Surely education—the process of learning—is an integral part of our daily lives. It takes place outside school as much as in it, and doesn’t stop when we leave school for a job or the dole queue.

Discipline

Education now consumes about one-sixth of central and local government spending, but government's role in education only came about for reasons clearly related to the historical development of capitalism. The first state intervention in education in England was the quaintly-named Health and Morals of Apprentices Act of 1802; this was an ineffective attempt to get factory-owners to provide some basic instruction for their younger apprentices, who had been forced into factory work by the Industrial Revolution. The reasons given for educating workers in the early nineteenth century were to teach thrift and good housekeeping (and so reduce the expense of poor relief), and to combat the rise in crime by teaching order and discipline. Most factory jobs needed few or no skills, so education was not seen as necessary for production.

In the course of the century, however, technical progress led to a greater demand for skilled and educated labour. Both state and church schools provided basic instruction (mainly in religion and the three other R’s), but formal schooling was still a small part of most people's lives. In 1851, an inquiry found that the average school attendance was just two years. In 1865 an investigation of children between the ages of 3 and 12 in Manchester showed that over half were neither attending school nor in employment. It was partly to control the potential for crime and disorder resulting from this idle mass that elementary education for all was introduced by the 1870 Elementary Education Act. which set the school leaving age at 12.

Pigeon-holing

But there were powerful economic arguments too. as Britain encountered competition from other capitalist countries, such as Germany, where a fairly sophisticated education system already existed. William Forster, the architect of the 1870 Act, claimed that “upon the speedy provision of elementary education depends our industrial prosperity". Similar arguments were used in the present century to motivate the expansion of secondary schools and the provision of teaching in technical subjects. A 1931 government report coined the word “numeracy” to indicate mathematical capabilities alongside the traditional literacy.

It was the Education Act of 1944 which instituted the system of primary and secondary education for all. Its proposal to raise the leaving age from 15 to 16 was not achieved till 1972, however. The Act enshrined a division of children into three types, each destined for a different kind of secondary school. Those who could follow a proper argument were earmarked for grammar school, those whose aptitude was more for applied science were suitable for technical school, while those who were supposedly happier with concrete things rather than ideas could hope for no more than a secondary modern school.

Such ludicrous pigeon-holing prompted the switch-over to comprehensive schools. It was often claimed that these were intended to give children equal opportunity to succeed, but of course there was another side to it. In 1964 Harold Wilson, soon to become Prime Minister, stated; "We simply cannot as a nation afford to neglect the educational development of a single boy or girl". Nowadays, too, the Labour Party seems to see education as the guarantor of efficiency and competitiveness, and hence as the saviour of British capitalism.

Education has clearly been viewed by politicians, and the capitalists whose interests they represent, as an instrument to serve their own ends. As production became ever more complex, the need for an educated workforce came to be the main motivation; so schools really do exist to prepare children for the world of work—for wage slavery. Ever-present, too, is the need for a disciplined workforce; whatever else schoolchildren may or may not learn, they are taught to do as they're told, to know their place and to knuckle under to authority. And who shall say that schools are not still means to keep potential troublemakers off the street, and to teach young workers how to manage on a pittance? Even the division of children into different ability groups is perpetuated by the continued use of streaming.

Book learning

William Morris in News from Nowhere depicted a society where the word "school" is unknown. People learn throughout their lives, picking up skills as they want to. We shouldn’t treat them as gospel, but Morris’s speculations are an interesting approach to what education might be like in socialism. With the ending of class society and production for profit, education will no longer serve the ends of providing an obedient and half-trained workforce. It will not be a preparation for anything, but will be an essential part of everyone’s existence.

The unnatural division into education of children on the one hand and of adults on the other will cease. Learning of practical skills can be done face-to-face—the idea of teaching such skills impersonally through books is, Morris thought, a rather odd one. Whether there will be separate institutions recognisable as schools is not for us to say now. But certainly there will be no examination tyranny, no blind faith in paper qualifications, no condemning of so many as “failures”.

We cannot know precisely what education will be like in socialism, but it will undoubtedly be a far cry from the production line-like schools of capitalism.

Paul Bennett

“There’s nothing we could do” (1991)

From the September 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Most nights, the Northern Ireland News on television has something to say about employment. If the news is good, if new jobs have been “created", the accompanying picture usually includes a group of people, sometimes with the Minister himself present. These are not the people for whom work has been created, of course; these are people drinking champagne because. the voice-over tells us, they have arranged for other people to work. The exercise is called “job creation".

But this “job creation" is a funny business. When the capitalists who have come to Northern Ireland to make a profit are being entertained by the Minister and an army of job creators, when the corks are popping and the actual number of millions of pounds being contributed by the government (to enable the new entrepreneurs to get going in a rent-free factory) is being announced, everybody present is happy. Well, two or three hundred jobs, in an area where there might be 60 or 70 percent of the local population unemployed, will be widely regarded as a joyful occasion.

Of course, the two or three hundred jobs will not be created overnight. Oh no, no. You see job creation doesn't work like that.The two or three hundred jobs are for the future . . . say in five years time. The Minister knows that, and so do the job creators. But there will, maybe, be twenty or thirty jobs immediately—if they can get people to come off the dole to work for that sort of money.

