Letter: Communists and Kings (1975)

Letter to the Editors from the April 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Communists and Kings

It was of course very wrong of the Morning Star to have published an attack on any aspect of the capitalist State, it should know that only the SPGB is allowed to do that. At any rate that is the opinion of the SPGB. Indeed the outside cover of your March issue should have read “Royalty, Rates, Taxes and the Working Class, Tzar Brezhnev and the Jews, Do They Matter?”, since without rates, taxes and Tzar Brezhnev capitalism would still exist as your pages of Socialist Theory make clear.

I notice that although you do not approve of the Morning Star article you nevertheless follow its lead in exposing the character of royalty. You in the end come down in its support because it gives “pageantry and a show”. If they did not get this some workers would have to start reading the Socialist Standard to find out why Royalty was not Rubbish.

Tom Braddock 

East Preston

Reply:

Obviously the Socialist Standard makes you wild by being right. If you are prone to the Morning Star, that is understandable; though, curiously enough, we never mentioned the Morning Star in the article you object to. We do not think, either, that anyone else thought the final paragraph “came down in support” of royalty.

However, since you draw the Morning Star to our attention, we will say that no notice need be taken of it. First, because it does not attack the capitalist state. It supports it in Russia all the time and elsewhere some of the time, as expedient. Second, because Communist parties and papers are quite prepared to support national figureheads. The Morning Star's predecessor The Daily Worker in 1947 (21st June) wrote of the present Queen’s 21st birthday:

The dignity of a modern state can only be met when its titular head is chosen from among its most eminent citizens.

In July 1938 the French Communist paper L’Humanite welcomed a visit to Paris by the King and Queen of England in these terms:

We applaud the visit of these rulers in the measure to which it is devoted to this end . . . Our good feeling is extended to that England which fights on the front of Collective Security; that England in the name of whom leading bourgeois such as Lord Cecil, Churchill, Lloyd George, and prelates like the Dean of Canterbury, pronounce regularly such grave warnings . . .

And haven’t you heard yet that a royal visit to Moscow is in the air? Tom Braddock, you are confused.

Editors.

Cooking the Books: Outdated measures (2026)

The Cooking The Books column from the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Communist Manifesto was published on 21 February 1848. The Morning Star, the paper run by nostalgics for the former USSR, chose that date this year for an editorial headed ‘The Communist Manifesto is as relevant today as it was in 1848’. Yes, most of it is. It is a brilliant description and analysis of the development of capitalism, its role in history in bringing into existence a working class struggling against exploitation and to replace capitalism with a society based on the common ownership of the means and instruments of production. It remains today a good introduction to socialist ideas which those interested in understanding the society we live in should read.

However, it was not this part that the Morning Star considered ‘relevant today’ but the ten measures listed at the end of Chapter 2, which include: abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes; a heavy progressive or graduated income tax; centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly; centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state; extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; and free education for all children in public schools.

The Morning Star sees them ‘as a series of direct demands which challenge the material basis of existing society’, as reforms which the working class should campaign for under capitalism. But this is a misinterpretation as the context, both textual and historical, makes clear. The preceding paragraphs indicate that they were measures that the working class should implement after it had won control of political power. One of the measures — the ‘confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels’ — doesn’t make sense except in that context.

The historical context is the uprising that had broken out in Germany against autocratic dynastic rule. Marx and Engels thought that this ‘bourgeois revolution will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution’. In other words, they were measures for the working class to implement on winning political control in 1848. This didn’t happen and, in exile in London three years later, Marx and Engels recognised that they had been mistaken and that this was never really on the cards. So the listed measures weren’t relevant even in 1848, let alone today 178 years later.

Some of them, such as a progressive income tax, a state bank, railway nationalisation, and free education, have since been implemented under capitalism; which rather undermines the Morning Star’s claim that they ‘challenge the basis of existing society’. In fact, that claim reveals that those behind it envisage existing capitalism being gradually transformed into state capitalism by a series of reforms and nationalisations.

But the killer quote that disposes of the Morning Star’s misinterpretation is what Engels wrote in the Preface to the 1872 re-edition:

‘The practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today’ (Our emphasis).

Today of course they would be even more differently worded, not that it would make sense to draw any up today since we don’t know what the conditions will be in which the working class will assume control of political power. But we can safely say that they won’t need to include any of those listed in 1848.

Cooking the Books: Woolly thinking (2025)

The Cooking the Books column from the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The money is there to make a better society and economy — it’s just in the wrong hands. We need to raise taxes on the wealthiest in society, and on those corporations who make record profits while our members struggle to put food on the table. That wealth should then be invested back into our communities — in housing, in health, in education, and in an industrial strategy that creates secure, unionised jobs. And investment must go hand in hand with a just transition that puts public need before corporate greed.’ So wrote Sarah Woolley, the general secretary of the bakers’ union, in the Morning Star (27 September).

By money she presumably means the monetary value that is attached to wealth produced in a capitalist society. Money, in this sense, comes into being when the wealth workers produce is sold. This is initially divided into wages and ‘surplus value’ as the part of what workers produce over and above their wages which is appropriated by the business corporation that employs them. The surplus value then comes to be divided into profits, ground-rent and interest. These are taxed by the government to get money to spend. What is left is accumulated by capitalists as more capital, with some spent to fund a privileged lifestyle.

So, at the end of a year a given amount of wealth, as measured in terms of its monetary value, is produced. There are also wealthy individuals and corporations who own previously produced wealth.

Woolley seems to accept this set-up and wants the government to change how what is produced under it is distributed. Some of the wealth appropriated by capitalists in the course of a year is to be taxed as well as some of the wealth accumulated by them in previous years. This ‘money’ is to be spent on better health, housing and education for the wage workers and their dependants and re-invested in providing secure and better paid jobs. She doesn’t put a figure on this but presumably the amount the government would spend would be much more than it now does.

She doesn’t seem to have taken into account what would happen if this was attempted. Remember we are talking about this happening in a capitalist economy where decisions about wealth production are in the hands of profit-seeking corporations.

So what would happen? First, the profits that corporations get to keep will be smaller. Since profit-making is what motivates them that incentive will be reduced. Less profit will mean less investment, resulting in less wealth — less money in her sense — being available to tax in the following year. Less investment would also mean fewer jobs, and so less paid out in wages. In short, there would be an economic downturn.

The fact is that a government cannot simply take money from the capitalist class and spend it to improve things for the working class. It cannot put ‘public need’ before ‘corporate greed’.

Woolley could come back and say that in that case the government would have to use some of ‘the money’ taken from the wealthy and their ‘greedy’ corporations and itself invest it. That would create other problems as the state investment would also have to yield profits to be sustainable. Maybe she does envisage a state-run capitalist economy as the way out, but it’s more likely to be a typical example of the confused rhetoric employed by left-wing trade union leaders — and by the left-wing politicians behind the new Corbyn party — which reflects a lack of understanding of how capitalism works.

