Make-Believe Revolutionaries: Two Case-Histories of Direct Action (1972)

From the September 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

A commonplace response to the Socialist case, by people who find it unanswerable, is that it is “all right in theory”. The implication is that there is something separate from and superior to theories, called Practice. This is, to start with, a misunderstanding of the nature of theory. Theory does not precede or stand apart from practice: on the contrary, it is the conclusion from practice — from what has happened and what is observed.

The sort of Practice implied, therefore, is action which does not give a hang for the known facts. The practitioners never state it like that, of course; they are Getting Things Done, and Striking a Blow for this or that. In recent years its special manifestation has been Direct Action, the doctrine of people taking things into their own hands and launching themselves against the system. Looking at some well-known instances, it is possible to see Practice in practice. Does direct action work?

Squatting

The squatter movement began in 1968, as a venture by the East London Libertarian Group. “Venture” is an accurate enough term: it was preceded by agitations over housing conditions at Coventry Cross, conditions in an unmarried mothers’ home in Walthamstow, and claimants’ grievances at the local Social Security office. For several weeks the squatter campaign consisted of Sunday afternoon visits to examples of inequality in housing. Invited groups of libertarians met without knowing where they would be taken — mystery tours, as a delighted anarchist described them without qualms over the leadership principle.

The general history of the squatter battles at Ilford and derivative episodes elsewhere, when the occupation of empty property began, is well enough known. Demonstration about homelessness became an infection in the Left; the north-west anarchist federation’s bulletin described it as “the highest form of revolutionary activity possible in Britain today”. But in fact the campaign’s first casualty was the proclaimed revolutionary content, the deadest mortality the anarchist slogan “Do it yourself”. For the avowed purpose was to promote direct action among the working class, and it never happened. The families which squatted in empty houses were taken to, installed and defended in them by the libertarian groups. No one did it himself.

Scalps & Souls

The Ilford episode ended in a treaty with the Council, which undertook — on certain conditions — to make condemned houses available for homeless families. The terms re-invoked the original presumption of the mystery tours: they were made not by the house-seekers or by collective decision of the agitators, but by the East London Libertarians’ leader Ron Bailey. Among the conditions was one that the houses where the siege had raged were to be given up, including a house in which a group of libertarians had made their own commune. On their eviction Freedom had a bitter, passionate article headed “The Soul of a Movement”. It was, they felt, as if the Redskin chief had started trading his own braves’ scalps to the white man.

Freedom Press was enthusiastic for squatting, and for the London hippies who occupied buildings in the Drury Lane-Piccadilly area: the “commune of the streets”. In 1969, after successive evictions, some of the hippies went to Freedom, cited the paper’s persistent encouragement of them and pointed out that the Freedom/Express Printers building in Angel Alley, Whitechapel, had empty rooms galore. The building had been acquired and renovated in the previous two years. The Freedom group felt a moral compulsion — they had supported, vindicated, egged-on; so they let the army of hippy squatters in. In the next two weeks, the building was turned to a shambles. Hell’s Angels stood guard, demanding subscriptions from anarchists who went there. The culminating incident was lead-stripping — from the roof above, from the printing works below. Describing it all in an article, the Freedom group asked unhappily: “What were we to do?” The movement’s soul was certainly a soul in torment.

Uncritical Support

At its height, squatting had a great deal of public sympathy. It had the Left and libertarian groups working together; and it illustrated succinctly all their misdirections and failings. “Direct action” failed, in circumstances most favourable to it. Indeed, the term “squatting” was a misnomer, implying people spontaneously taking possession. As has been said, that never happened: “installation” would have been more accurate. Nor is this mere carping. What has to be seen is that the do-it-yourself revolution was a myth, and the reality was a series of simple charitable acts. And today the energy and good intentions of the squatter movement appear to have made useful auxiliaries for local councils in their housing administration and welfare services.

As for the hippy squatters, it may sound ungracious but is true to say they were not homeless people at all. In general, they had homes but chose to be away from them; perhaps with reasons, but that is a different question. Their being on the streets was due chiefly to the demise of the Drury Lane Arts Laboratory, where anyone and everyone kipped. But the Freedom Press dilemma — “What were we to do?” — originated in uncritical support for any semblance of direct action. Otherwise, it would be hard to account for the presence on Freedom’s doorstep of Hell’s Angels, who are the nearest thing to pre-war Fascist youth in Britain today.

Bombs & Bullets

The most recent demonstration of direct action has been the “Angry Brigade” bombings. There is, no doubt, a division between those who would actually have done this kind of thing and those who would not; but there is no doubt either that it had the sympathy of practically all direct-actionists. A pamphlet published shortly before the Old Bailey trial, by the “Stoke Newington Eight Defence Group”, tries hard to suggest that bombs and firearms are now the method of radical activists at large:

The state is also alleging that bombings and shootings claimed by the First of May Group, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the Wild Bunch and Lotta Continua are also part of this conspiracy. In fact just about every single guerrilla action undertaken by groups from very different political areas within the movement over the past four years has been put down to them. The prosecution is attempting to create falsely the image that the political offensive carried out by the movement in the past four years is the work of a very small isolated gang of madmen.

Grand Delusion

What is a “political offensive” in these terms supposed to achieve? The authors of the pamphlet, which is called A Political Statement, assert that the Angry Brigade’s terrorism was an integral part of a working-class uprising:

Being part of their revolution they are sensitive to the needs and desires of that revolution. On January 12th we had a one day strike, we went on huge marches all over the country, we planned strategies for the future and we bombed Robert Carr.

The implication intended is of a massive number of workers united in all those activities. But one has only to ask who are the “we” of the dramatically italicized sentence, and its meaningless ranting is immediately exposed. On January 12, 1971, some trade unionists demonstrated against the Industrial Relations Bill; Left-wing groups distributed leaflets and had euphoric syndicalist dreams; and, in complete dissociation from all of that, a secret handful planted bombs which caused outrage but little harm.

