Sting in the Tail: Their Problems . . . (1992)

The Sting in the Tail column from the September 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Their Problems . . .

David Mellor's little lapse certainly hogged the headlines, but another story concerning more serious lapses by political leaders was tucked away inside The Guardian (25 July).

Professor Hugh Freeman, a prominent psychiatrist, told a meeting of fellow shrinks In Dublin that world statesmen have often been:

Incapable of exercising normal decision-making powers through abnormalities of brain functioning.

According to the Prof., Prime Minister Anthony Eden was heavily into booze and drugs during the 1956 Suez crisis and "was not fit to be In charge of national affairs at that time”: US President Woodrow Wilson was "severely mentally handicapped" for the last year of his term: Stalin ended up "so irrational" that he could have started World War 3, while JFK was almost certainly taking steroids and amphetamines during the Cuban missile crisis. The Profs case is made and he didn’t even mention Hitler!

As the poet wisely put it:

Great men are great In our eyes -

While we kneel.

Let us rise!

. . . Our Solution

Is it any wonder that 'World Statesmen" go barmy? Consider the hassle George Bush faces over the proposed sale of 5 billion dollars worth of US fighter aircraft to Saudi Arabia.

If the deal goes through he risks outraging the Israelis and, in this election year, the Jewish American vote, if it doesn’t go through then 30,000 defence industry jobs will be lost along with who knows how many votes.

Of course, he could buy-off the Israelis and their supporters by granting Israel the 10 billion dollar loan guarantees he has been holding out on, but this will not pacify the American arms control groups: how, they ask, can Bush claim to be promoting Middle East peace and sell arms there at the same time?

All heads of government constantly face such mind-bending problems: let's save the poor souls from their mental anquish by relieving them of all that decision-making and simply re-organise society for the benefit of humanity.

Footloose Faldo

Most days that Scorpion gets up he is quite pleased to find a pair of boots to wear. Sometimes he feels lucky just finding his feet.

That is not the case with Nick Faldo, recent winner of the British Open Golf Championship. Mr. Faldo has been paid £100,000 a year since 1989 to wear Stylo Matchmaker shoes during televised tournaments. Turns out that the naughty Faldo wore Footjoys shoes In his recent triumph. Stylo are not best pleased.

There is talk of-some action being taken which is understandable considering Stylo's holding company lost £9 million last year.

It says a lot about capitalism when even an enjoyable pursuit like an afternoon on a golf course has been turned into just another business opportunity for the money grubbers. Everything capitalism touches It spoils.

That's History

Are you baffled by the complexity of the ethnic mix of Eastern Europe and how it got that way? Then Malcolm Bradbury's description of an imaginary Eastern European country in his satirical novel "Rates of Exchange" could give you a clue:

It is a land that has . . . been pummelled, fought over, raped, pillaged, conquered and oppressed by the endless invaders who, from every direction, have swept and jostled through this all too accessible landscape. Swedes and Medes, Prussians and Russians, Asians and Thracians, Tartars and Cassocks, Mortars and Turds, Indeed almost every tribe or race specialist In pillage and rape, have been here . . . and left behind their imprint, their customs, their faiths, their architecture, their genes . . . And so its culture Is a melting pot, Its language a pot-pourri, Its people a salad.

So how do those "ethnic-cleansers" square all that with their racial nonsense?

All In The Game

Labour and Conservatives are fond of pretending that they are radically different from each other. Really, of course, it is all a bit of a game.

John Biffen, Tory MP writing in The Guardian (21 July) and discussing John Smith's future prospects had this to say:

He will have to provide a convincing policy alternative . . . He will be under great constraint to do this particularly as Labour's public spending and interest rates policies broadly reflect those of the Conservatives.

It Never Fails

Recently we saw a poster for an SWP meeting entitled "Will The Economy Ever Recover?" We saw it too late to hear what the speaker had to say, but our answer to that question is, yes, the economy will recover.

This will happen for several reasons: One is that the present slump will eventually bring down interest rates to the point where companies find it attractive enough to borrow in order to invest: another is that growing unemployment exerts downward pressure on wages and this will also attract employers.

Then the property crash means that factory, warehouse and office space can be had cheaply, and because of production cut-backs stocks will become depleted and need replacing, while companies will be able to buy the plant and machinery of bankrupt competitors at knock-down prices.

Factors like these will encourage capital to invest again in production because of the prospects for bigger profits and the economy will have recovered. Every slump contains the seed of the next boom and vice-versa.

Butchery in the Balkans (1992)

From the September 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the Berlin Wall came down and the Cold War ended, many in the West breathed a sigh of relief. Western democracy and the free market were seen to have triumphed and the Red Spectre that hunted Europe had been finally exorcised. Politicians and bureaucrats began speaking of a “New World Order" and of a “peace dividend" whereby money saved on military expenditure could be put to social use and channelled into health and education programmes.

Few anticipated that the end of the Cold War would open a new can of worms. From Prague to Vladivostok, republics and tiny enclaves became caught up in a tidal-wave of nationalist fervour. Overnight, even the most recently published atlases became out of date as the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia disintegrated.

Nowhere has nationalist upheaval been as intense as in the former "Socialist Federal Republic” of Yugoslavia. So enmeshed have become the politics here that a brief look at Yugoslavia’s history is in order.

Artificial creation

After the capitalist-instigated madness known as the first world war the Austro-Hungarian territories of Croatia. Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina were joined with Serbia and Montenegro under the Serbian king Alexander, and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was founded. Although a new constitution was proclaimed. rivalry between Serbs and Croats for political supremacy led Alexander to impose his own dictatorship in 1929, the year the republics were re-named Yugoslavia. This accentuated Croatian enmity to centralization and Serbian predominance.

Under the new Regent, Paul, Yugoslavia came increasingly under threat from the Axis powers, Germany and Italy, after 1933, and the hostility of the Soviet Union, which urged the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (formed in 1937) to work towards the fragmentation of the country. Germany took advantage of a popular uprising and invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941, creating a puppet fascist state out of Croatia and territory in Bosnia-Herzegovina, with the rest being parcelled between Germany, Italy, Bulgaria and Hungary.

Resistance groups soon emerged to confront the Nazis—the Serbian Chetniks under the leadership of Draza Mihailovic and Tito’s Communist Partisans. However, not only did many Croats support the Nazis, but many Chetniks collaborated against Tito’s partisans. By 1943, Tito had emerged as victor against Mihailovic and formed the Anti-Fascist National Liberation Council, which assumed power when the Nazis were finally driven out.

In November 1945, the provisional government abolished the monarchy and set up the Federative People’s Republic of Yugoslavia. Six months later the country adopted a constitution based upon that of the Soviet Union in 1936, and later nationalized transport, industry and banking, and brought agriculture under collectivization.

In 1971, after stating his intention of liberalizing the government. Tito established a 22-man collective presidency which he hoped would manage affairs after his death. This "liberalization" had the effect of sparking Croatian nationalism, culminating in mass demonstrations and widespread rioting. In 1981, Albanians in the autonomous province of Kosovo protested against ill-treatment by the Serbian administration. This was followed by further unrest in 1988 when Serbia moved to end provincial autonomy there.