Tiny Tips (2025)

The Tiny Tips column from the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The unrest reflected much deeper frustrations, including high unemployment, particularly among young people, growing poverty and anger at corruption and mismanagement. People see public resources channelled into luxury spending and infrastructure deals benefiting a few powerful figures connected to the ruling People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), while basic services and jobs are neglected.

[Inter Press Service News Agency]

In 1978, Clive James reviewed the official biography of Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev (General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1982) by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, CPSU Central Committee. “I read the whole thing from start to finish, waiting for the inevitable slip-up which would result in a living sentence. It never happened.” James found it so dull that “If you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead.” 

[MSN]

The announced $7 billion would be the biggest official tranche of funding to Ukraine’s drone industry so far. It’s close to the $6 billion that Ukraine’s defense minister, Denys Shmyhal, has said Kyiv needs to cover this year’s production of first-person-view drones, interceptors, long-range drones, and missiles. While new, Ukraine’s drone industry has increasingly been in the spotlight for producing cheap but effective weapons regularly being used to destroy Russian loitering munitions, armor, artillery, and production facilities. 

[Yahoo]

From an anarcho-communist perspective, this moment is not simply about one man’s death. It is about the world that produced both Charlie Kirk and the man who killed him. It is about capitalism’s ever-present violence, about the state’s monopoly on force, about the way political antagonisms are escalating into open bloodshed. It is about what happens when a society soaks every interaction in hierarchy, coercion, alienation, and humiliation, and then acts shocked when someone pulls a trigger…Wage labour itself is enforced by violence. If you refuse to work, you starve, or you are policed, or imprisoned. The entire edifice of private property rests on threat and force. 

[The Slow Burning Fuse]

North Korea’s Kim vows to build a ‘socialist paradise’ [sic]. 

[Morning Star]

Having a home of our own is essential to leading a dignified life, but in Venezuela, where access to housing is enshrined as a right in the Constitution, renting adequate accommodation is an unattainable luxury for hundreds of thousands of families, and buying property is almost impossible. Not only do market prices far exceed the average household income but inflation has also wiped out home loans, leaving citizens without access to financing. 

[Equal Times]

There is no genetic or biological basis for dividing the human race into distinct “races”. There are just groups of human beings — all of whom came from Africa originally — who developed slightly different physical characteristics over time as they travelled to, and adapted to, different climates and environments. 

[The Conversation]

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

The Gleam of Socialism? (2024)

Book Review from the April 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The Gleam of Socialism’. By Robert Griffiths, Praxis Press, 2004.

Why is there still a Communist Party? Good question. After all, the main role of that party throughout its history was to win support amongst workers for the foreign policy of the old USSR and its rulers. In fact, that’s why that state helped the finances of the party until the late 1970s, either directly or by buying thousands of copies of the old Daily Worker and its successor, the Morning Star.

No doubt, the leaders of the party weren’t just useful idiots but had sincerely convinced themselves that Russia was on the road to socialism and that in serving the interests of the USSR they were furthering the cause of socialism. But it wasn’t socialism. Far from it. It was a one-party dictatorship, the aim of whose rulers was to develop capitalism, in the form of a state capitalism, as rapidly as possible; which inevitably involved the economic exploitation of the workers there through the wages system and the extraction of surplus value. But this is the view of those Griffiths describes as ‘ultra-left anti-communists’.

Griffiths is the current general secretary of the ‘Communist Party of Britain’ (CPB), formed as a breakaway in 1988 from the historic ‘Communist Party of Great Britain’ whose leaders were indeed coming to the conclusion that there was no longer a need for a party dedicated to taking a lead from the rulers of the USSR. When the state-capitalist regime there finally collapsed in 1991 they decided to change the party’s name, to Democratic Left. Confusing matters, a grouplet, opportunistically, immediately took up the name and still exists under that name, publishing the Weekly Worker. This current CPGB has nothing to do with the historic party of that name. The original CPGB’s legitimate political successor can be said to be the CPB and the Morning Star.

There is also a previous breakaway, for the same sort of reason, in 1977 to form the still extant ‘New Communist Party’ which might have been able to claim this if they had not decided to link up with North Korea.

Griffiths’s book is a collection of articles, some of them published previously including short pieces on various well-known past CP members, mainly from Wales, from where he himself hails. The more substantial part is a history of the old CPGB — and its various policy twists and turns — and is accurate enough factually. It’s the explanation for them that is at fault as he presents them as being made in response to changes in conditions in Britain rather than at the behest of Moscow. Nor is there any reason to doubt the accuracy of his blow-by-blow account of the struggle in 1980s between the Old Guard CPers, centred around the Morning Star, and the ‘Eurocommunists’ who had won control of the party apparatus and who wanted to turn the party into a coalition of social movements, a sort of democratic green feminist left, and who were indeed ‘revisionists’ and ‘liquidationists’ from the Old Guard’s point of view.

The main reason for accepting the CPB as the political successor of the old CPGB is the continuity of political analysis which Griffiths illustrates. The CPB still sees the old USSR as having been socialist and still analyses present-day capitalism as ‘state-monopoly capitalism’ and still sees the way forward as a broad alliance of all anti-monopoly elements led by the ‘united working class movement’ to elect a left-wing Labour government. The aim, in other words, is an economy with a state-capitalist sector and a fairly extensive private non-monopoly sector under a reformist government.

Perhaps surprisingly, Jeremy Corbyn is described as a ‘longstanding friend of the Communist Party’. Maybe he just sees them as general Old Labour left-wing reformists like himself.

Adam Buick

The same old story (1971)

From the May 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Baltic shipyard workers, who have been demanding more money, were told by Poland’s new leadership that wages cannot be put up because economic plans it inherited provided no funds for this purpose. (Morning Star, 29 January).

Can’t Pay — Will Pay (1983)

From the February 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tebbit’s Green Paper on “union democracy” has been greeted with howls of indignation from the bureaucratic stooges who dominate the trade unions in Britain. Indeed, the trade unions are quite right to tell the Tories to keep their capitalist paws off independent working class organisations. Workers do not need lessons on democracy from a party which openly exists to preserve minority class privilege.

It cannot be denied, however, that the Green Paper's recommendation that the system of paying the political levy to the Labour Party be changed from contracting out if a worker does not want to pay to contracting in if one does, is in the interest of trade union democracy. It is a fact that very many workers — possibly hundreds of thousands — currently pay the levy because it is too much bother to contract out. In short, the Labour Party is receiving regular payments from many workers who do not vote for it or support it in any way. Attempts to contract out of the levy, which involve no more than signing a form, can be made difficult by those union officials who resent their members’ unwillingness to pay for the Labour Party. Many workers are simply paying the levy for the sake of a quiet life. If this were not so the Labour Party would not be so worried about the prospect of workers having to volunteer to pay. What kind of a party is it that can only survive by conning workers — many of whom oppose it — to supply its funds? Any attempt by the unions to abolish the levy and let workers volunteer dues to whichever political party they wish to support would be democratic.