The absurd delusion of a grand “political offensive” is further emphasized in a photograph of Carr’s front door, under the heading “The Minister’s Palace Destroyed”: which is quite untrue. Indeed, if the object of the “bombing and shooting” has been to kill representatives of the State, its incompetence is almost comical. The pamphlet claims at least 107 bombing episodes: not one person was hurt by them, it seems. If, on the other hand, the aim was not to kill but to alarm, that is even more ludicrous. It is reminiscent of the old yarn about the man who, finding his wife in bed with the milkman, went outside and kicked the milkman’s horse. What sort of “offensive” is that?

Serious Questions

Nevertheless, behind the puerile fantasy lie serious political considerations. At a simple everyday level, those most likely to be killed and injured by bombing are not establishment-figures but working men and women; Northern Ireland, to which the pamphlet refers repeatedly, demonstrates this only too well. For all the cant about “we” and “the movement”, bomb-planting is the negation of class-consciousness and democratic practice. Anarchists and direct-actionists may approve of the faits-accomplis, but that does not alter the fact that at the time they had no knowledge or control of what was being done in their name. Early in 1971 when publicity for the Angry Brigade explosions was at its height, the libertarian gossip and speculation were that the bombs were the work of agents-provocateurs with the object of raising public opinion against the Left. So much for “we”!

The knowledge that opinion — and repressive measures — are thus raised is another reason why terrorist tactics should not be supported. The State and the newspapers do not distinguish between “pretend” revolutionaries and real ones: direct action has done great harm to the growth of the Socialist movement. The “political statement” pamphlet complains of these consequences of the actions it is acclaiming:

This is a long hard struggle . . . It will be even more difficult in face of attacks from the political police which have grown enormously in organisation and number in the past year. The fact that there have been so many raids, the fact that they now habitually seize all political documents that they come across in their raids. The fact that innocent brothers and sisters arc locked up, some of them for many years.

Up to recent times anarchists were wont to respond to the traditional accusation of bomb-throwing by saying they had given it up because they had learned that governments did it better. That was at least a realistic view. The “urban guerrilla” and the saboteur may be problems to the state, but there is no question of their being able to match or weaken its armed power. Engels was able to point this out in military detail to would-be insurrectionists in 1895, in his preface to Marx’s Class Struggles in France. Speaking of the German bourgeoisie’s readiness to let rebels engage in physical battle with them, he said: “We are not so stupid.”

The State

The most important question of all, however, is: who are the enemy? Against whom is the “offensive”? The Angry Brigade’s targets were representatives of the State. The “political statement” of their supporters has not a single reference to capitalism, but insists on the state as adversary:

It began when it became clear that the state can and will smash the movement if it feels it can win. The bombings started.

And when he [Heath] talks of civil war, he is talking of a military/political offensive against all who oppose the corporate state.

The Stoke Newington Eight are . . . militants who have been active in the resistance to the corporate state and in the revolutionary movement.

Six years ago anarchists were wearing badges and carrying banners which said: “The state is your enemy”. And it is wrong, wrong, wrong. The deprivations, conflicts and miseries of the world we live in are caused not just by governments but by capitalism. The State’s rôle is to enforce them with the coercive machinery against which direct-actionists stub their toes and knock their heads. What the working class has to do is organize to abolish capitalism — by gaining control of the state machine with conscious intent to that end.

Consciousness

Socialists have no sympathy with those who believe bombs contribute to a social revolution. Of course rage and the desire for reprisal are emotions we have all experienced — who has not felt something like the poet’s “Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough/It isn’t fit for humans now”, or wished to kick-in the huge grinning teeth of some inflated politician? But the futility and self-destructiveness are clear. Indignation becomes constructive only when it is translated to consciousness. The direct-actionist asserts that consciousness can be a result of the act, that to cajole or push people into being hammered by capitalism’s force is to spread comprehension of what it is all about. There is not a shred of evidence that this has ever happened. On the other hand, the evidence provided by case-histories of direct action and terrorism is that they are at least fatuous and at worst horrifyingly pernicious, and always anti-working-class.

The means to change society exist and wait to be used, as Engels went on to say:

The irony of world history turns everything upside down. We, the 'revolutionaries’, the 'rebels’—we are thriving far better on legal methods than on illegal methods and revolt . . . we, under this legality, get firm muscles and rosy cheeks and look like eternal life.

Robert Barltrop

Ruff And Ready (2021)

Theatre Review from the December 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Ruff Tuff Cream Puff Estate Agency (Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, October 2021)

The squatting movement has a long history of searching for creative, practical ways to get around capitalism’s failure to satisfy needs as basic as housing. One story among many has been turned into an entertaining musical by Cardboard Citizens (a theatre group composed of people who have been homeless), playwright Sarah Woods and Boff Whalley, Chumbawamba’s guitarist. The Ruff Tuff Cream Puff Estate Agency is set in 1977, when there were an estimated 30,000 people living in squats among 100,000 empty houses in London alone. By this time, the eponymous estate agency had been running for three years, one of several services set up by and for squatters in the city, and the only one which ran as an estate agency, matching vacant buildings to people who needed housing. In an average day, it would be approached by 15 to 20 people made homeless through eviction, poverty or escaping violence who couldn’t or wouldn’t be supported by mainstream organisations. The police and social services even sent people there occasionally.

The play presents the agency as welcoming and open, and the enthusiasm of its members is warmly realised by an energetic cast. The properties they found or heard about were advertised in their bulletin with descriptions like ‘36 St Luke’s Road. Empty two years. Entry through rear. No roof. Suit astronomer’. The agency’s workers would break into the buildings, meaning that those who subsequently moved in weren’t committing an offence. The legislation in England and Wales has since changed, though, and squatting in a residential building was made illegal in 2012 (having been against the law in Scotland since 1865). This doesn’t mean that squatters in 1970s London were left alone by the authorities, though. The musical features undercover police monitoring the estate agency and officious landlords and council staff, all ridiculed by being played as deliberate caricatures.