Yugoslavia thrived during the Cold War, chiefly because both blocs paid handsomely to maintain Yugoslav non-alignment. The Serbian political leadership advocated a centralized state and tough authoritarian rule. This brought it into direct conflict with Slovenia and Croatia, both of whom favoured greater autonomy, more so in the wake of the break-up of the Yugoslav League of Communists in spring 1990.

The Yugoslav federal machinery wasn’t made to take the strain of political pluralism. The federal government, led by free-marketeer Ante Markovic, was paralysed by wrangling among the republics. No procedure could be agreed for federal elections.

In April 1990 both Croatia and Slovenia held free elections in which the centre-right Slovenian Democratic Community Party and the Croatian Democratic Union swept to power on nationalistic, pro-independence cards. When these two republics declared independence they were invaded by the Yugoslav Army. The same thing happened when on 1 March this year Bosnia-Herzegovina too declared its independence. All three republics have since been granted recognition by the EEC and the USA.

The history and politics of Yugoslavia are indeed complicated, and while it is true that the end of the Cold War hastened the break-up of the republics, this alone does not explain the conflict that has raged there for over a year. Indeed, few commentators can agree on the cause of the crisis, or why some republics want autonomy while others wish to stay within the federation.

The Croatian president Franjo Tudjman echoed Thatcher's views when he asserted that Serbs and Croats “were not just different people but different civilisations’’, and that the conflict was one of "democracy against communism” (European, 18 August 1991). Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian president, claimed that the trouble was caused by the secessionist demands of other republics, adding that "all processes in the contemporary world tend toward integration” (Time International, 8 June).

Richard West, writing in the Guardian, sees the “difference between the Yugoslav people” as “one of religion” (17 September 1991), while Branka Magas (Marxism Today, November 1991) declared that “the war being waged against Croatia is . . . in reality little more than a war of territorial conquest”.

Few, if any, are putting forward a socialist analysis of the causes of the conflict and blaming the capitalist system for the crisis. It is true that nationalism is a factor, but it is only a banner used as a means to an end—profit.

Uneven development

The influence of the world market in recent years has accentuated economic disparity in the Yugoslav republics. Both Tudjman and Milan Kukan (respective leaders of Croatia and Slovenia) saw the economic advantages in independence, manipulating nationalist sentiments for financial ends.

The conflict was sparked by greed for profit. The north-west republics of Croatia and Slovenia, tired of subsidizing their southern neighbours chanelled economic indignation into a raw form of nationalism—the Croatian leadership digging up wartime fascist insignia—fearing that a more centralized Yugoslav federation would mean a greater redistribution of their wealth.

Croatia and Slovenia are by far the wealthiest of the republics. Heavy industry is concentrated in Croatia and production centred on iron ore is thriving in Slovenia. Croatia is Yugoslavia’s biggest producer of oil and in 1987 attracted 7.2 million tourists, boosting the economy by USS3 billion. Although Slovenia has only 7.8 percent of the population, it accounts for an estimated 25 percent of Yugoslavia’s GNP and 30 percent of exports.

Slovenia has for some time been the most wealthy and economically efficient of the Yugoslav republics. Average earnings are more than double those in Croatia and reputedly six times those of the southern province of Kosovo, where unemployment stands at 40 percent.

It is little wonder, then, that a centralized Yugoslav federation which pumped 55 percent of the federal budget into maintaining the armed forces, looked so unattractive to capitalists in the northern republics. And little wonder that Croatian and Slovenian capitalists object to shouldering the burden of subsidies—development aid, federal projects, natural disaster relief, etc—to the poorer south.

So the basic, economic cause of the conflict boils down to a clash of interests between those capitalists who wanted and those who opposed a redistribution of profits.

Just as Franjo Tudjman and Milan Kukan have sought to secure their republic’s economic futures, appealing to nationalistic sentiments, so too has Milosevic reawakened Serbian nationalism by rallying his people against the richer north-west with rash promises of raised standards of living and long-term economic security.

War in Bosnia

War is now raging in Bosnia-Herzegovina where 44 percent of the population are Muslims. The UN has imposed sanctions and a naval blockade on Serbia and there is talk of military intervention. Serbia, however, is nearly self-sufficient in food production and has stockpiled goods and fuel—although the latter could run short as Serbia produces only 20 percent of what she uses. So it is likely that Serbia will not be too badly affected by sanctions.

The recalcitrant Milosevic sees sanctions as “the price Serbians have to pay for supporting Serbs outside Serbia” (Independent, 1 June), but neglects to tell the workers who do his fighting that war is the price they must pay for the right to be exploited by Serbian capitalists. And Tudjman never tells Croats fighting for Croatian enclaves that they are really fighting to make bigger profits for their masters under German economic rule.

It is a great sadness that so many have died in what was Yugoslavia from the virus of nationalism, injected into them by leaders suffering from the disease of capitalism.

Enlightened workers will be aware that the only remedy for the present world malaise is socialism. Workers in reality have no nation, but hoodwinked by their leaders they seek sanctuary inside artificially-constructed borders. Workers bind themselves with the chains of regional and national identity, giving their masters the keys. They forget that there is only one country—planet Earth—on which all wealth and the means of living in comfort and security is produced by themselves. Workers must unite and break these chains. The world is theirs for the taking.

John Bissett

What price democracy? (1992)

Cartoon by George Meddemmen.

From the September 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

With the collapse of what we were encouraged to believe was communism in eastern Europe, another clutch of nations are undergoing the birth pangs of what passes for freedom in the so-called western democracies.

Unquestionably, it is better to live in a society where there is some degree of democracy than in one where opposition to the regime is not tolerated. The question is, however, how democratic are the democratic countries and how much benign repression is concealed by the illusion of freedom?

We have all heard the boast that America is a classless society and that any man or woman, whatever his or her origins, can become the nation’s chief executive. That no-one is debarred from the office of President on the grounds of being a cheat, a liar or a fool, is demonstrated by the history, past and present, of US Presidents. On the other hand, neither a woman nor a black person have had the distinction of being selected and, while it is possible that the colour and sex prohibition may be overcome in the future, the likelihood of someone who is not immensely rich succeeding to the Presidency of the United States is extremely unlikely.

In the struggle for electoral victory in the US Presidential elections money is a primary factor. It is not expensive, of course, to advise the voting public about the real issues that concern their future; but it does cost the most fantastic amounts of money to obscure the reality of both the present and the future. All the work of programme preparation, the prime media time, the wages and salaries of artisans and specialists in all sorts of hype and media trickery, conning with paper hats, raspberry blowers, millions of posters carrying asinine slogans, telling lies, using private detectives to look for dirt with which to expose an opponent. The disgusting circus that passes for democracy at Presidential level is very, very expensive stuff in which there is no place for ideas or concepts that cannot be backed by multi-millions of dollars.

Of course the election of a President is a two-horse race. We don’t even hear about the other candidates nor, indeed, do most Americans. There is no bar on socialists, or any other grouping, running for office—that’s the basis of the claim that America is a democracy—but without the massive wealth to buy the organisation, media time etc. that the Republicans and Democrats can deploy, that claim is patently fraudulent.