The reverse of this job creation business takes place too. If the economic climate is not too bad, we can have job creation and the redundancies and sackings on alternate nights—which is good for the television company's Industrial Correspondent. Unfortunately, the one doesn't balance the other; which probably explains why, despite all the job creation, the skillfully-adjusted unemployment figures continue to increase and are now a province-wide 20 percent.

Job losses

The other night the busy Industrial Correspondent told us that a local firm, in an area of chronic unemployment, was “getting rid" of 260 workers and that most of the remaining 300-odd workers would be going on to a three-day week.

The company, James Mackie and Sons Ltd. used to employ 9.000 in its hey-day. Its textile machinery was exported throughout the world. But the world has changed; the place of the intricate machinery and the highly-skilled craftsmen who produced this machinery has been taken by electronic chips and. somewhere else, in a contracting market, there are workers who take even less than the low pay paid by Mackie’s in Belfast.

It was a family business. But the family is OK. The millions they got from the American company which took over the firm a few years ago will be working for them and saving them the inconvenience of having to work for themselves. The workers whose labour created that for which the American company paid millions . . . well, they're just redundant.

When the take-over was announced a couple of years ago. there were about 900 in the Mackies' employ. The new owners entered negotiations with the unions; 300 jobs would have to go in order to secure the jobs of the remaining 600.

Nothing very unusual in the story, even if we mention that the Minister and the job creators were also deeply involved doing their best for the new owners. Nothing unusual, indeed. Men and women walking out through the heavy iron gates for the last time. Men and women, thirty years, forty years, fifty years and without hope or promise for the future.

In a sane society it would be a good story. A story showing us how progress had made it unnecessary for working men and women to go into what is still a dark. Satanic mill. A story depicting how. away from the priorities of the market and the profit system, human beings could use science to emancipate themselves from drudgery and dangerous tasks. Unfortunately we are not living in a sane society, and the thing that these workers feared more than their slavery was the poverty that would accompany their emancipation from drudgery.

A reporter spoke to five workers. All complained that the media had learnt about the sackings before they had. All complained that the Company had failed to advise the unions. All expressed their fears for the future. And all ended their comments by making the same point, each in a different way but covered in a short sentence: "there's nothing we could do".

Paradox

Of course, it is the people and the institutions of capitalism, who tell us that we live in a democracy, where we, the people, are the source of all power, who also manage to promote the notion that there is nothing we can do. It's a formula for all situations: there is nothing we can do about poverty; about war and violence; about slums. In a word, about capitalism.

It is the working class which not only produces the goods and services required by people in capitalism but also carries out all the utterly wasteful administrative and other functions made necessary only by the casino economics of capitalism itself. Yet we have this paradox of a class which runs society from top to bottom within a system where its majority status should give it political and, thus, ultimately, economic control, accepting the tyranny of democratic powerlessness.

The paradox is explained by the political success of capitalism's institutions: its educational system, its class system, its political system and its control over the means of communication. These are the means by which we are conditioned to accept the idea that there are those intended to be leaders, those entitled to position, to wealth and privilege, and those who, if they display the required aptitudes, will be allowed to work for a wage or salary. Properly processed through this machinery of acceptance, most workers—and, ironically, especially those who boast that they live in a free and democratic country—will accept the idea that "there is nothing we can do".

The belief that we, the working class, are powerless to change society in our interests is a fundamental bulwark of capitalism's wage-slavery. The more skilful of capitalism's defenders are conscious that there is nothing that can be said in favour of an economic system which, through a complex process primarily intended to enrich a minority, creates such terrible problems for the great majority in our world. Such apologists, rather than attempting to defend the indefensible, concentrate on attacking those who offer an alternative form of social organisation. Essential to their apologia is the promotion of the idea that the working class is incapable of changing society.

If it was true, it would be the epitaph of freedom.

Richard Montague

Do we have democracy? (1991)

From the September 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is hardly necessary to stress the virtues of democracy, when we have the example before us of what goes on around the world in countries with Mafia-type set-ups. An absence of democracy tells us more than just that a particular country is ruled by despots. It indicates the absence of a stable class structure, with all the necessary institutions for running a modern industrial state. The system of democracy, or rather of democratic institutions (the right to form trade unions, of assembly and free speech), is essential to working class politics. It would, however, be wrong to assume that the democracy we have is in any sense complete, that the potential of democracy has been realised.

The question has to be considered within the context of capitalist society which, while it needs a certain level of democracy to function, places limits upon democracy. Within capitalist society there are many conflicting interests and, to arbitrate and regulate these, various democratic decision-making institutions have to be created. But because property has more power than people, and the demands of the economic system more power than either, the effectiveness of any popular or majority will is diluted, so that on balance it is the will or demands of capitalism that prevail, while keeping up a pretence of majority rule.

Pretence of majority rule

In terms of political power, our democratic freedom is limited to deciding who shall constitute the executive bodies of local and central government.These bodies make decisions that affect our lives but, once they are elected, we have little or no control over them.There are occasions when determined action does have an effect, but if we do not like these decisions, in the main the only recourse we have is to vote in another lot the next time we are given permission; who will eventually turn out to be as unsatisfactory as the others. The vital thing to remember, though, is that it is through this system that we may achieve socialism.

Although the means of selecting governing bodies by majority vote is democratic as far as it goes, the way these bodies function is not. This is because they are subject to pressures which have nothing to do with the reasons for their election and which force them into actions contrary to the interests and wishes of the electors.