The production could have lasted for longer, to go into more detail over what happened on Freston Road, then in Hammersmith. Supported by the estate agency, a community of 120 squatters were living there, and faced eviction when the Greater London Council planned to redevelop the area. The squatters responded by all adopting the surname of Bramley to support their application to be rehomed together as a family. Then they announced that Freston Road was now independent of the UK, and had become the ‘Free and Independent Republic of Frestonia’. The new self-declared country issued its own newspaper and stamps (accepted by the Post Office), ran its own art gallery and theatre and aimed to join both the UN and EEC. During the ’80s, Frestonia dropped its aspirations and morphed into an officially-recognised housing co-operative which still runs today.

As the musical depicts it, The Ruff Tuff Cream Puff Estate Agency lost momentum when its members had to focus on their own lives rather than their work. Trying to put free access into practice in capitalism would always be an uphill struggle, as it goes against how the economy and property laws operate. Although finding imaginative ways around the system isn’t the same as working to replace it, the determination of the agency’s staff meant that many people were helped into better situations, at least temporarily. The musical is an enjoyable celebration of them, as well as being an introduction to a lively aspect of working class history.

Clive Hendry

Anyone know a lifestyle anarchist? (2011)

From the July 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

  Keep a look-out for people who are chock-full of undirected, ill-informed revolutionary gusto, but empty of any desire to organise their views into a coherent critique of the world.

Are they easily bored by drab Marxian theory, with its ‘materialist conception of history’ and its ‘labour theory of value’? Do they feel guilty because their parents managed to scrape a bit more out of capitalism than the average wage-slave? Do they feel the need to rebel against daddy’s ‘inbuilt patriarchal mentality’ and mother’s lack of ability to cut the apron strings? Perhaps they like to wear bands around their wrist bearing slogans like ‘make poverty history’ or even better ‘make poverty herstory’. They might feel a sudden urge to grow dreadlocks, wear low crotched shorts, and backpack around the world. They may feel the need to say every damn thing as if it was a question, constantly inserting the word ‘like’ while offering self-righteous homilies about how they ‘just really want to like help the world?’ and how ‘we’ve like got to find like a new way of living?’

They may, in short, be on the verge of becoming a ‘lifestyle anarchist’.

Lifestyle anarchism can best be described as the malformed grandchild of that senile old bat, the sixties hippy movement. It sits in an uncomfortable position somewhere between Che Guevara and Ghandi, Bakunin and the Dalai Lama. Lifestyle anarchists like to engage in what they pretentiously call things like ‘grass roots happenings’ and ‘autonomous eco-resistance.’ To be a lifestyle anarchist you have do things like ‘dumpster diving’ or ‘skipping’ basically taking egotistical pleasure in a society that reduces you to eating out of a bin.

Don’t let a lifestyle anarchist hear you complain about the rent, it’s much cooler to ‘squat’ or even better ‘couch surf’. When university tuition fees get raised again or the trees in the park are chopped down in order to build yet another supermarket, it wouldn’t do to put it down to the shitty social system we live under and then actively encourage fellow workers to help get rid of it, oh no. For the lifestyle anarchist it’s much better to ‘occupy’ a lecture hall or chain themselves to an oak. That is of course until they get dragged away by a policeman, at which point they can really impress all their lifestyle anarchist mates by telling the copper what a ‘brutal like fascist like pig’ he is ‘working for like the man like that’.

Ah yes ‘the man’, is this the start of an understanding of what us socialists mean when we say the capitalist class? Not really, the enemy to the lifestyle anarchist is some sort of white European male, intent on keeping us all in a little box by flying planes into world trade centres then blaming it on really nice guys like the Taliban who only ever wanted to fight oppression. These are just some of the reasons among many why the lifestyle anarchists score very high on the rest of the working class’s bullshit radar.

Many lifestyle anarchists don’t ever seem to work at all, raising the question: when the squats get evicted and the ‘skipping’ is getting harder, where does all the money come from? One lifestyle anarchist I met was very vague about how she actually kept herself financially afloat, for the year or so she had spent hitch-hiking around Europe, preferring to answer the question with a patronising ‘you don’t actually need lots of money you know’. ‘Yes.’ I felt like saying, ‘but then you didn’t find your two iPods and your laptop in a skip now did you?’ I never found out what her parents did for a living, (or didn’t do in the case of the capitalist class). I was forced to leave it, we were ‘couch surfing’ in her house at the time and I suspected that if I really chose to assert my kindly granted ‘right to free speech’ it wouldn’t be long before she asserted her ‘right to private property’. It is for this reason that I am tempted to make my first experience of ‘couch surfing’ also my last.

What other anarchists think

Trotsky once described anarchists as ‘liberals with bombs’, whereas the lifestyle anarchists would be better described as ‘liberals with bins’. Trotsky of course had good reason to dislike anarchists, like Bakunin for example who for all his faults provided some very useful warnings about the dangers of authoritarianism in the working class movement, warnings a lot less applicable to Marx than to the likes of Lenin and Trotsky. While the lifestyle anarchists are keen to point out how ‘free from dogma’ they are, their complete lack of theory means they are prepared to uncritically help in the campaigns of any pseudo-socialist, Leninist party going.

It is of course unfair to equate lifestyle anarchism directly with the anarchist movement as a whole. For all its faults at least most strands of anarchism attempt a class analysis. At least some anarchists see the problems inherent in society as stemming from the fundamental features of that society, i.e., wage labour, production for profit, class rule, and the solution lying in the abolition of these same things. Indeed it is interesting to see the old dog anarchists’ reaction to this silly and incessantly annoying puppy chasing its own tail. On the one hand they like to encourage it for its ‘direct action’ and ‘grass roots defiance’ but even they are compelled to comment on the futility of it all.

