Social philosophy? (2025)

Book Review from the December 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard 

 

A Social History of Analytic Philosophy. By Christoph Schuringa. Verso, 2025.

This book describes the social history of philosophers, not philosophy. It is an interesting, blow by blow account of Western philosophers and their schools, mainly around the turn of the 20th century. But it takes the position of philosophy, that the activity is valid – that there is such a thing as philosophy to be found. This is the most socially historical aspect of the book – that the author, a philosophy professor, must start by accepting uncritically that professing philosophy is a valid thing to do. As Upton Sinclair noted, ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on not understanding it’.

In the Western tradition, a society of élite men, nominally confronting each other as equals beneath constitutional monarchs or in republics, felt capable of eyeballing God from their armchair or bathtub. Western philosophy is the sublime arrogance of thinking that one is one, and one can ‘know’ – that, for example, if all one has is sense perception, then all that exists is sense perception, rather than saying what a less privileged person might say, which is that you just don’t know and should instead just write down what you see as such. Just as the hand mill gives you feudalism and the steam mill industrial capitalism, so the ruling ideas of that epoch are echoes of the experience of elite life under these conditions.

This book contains much material that could be used for such a study of the social history of philosophy: but by taking philosophy seriously, it is not that study. Its relentless disdain of the Bloomsbury group, for example, is just gossip, while the real differences in background of this group, and Cambridge scholars, and Viennese scholars, and women trying to enter the debate, could have been measured against the social conditions of the various states in order to gain real insight. In short, to write this work adequately, one would first have to break with philosophy. Until this is done, all that remains is a discussion of events of the day, and a skeleton description of this philosophical history instead of the real animal.

In the last chapter (the book really needs a conclusion), Schuringa describes one of the most infamous encounters of Marxism with philosophy, that of G.A. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence. In it can be seen everything that is wrong with using analytical philosophy to describe Marx’s work. The background of Cohen and the rest of the September group, and their encounters with Marxism: the group’s intellectual trajectory, under pressure of the universities they were in, their peers, publication, the development of the idea that ‘dialectics is bullshit’, and repudiation of Marxism; all would provide data for a fascinating case study, but receive a mere two pages. But this would be to question the validity of philosophical thought, which in the introduction Schuringa says he refuses to do. As such, it’s not clear with which Marxist tradition he is in line. Certainly not one that Marx could inhabit.

SJW

Blogger's Note:

Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence was reviewed in the August 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Letters: More on Marx (2023)

Letters to the Editors from the August 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

More on Marx

Dear Editors

As a professional philosopher and a socialist I was interested to read the exchange between Brian Morris and SJW in the June Socialist Standard.

We cannot simply call Marx a philosopher, or indeed an economist or an historian. He made huge contributions to all three disciplines but more importantly he challenged their orthodoxies. He also had other things on his mind, such as fomenting a global revolution.

What shines through in all his work is a commitment to argumentation and evidence rather than just wishful thinking or arm waving. That commitment is echoed in the practice of current Marx commentators known as analytical Marxism (sometimes called by its practitioners non-bullshit Marxism). Whatever their failings politically, they too insist on logic and rigour in contrast to the flashy and obscurantist work of some other currently fashionable commentators.

An excellent example of analytical Marxism is G A Cohen’s book Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (which I reviewed in the Socialist Standard in August 1979). In it Cohen provided a philosophical underpinning for Marx’s theory and considered what implications this had for when and how revolutionary change might occur.

I am not a card-carrying member of the non-bullshit Marxism group but I used the same analytical methodology in my book Karl Marx our Contemporary: Social Theory for a post-Leninist World (reviewed by Adam Buick in the Socialist Standard for October 1992). In it I argued that the welcome collapse of the East European regimes gave us a chance to assess Marx’s theories in their own right rather than through the distorting lens of Leninism. What emerges from that analysis is that Marx’s theories are remarkably close to the position of the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

Keith Graham 

Even more on Marx

Dear Editors

I thank SJW for his response my letter. Three reflections.

I was surprised to learn that Marx was a postmodern skeptic who repudiated all ‘isms’. I always thought that he (and his friend Engels) expressed and defended philosophical materialism as a metaphysic.

Contrary to SJW’s assertion, I am unable to read other people’s minds. I simply interpreted Marx as a philosophical (dialectical) materialist through a serious study of his life and works extending over fifty years.

I too am a ‘worker’ and have been so since the age of fifteen when I began work in an iron foundry. But this has no relevance at all to an understanding of Marx’s philosophical outlook. Equating philosophical materialism with ‘capitalist interests’ (whatever they may be) is hardly enlightening.

Brian Morris, 

Lewes

Socialist Party Summer School (2002)

Party News from the June 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Where Farage won (2024)

From the August 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

A leprous body rots not from the head but from the extremities: this applies also to our diseased body politic. Starved of the lifeblood of economic activity, England’s forgotten peripheral towns have become necrotic tissue, an economically irrelevant expulsion of the disabled, the unemployed, the retired, along with a sufficient garrison of minimum-wage staff to run the tills and dole counters and care homes: the underpaid and the undermourned.

Welcome to Clacton

A decision was made, long ago, to arrange matters in this way, first under Thatcher and then under New Labour and subsequent governments. The focus would be the City, and such industries that were most profitable to export such as the arms trade, and the rest of the nation’s economy that was ill-served by this focus would be maintained by subsidy and the dole, paid with largesse from profits. Then once this policy was in place the other shoe dropped and the subsidy was withdrawn. A wildly unequal society emerged where a regional working class possessing only the ability to labour found no one who would buy, and no one who would make up the difference. There is a profitable economic axis from London to Liverpool with industry either side of the line: agricultural labour in the shires; but at the periphery there is despair brought and compounded by the arrival of uneconomic migrants who can no longer afford to live alongside those who still have wages.

These inward migrants of course blame immigrants of a darker hue for their troubles. A classic case of a post-hoc argument, whereby cheap labour arriving in the economic centres coinciding with the displacement of English workers is treated as a cause. And there is a certain reason: arriving workers are simply better skilled and less organised, commanding lower wages and conditions for a given productivity. Instead of insisting on integrating new arrivals, as workers in the core are wont to do, they blame them for their troubles. Which is why they can be found abusing lifeboat crews and hapless seaborne migrants, resisting the immigrant wave across the South Coast like so many latter-day Cnuts.

This is the classic view, but there are significant mitigations. For example, during the Corbyn years the Clacton Labour branch as least trebled in size, hardly a sign of universal right-wing opinion. In local politics, Clacton has one Labour ward, largely of local people who work in the town. Jaywick, which one would think the most viscerally aggrieved, returned two independents, at least one of which is of a left-Labour bent and a former Labour councillor. The trend for much of the town, however, is for Conservative councillors in the business town wards but pro-Brexit independents dominating most of the just-scraping-by residential areas of the town, who are by and large expelled Conservatives. Further out, like some political chromatography experiment, the countryside is Tory, the villages are LibDem, and neighbouring Harwich and Dovercourt, being a working town, is pretty solidly Labour. So there’s nothing in the sea air that necessarily drives the Reform/UKIP vote. Inland, political views normalise. And where there is local economic activity, politics arguably fall almost as Left as one can expect south of the Wash. Brexit and anti-immigrant politics express themselves partially across the dispossessed, but mainly the displaced from London, and mainly east London, who are arguably the plague carriers, self-employed traders such as plumbers but also East End retirees migrating down the A12 corridor, bringing the knuckle-dragging Alf Garnett politics of the I’m-all-right-Jack boomer generation. Meanwhile the spouses of such workers are under pressure to, well, espouse their spouses’ views for the sake of a quiet life.

Electoral evidence

This picture tends to be supported by the electoral evidence. It is hard to recall, fifteen years on, how significant the BNP was in the 2010 general election: the year the Clacton constituency was formed, now separated from the more industrial (and Labour) Harwich. They received 4.6 percent in Clacton, but in the East End of London Nick Griffin achieved a record 14.6 percent of the Barking vote. Dagenham and Rainham was their second most successful at 11.2 percent; Thurrock at 7.9 percent, Upminster at 6.4 percent, Basildon 5.6 percent, Romford at 5.2 percent, all kept their deposits. The BNP imploded after 2010, but the hate they had inhabited and encouraged lingered, and as the years passed this rough beast shuffled along the road towards Clacton, waiting to be reborn.

