Scargillism or socialism? (1999)

From the September 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The June elections to the European Parliament were notable not only in having the lowest turn-out ever in a national election but also for being the first national election in which every elector in Britain had a chance to vote for at least one party using the word “socialist” on the ballot paper. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a chance to vote for real socialism.

Only those in the North East had that chance. Apart from the Socialist Party the other parties calling themselves Socialist stood on anything but a socialist programme. Arthur Scargill’s SLP stood on a patriotic anti-Common Market programme. Tommy Sheridan’s SSP stood for Tommy Sheridan and Scottish separatism (the six words they used on the ballot paper were: “Scottish Socialist Party (Convenor Tommy Sheridan)”. An electoral coalition of Trotskyist groups including Militant and the SWP which contested the West Midlands under the name of “Socialist Alliance”, stood on a programme of minimum reforms such as “No to tuition fees and student loans”, “No to private toll roads”, “£5 an hour minimum wage”, “Oppose the Euro”, with no mention of socialism not even as a long-term goal (and not even as their mistaken definition of it as state-run capitalism).

Scargill’s party stood in all 11 Euroconstituencies in mainland Britain and in all but three of them was the only standard-bearer for the word “socialist”. But what a disgrace to the word his programme was!

The SLP’s main electoral slogan was “VOTE TO GET BRITAIN OUT OF THE EUROPEAN UNION”. Socialists know that it doesn’t make any difference to workers whether or not the British capitalist class are in or out of the European Union. Whether or not they stay in this businessman’s club is their problem, not ours. The problems we face as workers are caused by the class ownership of the means of life and production for profit, not by the trading arrangements of our capitalist masters.

The SLP’s election manifesto, however, did not make such a socialist analysis. Instead, it echoed the analysis made by the UK Independence Party and the BNP that all our problems are due to Britain being in the Common Market—and indeed that those of the capitalists are too, since the SLP manifesto expressed great concern about their trading prospects and about how much of the surplus-value extracted from the workers they have to pay over to Brussels.

According to Scargill’s manifesto:

When Britain joined the European Common Market the people were told that membership would protect British industries and British jobs—but the very opposite is true . . . Membership of the European Union has led to mass unemployment, the closure of steelworks and coal mines, engineering industries and the near-destruction of Britain’s manufacturing base.

Or, as the BNP put it in their manifesto:

Being in the EU makes it illegal for us to protect our own industries, including manufacturing, fishing and farming, from the foreign competition which has destroyed millions of jobs. The BNP says ‘no’ to EU insecurity, and—unlike the pro-free trade UKIP—’yes’ to protecting British jobs. That makes sense, doesn’t it?

Well, actually, no, it doesn’t, since the implication of the SLP/BNP position is that if British capitalism hadn’t been in the Common Market these closures and job losses could have been avoided. But how? Since they were caused by changes in world market conditions in the form of a world-wide economic slowdown it would have made no difference whether Britain was in or out of the EU. If Britain had not been in they would still have occurred.

The fact is that we are living in a global economy and there is nothing a government of any particular state can do to opt out of the effects of a global economic downturn. No doubt an SLP government—or a BNP government—would have tried to protect “British jobs” by putting up tariff walls to keep out “foreign” imports. But this is to forget that Britain, as part of the global economy, is also necessarily an exporting country; in fact its speciality has been transforming imported materials into manufactured goods for export. Keeping out cheap “foreign” imports would have meant forcing exporters to use more expensive British-made substitutes, so increasing their cost and making them less competitive on already over-supplied world markets. This, quite apart from the retaliatory action other states would be likely to have taken against imports from Britain to their countries. In other words, if such a protectionist policy had been pursued British exports would still have fallen off leading to . . . factory closures and job losses.

A siege economy, whether under Arthur Scargill or John Tyndall, is no way out of the global capitalist crisis. In fact there is no way out for workers other than socialism which, because capitalism is already a global system, has to be world-wide too. This is elementary Socialist thinking, but it’s the last thing you are going to hear from Scargill’s party.

Instead, we are told:

If a country like Norway—not a member of the EU—can have one of the most prosperous economies in the world outside the EU, why not Britain?

But Norway is an openly capitalist country (which didn’t in fact escape from the effects of the world slump), so the SLP evidently believes that the problems workers in Britain face can be solved within the context of capitalism. This mistaken conclusion follows logically from the SLP’s mistaken analysis: if the EU rather than capitalism is the cause of workers’ problems then the solution lies not in getting rid of capitalism but simply in getting out of the EU.

We suspect we know why the SLP chose Norway as its example of a supposed paradise outside the EU. The examples they normally give in their literature—Cuba and North Korea—are rather less attractive vote-pullers.

Although all this is enough to show not only that the SLP is not a socialist party at all but that it is a petty British nationalist party, the various Trotskyist groups were urging workers to vote for them, except in Scotland where they preferred Sheridan’s even pettier Scottish nationalism and in the West Midlands where they stood themselves, but including the North East where a genuine Socialist list was standing. This doesn’t surprise us as they have more in common with Scargill than they have with us and, in any event, we only want those who genuinely understand and want socialism to vote for us. They too are Eurosceptics, though not as extreme as Scargill, the BNP and UKIP in wanting a complete withdrawal. Their slogan of “OPPOSE THE EURO AND MAASTRICHT”, i.e. stay in but keep the pound, puts them rather in the camp of Thatcher and Norman Tebbitt.

The correct socialist position on the euro was put in a letter from one of our members published in the Newcastle Journal on 14 January:

To euro or not to euro, that is the question. Or is it? Does it really make any difference if you pay your bills with euro, dollars or pounds sterling? Would your life change if the money in your pocket no longer had a picture of the richest woman in England? The real truth is the rich will still be rich and the poor still be poor. Joining the euro will benefit the flow of business capital. Why? Because we live in a global economy. The European nations must compete as a trading bloc against their strongest competitors, the American and Far East economies. If this planet with all its vast resources was owned and democratically controlled by the people, money would be obsolete. Socialism means that the farms, factories, railways, etc are run for the benefit of all. Without the insanity of the boom-slump profit system, the Stock Exchanges of the world will become museums and the floor traders can stop running around like headless chickens wearing blazers.

The North East, in fact, was the one region where voters attracted by the mere word “socialist” on the ballot paper did have a choice between the SLP’s position and the genuine Socialist one. Of the 6021 voters in this category, 4511 voted for the SLP and 1510 for us. In other words, 25 percent opted for real socialism rather than Scargill’s British state capitalism. What is interesting is that in those areas where we had been active in putting over the Socialist case, in other elections and in letters to the press, the percentage opting for socialism rather than Scargillism was higher. In Jarrow it was 44 percent and in Easington 35 percent.

This would suggest that where those interested in socialism are given the opportunity to hear the socialist case on a regular basis they can be won over to supporting the real thing and not just the name. Many of the 86,749 people who voted for the SLP will have voted not for, but thankfully despite, its reactionary, non-socialist programme, as a way of showing that they rejected the Labour administration of capitalism and saw “socialism”, however vaguely defined, as the way out.

There is talk of getting all the various parties calling themselves “socialist” together in an electoral pact so as to win seats under proportional representation. We want no part of such an alliance. The SLP, the SSP and the Trotskyist groups may as well know that we will continue to put the case for socialism, against them and the other parties which all support capitalism in one form or another, at election times whenever we can. We shan’t be forming any electoral pacts with them since their objective of reforms now and state capitalism later has nothing in common with ours of a world community without frontiers based on common ownership and democratic control of the world’s resources with production to satisfy people’s needs not profit.

Adam Buick

All industrial unionists now? (1999)

From the September 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the opening years of this century industrial unionism—the idea that all the workers in the same industry should be in a single union—was raised as a radical demand. Today it is being embraced by the leaders of the existing business unions. How come?