Of course we socialists have nothing against people who want to raid through supermarket skips in order to help cut down on food bills. Having done it myself I can honestly say it’s incredible what supermarkets chuck away.  I once found a bin bag full of popcorn that was only a week out of date in a Marks and Spencer skip.

Nor do we have anything against those that choose to squat.  It’s another example of the ridiculous nature of capitalism that perfectly good homes should stay unoccupied while people sleep on the streets, just so a landlord can wait till the property prices rise. Where we have a problem is that for all the talk that lifestyle anarchists and others like them make about their actions being a means to an end, it invariably becomes an end in itself – people preferring to pose with their heads in skips or faces wrapped in kaftans without ever trying to actually understand why the world is the way it is.

Johnny Mercer

Letters: More on Squatting (1969)

Letters to the Editors from the October 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

My letter, (July Socialist Standard), was written in order to find out whether you have a coherent party line on reformism. Your reply suggests that you have not, and reveals a deep confusion as to how you think a worker should behave under capitalism.

You say that you “support the efforts of workers to improve their housing conditions under capitalism—even by squatting”, and yet you are “opposed to all reformist movements.” Your reason for thinking there is no inconsistency in this position is that "squatting is no more a reform than stealing.”

But it is. For example, although the East London Squatters encourage homeless people to occupy empty dwellings they do this as a means to the reformist end of persuading local authorities to change their housing policy. It just so happens that there you have a reformist movement which uses direct action instead of the orthodox political channels. So if you support people squatting then you support their engaging in reformist activities. This, I agree, is not the same as supporting a reformist movement, but since when did the SPGB support the workers in being reformists? To put your dilemma another way, if you support people in squatting but are opposed to all reformist movements would you allow a member of the East London Squatters to join your party?

You ought to, of course. For what is the difference between getting what you can out of capitalism by joining a trade union and doing the same by joining the Squatters or a Tenants' Association? The only difference I can think of is that possibly Marx would have approved of the first of these but not the other two. But I am sure you will agree as scientific socialists that this fact on its own is worthless (After all, Marx approved of support for bourgeois revolutions).

To sum up: it would be convenient if you could simply register opposition to all attempts at reform, right across the board. But apart from the sheer inhumanity of such a position, you are precluded from adopting it because of your views on trade unions and the vote. To draw the line here looks suspiciously arbitrary and anyway from what you say about squatting it looks as if you don’t draw it here. So where do you draw it? You think that workers should get what they can out of capitalism. So suppose a man could do this by joining the British Humanist Association (because this would give him contacts for a job offering more pay for less labour-power). You would then, prevent him from adopting it because of your views on something of which you approve.

W. Warwick, 

Oxford.

Sir,

I am intrigued by your reasoning in your reply to Mr. Warwick. I pass over the use of somewhat ill-chosen emotive terms to compare squatting with stealing, for there is no certainty that stealing will lead to greater equality of wealth, and in most workers’ minds the term suggests the bank robber carrying off not the bank’s wealth but the workers’ savings.

When you say that in supporting squatting you are not supporting reforms — is this because you give generalised support, but do not intend to take part in any attempt to help squatters do the squatting?As besides the workers involved a number of politicoes are there to help, redecorate the house, hand out leaflets explaining the case, print those leaflets, argue with and resist bailiffs and police and so forth. The family who squat, are certainly engaged in a day to day struggle to defend their living conditions, but what of their sympathisers and supporters?

In Ilford as in many other instances part of the support has meant that leaflets have been distributed explaining that as an immediate possibility such and such houses are empty, will be empty for some years as the council has not yet permission to undertake the scheme under which they are to be pulled down and does not anyway intend to tackle this part of Ilford until 76 and so on . . . Arguments are put that lack of housing is the product of the profit motive and not any intrinsic impossibility as to building; but specific demands are made for the here and now.

Some years back one of your members in an article condemning anarchists argued that syndicalism was reformist—reformism by blows, but reformism nevertheless — this would appear to be the case of squatting; I would prefer to use the phrase gradualist revolution, but if the argument is true of the one then it is true of both. 

Laurens Otter, 

Thornton Heath

Reply:

Our coherent policy on reforms and reformism is set out briefly here:

1. We are opposed to reformism, or the futile policy of trying to make capitalism work for the good of all.
2. We are opposed to political groups which pursue reformist policies.
3. We are not opposed to all reforms of capitalism.
4. We do not advocate or propose reforms. .
5. Reforms will be offered by capitalist governments when the Socialist Party grows stronger.
6. We urge workers to resist the downward pressures capitalism always exerts on their living standards.

Since it is this last point which worries Mr. Warwick let us go into it further. We appreciate that as long as workers are not socialists, this resistance will often be carried on in a disorganised and ineffective way usually involving support for reformist policies and parties. As long as socialist numbers are small (as now) there is little we can do to remedy this save urging workers to recognise the futility of reformism and to become socialists and wage the class struggle in an organised and conscious way.

There is a difference, which we are sure Mr. Warwick can see, between giving support to the general aim of working class resistance to capitalism and giving support to any and every specific method a non-socialist working class might use. We only endorse those methods which we consider to be in the interests of the working class, e.g., some aspects of trade unionism. We oppose those methods which we consider do not measure up to this standard, e.g., reformism.

Now, where does squatting come in? Obviously we should have made it more clear what we meant by ’’squatting” when we said it was the kind of action a worker could take to improve his housing conditions under capitalism.

