Naked and unashamed. (1911)

From the August 1911 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is an old adage running somewhat to the effect that when men of doubtful honesty have a difference of opinion, then is the time for honest men to come by their own. The Labour Party, through its prominent members, who appear at the moment to be very much at variance, enables us, by means of its internal squabbles, to give further proof of our contention as to its utterly incompetent and fraudulent methods ; enables us to show, once again, how much—or rather, how little—reliance can be placed in its vaunted independence of the Liberal party and policy.

As is well known, for years past, in and out of Parliament, the members of the Labour Party have vehemently protested their independence, have repudiated with indignation and scorn any suggestion of a coalition between them and the Liberals. Now, however, it would seem that the object for which they have been striving and intriguing is near enough to accomplishment to render any further disguise on their part unnecessary. They stand condemned, not from the words of the S.P.G.B., but out of the mouth of one of their most prominent leaders, who, for reasons of his own, wishes still to pose as an incorruptible.

Mr. Philip Snowden, writing in the “Labour Leader” of June 14, referring to the vote of the Labour Party the previous Thursday on the Financial Resolution of the Insurance Bill, says :

“Six members of the Labour Party voted against that resolution ; the majority supported the Government.

“The Labour Party had amendments down to raise the contribution of the State from 2d. to 3d. They had others which proposed to increase the benefits. The Financial Resolution submitted by the Government was designed, as Mr. Lloyd George frankly said, to rule out every amendment which would increase the State’s contribution.

“In answer to a question the Chairman said that if the Resolution was passed it would not be permissible to move the Labour Party’s amendments. Yet in the face of this the official spokesman of the Labour Party, after joining with the Unionist speaker in condemning the resolution, and after condemning the State’s ‘inadequate contribution,’ announced, not that the Labour Party would vote against it, or abstain, but that they would support the resolution which killed every one of their amendments worth trying to get !

“If the I.L.P. will stand this it will stand anything. If it submits to this it is time to go into voluntary liquidation as a preliminary to affiliating with the National Liberal Federation. The official Labour Party is now indistinguishable from the official Liberals. The Labour Whip was put on to send the Labour Members into the lobby to destroy their own amendment.”

Further, in “The Christian Commonwealth,” July 12, he writes with reference to this same amendments :

“There was never a clearer case of men deliberately putting an halter round their necks. … The Labour Party was instructed by the Conference which met three weeks ago to proceed with that amendment.

“But when the test of its independence came, when it was called upon to choose between obeying the instructions of its own conference and supporting the Liberal Government on an occasion when the Tories were not voting, the Labour Members, with about half-a dozen dissentients, showed that they were more anxious to follow the Liberal Whip than to obey the authority from which they profess to derive their mandate. This action on the part of the official Labour Party finally completes their identity with official Liberalism.”

This righteous indignation on the part of Mr. Snowden is rather amusing when one considers that it emanates from the man who, but a short time ago, was eulogising the honesty of Mr. Asquith, defending the action of the Liberals in sending the military to shoot down the workers at Belfast and Featherstone, and who was only returned to Parliament with the aid of Lord Morley and by Liberal votes.

If further evidence is needed of the betrayal of their followers by these leaders of “Labour,” it can be found in a recital of their doings during the recent Coronation festivities. As was pointed out at the recent I.L.P. conference, a Labour Party representative was allowed to serve on the Committee which sat in connection with the Coronation celebration. At the Coronation ceremony itself Messrs. Mullin and Davis attended on behalf of the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress ; Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, “in faultless morning dress, disquietingly like a labour leader” (“Christian Commonwealth”), also graced the ceremony with his presence.

The sycophantic attitude of the Labour Party to Royalty is still further illustrated by the appearance of the Chairman of the Labour Party at the luncheon party given by the Secretary of State for War in honour of William II. of Germany. Mr. MacDonald went to the luncheon with the consent of the Labour Party, thus becoming its official representative. It might well be asked what a member of the Independent Labour Party, which a few months previously had been indulging in what was called “a great anti war campaign,” and who himself had taken a prominent part in the campaign, was doing in such a galley. He had as fellow-guests, such lovers and advocates of peace as the war-lord of Germany himself, Count Matternich, Gen. von Plessen, Admiral von Mülller, Lord Kitchener, and numerous others. Did the Kaiser and the Labour leader discuss, during their long conversation, the brutal repressive measures that have been taken in Germany, even in recent years ? Did Mr. MacDonald mention, for example, the ruthless manner in which the police shot down men, women, and children at the end of September last year during the strikes in Berlin ? Possibly, however, these small troubles of the working class slipped his memory—the memories of Labour leaders are conveniently short upon occasions.