The system is not necessarily fashioned to repress the free expression of ideas but that is what it does. Western capitalism uses the power of money to benignly repress the general dissemination of ideas with even more efficacy than eastern state capitalism repressed ideas with terror. In the latter, the means used to suppress inexorably created their own reaction; in the former, since all are theoretically free to express their ideas and are gagged by lack of money, the public—conditioned to accept the economic logic of people even dying because they do not have the money to buy the food, shelter or medical care they need—can easily accept the financial suppression of ideas as being consistent with the democracy of the market.

Power of money

The same two-horse race as takes place between the Democrats and Republicans in the US takes place in Britain; here the runners are the Conservative Party and the Labour Party—with the so-called Liberal Democrats anxious to supplant one or other of the runners.

In Britain—especially following the revelation that one of the biggest press barons was a despicable crook who even stole from his retired workers—it would be freely admitted that, as in all the other so-called democratic countries, the press is owned and controlled by unscrupulous racketeers who have the power to influence millions of people every day. But it would be argued that at least the more influencial electronic media is largely free of undemocratic practices. Unlike the United States, where politicians and political interest groups can buy radio and TV lime, the electronic media here is allegedly protected against undemocratic abuse by rigorously enforced guidelines.

In fact these guidelines are even more repressive of genuine democratic practice than the American system. While it is true that in the United States those political parties serving the political needs of the capitalist class can buy the most potent means of controlling and conditioning masses of people and that this is the opposite of democratic, it is also true that interests outside the big parties can buy such exposure for their ideas as their necessarily meagre finances allow. In Britain, minority voices are denied access to the mass communication media except, of course, if they can muster amounts of money far greater than would be required for a modest campaign on American TV or radio!

In order to get an insignificant amount of broadcasting time on BBC or ITV in a general election, a political organisation must put up at least £25,000 as deposits for 50 candidates. On top of this a reasonably credible campaign in support these candidates would cost another £125,000. Any crackpot thesis, providing it is legal—and the rubbish that the major parties pul out on TV shows legality is no guide to sense!—can get the maximum amount of time if its sponsors can raise about £300,000 in the form of deposits for candidates in every coastituency. This amount of money buys it the right of access to the public through the medium of television and radio just as surely as it would in the US if it was paid over directly to the TV companies.

It has to be added, lest anyone is surprised that British democracy is so cheap that, after the deposits have been paid, about another £1,500,000 would be required to field a modest campaign—indeed, one press report claimed that the Tories invested in excess of £20,000,000 in buying the opportunity in the 1992 General Election to govern Britain.

So much for living in a democratic society. The cash nexus that controls capitalist democracy means that new ideas and concepts that do have, or may have, merit in solving the terrible and intractable problems of capitalism are frozen out of the pseudo-democratic system by the power of money. That, of course, is why problems like poverty, insecurity, homelessness, crime and wars, are intractable—because mass public examination of new solutions or different approaches to our problems are not permitted by those who gain wealth, power and privilege out of the very system that creates these problems.

Struggle for democracy

The "justification" for this anti-democratic system of closed loop capitalist "democracy" that ensures that the public is comfortably insulated from knowledge of any sane alternative to the present system of social lunacy, is the argument that the financial bar precludes all sorts of nut-cases from getting involved in elections. Of course, the amount of money spent in procuring a percentage of the vote at elections also acts as the means of measuring what access, if any, those outside the mainstream parties have between elections.

It is certainly no accident that, despite the fact that political fare is a sought after and, normally, ongoing part of television and radio programming, it is a rarity for anyone outside the mainstream panics to be seen or heard on British TV. Nor does the absence mean that there is a dearth of minority political opinion or spokespersons prepared to pul such opinion. No, it means that the utterly anti-democratic "percentage of the vote" thesis is working a treat for British capitalism.

But the argument itself, that nut-cases are kept off the air—apart from the fact that it is an essentially anti-democratic argument that makes money the arbiter of political sanity—falls down in practice. Apart from the Monster Raving Looney Party and the mass of candidates who fought the General Election on a policy of conquering problems by thinking they are not there, there are the orthodox inanities of Major, Kinnock and Ashdown.

Real democracy, of course, is impossible to achieve within a system of social inequality; the essence of real, informed and fully participative democracy can only prevail in a truly socialist society. Still, to establish the majority socialist consciousness that must necessarily underpin Socialism, it is important to struggle for our voice to be heard; for the limping democracy of capitalism to become more than a mere numbers game for pollsters and politicians. That is not to say that the struggle for a wider degree of democracy must precede the struggle for Socialism but, rather, that the struggle for democracy is an integral part of the struggle for Socialism.

Richard Montague

They said it . . . (1992)

From the September 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

We had women on every platform daring the election, hat the party used them like decorative potted plants—Labour MP Ann Clwyd on women and the Labour Party.

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I did it because they were going to repossess my Sky dish—David Kernaghan, explaining the armed robbery which brought him a seven-year gaol sentence.

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You should not believe everything you read in the newspapers—Robert Clark, chairman of Mirror Group Newspapers. 

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It is quite a work to dredge out of the English language pejoratives strong enough to describe their vulgarity, brutishness and maladroitness—Former Tory Minister Alan Clark on the royal family.

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Nobody was going to throw the first brick because there were too many people living in glass houses—Norman Tebbit on the Mellor scandal.

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With low coffee prices a symptom of stocks rather than supply, a stock destruction plan by producers would have a greater effect on the world market price than anything else— Lawrence Eagles, commodity analyst.

Letter: What justice? (1992)

Letter to the Editors from the September 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

What justice?

Dear Editors,

“What Makes You Angry?” (Socialist Standard, July). I do not know whether responses were anticipated to such an open question, but I certainly feel able to throw in my twopenny worth.

The system under which we all exist, live, prosper and exploit (in that order) angers me constantly. The system is an evil joke played upon humanity, where success at one end of the scale is measured by the amount of poverty and suffering at the other.

I believe it was Balzac who remarked that “behind every great man is a crime”, or words to like effect, and it is true, if crime is defined as causing suffering and deprivation through greed and wanton cruelty.

Civilised society is merely a facade, the icing on a cake consisting of the following ingredients: selfishness, theft, murder; yes, even murder! After all let us remember that murder has not always been a capital offence. In Saxon times, the penalty for murdering a labourer was about £10, a bishop cost you £60, and an archbishop would set you back about £180. In fact, with the exception of regicide, you could pay in cash for most malefactions.

Inequalities in the way justice is administered enrage me. In the light of Guildford, Birmingham, Kiszko, and the remainder of Lord Lane’s whipping boys, what happened to Habeas Corpus, the presumption of innocence, and the burden of proof? Were they conveniently forgotten in the haste to secure convictions for undeniable atrocities. And why aren’t the West Midlands rabble in prison instead of voting for the return of public executions, the tumbril cart, and the Tyburn Tree, when each week people who are unable to pay their poll tax are carted off to gaol amid harsh condemnation from the bench?

Why do people like Anthony Blunt get offered immunity from prosecution for offences against the Official Secrets Act, allowing them to continue their bourgeois lives, in exchange for a few names and dates?

And last, but by no means least, why is Lord Lane allowed to retain his title in spite of the damage he has done in the name of British Justice?