Originally the word meant to occupy land without title and has come to refer also to occupying empty houses. When we referred to ’’squatting” in the April Socialist Standard and in our July reply to Mr. Warwick we meant the simple act of a homeless family moving into an empty house, i.e., the act of an individual, family trying to get better housing. We are not opposed to, and will not criticise, workers for doing this. We did emphasise also that this was not the way to solve or even palliate the working class housing problem.

However, it is true that ’’squatting” also has a broader meaning: the sort of policy outlined by Mr. Otter with the aim, as Mr. Warwick says, of ’’persuading local authorities to change their housing policy”. This we are opposed to and to organisations like the “East London Squatters” whose reformist policy Mr. Otter was outlining.

Mr. Warwick is obviously unaware that SPGB members are in tenants associations, student unions, parent-teacher groups as well as in trade unions. This is not part of their Party activity but part of their activity as workers, who are tenants or students or parents and who are trying to resist capitalist pressure. This has long been our attitude. We refer Mr. Warwick to the Socialist Standard of January 1932 where a correspondent was told that “members of the SPGB are permitted to belong to certain of the organisations of the unemployed”. The emphasis was put on certain because some of these and other organisations are merely fronts for reformist groups. We would say this is true for the various so-called Squatters campaigns which serve the ulterior motives of assorted anarchist and trotskyist groups. Obviously an SPGB member could not join an organisation of this type.

Our policy on trade unions has been worked out in the light of modern industrial and political conditions. While we recognise that the socialist movement owes a great debt to Marx who first put its theory onto a scientific basis, we have registered our disagreement with the attitude he took up on a number of points (war, nationalism and even reforms).

Finally, we only drew a parallel between squatting and stealing to show that we were not worried that squatting was illegal. The law only exists to protect private property and who are we to respect it?

Editorial Committee

Letter: Have We Gone Reformist? (1969)

Letter to the Editors from the July 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sirs,

I quote from the Socialist Standard for April, 1969:

1. "The Socialist Party supports the efforts of workers to improve their housing conditions under capitalism—even by squatting’' (p52).

The word you use is ‘supports’. I always understood that yours was a revolutionary party which neither supported nor opposed reforms, but ‘welcomed' them when they were achieved by reformists. What kind of support is now being given to reformist movements, either by the Socialist Party as a whole, or by individual members?

2. "A minority of socialist MPs would certainly support genuine reforms in working class standards and conditions but they would not be allowed to make the mistake of becoming reformist—of offering reforms as a political programme and an alternative to Socialism” (p60).

In such a situation, then, reforms would be a supplement (even though not an alternative) to socialist policy. Are we to assume that this is your party’s policy at the present stage of capitalism too? There was a time, I believe, when your members were discouraged from joining even such unspecific reformist movements as the Humanist Association. Perhaps you could state when this important change in your party line occurred.

W. Warwick 

Oxford

Reply:

1. The passage Mr. Warwick quotes merely says that the Socialist Party of Great Britain is in favour of workers trying to improve their (in this case, housing) conditions under capitalism. It does not say that we support specific reform measures in the housing field. If it did, Mr Warwick would have a case for saying we had changed our policy. We have of course, as Mr Warwick will know, always said workers should try to get as much as they can out of capitalism.

Squatting is no more a reform than stealing is. We shall go on saying that a homeless family should move into any empty house just as a hungry man should steal a loaf of bread. We are opposed to all reformist movements. But this does not mean that we are opposed on principle to any reform of capitalism. What we say is that a socialist party ought not to advocate reforms for fear of attracting non-socialist support, and in a bid to keep that support being dragged into compromise with capitalism. We thus campaign for Socialism alone, and not for or against specific reforms. We do indeed welcome any crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table.

2. We have long held that socialist MPs or local councillors ought to judge on their merits any reform measures placed before them by other parties. We accept that on occasions this would mean their voting for reforms. But—and this is made clear in the passage Mr. Warwick quotes—the socialist delegates would not themselves propose reforms. So it is not true that in such a situation the Socialist Party would be advocating reforms as well as Socialism. The difference would be that then, as compared with now, the larger socialist movement would be able to have some political influence which it would obviously use to further working-class interests.

Once again, Mr. Warwick’s question falls. We do not advocate reforms now either. We do, however, judge reforms proposed by other parties on their merits. Our knowledge of how capitalism works enables us to see that most of them are pretty futile, though at times we recognise that some could be useful in a small way — and say so. For instance, one man, one vote in local elections in Northern Ireland (see p53 of the April Socialist Standard).

Finally, we do regard the British Humanist Association, set up in 1967, as a reformist political organisation whose members are ineligible to join the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

Editorial Committee

Rear View: Constipated reformists (2017)

The Rear View Column from the March 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Constipated reformists

‘ANAL squatting collective takes over Qatari general’s £17m London townhouse’ (rt.com, 2 February). With a name like that, the Autonomous Nation of Anarchist Libertarians have achieved one of their aims – exposure! They wish to draw our attention to the ‘problem’ of growing homelessness alongside thousands of properties in London alone, and over 200,000 in England, which have been unoccupied for more than six months. ANAL is supported by a number of groups concerned with housing and homelessness, including Architects for Social Housing who tweeted Homes for people, not for profit. Indeed. But because housing is produced for profit there is no possibility of a rational approach to housing within capitalism. Engels made this clear as far back as 1872: ‘As long as the capitalist mode of production continues to exist, it is folly to hope for an isolated solution of the housing question or of any other social question affecting the fate of the workers. The solution lies in the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the appropriation of all the means of life and labour by the working class itself’ (The Housing Question).


Clueless

‘Comments President Donald Trump made Wednesday at the White House during a Black History Month event left some people scratching their heads.

