Visit from India (1996)

Party News from the September 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Binay Sarkar, from the World Socialist Party (India) in Calcutta, visited Britain in July mainly to speak at the Socialist Party Summer School in Birmingham.

Speaking before an audience of 60 or so, he traced the origins of Marxism in Europe and of the anti-reformist but pro-electoral stance of the parties of the World Socialist Movement. He explained that the "Marxism” which spread to Asia after the First World War had not been genuine Marxism but Leninism; which meant that those there who called themselves Marxists thought that Marx really had stood for the formation of a minority, vanguard party to lead the workers and take power in their name, and they regarded the Bolshevik coup in Russia in November 1917 as a model socialist revolution and accepted Lenin’s theory of imperialism according to which the struggle in the world is not between workers and capitalists but between imperialist and anti-imperialist states. This was beginning to change slowly, with the growing realisation that not only had Russia and China been state capitalist but also that the Russian and Chinese Revolutions had been state capitalist revolutions; one sign of this was the emergence of the WSP (India) from people who had previously been in the Communist Party and in Left Communist groupings.

Comrade Sarkar spoke at other meetings in London and Manchester, on the results of the recent elections in India (no real change, even though there were now some "Communist” ministers) and on the development of capitalism in India (not doing very well). He also met members and sympathisers in Bolton, Glasgow and Edinburgh.

When he returned to India on 18 July after his successful speaking tour, he took with him a collection of books and pamphlets, gifts from the Socialist Party and members for their party library.

We take this opportunity to thank those who responded to our appeal and donated a total of £454, which made this tour possible.

An unreal world (1996)

Theatre Review from the September 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Tempest by William Shakespeare (Attic Theatre Company)

I love the theatre. The immediacy of it all, its live spontaneity; with actors often within touching distance, sharing the intimacy of feelings and actions with a rapt audience. An inspiring performance of a great play can be an unforgettable experience, living on in the memory and affecting the way we see life, helping us better to understand ourselves and the world of which we are a part.

I feel engaged with life when watching serious drama, even if occasionally—as I shared with readers last month—a performance is so pretentious and perfidious as to make me want to boo. So it was with pleasure that I anticipated seeing an open air production of Shakespeare's The Tempest whilst on holiday in Cornwall.

I’ve been lucky. I've seen a dozen or so performances of The Tempest. It is a favourite play. Like many plays it is hugely revealing of the time in which it was written (1613): with displaced monarchs. the colonisation and exploitation of a mysterious and a supposed alien world, the developing "magic" of science. But more than this it is clear that Shakespeare wrote himself into the central figure of Prospero, intending The Tempest to be his last play, and in the epilogue it is Shakespeare as well as Prospero who takes his leave of the audience in the final couplet:

“As you from crimes would pardoned beLet your indulgence set me free.

The Tempest is a play about power, about the possibility of change for the better, about love and forgiveness. It is full of unforgettable lines, wonderful images, and a prevailing sense of optimism. It is, so it seems to me, a life-enhancing masterpiece.

The little group of actors (from the Attic Theatre Company) presenting their performance had a problem: they were seven in number, whereas Shakespeare names twice that number of characters in the plot. The usual way of dealing with such challenges is for members of the cast to play two or more parts; helping the audience to recognise which part they are playing by adding or subtracting some article of clothing as necessary, and/or by affecting some physical transformation—changing the voice or manner of walking, or whatever.

The seven talented actors who played with such energy and commitment for us had been directed otherwise. They each played many parts. The programme alerted us to what was planned:

  “Though texturally based, the performers are not playing any one part, and indeed are many characters. In this way the performers explore the unity and disparity of the human condition, the conflicts and harmonies within, giving a rich three-dimensional form to the text, the story, the characters and even the scene."

Thus we were introduced to five Prosperos who appeared singly, but once or twice as a five-strong group; two Mirandas and two Calibans; and various numbers of other characters.

Whilst it is one thing to recognise that as human beings we all have common features— emotionally and psychologically as well as two eyes and two ears, etc.—it just isn't true that people are composites in the way that is implied by having five people play Prospero. Whilst Prospero might in some sense be seen as a surrogate for Shakespeare, to suggest in consequence that since Prospero is Shakespeare’s construction all the other characters in The Tempest are “facets of him (Prospero)" and that “It is his tempest and out of him comes everything and everyone," seems perverse. And in any [way] even if all we see is part of Prospero's dream, shouldn’t all seven players appear as Prospero? Why only five? Shakespearean comedies may be surreal but they are not fantasies. Their enduring attraction for people is a consequence of the clear basis in the common currency of human experience.