Again, at the recent investiture .of the Prince of Wales, it might reasonably have been supposed that the official representatives of Labour would have no part. At the time this investiture was taking place, on the hillsides and in the valleys of South Wales were thousands of locked out and striking miners, fighting what must, unfortunately, be a losing fight with the powers of capitalism. The distress prevalent among these men and those immediately dependent upon them was appalling in its intensity. One would have thought that in common decency the least the Labour representatives could have done would have been to refrain from identifying themselves with the symbols and regalia of the flaunting wealth of capitalism. But no ! In the procession formed to do honour to the boy Edward, among other Welsh M.P.s, walked Mr. Keir Hardie, the Rt. Hon. W. Abraham, Mr. William Brace, Mr. J. Williams, and Mr. T. Richards. So glad were these men to be allowed the opportunity of licking the boots of Royalty, so eager were they to be acclaimed loyal subjects, that less than nothing to them were the starving men and women whom they have the audacity to claim to represent. The insult contained in this wanton callousness could not very well be greater.

The Labour Party appear to have thrown off all disguise. What does this kow-towing to kings and princes, this servile waiting upon the Liberal party, portend ? Perhaps the following paragraph, which appeared in the “Daily Chronicle” of 19 July, may throw some further light on the subject.

“The Ministry of Labour Bill, the text of which was issued yesterday, has for its object ‘to establish a Ministry of Labour for the better organisation of the labour market, for the prevention of unemployment, to regulate and in certain cases prohibit child labour, and to establish a general minimum wage for adult workers.’

“The salary of the Minister is placed at £5,000 a year, ‘and to the secretary, assistant secretary, officials and servants such salaries as the Treasury may from time to time determine.’

“The Bill, which is presented by Mr. Lansbury, is supported by Mr. Keir Hardie, Mr. Barnes, Mr. Jowett and Mr. Snowden.”

The vultures are gathering together about the carcase and have already started fighting among themselves for the choicest tit-bits. They are welcome to the spoil. The present writer, however, for one, finds that even the thought of its putridity is almost too nauseating for his mental digestion. Would that the whole working class could say the same.

F. J. Webb

Blue Blood (1950)

From the August 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

People often boast of having “ blue blood ” in their veins, meaning of course that they are related more or less closely to some member of the nobility. This is supposed to lend a charm to their character, not possessed by more common folk.

A peep into “The Complete Peerage” a work, still in the process of construction, it will not be finished until 1954, will at least make people hesitate before claiming relationship with the “gentry.” Baron Hungerford was found guilty of so many unnatural crimes that he was beheaded in 1540.

For four years he imprisoned his starved wife in a castle, and suborned the chaplain to poison her.

A Mad Earl of Queensbury fell upon a cookboy who was burning the spit in the kitchen of Holyrood in 1707 and spitted and roasted him in front of the fire.

Lady Glamis, ancestor of the present Queen, was burned at the stake as a sorceress who tried to poison the King of Scotland in 1537.

Maybe the sacked dustman now reinstated, “who was dismissed because he was supposed to have mimicked the. Queen,” will be surprised to learn this.

Some of these gentry also possessed a 'sense of “ humour/’ As in the case of the cruel Lady Marischal who died from laughing at a killing in 1598.

Lady Janet Gray smothered her first husband at the end of the fifteenth century but found two more.

These are some of the facts drawn from this work, there are many more but these will suffice to illustrate the kind of people many of them were.

It may be said in their defence that the period was a vicious one, but it does not lend any weight to their claims of being the lords of creation. These facts about the nobility are taken from an article in the Sunday Express on May 28th entitled “ The Peerage without Whitewash,” by Sidney Rodin.