During a listening session, Trump praised abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who died in 1895. He mentioned Douglass as ‘an example of somebody who has done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice,’ Trump said’ (kansascity.com, 1 February). On this performance alone, Trump’s future is certain – as presenter of I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue. He could well be joined by the anarchist Professor David Graeber, who thinks that the clown Trump’s victory ‘had proved that anarchists’ diagnosis of society’s ills was correct’ (nytimes, 2 February) – not to mention their disdain for democracy – and that ‘people want something radically different’. The Doctor sees only symptoms – hence his fervent support for Occupy who ‘had elevated income inequality to the top of the Democratic political agenda’! – not the disease. Douglass was better informed: ‘The old master class was not deprived of the power of life and death, which was the soul of the relation of master and slave. They could not, of course, sell their former slaves, but they retained the power to starve them to death, and wherever this power is held there is the power of slavery. He who can say to his fellow- man,  You shall serve me or starve, is a master and his subject is a slave….Though no longer a slave, he is in a thralldom grievous and intolerable, compelled to work for whatever his employer is pleased to pay him..’ (Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, 1892)


$ex and the 1%

‘One of the world’s most exclusive sex clubs for the rich and powerful has opened its doors to the public – but it will set you back a hefty £1,500-a-night. You’ll also have to jet to Los Angeles, where members at the Snctm sex club in Los Angeles – who sign a blood oath to join – are also splashing out an eye-watering £60,000-a-year for unlimited access to special rooms and privileges at the orgies’ (mirror.co.uk, 2 February). We the 99% are expected to find the means to raise the next generation of the working class. This has been so for centuries. Who better to comment on this situation than the Marquis De Sade: ‘Everywhere I could reduce men into two classes both equally pitiable; in the one the rich who was the slave of his pleasures; in the other the unhappy victims of fortune; and I never found in the former the desire to be better or in the latter the possibility of becoming so, as though both classes were working for their common misery…I saw the rich continually increasing the chains of the poor, while doubling his own luxury, while the poor, insulted and despised by the other, did not even receive the encouragement necessary to bear his burden. I demanded equality and was told it was utopian; but I soon saw those who denied its possibility were those who would lose by it…’ (Aline et Valcour, ou le Roman philosophique, 1788)


Shafted

‘Canadian Mint Worker Sentenced To 30 Months For Smuggling $140,000 Of Gold In His Rectum’ (zerohedge.com, 2 February).

A headline you will not see in a socialist world without workers and crime – or your money back!

Cooking the Books: The Property Rights Act (2006)

The Cooking the Books Column from the January 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

When Labour got back into office in 1997, one of the first things they did, to show without spending any money that they were reformers, was to sign up to the European Convention on Human Rights. This was supposed to give people more legal “rights”. Actually, as infringements could give rise to monetary compensation, it was more a bonanza for lawyers and has resulted in the further spread of “compensation culture”, capitalism’s tendency to put a monetary value on everything.

But it has also had another effect: to entrench further the rights of property, as two recent legal cases have shown (Times, 18 April and 23 November). Before the entry into force of the 1998 Human Rights Act, “squatters” acquired a legal right to a property after occupying it unchallenged for at least 12 years.

The cases involved property companies which had acquired titles to land which had been squatted by farmers for more than the 12 years. The companies relied on an article of the Convention that states: “Every natural person is entitled to the peaceful enjoyment of his possessions. No one shall be deprived of his possessions except in the public interest and subject to the conditions provided by law.”

The judges in both cases (the second those of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasburg from which there is no appeal) ruled that the previous English law that allowed the farmers to assume ownership of the land was an infringement of the property companies’ rights as enshrined in the Convention. As a result they will receive as compensation a nice fat cheque, likely to run in one case to millions of pounds.

So-called “human rights” have always been linked to property rights. As C.B. Macpherson showed in his classic study of 16th and 17th English political philosophy, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, the whole concept of human rights was based on the idea of every human being having a property right to their own body. The state is not supposed to stop them using their mental and physical energies as they think fit; this involves not just freedom from arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, but also the freedom to exercise their mental faculties in speech, publication and religion.

Property as such came to be regarded as a human right when it was argued that humans also had a right to what they themselves had got from nature by their own bodily efforts, i.e. by their own labour. However, given the existing unequal ownership of property, especially land, the bourgeois “theorists of possessive individualism” shied away from the egalitarian implications of this labour theory of property. Instead they came up with various more or less specious reasons as to why property, however acquired (and including land, which no one created by their labour, and even slaves), was, in the words of the French Revolution’s 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, “an inviolable and sacred right”.

The freedom of property-owners from arbitrary dispossession by the state was what the French Revolution established in France, but which the so-called Glorious Revolution in England in 1688 and the US Constitution had already established in these countries.

The European Convention of Human Rights is a direct descendant of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man, itself a reflection of the theory of “possessive individualism”. It is essentially a Convention on the Rights of Property – as neatly illustrated by the fact that the article under which the property companies won was not some obscure subsection, but Article I of Protocol I entitled “Protection of Property”.

Squatters and the Housing Problem (1969)

From the April 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

The plight of the homeless has once again made headline news in the daily press with the occupation of a block of luxury flats in London. It should come as no surprise to anyone that one of the oldest problems of capitalism, that of providing cheap accommodation for the working class, is still as acute as it ever was, after 120 years of various reforms and measures introduced by a succession of Tory, Liberal, and Labour governments.

The number of people involved in the 'squat-ins' now going on is extremely small compared with the number of homeless people who occupied empty camps under the control of the War Ministry just after the Second World War. One estimate put the number of squatters then involved at about 45,000. Of course conditions after the war were exceptional, as is to be expected when the warring national capitalist classes of the world have blasted one another's cities by aerial bombardment. Nevertheless no member of the British capitalist class whose home had been bombed ever had to move into an unoccupied army camp. This was something suffered only by the working class.