And we recognise the complexity of ourselves and others well enough. Decent actors— and certainly the actors on view from the Attic Theatre Company fall easily into this category—are able to transmit the multi-dimensional complexities of the people they are playing. We don't need two or more physical representations on stage to make the point. And crucially people are not interchangeable in the way that is suggested in this production, and to imply otherwise is just plain wrong. It is not only a matter of individuality but also, and much more telling, of social status and class. Imagine one of London’s homeless men or women turning up at the Bank of England and informing the surprised commissionaire on duty that they were standing in for the Governor for the day. Just imagine.

Shakespeare clearly knew more about the realities of living in a class-divided world that the worthy director of this production. Shakespeare would never have made the mistake of assuming that two drunken sailors could stand in lieu of the Duke of Milan. He had a surer purchase on the realities of economic and social life. His play may be set on a remote island, but that island is rccognisably part of the real world of the seventeenth century. In contrast the world presented by this production is a world without social and economic reference points, an unreal world, a wild fantasia, a world finally stripped of meaning. Whereas Shakespeare’s text carries significant messages for humanity, this production has none.

I felt sorry for the audience at the end of the performance. Being familiar with the play I could largely follow what was going on in this schizoid production. But I felt angry. How could someone so transform one of the world’s great plays as to make it largely inaccessible to an audience? If, as an acting exercise, members of the cast wanted to investigate what it felt like to play a variety of roles, that is one thing. But why inflict the exercise on an audience as a counterfeit of a great play? And how dangerously naive to suggest that people are interchangeable. Not in a class-divided world they aren’t, and for the director to imagine otherwise suggests that it is he and not Prospero who is dreaming.

Michael Gill

The demands of global capitalism (1996)

Book Review from the September 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

The End of Work. The decline of the global labour force and the dawn of the post-market era by Jeremy Rifkin (G.P. Putnam. New York, 1995)

Rifkin argues that: " . . . for the first time, human labour is being systematically eliminated from the production process. Within less than a century,'mass' work in the market sector is likely to be phased out in virtually all the industrial nations of the world".

His book is thought-provoking and discusses an issue that many economists avoid - that we have entered an era when the traditional work patterns have changed. The consequences that technological unemployment brings reverberate in every aspect of society. Rifkin estimates that in the USA, 90 million workers out of a total 124 million could potentially lose their jobs. Capitalism breeds the alienation in the young who turn to crime and the bleak futures faced by older workers, who in their economic insecurity have fears such as house repossession.

The book can be divided in two. indicated by the subtitle, ‘the decline of the global labour force and the dawn of the post-market era'. The first four parts (fourteen chapters) deal with the background and the decline of the global labour force - the strongest sections of the book. Rifkin’s strength is that the book is historically situated. It has its parallels in Volume I of Capital, where Marx analyses the historical tendency of automation to eliminate labour-power (chapter 15 - Machinery and Modern Industry). The book is well-researched, and although Rifkin is not saying much new, it is presented in an engaging manner.

In chapter I, Rifkin argues that workers are unprepared to meet the demands of global capitalism:

"The idea of a society not based on work is utterly alien to any notion we have about how to organise large numbers of people into a social whole, that we are faced with the prospect of having to rethink the very basis of the social contract."

As a liberal, Rifkin does not give up hope of workers benefitting through piecemeal reforms that would increase pay and improve working conditions, but he has grave doubts:

"The new economic realities of the coming century make it far less likely that either the marketplace or public sector will once again be able to rescue the economy from increasing technological unemployment and weakened consumer demand."

Although not the solution that socialists support. Rifkin proposes what he terms the “social economy", which is discussed in the chapters on “the dawn of the post-market era".

Rifkin proposes two courses of action to make the transition to "the post-market era". Firstly, productivity gains to be shared among workers so as to bring about an equitable re-distribution for an equitable share of the fruits of technological progress. Secondly, that the shrinking of mass employment in the formal market economy and cuts in public expenditure bring a need to focus on the third economy - the social economy - which would, argues Rifkin, meet the needs that are not met by the market and public sectors.