P. S. M.

Does class still count? (1972)

From the October 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the years following the second world war it was widely said that “the old class barriers'’ were being broken down. England, characterised as the most class-ridden country in the world, had at last given up its forelock-touching, its obsession with accents, its one-law-for-the-rich-and-one-for-the-poor, thank you kindly ma’am, and the rest. Marghanita Laski’s novel The Village, published in 1951, showed the breakdown of tradition-based assumptions of social superiority in a small community: gentility and “background” gagging on the discovery of their small weight in the modern world. The class assumptions were those of pre-war Punch and West-End stage jokes, in which low incomes meant male illiteracy and female idiocy, and a servile manner was de rigueur from both.

In those terms, it was commonplace also that relatively few people admitted to being working-class. The usual term was “lower middle class”. What strata lay above this mass has always been indistinct—whether there existed a central middle class to which this was the aspiring lower fringe and another the cake-icing, as it were, or whether the middle class was a two-layer affair of uppers and lowers only. But whatever the boundaries, the array of qualifications was formidable: the school one went to, one’s dress and speech, family connections, tastes and, of course, income. And these things, we were told, were fast losing their significance in the nineteen-fifties. Social progress and humane legislation had equalised us all, making Jack as good as his master and privilege an archaism.

Superior & Inferior

Talking of “class” like that does not mean class at all. What is meant is social groupings imbued with the idea of places in a hierarchy. Viewed from the top, they are simply a question of degrees of extravagance. Veblin in his Theory of the Leisure Class dwelt on fox-hunting as the acme of “conspicuous wasteful consumption”, an incredibly expensive and incompetent—but ostentatious—way of doing what a chicken-farmer achieves better with a shotgun: and the ability to afford it makes its own social demarcation. The same applies to the public schooling and the domestic splendour, down to the details of personal appearance and manner. Nobody who has read Daphne Du Maurier’s snob-romance Rebecca is likely to forget the description of the cad: the kind of man who did not wear a hat and who would appeal only to “girls who gave one programmes in a cinema”.

From below, the groupings are stages in presumed rising-above the familiar deprivations and humiliations of working-class life. The person who has escaped from run-down housing to a suburb with trees, become a car-owner and seen his children “doing well”, is strongly persuaded to think of it as superiority. Those left behind in seedy surroundings and dismal jobs, condemned to having their noses rubbed in the worst of capitalism’s dirt, are all in a boat he has got out of: and what he now has, he’ll hold. On the other side there are people with more advantages — better houses, bigger cars, ampler displays of status — who look down on him. Called “class distinction”, these are the views from different rungs of the ladder.

Welfare Culture

What was implied, then, in the claim to break down class barriers was the ending of inequalities between social groups. The biggest factor ironing-out the differences was held to be the Welfare State. Not only need no-one be thrown into destitution by sickness or unemployment; medical attention was available to all according to need, and such stigmas as the pauper funeral were abolished. The extension of the school-leaving age and the accessibility of grants for further education were parts of the same process. “Equality of opportunity” was the watchword.

But besides these legislative steamrollers, equality was claimed to be spreading through society from the sheer diffusion of commodities. In money terms the television set in working-class homes was less of a luxury than what it replaced, the family piano; but in cultural terms, the same programmes went into the houses of rich and poor alike. Newspapers, car travel, labour-saving domestic appliances were all seen as having the same equalising tendency. Even holidays abroad, once the exclusive prerogative of the very well-to-do, were now available to working people. “The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate” had vanished as social symbols. Instead, both were believed to be seated in front of television sets, reading the same continental holiday brochures through National Health spectacles.

New Labels

If any of this had been true, a silent social revolution should have taken place in the past twenty years. What has happened? In fact, the crude semi-feudal tokens of privilege whose disappearance was being celebrated have been replaced by a complex of social groupings and distinctions. “Class” is as pervasive as ever.

The redevelopment of towns has, if anything, intensified their stratification. Any large city is, socially, a series of islands on which people live among their acknowledged kinds — white-collars, labouring population, art-and-craft, high prosperity, etc.: the next island may be only up the road, but it is a foreign land whose children may not play with one’s own. The growth of council-house estates and owner-occupation, to say nothing of immigrant districts, has multiplied the islands. Likewise in rural areas the two layers of village life, gentry and farmworkers, have given way to the varied social self-valuations of commuters, directors and retired shopkeepers. It is commonly complained in the country that these new populations from town ‘‘don’t mix”; that is, they bring with them their own social-group palisades.