I recently attended a student union meeting about a fast food franchise employing students at ridiculously low wage rates over the night shift. The union “officials” had been optimistic, they felt they could get a result on this one, they felt that it was a strong issue; so, predictably, the meeting was inquorate. It was, at least, the biggest inquorate meeting for some while, but, it was inquorate nonetheless. The usual debates about student apathy began once more.

I was reminded, somewhat, of my old man, confidently telling me that “grass roots democracy is impossible”, and then regaling me with his story about his time as a union rep at ICI. “Out I would come,” he’d say, “after negotiating complex things with the management, and all me mates’d ask was ‘Well, man, did we get the pay rise?.'” As I sat there, surveying the empty wilderness of the meeting hall, I thought, sadly, that he was right.

It’s an unfortunate fact that the officials of most unions believe exactly as he did. Certainly it’s implied in the way they behave. We could take, for example, an interesting piece in the June issue of Labour Research about a growing demand for industrial unionism within the TUC. Industrial unionism, a familiar concept from the radical fringe across the Atlantic (specifically the Industrial Workers of the World [IWW] and various “DeLeonist” factions there), is the idea that instead of “craft” or “trade” unions, representing workers of a particular skill/type, we have one union representing everyone in a specific industry (thus a Chemical Workers Union, or a Steel Workers Union), and thus avoid all the infighting and protectionism of one union poaching members from another in the same workplace, or demanding that a specific job be done by a specific union. Real solidarity.

It could be a sign of hope, a cause for inspiration, that workers are setting aside their factional disputes, and deciding to stand solidly together, in common interest against the capitalist foe. Except, it’s not. As it turns out, the call for industrial unions comes from the top of the TUC, General Secretary John Monks himself.

At the inaugural conference of the new banking union UNiFI (how appropriate) Monks described what he would like to see happen to unions in the 21st century. By 2010, he reckons, industrial unionism should be brought about, by merging more unions with a common interest in different sectors. The truth of the matter, however, is not a sudden conversion of union leaders to radical revolutionary unionism (oh, how that would please the Leftists, and how sorely disappoint), but rather is a response to a number of pragmatic concerns facing the union movement.

Competing for members 

The first, it appears, is that the TUC is anxious to avoid disputes being caused by the new union recognition laws instituted by the Labour Party as a reward for union electoral and financial support. According to Labour Research this presents the threat of “a new wave of competition between unions intent on gaining recognition” (emphasis added). To avoid that competition the TUC wants to change its internal structures in order to have the “active prompting of mergers by the TUC to create fewer unions. . . in key sectors like public services, education, transport . . .”

Once again the glorious leaders charge forth with presumptuousness, believing they actually are in charge, and that they can do as they say. However, obstacles await them. As the article further notes, “a substantial proportion of merger activity between 1988 and 1995 was purely expansionist, to compensate for declining memberships and finances” (emphasis added). Even where an “industrial” model has been followed, such as in the creation of UNISON (1,248,670 members), caveats remain. Most UNISON members are in local government (750,000), however “substantial numbers of manual workers in local government are organised by the general unions TGWU [881,625 members] and GMB [750,000].” This presents the almost insurmountable problem, acknowledged by the TUC that “some unions currently straddle two or more . . . sectors . . . it would be neither possible, nor desirable, to seek mass transfers of existing members.”

Of course, the leadership of each union has a vested interest in getting members. Members mean money—UNISON made £1 million “surplus” in 1997 and the T&GWU £11.2 millions. The UNISON General Secretary (Rodney Bickerstaffe) took home a salary of £68,840 + £19,129 “benefits”. Labour Research called that a “relatively modest” salary, and, indeed, it is, compared with similar positions in business—which is a fair comparison, because unions today are effectively a business, selling good labour relations. The emphasised sections in the quotes show this: when business is bad, firms merge to reduce running costs and open up markets; similarly, unions are competing for members and have a great deal in terms of money, investment and infrastructure to protect. Again, the leaders of the unions are as much not in charge as our beloved masters in Whitehall, and for the same reason—their plans are subject to the market, a market beyond their control.

Many leftists refuse to recognise this. Preferring to keep their dreams of leadership burning, they think it’s all a matter of the wrong people being in charge (generic Trotskyist quote, to be heard at almost any meeting: “The failure of the revolution in [insert country] in [insert year] was due to the lack of an adequate revolutionary leadership”). If pressure could be brought to bear, or the right people put in charge, then, oh then, the mass will to revolution of the working class can be unleashed.

The unions we deserve 

This is complete nonsense of course. The working class gets the unions, and the leadership, it deserves. Just as, according to Marx, a King is only a King because he is obeyed, so too are union leaders only union leaders because they are followed. To imagine they lead is to imbue them with mystical powers within themselves, and set up a phantasm of leadership that exactly mirror images the same phantasm as our masters believe. So long as the workers themselves are content to deal with such a union system, and its leaders, then such a union system and its leaders will remain, and will have to react to the expectations of the members.

The way to industrial unions, or socialist unions, or whatever, is not through the leadership of the unions. The unions will always reflect the nature of their memberships, and until their membership change, they will not change. So long as workers accept unions as another form of business, giving them insurance, then unions will have to behave like a business offering insurance, competing for members. Unions are neither inherently reactionary, nor inherently revolutionary; they are simply a means to an end for their membership.

The only way to change unions is not through seizing or pressurising the leadership, but through making sure that they have a committed membership, a socialist membership. And that is where the Socialist Party can come in, through making socialists, through that and that alone—making people committed heart and soul to working class interests, democracy and the establishment of socialism. Anything else is just abstractions and formalisms.

My father was, I’m happy to say, refuted by that student union meeting. Among those that did show, a great debate ensued—during the discussion of the sports facilities. People questioned the officials closely and carefully, determined to make sure that they knew what exactly was happening with their valued sports facilities. When folks have a strong emotional and practical commitment, they can make grass roots democracy work. It’s up to us to encourage that commitment.

Pik Smeet

War and capitalism in Africa (1999)

From the September 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The president of Zambia, Frederick Chibula, recently declared the “dawn of a new era for Africa”. Such comments have become something of a regular occurrence amongst African and international “leaders”, including that messiah of the “new world order” Bill Clinton. The latest round of platitudes coincides with a period of instability and armament amongst the competing representatives of African capitalism.

Despite the signing of accords which appear to declare the desire of capitalist interests to accommodate each other’s interests in Sierra Leone and the Congo, Chibula made his comments at a time of simmering conflicts across Africa including a savage war between Ethiopia and Eritrea and a rampant civil war in Angola. Even in Sierra Leone and the Congo the accords thrashed out seem likely to fail, with international “peace-keeping” forces (the US and western Europe) not being committed as the interests of their ruling classes are not threatened.

Unlike the huge resources deployed to Kosovo where Western leaders wish to “protect” the Kosovo Albanian population from mass slaughter as a pretext for extending their influence in the Balkans at the expense of Serbia, the hypocritical face of capitalism is revealed once more. A blind eye and an arrogant shrug greeted and continues to greet the mass killing in Africa (in the case of the Sierra Leone conflict the British government was in fact implicated in the supply of arms to the conflict in contravention of its own “rules”, as if such things exist in capitalism’s wars).

Ethiopia and Eritrea

It is in the little-mentioned conflict (the press coverage being remarkably little) between the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments that Bill Clinton’s “new leaders of Africa” have revealed the degree to which the politicians of capitalism will sacrifice the lives of working-class men and women in the interests of profits. Originally intended as the leaders of a regional alliance for the US against the “threat” of Islamic Sudan, Presidents Issaias of Eritrea and Meles of Ethiopia descended into a quarrel in May 1998 ostensibly over a small area of barren and mountainous terrain. In reality it was over Eritrea’s new status as a potential African Singapore threatening Ethiopia’s commercial interests (principally coffee) and aims for economic self-sufficiency and protectionism.