Seventy-five per cent of Labour Party money is acquired by means of union political funds. In 1927 the Conservative government introduced legislation forcing the contracting in system on the unions. The result of this legislation made clear the real degree of willingness within the unions to support the Labour Party: the number paying the levy fell from 3.3 million in 1926 to 2 million in 1928. By 1934 only 1.85 million union members volunteered to pay the political levy. In 1946 the Labour Party passed a law permitting a return to the undemocratic procedure of contracting out. This led to a sharp increase in those paying the levy from 2.6 million in 1946 to 4.3 million in 1947. Was this because nearly two million trade unionists had been converted into Labour Party supporters and wanted to give it their money? No: it was due to a change in the law initiated by an anti-working class party in order to increase its own funds.

The function of trade unions is to defend and increase the wages or salaries of their members and to attempt to improve conditions of employment. Trade union action is strictly limited by the social laws of the profit system and can never lead to working class emancipation. For unions to support pro-capitalist parties, financially or in any other way, is manifestly against their interests. In supporting Labour’s policies for capitalism, trade unions become involved in disadvantageous deals to make the system work more efficiently. The business of running capitalism is not the political concern of workers: the working class can only advance by abolishing the wages system.

Prior to the 1979-General Election several unions increased their political donations to the Labour Party: the GMWU gave £100,000: the TGWU £150,000; the NUM £100,000; the AUEW £102.400; and the ASTMS £50,000. This was on top of their regular political payments. Were the members of these unions balloted before this money was given away? No, they were not — and they will not be when union funds are wasted once again on helping the Labour Party to deceive the workers in the next General Election. Socialists refuse to pay the political levy and many of us make efforts in our unions to end affiliation to the Labour Party.

The Labour Party’s financial crisis is not unique. Long bankrupt in the field of political ideas, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CP) is apparently on the approach road to financial insolvency; its daily newspaper, the Morning Star, has launched an appeal fund to keep it going. The Star's precursor, the Daily Worker, was the first newspaper in Britain to greet the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as an admirable event. Posing as a friend of the working class, the CP’s newspaper has a long and disgusting record of supporting the dictatorship in Russia, from the days of Stalin to the present. Of the 30,000 Morning Stars printed daily, approximately 15,000 arc sold in Eastern Europe (where workers must be very interested to read about a Communist Party which actually encourages strikes rather than locking up workers who participate in them). This means that the CP is selling only 15,000 Morning Stars in Britain — less than the claimed membership of the CP: 20,000. The CP is appealing to trade unions, such as AEUW-TASS and the TGWU, to buy shares of up to £10,000 in the paper. If these unions provide such aid will they first ballot their members?

The CP has faced grave political problems in recent years, with rival factions (Stalinists v. Eurocommunists) pulling in different directions. It seems that the Stalinist wing (known within the CP as the “tankies”) arc opposed to the occasional criticisms of Kremlin policies which expediency has compelled the CP to make. Mick Costello has recently resigned as the CP’s Industrial Organiser because of his opposition to certain official CP policies, including its involvement in CND which is thought by the “tankies” to be “too anti- Soviet". There are strong rumours around the CP that their next Congress in November will remove the present General Secretary, Gordon McLennan, and appoint a new. more pro-Russian leadership. The effect of all these “vanguard manoeuvres” on the working class will not be very great. Indeed, if the CP goes out of existence it can only be to the benefit of the movement for socialism. Meanwhile, the CP's Gerry Cohen has been given the job of taking the begging bowl around the unions to canvass funds from bureaucrats with a liking for the Kremlin autocracy.

The Tory Party, of course, is never short of a few bob when there is capitalist propaganda to be put out. Its funds are not the result of dues and collections taken by its members; only just over £500,000 a year is paid into Tory funds by its constituency branches (Financial Times, 7 October. 1978). A substantial proportion of Tory funds comes from companies which make political donations either to the Conservative Party itself or to allied bodies which exist either largely as front organisations for Tory political aims. For example, in the financial year before the last General Election. Rank Organisation gave £30,000 to the Tory Party plus £1,000 each to the Centre for Policy Studies and Aims; United Biscuits gave £20,000 to British United Industrialists (BUI); Tate and Lyle gave £10,675 to the Tories, £5,000 to the Centre for Policy Studies and £3,000 to BUI; Taylor Woodrow gave £15,000 to the Tories and another £15,000 to BUI; Allied Breweries gave only £2,310 to the Tories, but then gave £26,500 to BUI. So what are these front organisations? BUI raises approximately £500,000 a year for political purposes: at election time most of this goes into the Conservative Party campaign. Aims was previously known as Aims of Industry and existed as a “pro-free enterprise" pressure group made up of several Tory MPs. The Centre for Policy Studies, of which Margaret Thatcher is President and Keith Joseph Chairman, is a Tory think tank which contributes more than thoughts when election fund donations are required. It causes far less public embarrassment for big companies if they are able to channel their support for Toryism through these front organisations.

Some big businesses are now turning to the latest capitalist party, the SDP. There is some hope that investment in the latest political con-trick will yield returns. At present the SDP is keeping quiet about where it gets its funds from; of course, the millions of pounds worth of media publicity given to the new product — even when it only consisted of four members — was absolutely free.

It remains to be stated that the only Socialist Party in Britain has no grants coming in from trade unions or rich companies; it has no front organisations to collect its money surreptitiously; unlike the so-called Workers Revolutionary Party it has no film star leaders (or leaders of any description) who can afford to invest thousands of pounds in it; there are no foreign governments subsidising the SPGB. Of course, millionaires with nothing better to spend their legally stolen money on are most welcome to donate large amounts of it to us; but we shall not hang about waiting for them. The fuel for the coming workers’ revolution must be provided by the working class itself — there is no better cause. 

Steve Coleman

Alright up to a point (2019)

Book Review from the August 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Many Not the Few. An Illustrated History of Britain Shaped by the People. By Sean Michael Wilson and Robert Brown. Workable Books. 2019. £9.99.

This is a primer, in the cartoon form of conversations between a retired trade unionist and his granddaughter, of working class, or rather lower class (since it starts with the Peasants’ Revolt), history, aimed at those new to trade unionism and ‘labour’ politics. Wat Tyler, the Levellers, the Diggers, Peterloo, the Chartists, the match girls’ strike, they are all there. When, however, it comes to the twentieth century and the formation of the Labour Party it becomes tendentious; which no doubt explains why it comes with a preface and recommendation from Jeremy Corbyn.

However, Corbyn might be embarrassed (or maybe not) by the anti-EU and pro-Brexit stance taken at the end. This, no doubt, is due to the ‘history adviser’ being Doug Nicholls, a frequent contributor to the Morning Star and first chair of Trade Unionists Against the European Union. There is a mysterious reference to a ‘Worker’s Liberty’ website on page 109, odd because if that’s to the trotskyoid AWL they are anti-Brexit. In any event, dragging in Brexit will date the book and, besides, has nothing to do with working class history.