David Hinchcliffe,

Accrington

Reply:

“British Justice" has always been what it is today: an arm of the state machine which exists to defend the interests of the ruling class at home and abroad. Nor could it be anything else since, as Kropotkin once pointed out, the whole system of law courts and prisons is essentially only “organised vengeance called justice”.

Editors.

Between the Lines: State Murder, USA (1992)

The Between the Lines Column from the September 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

State Murder, USA

In sixteenth-century Geneva a deranged character by the name of Jacques Chapellaz confessed to cursing God and trying to eat the devil, though finding it hard to swallow his horns. The poor man was condemned to having his tongue cut out. That was then: dark, ignorant, religiously confused times. Panorama (BBC1, 9.30 pm, 3 August) was about how the USA claims to be a rational society which has surpassed the excesses of Old Testament morality. The programme showed how false is such a claim. In the cells of Death Row in Huntsville, Texas there are 358 men who have been sentenced to be murdered by the state. That is just one of the waiting rooms for death in the 50 states of the USA. Amongst those awaiting the legalised murder which “justice" has condemned them to are several who are clearly so mentally deranged as to have little control over their actions. For example, one condemned prisoner was interviewed who was described by a psychologist as having a mental age of ten and as compulsively agreeing with whatever is asked of him in order to please people. Obtaining a confession of murder from such a pathetic person was hardly difficult.

A new and highly conspicuous pressure group is called VOCAL: Victims of Crime and Leniency, comprising people who want courts to sentence more "wrongdoers" to death. Many of these advocates of callous vengeance were themselves bereaved as a result of murder. They have become bitter and irrational. But now they have won the right for victims' families to testify in courts in order to explain to juries how only an eye for an eye will satisfy them. The unreasonableness of expecting just responses to emanate from angry, vengeful relatives of those who have been murdered is obvious; their inclusion into the US “justice" system is proof that the objective of criminal punishment is largely revenge.

The reverse side of this thirst for revenge in the form of dead bodies, which turns “justice" into organised murder to show the murderers the validity of violence as the highest ethic, is fear. The reason for disgusting pressure groups like VOCAL, made up of wretched, hurt workers, is that they live in a society where almost everyone is scared. The victims are afraid, and their relatives are afraid that the criminals will be punished too little, and the criminals are made afraid by the threat of state murder. What way of running a society is such mutual fear? How dare the US leaders preach of new world orders and civilised values and human rights. In a socialist society, where anti-social behaviour will no longer be stimulated by the relationships of property, we shall not seek to solve problems (and problems there surely will be) by threats, either of confinement or murder.

The members of of VOCAL shown on Panorama would do well to read William Morris's News From Nowhere wherein Old Hammond, speaking from the vantage of a moneyless, propertyless, stateless socialist society, explains how the response to anti-social acts has changed:

'The punishment of which men used to talk wisely and act so foolishly, what was it hut the expression of their fear, since they - i.e. the rulers of society - were dwelling like an armed band in a hostile country. But we who live amongst our friends need neither fear nor punish. Surely if we, in dread of an occasional rare homicide, an occasional rough blow, were solemnly and legally to commit homicide and violence, we would only be a society of ferocious cowards."

In the USA today 80 per cent of people polled favour state murder; a decade ago less than half did. More fear, more cowardly revenge and more prisoners condemned to lives waiting for execution. Surely there is a wiser course for humanity.

Who is the savage?

Early Travellers in North America (BBC2, 9.10pm, 6 August) presented a series of accounts from nineteenth-century travellers who encountered the North American Indians. European orthodoxy at the time was that these people were savages, racially sub-human. In fact, visitors such as Charles Dickens, Frances Trollope and Robert Louis Stevenson were impressed by the dignity of the co-operative native Americans and horrified by the way in which they were cast into prison-like reservations and often killed. Coming only a few days after the Panorama documentary two points emerged forcefully: Firstly, there were no eases of native American Indian Death Rows; secondly, how many of the current "justice" officials owe their power to those before them whose prestige and wealth was obtained by organising the violent attacks upon and killings of defenceless Indians? If justice was about revenge - and both are terms from the vocabulary of capitalism - might not some of the great capitalist families of the Land of the Free be rotting in death cells instead of hopeless wage slaves, many of whom will be killed for crimes that they did not even commit but lack the money or the wit to prove their innocence?

Steve Coleman

SPGB Meetings (1992)

Party News from the September 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

SPGB Series of Meetings: History . . . Not Our Masters Voice (1992)

Party News from the September 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

My guess is that this series of meetings were organised by the (then) new Camden Branch of the SPGB.

Unfortunately, only one of the meetings listed is available as an audio recording on the SPGB's website. Maybe recordings of the other meetings are out there somewhere. It would be nice to know who gave the talk on Tudor England.

Here's a link to the audio recording of Clifford Slapper's meeting:

• The Movement for "National Efficiency" 1880-1914

Press, privacy and profit (1992)

Cartoon by Peter Rigg.

From the September 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

When David Mellor’s affair with the unemployed actress suddenly ceased to interest the newspapers it left room on the front pages for such trivial matters as the world economic recession, the fighting in Bosnia, the famine in Africa which threatens to kill three million people, the crisis in the Gulf, the riots in British cities . . . But of course there was more to it than a bit of prurient excitement about a Minister and a woman; for one thing, did Mellor and de Sancha merely drop out of the headlines or were they pushed?

The affair happened when Mellor’s marriage was in difficulty—although it was not clear which came first and whether one caused the other. In any event the Minister might have got away with it— like so many other prominent politicians—had he not revealed in a bugged telephone conversation that after a night with de Sancha he was too exhausted to write a couple of speeches. Some people might have thought that she had done us a favour but to the People newspaper the prospect of thousands of desperate voters being deprived of listening to Mellor was too much. In the national interest, they decided, they must act; we simply can’t have the country run by a lot of weary and wordless Ministers. However it may damage Mellor and the government—and of course with absolutely no regard to whether it increased the paper’s sales—all must be revealed.

Privacy

And revealed it was, in all the detail customary to what is politely known as the “tabloid”—or, in the best of circles, the “compact”—press. To say that this area of the media operates on double standards would be to understate the arithmetic of how they operate. It is commonplace for them to denounce on one page an example of sexual excess— thunderously scourging some alleged sexual offender as a “beast"—while on another page they excite sexual tensions with pictures of a scantily clothed woman whose condition is explained in a succession of soggily provocative puns. This seeming contradiction survives and flourishes through the admitted skills of the newspapers’ wordsmiths. to devalue the whole thing as an innocent joke. This trick is pulled with the help of a specialised vocabulary, in which sexual intercourse becomes “bonking” and, for example, the ex-boss of Burtons is not just another customer of an expensive prostitute but “five times a night Halpern”. That type of vocabulary not only pushes up the sales of papers like the Sun and the Star but gets the readers chuckling, in the bus queues and the works canteens. at the discomfiture of the subjects of the reports.

This situation is so traditional in the press that there has been a long-running battle about whether reporters have an unrestricted right to invade a person’s privacy. Most recently this was scrutinised by the Calcutt Committee, which concluded that the press should be left for a probationary period to mend its ways voluntarily rather than be subjected to any legal restrictions. It is just possible that one of the motives behind the People publishing Mellor’s affair was to re-open the debate over privacy in such a way as to establish their right to intrude, at whatever cost to the victims, whenever they judged it would boost their sales.