If we look at the Clacton general election results we find the following. In 2010 the Tories won 53 percent, Labour 25 percent, LibDem 12.9 percent, BNP 4.6 percent, and ‘Tendring First’ (a grouping expelled from the Conservatives) 2.5 percent. In 2014 the Conservative MP, Douglas Carswell, switched to UKIP and forced a by-election which he won with 59.7 percent, with Conservative Giles Watling on 24.6, and Labour with 11.2 percent. The LibDems had collapsed to 1.3 percent. In 2015 Carswell kept the seat for UKIP with 44.4 percent as opposed to 36.7 percent for the Conservative candidate. In 2017 Carswell didn’t stand, Watling secured 61.2 percent for the Conservatives, but Labour got 25.2 percent with a local (now Green) Left candidate, and UKIP trailed at 7.6 percent with a new candidate. In 2019 Watling gained 72.3 percent of the vote, Labour 15.5 percent under a centre-right unknown (the initial Left candidate was smeared as an antisemite and replaced by head office), the LibDems won 5.8 percent, the Greens creeping up on 2.8 percent. Which brings us to the current 2024 result with Farage on 46.2 percent for Reform, Watling for the Conservatives on 27.9 percent, a foisted (but later withdrawn for apparently being too charismatic!) Labour candidate on 16.2 percent, and the LibDems on 4.4 percent and Greens on 4.2 percent. There was an additional 1 percent for two disgruntled UKIPpers standing as independents: one had been the Reform candidate before Farage thrust him aside.

So, wading through the data, the right-wing vote in Clacton (Con, UKIP, Reform, BNP, Independent) was 61 percent in 2010 but has been steady at about 75 percent since. There was a pulse of personal and UKIP support in 2014 and 2015 for Carswell’s candidacy which may have helped drive further into the rump vote for a few extra percent. 2017 was left-Labour’s year under Corbyn, gaining fully 10 percent from the Conservative vote, but sinking back later to an average 15 percent. And in 2024 the right-wing vote was arguably ‘average’ for the seat. Farage didn’t take votes off Labour, LibDem or Green (who increased their vote by 50 percent with left-Labour votes), he simply split the Conservative vote, doing much worse than Carswell did for UKIP a decade ago. Both right and left have radicalised, the right to Reform and the left to the Greens, while a 10 percent vote, rootless since the LibDem’s self-immolation, has swung to Carswell, to Corbyn, and now straddles LibDem and Green.

How did he do it?

As a Clacton resident, I can speak to how the trick was done. Money. They rented prime town space for a campaign office, just round the corner from the Wetherspoons pub. There were the Reform leaflets. Then there were several ‘personal communications’ from supposed private citizens, like a doctor begging us to vote Reform to save the NHS. As well as enormous and copious signage, there were A-frame flatbed lorries with mobile signs, at least one with a massive TV display, and also parked on prominent bridges, across not just the constituency but the surrounding council area. And of course the celebrity factor of Farage’s name. And, as Channel 4 discovered, racists from London come down to spread their filth door to door.

In conclusion, there hasn’t been a shift to the right. There has been a shift rightwards within the right (and, within the left, leftwards), while 10 percent of voters will vote for anything that looks fresh. While Thatcher defeated the National Front by stealing their policies, so the far right has metastasised within the Conservatives and Farage is holding what now amounts to an internal debate. But whereas many Northern towns can see the same right-wing voters emerge in the same place decades later, London has flung its white, politically dispossessed to the coastal periphery. In the end, Clacton’s political change may depend on probate as a resentful post-war generation, that watched the Empire fall and colonials progress to equals, and then shuffled to the coast to retire, shuffles a little further off.

Clactonian

Nazism – the ultimate evil? (2009)

From the September 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Everything undertaken in the regimes called Nazi, or fascist, finds its parallel in the capitalism of other areas.

Capitalism stinks. It stinks of corpses. The millions starved to death, dead of preventable diseases, killed in war, worked to death: and the myriad mundane vicissitudes of class life, beaten to death in the petty squabbles of humans thrown together against their will, coughing out their final days with coaldust on their lungs or dying of lung cancer from tobacco, promoted to children, killing them in old age, ending with the suicide of those who can no longer stand the ruin that capitalism makes of a modern life.

For those of us who remain amongst the living, capitalism is a constant trial, mocked gleefully in the soap operas that, like fairground mirrors, reflect the ugly truth of our existence, misshapen and distorted. Rather than simple poverty, capitalism runs the full gamut of a life with a void at its centre: poverty of the underweight, poverty of the overweight, poverty of the deluded in their temples, poverty of the disillusioned who bear the absurdity of life lived not even for another, but for a number, a bank account, in more or less terror for their sanity.

I say all this to put my next statement into context. Nazism is not a special, nasty kind of capitalism. Everything undertaken in the regimes called Nazi, or fascist, finds its parallel in the capitalism of other areas, whether the ‘free world’ or the ‘communist’. As Captain Willard said in Apocalypse Now, of Vietnam, “charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets in the Indy 500”. It’s capitalism with a black shirt on.

In case there’s still resistance to this notion, consider the rivers of blood that European powers – amongst which we should really number the United States – waded through in the Americas, treading a bloody trail from sea to shining sea, exploiting and murdering all those in their path. Or the British Empire, whether addicting millions to opium or starving them to death through either discipline or incompetence. The supposedly communist, in both Russia and China, starving millions of their own people in famines both intentional and accidental. Millions have been worked to death in slave conditions within capitalism, from the plantations of the Americas, through the Gulags of Stalin, to the Nazi work camps. Today, of course, the whole world is a work camp, with the barbed wire replaced by immigration control and the richer parts of the West and other parts as gated communities.

So when I say that Nazism is no different to capitalism generally, I am not exonerating Nazism. I am damning capitalism. I am damning the Stalinists who still claim ‘at least we defeated fascism’ as their sole claim to fame – while Stalin killed more than Hitler ever did. The so-called liberal democracies claim that they could never go to war, and their forces are only for defence: yet they have slaughtered their way across the globe on the flimsiest of pretexts, such as the sinking of the USS Maine leading to the Spanish-American War in the late 19th century – a purely imperialist grab against a weakened Spain, fulfilling the Monroe Doctrine just as closely as the Nazis with their Lebensraum. Other incidents, such as the Gulf of Tonkin, are now known to have been ruses; there is no need to enter into vast conspiracy theories to say that a disproportional response is no different to a war of aggression. At least ironically, one could credit mad dictators with honesty; the drive to profit inherent in all capitalist regimes, in them is closer to the surface and less buried in doubletalk.

In fact, one can measure the bankruptcy of a political position fairly accurately by the need to resort to ‘we’re better than the Nazis’ as an excuse. It means that their wages are 5 percent better, they kill 7 percent less civilians, their press is 13 percent less prone to lies and censorship; but they still force their citizens to work, they still murder for profit, they still lie to keep ‘their’ workers in line.

Racism, for example, is not some special product of a diseased ideology. It is a basic part of state building in the early stages, reused at those times when international trade is low and protectionism, coupled with aggressive or military action, becomes a state priority. There is not a magic race ogre that leads people, Pied Piper fashion, down the road to bigotry: in class society it is a well-travelled highway.

In short, capitalism is a thing that should fill us with disgust and revulsion. To pick and choose isolated moments of its history and claim that they are the true evil is to attempt to rescue the whole, like Bolsheviks bickering over whether the charnel house that was Russia in the 1930s would have been better or worse with Trotsky or Stalin at the helm: or, really, like any US presidential election, for the rest of the world. Kennedy or Nixon? Carter or Reagan? Every one of these men has been prepared to turn the world into a radioactive cinder, yet people still debate their relative merits.

We have had a century and more of capitalists trying to bolster their pathetic reputations by showing how much better their labour camp is than that run by those next door. Whether it’s Nazis, Bolsheviks, Maoists, or Prussians, Russians and the Inscrutable East, every single one of these societies has been built on the energies, the lost hopes, and the bones of workers, both at home and abroad. To single out any one of these as the one root of evil is to try to whitewash capitalism itself, to deny that there is evil at the very root of our whole world.