His strategies for dealing with technologically displaced labour are nothing new and include reducing the working week, spreading employment amongst a greater number of workers without sacrificing productivity, an index-linked minimum wage and compensatory welfare payments. What Rifkin argues here has become common in political circles especially among the communitarian movement in America and the "stakeholder society" of Blair's New Labour.

Rifkin, like many who call for what Diane Elson terms the “socialisation of the market" places emphasis on unpaid voluntary work to regenerate the community. The only positive aspect of this for 

socialists is that volunteering shows that there is no need for the capitalist system of buying and selling. However, the reforms that Rifkin proposes would not in the long term be of much benefit to workers. If a Social Democratic “consensus" government was to begin to implement these reforms it would only cut into profits and future investment, thus meeting resistance from the capitalists.

Rifkin ends the book with a warning. "The end of work could spell a death sentence for civilization as we have come to know it. The end of work could also signal the beginning of a great transformation, a rebirth of the human spirit. The future lies in our hands." Indeed it does, and we don't want our futures to go to waste under capitalism. 

Rob Smith

Editorial: Their politics and ours (1996)

Editorial from the September 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism depends on the uncritical acceptance of dishonest politics in order to gain your consent to the legalised robbery of wage-slavery. Caught in the trap of dishonest politics we can only expect the circus of opportunist politicians to bury our ambitions and aspirations under a glut of misery and deprivation with their empty talk of a "stakeholder economy" or a "share-owning democracy". Which in truth means that the fat cats share out the wealth we create whilst we are left to  make the dismal comparison between existence and survival.

Fear comes from insecurity, both emotional and physical; and the insecurity is the inescapable lot of the wage-slave. The constant threat of unemployment, repossession, homelessness, and related problems, are persistent reminders of the instability of the profit system. For the global search for profitable markets totally disregards the victims and the environmental consequences of a quick buck economy.

Le's get one thing clear. This state of affairs will continue unless we are prepared to withdraw our support for the profit system of global exploitation and everything connected with it. This entails putting no trust in leaders, whatever their political colours. It means recognising that capitalism can only benefit the minority owners of wealth, and that the working class majority are expected to scramble over the scraps.

It will mean taking over political control for ourselves and using it to replace the profit system with a system based on need, not greed. It will mean establishing a society of free access globally, with production for use—so resources are conserved and recycled—not wasted in the pursuit of short-term expediencies. It will mean placing all the social and natural resources under the democratic control of society as a whole.

A striking example of mutiny (1996)

TV Review from the September 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last month this column berated Channel Four's Secret History series for its tedious and irrelevant programme about the tactics of the British army during the Falklands war. This month we return to the scene of the crime, battered by two weeks of heroic British failure at the Olympics and endless summer repeats of second-rate sitcoms. On 8 August—like a diamond glistening in a vast cow-pat—Secret History redeemed itself with a documentary called Mutiny In The RAF. This, at least, was a secret history worth commenting about, centring on the massive wave of strikes which broke out in the RAF after the end of the Second World War in India, Singapore, the Middle East and other centres of British imperial rule. Largely due to the activities of the British ruling class, few will have been cognisant of the facts surrounding this series of mutinies against military authority, and the documentary team compiling this particular programme can be satisfied with a job well done.

The British bourgeoisie—one of the most experienced ruling classes in the world—has long done its best to hide the real truth of the various mutinies and strikes in HM Forces throughout this century. For decades it tried to keep hidden the nature of the massive wave of discontent which took place in 1919 after the so-called Great War, when soldiers and policemen went on strike and mutinied, and when sailors demanding better pay hauled down the British Ensign and hoisted the Red Flag. For entirely understandable reasons it has tried to do the same in relation to the wave of discontent of 1945-6 too. Thankfully, it has failed.

Secret History told the history of how over 50,000 RAF servicemen refused to do the dirty work of British Imperialism in its outposts of Empire any longer. Serving in appalling conditions and with little chance of demobilisation, this mixture of volunteers and conscripts refused to obey their officers' orders, substituted self-discipline for hierarchical rule, formed democratically-run strike committees and successfully spread their struggle even to section's of the Indian armed forces. They were met with bogus trials and false imprisonment, harassment from the military police and the ultimate deterrent of threatened executions. Expecting sympathetic treatment from the newly-elected Labour Government under Clement Attlee, their actions instead were met with subterfuge and repression, characteristic treatment of workers by Labour governments before and since. That they eventually met with some success in ensuring early demobilisation for hundreds of thousands was a testament to their tenacity and the power of working-class combination. Not unwisely, the British ruling class took the view that to keep such disgruntled servicemen in troubled outposts like India at such a sensitive time was to invite chaos.