On October 11, 1946, statistics given by Aneurin Bevan revealed that 1,038 camps in England and Wales were occupied by 39,535 people. On Sept. 5 G. Buchanan, the then Under-Secretary of State, gave figures showing that in Scotland squatters numbered about 1,300 families comprising 4,000 people. Squatting on a considerable scale also took place in Northern Ireland.

Not all of the properties occupied by the squatters were army camps. Like their present-day counterparts, who took over the block of luxury flats in Snaresbrook, London, they showed impeccable taste by installing themselves in such residences as a 17-room vicarage in Shropshire, a 17th-century 40-room house owned by Vesta Tilley, a house in Finsbury owned by the Marquis of Northampton, and Litley Court, Hereford. A number of high-class properties in London were also taken over. Then, as now, the only reason for the properties being allowed to remain empty was that there were no buyers able or willing to pay the price demanded. Housing, like everything under capitalism, is produced for sale to realise profit or to be rented for the highest amount obtainable.

In 1946 Kensington and Marylebone had thousands of empty flats and houses, while their combined housing lists totalled 7,367. A similar situation prevails today in the same boroughs, especially in the Notting Hill area, with blocks of luxury flats virtually nestling side-by-side with crumbling tenements, large numbers of which are awaiting demolition, whose residents have been compelled by high rates and rents to seek accommodation elsewhere.

The policy of the majority of councils just after the war with regard to squatters is in sharp contrast with that of councils today, which is to evict them as quickly as possible from any property they occupy. In 1946 squatters were actually encouraged in their actions by councils, Scunthorpe acting first by taking over three army camps, after making prior arrangements with the Ministry of Health. Some councils failed to get Ministerial consent to take over camps, while some councils, like Reading, resisted the squatters from the start, cutting off electricity and threatening to remove their names from the housing list.

Twenty-three years after what must surely have been the biggest 'squat-in' of all time, the homeless are still with us and are still resorting to the same desperate measures to get a roof over their heads. In the Greater London area alone there are 170,000 families on the housing list and about 9,000 people in local authority hostels. The story is the same for the rest of the country, the acuteness of the problem varying from place to place, so much so that the claim of Kenneth Robinson, Minister of Planning and Land, that there would be a surplus of one million houses by 1973 sounds pretty hollow when it is realised that of a total of 17½  million dwellings in England three million (17 per cent) are irredeemable slums . . .

Even a bigger allocation of houses will not remove all today's slums by 1990, let alone 1975. Yet a target of 500,000 houses per year, if sustained throughout the early 1970s, will demand three times the present rate of slum clearance (Economist, October 14, 1967). Changes in the classification of housing could enlarge this estimate of the number of slums, making an even bigger problem of rehousing.

The Socialist Party supports the efforts of workers to improve their housing conditions under capitalism — even by squatting. But socialists also point out that there is no solution to the housing problem inside capitalism, and even if the agitation of those who support the squatters succeeds for the families they are now trying to help, future generations will still face the same misery and hardship of homelessness. Only in a society in which production is carried on solely to satisfy human wants, without anyone having to worry about where next week's rent or next month's mortgage repayment is coming from, will the housing problem find a solution.

Lawrence Brown

Rent Rows (1965)

From the November 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Just before I joined the Socialist Party, I was friendly with Albert, a member of the Communist Party, a man with a wife and two young children, who has been in the army during the last war and like many others, had come back to an appalling housing problem. Albert and his family lived in two small rooms, and in between his battles with the local housing committee, he would lead all sorts of militant actions—such as “squatting”—and would urge my support in the “day-to-day struggle”. He was evicted from many a vacant property (and sometimes from meetings of the town council too) before he was eventually granted a house on a new estate.

Not a very tolerant man, he was furious when he heard of my decision to join the SPGB “They never do nuthin’," he shouted contemptuously, and refused to speak to me ever again. Albert has long since moved out of the district and I wonder just what his political views are today—also whether his present home is a council house.

Certainly in those earlier days this would have been the limit of his horizon —what he would have called “doin’ sumthin’” —and we can agree that a council house is preferable to a disused army nissen hut. But it makes a pretty poor comparison with what society is really capable of producing. And there is another unpleasant aspect which these day-to-day strugglers seem to overlook, and that is the role of the local authorities as landlords. They can be just as harsh as private owners, particularly if you fall behind with the rent, and they are not so restricted legally when it comes to the question of rent increases.

I am reminded of this by a recent report that Belfast City Council have decided to increase their house rents by up to 5/9d. a week. When it was debated there were noisy protests from tenants in the public gallery, but the decision went through. Albert would have acclaimed the protest as something concrete; he would have missed the point that this was one result of his previous struggles —council house building has been beloved of the left for donkey’s years— and perhaps the most important point of all would have completely eluded him. It is only workers who have to struggle for, live in, and protest about the rent of, council houses.

Eddie Critchfield

Is Housing a Right? (1971)

From the April 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

I have in front of me an expensively produced broadsheet from Shelter which is designed to push the special place of housing among the problems that face society under capitalism. But any notion that Shelter understands the first thing about the social system which produces our present housing conditions is rather hard to come by. In the first place is housing a "right” at all? In this country, for example we have a few rights, some tenuous, some fairly solid. We have a right to say what we like if we can find someone to listen; to print what we like if we can find the cash; to vote; to put up candidates to oppose the government and other parties. We can tell these are rights because we use them. To say we have a right to housing, however, is clearly tampering with the language. We know we have a right to vote because nobody stops us doing so. But housing? Three million families live in slums or near-slums says Shelter. It does not seem very likely that they have a "right” to enjoy first-class housing and prefer to condemn themselves and their children to slum conditions. The fact is, of course, that there is no more right to good housing under capitalism than to good food, or good clothes or good holidays or good anything else. All good things are available under capitalism but not as of right. They are there for those who have the money to pay for them.