This is why socialists oppose all capitalism, and refuse to take sides. We recognise that some circumstances are better than others, but none are worth a drop of workers’ blood, especially not when all of our energies should be turned towards rooting out capitalism as a system. We do not set up fascism against capitalism – we set up capitalism against socialism. Join us in the real human crusade.

SJW

Party News: Fircroft Summer School (2007)

Party News from the August 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

This weekend some 40-plus members, sympathisers and Standard-subscribers from as far a field as Italy, Turkey and USA gathered for a weekend of discussion and debate at the annual summer school organised by Birmingham Branch.

Under the theme “Thinkers of the 20th Century” a range of ideas – from disciplines as diverse as anthropology, information technology, literature and philosophy – were reviewed from a socialist perspective and much heated debate followed.

Its not surprising that a recurring issue throughout such a themed weekend is that of “freedom”. Much abused in everyday currency, “freedom” often translates as little more than lower taxes and fewer regulations, issues of little or no concern to world socialists. In contrast, socialists are intensely interested in freedom, whether its the freedom we have to surpass the gene as a constraint on how we live, the freedom to work co-operatively in software development/use software without restrictions, or the more abstract freedom of the individual under the state.

The dystopian visions of Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) and George Orwell (1984) then, formed a large part of the discussions around the first two talks from Richard Headicar and Mike Foster respectively. What sort of state do we live in now? Which dismal projection has survived the best ? Probably a bit of both is the answer: Orwell’s boot stamping on the face is still prevalent in many parts of the world as the market system emerges to an ungrateful population of new wage-earners. “Late” capitalist states on the other hand have clearly evolved more complex and subtle forms of oppression, including of course the diversions of Big Brother (the TV “reality” show) and the dubious freedom of consumer choice.

To what extent can you separate the thinker from the thoughts ? While Orwell got his hands dirty down mines, in hotel kitchens and most famously on the frontline in Spain, Aldous Huxley in common with most of the other thinkers risked little more than a paper cut in the drawing rooms of Bloomsbury. Does this influence how we read each author ?

As Marx famously noted, “the philosophers have only interpreted the world the point is to change it”. Someone who has done very little interpretation of the world, but by contrast has undeniably changed it is Richard Stallman. A software engineer turned intellectual property activist, Stallman developed GNU software, CopyLeft and the free software movement. This has inverted contract law to ensure that CopyLeft software (such as Linux operating system) gets the fullest expression of its use value (i.e. it is free to copy and use), but has effectively no exchange value as users have to agree to make available and not restrict access to any amendments made to it. Tristan Miller discussed how this little oasis of “socialistic” production has grown unstoppably within the body of capitalism and effectively mirrors – albeit within the software and digital music communities – all the features of “from each according to ability, to each according to need”.

The subject of freedom of the individual phenotype (e.g. human) as opposed to the dubious constraints of biological determinism arose during Adam Buick’s introduction to the cultural anthropologist Ashley Montagu, who is best known for his contributions during the middle part of last century to the nature v nurture debate. It is likely that his writings will stand the test of time better than the more recent fashions of biological determinism – sociobiology and evolutionary psychology – as typified by the “popular” science writers Richard Dawkins, E O Wilson and Steven Pinker. If human nature is slowly becoming less of an ideological “barrier to socialism “than it once was, it will be due to the painstaking work of real scientists such as Montagu.

Simon Wigley got the short straw in having to present the ideas of the Frankfurt School of philosophy shortly after a large Saturday lunch. He stuck to the brief given to him admirably however, particularly given that he had little enthusiasm for these ideas, as he made clear. Whilst some in the audience wanted to shoot the piano player, others were grateful that Simon had done the hard work of reading this stuff and translating it from the English for our benefit.

Personally speaking I gained most from this talk – even if it was only to gain confidence that the Frankfurt emperors were indeed just as stark naked as I had always suspected, and that rather than being extensions to marxist philosophy, the ideas of Adorno, Habermas et al (along with the post-modern ideas they set the scene for) are negations of class-based analysis, of the enlightenment, and even of the scientific method that drove it.

The material conditions of capitalism really haven’t changed that much in the last century – and our philosophies really don’t look like they need to change much either. Anyone who thinks that world socialists are intellectuals, academics or armchair philosophers would have been pleasantly surprised at the disdain with which these ideas – far removed from anything actually to do with working class experience – were discussed. Habermas could have dug coal during the Spanish Civil War for all I know, but – judged on their own merit – his ideas still should not be taken seriously.

In summary, there is of course a perpetual tension between theory and practice that no political organisation, whether liberal, marxist or anarchist, gets right all the time. However, assisted by a plentiful supply (according to need of course) of the local Black Country beer, and the opportunity to catch up with old comrades and new sympathisers, most attendees I spoke with left the weekend feeling stimulated, reinvigorated and better-prepared for the more practical need to spread the socialist case. Surely, the ideal balance between ideas and action.

Brian Gardner

Blogger's Note:

The Socialism or Your Money blog also carries this report from July 2007, where there are some interesting comments arising out of Brian's report of the Summer School.

Prehistoric capitalism? (2004)

Book Review from the July 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is the practice of exchange one which occurs in all societies, or is it rather something which emerges in particular historical circumstances? One writer who has recently discussed such questions is Steven Mithen. Mithen has written previously (in The Prehistory of the Mind, 1996) on the genetic development of a brain and mind capable of our modern complex set of activities. His latest book (After The Ice: A Global Human History 20,000-5,000BC, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003) deals with the formation of a productive culture within the effectively fixed constraints of our previous biological evolution.

The contents of After the Ice are an excellent, extremely readable account of early human life as reconstructed from known artefacts and other archaeological evidence. One vital component, added as an aid to presentation but essential to a work of this nature, it would seem, is the introduction of an observer, John Lubbock, through whose eyes we explore this prehistoric world. This observer, who bears the same name as an actual 19th century scientist but is not him, combines characteristics of Victorian and modern scientist, and thus when we read what he sees we are alerted to the fact that these are interpretations based on scarce data, and filtered not just through the eye but also the mind of the observer.

This becomes especially important when Mithen comes to discussing prehistoric economics. He takes care to attribute at least the wilder claims to the appropriate sources, these sources being those for whom Lubbock is a warning – those attempting to apply modern economics to scraps of ancient data. For example, we are told that a prehistoric inland tribe buried sea shells with their dead; therefore, given the mind of a modern or Victorian economist, they must have traded food for these shells; the shells must have been a symbol of status and power; and by burying these shells with their dead the high status clans could preserve the link between their ownership of shells and status, wealth and power.

Let us consider instead that ancient humans knew nothing of modern capitalist economics, and that, until we have evidence to the contrary, the human mind does not have a specific module devoted to capitalistic thinking. Instead, we will assume that ideas are the product of development, including ideas about human relationships. We then find that what seems the simplest of ideas, trading shells for an equal value of food, is actually a curious modern concept.

Firstly, the relationship between food and other products must be established: they must be exchanged, and to be valued they must be exchangeable for one product in common, a reproducible product of labour. Historically this is often cattle; for example, our words “fee” and ”pecuniary” are based on words for cattle in the Germanic languages and Latin respectively. Cattle can, however, only be subdivided when they are eaten; therefore in the course of millennia of trading the precious metals come to the fore as products of labour which can easily be used as a means of exchange and a measure of exchange value. Once such a universal representative of value has been developed, and only then, may tokens may be substituted for it, whether paper, copper and nickel, as today, or shells and beads. However, it was only in the 20th century that token money developed to the point of ending the gold standard and allowing the tokens a semblance of freedom in exchange (and only a semblance). How are our primitive forebears meant to have achieved this trick, except in the mind of a 20th century archaeologist with an understanding of such an advanced trading system so ingrained that they see it as natural to humans from the first generation?

Rather than such an understanding being genetically programmed into the hyman mind and brain, it is the product of thousands of years of social evolution, which had not finished even as the first modern archaeologists began to conjure such systems for their ancient forebears.

These criticisms aside – and they are criticisms which we would be forced to level against all academic endeavour which assumes modern conditions to be universal conditions – this is an excellent book which can be recommended to all socialists as an accessible source of information on ancient human societies.