The depths

The depths to which newspapers will sink in this quest are as yet unplumbed. Here is how the father of Julie Ward, who was murdered in the Masai Mara in 1988, reacted to the breathtakingly dishonest reporting of the murder by the Sunday Mirror:

David Barritt is a freelance reporter. Tony Frost was the deputy editor. Eve Pollard was editor and Robert Maxwell the publisher. I loathe them all . . . if I could have got my hands round Maxwells or Pollard's necks that morning I would have choked the life out of them.

In 1982 the loudly trumpeted patriotism of the Sun did not prevent it concocting an interview with Marcia McKay— whose husband had been killed in the Falklands war— which had never taken place. In 1989 Peter Bottomley, who was then Transport Minister, was smeared in a Mail On Sunday headline: “Minister in Sex Case Row”—an implied accusation for which the newspaper was later forced to apologise and pay substantial damages. And in 1990 two reporters from the Sunday Sport—which is hardly a newspaper—entered the hospital room where the actor Gordon Kaye lay seriously injured to take photographs of him and attempt to interview him. This kind of hard-nosed and callous intrusion is another tradition; according to Ray Snoddy, who is media correspondent of the Financial Times, “in the old days, dressing up as a doctor to get a hospital interview was just one of the tricks of the trade”.

Mellor’s attitude to all this might kindly be described as ambivalent, although some might prefer the opinion of one Tory backbencher that he had “made an ass of himself’. As a politician who has always been acutely aware of the need to keep himself in the public eye, Mellor did not know whether to plead to be left alone or to set up a series of photo opportunities. So, just to be safe, he did both.

The family

Of course there was the little problem that he was a member of Thatcher’s government when it suddenly began to espouse its peculiar version of “Victorian values”, which included a reverence for the sanctity of monogamous marriage. He was one of the Ministers instructed by Thatcher to go away during a parliamentary holiday and “think about the family”—because the Tories had decided that the supposed stability and protectiveness of the nuclear family was a vote winner. Finally there is the fact that Mellor, like other politicians, has used his family to appeal for votes, as if a conscientious and caring father could be trusted to run capitalism more humanely than one who has an affair with an out of work actress.

The People could hardly have believed its luck when it got the offer of the tapes which exposed Mellor’s hypocrisy. At a time when the newspapers were under a lot of pressure to clean up their act—to stop their reporters dressing up as doctors, to stop concocting and printing stories—Mellor had made his views clear. In a Hard News programme in December 1989 he posed as a fearless defender of truth and probity, saying that he was “almost embarrassed to live in the same society" as the people responsible for press invasion of privacy and for the ghoulish reporting of tragedies like Hillsborough. He moved right into the bull’s-eye in the sights of the press when Major put him in charge of the new ministry responsible for the press.

On the day after the story of his affair broke, Mellor announced that he was reviving the Calcutt investigation, which clearly implied that the press had failed its period on probation and might now expect the laws on trespass and intrusive technology to be tightened. The press responded to this by squealing that any such laws would be used to protect the government of the day, which would have been more impressive if the press itself did not use such disreputable methods to push its own political opinions. For example the support which the Murdoch papers give the Tory government is consistently and hysterically based on distortions of reality.

Hypocrisy

But just as the debate—if that is the word for it—was heating up the Mellor affair suddenly dropped out of sight. Anyone who was disappointed at not getting their daily ration of revelations about de Sancha sucking someone’s toes may ponder that this may have happened because a deal was struck between the government and the press: no more exposure of the Minister’s indiscretions in exchange for a promise not to impose any further restrictions on the press? If such an agreement would be a prime example of hypocrisy on both sides—well, that is what the whole matter was all about.

In a Commons debate in 1989 the Tory MP Julian Critchley said “the truth is that as standards drop circulation figures rise. Such newspapers lie in search of profit". It is all very well—and very convenient—for an MP to condemn some of the nastier effects of the profit system but this is done only by ignoring the fact that those effects are inseparable from the basis of the system, which they accept and support. Capitalism produces its wealth—including newspapers—for sale and profit and its morality is fashioned by that. If truth reticently stated sold newspapers the Sun would be as staid as the "quality" press. As it is, what pushes up circulation into the millions are lurid concoctions about private lives, a distortion of human sexuality, gruesome horror stories, pointless intrusions into grief, . . . None of that is a pretty sight but capitalism and its profit motive, and what that does to human beings, are not pretty either.

The Mellor affair was not pretty, nor was the way the press exposed him for the canting humbug he is; nor was the way the government and his fellow politicians responded. And while we are on the subject neither is this society pretty, with its seething problems beside which the wretched Mellor and his woman friend are reduced to the historical non-entities they are.

Ivan

50 Years Ago: Gandhi and the Millionaires (1992)

The 50 Years Ago column from the September 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the time of Gandhi’s arrest several British newspapers made much of the close association between Congress leaders and wealthy Indian capitalists, the Daily Express had the following:—

  Just as ten years ago German industrialists decided to finance Hitler for their own ends, so to-day it is largely great Indian capitalists who stand behind Congress.
  Men like the Birla brothers, great mill owners, and Walchand Hirachand, chairman of the £1,700,000 Scindia Steam Navigation Company, see India freed from British control, as the industrialists' paradise, with high tariff walls.
  Some rich Congressmen would like to do a business deal with Japan, too. It is against such tendencies that two new leaders have now sprung up, who are putting Congress through the greatest crisis of its career.

(Daily Express, August 6th, 1942.)

The Evening Standard (August 4th) said: “There was surely never a quainter contrast in political associates than that between Gandhi and his host for the Bombay meeting of Congress, Ghanshyam Das Birla, the millionaire of big business . . . Now and then their friendship has been criticised by Indian Socialists." This is fair comment. A political movement which claims to represent the interests of Indian workers and peasants has got to explain why it receives financial support from Indian big business, the exploiters of the Indian toilers; but why does this apply only in India; why not nearer home? What about big business influence in British political parties? And why should Indian workers be impressed by advice from millionaire controlled British newspapers, or from politicians who likewise find close associates in the ranks of the captains of industry?

[From “Notes By The Way”, Socialist Standard, September 1942.]

Socialist summer school (1992)

Party News from the September 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

The 4 and 5 July Socialist Party weekend of speakers, debate and socializing was a great success. Although outside of the Party and critical of some of its aspects, I felt welcome and included. The food was wonderful and much thanks must go to our hosts and caterers. Having toiled from the bus stop up the hill, I was greeted with a cocktail, lunch and a splendid view over the Gloucestershire countryside. For a moment I had the illusion of having stumbled into William Morris’s News from Nowhere. After lunch, proceedings continued with an impressive piece of oratory exploring a socialist vision of the future and the poverty of alternative aspirations.

Where Socialists look to a moneyless cooperative society where creativity is released and humanity grows in myriad ways, cynicism rules amongst the non-socialists. A John Major version of "Imagine”, including lines such as "Imagine no inflation, it’s easy if you try”, may not have been the musical highlight of the weekend but illustrated the theme. Imagination was shown to be, just as much as theory, a weapon of revolutionary struggle and a central aspect of Marx’s system.