These pressures which restrict democracy are those that allow commercial and industrial enterprises to compete freely with each other for profits. Because this adversely affects working class interests, workers in turn exert pressure upon the government. The government cannot resolve this conflict. so to absorb the mounting pressure of dissatisfaction the political system has a safety valve of ins and outs which temporarily allays the problem. The governing party goes to the country, as the saying has it. Another party assumes power. Society breathes again. Old men with new faces and old ideas in new suits appear on the scene; only to soon look shabby and familiar.

The inability of limited democracy within the framework of capitalism to solve problems sometimes goads people into taking matters into their own hands. This too has been foreseen. The law is there to counter such action, to protect the institutions of the elected from the depredations of the electorate. It is important, however, to remember that any action that could ultimately weaken or destroy democratic rights is not in the interest of the working class. For the limited democracy we have is not only necessary for us here and now, but essential for the creation of the socialist commonwealth and, with it, true democracy.

True democracy

Democracy under capitalism is not there to enable us to decide how our lives should be run. but to enable our rulers to escape responsibility for their actions and to put the blame on us for their inevitable failure to run capitalism in our interests. This, as will now be realised, is not the fault of democracy as a sound principle for running affairs, but the fraudulent way it is organised and the nefarious purposes to which it is put under capitalism.

Governments frequently claim to be omnipotent, to be able to do what they want to do. and as frequently are forced to find excuses for why they are not and can not. How often have we been given phrases to explain why the elected have reneged on the electors: “necessary unpopular measures", "in the national interest”? The commonly accepted definition of democracy as the will of the majority is used to limit its scope to what is convenient to the ruling class, to what is required to maintain workable executive powers on a stable political foundation in its interests.

Democracy today is certainly not there to enable us to decide how our lives should be run, but it could be if we used its present institutions to vote out capitalism. With the abolition of the institution of property and of class power, with its overriding commercial and financial interests, all the potential of democracy would be realised.

Socialism is a society in which the interests of people as such are the only criteria. Not people divided by irreconcilable class interests, with workers always coming off worst; not people driven by what is called “economic necessity", the obligation to make profits rather than to satisfy needs; but people who would make real democratic decisions and partake in those decisions from a position of equality, secure in the knowledge that they were their own masters, in control of their own destiny.

Ian Jones

Between the Lines: Heart of a Heartless World (1991)

The Between the Lines column from the September 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Heart of a Heartless World

Marx saw religion as "the sigh of the oppressed". As oppression imposes itself upon people in ever new ways, from the crushing weight of the credit card to the mind-numbing sterility of Madonna, the religious cries in the wilderness become more pathetic, more ridiculous, more religious than orthodox religion. Everyman (BBC1, 10.30pm, 4 August) offered a glimpse into the crazy world of the Kensington Temple, an evangelical church for born-again inmates. They screamed that Jesus is Alive in much the way that born-again Stalinists used to stand on street comers yelling that inflation had been abolished in Albania. The spectacle is highly amusing, until you think that these are potentially intelligent beings throwing themselves before the mercy of an all-powerful invisibility above the clouds.

The documentary showed how one woman had turned from stealing and drug-dealing to running aerobic classes for nifty Christians and reading the Bible with her boyfriend instead of sleeping with him. Clearly, for her the religious hallucinations offered by faith gave a better escape route than the buzz from cocaine. Members of the Kensington Temple wander round street markets offering salvation to wage slaves looking for cheap goods. Fortunately, most of the people approached by them in the documentary told them that whatever else they needed, they did not want to find the Lord. If Christianity is to have a future in places like Britain where most workers are not interested in falling to their knees as a strategy for escape, it is the loud-mouthed, emotionally-crippling, morally-obnoxious evangelicals who will carry the torch. By and large, though, the workers of the more developed capitalist countries will have little time for religion. Secular capitalism creates new gods, one of the oddest of whom is the man who died fourteen years ago as a drugged-exit, drunk-out obese clone who was too incapacitated to even wipe his own backside: he spent his last months wearing nappies, apparently.

The cult of Elvis is a minor form of secular worship in the USA, as it is in Britain. Viva Elvis (C4, 10pm, 12 August) was a journey to the outer reaches of human absurdity. There was a woman who has an Elvis museum in her house, including such exhibits as the Great One’s toenail clippings and a wart which he once had removed by a surgeon. Another crank had a shrine to Elvis in his living room which was constantly attended by himself and his son — Elvis, of course. An Elvis look-alike competition was shown in which grown men performed before screaming women who looked like recent escapees from the Kensington Temple. In Mexico a man called El Vez translates Elvis's profound lyrics into Spanish so that those hitherto stuck with the limited offerings of an Aztec past can now sing and sigh to their heart's content about hound dogs and other pressing questions of the day. Why all of this searching for gods? People who are made to feel small and powerless look for something which is big and powerful. They look and are offered a menu of Jesus, Elvis, not to mention Ron Hubbard and Lenin. Shut your eyes and believe in religion; open them wide and you might just catch sight of how big and powerful we all are if only we decide to be.