Taking advantage of its coastal status and Ethiopian cheap labour and launching its own currency, to counter what it saw as an overvalued Ethiopian currency which hindered it exports, Eritrea began to threaten the interests of Ethiopian capital. Becoming landlocked in 1993, following the overthrow of the dictator Mengistu and Eritrea obtaining independence, Ethiopia perceived a threat to its cheap labour market from the new-independently Eritrea’s processing export industries and cheap Eritrean imports, and thus began to impose tariffs. The territorial boundaries between Eritrea and Ethiopia, which had previously been a matter of little formal control and even convenient administration by local authorities on either side of the borders, began in such circumstances to be marked by claims of encroachment and eventually an act of aggression which sparked off a war which may have already claimed as many as 50,000 lives.

In a country racked by civil war and droughts where the majority of men and women exist in dire poverty, its leaders see their interests served by spending vast sums on armaments and mobilising hundreds of thousands to mass slaughter. The death toll in this conflict between capitalists using working class cannon fodder has been particularly high with a ratio of dead to wounded of one-to-one (the average for most modern wars being one dead to three wounded). According to the Economist (8-14 May) “the death toll is high because the combatants use the weapons of the Korean war, the tactics of the first world war and the medical treatments of the 19th century”.

With war of course comes the massive displacement of populations with, in this instance, many tens of thousands of Eritreans forcibly ejected from Ethiopia. As with all wars the Ethiopia-Eritrea war has competing capitalist interests at its root and the mass slaughter and suffering of its workers as its consequence.

Central and southern regions 

This conflict, however, is only part of a general increase in tension between African governments whose interests are perceived to lie in the increased militarisation of the continent. This was most particularly evident in the central and southern regions. Indeed the wars in the Congo and Angola appear to be threatening to draw these regions into full-scale sub-continental war. Angola has threatened Zambia with invasion over its ruling-class support for the UNITA rebel opposition in Angola, a position also supported by some members of the South African ruling class. The Mugabe regime on the other hand supports intervention on the side of the Angolan government. Tension still runs high over the war in the Congo, with Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia and Chad drawn into the conflict in support of President Kabila and Uganda and Rwanda on the side of the anti-Kabila forces. Conflict over the Caprivi Strip between Namibia and Botswana also poses a threat, with the Zimbabwean ruling class supporting the former and the South African ruling class supporting the latter.

The underlying cause of this increase in tension is in the economic crisis facing the two most powerful economies of the region, Zimbabwe and South Africa, in the face of the global economic downturn. The ensuing economic competition between the rival ruling classes has forced the two governments to attempt to form regional alliances. Such action is taking on an increasingly military character with the Zimbabwean government, backed by Namibia, justifying its intervention in the Congo on the grounds of securing markets at the expense of South African multinationals. In another example of capitalist robbers fighting over their ill-gotten gains South Africa, backed by Botswana, asserted its influence over Lesotho to protect the interests of its ruling class following attempts by the Lesothon population to overthrow the existing dictatorial regime.

In such circumstances an ominous regional arms race is beginning to take place, with South Africa announcing at the end of 1998 a re-armament programme worth 20 billion rands. Botswana, South Africa’s main regional ally, has also been conducting a re-armament programme including the construction of a US-assisted military airbase. Zimbabwe, under the pretext of the conflict in the Congo, has also been spending billions of dollars on re-arming with its most recent purchase being over $1 billion-worth of Russian military equipment. A similar massive re-armament has taken place in Angola as a consequence of the intensifying civil war. It seems that the increasing trade war taking place between the capitalists of southern Africa may result in yet another war in which the workers fights for the interests of capital.

In the era of the “New World Order” capitalism once again proves itself to be an uncontrollable and destructive system of society. A system which accords the majority slave status and then expects them to die for their masters’ interests. The only solution to war and to the miseries of capitalism in Africa, as in the rest of the world, is for the working class to organise for common ownership and democratic control, a society where the root cause of war in the economic and strategic rivalry of a minority owning class is removed and the production and distribution of wealth is conducted in the interests of the whole community—Socialism. It is time the working class struggled for its own interests.

Colin Skelly

Population: Feeding the Six Billionth (1999)

From the September 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the year 1800, there were one billion humans alive. Seventy years ago, the world had two billion human inhabitants. Thirty years ago, that figure had doubled to four billion. On October 12 of this year, at 1.24 am New York Time, the UN Secretary General will announce to the world that the six billionth human has been born.

By all accounts, the six billionth baby will be born into a life of poverty and misery. While the population trend in the industrialised world is stability or declining numbers—with Europe’s population, for instance, expected to drop by 25 percent in the next 50 years—97 out of every 100 children born live in the developing world.

At present, the increase in the world’s population stands at some 78 million per year. By the year 2050, Earth is expected to have 8.9 billion human inhabitants, with the UN forecasting that the global population will level off at about 11 billion round about 2120.

Come this October, we can no doubt expect a glut of newspaper articles highlighting Kofi Annan’s statement, many in the Malthusian tradition, arguing that population cannot grow beyond the means of subsistence and that we can expect increased rivalry for scarce resources, civil unrest and a breakdown in law and order. We can expect to be reminded that we cannot grow the food for increased future generations and that the world’s fresh water supplies are dwindling.

Firstly, under capitalism rivalry for resources, scarce or in abundance, has always been the norm. Secondly, it is important to point out that what scarcity there is—whether it be food or water—is artificially brought about.

It is no state secret that food is not primarily produced to eat. It is produced for the market and with a view to make profits. The 1.3 billion humans in the underdeveloped world who go without food on any given day do not constitute a market because they cannot purchase what they need. Hence, we find governments ordering land to be taken out of production because the surplus cannot be sold at a profit. We find governments the world over ordering the destruction of mountains of food to keep prices high. We are informed of the dwindling supplies of fresh water, but the technology has existed for quite some time to enable us to convert sea water into fresh water for irrigation and domestic use.

The paradox that there is hunger and thirst in the midst of plenty was hinted at as far back as 50 years ago when the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation was formed. Its first Director General, Lord Boyd-Orr, observed in the Times of 22nd July 1949 how:

There was no difficulty about producing enough food for the present population of the world, or even twice that number, but the problem was, could politics and economics arrange that the food that was produced was dispersed and consumed in the countries that needed it?

The problem becomes not one of feeding the world’s growing population, but of organising production and distribution on a rational basis. While we can expect the Malthusian prophets of doom to remind us that every new child means an extra mouth to feed, they will neglect to add that it also means an extra pair of hands, an extra brain, capable of contributing to the common good .

Socialists ask whether the present social system will allow these hands and this brain to be used wisely, to produce the extra wealth needed for a growing population. So long as the market system prevails the answer is no. Capitalism is not only a system of artificial scarcity, it is also a system of organised waste. Countless millions of workers are to be found in the armed forces, many more in the security and law and order business, with many times that number employed in the field of commerce and finance.

And its not as though there is a problem with there being enough workers to produce what we need. It has been estimated that within 25 years, just 2 percent of the world’s population will be able to produce everything needed—and this takes into account the insane and artificial constraints imposed by the profit system.

Present and projected increases in the global population only pose a problem under the conditions imposed by capitalist society—the laws of profit first and can’t pay, can’t have. Socialist society will see an end to the “planned and subsidised under-production” that President Kennedy observed almost 40 years ago. It will see an end to scarcity and a removing of the artificial barriers that presently curb production. Socialist society will ensure that the resources of the Earth are used in a manner that ensures every man, woman and child is adequately fed, clothed and sheltered—something capitalism has never been capable of overseeing.

John Bissett

Caught in the deep (1999)

TV Review from the September 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bizarre though it may seem, English cricket—and the televising of English cricket—so accurately reflects the wider economic and cultural changes of British society in recent years that it is simply uncanny. For those who care to remember, leisurely games of cricket on the village green were central to John Major’s vision of a society at ease with itself, along with warm beer and old ladies cycling to church on Sunday mornings. And while Major’s vision was overtly anachronistic, cricket has always tended to embody much that is considered to be distinctively “British”: the old Gentlemen versus Players class distinction, the quiet civility of the English tea, the resolute application and grit of the undefeated all-day batsman, and—more often than not—the stiff upper lip of those in extreme adversity. Of course, the game has changed over the years along with wider society and few would disagree that it has become harsher, nastier and more competitive. English cricketers have been, if we are to be charitable, poor at acclimatising to the new conditions. Today there is something of the metaphoric frightened rabbit about them as they are repeatedly showered under a hail of West Indian bouncers, spun out of their senses by passing magicians from the sub-continent and battered by the explosive and inflammatory verbals of the Australians.