We would, with our different interpretation, however, certainly come to more positive conclusions than Mithen. He writes, “Our politicians might devise both the will and the means to curb pollution, to distribute resources fairly throughout the world, to provide new homes for displaced populations, and to preserve the natural world. They might do all these things. But they probably won’t.” This is consistent with thinking that human social evolution is fundamentally constrained within the inherited mental structure of our organism. Socialists, on the other hand, see people as the product of history, just as earlier we have explained that one part of our lives, exchange between humans, is a product of history rather than a fact of nature to be merely endured. And so we would point to our ability to change, to transcend the limitations of our organism, to manufacture our social conditions rather than to be the product of original conditions; a potential yet to be fully realised, and which will be fully realised by transcending the conditions of our history that have led us so far from the ape to capitalist society. In other words, the answer is not to find solace in our fixed animal behaviours but in our mutability, and our ability to overcome these behaviours and conditions.

SJW

Turkey’s ambivalent elections (2023)

From the June 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Turkey’s modern political history is one of genocides, state-sponsored political assassinations, demonstrators machine-gunned by unknown actors or tear-gassed by police and army, and the Left arrested, executed, imprisoned en masse, or forced to flee: all under the ever-present threat of army intervention, with its military intelligence heavily exposed to the CIA.

And elections, such as this one.

Turkish political dynamics express themselves through a multiplicity of parties which then form coalitions to fight elections, which are essentially bipolar. The names of the parties shift as they fracture or are suppressed by the state: compared to European politics there is a bewildering turnover. Since 1982 Turkish courts have suppressed 19 political parties, violating the ECHR’s Convention on Human Rights in almost all cases it has reviewed, mainly for expressing Kurdish political interests. The two main reasons given are that the party is in conflict with ‘the indivisible integrity of the State with its territory and nation’, or ‘the principles of the democratic and secular republic’. This is a fair summary of the vague limits of Turkish political activity, though democracy gets shot on the court steps.

Deep state

Then there is the ‘Deep state’, a term which Turkey originated and Trump merely co-opted. This was exposed to the public in the Susurluk scandal, where a Turkish mafia assassin, his model girlfriend, the Istanbul chief of police, and a Turkish MP, were involved in a car crash (only the MP survived). But it was and presumably is a constant feature of Turkish political life: an unaccountable (except perhaps to the CIA) association of military intelligence, the criminal underworld, and enabling fascist political figures, originating as part of Operation Gladio but with its own autonomy. Its relative strength is demonstrated by its ability to slay those investigating them, including most probably a former prime minister, Turgut Özal, and avoid punishment. Its control of the Turkish heroin trade, worth more than the entire Turkish state budget at the time ($50 billion to $48 billion) accounted for much of their power, as well as their American allies in the shadows.

Closely linked with the military, and formed with its aid, are the ultra-right/fascist party, the MHP, and their youth/terror wing, the ‘Grey Wolves’. Opposing them is a strong ‘communist’ and ‘socialist’ tradition, often fragmented, often suppressed, often imprisoned. Their parties form new initials as quickly as the courts suppress the old ones. Not content to merely imprison them, in 2000-2001 the authorities forced them out of dormitory prison blocks, where they practised actually existing prison communism, into small three-person cells. There were mass protests, hunger strikes and deaths.

Always there is the issue of religion, though the matter is more complex than it appears: one is reminded of the fable of the Wind and the Sun. The state was aggressively secular, and aggressively against minorities, most of whose identity was in part religious. Politically speaking, expression of religious identity was and is thus in part a matter of cultural rather than religious fervour. Also, secularism is associated with wealth, the middle class, and the western cities of Turkey. As the poor agricultural workers of the Turkish heartland migrated to the cities, religion became a defining, comforting feature of their mutual character as they lived in the spaces left to them, in gecekondus (shacks built overnight) or other poor housing.

Then there are the Kurds, Alevi and Sunni. A genocide in the 1930s killed or displaced many Alevis from their home in Dersim, which was renamed, on maps at least, to Tunceli: the very name, ‘Bronze Fist’, of the genocide operation. And there is the ongoing war against Sunni Kurds in the South East. These remain politically relevant. There are many other nationalities in Turkey, but they were brutalised long ago.

Failed coup

Recent history, since the election of Erdoğan’s AKP (Justice and Progress Party) in 2002, has seen several changes within this continuity. Corruption has moved to private industry, where new corporate players have emerged: especially in the construction industry, largely responsible for the Eastern earthquake calamity where their cheap and profitable buildings fell down. The army has been suppressed, with mass show trials in the Ergenekon scandal and others, more so since the failed 2016 coup. From a situation where the Army had the standing power via the National Security Council to suppress civil politics, essentially a permanent coup option, now Erdoğan, their victim in the past and now rid of them, has adopted a similar bullying role as president in lieu of restoring civil society. Fethullah Gülen, master of a ‘parallel state’, a network of civil servants and army officers, once Erdoğan’s ally in the shadow war for the deep state, is now an enemy of the state exiled in the US.

In 2017 Erdoğan strengthened the presidency in a constitutional referendum, granting him powers to appoint and sack ministers and issue executive decrees. And in 2018 the last election was carried out still under the ‘state of emergency’ declared 5 days after the coup attempt. All in the context of war at home and abroad, mainly against Kurdish aspirations but also seeking to gain from Syria’s woes. Turkey has a seat at the table in NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine, and its restive place in NATO is a matter for constant Western scrutiny and cajoling, especially over the Syrian war, and purchasing Russian arms. All in the context of economically bizarre policies that have seen inflation wipe out savings and drive the population to penury. But the most important recent event is the catastrophic earthquakes of February this year, killing 50,000 and leaving 1.5 million homeless. This last was thought to set the context for the election, making Erdoğan’s general misrule an electoral focus in itself that might attract the disaffected/dispossessed right and harden support among the newly homeless in the South East.

Secular opposition

And so to 14 May 2023. There are three main electoral alliances, two standing for the presidency as well, the candidates being Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (AKP) and Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu (CHP). The ruling right-wing ‘People’s Alliance’ of the AKP and the MHP (Nationalist Movement Party), versus the ‘Nation Alliance’ of the CHP (Republican People’s Party) and five other parties, with support from most other parties from centre-right to ultra-left. There are tensions in both camps – the MHP for example is both virulently opposed to any compromise with the Kurds, such as the current peace process, and also its Turkic ultra-nationalism clashes with Erdoğan’s Islamic dreams. As always though the right is far more cohesive than the centre and left, strange bedfellows united only in opposition: the CHP is the original party of the Turkish state, of Ataturk, and still professes the secularism, nationalism and capitalism that most of its bedfellows in some way disagree with.

The second and only other substantial party in their alliance, the İYİ Parti (Good Party) is a splinter from the MHP, professing to be civic nationalists instead of Turkic nationalists, and good followers of Atatürk: their voter base consists largely of the right wing who are disillusioned with the existing right wing, in other words a classic populist party. This ability of a fragment of the MHP to thus realign leftwards gives some idea of the complexity of Turkish politics, even though most voters will have an imperative which eventually dictates their political choice. The third alliance is the Labour and Freedom Alliance, egalitarian progressives, but almost entirely composed of HDP (Democratic Party of the Peoples) candidates expecting the state closure of their party and so standing as Yeşil Sol (Green Left) candidates. (In the aftermath of the failed 2016 coup more than 10,000 HDP members were imprisoned, including their leaders, on vague accusations of being supporters of terrorism). They are backing Kılıçdaroğlu for president rather than splitting the vote. But while wishing to see the back of the AKP and MHP, they have no reason to love or trust the CHP who when in power suppressed them just as savagely, and so are merely advising their supporters to vote for cholera instead of typhoid in the presidential election.

And the result? In parliamentary terms, Erdoğan’s People’s Alliance has a clear majority, of 322 seats against the Nation Alliance’s 212 and the Labour and Freedom Alliance’s 64. Presidentially also, it would seem that Erdoğan has survived. Neither candidate having 50 percent, the presidency goes to a second round: but with 49.51 percent of the vote to Kilicdaroglu’s 44.88 percent in the first round, the presidency seems all but his to keep. (There was a third candidate, Oğan, with 5 percent, a former contender for the MHP leadership).

The last act will be bruising. Erdoğan used his post-election speech to label his opponents as terrorists, setting the tone. And the earthquake survivors? They have to vote from their registered homes. That means that in order to vote they will have to travel back once more to those ruins from wherever they are billeted in Turkey, at no mean expense of money or time. Exhaustion, as always, tends to work for the incumbent. Time and fate is on Erdoğan’s side.