A Vindication

The newspaper, Stage and Television Today (1 August) interviewed Michael Ferguson who has been executive editor of the awful EastEnders since 1989. Jane Gamer, the interviewer, reports that "He has delved deep into soap psyche and seen battles of good versus evil, the foundation stone of Passion Plays, plus myriad struggles of Common Man and an ability to tap a deep-rooted need in millions of viewers". In this column we have repeatedly stated how soap operas are moralising mouthpieces appealing to alienated workers. EastEnders, in particular, offers its viewers simplistic caricatures of Good and Evil to be followed or avoided in line with the consequences depicted in the drama. We were criticised in the tabloid rag, The People, for making such observations, but now we have it from the horse's mouth; says Ferguson, ". . . there is a strong tie in it for me with the morality plays, there is good and evil. Nick Cotton is the personification of evil . . . Dot Cotton is a good character, she has a high sense of moral duty." Wage slaves used to go to Churches to be told what their moral duties were. These days, those who are not having evangelical orgasms in the Kensington Temple or paying pilgrimage to Elvis's left toenail are watching Saint Dot fight the twice-weekly holy struggle against Wicked Nick to see how the good life must be led.

Cat Sense

There is an irritating ad for Whiskas which says that if cats could do so they would buy Whiskas. Cats have more sense than to buy anything. Cats take what they need. Cats do not go shopping or carry credit cards or have overdrafts or make adverts selling horrible, cheap rubbish. My cat runs a mile every time he smells Whiskas. Come to that, he never goes to Church, worships no gods and has never been seen near the hi-fi when Elvis is on. And he has no sophisticated consciousness like humans do. Come to think of it, humans would not buy Whiskas, or any other commodity for sale, if they thought about it for more than five minutes.

Steve Coleman

SPGB Meetings (1991)

Party News from the September 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

50 Years Ago: “Two Years" (1991)

The 50 Years Ago column from the September 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

September, 1939, to September, 1941: two years of warfare on an unpreedented scale. Death and devastation rained from the sky on countless cities, with appalling consequences for the working class of this and other lands.

Looking back to the early days of this vast and terrible conflict, few of us in the Socialist Party then dared hope that conditions, even for a few months ahead, would permit us to continue propaganda for Socialism. But. here we are. after two years of war, still proclaiming that Socialism is the only way by which the working class can achieve a genuine "New Order” out of the present chaos of Capitalism.

It is true that in this period our meetings are not as numerous or as widespread as they were just prior to the war. but we can record that wherever they are held larger and more appreciative audiences are the result. Further, our literature sales are being effected in every party of the country.

Our difficulties, though, have been many and hard to overcome. The majority of branches were seriously dislocated as a consequence of the air raids. Many of the most active of our comrades were, through force of circumstances, compelled to leave the main centres of Party activity in order to follow their employment in distant parts of Britain.

Our Headquarters were bombed and demolished. causing us much extra work and not a little anxiety about meeting the inevitable expenses of transferring to new premises and the replacement of ruined equipment. 

(From an Appeal by the Party Funds Organiser. Socialist Standard, September 1941.)

Letters: Militant's future (1991)

Letters to the Editors from the September 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Militant’s future

Dear Editors,

After the Walton by-election in Liverpool and the defeat of the "Real" Labour candidate is Militant ready for further confrontations and political battles all over the country? Now, with many of its members soon to be expelled from the Labour Party and any base or foothold to be broken up or removed, is Militant willing to acknowledge it has only one option? To create and start as a national political party and campaign on the streets and through the media for votes from the public and fight for power through elections, local and national.

Militant has no alternative and can only fight for its political life through the ballot box and use its members to do the work, as the Labour and Liberal parties do. Militant can go nowhere now. but has to start to campaign on its own and seek support from the British public.

It could, as it did in Liverpool, seek help and support from the WRP and SWP but I doubt these would move so far themselves as to amalgamate with Militant to form a “new” party, e.g. "Militant Socialist Labour Party”.

Andrew Melville

Leicester

Reply:

We agree that there is a crying need for the Labour Party to be challenged at the polls all over the country by real socialist candidates. But we don’t think that Militant is at all qualified to perform this role; nor do we think that they want to challenge the Labour Party nationally.

As Trotskyists they stand for state capitalism not real socialism. 'They want an economy where we would all be employees of the state and where the state would be controlled by an elite of political manipulators like themselves (and the WRP. SWP, etc). So, even if they did form a new party to oppose Labour, this would not be a socialist party. But there is nothing to suggest that this is what they want to do or what they will do. They know that outside the special circumstances of Liverpool their vote would be numbered in hundreds not thousands and that outside the Labour Party they would have no influence.

So what they will try to do now is to stay in the Labour Party taking even more precautions not to be caught breaking its rules. The Labour leaders, on the other hand, will resort to ever more underhand methods (secret photographs. tape recordings, moles, etc) to root them out. This sordid battle of intrigue and deceit between two sets of political manipulators is of no concern to workers generally, except insofar as it exposes both of them as unworthy of their support.

In any event there is no need to form a "new socialist party" since a genuine socialist party has been in existence in this country since 1904. We have opposed the Labour Party since its foundation on the grounds that it has been a party of capitalist reform not a socialist party. At every general election since 1945, and on other occasions such as by-elections and local council elections, we have stood against Labour (and the other capitalist parties) offering workers a chance to vote for the genuine socialist alternative.

We plan to do so again in the coming general election but for this to happen on an increasing scale, as our correspondent rightly wants, those who have become convinced of the need to establish, by democratic means, a socialist society of common ownership, democratic control and production for use not profit will need to join us to ensure that it does.

Editors.