It was not, of course, the case that those who mutinied in the RAF wanted socialism any more than their fellow workers back home who had joined with them to vote in the pro-capitalist Labour Party the previous year—their struggle was in fact more akin to a defensive economic trade union struggle within capitalism. Indeed, many of the strikers had been active trade unionists before the war. But what it did got to show—like many other similar incidents across the world—is that men and women in the armed forces are generally workers in uniform. They are doing an unpleasant job on behalf of the capitalist class, but then again, so do millions of other workers. And just like other workers, those in the armed forces are capable of critically assessing their own class position and of coming to the conclusion that it is at odds with the position of the bourgeoisie. This is contrary to the unhistorical and anti-materialist position of so many Leninists who don't even regard members of the armed forces or the police as being members of the working class in the first place. It can also be added—far in advance of the Leninist vanguards—workers in uniform have demonstrated time and again that they can organise democratically and collectively, without leaders, to further their own class interests. This in turn demonstrates that the armed forces, like all other sections of the working class, are capable of developing recognition of their real position within capitalism and of the necessity of socialism.

The RAF mutiny in 1946 was a case in point and its lessons must never be forgotten. Working-class self-activity and democratic organisation is the key to any struggle whether for economic defence within the system (as with trade unionism) or for revolutionary transformation. As the movement for final working-class emancipation can only be collective and majoritarian, the former will surely still have an important role to play as the training ground for the latter.

Dave Perrin

Landed with Tony Blair! (1996)

Book Review from the September 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Impossibilists: Selections from the Press of The Socialist Party of Canada And One Big Union, 1906-38. edited by L Gambone (Red Lion Press £4).

It is easy to forget that before the formation of the Socialist Party of Great Britain in June 1904 there had already been in existence the Socialist Party of British Columbia, founded in 1901, but having an organised existence going back to 1895. The early history of this, our companion party in canada, is brought to life by the re-publications of a volume of reprinted articles from the Western Clarion, the SPC's first journal, as well as other journals of the period which came out of this broadly impossibilist tradition.

A few words are in order about this term "impossibilist". It emerged, of course, as a term of political abuse. Socialists who stood for the end of capitalism and no compromises along the way were seen to be demanding the impossible. Interestingly, before anyone ever used that word there was another term which was popular: possibilism. The so-called possibilists emerged in France in the early 1880s, and they were the reformists, tired of trying to bring about socialism and nothing less, who imagined that the best possible option would be to chip away at the edifice of capitalism bit-by-bit, reforming it until it looked like socialism. Over a century has passed since these undoubtedly sincere people embarked upon their futile course and everywhere reformist gradualism has ended in the most abject failure. A hundred years of demanding "the possible" or "something now" has landed the Labour Party with Tory Blair! So, if we who refuse to settle for anything less then real real socialists are impossibilists, perhaps it is time for our fellow workers to be rather more practical and demand "the impossible".

The articles which are reprinted give modern readers a good flavour of the clarity of analysis and vision of our early North American comrades. Warren Atkinson's Western Clarion article of 1906 exhibits prescient recognition of the capitalist nature of so-called public (i.e. state) ownership; Rab's 1918 article on dialectical thought is as relevant today as ever it was; John Tyler's 1919 Red Flag article deals with the myth of the Bolsheviks' "socialist revolution" (as do others in the volume), and there is also material written by Charlie Lestor during his "One Big Union" period—before he joined the SPGB. Article after after in this volume leaves the reader saying "they were right all along". And there is no shame in consistency when it is attached to validity and honest principles.

Gambone provides a useful, though incomplete, bibliography at the back, and there is a basically sound introduction, only marred by the biased sulkiness in the brief reference to the current Socialist Party of Canada. Small though it may be, at least it still exists as a relatively active party, which is more than can be said for the other movements mentioned which have expired in the course of the century. Has it ever occurred to Gambone, and those like him who celebrate the revolutionary past of the SPC/SPGB tradition while deriding its present existence, that history is of little use unless it teaches you what you should be doing now? For anyone who has come into contact with our ideas in recent years (or recent decades, for that matter) this is an invaluable guide to a hitherto under-publicised part of our past.

Steve Coleman