SJW

Letter: Philosophical debate (2023)

Letter to the Editors from the June 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors

There is a world beyond the senses, SJW informs us (May Socialist Standard) (true!) but ‘we are only ever speaking of our experience of it’. This is pure empiricism, the phenomenalism of Kant, the logical positivists (Mach, Carnap) and the phenomenologists (Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida et al) Karl Marx was not a phenomenalist but a dialectical materialist who embraced a ratio-empiricist epistemology (a critical realism or science) that sought to understand the reality of the material world (including capitalism) by going beyond immediate experience of appearances (phenomena). Nobody has ever experienced a dinosaur, or photosynthesis.

Brian Morris, 

Lewes

PS. In my Anthropology and Dialectical Naturalism (Black Rose 2022) I defend philosophical materialism as a metaphysic against its current detractors, especially the postmodernists and phenomenalists like Latour.

SJW writes: 

Marx was a skeptic by confession – his motto was ‘Doubt everything’. He was ‘no Marxist’, but criticised the entire edifice of philosophy that defends the brutal experience of private property with bewildering flights of fancy. The ‘Marxists’ that followed bewailed the fact that Marx did not leave them a philosophy. Engels and Kautsky provided their thoughts as substitute, and the entire edifice of dialectical and other materialisms is based on their works and later the likes of Lukacs and Bukharin. It is my argument that dialectical materialism and other ‘isms’ sometimes mangle the position that Marx took. I don’t claim to know Marx’s mind, as Brian Morris does, or to install him in the pantheon of capitalist thinkers: only to think clearly, as a worker in capitalism, and come to similar conclusions to Marx in the present day. We should expect to do our own thinking, as workers, simple yet profoundly different from capitalist teachings, being more daring than complex.

What do you think? (2023)

From the May 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

As you wake in the morning, and go to sleep at night, and whatever dreams may come – so you are. The sum total of your experience. Likewise, we as a species are the sum total of our experience. There is a world beyond the senses, but we are only ever speaking of our experience of it.

We organise that experience in various ways, corresponding to (1) brain structure (2) the geometry of sharing ideas between ourselves, as well as (3) integrating it with past experiences that we already have.

There is no reason to make things more complicated than that. While we look at our life in this way and that way, from different aspects, it is all manipulating this whole. You can look at your world with the eyes of a child, of an old man or woman, or suppress your self-consciousness as the Eastern philosophers try to do and see yourself as an uncarved block, but it’s all the same mind. We can create categories to better structure and further our experience, but they are just that – our categories, things that we made rather than things that we found, ways to organise our experience, and things that we may often have to re-evaluate and even overthrow. ‘Reality’ is not something that we find, but something that we manufacture.

So while there are socialist theories – you can make as many theories as you like, all scientifically testing the data available – there isn’t a philosophy, at least not in the conventional sense. There is only pulling apart and better reforming our experience, in cogitation and conversation, no more magically than one might knead and pull apart dough while making bread.

It would be folly of course, as we said, to think that there was no world beyond the senses. But it is simply not what we are talking about. Everything we think to say about the world, we say about ourselves. We are not gods, looking down upon our own creation. Instead, we come after the fact, back-seat drivers in an organism we will never truly know. We are dragged through the world as if through a thorn bush at midnight, and all we know of it is by examining our scratches and scars. Similarly, we interact with the world according to our own plan, like children on their backs making snow angels in the snow.

Animals evolve: they mutate, and then these mutations are tested against the world beyond the genome, with some prospering and some dying. In a similar way we simply value what we value, with modifications, and act accordingly. These values are then tested for fitness – do we prosper or suffer? – and modified, without ever being true except in their own terms, from the earliest human and probably far further back, up to today. It’s like playing that old game Mastermind, where you guess what pattern of colours are behind the screen, except here when you lift the screen at the end of the game there is nothing to see.

Dialectical thinking

You may by now be firmly grabbing the arms of your chair, testing for your thoughts to be real. You may even, as Samuel Johnson did, kick a stone to show how real your experience is. But these themselves are just more experiences, if in a certain category of experiences that we use to judge the whole. Not just touch: we have many. ‘Seeing is believing’. I feel it in my gut’. ‘It’s beautiful’. ‘It’s mathematically pure’. ‘It feels logical’. ‘I experience the Divine’. All of these are so many ways of assuring ourselves that this concept rather than that is the right one, is somehow true. But they are no more or less substantial than the rest of our experience, except in that this is how we organise our experiences. Certainty is key to action: but wisdom lies always in doubt.

This is all that is meant by dialectical thinking. Instead of the commonplace model, of a world of objects viewed by an abstract Self with dreams and desires, for us all the parts of our experience are of the same kind. So for example, a factory is a brick building, a place where things are made, where profit is made, where misery and boredom is experienced, and all are just looking at the same matter from different aspects. You cannot separate the things that a factory makes from the experience of being in it.

There is a world beyond the senses, but we are never talking about it. Rather when we talk about iron, or a factory, or railways, we have the sense of them being heavy, immovable and, in capitalism, not ours, but we should always remember that it is our experience that we are talking about, and that experience of mass is commensurate with the experience of boredom, of misery, of lost love, of a daytime life from schoolroom to factory to office spent trapped inside out of the sunlight. In capitalism we treat commodities as substantial, and the horror of their production as ephemeral. This commonsensical attitude is the capitalist attitude, the attitude of objectification, that makes us credit what seems heavy and dismiss what seems light. It is the alienation that makes us dismiss our feelings in production, our whole, real lives, and only pursue them in the time granted us to wallow in sentimentality in our soap operas, our fictional lives, before bed.

The socialist revolution lies in the healing of this wound.

Alienation

It is our current, capitalist – or rather, private property – society, that demands that we think in this more complex manner. As the means of life are denied us, we are not only deprived, we are alienated from those aspects of our lives. Any organic relationship between our society, our labour, and the things of life and of enjoyment, is now ruptured – part of our world is made violently inaccessible to us, by a group of people alien to us. As that loss becomes timeworn, and children are born to the alienated world, that situation ceases to be a wrong and becomes a social fact – alienation becomes objectification. And the organic world of both social relations and the means of life, that had been violated, becomes divided into things without persons and persons without things. The Self is established and reinforced, as an isolated person devoid of means and of relations, as the afterimage of a world of commodities.

Because this is the most fiendish aspect of capitalism. What is objectified from us is not a thing, distant in space. It is a portion of our own self. Our minds, objectified, are sliced into a myriad pieces, all with owner’s marks and price tags on them, all but the bleeding remnant of the Self, which is defined by its dismemberment much as a torso is defined by amputation, and then hyper-sentimentalised by the very lack of its real object. We live as starveling lodgers in our own skulls. Capitalism’s daily violations leave constant fresh scars on the psyche, while the world we inherited from our parents is endured as a dull wound. And cruelty on cruelty, we are offered a way back, on an offering of servitude and pain, to reunite with our lost world, but not as a living thing, only a possession, the commodity – much as some eunuchs would keep their testicles, mournfully, in a separate box.

Companionship is replaced by the television and the internet. Security is replaced by rent paid – this month. And feelings turn in on themselves, finding outlets wherever they may. In the end, the old die alone. And whereas we started by producing existing values, such as bread and clothes, by valuing them in part according to the misery involved in their production, now that misery is much of what we produce, and what the rich consume. Our feudal lords at least had taste, and took the best of what we all desired: but the value of a capitalist’s goods lies mainly in the lost lives of those who produced it, with its practical value as a distant echo.

So while the Self is the starting point for capitalist philosophy, it is not a real start, it is the end point of the capitalist process, of the immiseration process of history to date. It is the internalisation of the class struggle, at the point that it has already been lost, accepting this butchering of the human soul as a precondition for thought itself. Rejecting this start point, demanding the end of a condition where one’s own experience is infinitely fragmented and one must go to war with all others in order to regain those objects, even those relations, with force or with money – this is the start point for any revolutionary position. And this is why we are dialectical, because we merely wish to think like human beings and not these one-sided and broken creatures. As Marx put it, the revolutionary cry is ‘I am nothing and should be everything!’.

The revolutionary emotion is shame.