Cricket in England had always been an essentially timeless phenomenon—like the “season”, Wimbledon, Last Night of the Proms and much else. That TV coverage of cricket reflected this is fairly obvious. Few could have died of excitement at the sound of John Arlott and Jim Laker coaxing England towards a draw on a dank Tuesday afternoon at Old Trafford. High drama it certainly wasn’t, though perhaps one of the finest accolades given to them by a critic was that they at least made five days of sitting in an armchair watching the grass grow seem like a veritable pleasure, and indeed for a few million every summer it was. But now the BBC have lost the Test Match coverage franchise for the first time—along with so much else too—and things are not quite the same. The greying, sedate affair hosted by the BBC has left the field of play, retired hurt, to be replaced by something altogether more brash.

A loud appeal

Channel 4’s cricket coverage has certainly blown away a few of the old cobwebs. Indeed, just as the new technology of capitalism constantly serves to revolutionise that system from within, so at last (though more prosaically) has TV cricket coverage been revolutionised by elements of that same technology so as to accurately reflect the dynamic of society as a whole. From the “speedster” and the close up action replay through to the “snick-o-meter”, Channel 4 is knocking on the door of the twenty first century, bringing to sports lovers the aids to comprehension and the sheer excitement that befits a technologically advanced civilisation. And yet there is a downside, as there always is in the market economy.

While the technological advancements of civilisation open up whole new vistas, so at the same time does society itself become less “civilised”. Not only does Channel 4’s coverage come with a good deal of the brashness we have come to associate with so much else of the fast-food culture we inhabit, but it extends to breaking point public tolerance of commercially-orientated TV. The advertisements that have crept into cricket and other sports over recent years, from the advertising hoardings at the grounds and the sponsoring of competitions and then teams, to the painted advertisements on the pitch itself, have now been supplemented by particularly insidious versions of the ubiquitous TV commercial.

As each session of play in a Test Match lasts for at least two hours, usually without formal interruption of any sort, the advertisers had a headache reconciling the needs of the game and of the viewer on the one hand with the dictates of the market and profit on the other. Their solution has been to run a 20 second-or-so commercial every few overs of play, completely untelegraphed to the audience. There is no programme theme music, no couple of seconds of silence as the programme “card” comes up by way of warning—in fact, there is no warning at all. It is effectively a bizarre, elongated version of subliminal advertising. It is immensely irritating and not surprisingly, has been almost uniformly condemned. Yet, ironically, without the increasingly bizarre adverts for cars and bottled lagers which now infest the screen during cricket coverage, there would probably be no improved coverage of the type Channel 4 have been able to provide.

There may be more important examples of the irrationality of capitalism and of how the market system is unable to properly use the technology it has helped develop so as to meet human needs, but few illustrate it so graphically as the changes undergone by cricket coverage, and exemplified by Channel 4. Cricket is now a more compelling TV sport than it ever has been, except that it is ceaselessly undermined with adverts which seek to distract and intrude rather than genuinely inform. Just as the market gives with one hand, so it takes back with another because the rational planning of human services will always be a secondary consideration quite some way behind the making of profits.

One final thought: does the cricket “third umpire”—called upon to make adjudications with the help of a TV monitor and replays—have to sit through some near-subliminal rubbish while he tries to make a decision over a marginal run out? Somehow we think not. And is he doesn’t have to, then why the hell should we?

Dave Perrin

Lost Musicals and “Get Lost” Musicals (1999)

Theatre Review from the September 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

110 In the Shade, Fortune Theatre, London

I have to admit that I like musicals, and especially old musicals of the kind that were common from the nineteen-twenties and thirties until the seventies. True many were arch, whilst others were coy and over-sentimental. But when they worked it was usually because they had wit and charm and, in the years following the end of the Second World War, because they were increasingly grounded in the lives of ordinary people. Their books were written by the likes of Guy Bolton, George Kaufman, Moss Hart and Wolf Mankowitz; with words and music from, for example, the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart, Frank Loesser and Howard Goodall.

Today’s musicals, by comparison, affect to be populist operas. Words are at a premium, the intention being to write an “all-through” score, as in Les Miserables. Character and story lines frequently fall victim of the desire to produce knock-out “special effects”, like the arrival of the helicopter in Miss Saigon. Story lines are pretentious and amoral (Aspects of Love), extravagant and fanciful (Phantom of the Opera) and naïve and childlike (Beauty and the Beast). Audiences are stunned by sound and spectacle. Humanity and reality lose out to noise and stage technology.

The effect is frequently chilling. I recall seeing Les Miserables at the Barbican—astonishingly it was produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company. All around me people were clapping and cheering—some had even leapt onto their seats the better to give expression to their feelings. And for what? A great novel had been shredded before our eyes and repackaged as an indifferent quasi-opera. History had been re-written, and events in mid-nineteenth-century France turned into the kind of fiction that I remember as a child associating with the adventures of Flash Gordon at the local cinema on a Saturday morning. Yet people were cheering. How could this be? I felt a huge sense of isolation. It was as though I was a prisoner on another, alien planet.

Contemporary musicals form part of the ideological apparatus of capitalism. Their function is first and foremost to make money for their backers by projecting messages which are consistent with the status quo. To do this they employ lavish sets and imposing numbers of people and special effects in order to tell bizarre tales (Starlight Express) and other unlikely fictions, in a manner which, as one critic puts it, “stuns you into submission”. Their size makes them expensive, and in order to recoup their costs they have to continue to pull in the punters literally for years. This means that they have to be pre-packaged and sold. Like Star Wars Episode 1 which is reputed to have carried a pre-showing budget of several millions of pounds in the UK, any significant new musical is going to be hyped for weeks and months before it opens. This makes the critic’s job more difficult. An honest opinion is difficult if the pre-production gloss has led you to expect a masterpiece, and if the newspaper in which you write is owned by someone who has invested in the show. But once the public has been persuaded, often regardless of the merits or otherwise of the piece that the show is worth seeing, once a show has survived six months or so in the West End and the coach companies are arranging trips from the far-flung corners of the country, then producers can be pretty certain of getting their money back and more; much, much more.

How nice then to report that for those living near to London it is possible to see musicals predicated, in part, on a different basis. For a couple of years now my partner and I have been attending occasional performances of “The Lost Musicals” on Sunday afternoons in May, July and September. Organised by a charitable trust and managed by a man whose enthusiasm for musicals is as obvious as his indifference to the money-making, in nine years they have managed to offer 160 performances of over 40 different shows which haven’t been seen for 30-50 years or so, using 600 actors who have given their services free.

Recently we saw 110 In The Shade, a warm folksy tale based on Richard Nash’s play The Rainmaker. Never mind that the actors were reading their parts against a black back-cloth, and singing with the support of only a single pianist, this was a wonderful experience. There was more honesty, warmth, wit and wisdom in this unpretentious show than in all of the lavish musicals on offer in the West End. The best musicals manage to conjure from story, character, music and dance, something close to occasional moments of ecstasy. Perhaps understandably then there was something of the ecstatic in the audience’s response.

Michael Gill

Party activity during the summer months (1999)

Party News from the September 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialist Party members were active leafleting various events, including the Durham Miners’ Gala and the Tolpuddle Martyrs memorial. We reproduce below the texts of the leaflets distributed in July at the two events.

Message for the 1999 Durham Miners’ Gala.

The Durham Miners’ Gala is an integral part of the working-class tradition and history in the North East in general, and County Durham in particular. Although there is now only one working colliery in the North East coalfield, the gala’s pre-eminence as a working-class gathering remains. The crowds may have diminished from its heyday but other things have not changed. The continued attendance of those state-capitalists in socialist clothing, the Labour Party, is still galling.