Marx and socialism

Dear Editors,

I am writing this letter to seek clarification about the socialist ideology. I heard from your representative at Hyde Park about the recent change in economic policies of Eastern Europe/USSR where it was said that the economic policies of Lenin were based on “State Capitalism” instead of “Socialism”. Hence socialism cannot be blamed for such failure. Socialist Party Leaflet No 4 (What about Eastern Europe?) was distributed in order to support the speaker's arguments. But today (25 July) I heard on ITV news that the manifesto given by Marx in 1848 contained “state-run economy" instead of a “society based on common ownership" where “there will be no profits, no wages and no exploitation".

On the basis of the information given by the ITV, I understand that either Marx believed in state capitalism or the idea of socialism preached by you is different from Marx's ideas. I would appreciate if you would please send me your comments on the socialist economic policies.

K. N.

London SW7

Reply:

We too heard ITV News claim that Marx advocated a “state-run economy" quoting the 1848 Communist Manifesto as evidence. It is true that at the end of the second part this manifesto did contain a list of immediate revolutionary measures which included setting up a state bank, nationalising transport and communications and extending state-owned factories, and so which might legitimately be described as “state capitalist”.

These were measures which Marx believed socialists would have needed to implement had they come to power in 1848 (a most unlikely event even if at the time Marx and Engels believed otherwise, mistakenly as they later admitted). Marx judged—this time rightly— that the productive forces were not sufficiently developed in 1848 to permit the immediate establishment of socialism as a society of common ownership with no profits and no wages. He saw these measures as a way "to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible" and so bring nearer the time when full socialism could be established.

Marx never saw socialism itself as being a state-run economy but. on the contrary, as he puts it elsewhere in the Communist Manifesto as one where "the public power will lose its political character" and involving "the conversion of the functions of the state into a mere superintendence of production" as well as the "abolition of buying and selling" and of “the wages system".

Besides, when they reprinted the manifesto in 1872 Marx and Engels wrote in an introduction that, because historical circumstances had changed since 1848, “no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II . . . this programme has in some details become antiquated". Well, if it was antiquated in 1872 it has long since become completely fossilized! So it is a distortion typical of the capitalist media to portray this as evidence that Marx's aim was a state-run economy, i. e. state capitalism. This was merely something he advocated, briefly, in 1848 and then only to deal with a problem which no longer exists, since the productive forces have long been developed to permit the immediate and direct establishment of socialism as a classless, stateless, moneyless society just as soon as a majority want it.

Editors.

Yugo—map

Dear Comrades.

I don’t know where you obtained the map of Yugoslavia used on the front cover of last month’s Socialist Standard, but the frontiers shown for Slovenia do not reflect the current situation.

After the WWII peace settlement between Italy and Yugoslavia the Istrian peninsula was transferred to Yugoslavia, initially I believe to the Slovene Republic. Zones A and B of Trieste remained a city state under Allied military occupation. Subsequently, the city proper comprising Zone A reverted to Italy. The southern district Zone B was incorporated into Yugoslavia and I think it was at that stage that the lower half of Istria became a part of Croatia, the north remaining within Slovenia.

Let’s hope no disgruntled emigre Croat nationalist feels obliged to toss a brick through our Head Office window to redress matters!

E. S. Grant,

London NW4

How long will the slump last? (1991)

From the September 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Despite Chancellor Lamont's predictions, the British economy still shows no sign of recovery from the recession. Indeed, the picture is a gloomy one with world slump conditions becoming apparent as the economic downturn in Britain is mirrored in a number of other leading industrial nations. Among others, the United States, Canada, France and even Japan have all recently seen industrial production fall and unemployment rise.

In Britain, the CBI has been reporting falling confidence, orders and output. The construction industry is predicting a total loss of up to 250,000 jobs (Times, 5 August), and motor manufacturing—always a good indicator of the overall health of the economy—is in dire straits. Sales have fallen dramatically and there are widespread redundancies in the offing, with the large Ford plant at Halewood already operating a three-day week. Across much of the South the condition of the formerly booming high-tech “sunrise'' industries is more suggestive of a sunset, with thousands of redundancies and increasing numbers of factory closures. The official unemployment statistics, while grossly underestimating the real situation, are indicating that the 3 million figure will be reached before too long, possibly early next year. In the first quarter of 1991, capital investment in the UK was down by 9.8 percent (Sunday Times, 28 July) and there appears to be little sign of real improvement.

Bad though the situation is, it seems that none of the capitalist political parties think they have much by way of a solution. It now seems a very long time since the Labour Party advocated government intervention and large increases in state spending to create full employment, or since Mrs Thatcher promised the British economy a good “shake-out" after which it would be leaner, fitter and more successful for years to come. Indeed, while Keynesianism seems as dead and buried as its founder, the Monetarist doctrine which attempted to supersede it as the cure-all for the nations ills rarely now gets mentioned outside of the more eccentric university economics departments.

During the last slump in the early 1980s things couldn’t have been more different. Monetarism was in the ascendant, with the Prime Minister, Chancellor and their leading economic advisers all followers of this spurious faith, arguing that if increases in the price level could be kept to a minimum, then the market would deliver economic growth and increasing employment without too much assistance from the state.