The idea of amenities as an equalitarian force is part of the old Fabian nonsense. In the early nineteen- twenties H. G. Wells informed Lenin and Trotsky that electric power would achieve more than the class struggle (“What a little bourgeois”, Lenin is supposed to have said afterwards). However, the divisive effects of piped and purchased amenities have grown as fast as they have spread. Every car carries its social label, the make and age connoting the owner’s income and status. The Fabians’ picture of ‘‘gas-and-water socialism” did not include House and Garden showing impossibly opulent kitchens and the Florentine statuary in Sir Wiliam’s loo. As for holidays abroad, "package” has become almost a contemptuous term implying bone-pared schedules of cheap hotels and sweaty droves pressed between famous buildings and souvenir shops. If a modern Robin Hood took that from the rich to give to the poor, he died laughing.

Dole, School, Colour

The Welfare State has, notoriously, gone sour on those who idealised it —not least in its promise to dissolve have-and-have-not differences. In general, what is provided by the State is the barest and most minimal; better has to be paid for, by those who can. The inevitable outcome has been the growth of private insurance schemes catering for the sizeable section who can’t quite afford to be cash patients but may, on an actuarial basis, keep their feet out of the water in which the poorest swim. In the everyday administration of “welfare”, the rise of the Claimants’ Unions owes directly to social-group attitudes to the Social Security system. So far from seeing themselves as part of the will of the community, officials have taken their task as a defensive action against undeserving layabouts and would-be tricksters. Indeed, the Welfare State has produced a saloon-bar mythology nearly as profuse as that of race. Its favourite character, heard-of everywhere, is the man who chooses unemployment because it pays him better: no-one seems to ask what appalling wage he gets in work, then.

The hope of educational equality has gone the same way. The replacement of selective separate schools by comprehensive ones was hailed as a great levelling movement: few people can have noticed that comprehensive education was called “true selection” in the 1958 Labour Party document on the subject. Apart from the grading principle on which comprehensive education is based, the schools themselves have quickly acquired their own status to be sought-after or not: the case of Holland Park as the “superior” comp is now being reproduced again and again. Nor does the admission of working-class boys and girls to universities go far to diminish the differences. Last month E. R. Braithwaite, the black West Indian writer, described on television his days at an English university where all students were equal before the subject at study — and his discovery later that this did not make them equal before the world.

Race has been one other field round which social groups have formed themselves. It is curious how the issue is always made that of colour when it is patently class. Anyone who doubts that should try fitting everything now said about coloured immigrants over what used to be said about the so-called lumpenproletariat — the poorest, most deprived sections of the working class — any time up to 1939. The fit is exact. Of inferior intelligence; lazy (of course); dirty; and disposed to violent crime. Moreover, they have huge families (living like animals), have rowdy parties every night, eat smelly food, and would ruin a decent neighbourhood if they were allowed in it. Enoch Powell might be interested to know that his story of excrement pushed through the letter-box was first heard by the writer from an industrial housing estate, all white, over twenty years ago.

Class and Capitalism

What is class, then, that will not be eradicated? The numerous groupings and divisions which persist and re-form continually in our society are, as has been said, not classes though they call themselves so. Classes are categories deriving from the basic organisation of society. If one looks at capitalism for its organic structure, there are two classes only: those who live by owning the means of production and distribution, and those who don’t. The position of the former is obvious enough. For the latter, the position would be also easy to see if it were not obscured — for many — by semantics and humbug. It is one of dependence on being employed and paid a wage. Regardless of accent, colour, education and high or low income, nine-tenths of the population everywhere are in this situation.

The supposed other classes are not sub-sections within that division. They are reflections of it, demonstrations of the way capitalism sets man against man. The fact that people are always hoping to get rid of these “class barriers”, and short-lived successes in doing so are claimed, shows their fluidity while the single great division remains. They are fluid because no-one is secure who depends on a wage. Last year publicity was given to the troubles of out-of-work executives. One, in a television programme, spoke angrily of the treatment at the Social Security office: if the clerk had not been a woman, he said, he would have smashed her face in. On the scrap-heap, the pretences of class are exchanged for the realities.

What is Classless Society?