Adam Buick

Cooking the Books: Marx and Banks (2013)

The Cooking the Books column from the May 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Morning Star (23-24 March) carried a cartoon which has Marx holding a piece of paper on which is written ‘Cyprus banks grab’. He is writing on a blackboard:  ‘Banks in Capitalist society are institutions created for the systematic robbery of the people’ and asking, ‘Now will you believe me?’

The only problem is that this is not a quote from Marx, nor does it correspond with Marx’s expressed views on banks. Marx was well aware of the opportunities for swindlers opened up by the coming of limited liability companies and their promotion, and by stock exchange manipulations in which some financiers and banks already were involved in his day, and wrote about this.

However, Marx’s whole analysis of the nature of exploitation under capitalism was that this took place in the course of production in the places where real wealth was actually produced when capitalist employers extracted surplus-value from wage-workers, not in the sphere of money and finance.

In Volume 1 of Capital he specifically repudiated such views:

  ‘The great part that the public debt and fiscal system corresponding to it have played in the capitalization of wealth and the expropriation of the masses, has led many writers, like Cobbett, Doubleday and others, to seek here, incorrectly, the fundamental cause of the misery of the people in modern times’ (Chapter 31).

A large part of Volume 3 of Capital is devoted to a discussion of banking and finance. Here Marx analysed banks as being essentially institutions for collecting the savings of people who did not want to spend their money for the time being and channelling these as money capital for productive industry. As he put it:

  ‘A bank represents on the one hand the centralization of money capital, of the lenders, and on the other hand the centralization of the borrowers. It makes its profit in general by borrowing at lower rates than those at which it lends.’

In other words, banks were not a scam to systematically rob people but institutions which played an essential role in the operation of the capitalist system.

There is another problem with the cartoon’s supposed quote. When it says ‘banks in capitalist society’ this could imply that banks in a non-capitalist society would have a different role. But it was Marx’s view that banks would have no place in a socialist society (or as he preferred to call it, a communist society, meaning the same thing).

In Volume 2 of Capital he wrote: ‘if we were to consider a communist society in place of a capitalist one, then money capital would immediately be done away with’  (chapter 14, section 3) and that ‘with collective production, money capital is completely dispensed with’ (Chapter 18).

This is clear enough. Banks channel savings as money capital. Money capital won’t exist in socialism. Therefore banks won’t exist in socialism.

Ironically, since the paper normally gives free range to currency cranks, Richard Seymour writing in the Guardian (27 March) got it better when he concluded an article: ‘Cyprus crisis: why do we need banks at all?’

‘To paraphrase Karl Marx on religion, the demand to abolish banking is a demand to abolish the state of affairs that needs banking.’

That’s what Marx is more likely to have written on the Morning Star’s blackboard.

Cooking the Books: Who is Exploited? (2019)

The Cooking the Books column from the January 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

If you work in an office how can you be economically exploited if you don’t produce anything that your employer appropriates? That was a question touched on in the Morning Star (12 November) in an article on ‘What is “surplus value?”’ prepared by the Marx Memorial Library. Their answer was that all workers create surplus value. Among the work and workers that the article said produce value and surplus value were those in sales, accountancy and marketing. Marx would have disagreed.

He held that value (and so surplus value) was created only in the process of producing commodities as use-values for sale. He defined production as the fashioning of new use-values out of materials that originally came from nature. This included not just the work of handling the materials but also that of planning their production, so it did include office workers such as designers, draughtspeople and architects. It also included transport as transporting a commodity from where it was produced to where it was to be consumed did make it more useful.

In Marx’s view, if work did not add to the use-value of a commodity then it could not add to its value. The work of selling a commodity, essential as it is under capitalism, does not add to the commodity’s use-value. So those performing such work do not produce surplus value. The capital invested in such activities does return a profit, but its source is a share of the surplus value created in the value-producing sector of the economy. It is not created by its employees.

This does not mean that such workers are not exploited. They do perform surplus labour for which they are not paid over and above the labour equivalent of their wages. It is just that this surplus labour does not create surplus value; what it does is reduce the costs to the employer of running their business.

As one exponent of Marxian economics put it:

  ‘The merchant has invested a certain amount of money-capital in a store, equipment, and wage laborers (clerks, salesmen, etc.). These wage workers are unproductive like the merchant himself although they work for him a longer time than he pays for. But their surplus-labour is as unproductive as the capital of the merchant. They merely realize the surplus-value for the merchant, which was produced in the sphere of production, and make profits for him so much quicker, the more their unproductive surplus-labor is extended and their necessary labor shortened (Ernest Unterman, Marxian Economics, 1903, Ch. XVI).

The same applies to workers in banking, insurance, and other money handling activities.

There is a second category of work and workers that Marx didn’t consider produced surplus value. In a comment in Volume 1 of Capital on the 1861 Census Marx pointed out that there were as many people employed as domestic servants (1,208,648) as in textile factories and mines together (1,208, 442) (ch. 16, section 6). Although he described them as ’modern domestic slaves’ he did not consider that they created surplus value; they were an expense paid out of income. This applies also to those called, appropriately enough, civil servants. They are the servants of the capitalist class as a whole employed by their state and paid for out of their income (via taxes). They too perform more work than they are paid for, which economises on the cost of government, national and local.

The fact that commercial and financial workers and civil servants don’t produce surplus value does not make them any less, or lesser, members of the working class. They, too, are victims of the wages system and have an interest in working for its abolition.

Cooking the Books: Clueless (2012)

The Cooking the Books column from the January 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the first things George Osborne did on becoming Chancellor in May 2010 was to headhunt a whizz-kid economic forecaster to head a new Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). For Osborne’s 2010 budget the OBR forecast that GDP would grow by 2.3 percent in 2011. It also made forecasts for the years up to 2015. We commented in this column in August 2010:

  Long-term predictions are even less reliable. Even so, the OBR has indulged in this, predicting (and we record the figures for future reference) that in 2012 growth will be 2.8 percent, in 2013 2.9 percent, and 2.7 percent in 2014 and 2015. This is not worth the paper it’s written on. It’s like the Met Office predicting a barbecue summer in two years time.

In his Autumn Statement on 29 November Osborne revealed that the OBR had gone back to the drawing board and come up with some new figures:

  They expect GDP in Britain to grow this year by 0.9% – and by 0.7% next year. They then forecast 2.1% growth in 2013, 2.7% in 2014, followed by 3% in 2015 and 3% again in 2016.

Given the unpredictable nature of capitalism, the chances are that the figures for the years after 2012 will turn out to be just as wrong.

The day after the Autumn Statement, there was a one-day public sector general strike. For the occasion, the Morning Star, which is close to the “Communist Party of Britain” (the nearest thing to the old “Communist” Party), brought out a special, free edition. It contained an article by Jerry Jones, the economic expert of the Morning Star and CPB, which revealed that those at the opposite end of the political spectrum to Osborne are just as clueless.

The CPB claims to be Marxist but Jones’s analysis was not based on Marx’s view that what drives the capitalist economy is investment by capitalist enterprises in search of profit. He argues that, on the contrary, capitalism is motivated by “economic demand” as if it were a system geared to what people want to buy; and that the current economic crisis is not a lack of profits but a lack of paying demand.