Labour’s void

At the other end of the capitalist political spectrum, the Labour Party was showing a renewed faith in Keynesian-style expansion, while bitterly opposing the Tory governments attempts to cut government spending in real terms. Labour’s disastrous 1983 General Election manifesto (dubbed by Labour MP Austin Mitchell “the longest suicide note in political history") stated gloriously:

   We will expand the economy by providing a strong and measured increase in spending . . . more spending means that the economy will begin to expand: and growth will provide the new wealth for higher wages and better living standards, the right climate for industry to invest, and more resources for the public services . . . economic expansion will make it possible to end the waste of mass unemployment.

In one sense it was touching that the manifest failure of these policies when implemented in 1974-5 under Wilson and Healey did not deter Labour from promising to have another attempt. But by this time Keynesian nonsense about an increase in state spending boosting the economy and reducing unemployment (when representing in fact merely a re-arrangement of spending power within the economy between the state and private sectors) was unlikely to fool the electorate.

Though there are still some unrepentant Keynesians in the Labour Party (and some in the Tory Party, too) Labour has now moved away from such cumbersome commitments, content in its political void and happy to criticise the supposed failings of others without bothering to offer anything substantially different of its own. The Conservative Party, likewise, had already long abandoned any hope it may once have had of reducing unemployment and stimulating growth through its own efforts at manipulating the capitalist trade cycle. Now they can only hope that better days are around the corner, waiting for the turnaround in the economy like a beached whale waiting for the tide to come back in and rescue it.

No solution

The impotence of the various parties of capitalism when confronted with the system’s unpredictable trade cycle has been clearly exposed by a long scries of past failures. Faced with ever-recurring capitalist crises and slumps, they have tried protectionism and free trade, increased government spending and reduced government spending, fixed exchange rates and floating exchange rates, imperial preference and the Common Market, nationalisation and privatisation—and all to no avail. The underlying problem has remained—because it is built-in to the system.

The unplanned nature of its production means that capitalism will always periodically plunge headlong into slump. Over-investment in key industries inevitably occurs because of the never-ending drive towards capital accumulation, leading to falling rates of profit and overproduction of commodities for the market. As a result, the human miseries of redundancy and unemployment intrude into the lives of those most vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the market economy. They, of course, are the people currently paying a price Chancellor Lamont says "is well worth paying".

But it is not simply that the politicians are deliberately callous when some reformist solution to the problem is there for all to see and for them to take up. In reality there never has been a solution to capitalist slumps and, given the anarchic nature of the capitalist system, it would seem that the best Major and Lamont can presently hope for is that the recession is not exacerbated by the type of financial crash that occurred in 1929. But the recent scries of financial scandals coupled with the fall in the Nikkei Index in Japan from nearly 39,000 points to just over 23,000 in less than two years (knocking more than £1,000 billion off the value of quoted shares) suggest that things are not looking too good on that front either.

The capitalist system has always been at the mercy of such factors and only a fool could predict that “the resumption of growth should not long be delayed" (Chancellors Budget Speech, 19 March). Though the slump will end sometime—after which the cycle will come round all over again—it will surely have demonstrated once and for all the complete inability of the political parties and governments of capitalism to control their own economic system, and will have exposed the so-called “triumph of capitalism" for the hollow sham that it is.

Dave Perrin

Crazy World of Economics (1991)

Book Review from the September 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Action for prosperity : a new direction for industrial solidarity By Robert Corfe (Collindist Press. 1990.)

The author of this booklet is a management consultant employed by engineering firms in the Eastern Counties. A year ago, after less than a month’s service, he was fired along with most of the labour force, from a small company which had been taken over. A privileged few of the staff had been kept on and transferred to another factory. These and other experiences have led him to draw a number of conclusions about the world we live in. particularly the world of economics, and to write a series of booklets, of which this is one.

He says that nowadays firms tend to be financed by “rentiers” or owned by multinationals. whose thinking is short-term and who are sufficiently remote to have no other thought than for the bottom line of the balance sheet. The consequence of all this, he argues, is the de-industrialisation of Britain (and the US). Businesses funded by rentiers tend to be bankrupted by the moneylenders at the least sign of trouble, and those taken over by multinationals are closed down in rationalisation programmes. The only sectors to expand are those peculiar to money-juggling such as banking. insurance and other such “services".

We cannot quarrel with much of this; the problem is what to do about it. His short-term prescription is for the workers and management to occupy the factory. His long-term solution is a new ethos based on proper long-term funding of wealth-producing industry, and protection against imports.

The occupation of factories, sit-ins. work-ins, and similar stratagems are tactics which have been used in many places and for a long time. I am not sure of their efficacy, but the privilege of judging does not belong to us, since we do not have to bear the responsibility that goes with the action. Workers in dispute are better off without armchair generals to advise them.They will know better than anybody the risk of encounters with bailiffs and their rottweilers, of truncheon-wielding policemen, of, in the last analysis, the armed forces, all of which have been used by governments against workers in occupation of factories.

What Corfe does not attempt to deal with is the cause or causes underlying these closures. We must, according to him, look forward to an infinite future of work-ins, lockouts, and similar industrial scenarios.

His alternative long-term solution is for finance to be made available to productive industry at much cheaper rates, as is the case in Germany and Japan where there is a much more rational attitude to wealth creation and a realisation that what are referred to as "service industries”, the objects of Corfe's ire don’t create wealth at all.