Other discussions addressing such topics as sex, economics, ecology and personal freedom looked in greater detail at the possibilities of a socialist society, one where individuals rather than the blind economic force of capitalism, might determine progress. One of capitalism’s most dangerous ideological ruses is to dress up our present decaying order of ecological degradation, mass poverty and alienating work as the only way that things can be. The lesson of the weekend was that we could imagine alternatives and work towards a socialist world.

Contributions to the discussions were wide-ranging and well-informed, covering such diverse issues as democracy, political practice and vegetarianism. For me the event was both very enjoyable and contributed to my understanding of socialism, I look forward to similar occasions. The Social Democratic Federation of which William Morris was a founder member and which the Socialist Party split from in, I believe, 1904, used the slogan “Educate, Agitate, Organise". I feel there is a greater hunger for radical education amongst those disillusioned by the failures of both capitalism and the Leninist Left. This hunger can perhaps be fuelled and filled by rigorous but comradely debate such as the Libertarian Socialist weekend, in particular, and the activities of the Socialist Party in general have provided.

Derek Wall 

Bristol

Derek Wall helps edit Green Revolution and is writing a book examining Green politics and Marxism that will be published by Greenprint in 1993.

Editorial: Capitalism fails again (1992)

Editorial from the September 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the 1980s the poor got poorer. This is not Marxist dogma but official government statistics. The Households Below Average Income survey, published by the Department of Social Security at the end of July, showed that between 1979 and 1989 the number of individuals in households with less than half the average income (the official Common Market measure of poverty) rose from 5 million to 12 million. The number of children affected increased from 1.4 million to 3.1 million, a quarter of all children.

Since average income increased in the same period this does not necessarily mean that those at the bottom became poorer. Nor, whatever some claim, is this what Marxists say has to happen. But it can happen. And it did. In the 1980s the average weekly income of the bottom 10 percent, after payment of housing costs and in April 1992 money, fell from £70 to £66. That of the bottom 20 percent remained static at £81. But this average figure disguises the fact that, while the income of those over pension age increased marginally, those below pension age suffered a drop except for single parent households who got a measly £1 more.

Peter Lilley, the Secretary of State for Social Security, naturally sought to emphasise another statistic: that the average income increased by 30 percent. And it is true that in the 10 years average earnings went up more than prices. So (most but by no means all) people in employment did have more money to spend. But this doesn’t mean that they were better off by that amount. There was a price to pay.

During the 1980s competitive pressures forced employers, in the public as well as the private sector to cut costs, including labour costs. This meant getting more work done by less people. Workers were sacked but the workload remained the same or was increased. Those who kept their jobs had to work harder—more labour was extracted from them. This was the story in factories, offices, hospitals and educational establishments up and down the country. In addition, more workers were required to work unsocial hours. Another official government publication Social Trends, published by the Central Statistical Office in January, recorded that, while in 1985 44.3 percent of workers were forced to work at least one weekend a month, in 1990 48.5 percent were. Similarly, those forced to do shiftwork increased from 12.3 to 13.2 percent. All this amounts to a deterioration of working conditions.

But that wasn’t the only thing to get worse. Over the same period the level and quality of public services declined, as the central government, through such devices as “charge-capping”, took steps to pass on to local authorities the capitalist market pressures to cut costs. Everywhere the provision of libraries, creches, help for the elderly and disabled, adult education, sports facilities, and the like was markedly worse in 1989 than it had been in 1979.

Unemployment increased. Homelessness increased. Pollution increased. More people got into debt. Suicides, crime and drug addiction all went up. More sites of natural and historical interest were destroyed. Housing standards were lowered. Business got into the schools. Advertising was allowed on the radio. Need we go on?

Faced with these facts only a die-hard defender could claim that capitalism is a benign system which provides steadily rising living standards for the whole working class. Capitalism never has been and never will be like that. Those in work will always be under pressure to work harder while those not in work will never get more than a pittance. That is all capitalism can offer. Which is why it must be replaced by socialism—a society where poverty will be impossible since the overriding social aim will be to satisfy everybody’s needs, not to make profits.

Can the welfare state survive? (1992)

From the September 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

With the deepening of the world economic crisis and the inevitable increase in unemployment, homelessness and poverty, pressures on welfare agencies world-wide are increasing. Governments are being compelled to review their public spending budgets in an attempt to meet these problems.

Here in Britain the Chancellor, Norman Lamont, has emphasised the Conservatives' commitment:

to reduce the proportion of the nation's wealth pre-empted by the public sector . . . Recession inevitably makes that difficult for a while, as output shrinks while rising unemployment pushes up spending. So public spending as a proportion of GDP will rise for a couple of years. But as the economy recovers we need to get it back on a steady downward trend (Daily Telegraph. 24 July).

He went on to say that the "total level of public expenditure must be fixed on the basis of what is affordable".

This statement implies that, for the government’s plan to succeed, recovery must occur within two years. If the Chancellor's previous forecasts arc anything to go by— he announced in June last year that recovery had begun—then his pronouncement lacks credibility.

Same the whole world over

The strains on welfare budgets are not confined to Britain. In America the State of California is broke. For the first time since 1930 welfare cheques have been issued as lOUs and some banks have bounced them. In New Zealand, the National Party government of Jim Bolger has made a determined attempt to drastically modify the welfare state which has existed ten years longer than in Britain. Against a background of net debt ratio to public spending of 46.5 percent, compared to an OECD average of 33 percent, cutbacks have begun in earnest. Hospital charges for those on higher incomes have increased and are effectively means-tested. Retirement age will be increased from 60 to 65 over a ten-year period. There will be a surcharge for all tax-paying pensioners. Unemployment benefit for a single person has been cut by 10 percent in cash terms. It is now no longer paid to those below 18 and only at a reduced rate to those up to age 25 (Financial Times, 24 July).

Sweden, that shining example of a social welfare state according to many reformist Social Democrats, where prior to last year’s election public spending totalled 61 percent of GNP. has been forced to make reductions in social security spending. After nearly 60 years so-called “caring economics” has ended “in uncontrollable public spending and the highest tax rates in the world along with chronic wage inflation as workers tried to claw back tax increases through their wage packets" (Daily Telegraph, 26 March).

In Italy the public debt at a level of 105 percent of National Income is clearly out of control. The ratio of debt to GNP is growing faster than the economy. Endemic political scandals linking prominent government Ministers to corruption involving public works contracts and the Mafia have undermined confidence in the country’s finances. Privatisation plans, intended to reshuffle the states insurance, oil and electricity into two main groups in preparation for sale to the public, had to be modified as a result of the disclosure of huge debts owed by these institutions to foreign banks totalling £5.2 billion (Financial Times, 24 July).

Governments have no money other than that which they raise from taxation, direct and indirect, borrowing by issuing government stock, increasing the money supply and, in recent years, privatisation of formerly state-run industries. Ultimately this revenue must come out of the profit-making sector of the capitalist economy.