From this faulty analysis his faulty conclusion follows: that the state should invest in new productive activities, so putting money into workers’ pockets and increasing economic demand that way. This is Keynes rather than Marx, but where’s the state to get the money to invest? Easy:

  The fact is that governments could simply tell their central bank – the Bank of England in Britain’s case – to print the money or its electronic equivalent and hand it over to the government to invest.

Jones himself then poses the question: “But doesn’t ‘printing money’ cause inflation?” He answers “No” on the grounds that the “true cause” of inflation is not “too much money floating around” but is “always insufficient supply, or investment, to meet growing economic demand.”

But, in the end, this is the same thing. The price of any good will go up if the paying demand for it exceeds its supply but, since paying demand is generated in production, the only way that total demand can come to exceed total supply (Jones’s assumption) is by it being inflated by the government “printing more money” (more accurately, printing more money than the economy needs).

The inflationary policy advocated by Jones might temporarily induce some increased production but would eventually lead to “stagflation”, as it did when tried in the slump of the mid-1970s. The Morning Star’s Keynesian reformism is not a viable alternative. Only socialism is.

End of the road (1991)

From the May 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Hungarian uprising of 1956 is generally considered to mark a watershed in the history of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Although the CPGB lost about one quarter of its members—from 33,095 in February 1956 to 26,742 by February 1957—a decline had been evident from the early 1950’s as a result of the “cold war” and the waning of the comparative popularity which had been achieved during the Second World War as anti-fascists.

Like all other minor parties, the CPGB had difficulty making progress within the British electoral system which favours the two major parties. But in the 1966 election the Communist Party candidates could only obtain 3 per cent of the votes in the seats they contested compared with 1945 when they obtained two MP’s (Willie Gallagher and Phil Piratin) and Harry Pollitt, their general secretary, nearly unseated the sitting MP at Rhondda East

Eurocommunism

In 1956 when Pollitt retired, the CPGB had to come to terms not only with the Hungarian uprising but also with Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin and the “Cult of personality” and the growing conflict between Russia and China. Its 1977 programme sought an alliance of all sorts of reformist groups and sectional interests including consumer groups and Scottish and Welsh nationalists. This new strategy, coupled with the end of uncritical support for Russia, came to be known as “Eurocommunism”.

In the mid-1970’s the CPGB started to show divisions within its ranks over trade union strategy. In a pamphlet entitled Advanced Capitalism and Backward Socialism Bill Warren and Mike Prior demonstrated their ignorance of Marxist theory by arguing that inflation was related to wage militancy. The arguments raged over the next few years: the hardliners who had remained within the Party to fight for a return to traditional methods, and the Eurocommunists disagreed violently over trade union strategy. When Tony Lane wrote an article in Marxism Today (the Party’s theoretical journal founded in 1957 which adopted a more and more trendy stance after the appointment of Martin Jacques as editor in 1978) criticising shop stewards, Mick Costello, the CPGB’s industrial organiser, was incensed and replied with an article in the Morning Star (as the Daily Worker had been renamed in 1966), for which he was sacked and replaced by Peter Carter, a former official of UCATT, the building workers union.

During the 1985 miners’ strike the gulf between the different wings of the CPGB widened. For the first time the Party actually lost members during a campaign. Criticism of the miners’ strike, and Arthur Scargill’s leadership in particular, came from Marxism Today and Peter Carter wrote a deeply critical pamphlet of Scargill’s leadership which was suppressed for the sake of unity. Scargill, a former member of the YCL national committee in the late 1950’s, was deeply resentful of the “line” taken by Marxism Today and accused Carter of compromising with the class enemy and vilifying the NUM.

Morning Star

The group around the Morning Star has been in conflict with the CPGB since 1981 when the conference criticised the paper for failing to give sufficient prominence to the 1977 programme. This group sees the traditional emphasis on the working class and industrial strength in the trade unions as the correct way forward. Eurocommunism is seen as a liberal fad which should be dropped.

In 1983 the 38th congress of the CPGB voted to dismiss Tony Chater, the editor and David Whitfield, the assistant editor, by 155 votes to 92. They refused to relinquish their posts. In June of the following year the paper’s shareholders voted to support Chater and Whitfield in defiance of the Eurocommunist leadership. The Morning Star is not owned by the CPGB. When its forerunner, the Daily Worker was founded in 1930, an independent co-operative, the People’s Press Printing Society, was set up to avoid accusations that the paper was simply a mouthpiece for Communist Party policy. Now this strategy rebounded with a vengeance.

Following the special congress in May 1985 the Eurocommunist leadership carried out a systematic purge of borough committees, branches and industrial organisations. In less than two years 3,000 members were expelled or left because they were demoralised. Industrial stalwarts such as Ken Gill, president of TASS (now joint general secretary of MSF), Bert Ramelson and Mick Costello, former CPGB industrial organisers, and Derek Robinson, the shop steward who made news after he was sacked by Michael Edwardes at British Leyland’s Longbridge plant, were all expelled.

It is rather surprising that with all the purges and demoralisation the Morning Star group did not break away and form the Communist Party of Britain until 1988. This party is centred around the Morning Star, with Mike Hicks, an executive member of Sogat, as its general secretary and Derek Robinson as its industrial organiser. It rejects Stalinism but supports Russia, though not unconditionally. Chater had criticised the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Last year the CPGB still had about 6,000 members but its bases in the trade unions had been badly damaged. In addition Marxism Today, with a circulation of 10,000 is likely to be sold off soon. In January 1990 Nina Temple had the unenviable job of taking over from Gordon McLennan as general secretary of the CPGB. She soon stated the CPGB might be disbanded and form a club within the Labour Party. Last month the Party’s executive committee announced the end of the Communist Party and its transformation into an amorphous group to be known as the “Democratic Left”.

Disbandment was the only course open to the CPGB. It had lost all credibility. From a party of 46,000 members [56,000 members]  and two MP’s in its heyday and 60 full time workers—a much higher ratio than either the Labour or Conservative parties—it had shrunk to a rump of an organisation that only polled 0.8 per cent of the votes in each constituency that it contested.

Historians may lament the demise of the CPGB but workers should not. The CPGB has stood for every shabby compromise, has mislead generations of sincere workers, has been vanguardist, conspiratorial, undemocratic and dishonest. It has purported to oppose capitalism whilst supporting state capitalism. It has criticised imperialism whilst condoning and defending Russian imperialism. [It has supported nationalism and at times even xenophobia.] And, worst of all, by posing as Marxist it set back the cause of socialism by several decades.