One thing which is clear about “class” is that nobody likes it. Many people take it to be inevitable, but live in hopes of some lucky break which will take them to another rung of the ladder where, it is thought, things would be different. Everyone talks of “getting out of the rat race”.

When the phrase “classless society” is used, it usually means the absence of unfairness and inequality among social groups. What must be seen is that these problems derive from and exist because of capitalism’s division into owners and non-owners. The classless society is one in which the means of living have become common property. Given that, the basis for any assumption of social superiority from race, sex or possessions disappears. The first step to making such a society, however, is for all those dependent on wages to recognise this as the only true factor of their class position now. "Class-consciousness” is commonly a term for snobbery. Correctly, it means understanding of the fact that everyone who has to work is — working-class.

Robert Barltrop

'Their honours' (1975)

From the August 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the many unpleasant aspects of a society divided into owners and non-owners (i.e. class society) is the consequent existence of governors and governed and rulers and ruled. The majority of people accept private property and therefore agree to the systems of governments, rulers, bosses etc., and this means having some people elevated to the position of “judges”.

The concept of a group of people sitting in judgment on their fellows is anathema to the Socialist who wants a free society. Socialism as a voluntary society with no private wealth to protect will not need to disguise old men with wigs, gowns and legal mystique in order to frighten elements of the population into submission to the interests of a small minority.

One of the strangest points about the idea of judges is that instead of their jobs being regarded as odious, they are looked upon with respect not only by the capitalist class (who need them to preserve their monopoly of wealth and to sort out disputes between various competing sections of their class) but by workers too. Everyone under capitalism is “judged” from birth to death by their “price tag” i.e. the size of their wage or salary, or their ownership of wealth. Partly because judges have such a high price-tag, their lengthy boring) speeches in and out of courts of law are listened to with awe and reverence.

The tragedy is that they have nothing to say of any interest to the working class. They can’t even help administer capitalism very well. Witness the controversy the House of Lords (the highest court in the land) recently caused over the law of rape. However, "I thought she consented” is the capitalist’s apology for exploiting everybody. When a judge freed a double rapist on the grounds that he had strong sexual urges, he gave voice to the “human nature” justification in which capitalism is only expressing the strong acquisitive urges which we’ve all (likewise) got.

When tin gods come out of their natural environment (law courts) and comment on all sorts of things, the fun really starts. For example, what child would suggest a solution to the traffic problem on these lines:

Lord Salmon Lord of appeal in ordinary has hit on a way to fight the menace of juggernaut lorries in his home town of Sandwich, Kent without breaking the law. He says citizens should sail boats constantly on the river Stour, which would force authorities to keep the town’s swing bridge open and effectively jam all road traffic. (Sunday Times, 20th October 1974)

What a way to analyze a social problem springing from profit-motive society.

The real function of judges is to help in the dirty job of keeping the workers in subjection. This is made clear when they attempt to analyze society. For example, Lord Devlin was reported in The Times (26th June 1975) giving an address whose theme was a rejection of criticism “that the English judiciary was torpid, inactive and unwilling to develop the law to fit changing times”. But the same article reported Devlin as saying:

Those who took up the law . . . tended to be of the same type who did not seriously question the status quo and who wanted to serve the law and not be its master. Lawyers were not naturally interested in social reform.

Those people who “serve the law” know full well whom the law serves—the owners of wealth. It is the instrument by which their monopoly is preserved. Devlin is merely saying the law and those who practise it are going to do their best to maintain that system. And he makes it perfectly clear that he wants the boundary between the haves and have nots to remain just where it is:

The first mark of a free and orderly society was that the boundaries between the rulers and the ruled should be guarded and that trespasses from one side to the other should be independently and impartially determined.

Devlin argues that it is not the judge’s job to change the rules of capitalism. Another judge, Lord Lawton recently argued the opposite case. Describing what the judges learnt from seeing poor wretches brought before them he said:

This experience enabled judges to give a lead to public opinion in many matters affecting the lives of ordinary men and women . . . (Law Society Gazette, 18th June 1975)

One wonders how any one who has ever been in the frightening, artificial atmosphere of a law court can seriously suggest as Lawton does:

Judges learned from the cases they tried how people lived and the attitudes they held in every part of England and Wales.