 Offering much, but delivering nothing. They claim to be socialists but are indistinguishable from the Tories, Liberals and the rest.

 Labour, it should be remembered, between 1964-69 closed 233 pits around the country, and have never been backward in coming forward when it comes to using the full weight of the state against the working class.

 Using troops and the police to break strikes is merely one example. Ask yourself this: for all of the hundreds of billions of pounds-worth of coal which has been extracted from North East mines, with the concomitant cost in terms of tens of thousands of workers still suffering, what has been the reward?

Have miners lived lives of fulfilment, free from stress and anxiety? Free from worry over our and our children’s futures? The answer must be an unequivocal NO!

The wealth represented by coal has been pillaged by a tiny few, for their enrichment. The private coal owners at first, then on behalf of the capitalist class as a whole through state-capitalist nationalisation in latter years and now back to private owners today.

 In all of these periods, even during the spell of nationalisation (which was state capitalism, not socialism) the reward has been poverty, degradation and insecurity. The people who worked and died, and are still dying, to extract the coal, have had scant reward for their toil. The people who have suffered, and who still suffer, react to this by continuing to allow the tricksters of the left to con them.

Blair and his cronies are only the latest edition.

 The solution however is quite simple! It is a solution which is shown quite plainly on the banner of Murton pit itself, reproduced on the front of this leaflet: “Production for use, not profit”

 This is precisely what the Socialist Party advocates and has done since 1904. Socialism: nothing more, nothing less. The common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing the things we need to live. Where we all have equal access to the means of life.

A demand echoed by the above slogan. Only we, as a united working class, can bring this about and if you would like to know more about these ideas, why not get in touch: our address is contained in this leaflet.

Message for the 1999 Tolpuddle Martyrs Rally.

Tolpuddle Martyrs If gathering together to remember the Tolpuddle Martyrs means anything then it is surely not simply a question of just remembering but of also trying to change things for the better. This is precisely what those six Dorset farm labourers were trying to do 165 years ago.

 There will be many messages put forward today. The trade union and Labour Party leaders will tell us how far we have come since 1834. How much things have changed for the better, how fortunate we are to have a Labour government and how if we are patient and leave it to them things will improve still further.

 Our message is different. Much has changed since the nineteenth century and in some respects things have improved. These improvements have been brought about by people organising themselves and not by leaders.

 However the fundamental problems that faced people around 1834, such as poverty, homelessness, unemployment and so on are still with us today.

 If these problems are considered in the light of the wealth that is created today in comparison with over 150 years ago and if we look at things on a world-wide scale then we have made little headway.

 There is still an enormous growing gap between rich and poor. We still face these problems because one fundamental thing has not changed, namely, the nature of the society we live in. As in the last century we live in a social system where the prime motivation for producing goods and services for profit.

 What has changed is that more than ever we live in a global economy dominated by giant corporations. Many of these corporations have more economic power than some countries.

 We are not pleading with the heads of corporations that dominate the world today to behave a little kinder. We are not asking politicians to attempt to control the corporations. We are not saying let us run this system because we can run it more humanely.

 The present system is operating the only way it can, profits first, human needs second and the politicians have as much chance of controlling it as a two-year-old has of stopping a runaway horse.

Our message is that we need a complete change. At present, the instruments needed to produce and distribute the things we need, are owned by a minority, around 5 percent of the population.

 Our alternative is a system of common ownership and democratic control. Goods and services could then be produced directly for use thus ending the situation where production is geared to the profit motive.

This change cannot be handed down by leaders but will be brought about by a majority acting democratically and fully conscious of what they are doing. Since this society can only function on a global scale, the movement that brings it about will have to be organised on a world-wide basis.

If you are here today because you feel a fundamental change in the way society is organised is needed then you owe it to yourself to find out more about the only political movement which seeks FUNDAMENTAL CHANGE.

50 Years Ago: Another Fake Goes West (1999)

The 50 Years Ago column from the September 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Exit the Revolutionary Communist Party

In July of this year the English Trotzkyists, the Revolutionary Communist Party, brought out a Special Number of their paper, the Socialist Appeal, consisting of a small four-page leaflet. If there were ever any doubts about the reformist character of the R.C.P., this four-page leaflet disposes of them for ever!

The front page of the leaflet contains nothing but the following, in large type:-

“DECLARATION

“On the Dissolution of the Revolutionary Communist Party and the entry of its members into the Labour Party.”

The second page informs us that after several months of discussion a Special National Conference was held in London, June 4th, 5th and 6th. and that the only items on the Agenda for this Conference were:-

“The current political situation in Britain: what forms the class struggle would take in the next period, and how best the energies and activities of its members could be utilised to further the cause of Socialism.”

We are told that:-

“After a two-days debate, this fully representative Conference decided, by a substantial majority, to dissolve the organisation and call upon the members of the Party to enter the Labour Party—to which the majority already pay the Trade Union political levy—as individual members. Within the Labour Party they would carry on the fight for the overthrow of the capitalist system and for a Socialist Britain.”

The last sentence is an exposure of mental bankruptcy; after originating as a challenge to the nationalism of the Stalinites the R.C.P. falls for the “Socialism in One Country” idea.

(From an article by “Gilmac”, Socialist Standard, September 1949)

Obituary: Patrick Maratty (1999)

Obituary from the September 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

On Wednesday 21 July my brother Patrick Maratty, who over the years has written many letters to the Sunderland Echo under the pseudonym “anti-capitalist” and was a member of the Socialist Party, died in hospital after years of neglect by the health and social services.

Patrick loved snooker and wanted his son Matty to be a champion player. He believed that the only way Matty could become a “professional” as he called it was to act like one: this meant practising eight hours a day. He spent much of his life teaching his son how to play the game and anyone who knows Matty knows that he lives up to his dad’s expectations.

The other passion in Pat’s life was socialism. He believed that the major cause of social problems was capitalism and that the working class throughout the world should organise democratically and politically for a society based upon common ownership. He scorned religious beliefs as false, dangerous, divisive and a major contributory factor to many horrendous acts throughout history. I know he hasn’t gone to heaven, hell or purgatory but he will have found peace. I loved him and will miss him.

Vince Maratty

Venezuela: Rooting out corruption? (1999)

From the September 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1989, following mass rioting, after government austerity measures which cut working-class incomes, 300 people were killed by the security forces in Venezuela. Most of the bodies “disappeared”; but in October 1996, because of a putrid smell in a building in a cemetery, on a hillside just outside the capital, Caracas, dozens of unidentified corpses were discovered. They had been dumped there secretly by the state, and left to rot.

It was not, however, just the bodies of the workers that were left to rot. Much of Venezuela was in a state of decay. Moreover, as we pointed out last year (Socialist Standard, October 1998), the economy had been teetering on the edge of total instability throughout the 1990s. Not surprisingly, Venezuela was badly affected by the economic crisis spreading throughout much of the world. The government, whose currency had been under intense pressure for some time, launched an immediate round of public spending cuts. What has happened since then?

Seven years ago, Hugo Chavez led a failed military coup against the government, “in the name of Venezuela’s poor”; but was democratically elected president last February. He is a belligerent populist, who claimed that he would root out corruption, of which there is a lot, in Venezuela.

Following his inauguration, Chavez soon showed his hand. He began to prepare for the elections in August. He flouted the electoral laws by promoting his own candidates, and by appointing army officers to senior government posts. And he claimed that he had strong support among the poor majority. And he has been proved right. His left-wing coalition, which included his wife, his brother and about 20 of his former military colleagues, won 122 seats of the 131-seat assembly, in an 80 percent turnout.

He says that the new assembly will renew institutions which have been dominated by the two old parties for 40 years; and he wants the assembly to dissolve congress and the supreme court. Following his victory, Chavez claimed that:

  The victory of the patriots has been pulverising. We are building a true democracy in a way that those who destroyed the country from here didn’t know how to (Guardian, 27 July).