Carl Pinel

Political Notebook: Gormley the Scab (1979)

The Political Notebook column from the February 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Gormley the Scab

It must be a hard life being a trade union leader. The endless meetings with the Government and the bosses in which they sell out their members’ interests, all those speeches to conference telling the workers to pull their belts in for the sake of the Right For Callaghan To Work campaign. And then there’s the insufferable inconvenience of delegations abroad, especially unmanageable when you consider the five-star hotels, the massive banquets and the tours around the workplaces to observe the sterile lives of those who put their trust in leaders. It is a well known fact that such visits are especially favoured when they are to East European state capitalist countries. Joe Gormley, leader of the National Union of Miners, returned not long ago from an outing to Poland where he met up with his counterpart, the leader of the State-controlled Polish miners’ union. Between cocktail parties the two workers’ representatives discussed the case of a certain Polish miner who was the foreman in a mine and was disturbed by the appalling conditions under which his men were forced to work which were in breach of the union regulations. Needless to say, his union failed to support his complaint so he attempted to set up an unofficial union to fight for better conditions of work in the mines. But real unions aren’t allowed in the People’s Democracy of Poland and the man was thrown into a psychiatric hospital. Recalling the heroic struggles of British workers to form unions like the NUM, one might have expected Gormley to have had a few tough words to say to his Polish counterpart. But. according to a report in the Observer, Gormley accepted that this man’s incarceration was quite legitimate on the grounds that he was an adulterer and a jew — crimes against the people, indeed! Internationalist solidarity and freedom for wage labour to struggle against capital clearly mean less to Joe Gormley than the petty comforts of a free holiday in Poland. By remaining silent while fellow miners arc locked up for demanding the right to organise in a free trade union Gormley has shown himself to be an enemy of the working class. Trade unionists have a name for the likes of Gormley: he is a scab.


Conspicuous Silence

When is a ‘ruthless imperialist invasion’ (Morning Star on the Americans in Vietnam) a case of freedom fighters (equipped with Russian tanks) extending the frontiers of socialism? When it’s Russian-aided Vietnam attacking China-backed Cambodia. Any comments from the Morning Star on this ruthless capitalist invasion in which many innocent people have been slaughtered for the sake of territorial expansion? How about a demonstration outside the Vietnamese embassy? Or even a ’Hands Off Phnom Penh' campaign? Communist Party hypocrisy?


Front Bench Socialists

Here’s a story which might turn a few faces red in the corridors of power. Not long after his resignation. Sir Harold Wilson was due to appear on a certain BBC radio programme for young people in which he was to answer questions from members of the public who made up the audience. Like most BBC operations, the audience was not entirely unselected and members of the ’youth sections’ of each of the major parties were invited to attend. At least, that’s what the BBC think happened. In fact, the producer of the programme mistakenly phoned the Head Office of the Socialist Party instead of the Labour Party. He asked for a bunch of ‘keen young socialists' to go along to Broadcasting House for the recording of the programme. He even said that Wilson was particularly anxious that the socialists should sit in the front row where he could see them. Never ones to disappoint the old and needy, a group of young members of the SPGB turned up at Broadcasting House. Wilson’s smile temporarily dropped when one SPGBer asked him how he had the nerve to call himself a socialist. Oddly enough, no one else from the front row was asked to speak after that.


Nothing To Fear

Another man who wouldn’t have much faith in Wilson’s ‘socialism’ is Peter Tebbutt. Writing in the January issue of Socialist Organiser he says:

   Over and over again Labour in office shows a distinct leaning towards capitalist organisation. Ministerial advisers and appointees are drawn from the ranks of the business and professional classes. Little wonder that the aspirations of the working classes (sic) never reach fulfilment. Capitalism certainly has nothing to fear from a Labour Government . . .

Mr. Tebbutt is prospective parliamentary candidate for the Labour Party for Falmouth and Camborne. Come the next General Election he will be asking workers to elect a Labour Government which will never fulfil their aspirations. The SPGB agrees with Mr. Tebbutt that Labour cannot solve the problems of the vast majority. But we. oddly enough, advise workers not to vote Labour. Perhaps it’s because we put political honesty before personal ambition.


All Honourable Men?

With the police hoping to persuade Lord Kagan back to England to help with their enquiries into some very large currency fiddles, yet another of the businessmen ennobled in Harold Wilson’s resignation honours list is receiving some unwanted publicity.

The last of Wilson's noblemen to suffer this was Eric Miller, a property tycoon who shot himself as the Fraud Squad were closing in on him.

The Labour ex-Prcmier seems to have had a mutual help arrangement with the likes of Kagan and Miller. Wilson’s affection for his Gannex mac probably did a lot for Kagan's raincoat business and the happy friendship was scaled by his making Kagan a Life Peer.

It was only a few spoilsports like backwoods aristocrats and nasty-minded newshounds who wondered whether this sort of thing was a misuse of the Honours List. Wilson might have reminded them that it was all in tradition: the English aristocracy was largely born from the more successful pirates and bandits of mediaeval England and grew up on such inhumanities as the slave trade and the Industrial Revolution.

Honours are awarded for long service to British capitalism, which is why trade union leaders often find themselves, in the twilight of their days, sitting in the House of Lords. Capitalism is itself a massive crime—the depriving of the majority of people of the wealth they produce—a fact which, to say the least, tends to blur the distinction between what capitalism says is lawful and that which it outlaws.

By capitalism's standards, the likes of Kagan and Miller were ripe to receive some entitlement to dress up in outdated and inconvenient clothes, as a formal recognition of what they represent. Their support for the Labour Party—and the reward they received for it—may give food for thought to that dwindling band of Labour supporters who still think their party has something to do with a society where people will stand in equality.

Steve Coleman

Finance and Industry: Partners in Progress (1968)

The Finance and Industry column from the January 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

Partners in Progress

The fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia was a boon to the Morning Star. Its special enlarged issue of 7 November had articles on the coup and on the changes that have taken place in Russia since. The advertising department had cause to be proud as a large part of the extra space was taken up with adverts from Russian and British industrial organisations. There was a full page effort by Courtaulds telling of their trade with Russia. But pride of place must go to a quarter-page taken by ICI headed “Partners in Progress”. It stated:

  ICI-Western Europe's largest chemical company-enjoys a thriving business relationship with the Soviet Union.

And went on to list some of its products exported to Russia and of plants being set up there under license from ICI. It ended on technical co-operation:

   Just over a year ago this form of co-operation reached a new stage when a five-year agreement was signed by ICI and the State Committee of the Council of Ministers of the USSR for Science and Technology. This agreement—providing for technical co-operation and the exchange of information in certain fields—was the first of its kind to be concluded between the Soviet Union and a British company.

For ICI progress means a thriving business relationship and technical co-operation. Socialists know that scientific development and increased trade do not necessarily constitute progress. In the context of capitalism, in both the ICI and Russian state versions, science is used to increase productivity with a view to extracting more surplus value from the working class. It is only in Socialism where the means and techniques of production belong to and are under the democratic control of the whole of society that the results of scientific research will be used for the benefit of all.

We know that the so-called Communist Party and their unofficial organ, the Morning Star, are confused as to the nature of society in Russia. Now it seems their attitude to ICI has changed. This is what John Gollan had to say at their 29th Congress in November 1965:

  Labour's Britain of the 1970's will still be the Britain of the ICI, the Prudential, Vickers, the Stock Exchange, Eton and Harrow, the House of Lords and Buckingham Palace. We Communists refuse to accept this future (Turn Left for Progress).