The judge’s message soon became clear. Judges are not there to change society but to preserve it. In some thing of an understatement he says of judges:

They tend to doubt the wisdom of tearing institutions up by their roots and starting afresh.

Clearly proud of a system of society that has produced nothing but wars, poverty, unemployment, shortages, pollution, mass starvation etc. on a scale no previous society could match, he comes out with the oldest of fallacies:

Crime would continue to increase until it was recognised that its prime cause was wickedness . . .

Nothing like a well-fed judge to blame the workers for all the problems around and call them wicked. We can only suggest to this one that he analyze the class basis of society. This would show him that people are the products of the society in which they live and a society based on the common interest of all could not produce the sort of “wickedness” (e.g. thefts of private property) that he talks about.

In Shakespeare’s Much Ado, Conrade when confronted with an officer of the law, says “Away. You are an ass, you are an ass”. We would add, that people should retort “Away!” with the outdated social ideas the spokesmen of the capitalist class foist on them. And next time that puny objection to Socialism is brought up, “Who will do the dirty work in a Socialist society?” you might remember that a good deal of it such as the work of police forces, armies and judges, won’t need doing at all.

Ronnie Warrington

Swearing (2023)

From the June 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

7-ish am on 6 May. I awoke to a cascade of royal drivel gushing from my radio. At that moment one of the most beneficial technological innovations was the ‘OFF’ button (preceded by an appropriate invective).

Before my censorship of the impartial BBC there was a report that Canterbury had recanted. The Archbishop was no longer going to invite the goggling masses to do verbal homage to their newly anointed king by swearing allegiance before God and the TV.

The previous day, in an interview, a friend, confidant and biographer insisted the monarch had no wish for anyone to pay such formalised respects except, perhaps, as a joke. Not much of a stand-up routine in my opinion.

However, the nation need not be struck dumb when the moment in the coronation ceremony came as there would be an invitation by the Anglican head prelate for viewers to join in with the declaration, ‘God save King Charles’. Who then would be dumb?

To voice such a sentiment is at least a tacit acceptance of inferiority, of subjection, of being a subject of the crown. The Lords will still be called upon to pay homage, binding them closer to the monarch than the vassals excluded from direct attendance.

This recognition of divine right to rule does not, of course, confer arbitrary powers upon the King. While he may well still consider himself answerable to a divinity, the engines of the state through which crown power is actually exercised are answerable, ultimately to capital.

The notion of inviting the nation to express its loyalty through swearing an oath of allegiance is an indication that a liberal bourgeois democracy is by no means a society of equals. Perhaps it would have been a too blatant expression of inequality which led to it being substantially toned down.

Whether Charles lll was in favour of it or not is beside the point. It is a demonstration of the careful and meticulous management of public perception by which capitalism ultimately maintains its ideological hold.

There may well be further demonstrations by republicans, vexed at having an unelected head of state foisted upon the nation. While there is no pretence of democracy by having a monarch chosen by birth not the ballot box, election does not substantially change the role of a head of state.

A president may be able to serve only a fixed term, but that merely means that the person in office changes regularly, not the office. Nor is there any compelling evidence that suffrage guarantees meritocratic excellence. The example of the USA shows financial clout not ability is the determining factor in selecting an incumbent for the White House.

Nor does America demonstrate any significant social egalitarianism for all its rejection of monarchy and formal aristocracy. Can there be any doubt that the nation is in thrall to the lords of capital even if they don’t grant them such formal titles.

The swearing of allegiance, right hand earnestly pressed to the heart, is certainly a feature of American pomp and circumstance. The form of address may be Mr. President rather than your majesty, but the effect is the same.

The swearing of oaths has an honourable working class pedigree. In the early days of British industrial capitalism workers responded to their harsh conditions through trade union organisation. This was duly criminalised by the Combination Acts of 1799/1800.

Workers continued to organise, but as a response to illegality and a need for secrecy an oath of allegiance to the union and its fellow members was often required, a condition known as being twisted in.

Following the repeal, in the 1820s, of those pernicious acts workers began to further develop their organisations. However, the use of oaths of allegiance did not immediately disappear. Worker solidarity and the seriousness of their unions were on occasion emphasised through formal ceremony.