Official statistics admit that sixty-five percent of Venezuelans live in poverty, despite the fact that the country possesses the largest oil reserves in the Western Hemisphere. During the last three decades, the per capita wealth of Venezuela has dropped twenty-five percent. In October last year, we asked: what of the working class? And we said that, for them, it can only get worse. We were right.

Despite the stabilisation of the currency, there has been a sharp economic downturn of the economy, resulting in the loss of about 600,000 jobs since Hugo Chavez took office as President in February. Moreover, we can safely predict that the majority of the people of Venezuela, the employed and unemployed working class, will continue to exist in poverty and deprivation, in the dilapidated apartments of Caracas, the run-down shacks of the surrounding ranchos or the one-storey slums of Maracy in Aragua state.

All Chavez’s proposed reforms, and all the present support of the workers, will not make one iota of difference. Only a change from capitalism to socialism will achieve that.

Peter E. Newell

What was fascism? (1999)

Book Review from the September 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fascism: Theory and Practice By Dave Renton. Pluto Press.

Fascism was basically an extreme form that nationalism took in Italy and Germany, for reasons specific to the particular history of these capitalist states, in the period between the 20th century’s two world wars.

Fascism originated in Italy in 1919 in Italy when Mussolini set up the fascisti di combattimento, so called after units of the Roman army. Later the word was used in relation to a similar extreme nationalist movement in Germany even though this described itself as “national-socialist” (Nazi) rather than fascist. Both these movements won control of political power more or less constitutionally, in Italy in 1922 and in Germany in 1933, and proceeded to establish a one-party dictatorship with mass organisations to embrigade the population and preaching that all members of the “nation” had a common interest. Fascism/Nazism was implacably opposed to Marxism for its internationalism and its advocacy of the class struggle within nations.

Analysing this new phenomenon, which represented political regression compared with how Marx and Marxists until the first world war had seen things developing (political democracy, then socialism), was a challenge to those who called themselves Marxists. It is how they met this challenge that Renton’s book describes. Well-written and easy-to-read it suffers from the defect that its author is an SWP member who sees Trotsky as a brilliant political thinker. But Trotsky was disqualified from usefully contributing to the debate since, although he wasn’t a racist, he too favoured a one-party dictatorship.

The SWP makes campaigning against the fascist grouplets that exist today one of its top priorities but since fascism is only an extreme development of nationalism they ought also to campaign against nationalism. Only they don’t; they support the so-called “right of nations to self-determination”, a doctrine which accepts the myth that “nations”—and so “aliens”—exist and so provides ideological ammunition to justify “ethnic cleansing” of members of other “nations” living on a “nation’s” territory.

Adam Buick

Headlines (1999)

Editorial from the September 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

• GOVERNMENT ADMITS NEW CABINETS WILL MEET IN SECRET (Camden New Journal, 11 April)
• BLAIR ATTACKS “SNOBS” WHO DERIDE WEALTH (Times, 7 July)
• SCHOOL TEST MANIA “KILLING CREATIVITY” (Independent, 15 July)

These recent headlines neatly sum up the activity of the Labour government in three particular areas—constitutional reform, enterprise culture and education.

Labour’s constitutional reforms are only a red herring, to allow it to pose as a reforming party even though it is unable and unwilling to deliver any social reforms (and in fact is continuing to whittle them away, as the disabled, single mothers and the unemployed can testify). But their constitutional changes are not even democratic. Instead of the pure and simple abolition of the House of Lords they are planning to turn it from a mixture of hereditary and appointed Lords into a House of Appointees only. The headline above refers to one of their proposals that will make local government less democratic: the replacing of the present system of committees meeting in public by an elected Mayor presiding over a cabinet that meets in secret.

Addressing a meeting of the British Venture Capital Association in July, Blair sounded exactly like Thatcher when he denounced most people’s disdain for so-called self-made businessmen and women as “unhealthy”. Instead of looking down on them he said, “we need society as a whole to applaud you”, and he pledged himself to instil such a healthy attitude to these cockroach capitalists even in schools. There can be no doubt about it. Thatcher’s programme of encouraging “enterprise culture” to pollute every aspect of life is in safe hands under Blair.

On education, the Labour government has made things worse for school students and teachers: testing, competition and tables of winners and losers have been extended even further than under the Tories. The headline here introduced a report of a speech by the author of children’s books David Almond who summed up Labour’s education policies as:

  Get kids into school fast! Get them assessed while they are in nappies! Get them going into literacy clubs, numeracy clubs, lunchtime learning clubs, holiday learning clubs! Holidays? Let’s cut them. School day? Let’s lengthen it. Homework? One hour? No, let’s make it two, eh! Let’s see them, children and teachers, work, work, work.

Inevitably, this has led to a fourth headline: “Exams criticised as ‘child abuse’. Children driven to suicide, reports Mark Henderson” (Times, 28 July).

Labour once used to be a reformist party which claimed to be able to impose socialist values—democracy, equality, co-operation not competition—on capitalist society. It was an impossible project of course which was bound to fail because capitalism can only work as capitalism. Now Labour is an openly capitalist party trying to impose capitalist values on those who haven’t absorbed them.

How right Socialists were to have had nothing to do with the Labour Party from the start.

Greasy Pole: Prescott on class (1999)

The Greasy Pole column from the September 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nicholas Soames is a Tory MP—the sort who is instantly at home in the club-like atmosphere of the House of Commons with its adolescent misbehaviour, its false camaraderie and its ravenous appetite for rumour. Soames is rich, privileged, secure. He speaks in a booming voice and is insultingly deferential or disparaging towards women. Claire Short, for example, is a natural victim for him. He likes to indulge all his appetites; the equally obnoxious MP Alan Clark tells of him taking up a lot of time during Agriculture Questions recommending “. . . an incredibly powerful new aphrodisiac he had discovered” (is this why people are elected to the Mother of Parliaments?) and on another occasion even the famously immoderate Clark was uncomfortable at the thought of how much he and Soames could spend on one meal in an exclusive restaurant.

To put it another way, Soames is an overweight, arrogant buffoon who, had he not been born into a very rich family, would have had difficulty in persuading an employer to give him a job stacking shelves in a supermarket. If he had got the job the other shelf-fillers would not have appreciated his “jokes”, which are manufactured and trumpeted out for the benefit of Soames rather than his defenceless listeners. For example, if Soames is in the House when John Prescott gets onto his feet he usually greets him with the cry: “Two gin and tonics please, Giuseppe.” This is supposed to be funny because it refers to the fact that in his early days, before he climbed the ladder of trade union officialdom, university student, MP and minister, Prescott was a waiter on an ocean-going liner. It is not amusing, especially for those who have heard it for the fortieth time. But perhaps it rattles Prescott, who recently got some unwelcome publicity about the fact that he no longer admits to being a member of the working class and instead lays claim to membership of that vague, indefinable, mysterious social strata called the middle class.

Father

The story was ecstatically embraced by the media. After all Prescott has a reputation of being the only representative of Old Labour in the Cabinet—the only link with the days when the governments of Attlee, Wilson and Callaghan were following roughly the same policies as Blair but not so blatantly. As might have been expected the Sun led the pack with an interview with Prescott’s 89-year-old father in his wheelchair. Prescott senior is angry with his famous son for many reasons: “spiteful” was how he described him in a typical Sun headline. The father began his working life as a railway porter and ended it as controller of Liverpool Lime Street station. At some stage he fell out with his son who, he says, has not spoken to him civilly for three years. For 50 years he has been a “traditional” Labour Party member, from which we can infer that he does not approve of John Prescott’s apparent shame at his roots.

There is rather more to it than that—as there is to the whole business of which class John Prescott belongs to and why and what he feels about it. A former Labour Party leader in Hull—which has John Prescott as its MP—says that he “. . . bent over backwards to show he is middle class”. Bending over backwards seems to entail living in one of the biggest houses in the city, with turrets and decorated chimney pots, having two Jaguar cars and other trappings. All of this sits uneasily with Prescott’s pose as a rough, tough son of the proletariat. It makes him seem to want to forget his time as a waiter (except that Soames won’t let him) and to be ashamed of his class origins (which Soames will never be).