There is no doubt about their attitude in that statement. They say they refuse to accept a future Britain of the ICI and so on. Yet in 1967 they accept an advert from their old enemy which points out its close ties with the Russian state. One useful aspect, however, is that the faithful followers of the Communist Party who will only accept information coming from the Morning Star have it straight from the horse's mouth: the Russian state and ICI have enough in common to be considered partners. We have one small suggestion. The caption should have read Co-operators in Capitalism.

Big Deal

The recent take-over battle in which the General Electric Company (GEC) gained control of Associated Electrical Industries (AEI) publicised the main features of capitalism which the journalistic trivia over personalities could not disguise. The first point to note is that the issue was not decided by the 150,000 or so people employed by the two companies even though it is they who carry out all the varied tasks involved in running both set-ups. Nor was the population of Britain consulted in spite of all the talk of how Britain’s interest would be served by the deal. The AEI shareholders were the important people and each side addressed their arguments to them. It was for them to decide and the point at issue was profits.

The argument raged over which management would deliver the greater profit. GEC had its record of growth in profit during the past five years as a recommendation. While AEI, in view of the stagnation of profits in the same period, could only claim that recent reorganisation would bear fruit in increased profits in the next few years.

It was clear that improvements in profits were expected to come as a result of a ruthless cutting back in the workforce. GECs record has shown what can be done for their shareholders through more intensive working of their staff; Moves included shutting down 35 regional offices and reducing head office staff from 2,000 io 200. AEI had been going in for the same sort of thing. The Financial Times of 6 November reported:

  Manpower has been reduced by nearly 9.000 and 12 major establishments closed with no reduction in manufacturing capacity . . .  but these actions alone reduce annual costs by about £7m.

Since the take-over the process continues. Cuts have been announced in AEI head office staff and more may follow elsewhere. The point to note here is that the drive to economise is inherent in the system and does not just occur when there is a merger or take-over.

Another feature of modern capitalism that the take-over publicised was the amount of common interest the parties involved had. Large shareholders were held in both firms by major institutional investors such as the Church Commissioners, the Prudential, the Co-operative Insurance. Not only did AEI and GEC have shareholders in common but they also shared investments such as the 18 per cent each had in C.A. Parsons, the leading supplier of generating equipment to the CEGB. Their interests involved agreements with firms in such fields as domestic appliances, lighting, telephone equipment, radio and television, electronic components and nuclear power stations. The take-over demonstrated how that holy cow competition works nowadays. The pressures generated by free, unbridled competition lead to its opposite where marketing and licensing agreements are entered into to try and bring some order into the anarchy of producing for sale with a view to profit. But capitalism does pave the way for Socialism in that even it needs large-scale co-operation. Its great stumbling block is of course that it is based on private property so that production solely for use, the logical outcome of socialised production, cannot be achieved.

Another publicised factor, the size of the resulting unit, is also important but it must be emphasised that the whole exercise was not concerned with increasing size for its own sake. The advantage of large groups is in the economies in design, research and marketing which large-scale production allows. In fields where AEI and GEC were competitors, duplication of design and research are cut out. The same goes for overseas sales. It is estimated that GEC-AEI will have annual sales of approximately £450m, which will make them seventh in the world league for the electrical industry. Even then they will be small in comparison with their American rivals of the same name. General Electric, whose annual sales are in the region of £7,000m. So that, in world terms, the going will be tough. In fact this was one of the pressures that led to the takeover. It is a case of running faster in order to stay in the same place. This is why mere size or the GEC Board's record are no guarantee of future success in profit making. ICI, whose management used to be the idol of the supporters of capitalism, has stagnated. BMH, in spite of mergers and rationalisation, has still found the going tough. Quality of management and size are only subsidiary factors to the main regulator—the condition of the market.

Mergers concern the owners or shareholders involved in that they hope to safeguard their investments through larger industrial units. The workers' role lies in producing the wealth from which the profit is made. Mergers take place due to the increasing competition within capitalism, but they do not guarantee any better profits as in general they are only keeping up with industry as a whole. For workers the lesson of mergers is an exercise in how the capitalist class protect their interest. They should take a hint from their masters and organise the biggest take-over of all—the take-over of the world's means of production for the benefit of everyone.

Joe Carter

World at Work: R.R. Joins B.R. (1971)

From the March 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Rolls Royce affair is a practical example that nationalisation is vital to capitalism and has nothing to do with Socialism. In this case it appears to be a means of keeping in being production facilities which supply vital equipment to the armed forces of eighty or more countries and over two hundred airlines, while avoiding liabilities for losses expected by some sources to run up to £400m. Governments do not run capitalism; in fact it runs them. This comes out clearly in the Labour-Tory wrangles over who is to blame. Labourites point out that a previous Tory government has involved the taxpayer (read capitalist class) in paying out hundreds of millions of pounds extra costs over the Concorde treaty with France. Tories fume at being forced against their cherished political nostrums to nationalise Rolls-Royce. There are lessons in all this for the working class about the world they live in.

How was it that one of the world's largest aeroengine makers went bankrupt? In 1968 they won the contract on which the fatal trouble occurred to supply engines to the American Lockheed company for its Tri-star Aircraft. At the time it was considered a major triumph for British industry and the Labour government’s policy of promoting the growth of what they called high technology. As it turned out the development costs of the engine were to be much greater than originally calculated; production costs had risen and there are some unsolved technical problems causing delays involving penalties for late delivery. This is not unusual for this type of work and it has been pointed out that had the same contractual obligations applied to the Concorde project Rolls-Royce would have gone bust sooner. Lockheed have not been free of trouble: on one government contract costs had risen by three and a half times over the original estimate and their bankruptcy has been expected for some time. The American government share the problem of their British counterpart of how to keep a leading defence contractor in business.

It may seem that all this has come about as a result of bungling and incompetence. Those who hold this view must explain why Rolls-Royce was for so long a model of all that was best in capitalism. That is, it was profitable, its shares had an international clientele, as had its products. It was reputed to have the finest computer installation in Europe. As for labour relations it was a model that co-partnership proponents could point to. Over 4,700 of its employees held ordinary shares in the firm. Another ten thousand held special workers’ shares. Not that it was a small family firm. Rolls Royce employed nearly eighty thousand workers throughout the United Kingdom. As a result of mergers, takeovers and government reorganisation of the aero-industry, Rolls Royce became in recent years the sole aero-engine manufacturer in Britain. It may be said that with almost everything working in their favour Rolls-Royce still went bust. It could be said that other industries that have ended up nationalised had been among the front runners and become unable to compete with newer rivals while still important to the capitalist class. Events caught up with Rolls-Royce a little earlier.

Much of this is evidence of the contradictions that fetter the development of capitalism. Goods and services are produced for sale on the market with a view to profit. This generates competition and a drive towards the concentration of industry into huge groups or combines. This applies to the aircraft industry where competition has produced a demand for larger and faster passenger planes.