It is perhaps natural that the housing problem should always seem to generate more emotion than the countless other problems of our present social set-up. One cannot live a decent life without a decent home. But before looking a little further into housing, it is necessary to dispose of the silly notion of single issue groups like Shelter that housing is by definition in a class by itself and that anyone would prefer to live on bread and water in Buckingham Palace than on caviar and chips in Notting Hill. It ain’t necessarily so. And anyway, it is obvious that as things are, the people who have the best houses are by a capitalist law of nature the ones who have the best everything else as well. They are the owning class for whom there is no housing problem; there is no shortage of delectable houses in the property columns of the posh papers. So it would seem to be fairly obvious that the class division of society has something to do with the matter. But you wouldn’t think so from reading Shelter's stuff. Quite the contrary. "Our researches show that bad housing and overcrowding is the root cause of nearly all our social problems.” Is they really? I should have thought that bad housing was one of our social problems itself. It is not a cause but an effect.

It is a perennial mystery how reformers have been busy solving the housing problem for so many generations and yet each succeeding generation needs to solve it afresh. It is as though they were conditioned by the gods, like Sisyphus, to go on and on with a task which will never end. At least he used to get the stone near the top before he had the mortification of having to start all over again. The housing reformers have never had a glimpse of their summit. The housing problem is as old as capitalism (or rather as old as property society — but only for the non-propertied). It is universal. If it were a "right” surely some workers somewhere would exercise it. They don’t seem to do so in advanced spots like the capitals of rich countries. Slums are an even bigger scandal in Washington than in London. As for “backward” places like Calcutta (where there is any amount of opulence among the capitalists of the "socialist” Mrs. Gandhi’s India), imagination boggles. But what about Western Germany? All one hears from there is the story of the wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle, the envy of the capitalist world. Harold Wilson told us that we must wait for our salvation till “we have got the economy right”, till the precious balance of payments is secure (as though anything is ever secure under the anarchic system of capitalism). They can’t tell that one to the German workers, can they! It is in fact their "success” in creating a huge surplus of exports which has been the cause of the very surplus of imports which has upset the applecart here. And I must confess that as I had heard nothing about housing conditions from Germany I had assumed this place may have been an exception to the rule. And after all, the RAF had done them the favour of bombing the place flat so they would not have the same legacy of housing which had been crumbling for a hundred years and more. But no. Two homes in three are reported as having no bathrooms of their own. Nearly two million families have no lavatory of their own. An old lady who won the pools (a million marks, nearly £200,000) could only say how happy she was to look forward to her own bathroom for her last years. I hear that a prize of another million marks is being offered for the correct answer to the question: Which class in Germany is the one without the lavatories? It could be the answer is the same one as here and India (and Russia where the rulers have their country houses and their Black Sea villas). When are the workers going to claim their real right: to the resources of the entire world? Which will then be applied to the one task: making a decent life for human beings and not to such delights as going to the moon (which, in view of the conditions of most people on earth, is nothing short of an obscenity). It happens that I have met a few people who have taken up their alleged rights. Squatters who have occupied slum-clearance houses in Hackney. They actually have the idea that it is wrong to allow houses to lie empty while people are without homes. And they even say nasty things about "our so-called socialist council in Hackney”. But of course they were a long way from understanding that occupying a few derelict houses (while they are allowed to get away with it) is not the answer to the housing problem. Any more than the efforts of people like Shelter. Isn't it time that more people got down to the idea of changing society to one where homes and food and clothes and everything else are made not for profit but for people?

L. E. Weidberg

Housing: An Anarchist Approach (1976)

Book Review from the September 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Housing: An Anarchist Approach by Colin Ward. Freedom Press, £1.25.

This is a collection of articles by the former editor of Anarchy, published between 1945 and 1957: some in anarchist journals, others in architects’ and planning publications. They are informative, and the book can be read as a survey of the housing situation in Britain over the past thirty years. None of the problems has dated, of course. Like the motif of Cathy Come Home, which last month was repeated on television ten years after its original showing, they are still crying out as hopelessly as ever.

The difficulty about the book is in its title. “An anarchist approach” implies that other anarchists would take different views, even opposite ones (the cover describes Colin Ward as a well-known authority, which may well have given some anarchists apoplexy). In fact the approach is a liberal-type reformist one, full of suggestions to the Housing Minister, local councils, and architects’ associations. The book ends with an advocacy of “dweller control”. Though earlier chapters enthuse about the squatter movements of 1946 and 1968 as examples of direct action, in a 1974 article the writer expresses doubt whether seizure of housing is a practical thing to advocate: 

It would certainly save a lot of tedious calculation if we could count on tenant militancy to do the trick, but the possibility, short of a revolutionary situation, is not great. It did not need Clay Cross to demonstrate that in view of the powers of the district auditor and of central government over housing, it needs more than local direct action to win.

The “tenant take-over” advocated comes down, therefore, to self-management under government supervision, or a variation on the principles of the Co-operative Society.

The chapters under the heading “Self Help” give accounts of “cities the poor build” in Latin America, and the shanty-bungalow towns of the Laindon-Pitsea area, in Essex. As Colin Ward says, building regulations and land prices have made sure there won’t be any more of these. He argues that they could provide the guidelines for “a desirable experiment”, helped by the government, to solve the housing problem. Helped by the government, we can guess what it would turn out like. However, these settlements indicate something much more important. If a housing shortage were discovered in Socialist society, it would not constitute a “housing problem”: without the pressures of cost and economic policies, people can create homes and communities anywhere.

As it is, the housing problem in capitalism is neither a shortage nor an architectural poser. It is from first to last an aspect of the poverty problem: huge numbers of the working class are either badly housed or not housed at all because they are workers, their lives’ aspirations bound and gagged by wages. That state of affairs can only be remedied by abolishing the wage-system and establishing Socialism.

Robert Barltrop