Pride

The inference of this is that shame—and therefore pride—should come into the issue of class. It is usual to hear Labour politicians who declare themselves to be working class stoutly asserting that they are proud of it. On the other hand Prescott, according to the Sunday Times of 18 July, is proud of being in another class—of “. . . having hauled himself up” from the proletariat depths. It is a mystery, why anyone should feel pride in being born into one class or another, which is something quite out of their control and not something they have achieved. That is why millions of people who may be proud of being workers try so persistently to remove themselves from the source of their pride by winning the lottery. The same goes for members of the ruling class; it is no achievement of theirs to be born of parents like Nicholas Soames or Rupert Murdoch or Jonathan Aitken.

This is typical of the confusion in which the matter of social class is embedded. Living in a larger house and running a couple of cars does not in itself raise someone into another class. Neither does earning a bigger wage. The roller-coaster of capitalism’s economy has recently brought thousands of people in this country sharply up against the fact that there is more to it than that. Thousands who thought that taking out a mortgage on a house made them middle class were deprived of that delusion by the reality of re-possession. Thousands who assumed they were middle class because they sat in a manager’s chair and drove a company car were forced to re-arrange their concepts about society when they got their redundancy notice.

Exploitation 

A great deal of anguish might have been saved for these people through a proper understanding of capitalism’s class structure—what it is, how it operates and what it does to us. Simply—class is determined by a person’s economic standing and interests. Those who have to be employed—at whatever job—for a living are members of the working class. Their interests are the same as those of all other members of that class and opposed to those of the one other class, who as a class employ and exploit them. In this process capitalism’s class structure is protected and perpetuated.

Whether John Prescott understands this or not is another matter (although as he still describes himself as a socialist he ought to have at least an inkling of it—or did he not pay attention during his time at Ruskin)? He has made it almost to the top in government—hauled himself up so that he has a big say in organising the exploitation of workers like his dad to the enrichment and comfort of parasites like Nicholas Soames. Now that is something to be ashamed of.

Ivan

Social Protest Literature (1999)

Book Review from the September 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Social Protest Literature: An Encyclopaedia of Works, Characters, Author, and Themes. Patricia D. Netzley, ACB-CLIO Inc. 1999.

You will learn a lot from this dog’s dinner of a reference book. Did you know that “monkey-wrenching” in America is a form of environmental sabotage? Or that a character called Teacake, in a black feminist novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, contracted rabies and had to be shot by his wife? You didn’t? Well, you do now.

The trouble with Netzley’s confection is that it is wilfully selective, often tediously trivial—and, frankly, just too American. Of the 343 works cited, no less than 93 percent were published in the US. The British ones include those by or about Dickens, Aldous Huxley, Gilbert Murray, Herbert Read, Shaw and Raymond Williams. Bernard Marx, a character in Huxley’s Brave New World, merits a 200-word discussion. No entry for Karl Marx—only a passing reference to him under communism and socialism. The social reformer Edward Bellamy, with his boring prediction of a nationalised “socialist” America in Looking Backward, gets an enthusiastic 700-word coverage. For William Morris’s much more imaginative News from Nowhere—zilch! The entries for communism and socialism are disappointing. We are told that the principles of communism developed in ancient times, that Marxists split into several factions during and after the Russian Revolution of 1917, and that McCarthy led a crusade against communism. Not a word about what communism actually is as an alternative to capitalism.

Socialism fares only a little better. After being told that it “is an ideology that advocates equality and the abolishment of class structure and capitalism” we learn that “Socialists believe that the people, in the form of the state, should control all property and production of goods”!

Perhaps the main problem with this book is her focus on the word “protest”. It is a weak and even cunning word, exemplified in the protest vote, when you vote for someone you don’t agree with to give someone else a warning. Protest is often ineffective and done from a position of subservience: you protest the price of fish when you ought to be boldly changing the world. Socialists don’t go much on protest—vigorous opposition and constructive imagination are more our style.

Social Protest Literature has some good points. As the blurb says it is beautifully illustrated and would look good on a coffee table. It gives a fair introduction to a wide range of fictional literature on the lives of victims of property society. But don’t expect to find anything useful about how to abolish that society and replace it with socialism.

Stan Parker

Alcoholics Anonymous (1999)

A Short Story from the September 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Idly browsing through a magazine not so long ago I came across a questionnaire on people's drinking habits. The questionnaire, which was headed "Are You An Alcoholic?" suggested that anyone answering with a total of five "yes's" out of twelve questions had a proclivity towards alcoholism. I was stunned to discover that my score was eight. Alcoholics Anonymous here I come, I thought.

Several days later I took stock and reflected that in all seriousness I could hardly believe myself to be a true alcoholic. I could, by a sheer effort of will, abstain from drinking for weeks at a time, though I was honest enough with myself to own up to the fact that as soon as I resumed the habit I seemed to be making an unconscious effort to make up for lost time. The questionnaire advised that this was not good news. It pointed to bingeing, it said. I made enquiries about the next meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous and took myself along.

On the night if I thought I would be entering a room occupied by red-nosed, broken-veined down-and-outs, carefully concealing their hip flasks and uttering in slurred voices, then I was certainly in error. I am not sure that I did think that, but still my expectations were such that I imagined alcoholics not to be "normal" people going about their daily lives just like everybody else. A couple of people introduced themselves to me and I was offered a cup of tea. I heard friendly banter being exchanged between those who were regulars and knew each other. About twenty people had gathered, their ages ranging between twenty-five and sixty. (Later I was to learn that a few of the older people hadn't "touched a drop" for ten to fifteen years.) We stood round a large table, linked hands and in unison (except for me; I didn't know the words) recited a kind of litany, which talked about life and what our attitude should be to it—presumably to contribute to keeping us sober. What I remember most about the litany was a phrase which said we should learn to "accept that which we cannot change". My hackles were up. I found that idea too fatalistic, believing that most things can be changed, apart from the fact of death, that is. Then we sat down and the meeting began.

People who felt moved to speak gave their case histories—all in matter-of-fact tones, rather as though they were relating an assortment of experiences common to us all, events likely to overtake most people during a lifetime. Marriages and partnerships had come to an end because all money coming into the house had been, either surreptitiously or openly, squandered on booze. Some people had lost their houses, businesses and jobs, their careers, the love of their spouses and children. A few of those present had spent nights on park benches often landing up in hospital to be dried out. Some were not regular drinkers but were now and then compelled to go out on nights of carousing, seeking asylum in pubs and in the company of other drinkers, consoling themselves and each other in their addiction.

Sitting amidst all this tragedy, endless cups of tea and overflowing ashtrays, I stayed silent but tearful. One thought, however, persisted in my mind and I knew I should be ashamed of it; it was that if we could all have a cosy drink together then we would, at least temporarily, be able to forget all our misery. It was fortunate indeed that what little wisdom I had prevented me from voicing this absurd, and somewhat revealing, notion.

Some alcoholics had sought refuge in religion, others in a simmering hatred of the social system under which we live. "I couldn't get a job" was one refrain. "I felt the world was a cruel place and there was very little compassion in it" was another. Politicians failed people and so did religion and much of what happened in our social order appeared not to make sense.

As a socialist I recognised what had sustained me over the years (as well as frustrating me and causing me enough rage to find me reaching for the bottle on occasion). I understood something about social alienation and if I had not been so overcome with emotion at the sad stories I heard that night, then maybe I would have told my own story, of years of reading and learning to analysis, at least to some extent, the capitalist system and the effect it can have on people's lives. If the propensity for alcohol is innate (and that is debatable) then the profit system, the National Lottery with its appeal to selfishness and greed, this grab-all environment against which we are expected to function, will always be a hindrance to the cure of sensitive people who bend under the strain of so much social tension.