It follows that increases in public spending must involve a reduction of profit in the non-state profit-making sector unless the latter can increase its profits to a level that compensates for the increased public sector spending. This, however, is not possible when the capitalist mode of production. whose sole function is the accumulation of capital in order to realise a greater mass of profit, enters into deep economic crisis, as it has at present. Personal and business bankruptcies increase, unemployment soars along with homelessness resulting from repossessions, all increasing demands on the public sector. This in turn results in increased government borrowing.

In spite of their alleged differences, all the major parties at the last election attempted to outbid each other in their promises of increased public spending. The Conservatives claimed that better management and accountability would produce better value for money. Labour called for a more "caring society”, but the call from their deputy leader, Margaret Beckett, for the lowering of interest rates to revive the economy fails to account for the fact that the US has its lowest interest rates since the 1930s and yet still has no recovery.

More cuts to come

None of the catch slogans of either party address the fundamental contradictions contained within capitalism which are manifesting themselves in greater problems in the public sector. Having allowed public spending to increase, with the elections over, the Chancellor now has the task with Michael Portillo, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, of keeping public spending within the projected limits of £245 billion for 1993/ 94. While details of cutbacks have yet to be revealed, unemployment benefit is a likely target.

Some idea of the magnitude of the problems involved can be seen from the estimated costs of unemployment, income support and housing benefits which rise by about £350 million for every 100,000 unemployed above the governments projected forecast (Daily Telegraph, 24 July). The costs of long-term unemployment of 600,000 have been put at £4 billion by R. Layard (Employment Institute pamphlet, September 1991). The charity Relate has put the cost of single parent families to the public sector as £600 million (Daily Telegraph, 1 August).

And what if the long-promised economic recovery fails to materialise on time? Then the problems outlined above will increase to a degree that at worst could cause a collapse of the welfare state both here and abroad or at best result in a drastic cut back in welfare provisions as in the 1930s with its consequent suffering and hardship for members of the working class. The solution lies with those who are always on the receiving end. The class that produces the wealth—the working class. They and they alone can end this nightmare by establishing a society of production for use and the welfare of all humanity.

Terry Lawlor

Obituary: Harry Hayden (1992)

Obituary from the September 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Harry, who died in July at the age of 88, joined the Party in 1932 after an association with the No-War Fellowship. After serving his apprenticeship he spent his working life as a lighterman on the Thames. During the 1930s slump he was unemployed and the resulting hardship left an indelible impression on him, as it did on many other workers who suffered during that period. He was a conscientious objector in the war, but was ordered to continue in his job as a lighterman.

During the post-war period he served on a committee representing lightermen which issued a journal warning of the redundancies that would result from the Devlin Plan for the reorganisation of the docks during the 1960s. Several of his fellow lightermen of those days attended his funeral.

Harry had a vast knowledge of both the history and geography of the Thames and in his youth was an accomplished sculler. He was well read in history, literature and the works of Marx, and gave classes in Marxist economics for the Party. He assembled a splendid collection of the works of Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, Kautsky and William Morris which he donated to the Party. He was well versed in classical music, opera and literature. He can aptly be described as an educated and cultured member of the working class.

Having lived through the 1930s slump he took the view, when the question of capitalist economic crises came up for discussion in the Party, that the tendency was for world slumps to worsen. He steadfastly stuck to this view throughout the post-war period always maintaining the longer postponed the worse it would be. His passing results in a further diminution of the number of Party members who joined in the 1930s. We extend our sincere condolences to his family.

T. L.

History—whose story? (1992)

From the September 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

We live in times of great change, uncertainty and bewilderment. For many it is hard to see where it is all leading. Empires fall; economies slump; morals are up in the air; riots; new national conflicts; New World Orders that are more wish than substance. Like in the inter-war years, the ruling class seem to be unsure quite what it is they are ruling—and for how long they will do so. The majority of people are a little numbed by it all. Better the devil you know? The atmosphere is one of expectation—often pessimistic and fatalistic, but the assumption is that everything in the known world might soon be not quite the same.

History is society's collective memory. In times of relative stability (capitalism is never stable, but there are some periods when social chaos is less evident) people do not have to worry very much about his­tory. For the conservative, happy with the present and sure that the future will be much like it, the future is a dull continua­tion of today, just as today is a tedious crawl forward from the days before it. In times of change and manifest social contradiction, such as the period we are living through, history becomes a highly contested area. The conservative needs to manufacture a history which teaches the lesson of keeping things as they are. Others will use history as a weapon to forge a different future. These others need not be positive forces in their enthusiastic future-building. For example, there are now plenty of emergent nationalist forces which are busily inventing histories in order to validate their own petty territorial claims. The romance of an idealized national story of the past is the stuff which gets young kids to enter the madness of losing limbs and leaving parents burying their sons in places like Bosnia or Belfast or Beirut or Palestine. The bullets follow the flag-waving rituals and they in turn follow the legendary histories which inspire a false consciousness of pride in our Land: the historically manufactured homeland which the past now calls upon the present to restore.

Flag-waving rituals

In the powerful nations history becomes a means of winning popular emotions to the cause of stability. An influential and well-funded Nostalgia Industry has long been used in Britain to persuade workers that there is something great about being British subjects. The glorification of war, the myths of national gallantry, the culture which emphasises homely values, the stately homes and the magical qualities attributed to the Royal past are all part of this museum-based ideology which all of us are urged to take in almost with our mother's milk.

The patriotic lager louts, handling their flags like medieval weapons which will be used to put the passing "frog" or "paki" in his place, are not grotesque monsters who came from nowhere; they are the children of a particularly sick historical consciousness (for which read unconsciousness) who are only mimicking the Great British past depicted to them through cartoon cinema and school book. Our rulers might be embarrassed by the drunken excesses of the ugly Briton on his mean hols in Benidorm or in the Heysel Stadium, but by and large this Union-Jack-loving moron is the success story of the conservative history project. Better the lout who will read the latest exploits of "his" Queen Mum in the Sun than anyone with real historical questioning: Why more war? Why have a monarchy? Why government? Why accept the present?

The minority who control this society (the capitalists and their salaried functionaries) are spending a great deal of time and money right now making sure that history becomes History: the story of our masters and their good reason to be our masters. Frank Furedi's Mythical Past, Elusive Future: History and Society in an Anxious Age is a book which gives a very useful account of this battle by uncertain rulers to use the past. He looks at the history debate in Germany, Japan, the USA and Britain and draws the correct conclusion that in all of these countries fear is generating a return to what the rulers call "traditional values" in relation to history, but what is in fact a concerted effort to make it seem as if there can be no future except for the continuation of business as usual. As early as 1975, before becoming Prime Minister, Thatcher announced her historical agenda:

We are witnessing a deliberate attack on . . . our heritage and our past, and there are those who gnaw away at our national self-respect, rewriting British history as centuries of unrelieved doom, oppression and failure—as days of hopelessness, not of hope. (Quoted in J .H. Plumb, The Death of the Past, p. 18, London, 1986)

By 1984 one of Thatcher's favourite historians, Lord Elton, the Tudor expert, began his History of England by warning that in times of great social uncertainty and crisis people "can do with the corrective of a past that demonstrates virtue and achievement". Note the ideological language used here: Thatcher speaks of "our heritage" and "our past" and Elton writes not of the past but a past, almost confessing to the use of history as a means to an end, regardless of the objective validity of the past, offered as indoctrination. We know that there is now a major government move to censor school history, to ensure that the text-books uphold the official line, to pursue the Jesuit-like aim of taking children and infecting their minds with national imagery before they are old enough to think critically. Is it an overstatement to claim that the battle to monopolize history has been the greatest ideological enterprise of the capitalist class in the past decade?