An initiation into membership could involve an individual being blindfolded and required to swear an oath of loyalty before a skeleton painting, a reminder of mortality and the seriousness of the undertaking.

It was for such a procedure the Tolpuddle Martyrs were convicted under the Unlawful Oaths Act, 1797, originally passed in reaction to naval mutinies at Spithead and Nore. The use of oaths obviously depends on who is swearing them and for what purpose.

The crown and its agents are not so enamoured of oaths taken for the purpose of reinforcing working class solidarity. Such, it seems, trespasses upon the royal prerogative designed to ensure everyone accepts society as it is organised and each person’s relationship with the status quo.

Reflecting on the coronation there was a brief radio interview with a woman who’d been honoured for her charity work and was an invited guest at the Westminster service. Her reaction was along the lines that it was marvellous that someone like her, a commoner (her word), had been able to attend.

Actually being there might well have required her to join in repeating the oath of allegiance which essentially confirms her status. Indeed, all who did verbal homage affirmed the notion that one person is elevated over all others.

For socialists, attitudes such as this represent a serious obstacle to the pursuit of socialism. Those who were not fascinated by the carefully stage-managed spectacle are still influenced by it. Thankful for another bank holiday, as if there should be gratitude for the grace and favour of being granted a day off from work.

Even the ones who consciously opposed the coronation such as members of ‘Republic’ are focusing attention on the monarch or the possibility of an alternative essentially fulfilling the same role. Whereas pledging allegiance to a monarch or president doesn’t address the basic issue.

That is, the achievement of a society free of social hierarchy and based instead on everyone contributing to society according to ability, thereby creating the conditions in which everybody’s self-determined needs can be met.

This will only happen if and when the vast majority get up, actually or metaphorically, off their knees and stride towards their consciously created future – socialism.

Dave Alton

What has the monarchy done for us? (2022)

From the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

How does a technologically and industrially advanced 21st century nation come to have an unelected head of state that is at the centre of extravagant and expensive medieval-inspired rituals such as coronations and jubilees? Many countries have adopted, in various forms, a constitutional monarchy but none go to such lengths to celebrate monarchical decadence as do the English. It is all the more surprising since it was the English bourgeoisie who were historically the first to cut off a king’s head during their quest for power in the 17th century. Far from being a symbol of Englishness the present queen comes from an ancient line of German princes who, in many of their inbred incarnations, actively opposed English imperialism. We can answer some of these questions historically but how are we to explain the admiration of so many of the working class for this symbol of their slavery?

The Tudor dynasty had adopted (rather half-heartedly) the Reformation and developed a centralised state that made the evolution of the modern nation state possible in the following centuries. When the last of them (Elizabeth I) died the Scottish Stuart dynasty took over with an inbuilt autocratic tendency that was to prove ill-suited to deal with the rise of the ‘middle class’ and their rising hegemony within parliament (House of Commons). The resulting revolution convulsed the country with some quarter of a million casualties (making the French revolution look like a bar brawl) and a republic whose leaders executed the king (Charles I) for treason. This regime was soon to degenerate into a military dictatorship that was thoroughly disliked by the people and a deal was done with Charles II for his return on the understanding he would respect parliamentary power. This again soon degenerated into an attempt at counter revolution led by James II, which proved once and for all to the English bourgeoisie that they could not trust the Stuarts and that their only hope for a truly constitutional monarchy was to call on William of Orange who had proven his credentials in this respect within the Dutch Republic. This proved to be successful in giving the illusion of both historical/royal continuity and also liberating capitalist trade from the threat of monopolistic autocracy.

Subsequent ‘Whig’ historians dedicated themselves to creating a history where the English revolution was relegated to a religious civil war followed quickly by a ‘restoration’ that hardly troubled the calm national continuity of the English class system. This myth became very convenient when the international power of the English ruling class was threatened by the French Revolution and the subsequent rise of the European Napoleonic Empire. The political convulsions of continental Europe were contrasted to the stability of the British system and it is indeed true that the first of the French revolutionaries wanted to create a constitutional monarchy on the English model but the duplicity of their king (just as with Charles I) made this impossible giving the militant Jacobins their chance to create a republic. Another difference between the two revolutions was the relatively quick integration of the bourgeois and aristocratic classes in England. The ruling class was now economically entirely capitalistic but the old families of aristocratic origin retained an air of cultural superiority and the nouveau rich could not help but admire this ancient elitism – when it didn’t conflict with profit making. The other element of aristocratic culture that the English bourgeoisie absolutely adored was the warrior tradition and pageantry. No coal magnate, however rich, could compare with the mythology of Henry V and his victory at Agincourt!