But let us assume that all his pleas were satisfied, that special interest rates were agreed for manufacturing. what would that do to prevent the system continuing to oscillate between slump and growth, as it has done for the last two centuries? We have experienced the whole spectrum of market economy operation, from command systems like those of Eastern European state capitalism, through various flavours of intervention, Keynesian and Fabian, for example, to the voodoo Free-Market Economics of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The first lot finally collapsed last year, the Keynesian dream ended in the sleepwalk of the Carter and Callaghan administrations, and the last lot are just slipping down the toilet. Corfe would appear to favour the Keynesian interventionist option. But has he forgotten the 1970s?

The alternatives within this system are always a slump or growth. Too little or too much. A slump that threatens the majority of people with debt, in some cases denying them the bare necessities of life; and as an alternative the growth which is destroying the planet.

Now we have got a crazy idea. This is to let Mr Corfe and his fellow workers have all the food, clothing, housing, transport and entertainment, and the factory have all the plant and raw materials they need at a cost of nothing, nil. nix, no money. They can do the same for others. In this way we can get down to satisfying our needs directly without the need for finance or financiers. Too simple? But the truth is always simple. Understanding it is the hard bit. Entitia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, superbly translated by Ray Kroc, founder of the MacDonalds junk food empire, as: "Keep it simple, stupid!"

Ken Smith

Disasters: who's to blame? (1991)

From the September 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Events which leave one sickened seem to be everyday if not twice-a-day occurrences lately. Switch off the horror films, view reality instead.

The pace of life and the power behind that tempo are aspects of modern society to which we close our minds, except when a tragedy hits the headlines. The way we distance ourselves is by never imagining that the latest horrific accident will happen to ourselves or our loved ones. Nor do we think that we are in any way responsible. Usually the fault is laid at “their” door, “they” didn't do the job properly, “they” caused those people to drown, be burned or poisoned and “they” should do something about it. But if "we” think that a society operated by money and the wages system is the only way to be—if time is money and cutting corners a way to make more— if this is acceptable then so must be the Kings Cross fire, Hillsborough, Zeebrugge, Chernobyl, Bhopal, Seveso, Three Mile Island. Sellafield— the list could go on and on, and it is “we" who must share the responsibility.

What all these “accidents” have in common is that they are all related to the profit-making system of society that is capitalism—and its imperatives—and have all been attributed to human error. The Master of the ship the Herald of Free Enterprise (the name is a herald of foreboding) goes to sea with the bow doors open. The operators in the Three Mile Island disaster were said to have a "faulty mental model" of the system. The fire in the reactor at Sellafield/Windscale, in October 1957, was the result of certain control operations being performed too soon and too rapidly. In 1974 a DC10 plane crashed after taking off from Orly Airport near Paris killing 346 people: an overworked baggage handler had failed to secure the cargo doors, which subsequently blew out. The Torrey Canyon oil tanker ran aground when the captain who was trying to negotiate a difficult route through the Scilly Isles in order to meet an unrealistic schedule, failed to switch from auto pilot to manual control. At a critical moment, he turned the wheel hard and nothing happened.

The nature of the technology determines the scale of the disasters and human error is involved—but the error is the collective error of those who support present-day society rather than that of the individual workers. If the next terrible happening was to be in our own backyard, if our own child were to die of radiation-related leukaemia, surely we would say enough is enough, no more pain or grief over totally unnecessary events. There must be a better way of providing the necessities of our daily lives and, given collective responsibility, there is.

Janet Carter

Rio Tinto plunder (1991)

Book Review from the September 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

“We don’t grow healthy crops anymore, our traditional customs and values have been disrupted and we have become mere spectators as our earth is being dug-up. taken away and sold for millions. Our land was taken away from us by force: we were blind then but we have finally grown to understand what’s going on”.

These words were spoken by Perpetua Serero in Bouganville, Papua New Guinea, after she and her community were driven off the land which they were dependent on for their livelihoods so as to make way for a potentially highly profitable but environmentally and socially disastrous mine operated by one of the world’s largest multinational mining corporations. Rio Tinto Zinc. Her words are echoed all round the world by thousands of people whose lifestyles and communities have been wrecked by the operations of this company.

In its relentless pursuit of profits Rio Tinto Zinc has left a trail of human and environmental devastation of staggering proportions, as detailed in Plunder published by Partizans (218 Liverpool Rd, London N1 1LE, price £6.50 including postage). This is a thoroughly researched account of how RTZ arrived at and continues to maintain its position of world leader in the mining industry. The book deals with the company’s mining operations in every part of the world and in each section are well-documented examples of the devious, competitive practices that are typical of such capitalist organisations. These include a number of dirty tricks such as brow-beating opponents, leaning on governments, price-fixing, breaking the law, and union- busting.

RTZ claims in its glossy annual report to be “bringing out the best in the world". It even goes so far as to state that it aims to “act responsibly as a steward of the essential resources in its care" and “to involve the local communities wherever it operates and to promote their well-being".

Destroyed communities

Plunder tells a very different story. In its mining operations in over forty different countries. RTZ and its subsidiaries have poisoned the air, the rivers and the land, made species of animals and plants extinct, and turned areas of wild scenic beauty into barren wastelands. Far from promoting the well-being of local communities, RTZ has uprooted and displaced indigenous peoples, destroying their livelihoods and communities. It has turned them into an alienated and unskilled population forced into a lifestyle of abject poverty, prostitution, alcohol abuse and crime. In other words, they are forced into a life of wage-slavery at its bottom-most level.