SJW

The cloying embrace of the New Age (2004)

From the March 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard 

"The criticism of religion ends with the doctrine that man is the highest being for man, that is, with the categorical imperative to overthrow all circumstances in which man is humiliated, enslaved, abandoned and despised”. (Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right)

In the last thirty or so years there has sprung up a set of ideas, loosely related in content but closely tied by form, referred to collectively as the ‘New Age’ Aquarianism, Wicca, crystal healing, aromatherapy, holistic remedies, along with a host of offshoots from more conventional religions whether Christian or otherwise. These institutions themselves are internal to a general ‘change of consciousness’, in the main anti-technological and pro-‘spiritual’, or ‘Green’.

We as Socialists often appear alone in standing against this seeming tide of goodwill, good vibrations, and wholesomeness, as if slaughtermen at a refuge for foundling woodland animals. People know, and usually respect, our position on organised religion; that religion is debilitating to the mind of the worker and thus to the progress which we wish to make as workers in advancing our interests. But the New Age? What could be bad about ‘healing’? Who could protest against a Green utopia? Or, indeed, the benefits of goddess worship in empowering women? Surely this New Age is at worst harmless fun and at best a route to a new, gentler society?

Our answer is that the New Age religion is merely the old age religion in a new, consistently modern form. For example, it follows all the rules of modern science, often becoming a cult of scientism itself, demanding (usually)? no virgin births or flat earths, and steps between the cracks of this modern science where it fails to tread, in the subjective part of human experience; the New Age’s powers are all developed on the side of ‘spiritual energy’, ‘psychic transformation’, etc. If the old religion was the opium of the people, then this is the heroin; no longer extracted by chance from nature but refined, even artificially manufactured, and all the stronger for the process. The chants and prayers of the old religion have become commodified into tarot cards, crystals, massage and healing workshops, incense burners, and scented candles.

How did this come to pass? How could a modern working class, far more capable at mental labour than our forebears, sink so low as to fall in love with our own mental chains instead of merely bearing them in guilt and shame? The answer is to be found in considering what religious alienation is.

Religious alienation

Religion is not a set of monotheistic doctrines, whether Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, Buddhism, etc., but an ideal world where the problems of society are transcended in thought. The underlying cause, the system of society, capitalist social relations, which alienates us as humans from our material powers, remains intact, in fact, unchecked; it reproduces the problem. The New Age is not different from religion as anciently conceived; it is the perfection of it.

The old religions are dying in the West not because of a lack of proselytisation, the loss of God’s favour, or any other cause which religions might claim, but because actual experience of the modern world has ripped them asunder, and as dogmas they must break instead of bowing to this change. The Pope cannot end the Catholic Church’s stance on abortion, for example, even though every Catholic with a rudimentary scientific education knows that there is no divine spark at conception, unseeable until nine months later; the entire process of human reproduction is now well known and it would be expected in any doctor’s surgery that in practice no-one would hold such a belief.

Protestantism instead is the basis of the New Age religion, even though virtually unrecognisable once it has cast off its particular historical cloak of inherited catholic ideas, adapting new materials to its needs. What remains is that ‘each man and woman is their own priest’. As Marx put it, “Luther freed the body from its chains in order to put the heart in chains”; rather than obeying a priest, we choose the form of our own mental domination, just as in work we no longer slave for one master but can choose from hundreds to slave for. The pagan backdrop of Catholicism is filled by that of Hinduism, Buddhism, even Islam, removed from their own social contexts of native exploitation; all are grist to this mill, generating a thousand and one cults, sects, and aquarian societies.

What all these have in common is the form they take; the flight from reality into a magical world where the evils of the material world are transcended in thought. They are not revolutionary, as some might suppose, from their content of peace, love and contentment; they are escape, the only escape of the life prisoner staring from their cell window, and the form is the acceptance of their existence only as an ideal life, never as a fully material one. They are the product of personal inspiration, mental focussing, or good vibrations, not the actual powers of human beings living and breathing in and out all of the powers of nature.

Socialism/communism

So what is the socialist answer? Quite simply that we wish to abolish alienation at its root; rather than fleeing from its effects we wish to tackle its causes. These causes are, briefly put, the forces behind the capitalist mode of production.

To expand a little, the capitalist mode of production involves a division of the productive process into the production of two kinds of values; use values, which the capitalist later sells to make more capital, and exchange value, which is the labour cost, including reproducing our labour-power, of producing them. Note that there is no need to invoke Dickensian poverty or the lash of the Pharaohs in order to explain the reproduction of the working class; we are not necessarily materially impoverished by the process, that would be like failing to put oil in a car engine or charge the radiator with antifreeze. Instead, like the car, we are objects of use, means rather than ends, and as the productive process accelerates, as capitalism has come to predominate, mere cogs in a machine, and our creative powers of producing values appear irrevocably transferred to the objects we have made. As Marx put it, “in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse”. Contrary to popular apprehension, therefore, we as socialists are primarily concerned not with becoming better fed workers, but ending our existence as the ciphers of our own life process. Our immiseration, which we wish to overcome, is precisely that which the New Ager recognises at one remove, as the world of other people who have not heard of healing, spiritual crystal workshops, or whatever, which has transformed their life: we as socialists (or, the same thing, communists) do not have the luxury of such self-delusion, whether through an inability to be so hypnotised, an allergic reaction to religion, or sheer bloody-mindedness, and must therefore instead overthrow the conditions which give rise to the pain from which New Agers flee.

We are not fighting blindly. We have a theory of society, of our history, which explains how we have come to this pass and how we can escape it – a theory explained further throughout this journal and in books, pamphlets, in fact every time you stop a socialist and ask them the time of day. We have the vast mass of society potentially as allies, and stand at the end of society’s historical alienation process, with no further worlds to be won but our own. Moreover, the process itself is liberatory; again, as Marx put it, “Communism is the actual movement which abolishes the state of affairs” and anyone who has been to a big rally or demonstration will know a small part of the power that is to be had through participation in one’s own liberation, be the goal seemingly ever so far off.

These are the things which we offer instead of the New Age, and why we consider it to be such an enemy and attack it with such determination. It is a trap for our kind, all the more pernicious because of our potential to transcend its petty gifts were all its prisoners released and their energies devoted to socialism. Its supposed similarity to socialism at isolated points are invariably arrived at from opposite directions; ‘world peace’ from a sense of passivity as to world affairs rather than a wish to participate in world affairs; ‘communalism’ from an inability to conceive of social action above the level of the commune, a retreat rather than an advance; ‘abolish money’ in order to live the passive existence of a lotus eater rather than to produce and consume with abandon.

We would thus urge anyone who would see themselves as a ‘New Ager’ – and is probably now just angry enough from reading the above to have started thinking – to free themself from an imaginary world; there is a real world to be transformed, and that transformation itself contains within it the realisation of our social powers.

SJW

An Open Letter to ‘Reclaim the Streets’ (2000)

From the January 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Friends,

There has been a radical shift, in radical politics, from single issue campaigns within capitalism to attacks on capitalism as a system. As one focus for this shift “Reclaim the Streets” is to be commended. However, whilst J18 attacked capitalism as a whole, using the City as a focus, there was a worrying trend during N30 to make Seattle and the WTO—”fair trade not free trade”—the focus, thus leaving capitalism as a whole unscathed.

There are no nice capitalists. Capitalists in the Third World are just as ruthless and just as exploitative as their First World brethren. The debate over globalisation is a ruling class debate over how they divide the spoils from their collective exploitation of us. A peasant gets peanuts for growing peanuts because that is the going rate for peanuts in the world economy. If the price of peanuts is raised, the local exploiter will gain at the expense of the First World importer, and the peasant still gets peanuts. Anyone still unsure of the rapacity of Third World rulers should take a quick look at Burma/Myanmar, Indonesia, etc. As revolutionaries we should fight the collective war between us and the ruling class, not play the hostage game at their bargaining table.

We have nothing to say to our rulers on how to run capitalism, we should not be drawn into fighting their battles, and we should certainly not be drawn into rolling history back instead of forwards, as a global revolution must be made globally.