I never returned to Alcoholics Anonymous, though I did kick alcohol for seven months. The truth is that I lacked the courage to re-visit the place where I had listened to so many harrowing stories . . . and so many heroic struggles with the demon drink.

Heather Ball

Plague Wars (1999)

Book Review from the September 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Plague Makers: The Secret World of Biological Warfare. Wendy Barnaby. Vision paperbacks, London 1999, pp 214. £9.99.

This interesting book looks at the history of biological weapons; their development this century; who produces them and why; and the attempts to prevent them from being used.

The Persians, Greeks and Romans poisoned wells by throwing corpses into them and, in 1763, a British captain tried to kill North American Indians by giving them blankets from a smallpox hospital. The crudeness of delivery systems in the past led to a belief that biological weapons were not reliable, but the development of modern techniques has led to this assumption being questioned.

Wendy Barnaby points out that biological weapons can be made much more cheaply than nuclear or chemical weapons and that attacks may be impossible to determine from naturally occurring outbreaks of disease.

The destruction that can be wreaked by biological weapons is frightening: "One gram of anthrax could, if distributed effectively, kill more than 100 millions people." And it is not only governments that develop biological weapons; their cheapness makes them available to terrorist groups. It has been estimated that ". . . a major biological arsenal could be built in a room 15-by-15 feet, with £5,000 worth of equipment".

The Aum Shinrikyo sect, responsible for the nerve gas attack in Tokyo's underground in 1995, had 160 barrels of media for growing clostridium botulinum and members of the right-wing supremacist group, Order of the Rising Sun, had more than 30 kilograms of typhoid bacteria in their possession when they were arrested. They planned to poison the water supplies of major cities to create a master race.

The duplicity of governments is demonstrated by the manufacture of biological weapons despite endorsing the 1925 Geneva Protocol which condemned them. Britain produced five million cattle cakes containing anthrax in "Operation Vegetarian" during the Second World War although they were never used despite Churchill's readiness to wage war with them in 1945, prevented only by the cessation of hostilities. The island of Gruinard was contaminated with anthrax in 1942 and remained closed to the public until decontaminated in 1990. Nevertheless, the UN General Assembly was assured in 1969 that Britain had never produced biological weapons. The American programme was even bigger, employing nearly 4,000 people after the war.

Thousands of American prisoners were killed in experiments by the Japanese, but the perpetrators were given immunity from prosecution provided they shared their knowledge. Barnaby shows how utterly ruthless capitalist politicians are in pursuit of power. The apartheid regime in South Africa had a programme to try to develop vaccines that only worked on black people, and a number of political assassinations were carried out with biological and chemical weapons including poisoning Steve Biko with thallium and poisoning three Russian advisers to the ANC by contaminating their food with anthrax.

Between 1949 and 1969, the Pentagon carried out 239 tests, spraying Serratia marcesens and Bacillus globigii over populated areas. Despite claiming that the bacteria were harmless the army decided not to continue trials in case they affected the health of servicemen. On 26 July 1963, Bacillus globigii was released in London's underground to see how it would spread.

The 1925 Geneva Protocol and the 1975 Biological Weapons Convention has had little effect on the manufacture of biological weapons. We cannot know to what extent they are manufactured because of the secrecy with which governments operate. Barnaby states: "a more informed public would want to reinforce the revulsion ordinary people fell about the use of biological weapons" and "a public more alive to the threat posed by biological weapons would back up governments trying to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention". But governments will always operate in secret because the cut-throat competitive nature of capitalism permits of no alternative. Attempts to reform capitalism and make war more humane are doomed to failure because the availability of naturally-occurring bacteria makes it impossible to police the activities of governments or terrorist groups. Only socialism can eliminate war by removing the profit system which is the driving force for competition and conflict. Unfortunately, in this interesting and well-researching book such a solution is not even considered.

Carl Pinel

Voice from the Back: Plus ça change . . . (1999)

The Voice From The Back column in the September 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Plus ça change . . . 

". . . we are no less communists, but modern communists, who change with society." Robert Hue in l' Humanité, 18 March. Hue's statement on page 2 of the new l' Humanité does not bode well. To be modern is not of itself a virtue, especially not when one speaks of changing with society. It was once thought that the communists were there to change society. Now they accompany those who simply ride along. If true hitherto in their actions anyway, this is now also their objective." Claud Sicre, La Linha Imaginôt, May.

Whose treasure?

IF YOU CAN TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GOLD AND PAPER, TELL GORDON BROWN BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE. On 6 July the Chancellor of the Exchequer starts selling off your gold. More than two billion pounds worth. He plans to auction the UK's gold reserves and, in return buy lots of paper. Dollars, Yen, and Euros. Do you want him to sell our nation's treasure, which it has taken over three hundred years to accumulate? And do you want this most precious metal replaced by piles of other people's bank notes? If not, now is the time to make your voice heard . . . Advert "sponsored by the World Gold Council".

It's the way I tell 'em 

Coal and other novel sources of heat encouraged people to rise from their beds—and work. Even plentiful food, once so scarce, proved a mixed blessing, for the better fed are capable of more sustained labour. As the opportunities for work accelerated, so we embraced them. Not only have we lost most of the 150 holidays but even Sunday has gone the way of the secular six. We do not have to work every available hour—we choose to. In his Mighty Micro Evans supposed that people could be satisfied through wealth, but people never are. They always want more. Terence Kealey, New Scientist, 10 July.

Wielding the inflation stick 

City analysts said Britain's unusual combination of low earnings growth and falling unemployment could be symptomatic of a new era in which low inflation expectations had disciplined wage bargainers into accepting less generous pay settlements, creating a cycle of falling prices and unemployment . . . David Walton, of US investment bank Goldman Sachs, said the key question was: can wage growth continue to ease in the face of a tightening labour market? "With headline inflation at 1.3 percent, there is a reasonable prospect that it can, which in turn will help to keep inflation below the government's 2.5 percent target. But the labour market will need to be monitored carefully for any signs of renewed upward pressure on pay." Guardian, 15 July.

Deflated 

More than a third of British families cannot afford a week's annual holiday away from home, according to a EU survey on European lifestyles which also reveals that Britain's poverty is "relatively high" at 24 percent. Evening Mail, 25 June.

Power play 

I have just been sent a review copy of Shakespeare on Management by Paul Corrigan, to be published by Kogan Page later this year. And it's as riveting a read as I had hoped. For Richard III, Shakespeare's grisliest villain, is held up as a key example to managers. "This is the most straightforward lesson Shakespeare teaches," writes Mr Corrigan, a former management consultant. "You know that if you have lied and cheated your way to the top, others can lie and cheat their way to the top and there is nothing you can do or say about it." An ideal stocking filler for your more successful friends. John Willcock, Independent, 21 July.

Boomtime (1) 

More than four million children in Britain are living in poverty, according to new research that highlights the task the Prime Minister has set himself with his pledge to end such poverty within a generation. The number of children in households with incomes below half the national average climbed from 1.4 million, or one in ten children, in 1968 to 4.3 million, or one in three in 1995-96, research published by the Institute of Fiscal Studies reports today. Half of today's poor children live in households where nobody works, and the UK has the highest level of joblessness among families with children on an international comparison. The research, by Paul Gregg, a Treasury adviser, Susan Harkness and Stephen Machin, also shows that poor households with children have enjoyed no improvement in their living standards since the late 1970s, falling further and further behind the average.Independent, 20 July.

Boomtime (2) 

In 1995, about 49 million [American] people about 1 in 5 lived in a household whose members had difficulty satisfying basic needs, according to a report released today by the Commerce Department's Census Bureau. The report, Extended Measures of Well-Being: Meeting Basic Needs, 1995, takes a look at households who didn't make mortgage or rent payments, failed to pay utility bills and/or had service shut off, didn't get enough to eat, needed to see a doctor or dentist but didn't or otherwise could not meet essential expenses. Public Information Office [USA], 9 July.