RTZ has disregarded health and safety standards, causing the deaths over the years of hundreds and possibly thousands of workers from dust and radiation related diseases. Many of its workers, as in the case of the Rossing uranium mine in Namibia are expected to live in accommodation described as the worst in the world. RTZ also has a long record of trying to prevent workers organising trade unions. For instance, in 1937 the company Chairman was able to report to the shareholders in London on the tense labour situation at the company’s mines in Spain: “Since the mining region was occupied by General Franco’s forces there have been no further labour problems . . . Miners found guilty of troublemaking are court-martialled and shot".

However, Plunder is more than just an account of the nefarious activities of a mining company. It is also a resource book by and about people fighting for their lives, their communities and their environment against the profit-seeking onslaught of just one of the many multinational giants who constitute the very machinery of the capitalist system. The book represents the cooperative efforts of many individuals, organisations and communities around the world brought together by Partizans (People Against RioTinto Zinc and its Subsidiaries) who published the book at their own expense. The text written by Roger Moody is based on research and contributions by people from indigenous communities. trade unions, organisations concerned with the environment and occupational health, and many others. It has been published with the intention of being a handbook for people confronting multinational mining companies, particularly more isolated communities with little experience of the dirty business of capitalism and perhaps unaware that others are in the same situation as them.

Global solidarity

For Socialists Plunder is a valuable book in the battle of ideas. Firstly, because it represents a wealth of evidence to show that the profit system cannot be run in the interests of working people and their environment. Secondly and more importantly, because it has grown out of a vision that global solidarity is the only way to bring about an end to this exploitative global system.

In Plunder we hear the voices of people who are aware that RTZ has only one driving force behind it, the profit motive. The indigenous communities involved in the battle against RTZ bring to the class struggle a sense of communal responsibility to each other and the world around them as well as a sense of individual self-respect. To some of these communities property and hierarchical social organisations are alien concepts. Their experience of alternative lifestyles based on mutual respect and responsibility for the land on which they depend for their living imbues their resistance with a inner strength the importance of which we should not ignore or deny.

The struggles of these communities serve as a reminder that socialism is about knowing that an alternative to capitalist society is possible and that we can bring it about by understanding the source of our oppression and acting in a spirit of comradeship and solidarity with our fellow workers throughout the world.

Kerima Mohideen

Kremlin Coup—Lies, Tanks & Western Banks (1991)

Editorial from the September 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1917 the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia by a coup d'état. In the elections to the Constituent Assembly early the next year a majority of voters opted for the other parties. So the Bolsheviks sent troops to close down the elected Assembly. The tactics of Bolshevism were the tactics of a ruthless left-wing fascism, contemptuous in every way of the will of the majority.

The Bolsheviks smashed the opposition parties and closed the press of their critics. The Cheka was set up to persecute those who stood against the Bolshevik state dictatorship. All of this happened under Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks. Under his second-in-command, Trotsky, the sailors of Kronstadt who dared to reject the authoritarian dictatorship were massacred. The fascistic nature of the regime cannot be blamed upon the singular wickedness of Stalin who succeeded Lenin as party chief. The apparatus of oppression was built into a regime established by minority coup.

The myth of Russian socialism has been the most grotesque political illusion of this century. Opponents of working-class freedom have used the example of the Bolshevik coup and its appalling consequences as proof that "socialism" must lead to dictatorship. The parties and sects of the Left, who have danced like puppets to the tunes of the Kremlin dictators, and have confused workers with nonsensical notions of "Marxism-Leninism", have dragged the idea of socialism through the mud.

The Socialist Party has pointed out since 1917 that Russia was creating state capitalism, not socialism. It is a system based upon state dictatorship, not common ownership and democratic control.

The beneficiaries of the Leninist governments have been the bureaucratic elites who have enjoyed much the same affluence and privilege as the capitalist masters in the openly capitalist countries. These Party bosses hate to see workers combining, whether in independent unions or for freedom to assemble or publish ideas or vote for who is to have power.

In 1981 the Polish Party bosses, backed by the Leninist super-bosses in the Kremlin, used military force to crush the independent union, Solidarity, and attempted to restore their unimpeded dictatorship. They failed. Once workers had a taste of democracy, however limited, there is no chance of stopping them from going for more.

In 1991 the Party bosses of the CPSU have orchestrated a coup to restore full state power to themselves. They feared that nationalist and other factions would break their monopoly of power. The Red Fascists of the KGB, the Red Army and Party officialdom have tried to repeat the tactic of 1917: take power regardless of the electoral will of the workers.

The democratic concessions which the workers of the Russian Empire have won over the past half-decade will not be surrendered without a struggle. When workers defend their freedom to assemble and to print literature and to vote, the Red Fascists will try to use violent force against them.

The Socialist Party is hostile to the state capitalism of the Russian Empire (as well as China and the other pseudo-socialist nations) and also to the private capitalism of Bush's "New World Order" where millions dwell in poverty and anxiety. We call upon our fellow workers to join the movement for a truly democratic society without classes, states or leaders. The movement for socialism must be conducted democratically or else it can not be socialist; it must stand for a society of free access to all goods and services, and nothing less, or else it is not proposing an alternative to capitalism. Workers of the Russian Empire—workers of Britain—workers of the world—let us avoid further bloodshed and oppression; let us take the world into our own hands.