Thankfully the Left-wing is dying. Good riddance! It was always the campaign for “real” i.e. manufacturing capitalism against finance and landed interests, and its demise is only a sign of capitalism’s maturity, not its triumph. We must return to the working class agenda, subverted by the Left, of calling for the abolition of capitalism rather than its “fair” administration. In a world where we are the slaves of many masters rather than one, and are told that the choice of masters is our freedom, the only action of any meaning to us is the abolition of the wages system, and thus of work as we understand it. A world which we own, and create, has no place in it for ruining men and women’s minds and bodies with employment, enslavement, or any other constraint on their mutual enjoyment of their creations. But be warned—the Left is trying to subvert your movement! The SWP, in particular, has been seen trying to recruit young and eager minds with their state capitalist poison, even at regular RTS co-ordination meetings when you and others are not represented.

The use of violence is counterproductive, as many in RTS realise. The state is strongest in its use of force, and weakest in its legitimisation of that force. Virtually all of the state’s hired thugs and hired killers are working class, from working class homes, and only function within mass organisations of repression because the state explains their actions to them as being in society’s interests. Ten years ago, Eastern Europe learned how impotent these forces are against a working class which has destroyed state legitimacy by peaceful action. As a class we run society from top to bottom, and revolutionary action lies in effectively communicating that message to each other: once legitimacy falls, the state falls. This is precisely why these forces provoke violence, with snatch squads, baton charges and horses, so that we will respond with violence and justify their repression. You don’t need to keep it fluffy—sullen resentment will do fine.

As members of the World Socialist Movement, we are glad to see the emergence of organisations attacking capitalism as a system rather than merely its particular evils. In Britain, we in the Socialist Party have stood since 1904 for the abolition of capitalism, and the establishment of socialism, i.e. the abolition of money, private property and the state. For most of that time the working class agenda has been dominated by those who said that socialism was about running capitalism better, be it Russia, China, Cuba, Labour, Sweden, etc. Now that this presence is lifting we find that many thousands have arrived at the same conclusions as ourselves, but have organised along the lines of the anarchist tradition. Whilst its diversity has allowed revolutionary ideas to flourish (as well as several reactionary ones!) it has the opposite problem to the Left. They are monolithic, but anarchism is fragmented.

We can only hope that RTS develops beyond its teething troubles, by shedding particular campaigns for the improvement of capitalism, into a general and radical attack on capitalism itself. You already have that programme in ideal, via the Situationists who seem to inspire much of your propaganda. We ourselves have spent nearly a century struggling for an authentic socialist movement, and understand the difficulties. We have a history, theory and organisation designed precisely for that revolutionary project towards which RTS is hopefully heading. We would urge all those in RTS who back the project for abolishing capitalism to meet and discuss with our organisation. We both have things to learn.

Contact us. Our branches are listed on a link from our home page, or email our Head Office, again from our home page. We look forward to hearing from you.

Yours for world socialism,

Simon Wigley

Changing the System (2005)

From the March 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard 

If you have no freedom to change your life you may as well be in prison. Workers in capitalism get more porridge than empowerment.

In the comedy show Porridge the drama takes place in Slade prison. There are prisoners and warders; the warders have varying personalities, from the ‘hard but fair’ MacKay, to the liberal Barraclough, and a selection of lesser unsavoury screws. The prisoners also have their various characteristics, all of them in their varying ways trying to make the best of their lot.

Here, then, we have the prison system. As a prisoner you would, by and large, prefer to have Barraclough to MacKay, and MacKay to the more sadistic screws, especially when trying to obtain some kind of favour, or minor change to prison routine such as a film showing every week. Barraclough might do it, MacKay might not. But on the subject of imprisonment itself, all of the screws are united in upholding the prison system, the idea of prison, and the wider social idea of just imprisonment. There is no negotiation that can take place for the prisoners to release themselves, convert the prison to an open one, or otherwise interfere with the prison’s core function of imprisonment.

Imprisonment is a social fact, harder than the walls and bars that are erected on its foundation (though of course mutually reinforced by them). Without a system of imprisonment, there can be no prisons. In the same way capitalism’s own prison has its own rules, its areas of compromise, and its areas that are non-negotiable. The leaders of capitalism can change how capitalism works, within limits, but cannot change the fact of capitalism.

Capitalism as a social fact is written into every one of our lives, every moment of the day, and we reinforce it every time we work for a wage and pay for our own goods with those wages. Even if a leader were to want to change matters they would be trapped by our own resistance to change. If there is to be change it must come from us.

It is sometimes thought that socialists have a conspiracy theory regarding the state and leaders – that they are all plotting to do us in, regardless of political colour. In fact, all we have to say is this: that they are bound to observe the system which they find themselves in. Some, of course, are corrupt bastards. Others can cut various deals with each other, and specifically can join in the fight between capitalists over whether finance or manufacturing capital is to do better from the current administration, or decide whether to maximise profit in the short, medium or longer term, but all must maintain the production of profits from us, the subject class, and defend those profits against all comers, whether it be us (by using the police) or capitalists of other states (with the armed forces).

So, appeals to leaders are not the answer, on a matter so integral to capitalism as the defence of profits. You may as well ask for more liberal laws on shoplifting. There is, however, the possibility yet to be considered of a popular ‘political’ movement without an attack on the economics of capitalism. Again, this falls as flat on its face. Let’s return to our prison example. The prisoners decide to bypass the screws and hold a meeting in the prison yard about how bad prisons are. If the meeting is about entertainment, for example, the screws may be intimidated into providing something, even unasked for, such as a prison library; but discussion of liberty will bring out the truncheons. Prison riots don’t provoke early release: they provoke savage repression, beatings and subsequent lockdown. Imprisonment is non-negotiable, because it is fundamental to the prison itself, and you would have to attack the social structure of prisons and imprisonment to make any change. In the same way, any movement to change a fundamental feature of capitalism, as with disarmament, must address the basis of the system itself rather than engaging in wishful thinking.

Thinking about it, the very word ‘Defence’ should be sufficient clue as to how much input we are meant to have with the issue. We are not even allowed to call it what it is. Not ‘attack’, not ‘bands of hired killers’, not ‘death factory’, not ‘organised murder’, but defence, something which we are to be forced to accept as an integral part of our lives. In the same way, we are expected to be glad of a job rather than resentful of our exploitation, and happy to be protected by the police rather than disturbed by the presence of blue-clad armed thugs defending their masters’ ill-gotten profits from us at the bank and at the supermarket.

So, while there is leeway in capitalism for change on minor issues, there is little or none for its basics of profitmaking and defence of those profits – the extraction of wealth from us and the defence of this wealth against all comers. Bodies of armed thugs and killers are basic to private property itself, even in previous epochs, not just its latest manifestation in capitalism. Any appeal to the goodwill of our masters, or the leniency of their foremen, is futile.

In short, the making of profits out of us, the subject class, and defending these against us, their rightful owners, and fighting over these profits between themselves – all these things are non-negotiable, social facts as solid as iron bars and prison walls, and cannot be changed by appeal to leaders or by political action that does not address the fundamental problem from which warfare springs – class society, where social wealth is a private thing, spoils to be fought over rather than shared. Whilst wealth is private property, to be fought over, it will be fought over, and preparations for these conflicts will continue apace.

What, then, as they say, is to be done? As mentioned, the basis of the system in which we live and are currently trapped is the making of profits from us, the working class. Our time at work not spent reproducing our own existence – building modest houses, growing food, producing light and power to keep our machines and computers humming into the night – is a social surplus, appropriated by the capitalists through their waving deeds of ownership, stocks and shares, pieces of paper and the like. Everything that we make, over and above that required to keep us coming back through the factory gates or the office door on a Monday morning for another week of drudgery, is appropriated and turned to the following purposes: reproducing the factories and offices in which we work; reproducing the class structure of police, prisons, cash tills and banks, to keep us in our places; defending their ill-gotten gains against other capitalists at home and abroad, with government and warfare; and only then can what remains be spent on gin-palaces, cocaine and, soon, day trips to outer space.

The way to stop these expenditures should be obvious: take back the surplus! We produced it, after all, if anyone is feeling legalistic. Put the wealth in our hands! Whilst there is a structural reason for capitalists to prepare for and go to war against each other, we have no reason to fight each other – maybe individually over some resentment, but to put a million men a side into trenches drenched in poison gas or drop fire on children from the sky takes capitalism. Every fraction of social wealth that is returned to our hands is wealth not put to slaughter or to extravagant capitalist consumption.