To this day the glamour attached to the aristocracy and the royal family in particular, is used to sell the illusion that the English are a united country which all have a common interest to preserve. As with all hierarchical social structures there is a need to condition those without wealth and power to believe that those who possess it are somehow different and special. Along with the myth of the ‘self-made man’ capitalism needs a symbol of nationalism/militarism and what better symbol than those descended from murderers (warriors) to stand on balconies wearing pantomime military uniforms. For socialists the queen stands for: nationalist tribalism, class privilege, massive unearned wealth, Christian superstition and unelected power. They cannot even preserve the image of an ideal bourgeois family that serves as a model for us all given the continual scandals emanating from what must be one of the most dysfunctional families in existence. Such criticisms are commonplace and feel like an exercise in the proverbial ‘shooting ducks in a barrel’ but somehow these people continue to be admired by many within the working class.

Given the history above and the usefulness of the royal family as propaganda we can see how they are placed at the centre of UK capitalism’s greatest shibboleth – ‘patriotism’. No mainstream politician dares question this tribal loyalty in public just as they would not criticise its royal incarnation. Perhaps to the younger people the royals are merely celebrities but for those of an older generation they represent a perverse feeling of community and continuity despite the reality that it is their existence and the class they represent that continually destroys communities by fuelling the relentless class struggle.

Wez.

The Wealthy Socialist. (1921)

From the November 1921 issue of the Socialist Standard

The general attitude of the worker towards those possessing wealth is amusingly paradoxical. It is the heritage of serfdom, together with his present servile existence, that engenders the attitude of respect he will always adopt. Yet let him learn of a member of the bourgeoisie who has taken up a stand on behalf of the workers and displayed a knowledge of working-class conditions, and he will regard him sceptically, as who should say: “He’s got money; how can he know anything of us who haven’t? ” Although that very same worker, and this is where the paradox comes in, refuses to think any other way than with the bourgeoisie. He reads and quotes the propaganda they disseminate in their press. He prefers to vote for a candidate who is of the master class, because he feels that such a candidate, being educated and well endowed with the world’s goods, must be, necessarily, better able to represent him in Parliament. It is still quite common to regard M.P.'s in the same category as "toffs,” and a little high-sounding rhetoric and an Oxford accent is a good deal more than half the battle at election time.

A grand example of the falsity of such a position is brought home to us when we consider the life and work of Frederick Engels. Engels was bourgeois by birth and environment, and died worth a considerable amount of money, yet no man, perhaps not even Marx himself, understood the proletarian psychology better. He was the son of an affluent Manchester merchant who needn’t have bothered a bit about the working-class had he chose. But the very fact that his studies and investigations had discovered to him the workings of the social system, forced him, being honest, to write the monumental works so invaluable to the student of Socialism, in spite of his wealth.

This must not be confused with the Fabian argument that the emancipation of the Working Class can only be accomplished by the ” intelligentsia ” of the middle class. The emancipation of the working class must be the work of that class itself. All that is necessary is that it shall become class-conscious and organise to capture the political machinery at present in the hands of the capitalist class. The slum workers and social reformers of the middle class do not understand the economic forces which dominate Society. If they did, they would not waste time in patching up a system which is rotten right at the roots.

It is not necessary to go down a mine, to understand that miners are exploited, nor is it impossible for. a millionaire to know that his millions come from the blood and sweat of a robbed proletariat. There is. nothing, save, of course, a misunderstanding of the. Socialist philosophy, to prevent any member of Society, of whatever social standing, proclaiming himself a Socialist and joining the Socialist Party to work for the emancipation of Society itself; The working class must take the trouble to think for themselves, not waste time wondering whether a man with unsoiled hands really can know anything about factory hells and slums, analyse their position, form their own conclusions, and act upon them, then the day of capitalism will close upon the horrors and terrors it has given birth to, and the morrow will, dawn brighter and happier for the whole human family.

S.