With each development came the need to spend more on research in order to bring into production larger and/or faster planes to render those in service commercially obsolete. Few firms are able to command the resources to keep in the race with hopes of huge profits or bankruptcy. It would seem that Rolls-Royce for all their resources can no longer do it. More correctly, the British government that backed it was no longer able or willing to risk the resources on such an increasingly large scale.

Nationalisation may help keep the weapons of war at the ready and airlines throughout the world flying. For those workers who don’t lose their jobs there is likely to be little joy. Those at the Rolls-Royce works at Crewe and Derby must already know that nationalisation in no way changed the social position of workers in the railway workshops there. They remained wage slaves.

One last point it is worth noting. Parliament can move fast when it comes to protecting ‘vital defence industries’. On the same day that it was announced that time would be found to get the nationalisation through in a week, pensioners were told that they may get an increase in six months time. That is what is known as getting your priorities right.

Ad Mad

Among the letters to the editor published in the Times on 2 February was one expressing deep concern at an act of Government discrimination against one national newspaper — the Morning Star. It continues

   For many years Government departments whose advertising is placed through the Central Office of Information have refused to advertise in the Morning Star

as a result no adverts on the technicalities of decimal currency have appeared in the Morning Star, with the result that

  Its readers are thus being denied information made accessible — to readers of other national newspapers and relating to the most important change in our monetary system for ages.

There are two points worthy of comment in the above extracts. Firstly the Morning Star is known to be closely associated with a political party claiming to be Communist and allegedly basing its policies on the teaching of Karl Marx. One of the main tenets of this body of theory is that the machinery of government known as the state is an instrument of coercion used by a ruling class to maintain its privileged position over the rest of society. Is it not odd that a journal claiming to champion the interests of the working class should seek financial support in the form of advertising revenue from the executive committee of the ruling class? The signatories overlooked one great lament the political left make about the press is that financial dependence on advertising must lead to compromise in editorial policy — not that we would expect the Morning Star to compromise one dot or comma of their support for the policy of the British road to State Capitalism. (Not for all the Gold in Westminster.)

The Socialist Party of Great Britain makes use of advertising as a means of getting the party, its activities and publications known. However we consider that our object Socialism calls for uncompromising opposition to capitalism, its political parties and governments. Hence our publications are not open to advertise the activities of those we oppose. This brings us to the second point. Why is a paper claiming to base itself on Marxian policies wanting to advertise details of currency reform? After all, the abolition of private property in the means of production implies no more buying and selling and no more need for money. Maybe we are not being fair to the Morning Star. It is possible that they knew nothing of the letter and that the signatories, including such prominent trade union leaders as Briginshaw, Daly, Jenkins and Scanlon, acted independently. May we give due notice to these latter-day practitioners of 'the fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work’ policy that the implementation of the socialist principle of ‘free access according to need’ will not require a vast advertising campaign. This revolutionary measure can only be introduced by conscious majority action. That is, its implications must be understood before it is put in practice, not afterwards.

Joe Carter

Political Notebook: Chinese Takeaway (1978)

The Political Notebook Column from the December 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last month’s Notebook looked at the current goings on in the big two and a half political parties. This month we turn our attention to what are commonly referred to as 'the extremists', a euphemism for those organisations which pursue the same sterile policies as Lib-Lab-Con, but haven't got many members.


Chinese Takeaway

Bad news for a few hundred million Chinese peasants. That famous book of everyday slogans for work, rest and sleep,  Quotations From The Thoughts of Chairman Mao Tse-Tung. is no longer to be treated like the bible. The Chinese leadership — and the Maoists in the West — have decided that the time has come to end the deification of Mao. So, after a quarter of a century in which Chinese workers and peasants have been taught to learn the words of the great book parrot-fashion, it seems that all has changed. Indeed, Maoist bookshops in London seem to have stopped displaying the little red book, the Chinese Embassy has stopped giving away free copies and even the tramp who used to sell them at Speakers' Corner for thirty pence a copy has been given the push. It can be predicted that by 2001 — the year by which Mao says China will have become ‘a powerful socialist country' (p.179) — the little red book will be as scarce as the collected works of Stalin in Russia today. Mao’s book contains the following passage:

    . . . US imperialism has made itself the enemy of the people of the world and has increasingly isolated itself. Those who refuse to be enslaved will never be cowed by the atom bombs and hydrogen bombs in the hands of the US imperialists. The raging tide of the people of the world against the US aggressors is irresistable. (p.78. written in 1964).

We wonder whether the book’s withdrawal could possibly have anything to do with the fact that China is now a diplomatic ally of the USA against Russia, is itself an imperialist power and has recently placed a multi-million pound order for Harrier jump-jets with the British Government.


A Front for What?

Mr. John Tyndall, like most of his good and sturdy fellow National Front leaders, is a man with convictions. In the case of Tyndall, these have sometimes been for breaking the law. It is interesting to read, in the NF paper. Spearhead, No. 18. just what Tyndall's idea of 'restoring law and order' involves:

    Driving out of Carnaby Street I beheld walking about a species of humanity that 1 thought only existed in the wilder forms of horror fiction and I resolved there and then that if I ever revisited this neighbourhood in the future it would not be at the wheel of a car but at the tiller of a chieftain tank, preferably with a flame thrower apparatus attached as an extra, and a large refuse van bringing up the rear.

Are we honestly supposed to treat the National Front as a serious political party?


Vanessa's Revolution

Down at the High Court, Ms. Vanessa Redgrave (actress) and Mr. David Astor (former editor of The Observer) argued about whether the Trotskyist Workers' Revolutionary Party is a 'nasty, despicable, ludicrous and silly’ party (as Mr. John Wilmers QC. appearing for Ms Redgrave neatly put it), or not. The case concerned an article entitled "Vanessa and the Red House Mystery”, published by The Observer in 1975. The article described events involving an actress. Irene Gorst, which are alleged to have taken place at the WRP's ‘education school’ in the Derbyshire Peak District. Ms Gorst claimed that she was forcibly detained at ‘the school', subjected to political indoctrination and told of stores of hidden arms in the basement of 'the Red House'. Clearly, it was not for us, but for the Defenders of British Justice, to determine whether Ms Gorst's story was a complete fabrication or whether, as we've always believed, the WRP comprises a crowd of crazy fantasists, waiting to re-enact the events of Petrograd 1917 in the streets of Derby. Whether or not it’s true that they’ve got a few rifles hidden in the closet, the plain fact is that the entire Leninist concept of revolution. based upon enlightened leaders and armed uprising, is doomed to failure in the capitalism of 1978. So that’s why you’re 'nasty, despicable, ludicrous and silly', Vanessa. And you can’t sue us for libel for writing that.


Star Wars

The Communist Party also went to Court last month to try and stop the new soft porn daily from calling itself the Daily Star in case readers mix it up with the Morning Star. If readers ever began to confuse what’s written in the Socialist Standard with the nonsense in the London Evening Standard, we'd politely tell our editorial committee that it's time they gave up the job.

Steve Coleman