We in the Socialist Party stand for such a position. We address the problem of disarmament, along with other unpleasant effects of capitalism, by looking to their root, in a class-divided society, which divisions create the institutional misery of war and arms production, as well as overwork, alienation and suicide, and the starvation of millions around the globe who in any sane society would be given the resources to realise their potential, not as an act of charity but from a simple sense of solidarity and a self-interest in every member of society being able to fully contribute.

All you will get with an appeal to the rich and supposedly powerful, to end arms production and spend money on the poor, is empty promises, disdain, and probably a sense of relief that once more the slaves are not yet powerful enough to rebel against their masters and must still beg for crumbs for themselves and their fellows.

If you think that the appeal to these leaders is rational, the answer will come back, perhaps sotto voce: “This is rational!” War is the logic of the capitalist state, just as policing is the logic of the class struggle at home, and the starvation and physical deprivation of more than a billion is likewise part of the logic of capitalism where if you do not produce a profit you cannot enter the economy and thus must starve.

No, we must work for ourselves, and we must address the problem at its root. The problem lies with capitalism, not with one of its features, and can only be resolved by grasping this root and tearing it from the ground.

SJW

Marching orders (2011)

From the January 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Are the student demonstrators really demanding higher education for everyone?

A great deal of ink has been spilt in the last couple of months over student protest – marches, occupations, invading Tory HQ, police cavalry charges, and police detaining thousands of people under armed guard for hours in the freezing cold and using exposure to the elements as a deterrent to protest (sorry, kettling). Notably, a sharp distinction was drawn between peaceful, well scrubbed demonstrators, and the ugly head of the anarchist unwashed. Notably also, the children of privilege were represented on both sides, as interns in Tory HQ: the fresh and inexperienced Oxbridge faces of both the Tory/Liberal front bench and those latter-day Gracchi, the Milibands of New-new Labour; and the liberal elite having a day on the wild side, most notably Charlie Gilmour swinging from a lamppost.

All this should be ironic – coverage of a protest dedicated in principle to the universal provision of an important resource being reduced to an elite discourse in the media by which most people in the country will learn about it and try to make sense of it. However, university education is an elite issue: less than 20 percent of the UK population had a degree in the 2001 census.

In our society education is the means whereby status and earning potential are transferred from parents to children: extending this privilege increases the pool of technically trained workers such as scientists and engineers, and increases social stability by giving at least the illusion of participation to these same technical workers. The simple fact is that education structures expectations in society as well as providing the tools for participation – if you want an unequal but stable society you follow Mao’s dictum and “keep the peasants poor and blank”. University education buys in a section of the working class and  coopts them to the status quo: the same state that subsidises their training then gives many of them employment directly in the civil service or other state projects, stable and defined pensions, in short an internment from the class struggle; others find, if they are fortunate, professional roles which may use their training directly but just as often are intereswted in their three year training in writing reports.

It is this section of the working class, trained and co-opted, that is often referred to as the “middle class”. Economically the working class is defined by its universal dispossession from the means of production and thus its need to work for an employer to survive: but sociologically there are fracture points, and the classically defined “workers” – blue overall, spanner in hand – continue to dwindle in numbers in the industrial West. We are paid for the value of our labour, or rather the cost of reproducing it: those workers who have received this training investment receive better reimbursement in the private sector, and protected benefits in the public sector. This and other institutionalised divisions in our class are the bane of socialist organisation: as in the ancient world, and the antebellum South to a lesser extent, there are two kinds of slaves, house and field, and the twain tend to loathe each other more than they do their masters. And yet all seem to admire models and footballers who rise from our ranks on the strength of natural advantage, charging extra rent for their services much as a landlord charging quadruple for fertile land than for swamp. For most of us, the only route out of wage slavery, if not the lottery, is the lottery of birth.

Heaping irony on irony, then, the Tories have the better of this argument. New Labour draws support from and now consciously seeks to represent this educated, “middle”, class: they have come to calculate that political power lies in these “chattering” – i.e. politically engaged – classes, not the great unwashed. They are defending not a universal franchise but its extension to their power base, which means that a moderate income bar is quite acceptable – the state should fund their constituents, who can and are prepared to leap this bar, to compete to attend Oxbridge or other prestigious institutions without further financial impediment. The Tories have no such scruples: in lieu of political necessity, money and influence should buy future earning potential and status, in strict measure, and that means withdrawing state subsidy. If wealth buys education then wealth buys citizenship.

When we say that we live in a democracy we tend to assume that, in addition to there being a formal vote mechanism regulating the state, additional benefits automatically accrue such as a guaranteed minimal standard of living. In short, we think of it as social democracy, where the state supposedly works for us. In particular, the state reproduces democracy, by fashioning its subjects into citizens and making sufficient provision that they can function as citizens – even to the extent of taking a mass stroll to Trafalgar Square on a Sunday afternoon without being killed by the state’s armed force or the hired gangs of the wealthy, and having the time off and the health to participate in meaningful debate. But this does not have to be the case: the state is, as they say, the executive committee of the ruling class, and dispensation of favours or participation to other orders is a matter of occasional largesse or, more commonly, buying off unrest. It is no accident that universal suffrage was granted across Europe in 1918, as the survivors of mass butchery returned to the states that had sent them.

An exact parallel can be found in the “forty shilling freeholders” of medieval England. Whilst in previous centuries the decisive force in war was the knights themselves, political power mailed and armed, now the English longbowman was the backbone of military victory, and had to be given a place at the foot of the table: it cost forty shillings to support such a combatant, so forty shillings became the property qualification. They were needed: they had power: they were involved. The post-WW2 Labour government, that great reforming force, was no happy liberal accident but again a similar calculation of expanding access to the state to a large returning military until they were both militarily and socially demobilised.

Changes in these provisions are very painful and difficult: once the ruling class has invited us as house guests it is hard for them to get us to leave and graciously resume our lower places. But hard times bring hard calculations – the fiction that education and other social provision is universal will soon be over. The “heroes” that the welfare provisions were made for are all but dead, and the concessions that brought them and a ruined economy back into a stable state have died with them. Education, in that it provides the tools of citizenship, will be based on a property qualification: in that it provides trained professionals for industry, the industry will pay for them just as they would pay for any other piece of equipment, either with compensatory higher wages or with bursaries.

Education under capitalism is not a right: nor is it a privilege. It is a weapon, and a careful state only arms its friends and its carefully disciplined house slaves. It is a costly tool to be placed in the hands of a grateful journeyman. It is an essential precondition of political action, which the unions have long recognised in sponsoring the education of their own members and officials. For revolutionaries of our, properly democratic creed – that revolution is the work of the working class itself which we make as equals, house and field slaves together – it is more fundamental than the democratic process itself: that process is only open to the powerful, and in a complex society without understanding there can be no power.

Does this mean that all of our class must have a university education? Of course not, any more than all of us must be able to program computers, make cars, fly planes, nurse the ill and care for the young. Intellectual labour is just that, labour. But collectively, our class needs to be able to perform all of these roles and in principle our class members have to have universal access to all of these roles, not segregated in feudal producer castes on the basis of parentage as we have in effect been in the past and still are, though to a lesser extent than previous centuries. Regardless of their birth or history, all of our class members should have universal access to the same education. This allows us to make a democratic revolution on the basis of class solidarity, rather than being in the laughable situation once articulated by the SWP of forcing technical workers to labour, if necessary, “with guns to their heads”. It is our boast that we already run society from top to bottom: that boast becomes hollow if our class is lobotomised, with higher state posts and the associated training being reserved to a minority of the elite and their coopted trusties.

In short, we should have no illusions about what we are owed. This is the language of that section of our class who expect to be co-opted and are merely discussing the terms of their future co-option. The state rules for the rulers: for the rest of us access to it is based on either necessity or force. Demonstrations are displays of necessity, in that the state is reminded that it needs the support of those who are demonstrating, and are thus by and large well-regarded by the co-opted section of our class. The way to demand a universal provision would be to identify a provision that the state has to make and then universalise it: this means class solidarity. Talk of “middle classes” is corrosive, and so-called revolutionaries that use this language – the same found on these marches – are working against us all. As a subject class we do not have rights or privileges, but we do have demands, and we must stand together if we are to make them. Education is not a moral issue: it is a class issue.

SJW