As Furedi rightly states:

Historical thinking begins with the recognition that human intervention plays a key role in social development: from this perspective the present is no longer the product of an unchanging past but the result of the actions of human beings. His­torical thinking is directly antithetical to History . . . Whereas History argues that there is no escape from the past, historical thinking gives a decisive role to the subjective factor, to the potential for human action.

This is a crucially important distinction. For how many people is history—more precisely, History—a mere story, an objectified account, a process in which they must look on like loyal subjects at a Royal parade. In fact, to think historically is to become empowered; it is to see that out of the darkness of our rulers' past has emerged us—thinking, active, potentially revolutionary beings with a capacity to make our own history. It is beings like that—like socialists—who are the intended victims of the government's new control of History. They realize that while we are spectators upon history we are malleable; historically conscious we are a force that will combine intelligently and overthrow these useless parasites who monopolize the world and its resources.

Her story—not ours

Speaking of useless parasites, it is worth bringing to light a current episode in their History which is illuminating. In June, while the world looked on as futile talks between legalized robbers of the Earth were held in Rio, the British tabloids were filled with a story which it was decided everyone would want to hear. It seems that all is not well in the marriage of the future King and Queen. This is the pointless, empty, devalued History that they want us to be come excited about. Only now the teaching of historical truth is not to be entrusted to the universities and schools, where strange Marxist and feminist figures have been seen to lurk, but will be issued straight from the banner headlines of the Sun, like the old town-crier bringing the Lord's lies to the peasants.

The new historians of capitalism are drunken little low lives from the tabloids who insult us with their Orwellian Newspeak. One such time waster is Andrew Mor­ton, a journalistic errand boy for the Murdoch Empire, and now a rich man thanks to his horrible little book, Diana: Her True Story. Books about the Royals are always nauseating, but they cannot be dismissed with a joke and a dismissive frown; the magic of monarchy is linked with superglue to the myth of History as an everyday story of Them Up There being observed uncritically by Us Down Here.

The endless tales of monarchy and their extra-special goings-on are a classical example of what the historian E.H. Carr called "The Good Queen Bess" version of history. According to this, history is a story of Good or Evil characters and their exploits in a kind of grand, timeless soap opera. Thus it is that we are presented with Histories of Churchill winning the war, Stalin ruining the Russian Revolution, Thatcher causing the crisis or Kinnock destroying Labour's principles. As if these single beings lived in a vacuum and were immune from the laws of causation. Every act is an effect; every cause of an effect is itself an effect of another cause.

If Royalty matters it is not for who they are or what they do (they are pointless parasites, they do the occasional useful deed), but for what they represent. Ann Morrow, the Court correspondent of the Daily Telegraph wrote an odious little book once called The Queen in which she inadvertently made the point:

They are at the top of a structure which is confidently based on enormous amounts of money, lots of land, a lot of horses, based in a way on agriculture, and secure in the slow turning of the agricultural seasons. As an institution, British royalty works. It provides stability and continuity for the British.

It is taken for granted that the "stability and continuity" of this "structure" wherein a few at the top have "lots" of everything and most of us own hardly anything is a necessary and beneficial thing. What seems to have happened to the monarchy, which is essentially a feudal hangover, is that it has be come increasingly exposed to the crude realities of capitalism and has opened its doors, misguidedly from its own point of view, to crude capitalist daughters of millionaires like Di and Fergie. They have found the suffocating confinement of ritualistic life within a household which still imagines it was divinely appointed too hot to handle; they would rather be with their Sloane Ranger friends indulging in all of the uncontrolled and unpublicized indulgences which are the lifestyles of a very small number of extremely rich idlers. Fer­gie has already decided to leave the Royal soap opera and return to a life of endless partying, like a decaying aristocratic excrescence out of a play by Chekhov—who wrote about these useless dinosaurs better than any historian has. Di is in the difficult position of being unable to get out of her awful marriage to a man who, by Morton's account, is an uncaring and selfish swine because she is afraid of losing her children.

It is an irony of history that even Di, this caricature Princess created to bolster the symbolism of capitalist History, has herself become a victim of it. She is so depressed by her pointless life that she has several times tried to end it, is frequently in tears. has a depression-caused eating disorder and turns to the queerest psychic jokers and magicians for "therapy" . Capitalism must be an awful system if even its most elegant heroine can't stand living out her role any more. If she who has whatever she needs and more is miserable, what hope for the woman with two kids who must survive on income support and a husband who knocks her about?

We can make history

What is interesting about the Morton book—more interesting even than its account of Di's extremely rich background (which exposes the lie that she was just another commoner) and the vast number of people in her circle who were active Tories—is the evidence given that she really believed all the crap about her own importance. Morton's book confirms a suspicion that the ruling class really do imagine themselves to have been born with a mission to be special. If Thatcher did go slightly mad, as her critics have dared to suggest, it was for the same reason; after a while these people start to believe the ideological junk which tabloid myth-makers sit in pubs inventing about them. For example, Carolyn Bartholomew, described as Di's best friend, is quoted as saying:

I'm not a terribly spiritual person but I do believe that she was meant to do what she is doing and she certainly believes that. She was surrounded by this golden aura which stopped men going any further, whether they would have liked to or not, it never happened. She was pro­tected somehow by a perfect light.

Or maybe it was just B.O. It is rather sad to think of these people really believing in the fantasy histories which workers are fed in order to make Royalty believable. Such self-deceit can drive a person crazy, and seems to have done so. What use could these people be to anyone in a society of equality, co-operation and useful production? Charles, whose future wife was obliged to address him as "Sir" until the day he announced their engagement, has spent his early manhood making pious speeches from a position where he has never had to do a stroke of practical work which has given him anything but an aloof picture of the world around him.

This Royal diversion is part of a grand diversion which is what History—their story—is all about. It is the story of their gains, their marriages, their Empire, their importance and our deference to all of that. 

As socialists, who do not aim to change the world here or there, but to turn it on its head and cast aside the whole structure of property and its harmful relationships of exploitation and oppression, it is not as a sideline that we study, discuss and prepare to make history. For history is the struggle for the future—for our own future. If it is to be ours we must make it for ourselves, consciously and democratically. There is no other path to socialism. It was a myth of certain vulgar Marxists of the past that all we need to do is wait and inevitably history would deliver the socialist future to us. Change will not come that way. Indeed, the inevitabilism of vulgar Marxism is best answered in a passage by Marx himself:

History does nothing ; it "possesses no immense wealth", it "wages no battles". It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; "history" is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims."(Collected Works, Vol. 4, p. 93)

History is too potent a weapon to be left to text-books or tabloids. It is bigger than the trivial lives of the grandest Princess. It is here, it is us, it is electrifying and exciting, and it is ours for the making.

Steve Coleman